Pam Rosenthal

by The Bookseller's Daughter

  If you’re able to, of course.

  No, you must. I insist.

  It’s not so bad, you know, for me to insist on things from time to time. For I was absolutely wrong last autumn not to insist that you come to Paris earlier. I love your independence and your stiff-necked shopkeeper’s pride, but you should have accepted assistance, Marie-Laure.

  So now, I shall insist upon your describing yourself to me.

  She nodded slowly.

  Perhaps she should have accepted assistance. She’d have to work all that out later.

  Right now, though, she had something very important to write.

  It’s as big as a pumpkin, Joseph.

  All right, [she added] I suppose even a nobleman knows that pumpkins come in all sizes. So I must be more precise.

  A fifteen-pound pumpkin, then. Or a melon. A lovely big round prize winter squash with a sort of squash blossom poking out where my perfectly ordinary-looking navel used to be. Reminding me that the baby is similarly connected.

  And reminding me of what I can’t do right now: move too much, or get too excited.

  You, of course, should continue to imagine making me scream amidst a chaos of bed sheets.

  But my imaginings must be quieter.

  I’m still on my side; I lie curved around this astonishing belly. Come to bed, Joseph. Lie on your side, facing me.

  Here’s my hand. I’m stroking your cheek. And now your mouth. Yes, you know what I’m doing. That’s right. Lick the palm of my hand. Get it very wet, ah yes just like that, so that when I touch you, when I wrap my hand around you, my hand will slide up and down the length of you.

  Up.

  Down.

  And again, so many “agains.”

  You’re harder now, so beautifully bowed and taut, and I’m moving my hand more quickly now, watching your jaw loosen, your eyes widen. What do you see at that moment, just before? I hope you see me, smiling proudly, laughing perhaps…

  I have a very sticky hand now—no, I don’t know how to be more poetic here and even this is probably a bit too exciting for me and so once again I must only breathe you in and out…

  Ah good. My supper is coming on a tray, and the distraction will probably help to calm me. I’ve become friends with the maid who brings it. Claudine is a very worldly Parisienne and thinks that I must be very good in bed to have attracted such a rich and handsome gentleman. I was shocked when she first told me that, but now I find it very amusing…

  Arranging the dinner tray at Marie-Laure’s side, Claudine poured some fresh water with the tiniest bit of wine mixed in to sweeten it, and then gave an expectant little ahem.

  For it was a Wednesday, and Claudine always spent her free Wednesday afternoons shopping.

  “But what wonderful stockings, Claudine,” Marie-Laure exclaimed.

  Claudine nodded modestly. “And what about this fichu?” she asked. “Look, the linen and stitching are almost as fine as what you’ll find on the rue Saint-Honoré. Well, it’s the details that matter, don’t you think?”

  And Marie-Laure, thinking of the letter she’d written that afternoon, had to agree. It was always the details that mattered.

  Ma belle Cinderella with her pumpkin,

  Less poetry is always better. I loved reading about your sticky hand, and spent some delightful minutes imagining you licking me off your sticky fingers.

  Jeanne tells me that Madame Rachel has been rubbing almond oil into your skin where it’s been stretched by your growing belly, so that the marks will fade after the baby comes out. I wish I could do that. I’d warm my hands over a candle flame, and rub it in so slowly and carefully that you’d never want anyone else to do it. I’d measure your waist with my hands every morning; I’d discern the tiniest changes…and I’d lie quietly behind you, my lips pressed against the nape of your neck, my front curved around your back while you curve around this astonishing belly of yours.

  And so you see what peaceable fancies I can have—while still (late at night) having the wildest, most wanton visions of you and me. For there are a few things we haven’t yet tried, you know. But I’ll save them. For the future. For our future…

  But Joseph, [she wrote back] I’ve never told you that the baby kicks! I forgot, until Mademoiselle Beauvoisin reminded me, that you probably haven’t seen very many pregnant women, or very many babies, for that matter.

  Anyway, if you put your hand on my belly, you can often feel it. It’s a dancer, it’s an acrobat, a fencer—it will be as graceful and light-footed as its papa.

