These Good Hands

by Carol Bruneau

  Like father like son. His namesake.

  Running a hand over his hair, our Monsieur then groomed himself to pay a late afternoon visit to Notre-Dame — the light at that hour lovely for viewing her rose windows, I do recall.

  But I stayed behind to await the agent from Beaux-Arts who’d promised to come. My time was horribly wasted when he didn’t show up — time that could have been spent applying finishing touches to Maman’s gesturing hand, as I sought to capture her in a kindlier attitude. Hours lost to my agitation at such discourtesy, I could not pick up my tools again until night came. “They know your modelling is first-class!” Monsieur was always reminding me; I could’ve used those words of solace as the shadows fell. I could’ve used your company. La Folie was slightly forbidding with no one around.

  Not that I’ve ever minded being alone.

  Working by gaslight, it took some doing to finish Maman’s fingers, especially since I was working from memory. Though the apartment was a mere tram-ride away, she might’ve lived in Japan, so removed was I. But the god of solitude let me visualize her body’s presence, muscle by muscle, and, before I knew it, I’d captured it. Positively ghostly, her half life-size figure gazed from the worktable.

  The insects chirring outside added their assurance. Seek and ye shall find, they said. Into the night I worked her figure. The sagging arms, the hollow chest, the place in her lap to accommodate the seated child. A simple matter now of assembling parts. Mère et enfant sharing some tender secret. By the wee hours — stillness, a rancidness wafting through the shutters — I’d worked her below the waist, done the modest drapery of her skirt.

  Stepping back to view the work, after being lost to it, was like coming to after a long, peculiar dream.

  Somehow, amid pigeons’ rustling, the Bièvre’s gurgle, and the zzzzz of sleeping mice, I missed Monsieur. At a different time, a different hour, I’d have caught a tram to rue de Bourgogne, watched for him in the window.

  Now that I was free from our family’s routine, part of me pitied him, this person held hostage by a crone and her spawn.

  Still, turning my work this way and that, admiring its progress, I recited Maman’s words: As a person makes their bed, so they must lie in it. Because part of me hated him also.

  “You can’t mean that, my dear?” said a visitor, whose sudden appearance took me by surprise. Criteur, of all people, the praticien from Monsieur’s other atelier. Since our move to La Folie, the Master was less and less likely to be found at his old premises, having opened yet another atelier in rue de Vaugirard to meet demands for his work. The one near the Seine was now so busy I was glad of this separate space.

  Perhaps I seemed less enthused than I felt. “Oh, it’s you.”

  “What a relief to find you,” Criteur gushed. A gleam in his eyes — was he unwell? Not the most robust, he sometimes begged off work, feeling ill. “Monsieur has more studios these days than ladies do silks.” A joke with a sickly bent.

  Before I could throw a wet shawl over my creation, he ran a palm over its planes. “Nice work — commissioned?” Surely he teased. “Your subject, I’m sure, will be happy.”

  “Will you take some wine? Tea?” I rummaged around our excuse for a kitchen, a coal fire rigged for boiling water. Who had time for such mindless chores as cooking? Monsieur and I — ohla-la — love kept us fed.

  “No, merci.” Criteur’s answer was curt, his gaze vacant, features blurring in the darkness.

  “Any message to give Monsieur? You could leave a note.” I pushed paper towards him. On the back was a study, one of a series: a child’s little portrait. I needed only to picture you, your eyes opened wide, lips parted as if you’d been startled from some reverie. Perhaps it was how I would sculpt myself. The enquiring child that inhabited us, the one who’d just discovered mud from the river behind our house. Fingers star-fished in delight, the moment between her first touch and delving in for more.

  “Nice.” Criteur eyed me playfully — playfully for him. I half imagined calipers measuring my skull, his probing and prodding, but he held off. “I only came to make sure you’re all right. Not the best place in the city to be alone.” He joked about the famously guillotined coming to taunt me, his nonchalance maddening. “You must see them, these headless ones — the way you and Monsieur see, through nerves in your skin? The way earthworms do.” He laughed. “You should get a cat. Something to keep you company while Monsieur” — he looked furtively about — “is on his jaunts. Strays prowl outside. Why not feed one and bring it in?”

  Then he said what I’d been thinking: that a change of scene, a trip, might do me good. You know how it is, the power of suggestion.

