My Life as a Silent Movie

by Jesse Lee Kercheval

  Had Apolline been standing just outside the photograph in Fontainebleau the day I came into my parents’ lives? When I came, not from the hospital as I had always believed, but from somewhere unknown. From Paris, said Z. From Paris with my father on the train.

  Why did it matter? I asked myself, testing this new sense of urgency I felt. What did it matter who my parents were? I shook my head. It did matter. Maybe I had a mother still alive somewhere, a mother who had always missed me, who would welcome me back. Or, at least, be glad I was alive. If I really was the last one of my whole family, if I had no parents, no husband, no children, I wasn’t sure I had any reason to keep living.

  I had to find out what was true. I would go to New York to see Apolline.

  3

  The fall before they died, my husband and daughter had been in a short film my husband made with his silent film class called The Magic Tree. Besides studying and writing about old films, my husband used the antique movie cameras he collected to have his classes at the college try their hand at a short silent film or two. In The Magic Tree, the first title card explains:

  After his family is killed in a railroad accident, a man wanders without hope.

  In the opening shot, he is walking through a deep forest with his few precious family mementoes in a sack. The man is my husband, made up with his eyes so wildly corked in, so dark, he looks like he had spent his grief in a coal mine. The film is dark, grainy black and white. I remembered my husband complaining about the difficulties he had shooting it. The late fall sun in Indiana had barely been up to the task of lighting the old-fashioned, insensitive film stock he used for reasons of authenticity. The class time had made for a late shooting schedule. My daughter had complained about how cold it had been in the woods in her thin cotton costume.

  Still, the film had turned out to be beautiful, so striking I was surprised when I saw it projected at the school, the pianist playing some Erik Satie to set the mood. Each leaf on the ground, each bare branch seemed etched on the screen. We watched, me, my daughter, my husband, his class, holding our breath.

  After the announced wandering, the man, passing by a massive oak, stumbles over a rock with an inscription:

  What you have loved

  What you have lost

  This tree returns

  He offers the tree all his money, pressing oversized bills onto the rough bark with both hands, his every gesture telegraphing desperate. Then he opens his sack and takes out the last reminders of his family, a small white stuffed bear and a picture of the daughter—our daughter—with his wife. The wife is one of his students, dressed for the period in a trailing white dress, her hair piled on her head. In the framed photograph, she sits with my daughter smiling in her lap. The man tosses first the stuffed bear, then the photograph, and they disappear mysteriously into the tree.

  Then out of the tree—magic!—step his wife and his daughter. My daughter looks younger than eight in a white sailor suit. The father hugs his wife. His daughter. They hug and hug—such joy. Then he tries to lead them away, but the wife pulls back, shaking her head. She kneels and brushes some leaves away from the rock and shows her husband the rest of the inscription:

  Whatever you have loved

  Whatever you have lost

  This tree returns

  But at great cost

  In life and in magic, always there is the fine print, the sub-clause, we would all be wise to read. At this point, students in the audience gasped. No matter that the film was sentimental, no matter that it was hand-cranked and slow. Loss is loss, even to an audience of twenty-year-olds.

  The husband and wife exchange a long look. Then, hand in hand, the student-as-wife, then the daughter, and then the husband disappear into the tree. My daughter and my husband there, then gone. Together in this alternate reality, smiling, as they disappear, one after the other, through the magic of the camera into that thick, unyielding oak.

  The night before I left for New York, I watched the film on video again and again, and all I could think was, “Why can’t I go with them?” Though I knew the rock was carved and painted Styrofoam, and the tree was an oak in the city park behind our house, it was all I could do to keep from running into the night to find it.

  Near dawn, I put the tape away and got ready to leave. Most of my bills were paid automatically, deducted from our checking account. My husband had been keen on that. The others—bills I picked out from the mail scattered on the floor inside the front door—were mostly things an empty house could live without, like cable TV and magazine subscriptions. I wrote notes on the bills, canceling them. I left a last check for my cleaning person with a note telling her I wouldn’t need her anymore and wrote the insufficient words Thanks for Everything! in ink on the bottom. My husband had been raised to be careful with money and had always kept six months of our salaries in savings. I moved all that money from savings to checking.

  After the accident, I’d taken sick leave for the rest of the spring semester, so I was still getting paid every month even though someone else was teaching my classes. I wasn’t scheduled to teach again until the fall. I wanted to go now before I changed my mind, before my friends I taught with at the college got over their shyness at my grief and started crowding around with suggestions for ways to fill my newly empty life.

  First I would see Apolline, then I would see what I would see. I didn’t pack a suitcase. I just tucked a spare pair of socks, two changes of underwear, and my toothbrush next to my credit cards in my purse. I didn’t want to think about how long I might be gone or what to take or not take. I could buy what I needed. In case nothing came of this, I also took the three-year-old bottle of Valium the doctor had prescribed for me after my mother took all of hers and her own life. I couldn’t bring a steak knife on the plane, but the world was filled with objects that were just as dangerously sharp.

