“Bed straps, camisoles, concomitant bleeding — all the more reason, surely, to trust in new treatments,” I began. “Sine-wave therapy, electroconvulsive shock —”
“Bien sûr,” she cut me off. “Those you’ll find in the building behind the Men’s. You’ll find too that, largely, our guests don’t merit them. The tried-and-true works equally well. Dr. Cadieu prefers it, in fact. Fever and coma when necessary, fresh air, exercise.” She eyed my watch. Admiring it?
“And work, Poitier. Never underestimate the therapeutic value of good, honest work. Speaking of which, you’re to escort those exempted from chapel to Laundry. Then Mademoiselle’s breakfast must be seen to — you might take her to the refectory if she’s up to it.” She saw my confusion. “Yes, yes, special treatment isn’t condoned. But she’s been with us so long she’s unlike the rest. You’re to make her as comfortable as possible, Cadieu’s orders. The poor thing’s failing.” Her eyes met mine, benignly. “You were able to bathe her?”
It was the perfect moment to raise something I shouldn’t have had to. “About that cat — isn’t vermin a worry?”
She pointed to the patients huddling farther up the corridor. “If you don’t mind, they’re due in Laundry.”
***
OUTSIDE, THE SUN was already blazing. Armed with vague directions, I led the little troop through a maze of buildings to one tucked behind Admin, not far from the directeur’s villa. By now I was ravenous, it’s fair to say weak with hunger.
The laundry was a concrete bunker as grey and echoey as a gym, filled with steaming vats, boilers, mangles and washboards. Workers moved about like jerky machines as a burly, red-faced gentleman oversaw them. He waved my charges toward a huge pressing machine flanked on either side by women feeding in, catching, and folding linens.
One of them, the woman in green I’d noticed earlier, pointed to my apron. I was flushing when I unbuttoned and gave it over, the steamy heat enough to cause a faint. It was soon returned, slightly scalded but perfectly smooth, by a guest who had the face of a saint on one of Sister’s holy cards, never mind her wild hair.
“Feed them in nicely, girls,” their supervisor barked. “Many hands make light work.” Indeed, said the nunnish voice lodged inside me.
I hastened back to the Pavilion and hurried to the second floor. When I entered Mademoiselle’s room — unimpeded, as luck would have it — the patient swept whatever she’d been scribbling on into the table’s little drawer, all but a sheet or two. She was still dressed for winter despite the rising heat. At her elbow was a cup of tea; on the floor was a saucer, from which that abominable creature, the cat, was licking eggshells.
When she decided to look up at me, the sight of her face was a shock. It was pasty white — had she powdered it with talcum? Only, I detected a floury scent. “Goodness! We have a ghost?” If you could see yourself, I had the sense to withhold — particularly since the room lacked a mirror, which could be put to horrific use if shattered. I made my voice loud and convivial. “I’m here to take you to breakfast, Mademoiselle.”
“You’re too late.” The poor thing uncapped a little vial of bluish milk and, bending creakily, emptied it into the saucer. “Puss-puss,” she murmured, ignoring the bits of eggshell floating there.
“That animal needs that far less than you do, dear. You need it to keep up your strength.”
“Who are you, my mother? Cruel, you think, using a cat as a canary?” she erupted. “Try minding your own business, Soitier Polange. If you haven’t noticed, the food here is unfit.”
“My business, love, dictates that you need to eat. I’ll help you to the dining room if you like — the common room,” I corrected myself. “Some company will do you good.”
“The common room,” she spat, “for common lunatics. Where do you come from?”
This I chose to ignore. “You have a special diet, then?”
“Whatever they can’t touch, the creatures in the kitchen. Not to be trusted.”
Pointless to debate the irrational, I’d discovered some years before during the briefest possible stint in pediatrics, a week there the most I could bear. Biting my tongue, I gripped the aliénée’s elbow to help her from the chair. She shook me off so violently I almost stumbled. Remembering Head Nurse’s instructions, I tried a different approach. “If you show me where the kitchen is, I’ll see to it that —”
“Their excuse for a cook adds enough poison? I’ve been, thank you, and outsmarted them,” she said, smug as could be. “Quite easily, too. Imbeciles never learn.” Her grin made cracks in her cakey mask.