  ***

  MY FRIEND, MY old friend, invited me on a jaunt to England and the Isle of Wight. (Who knows what, if any, grand designs she included in this?) Wanting fresh air and a bit of distance from Paris (don’t ask), I agreed — against all better judgment and only because Paul would come too. I missed him, frankly, the willing playmate of our childhood.

  Away from Maman, he was a different person. On the beach, he recited his poems while, unfettered as the fuchsia blooming along the shore, I was just another girl again, whiling away the hours sketching. My friend and I beachcombed and found the sun-bleached skull of a seal, which she drew. She too was easier company away from the city’s grind — she and another friend, in whose stupid notebook, An Album of Confessions to Record Thoughts, Feelings, etc., I wrote fitting answers to stupid questions.

  YOUR FAVOURITE VIRTUE.

  IF NOT YOURSELF, WHO WOULD YOU BE?

  I don’t have any: they are

  A hackney horse in Paris. all boring.

  YOUR FAVOURITE QUALITIES IN MAN.

  YOUR FAVOURITE POETS.

  To obey his wife.

  One who does not write verses.

  YOUR FAVOURITE QUALITIES IN WOMAN.

  YOUR FAVOURITE PAINTERS AND COMPOSERS.

  To make her husband fret.

  Myself.

  YOUR FAVOURITE OCCUPATION.

  YOUR FAVOURITE FOOD AND DRINK.

  To do nothing.

  Love and fresh water.

  YOUR CHIEF CHARACTERISTIC.

  WHAT IS YOUR PRESENT STATE OF MIND?

  Caprice and inconstancy.

  It is too difficult to tell.

  YOUR IDEA OF MISERY.

  FOR WHAT FAULTS DO YOU HAVE MOST TOLERANCE?

  To be the mother of many children.

  I tolerate all my faults but not at all other people’s.

  YOUR FAVOURITE COLOUR

  YOUR FAVOURITE MOTTO. AND FLOWER

  The most changing colour flower which does not change.

  A bird in the hand is worth two and the in the bush.

  My true confidences were kept for Paul. We shared a lemonade, he and I, passing the jar like toddlers, I the sophisticated elder.

  “There’s nothing between Monsieur and me, besides the fact that we’re friends.” Away from his church’s judgment and Maman’s, he listened. Brushed sand from his knees, kissed my cheek. “I don’t believe you,” he said, “but, if Monsieur makes you happy …”

  What made me happy was sculpting. Being away from it left me homesick — work-sick — and jittery, as fear does. Fear that a neglected muse will one day desert you. The sea made it worse. All that restless blue and too much sun and sand made the weeks a carousel, spinning, spinning. Eating, drinking, suffering others’ pleasures, was a too-giddy, dizzying ride. The sky’s glowering haze made me crave the studio, a stick of charcoal no substitute for a chisel. Work’s pull caught in an undertow sparkling with grit; frothy champagne or seawater, it mattered not.

  The sense of being becalmed is a torture, languish a word that gives anguish a despair all its own, C. The queer thing is that only one would understand: Monsieur. Despite his lies, his flightiness, I longed to stroke his bristly nape, the fold of skin above his collar. Such a dogged little man.

  ***

  MONSIEUR WAS WAITING when I re
turned in September, tanned and sick of moonlit strolls on rocky strands. I was unnerved to find that he and my friend exchanged letters. Little did I know, he had enlisted my friend, for all her discretion, as a spy to monitor my comings and goings. As if I had the guiles to escape an island! A seagull’s wits, maybe.

  Yet his kisses were like chocolat. He placed a rose on my pillow. Why a red one? He fancied me in silk that colour, not the grey pinstripe I wore, also courtesy of him, for the photograph he arranged. “Let’s cultivate a more polished image, let’s appeal to patrons.” Yet after the shoot, as we lay in each other’s arms, he spoke of the ancients and of Donatello, Michelangelo, et cetera et cetera, something something “in the heaven of their dreams”: a man’s need to strive despite the world’s oblivion. “What are we, if not our dreams? Windmills tilting at gusts?”

  How I despised the luxuries he took, going off on these long, fanciful flights. “And you have grounds to complain.”

  Lifting my sun-bleached hair from my nape, he kissed its paleness. “I ask only that you be more patient, my dear.”

