I rushed into the living room. “What’s wrong?”
“They shot him! They shot him!”
I remember sinking to the couch beside her and pulling her hands into mine. And then we wept. It was one of the rare times, after the war years, when I wept openly, and it was hours before we could fall asleep from exhaustion.
And the following Saturday, we watched on TV as Kennedy’s funeral train slowly journeyed southward from New York to Washington, passing enormous crowds. Mothers and children saluted the train as it passed. Boys in baseball uniforms held their caps over their hearts. Twenty thousand people sang the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” as the train passed through Philadelphia Station. Women fell to their knees and wailed, black and white—it didn’t matter—crammed together on station platforms, holding each other, crying together. Overpasses were lined with people carrying American flags, people crowded together in building windows and on street corners, police and military men stood at attention and saluted, bridesmaids delayed their receptions to toss flowers at the train, people stood on water towers, climbed signal trees, brandished signs saying God Bless Bobby. Nuns huddled in prayer as families stood together—father, mother, children—in order, tallest to shortest, hands over their hearts, and then, finally, the train arrived in Washington and the nation mourned again as one Kennedy was laid to rest next his brother. We watched it all, transfixed. I still remember Ted Kennedy’s words when he said his brother should be remembered as a man who “saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.”
And now I remember another southward journey filled with tears, the tears of Oradour where more than 600 people were murdered by the Germans, the tears of Tulle where 99 resistance fighters were executed, the tears of Élodie outside the cave at Lascaux. So many dead. So many tears.
And I remember the deep well of compassion inside Élodie, and back in 1968, I wished, more than anything, that I could have talked with Élodie about Bobby Kennedy’s life and his death.
There is a discreet knock on the door of my room at Spaulding, followed by a woman’s voice. “Good afternoon, Mister Budge.”
I turn from the window to see an attractive young woman with a shy smile. “You startled me.” I return the photo of Élodie to my pocket.
“I’m sorry. I just wanted to introduce myself. My name is Amélie. I’ll be your physical therapist while you’re here at Spalding Rehab.”
“Call me Henry,” I say. “You have a French name and accent.”
Her face brightens. “I was born and raised in Caen, France.”
I smile back. “Normandy.”
“Yes,” she replies as she examines my bracelet I.D. “Most Americans confuse it with Cannes on the Côte d’Azur. Do you know Normandy?”
I broaden my smile. “Intimately,” I say. “You remind me of horses.”
She gives me a bemused look. “Horses?”
“The perfume you’re wearing … it’s Nuit de Longchamp.”
“Why, yes, it is, Mister Budge! But how in the world do you know that?”
“Call me Henry. The olfactories have very long memories.” Élodie is almost there, almost at the threshold of the room, wanting to come in. Can’t I be granted just one moment? Just one?
“I’m sorry. I—” Amélie says.
“The nose remembers,” I say.
“But why horses, Mister Budge?”
“Henry.”
“I’m sorry. Henry. Why horses?”
“That’s better. Longchamp is a race track in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris.”
“Yes, of course. You have been there?”
If I was the age of my great grandkids, I might have said, “Duh!” Instead, I say, “I made a tour of France seventy years ago.”
She stares at me for a moment, then her eyes grow bright. ‘Oh. I’m sorry. I should have known, Mister Budge.”
“Henry, damn it! We’re on this earth together, you and I, and everybody else who’s alive. Let’s try to get by on a first-name basis. Who knows? Maybe world peace will break out.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. There’s that gorgeous smile again. “From now on I’ll call you Henry. I promise.”
“I may be just a tired historian, but I’m not retired from the world. I’m alive and want to be called by the name I prefer. And, besides, I’m still working, still writing. Don’t cremate me yet.”
“I understand.”
“They always want to separate us: the baby boomer generation, gen X, the millennials ….”
“The greatest generation … Henry?” A teasing smile.