I found myself counting again, imagining Sister’s adage, Refrain from showing undue emotion. “Imbeciles, Mademoiselle?”
“The imbeciles in charge, of course! The ones who do the rat’s bidding — as bad if not worse than the lunatics themselves. Why, Soitier Polange, are they so cruel as to keep me here?”
Over her tweedy shoulder, I glimpsed a stray paper, on which was an address in Paris and, in a similar scrawl, the words When may I see you? I gripped the patient’s arm more firmly and tried once more to raise her, intending to guide her to the hallway.
“Unhand me! Please! If you have any mercy — if you know what’s good for you!” Her shriek was enough to send the cat scuttling. Collapsing there, she pressed her cheek to the page.
“Good enough, then,” I conceded.
***
IT WASN’T TILL I’d found the common room, and found myself enlisted with feeding the others, that I realized how shaken I was. A pencil, a broken pen, a plate, possibly dashed against a wall: all weapons in the hands of the sick, and in Mademoiselle’s case they ought to have been removed.
But there wasn’t a moment to nip back upstairs between helping Novice coax porridge into drooling mouths, retrieving dropped spoons, and wiping up spills. Though I had no illusions about table manners, it wasn’t pleasant watching those who could feed themselves tuck into their food, watching their grinding jaws. Novice offered an untouched serving and, kindly, to cover for me while I ate it, but though my stomach growled, I could barely get it down. To think that most of these guests were fortunate to be here, housed and fed, while to the north and across the border, les fritz wouldn’t have treated them half as well. Treat the ill with equal compassion regardless of affliction: thank you, Sister Ursula, for instilling that cardinal rule!
When the feeding was accomplished, we checked sleeves and pockets for cutlery, counting everything twice before the kitchen girls came to trundle away their carts, and a bit of a lull followed. Some guests rocked in their chairs, jabbering, while others slouched and slumped, speechless.
Head Nurse appeared out of nowhere, accompanied by a greyhaired woman whose presence was announced by a clean but threadbare white coat. Dr. Cadieu greeted me with a bright if weary smile, her pouched eyes hawkish but not unkind, the lines around her eyes and mouth perhaps the toll of patience. “So you’ve met our Mademoiselle — and how do you find her?” she asked me.
Head cut in to confer about a fever treatment; I, perhaps overly eager and forgetting myself, asked, “A treatment for Mademoiselle?”
“If you don’t mind, Poitier, the doctor and I have other patients to discuss.”
Cadieu, however, shrugged this off. “Poor Mademoiselle, she’s excitable all right. But her age and her condition — her heart, you see — make fever risky, alas.” Head Nurse gave an impatient little nod, tapping her fingertips together, but the doctor seemed in no hurry. “The patient wasn’t always so, Nurse Poitier. On more than one occasion I’d have released her, let her go in a heartbeat, had it been my choice. Little can be done for her now, I’m sorry to say.”
“Poitier. If you’ll excuse us,” Head said, before speaking quietly with Cadieu — too quietly for me to hear. When the doctor retreated, my supervisor explained, “Poor Cadieu has been here as long as Mademoiselle.” She winced at the shuffling squeak of Cadieu’s soles, raising her brows — their thinness less the result of over-plucking
than of low thyroid, I surmised. Or menopause. Head would be that age; her moodiness suggests it.
Without warning, she brightened. An orderly was approaching, juggling my stepladder and something flat and square wrapped in paper. A painting to perk things up? Very nice. There must have been volunteers somewhere eager to contribute their handiwork. But when the orderly unveiled the object, Maréchal Pétain’s smile beamed from the frame.
Looking positively dewy-eyed, Head gave a salute, and recited the maréchal’s slogan, “‘Work, Family, Country.’” She peered at me, looking a little peeved, and sighed. “So that’s it, Poitier. Your job’s cut out for you. Rest assured, Cadieu’s logic isn’t mine. But Mademoiselle’s all yours. As if we have the bodies to spare. You’re to make her as comfortable as possible: doctor’s orders.”