  “With your government wags and cronies?”

  “With my charlady,” he said.

  So, you’ll perceive, no matter how much of himself he poured out, more than a little was held back. A reserve of something dark, dull and a little oily.

  One evening the pair of us left to stroll the Bièvre and happened upon a vagrant taking a piss, which inspired me to ask, “So, what about your son?”

  “His life has nothing to do with mine. Neither does his mother’s.” But he went home to more than a charlady’s boeuf bourguignon.

  More to her appeal than adeptness at mending and sweeping. He cared for her, however pitifully.

  Picturing my body under his, I said, “Leave her.”

  He didn’t seem to be listening. He explained how the woman’s sewing had kept them while he’d struggled to sculpt in Brussels. “But I can’t talk to her.” His voice was so loud the drunk turned, shaking himself off. “How can I talk to someone with nothing to say?”

  This was my problem? “You must have loved her, once.”

  “At the time. Perhaps. A long time ago.”

  “Your cleaning lady!”

  Be wise as a serpent and simple as a dove is wisdom our Paul imparted, cribbed from his bible — advice I was starting to heed, though my finger traced his palm, the blind reading Braille. My feelings for Monsieur shifted with the light through La Folie’s windows. His shadow covering mine.

  ***

  LA FOLIE — MY folly, you will think, staying on as I did. But work filled in where doubts tunnelled. And do you know how I picture doubt? Like hunched little men wielding pickaxes, the ones boring caves in Épernay’s chalk to rack a thousand years’ supply of Mumm’s. To every challenge, dear, a purpose. The year Eiffel’s tower rose to fuck the sky (pardon, but that’s how it seemed), I strove to give the world tranquility. Psalm, Young Girl with a Hood, Prayer: variously I titled a bust, a woman’s face, her eyes closed, lips parted. Acceptance, repudiation. Grief, praise. Her look was of trusting uncertainty, peaceful worry — the state known as gratitude — for I’d earned a small commission to do the bust of Monsieur’s friend’s son. Practice for my much more pressing depiction of a child.

  Yet peace eluded me. One day the door blew in. A flounce, a fever of frills, and there she was: the steely-haired hag, Rose herself, with her jeering poker face. She flew at me, a rasp in one hand, Monsieur’s chisel in the other, her cesspool mouth unleashing insults. “Bitch, bitch!” she screamed, completely berserk. I wrestled her weapons away, held her wrists. Still she clawed at me, savage old fingernails scraping and gouging fit to take out my eyes, both of them. I waved the rasp, only to show her who was who, as one would a snarling cur.

  “It’s not my fault Monsieur loves me. Not my fault you’re a dried-up twat.”

  As gentle as a dove, I was, and she a harpy, with switchblade eyes and tongue. Dove-gentle, to her serpent’s rant — and dare I say? Dare I think it? Her preachiness like the worst of Maman’s. “Get your head out of your arse, slut! You’re fou! Think for a second. Where does he go at night?”

  “Go home to your broom.” I threw the rasp. We both watched it stick in the blackened parquet and wobble. “Rose.” That poisoned name summoned every slight, every injury to me, every shortcoming, past, present and future, caused by her existence.

  You will appreciate what I mean, C. “‘Madame’ to you. You little whore.”

  Dovelike I held my tongue. Her nose, all but touching mine, grew longer, I swear. Face as puckered as feet steeped in the bath, the dog bared her teeth.

  Monsieur, off lunching with friends, was due back at any moment. You’d have been impressed at the charity I showed. “Best to leave, I think, before he comes and throws you out.”

  “Monsieur!” she taunted, snivelling. “Stay the hell away from him.”

  Looking her up and down, trembling, perhaps, ever so slightly, I expressed only pity. “Poor thing. As if Monsieur would want to be seen in public with mutton dressed as lamb.” Such honesty simply meant to be helpful.

  “Don’t fool yourself, my pet. He’s no different from other men. Wherever there’s a warm pussy … his heart only has room for me.”

  “Age before beauty.”

  Then, I confess, I acted as you might in such a situation. I picked up a fragment — an imperfect but perfectly useful fist, its finger cocked in the way of a pistol — and brought it down hard on Monsieur’s worktable. The pieces flying after her made me think of arrows. Maybe there was no need to yell, “Next time, ‘Madame,’ that will be your head.”