“Yes, that too.” I return the smile. It’s the same way Élodie had pronounced it … Uhnree
“We’ll begin PT tomorrow. How does eleven o’clock sound?”
“The sooner, the better,” I say. “I’m hoping to get to Normandy for the D-Day commemoration.”
She knits her brow. “I’m afraid that will be impossible. There’s not nearly enough time. Your doctors would never approve.”
Damn! Why can’t I keep things to myself? “I’ll make it happen,” I say. Weakly.
“But you won’t be fully recovered. There’ll be pain.”
“Do you plan to strap me to the bed?”
She laughs. “Of course not.”
“Well then Amélie, my sweet, let’s do what we need to do, and I’ll take it from there. Deal?”
“I don’t know. I—”
“Deal?”
She stares at me, bites her lower lip. Finally, she nods. “Deal.”
“Deal, what?”
“Deal, Henry.”
“Thank you. And don’t breathe a word of this to anyone else. Especially my family.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not allowed to. HIPAA. Patient privacy rights.”
“Good for HIPAA! Score one for bureaucracy.”
“And by the way, Henry, if what they tell me is correct, you are more than ‘just a retired historian.’ I understand several of your books have been quite popular.”
I shrug, assume what I hope is a look of modesty. “Yes … but you must still call me Henry. And there’s something else you can do for me.”
“What’s that?”
“Remove this goddamned Foley catheter. It’s uncomfortable as hell.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m damned sure! I don’t need it. Why did they put it in anyway?”
“Well, you needed it for the surgery. And then I guess they—”
“They what? Assumed since I’m over ninety I must be incontinent? Well, I’m not, and I want the damn thing out.”
“Okay, I’ll ask the doctor.”
“Don’t ask. Tell!”
Good. I’ve elicited that beautiful smile again!
“I’ll do what I can,” she says. “If you’d like to be nearer the window, I can bring a wheelchair in.”
“No! I don’t need …. Sure. Why not?”
After Amélie leaves, I roll the chair nearer the window and place the Boston Globe on the wall unit housing the heat and air conditioning, and pull the section containing the crossword puzzle from the rest of the newspaper and start solving it. In ink. I like the challenge of ink because it forces me to hold several intersecting words in mind at the same time to confirm the correctness of the interlocking entries before committing myself to writing the answer in. It is my private test for signs of Alzheimer’s and, so far, I’ve passed easily. I am half finished with the puzzle when I put it down on the wall unit. The pages of the newspaper flutter in the updraft. I place my hand in my pocket to touch the photo of Élodie and lean back to watch planes leaving Logan Airport.
When I saw Élodie’s tears that time, when I saw her tears after we had the film developed in the village of Prades in the Pyrénées, I fell even more deeply in love with her. Because, in addition to the photo I took of her—the one sitting in my pocket—there were other exposures on the Agfa film roll in the camera we took from one of the Germans w
e killed after Oradour. I remember Élodie insisted on knowing the man’s name. It was Fritz Dürbach.
In several of the pictures was a smiling young woman with her arms around two children, a boy and a girl. The boy, in turn, held a dog in his lap. On a table behind them was a framed picture of Dürbach. Then, in another picture, Dürbach himself, posed with his family in front of a Christmas tree. That was when tears formed in Élodie’s eyes. And it was when she muttered, “To hell with Hitler and his filthy, fucking, goddamned war!” I can almost hear her voice now. Almost.
Why, seventy years later, is Élodie’s memory calling me back to France? Beyond what I wrote in the beginning about ennobling the grief (which has intensified since Anna died, or since I’m approaching my own end) and to recover more perfect memories of my first love, what do I hope to accomplish? Do I also hope to exonerate myself for what I did at that time—or, more precisely, what I didn’t do—because of my love for Élodie? Come to a final reckoning? Close the ledger on a long life? It would be easy to avoid going to France. Getting shot is certainly a damn good excuse. Plus there’s my age, my family, the doctors, including Callie, who say I shouldn’t fly. I never thought going to France that first time was very heroic because I had no choice. The generals made me go. But to go a second time, to bring our story—a story that ended on the rise with no falling action, no denouement—to bring that story to a better conclusion requires a different kind of courage. Now all I need is to figure out how to escape from this place in time to catch my flight and make it to the ceremonies. And I need the courage to write the final chapter.