  In the morning, I gave Aunt Z more tea. I had done nothing about getting another car, so I called the airport shuttle and arranged for it to pick us up. Then we rode, side by side, to the airport in Indianapolis. “Are you going to be all right?” Aunt Zinnia asked, as I checked her in for her flight. “Because if you aren’t, I won’t go.”

  This didn’t sound like her at all. She had never been one to linger. She was a frequent visitor, but always in, then out. She took my hand and looked into my face. Whatever she saw did not reassure her. She looked as if she might cry. “I’ll stay if you ask me,” she said. “Livinia would have wanted me to stay.” Her family was an iceberg, melting under her feet. Soon we would all have to swim for it.

  I shook my head. “No need,” I said.

  As she was about to go through security, she turned one last time. “You were always a good daughter,” she said. I waited for the Z punch line, but she just waved. “The best,” she said, and was gone, a tiny old lady being kind, genuinely selfless, maybe for the first time in her life. I watched her disappear, on her way to her son’s house in Portland, then I went to the counter and asked for a one-way ticket to New York.

  The ticket agent looked a little puzzled. Not many people bought tickets at the counter. “This is for today?” she asked.

  “For the next flight.” She took my credit card and noticed my complete lack of luggage. “There’s been a death in the family,” I explained.

  “Oh,” she said and looked relieved. “Of course.” She looked at the black turtleneck sweater I was wearing, as if realizing that black was the color of mourning. Actually, since I was a writer, or had been one, as well as a professor, almost every sweater I owned was black, the house color of intellectuals and artists. Almost all the clothes I owned, except the blue jeans I had on, were black as well. “If you call this 800 number, they’ll tell you where to send a copy of the obituary.” The agent circled the number on the ticket jacket. “Then you could qualify for the family bereavement fare. If it was a close relative?” She looked up at me.

  “Yes,” I said. “Very.”

  “Well, good then. I’m
sure you’ll qualify,” she said, handing me my ticket. “Sorry about your loss.”

  So that is how I ended up on a plane, looking down at the clouds, on my way to find my mother. Or at least to find out who she was.

  As soon as I landed at Kennedy, I called the salon on the Upper West Side where Apolline worked. I asked for her, and someone with a Liverpool accent put me on hold. Apolline’s home number was unlisted. I’d checked that the night before, so either I reached her at the salon or I would take my chances on a surprise appearance at the address in Queens.

  An older man came on the phone with a French accent that sounded half Maurice Chevalier and half Pepé Le Pew. It was the famous stylist himself, the one who ran the salon. I knew from Apolline he had started life in Dothan, Alabama. I asked for Apolline, and there was a pause. “She has retired,” he said. “The last year. But I think she is staying still in New York, unless she returned to our beautiful France.”

  I said I needed to contact her. My parents, dear friends of hers, had died suddenly. He put me on hold and then came back. “This was her number,” he said. I wrote it down. “If you talk to her, tell her I said allo.”

  I called the number he’d given me. Apolline picked up on the first ring. “Hello?”

  I told her it was me. I said I was in New York. I wrote down her instructions, from Kennedy to the subway to her block, and then I followed them. I’d thought about telling her all the bad news on the phone, so she would have time to get used to the overwhelming amount of it, but she hung up before I had a chance.

  I reached Queens with no difficulty. Not surprising, really, that Apolline knew her way in from the airport to her own house; she’d done it often enough. As I walked from the subway station, I was amazed at how well I remembered the neighborhood when I had only been there once, so long ago, when I was sixteen. I could have found the apartment without her instructions, without the address even. My first trip to New York must have made a lasting impression on me. Except now either the neighborhood had changed for the better or I had seen more—and worse—cities. I remembered how Apolline had made me clutch my purse under my arm as we walked up the hill to her door. Now people passing me gave me odd looks and a wide berth. Me, the mad widow with the wild eyes who looked like she’d slept in her clothes. Except I hadn’t—slept, that is.

  I passed the Swiss butcher shop on the corner. I remembered stopping with Apolline, who bought us two boned chicken thighs for dinner. We had that, wine, some salad. When all the fuss had come out in the American press about how the French ate everything—butter, cheese, pastries—and never had heart attacks or high cholesterol or got fat because—oh, French miracle—they were protected by their habit of drinking red wine, I thought the people writing those articles had never really spent time with anyone French. Maybe they had been to France to visit, but that was the France of restaurants, and that was different. Apolline never ate sweets, never had more than fruit for dessert, and had told me, the time I visited her, that a woman should stand on the scale every day, and if she had gained so much as an sixteenth of a kilo, she shouldn’t eat that day. I had been skinny as a cat then, and I had laughed at what she said. Now I was that skinny again, but not laughing.

  I rang the bell, and Apolline buzzed me in. She held me at arm’s length, looking at me. Her hair was the color of Thanksgiving cranberries. Otherwise, she looked remarkably the same in her sixties as she had in her forties, leathery, thin, her eyebrows carefully penciled in above her dark eyes. She kissed me on both cheeks; she still smelled overpoweringly of Chanel No. 5.

  My little girl, she said in French, then switched to accented English to ask me how my parents were.

  I told her they were dead.

  She asked me how my family was.

  Dead, too.