  Mon amour,

  Can someone have erotic fancies when he’s trying his best to imagine being called “Papa”?

  And can someone imagine being called “Papa” when he’s spent his life being a scamp, a scapegrace, an enfant terrible?

  Well, he can try. And I am, I am.

  But since I once chastised you for your excess of responsibility, I can hardly, in fairness, not confess to my own sins. And not just of impulsiveness, or hypersensitivity, or all the absurdities of my libertine life. But of something else I don’t quite understand.

  I feel that somehow I brought this imprisonment on myself. Yes, I know it’s absurd, but I can’t lose the feeling. And not because of anything I did to the Baron Roque, for I had nothing whatsoever to do with his death.

  Perhaps it’s just my fears—or my guilt for leaving you at the chateau. But I don’t think so. I truly believe that there’s something I should be remembering. Or dreaming, perhaps. Something that will tell me what I need to know.

  I shall try to dream then. I shall go to bed and bring your letters with me. And I shall bring you too. You that first day in the barn, with rays of sunlight slanting onto your hair and your little pink tongue darting out of your mouth—I was breathless, thrilled, and almost mortally astonished that anyone could be so brave and so shy at the same moment. And you as you are now—formidable breasts and luscious belly—but, I dare to imagine, still the same bright hair and pink tongue and ah, the same determined mouth.

  Lie down on your side—there, you needn’t strain. I’ve covered your breasts and belly with kisses and now I’m putting my arms around you. Holding you, rocking you, our lips opening and tongues meeting.

  But you must imagine what you want to imagine. I won’t share what I’m thinking this time; take whatever you need of me, Marie-Laure, be it pleasure or comfort or simply—whatever else happens—my undying love.

  Joseph

  Whatever else happens.

  She read the letter so many times in the next few days that it was beginning to fray along the folds.

  It wasn’t quite coherent. But how could it be? The truth was that he and she—each in a different way—were in mortal danger. And yet they’d shared earnest hopes, pretty thoughts, and overwhelming desire. Nothing made a whole lot of sense in such a situation; she wasn’t surprised that he was plagued with muddled, nonsensical fancies about there being something he needed to remember. She folded the letter and put it back under her pillow, rearranged herself carefully on her left side, and fell into a troubled sleep.

  She dozed fitfully, plagued by dreams. She was running along the path by the river, but a tangle of vines—or were they serpents?—threatened to bar her way. She had to keep going, though, because a pack of baying hounds were trying to get at her—horrid dogs, with Monsieur Hubert among them. She could feel her pursuers’ hot breath; the hounds were tearing at her clothes with dripping fangs. She was helpless, naked now, and someone was leading her—where?

  She forced herself back to sweaty, gasping consciousness. Her head still ached; she was weak and shaky. But when she lit the candle at her bedside she was surprised that her vision was clear. In fact, everything was preternaturally clear and distinct, the colors deeply saturated.

  She could pull the bell cord at the side of her bed and bring the footman running. But she really felt more strange than bad. So she lay quietly on her side for the next few hours, forcing herself to breathe slowly and eve
nly, until daylight stole under the bottoms of the heavy curtains and Claudine appeared with her breakfast.

  She wasn’t hungry, but the coffee smelled good. Pulling herself to a more upright position, she suddenly felt…wet.

  “Please,” she whispered, “please, I think you’d better call somebody. I feel…well, I feel very odd.”

  She paused.

  “I think…” she began. And then she smiled. “No, I’m sure that was a contraction, and that the baby’s coming.”

  The contractions were weak, but the baby was undeniably on its way.

  Dr. Raspail looked solemn: a six-week-early baby might not be entirely prepared to eat and breathe on its own. But there was no stopping the inevitable, and nothing he could do until her labor was more advanced. He’d return, he said, in a few hours, after visiting a dropsical prince in the faubourg Saint-Germain.

  “It might be a blessing,” Mademoiselle Beauvoisin suggested. “Perhaps the baby is wise to leave before the toxemia gets any worse.”