I roll the wheelchair back to the window and see people moving briskly through chiaroscuro plays of light on the sidewalk. Several physical therapists work with patients in the Therapy Garden, a small park opposite the main entrance.
Why is trying to retrieve memories of Élodie like trying to remember the taste of a fine meal, the vaguest hint of flavor? Or like trying to hang onto a sound when the receding, reverberating, tenth echo had lost its life force? All I can recover are afterimages, like the vague, fast-fading, green-gray mackle you see when you close your eyes after gazing at a backlit window, or after staring at a cell phone in the dark.
Here I am, an expert in memory. I wrote the goddamned book, for Christ’s sake! The Architecture of Memory in Prehistory, Antiquity and the Middle Ages. I studied the key thinkers on memory—Simonides of Ceos, Cicero, Quintilian, Matteo Ricci, Giulio Camillo, Giordano Bruno—all of whom constructed what they called “memory palaces” whereby an item to be later remembered is stored in one or another imaginary room in an imaginary palace, and when that bit of knowledge is needed, all one has to do is visit the imaginary room in the mind, and there it would be. That may work for facts. But feelings? They are different. I can’t use that trick to recover the feeling of making love with
Élodie, her touch, her smell, her warmth, her yearning voice, the taste of her, or even the very look of her impassioned face. So, why do I think it will be better if I go to France?
“Well, aren’t you the picture of self-pity, sitting there looking out the window with a hangdog expression?”
I spin the wheelchair. “Callie!”
“Hello, Papa.”
“You can’t even see my expression from the door.”
“You were reflected in the window. And what are you doing sitting in a stuffy room like this? Don’t you know you can open a window?”
“What?” I say. “No, I didn’t know that. I thought they were fixed so people wouldn’t jump out.”
“Uh unh,” she says. “I guess when they designed the building they figured fresh air was worth a few bodies on First Avenue.” She opens the window. A breeze comes in and wafts through my hair. There is the sea-salt smell of the ocean. I hear the flutings of birdsong coming from the trees. I laugh. “Oh Christ, thank you Callie! Thank you! You have liberated me!”
“I brought your computer.”
“More liberation!”
“I talked to your physical therapist.”
“Amélie?”
“Yes. She said it would be okay to wheel you outside tonight. Want to go?”
“In this chair?”
“Of course. You haven’t recovered enough to be walking for more than a few minutes.”
“Do you know if your mother is coming tonight?”
“No. She said she was going to bed early. She’ll visit tomorrow.”
“Okay, then. I’d like to go outside.”
Callie tilts her head and gives me an inquisitive smile. “But only if Mom is not coming?”
“She would only have to see me in a wheelchair once and she’d start nagging me all over again about a nursing home. Next thing you know, she’ll be suggesting I wear diapers, for Christ’s sake!”
“Don’t worry, Papa, I won’t tell her.” Callie takes the brake off the wheelchair and pushes it into the hallway.
When we arrive outdoors by the Therapy Park, the sound of the wind is thready as it rustles through the trees. I see, in a slick of moonlight, a soft breeze dragging cat’s paws across the water. I ask, “Are you up to pushing me all the way out to the end of the dry dock?”
“Of course.”
A few minutes later, we arrive at the end where it juts into the harbor. Waves suck and wheeze against the pilings. We stop, and I gaze across the harbor at planes taking off and landing at Logan Airport. And though I can’t see the lighthouses at Graves and at Boston Light because of buildings in my line of sight, I look in their direction and know that, out there, ships are passing in and out of Boston Harbor.