  ***

  “CALL HER OFF,” I ordered at the first opportunity, which was some time in coming.

  The World Exposition had opened in the Champ de Mars, featuring our Master’s work and Eiffel’s marvel, or monstrosity, of engineering. How can iron resemble lace? To be fair, not just Monsieur had his nose in the air. “The grand asperge” was a darning needle stitching the clouds, casting its massive shadow over the Seine and the Trocadéro, not just the fairgrounds. Calling it a vegetable now seems unkind. “Climb it with me,” he said.

  I said I didn’t like heights, and repeated my order.

  “Rose isn’t well — she gets hysterical. You know what it’s like to be female. You’re even prettier,” — he sweetened it with a kiss — “when you’re pissed off.”

  “Forget her.” Can it be our country roots, C? I’ve never been too proud to plead.

  “But Mademoiselle. Do I ask you to forget your maman?” With this, his oldness grew loud and noisy.

  ***

  I HOPE I don’t offend your virgin ears. If such is the case, I send two kisses. XX

  I5

  … TO MAINTAIN AND ELEVATE THE STANDARD OF MY PROFESSION …

  MONTDEVERGUES ASYLUM

  18 SEPTEMBER 1943 23H57

  Observation 1: It helps to designate a regular time slot in one’s off hours for a program of self-evaluation. Unfortunately, free moments counted upon with regularity, when one isn’t battling fatigue, are a luxury few of us enjoy. A good nurse, however, makes do.

  Observation 2: The primipara has two distinct lives, one preceding the delivery table, and one following it. The cutting of the cord is decisive.

  Observation 3: Personally speaking, there is life before the passing of one’s mother and life after it. These separate lives can feel completely unrelated.

  Observation 4: Maternal separation affects each of us differently.

  Many patients appear to be too far gone to show its effects. It’s unclear how Observations 2 and 3 connect, though they seem to. Neither has much bearing on my professional day-to-day.

  ***

  THE SECRETARY HAD provided a half-full bottle of ink and a pen whose rusty nib still worked. I made a show of arranging these on Mademoiselle’s table.

  Rather than thanking me, us, she asked, right out of the blue: “Wouldn’t you like to find your son, the o
ne you gave away?”

  Perhaps she meant to be kind by showing an interest. Such “kindness,” however, is not appreciated. “Water under the bridge, long past. I wouldn’t know him, wouldn’t wish to.” Maybe I was overly brusque stating this. In taking full responsibility, the nurse buffers her patients from strains and burdens not theirs. “I don’t like the look of that sore,” I told the patient. Even if my voice carried a note of apology, it was abrupt. Purposeful. I explained that to keep it from festering she would need to remain a little mobile.

  “Like being a little pregnant? You’d have me run a race? Dash off into the sunset, I suppose? Once, I would’ve — gladly. How tiresome, being on my back,” she complained to the wall while I swabbed the wound. Decubitus ulcer, right sacrum. Another was forming above the left buttock.

  “If I could get you to sleep on your right side,” I advised. Despite the worrisome bedsores, having the patient lie prone provided relief to her ankles. And the edema was abating, like the summer’s heat.

  But it’s well known that the geriatric body plays tricks. Sometimes patients rally even as their vitals suggest sending for the priest to administer last rites. Where there’s life there’s hope, Sister Ursula says, and Dr. Cadieu as well. Viability upheld to the point of becoming burdensome in some cases; the worst pressure wounds commonly result from patients lingering far past the point at which death should spare them.

  A certain starched presence announced itself. I was vaguely aware of Head scowling at the ink bottle. “A word with you, please.”

  Duty kept me from looking up. I continued to apply the dressing, Mademoiselle wincing. “Certainly. Can it wait?”

  “Wait?”

  My supervisor breathed in time to the scissors’ wheezing through the adhesive tape. Piece by piece I tamped it over the gauze. Gently drawing up the patient’s undergarment, I smoothed its threadbare cotton over the bandage. Then I took the pillow I’d managed to wangle from Men’s and wedged it carefully between Mademoiselle’s bony knees. Heaven forbid they’d rub together and break their skin. Recalling Sister’s adage, a job done well takes time, I drew up then carefully folded back the sheet. There was still the sponge bath to be managed.