  Marie-Laure sat flanked by the actress and her mother. Madame Rachel was a small, silent, faded woman with endless knowledge of the mysterious processes underway.

  The day progressed slowly, the women taking turns holding Marie-Laure’s hand and helping her accept the gradually deepening contractions—to breathe through them, they’d insist.

  “Good, good,” they’d murmur from time to time.

  Good? By early evening she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to hug them for their patience or strangle them. Strangle them, she decided; she wanted to strangle anybody and everybody who wasn’t feeling their middles squeezed in an iron vise. Cursing softly, she turned back to the business of breathing, when she heard heavy steps on the marble stairway.

  It must be Doctor Raspail, she thought. But those didn’t sound like Doctor Raspail’s measured steps. What they did sound like were…

  But that was impossible. Still, the footsteps sounded (for hadn’t she heard him clomping up the staircase to his bedroom every day of her life until she’d left Montpellier?)—they sounded exactly like…

  Gilles?

  With the Marquise bringing up the rear.

  “But…but…” She forgot to breathe, and the but transmuted into a howl of pain.

  “Breathe!” the command issued in unintended unison from Gilles and Mademoiselle Beauvoisin, the simultaneity surprising each of them and Marie-Laure as well.

  “Breathe, chérie!”

  “Breathe dammit, Marie-Laure!”

  The two of them stared at one another. Mademoiselle Beauvoisin was clearly relieved to see Gilles. And Gilles was just as clearly determined to trust no one in this vile den of aristocrats—even a disarmingly beautiful woman who seemed to know something about obstetrics.

  “Here, Jeanne.” Mademoiselle Beauvoisin prodded the Marquise toward Marie-Laure’s bedside. “Take my place for just a moment, while I speak to Monsieur—”

  “Doctor Vernet.”

  So he’d passed his final examinations. How wonderful, Marie-Laure almost had time to think, before she howled again against the massive force of the next contraction.

  “Um, breathe please, Marie-Laure,” the Marquise offered timidly.

  Marie-Laure tried to obey, but the Marquise’s entreaties—and even Madame Rachel’s confident touch—weren’t enough to distract her from what Mademoiselle Beauvoisin was whispering to Gilles.

  “Second stage…difficult transition…effaced…”

  And then, “Toxemia, seems to be controlled with…but we’re not sure…pulsebeat…”

  “Bien.” Gilles took off his coat. Rolling up his sleeves, he strode to the pitcher of warm water on an inlaid commode. Marie-Laure expected him to stare disdainfully at the commode’s elaborate gold trim, but he seemed to have slipped off his edgy class-consciousness with his coat, and become merely an intent and very capable physician.

  “Thank you, Jeanne.” Mademoiselle Beauvoisin had rejoined the pale, perspiring Marquise. “And now, we’re going to prop up Marie-Laure’s legs on these pillows and bolsters, that’s right, ma chérie, just pile them there…”

  “And you,” Gilles announced to Marie-Laure, “are going to push the baby out.” He stood between her raised legs, looking down at her as though he were preparing another lesson in how to fight like a boy.

  “But how…” She wanted to ask him how he’d known to come and who had told him where to find her, but the questions evaporated somewhere between her mind and her mouth. Suddenly she didn’t care how he’d gotten here, she cared about nothing except a sudden overwhelming urge to push. And it seemed that she knew how to do it. Of course, it would be more like pushing an immense pumpkin than a baby—well, perhaps (ma belle Cinderella), perhaps it was a pumpkin after all. What else could it be? For surely a baby couldn’t be so enormous.

  Well, whatever it was, she knew what to do. Yes, Gilles, I know exactly. And it is a kind of fighting, she thought, between pushes, gasps, groans, bellows, and curses. Fighting like a woman.

  How strange that the pain should cease so abruptly—exactly as Gilles had given a satisfied little grunt, the one that always signaled an experiment had been a success. The baby isn’t inside me anymore, she thought. Gilles must have it in his hands.