4
OF HAPPIER TIMES I’m happy to write, lest you’ve forgotten them. I won’t let you forget. Shysters in white coats say, go back as far as you can remember. So many years between us, I’ve lost count. If you could see me now — this moment — if I could see myself! Whiteface. A geisha’s makeup, all the rage in Paris, where under the shadow of Eiffel’s grande asperge we hankered after japonisme. All because of Hokusai’s wave swamping tiny boats, a village. And studies drawn from life — no École des BeauxArts for people with tits! But. Bodies, freedom: the shape of vastness? Like God, some might say. Or Paris. A wisteria-tangled joie de vivre, a well-pruned riot — heaven; and you its debutante, at what age, forty? That show they gave us near La Madeleine: a coming out?
But before the tormenters return I must get to the point … the point before the troubles began, when the world was fresh, that other time: April in Paris, what finer place to start?
***
ASYLUM FOR LUNATICS
DAY? MONTH? YEAR?
MY DEAREST C,
In the grey-green thrall of another life, this earlier time (what’s to erase memory’s greenness?) the only bounds we knew were in Montparnasse. Maman’s, and the walls of our flat. Flocked paper, Papa’s pipe smoke. A holding pen, a corral and its starting gate bolted by rules, rules, rules. In those unbroken days — correct me if I’m wrong, it was 1884? — you were as headstrong as any horse.
Released, we raced along the boulevard at gunshot speed. As fast as they would take us, our feet skimmed cobblestones, fish-scale shiny after the rain. Moisture breathed up from everywhere — sidewalks, sewers, budded lilacs. Coffee smells, butter smells. Gutted fish, orange peels and piss in the gutters — the muse of all these scents enough to hold us, hold us up.
We were with a friend, of course; it didn’t do to be alone, girls flying arm in arm past shopkeepers sweeping shop-fronts, setting out fruit. Equally eager to escape Maman’s badgering, our friend behaved as one of us, though she was merely a boarder. We could not move fast enough with Maman’s voice in our ears. Who had time to waste taming a wild mane or properly lacing a corset? The dandruff dotting my hair was marble dust and dried clay, and my middle was bound, but by yesterday’s smock stiffened with plaster and not whalebone. When it bunched over my skirt and rode up, I peeled my jacket off and tied it around me by its sleeves, barely stopping.
“A target for pigeons, you look like. You might’ve been shat on!” our friend jeered, as if she too wasn’t splotched and splattered, a compliment paid out of mouth-full-of-marbles English decency. But, then, she wasn’t so different from us. Cutting through the Luxembourg Gardens, politely holding the gold-tipped gate, she paused to light a cigarette, took a puff, passed it. Its taste cut the perfume of freshly pruned trees.
Forgetting Maman’s well-pruned urbanity, we didn’t bother hiking our hems to jump puddles. Down chestnut-bordered allées we raced, past fountains and old men reading newspapers. We barely ogled the statuary, far too rushed to speculate about man-bits under fig leaves. Sprinting round the perfectly circular pond, even you hardly noticed the little toy boats drifting there.
Not soon enough we swung out into the streets again, past windows dressed with finery: hats, gloves, parasols, soaps, tarts, rainbow spreads of macarons and chocolates shaped like roses, fruit, birds, rabbits and any other form of flora and fauna imaginable. Vanities now, they were treats we would buy for ourselves when we were rich and famous, with the wealth caked in the creases of our knuckles and beneath our nails — dried clay, from which we made our treasures. Seduced by marzipan pigs and tartes citrons, my friend pressed her nose to the glass.
“Today of all days” — I stamped my foot, wrested her away — “how dare you think of your stomach?”
“Yes, Maman. No, Maman,” she mimicked my accent pathetically. “Because I can’t buy doesn’t mean I can’t look. If I could I’d window-shop down every bloody street here.”
“No time to be a flâneur! You said yourself, this is the chance we’ve been slaving for!”
“I as much as you.” Such presumption in one so falsely humble. “Can we not speak for each other? Though perhaps one can’t and mustn’t gauge another’s mind. But one can try.”
I had awaited this day all eighteen years of my life, as far back as I could remember. Long before we’d made the city our home, I’d delved with both hands into muck and murk, shaping faces out of mud, to Maman’s great disgust. All I had thought of was the chance, ooh-la-la, to study with a great artist, even persuading Papa to move our family — Maman, our brother, sister and me — to Paris.
