These Good Hands

by Carol Bruneau

  I took up some other missives, a whole raft of them addressed to “C,” her mysterious genderless penpal. Sipping wine — and eventually polishing off the bottle — I read with some interest, in fits and starts, as much as I could stick with them anyway. Mostly I skimmed. They were largely word salad, but aspects of them made me feel like a snoop, trading sound observation for prurient fascination, no better than happening by a patient’s door and lingering to watch them masturbate. Not that her musings were titillating. Far from it, bits and pieces of them were dead familiar, recalling more than a few of the little rants and phobias that Mademoiselle had used to distract us from the task at hand. Especially bathing, I thought with a smile.

  Not knowing quite what to do with them, I set the letters aside. Turning them over to Admin would feel disrespectful and only waste Secretary’s time, not to mention the new directeur’s. It would also be a betrayal, not just of the patient, but of the old directeur — the one whose only fault, as far as I could tell, was the laxness that sometimes accompanies kindness. The letter to the friend I folded into a triangle. A paper hat for the head inside my suitcase? Or a paper boat, that was more like it, one that fit nicely into my purse.

  Finally, using the last of my stationery — the backs of two discarded electroencephalograms — I wrote to the new man, then copied it out for Head. If I’d had more paper I’d have written a copy for Lyon, too. It took no time to find the words, no fuss no muss. The extremely short notice was something I sincerely regretted. But I had more urgent work to attend to, more pressing duties, and they should have no trouble finding a more qualified replacement — of that I was confident, I wrote, signing my name under Respectfully submitted.

  Mademoiselle’s pet leapt to the sill, then scrambled from there to the bed, eyeing the tarnished crucifix positioned like a large gnat on the wall. These busy weeks I’d come to barely see it, except when it reminded me of Sister.

  How would she have handled the letters?

  I took them to the loo and tore them up very carefully, being sure to flush away all the pieces.

  The cat was right at home when I came back, nestled on my psych notes. Though I was a little afraid it might pee on them — whoever inherited the room might find them useful — I resisted the urge to push it off. After a while, it traded them for my lap, and then my chest, purring and kneading with its claws. There was something about its prodding — a kitten rooting for the mother cat’s teat? — that drew out what I’d largely succeeded in avoiding all day.

  It’s stupid to cry. It’s stupid to cry. Buck up, I told myself. There might well be a better place.

  I blew my nose. Still a couple more details to attend to, there always are: some sort of wrap-up to this conscientious examination, and then a tiny flask of water from Lourdes to dispose of. Not as useful as Veronal, but unlike Veronal it has no best-before date. A gift for Sister, perhaps — water in exchange for hair, the gift that had broken a thousand rules and directives. Had she known all along that the boy — if the boy in my mind could possibly be the same one — was here in the Vaucluse, in Montfavet? Hair in exchange for water. Except I’d need a river of miracle water to find Renard’s young friend.

  As for said wrap-up, I suspect that my reportage has been largely fruitless — a failure, in fact. The heart wants what the heart wants. Juggling what one is given with what one hopes for reveals only that one tries one’s best. What’s best for one often contravenes what’s best for another. Yet one perseveres. C’est fini.

  28

  … OF THOSE COMMITTED TO MY CARE.

  MONTFAVET STATION,

  ABOARD MARSEILLES-LYON-PARIS EXPRESS

  ETA LYON 16:00 HEURES

  AWAITING DEPARTURE: 11H12 21 OCTOBER 1943

  Sister says we’re called to be God’s hands. Does writing qualify? I have my doubts, but it has become a habit I’m not quite ready to give up just yet, at least while idle. Idling gives rise to loose-cannon thoughts.

  When I handed in my notice, Head was aghast. “Is there nothing we can do to change your mind?” And after I’ve bent over backwards for you, her eyes said while she shook my hand, likely about as easy for her as shaking de Gaulle’s.

  Novice cried and the burliest orderly hugged me. Patting Novice’s arm, I told her she’d do just fine. Isn’t it what we’re put on Earth for, to build others up? Even when there’s no telling what happens, whether badness prevails or good.

  The soldiers inspecting our papers have come and gone, and despite finding all in order, they saw fit to search and then confiscate my suitcase — due to its weight! The books at least can be replaced, and my uniform, but not, regretfully, Cadieu’s cadeau.