  Oh, merde, she said, and led me into her kitchen. I told her what had happened, minus the violent details, the blood, but I could tell she knew what I was leaving out. She had grown up in Nazi-occupied Paris. She knew blood. Whatever family she had started with was gone by the liberation. When she’d come to work for us, she was an orphan with only distant cousins to call family.

  “Your poor little daughter,” she said. She got a bottle of brandy out of a cupboard and poured us each a juice glass full. We drained them. “I should have kept in better touch with your parents,” she said, pouring us another brandy.

  I shrugged. I had been in touch. Every day. It hadn’t saved either of them.

  After the third glass of brandy, I told her what Aunt Z had told me. Did my mother bring me home from the hospital, or did my father bring me home from Paris? I had brought the snapshot of my mother holding me outside our apartment, and I showed it to her.

  Apolline touched the blanket. “First he brought me from Paris to Fontainebleau,” she said. “Then he brought you.”

  Suddenly I understood everything. My father had once told me, apropos of nothing, that in France if your maid got pregnant, the law assumed you were the father and charged you for the child’s support until the child turned eighteen. He’d said it lightly, as if it were a humorous but slightly illuminating difference—brie versus Kraft singles—between the American idea of family and the French. But Apolline had been our maid. I thought of her on all those Christmas mornings, sitting on the floor with me, watching me open my boxes of Barbies and Barbie clothes. Once even, I remembered, a miniature Barbie convertible. She had watched me grow up thoroughly, irredeemably American. “You’re my mother,” I said.

  Apolline shook her head. She touched the picture again, this time putting a red fingernail on a shadow I had not noticed before, one that stretched across the ground at my mother’s feet. The shadow of the photographer, my father, that U.S. Army colonel. “I should have been,” she said. I was confused.

  “But were you?”

  “No,” she said. Then she patted my arm, got up from the table, and brought back an old copy of National Geographic. She flipped open the cover. I saw a small cache of $100 bills inside and a handful of snapshots—Apolline’s combined safety deposit box and savings bank. She pushed a small black-and-white square across the table to me. “This is your mother,” she said. “We were roommates in Paris. We worked at the same bar.”

  I peered down at the photograph, at a young woman with dark brown curls—a perm? She had on a tight white blouse and full skirt, and she was laughing, her head thrown back a little. I couldn’t really see her eyes, which were half-closed. I looked harder, expected some click of recognition. Some physical manifestation of ah hah. But I felt nothing. “What’s her name?” I asked Apolline.

  “Sophie,” she said. “Anne-Sophie Desnos. Or so she always told me.”

  “Desnos,” I said. “Like the poet?”

  “What poet?” Apolline said.

  I told her what I could remember, that Robert Desnos had been a Paris-born surrealist poet famous for automatic writing. How during the war he’d worked with the French Resistance, had been deported, and had died of typhus just after the camp he was in was liberated. What I remembered best was a story about him moving among the prisoners, reading their palms, trying to confound the guards, who told them daily they were all going to die, by predicting for each a long life. I had named a character in my only novel Desnos. Now I had hopes of a connection to both a hero of France and another writer.

  “I can’t imagine they were family,” Apolline said, doubtful. “Sophie said she had grown up in Alsace. She came to Paris right after the war. Lots of girls did.” She paused to look at the picture. “I did think maybe she was a Jew. I couldn’t ask her that, though, so who knows? Was Robert Desnos a Jew?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  “Still,” Apolline shrugged one shoulder. If my mother was Jewish, then I was, too.

  “What else can you tell me about her?” I asked.

  Now Apolline gave a truly Gallic shrug, one that implied the general mystery of the universe—or at least of the facts in question. What Apolline
did know is that they had worked in the same bar and lived in the same small attic room for nearly two years starting in 1957. It was at the bar that they met my father, the colonel, who came in sometimes with French officers they knew.

  “So my father went out with Sophie?”

  “Went out?” Apolline raised her plucked and penciled eyebrows. “Were they lovers? Maybe, but I don’t think so. I don’t think I ever saw them do more than talk over a drink. She certainly didn’t bring him back to our room, but then she wouldn’t have.” Apolline frowned, and I wondered if Sophie had not brought the American colonel back to their room because of some mutual agreement about not bringing men into what sounded like the tiniest of garrets. Or was it because she knew or guessed how Apolline felt about the colonel? I should have been your mother.

  “Sophie was clever,” Apolline said. “She could keep a secret. I’ll say that for her. She didn’t tell me everything. That’s for certain.” She pulled the other photos out from their hiding place in the magazine and pushed them across the table. Apolline and Sophie smoking beside what looked like a narrow industrial canal. Sophie on a ramshackle carousel, riding a one-legged horse. Again, there was a shadow on the ground. Was it the ride operator? The photographer? My real father, whoever that was? I looked at the shadow, trying to compare it to the one the colonel cast in the photo of Livvy with me. It was impossible to tell.

  The last picture in the pile wasn’t a snapshot but an old-fashioned postcard addressed to Apolline, or so I guessed. The looping fountain-penned handwriting was illegible to me. “Do you know who my father was?” I asked, turning the postcard over to look at the front.