Alas, studying here was to sketch statues, drawing from death, not life. How could we hope to show true anatomy, movement? To students like us, blessed with breasts, not penises, real bodies, living, naked ones, were off-limits. Most would give their eye teeth for the opportunity which had landed in our laps. Some would have given eyes and teeth.
As we wound our way up rue Jacob, and rue Jacob broadened and straightened into rue de l’Université, my friend’s babbling overran the river’s sounds — such a torrent that I quit listening. My belly was a bundle of nerves, and a brassy wonder took such hold that my bad foot dragged.
My foolish friend teased, “You’re not getting cold feet — you’re not afraid of him, are you?” I suppose that you remember this? My friend had acquired a habit of baiting me, finding a warped delight in it, perhaps, ever since our old teacher had brought the Master to our atelier and said Monsieur would instruct us in his absence.
“Cold feet! Don’t be stupid. Afraid of that runt of a man? Talking to him will be like talking to Papa, he must be that old.” I believe you put those words in my mouth. They shut her up, momentarily. Still her round eyes swooped over me.
“I’ve heard about him, from the other English girls — the ones studying too. He’s got a reputation for getting inside people’s knickers.”
I let out a snort. “And we’re lambs for the killing? I can’t speak for you, of course. But I care only about his work. The work of his hands, our own Michelangelo’s.” And I waved my own grandly, for we stood before the Dépôt des Marbres.
It was a gloomy building, arched windows glaring behind the lofty planes and their seedpods’ fuzzy, dangling bursts of green.
“Since you’re so sure, missy, you go first.”
A tenacious joy, climbing like wisteria, choked out any trepidation. The light inside, barely interrupted by the leafy branches beyond, was so harsh that we squinted. Pouring in, it showed a dusty purity — an oxymoron like our brother, who, after getting religion, could be sharp and dull.
Men worked silently in the clammy brightness, barely looking up, the air charged with its cellar-smell. Despite their bustling industry, their hammering and chiselling, we seemed the only breathing ones. It was a morgue of sorts: statues making a company of ghosts frozen into position.
Is it vivid to you, still? Everywhere, stacked and scattered over worktables and shelves, were body parts shaped from clay or plaster-cast. Torsos, heads, arms, legs. A limbo of fragments, as if plucked from a battlefield. My friend was agog. In this purgatory of white lay paradise.
Only then did I notice
one of the workers breezing past, a wraith-like fellow with a vaguely familiar face, who half nodded. I couldn’t think of his name. Perhaps he had been at our old school, was now privileged to be among the legion of Monsieur’s praticiens?
My friend, entranced, put out her hand, stroked a rigid ankle. Someone coughed a gruff Bonjour, and we were no longer so alone. Trapping her hand in her pocket, my friend struck the pose — do you remember? — so useful in currying Maman’s favour.
“Mesdemoiselles …?” Monsieur said vaguely. He was short, with threads of grey in his reddish beard and itchy-looking eyes. Exactly level with mine, his gaze was neither masterly nor instructive but just shy of being rude, lingering with a blunt curiosity, his blue eyes roving under pinkish lids. In one arm he held a sketchbook, in his hand a stub of chalk. He ran his other hand over his bristling grey hair, rubbed his big fleshy nose, and clapped his hands.
A girl appeared, with translucent skin set off by the dark triangle between her legs. With feline grace she stepped onto a platform and crouched. Neither you nor my friend looked at her. Then a man slipped from behind a curtain, naked as David. His face might’ve been raw canvas; my friend’s too, only hers was filled with such dismay it might have been her posing, undressed, stripped, by his hands. Not that it would’ve been torture. The muscles of his torso rippled like those of a Michelangelo, his penis a fat snail curled against his thigh.
It would be lying to say only my friend gaped. Not that we hadn’t seen a penis before, each of us lucky enough to have a brother. You were silent. But my friend elbowed me, choking back a giggle, a cough. Stop, I nudged her back, hoping our new master hadn’t noticed. Affecting the indifference fools take for wilfulness, I tried not to imagine Maman’s chiding: Your attitude will be the death of us all, my girl!
Fears of Monsieur seeing our display lifted when we saw that he had set down the sketchbook, seized a boulette, and was busily shaping it into a pointy lemon tart topped with a raspberry — a much too perfect boob.
These Good Hands Page 3