  Writing takes my mind off it. So let’s start where I ended, bidding Montdevergues goodbye.

  ***

  JUST COME FROM the chapel, the coffin waited on a wagon, raw wood and metal numbers glinting in the autumn sun. The new priest, the old nun from Bon Repos, and the chaplain, gathered at the gates — a prim-looking company, except for the nervous pastor robed in white. A tall, dark-haired, drop-dead handsome young man, he waited as I came struggling up juggling my purse, suitcase, and the cat wrapped in a sweater. The front of my cape was already plastered in orange hairs, no thanks owed to the sweater. “So God numbers the ones on our heads,” the young priest murmured. Equally anxious to get a move on, the horse pawed the ground and dropped a load of dung.

  The gateman, keeper of keys, nodded as if I’d soon be back. When we started walking, it was a small ordeal to keep up. I could barely contain the animal in my arms. No luck finding anyone to take it off my hands, aside from Cook, who proffered a potato sack and a boy to throw it into the canal. That and a word of condolence. “You must miss Renard,” she said.

  I brought up the rear, not looking back. I couldn’t. Everything I owned was piled inside my suitcase, including Cadieu’s ungainly present — everything except this notebook, and what was in my purse, and what I had in mind: one could call it a mission, though ambition’s a better word. Whatever a person needs to move on in this life.

  The planes’ leaves had turned a khaki green, dead ones sifting down. The climbing sun felt brilliant if remote, the air sharp enough that steam rose from the merde on the pavement. Thank goodness it wasn’t too far to the graveyard, that barren field near the road, with its little smattering of crosses arranged as in a war cemetery, a proper one, row on row. Our party barely spoke and no one new joined in. The whole world was busy, I suppose, peeling potatoes, wiping bottoms, posting mail, milking cows, minding lunatics, whatever people get up to at 08H30 on a crisp Thursday morning. Not that it affected me. The rest of my day — my life — stretched like the woods and fields around us.

  It was so quiet, I noticed. Apart from Cat’s scrabbling and the horse’s clopping, the only sound was of leaves shuffling along the ground. So quiet one could almost believe in peace.

  Hanging on to Cat for dear life, purse slung over one shoulder, I propped my suitcase against the cemetery’s little wall to collect myself. Some pink roses clung to a bush nearby. I broke one off, hooking myself on a thorn and losing Cat in the bargain. Gone, just like that, in a mad tussle of claws and teeth. Before I could even think to catch her, she scooted into the bushes by the canal, her coat a camouflage against the rust-coloured brush. The others kept going; those men taking down the coffin weren’t wasting time.

  Beside the open grave — a common one, of course — the religious caught their breath. The comb lines in the pastor’s hair were pleasantly undisturbed though his chasuble fluttered in the breeze. Its gilt embroidery caught the sun, which was busily warming fresh-turned earth and the crawl of worms. He stretched out his arms as if welcoming us all to a feast. I couldn’t help studying his shoes and his lacy hem as we prayed along — well, as I mouthed the words, sending Mademoiselle on her way to heaven, one only hopes. Or purgatory, or wherever one goes first. I like to think there is a beforehand, some place where people hover for a while, before judgment swoops
in and snaps them up. If there’s any fairness, I wanted to shout, this woman’s had her hell and won’t wind up there. In much the same way, I think of Renard and even my mother. We each of us are our own little balls of hell at times.

  When a fistful of dirt hit the coffin, I threw in the rose, a confetti of petals shadowed by birds circling overhead. Swallows or magpies, they made quite a racket squawking their hellos and goodbyes.

  “Good to see you — and bless you,” the chaplain said over a handshake, eyeing my overstuffed purse.

  “Souvenirs,” I said. And severance pay, travelling papers, and dreams, my dreams.

  “Should I wish you bon voyage?”

  No sign whatsoever of Cat. It was as if she were a figment or an imaginary friend, a mostly hostile one I’d accommodated briefly. Plenty of mice in the fields, birds too, I told myself — and doorsteps bearing saucers of milk, God willing. In the name of Mademoiselle, Cat and all her other fur persons, real or imagined, I blessed myself, and stumbled off. My journey would be less complicated and lighter with one less creature to tend.