  The grunt had sounded reassuring. But suddenly she was alone and everybody was terribly busy somewhere else. She heard someone mutter, “Blue, stressed.” Finally, eons later, she heard a lusty, outraged, energetic scream, and a relieved collective sigh.

  “Look at you,” she whispered to the tiny, waxy, purplish creature Gilles put down on her naked belly.

  “Breathing all right, thank God,” she heard someone say.

  “Just look at you,” she half crooned and half sobbed, as Madame Rachel helped her gather the baby into her arms. The child was wrapped in a heavy blanket (“These little, early ones do better if they’re kept warm,” Madame Rachel said), so all she could see was a tiny, thin face: the little features were scrunched up, exhausted by a long, hard journey. But there was no mistaking them. They were Joseph’s features, stamped as clearly on the new-made flesh as the King’s on a gold coin.

  Church bells rang somewhere.

  “It’s just after midnight,” the Marquise said in a dazed voice. “It’s Thursday, the day I visit Joseph.”

  “And you will tell him,” Mademoiselle Beauvoisin said softly, “that another beautiful, healthy young lady has come to stay with us, and that she is as eager as the rest of us for his release.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Gilles was at her bedside when she woke the next morning. “The Marquise wrote to me,” he told her, “probably the very day you arrived here. It was good of her to alert me about your condition.

  “Toxemia’s mysterious,” he added, pouring her a cup of coffee from the silver pot on the table, “and it can be extremely dangerous. You were lucky. They took good care of you—that actress especially.” He turned his eyes away.

  She wished she could calm his offended sensibilities. Yes, Gilles, it is what you suspect. But it’s not vile or scandalous—it’s really quite natural, once you get used to the idea.

  No, better not to embarrass him. She concentrated on her coffee, the still-warm bread wrapped in a linen napkin, the little crock of sweet butter beside it on the tray.

  “I checked up on the baby,” he said. “She’s doing very well, sleeping soundly. Madame Rachel has her in the next room.

  “She’s little and scrawny, of course,” he added, “but you can see that she’s one of the tough ones.”

  He looked away again, obviously at a loss for what to say next. She supposed it was up to her to begin. “This must come as something of a shock to you.”

  He rolled his eyes. Well, yes, that’s one way to put it.

  His face fell into familiar lines: a responsible older sibling’s exasperation with a flighty younger one.

  “Come home with me,” he demanded. “You can’t just let them keep you and the baby like
house pets.” He grimaced at Figaro, curled up on the bed at her feet.

  “I can’t come,” she answered. “I have to wait for Joseph. Sophie and I need to be here, for when he…in case of…”

  “You’re really naming her Sophie?” He allowed himself a quick smile of pleasure before continuing. “Your…your…” Considering possible ways he might refer to Joseph and rejecting them all, he shrugged his shoulders and continued. “His prospects don’t look good, you know.

  “Everybody at home talks about his case, Marie-Laure. They say it’s about time a damn aristocrat was prosecuted for something—though they admit it’s nice that he knocked off one of his own instead of taking it out on commoners. If public opinion counts for anything—and sometimes it does, even under our ridiculous Bourbon monarchy—he’ll never get out of the Bastille.”

  He seemed determined to be brutal. Or maybe the facts simply were brutal.

  “But the truth ought to count for something,” she retorted. “And the truth—as you very well know—is that Joseph didn’t do it. He was making deliveries to booksellers all day. His signature is probably filed away all over the city in offices like Rigaud’s.”

  Damn Gilles for goading her into arguing the point. She crossed her arms, leaned back against the pillows, and glared at him.

  “He didn’t do it and that’s final. Joseph’s not a murderer, Gilles.”

  He glared back at her. “Still, he took advantage of you, didn’t he? Don’t you understand that I’ll never forgive myself for allowing you to work there? It was my duty to protect you from libertine scum like him. I would have killed him rather than let him touch you. In fact I should never have…”

  She stared while his voice turned uncertain, the irony of what he’d just said becoming clear to him. And while he stammered, she could feel her own mouth shaping a small and not very tactful smile—at the memory of her determined self, maneuvering Joseph toward that pile of hay in the barn.