Ships! Passing in and out of Boston Harbor!
I look to the south and see a Coast Guard cutter at its pier and I know, beyond that, is the Black Falcon Cruise ship terminal.
And I begin to form a new idea. Why risk that pneumothorax thing by flying, when I can travel by sea?
Some eighty kilometers southwest of Corrèze, we come to the outskirts of Montignac, a small commune in the Dordogne where Marcel’s cousin lives. It is a heavily forested area in the valley of the Vézère River where limestone cliffs, honeycombed with caves, rise almost directly from the river. The village itself is medieval with narrow streets and half-timbered buildings dating from the 13th and 14th centuries, including a stone, arched bridge over the river and a turreted château on the outskirts of the village.
Marcel signals for us to pull over. “We must hide the car here and you must wait while I visit my cousin and make sure the place is safe.”
“Yes, go,” says Élodie. “But hurry. And don’t take any chances.”
We wait less than half an hour, mostly in silence. There is an obvious rancor among Élodie, me, and Jean-Baptiste which discourages conversation. Élodie and I stand together, resting our backs against the car. Jean-Baptiste leans against a tree trunk, some distance away, smoking several cigarettes in a row. Claude seems to want no part of the palpable tension, so he, too, stands off by himself. Finally, when we see Jean-Baptiste drop the stub of his cigarette to the ground, stomp on it, and start toward us, we turn to see Marcel approaching.
“Well?” Élodie asks.
“Georges thinks the Boche are all over in the nearest prefecture,” Marcel reports. “They haven’t seen any for several days. My cousin welcomes us and says his wife will kill a few ducks and make her famous Magret de Canard with a Sauce Perigueux.”
“A feast in the middle of a war!” Élodie’s voice is like a song. She turns to me. “Sauce Perigueux is a truffle sauce. I have no idea how she will manage to do this with the shortages.”
We climb into the car and drive into the commune and on to a stone house with an adjoining barn, also stone, behind which we park the car to hide it from the main road.
Georges and Isabeau Bosquet are a middle-aged couple who live alone except for a pig they call Adolphe they plan to eat when food becomes even scarcer—or to celebrate liberation if it comes first. I learn later that, for several years, they have been a sto
p along an underground railroad, sheltering Jews trying to escape the Nazis and passing them on to the next safe house, from where they are escorted along the chain until they are guided out of France, over the Pyrénées, and into Spain. We sit around the kitchen table and discuss the war while Isabeau vigorously works the lever of a red water pump that emits sighs and asthmatic gasps as it gushes water into a tin bucket. Fortunately for me, Georges and Isabeau speak English, though not nearly as well as Élodie and her companions.
“There has been much sabotage,” Georges says. “But the Boche are quick to repair the rail lines. More must be done.”
Claude leans forward. “That’s why we came to see you. Do you have dynamite you can give us?”
“No. But I can get some tomorrow.”
“Then do it.” Jean-Baptiste says it like it is a command. “We’ll stay the night here.”
Isabeau looks at Élodie. “We only have one extra room. You are welcome to it, mademoiselle.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Élodie says quickly. “I’ll sleep in the barn.”
“We’ll all sleep in the barn,” says Jean-Baptiste.
Élodie and I exchange glances.
Later, after the meal, Georges opens a third bottle of wine and holds it up as if for a toast. “Enough about war. Let us talk of more pleasant things. Have you heard of the important discovery some local boys made here four years ago?”
“No,” says Élodie. “What discovery?”
“An ancient cave with many, many paintings. Préhistorique.”
Élodie’s eyes widen. “That’s sounds fascinating. Will we have time to visit it? How long will it take for you to return with the explosives?”
“I have to go to Begerac for them, but the ordinary route is too close to Périgueux, so I must go indirectly. It will be four or five hours before I return.”
The Light from the Dark Side of the Moon Page 13