  Speaking of lighter, I remembered the crinkled paper boat in my purse — a swan, I decided, nearing the petite canal. Its narrow bed hugged the roadside, its pea-green current slipping underground every so often. Moving as steadily as any God-made stream, possibly with less effort, it quenched the countryside’s thirst even as it fed the Rhône. Who remembered what hands had built it? Nobody, I’ll bet, its builders long gone.

  Mademoiselle’s swan-boat floated and spun there, soaking up the wet. Her writing, and those faint pink zigzags — lightning, mountain peaks and valleys — instantly leached away. When it snagged on a leaf, it wasn’t a swan or a boat but a guest strapped to a bed, frozen. The leaf, curled and coloured like a cigar, reminded me of the paper tube in my silver cigarette case, so I pulled it out and threw it in too. In her right mind, Mademoiselle might have approved. What’s the point of hating?

  And now the first note, the one to her friend, was free. Off they both raced, sliding through a grate and down into the earth and, just like Cat, gone. Through the village, under the square, past the church and the dusty courtyard where men — men too old and too tired of war to fight over anything, I suspect — smoke and shoot boules. Then on to the river both would go, and with the river south, like the mistral.

  You have to be open to God’s will, Sister says. Whatever that means. Like the other winds, Cat and my boy — wherever he is — I guess we go where we will. Maybe I’ll ride through to Paris to see statues and rip down Nazi flags in the streets, or get off in Lyon and join the convent or the Maquis. See where the northbound wind takes me, though Lyon is a good place to begin. My purpose is like the wind; my ambitions, our country’s, and my son. A proper thing, too. Wherever he is, he is, whether I search and never find him, or whether I search and do.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Camille Claudel’s art is at last widely celebrated, but until very recently — to North Americans — her accomplishment was entirely overshadowed by her fame as Rodin’s mistress, his “tragic muse” who spent thirty years in an asylum for the insane. I first heard of Claudel a decade ago, when her story was mentioned in passing by two of my students. I was instantly hooked by her tragedy and then compelled to seek out her sculpture. I soon learned that she’s legendary in France, for her work as much as her biography, coloured as both are by her mental illness. What I was to discover, travelling several times to France and experiencing her work first-hand, is how brilliantly it outshines the limits of its creation — circumstances driven by the rampant misogyny of her day. She lived for her art in a time when a woman’s doing so was in itself a certain madness, especially a woman working in a medium known for its difficulty. The world was kinder to her teacher Rodin, who began an affair with her in the 1880s, when he was in his early 40s and Camille was still a teenager — a situation numerous biographers have glossed as being de rigueur, a part of artistic collaboration.

  Plus ça change? Time can be a bit of a healer, art too, though not always on its maker’s terms or in her lifetime. As much now as in Camille’s day, progress requires an army of supporters. Too many to name have made this book possible. Thanks go to the students who first tipped me off to Camille’s story, and to my late mother, Marion Bruneau, RN, valedictorian of her 1951 nursing class. Without her stories, the inspiration of her textbooks, the notes she took in training and the hospital scenarios she exposed me to, Nurse Poitier never would’ve reached the page. Also helpful were friends who shared professional expertise in mental health care, Dr. Mary Lynch, Nora Askew, and Pamela Donoghue. Many others helped nurse the manuscript through various stages, reading and offering feedback: Cindy Handren, Dawn Rae Downton, Sheree Fitch, Valerie Compton, Shaun Bradley, Catherine Marjoribanks, Bruce Erskine, and Michael Mirolla. Special thanks go to my publisher, Marc Côté, for seeing the true potential in the work, and to Bryan Jay Ibeas, editor extraordinaire whose brilliance helped me realize it. Still others provided encouragement when the project itself seemed terminal, as in lacking viability: Shawn Brown; the late Elizabeth Williams, whose creative spirit continues to inspire me; my inimitable writers’ group, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Binnie Brennan and Ramona Lumpkin; my sons Andrew, Seamus and Angus Erskine, and my dear travellin’ partner, Bruce, who willingly retraced Camille’s steps with me in some peculiar places.

  For its support of the early research and writing of this book I’m grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts, and to Dorothy Sedgwick for her list of reference texts. I’m indebted to Claudel’s biographers, especially Odile Ayral-Clause for Camille Claudel: A Life, and Reine-Marie Paris, whose Camille: The Life of Camille Claudel, translated from the French by Liliane Emery Tuck, includes the artist’s correspondence held by the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Numerous Rodin biographers have touched on Claudel, but most helpful were Ruth Butler and Rodin’s contemporaries, Judith Cladel and Paul Gsell, whose writings contextualize and, whether or not intentionally, confirm the breadth of her achievement.

  The headings for Nurse’s chapters are from “The Nightingale Pledge,” widely available online. The epigram is from Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, New York: Riverhead Books, 2005.

  Mademoiselle’s answers, on page 171 to questions in a friend’s “Album of Confessions” — a popular form of amusement at the time — are based on a document in Musée Rodin Archives, dated May 16, 1888. The complete list of Claudel’s original answers are in French and their translation appears in Odile Ayral-Clause’s Camille Claudel: A Life, pp. 67–68.

  NSCAD University and my colleagues there deserve ongoing thanks for nurturing artists and art students including Dorothy Skutezky, who graciously walked me through the old sculpture studio at Fountain Campus, and for the school’s library and its wonderful staff. Thanks, too, go to Dalhousie University for its Writer-in-Residence program, which supported this project. Numerous other institutions helped sustain my interest, and visits to all of these were inspiring: the Centre Hospitalier in Montfavet, Vaucluse, France; the Nova Scotia Hospital’s Mount Hope Library; Musée Sainte-Croix in Poitiers, France; Musée Rodin, Musée d’Orsay, Musée Bourdelle and Musée Jean Moulin in Paris; and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax. Most fortuitous of all were the 2008 Fundación Mapfre exhibition, Camille Claudel, which opened at Musée Rodin on the first day of my first trip to

  Paris, and the permanent exhibition of Claudel’s work in Poitiers, the city of my ancestors.

  A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF HELPFUL TEXTS

  TEXTS ON CLAUDEL

  Ayral-Clause, Odile. Camille Claudel: A Life. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002.

  Bond, Alma. Camille Claudel, a novel. Baltimore: PublishAmerica, 2006.

  Caranfa, Angelo. Camille Claudel: A Sculpture of Interior Solitude. London: Associated University Presses, 1999.

  Claudel, Camille. Camille Claudel: 1864–1943. Madrid, Paris: Fundación Mapfre/Museé Rodin/Gallimard,
2008.

  Delbée, Anne, translated by Carol Cosman. Camille Claudel: Une Femme. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1992.

  Paris, Reine-Marie, translated by Liliane Emery Tuck. Camille: The Life of Camille Claudel, Rodin’s Muse and Mistress. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1984.

  Paris, Reine-Marie. Camille Claudel. Washington, D.C.: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1988.

  TEXTS ON RODIN

  Butler, Ruth, ed. Rodin in Perspective. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1980.

  Butler, Ruth. Rodin: The Shape of Genius. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993.

  Crone, Rainer and Salzmann, Siegfried, eds. Rodin: Eros and Creativity. Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1992.

  Descharnes, Robert and Chabrun, Jean-Francois. Auguste Rodin. Secaucus, New Jersey: Chartwell Books, 1967.

  Elsen, Albert E. In Rodin’s Studio: A Photographic Record of Sculpture in The Making. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1980.

  Grunfeld, Frederic V. Rodin: A Biography. New York: Henry Holt, 1987.

  Geffroy, Gustave. “The Sculptor Rodin.” Arts and Letters. London, 1889, 289–304, quoted in Butler, Rodin in Perspective.

  Gsell, Paul, translated by Mrs. Romilly Fedden. Art by Auguste Rodin. New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1912.

  Hale, William Harlan. The World of Rodin: 1840–1917. New York: Time-Life Books, 1969.

  Rodin, Auguste. Rodin. London: Phaidon Press, 1951.

  NURSING-RELATED TEXTS

  Bostridge, Mark. Florence Nightingale: The Making of an Icon. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

  Cooper, Lenna F. and Barber, Edith M., and Mitchell, Helen S. Nutrition in Health and Disease. 9th edition. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1943.

  Dorland, W.A. Newman, ed. American Pocket Medical Dictionary. 17th edition. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company, 1943.