“Months,” Angela whispered and refused to meet her eyes.
She’s ashamed, Clarie thought as stepped back, her heart swelling with pity, ashamed of what he’s done to her. No matter what her relationship with the young anarchist had been, Angela’s suffering was real. No one should have to live with such brutality. “If you go back home, will you be safe?” Clarie asked. “Is there somewhere else you can go? Someone to protect you?”
“Nothing for you to worry about,” Maura said. She marched over to her older sister, put a protective arm around her, and told her she didn’t have to say anything else. Maura glowered at Clarie, undoubtedly hating her because she was so useless.
Really, the girl was impossible. Clarie strode back to her desk and began to fasten the belts on her schoolbag with hard, swift motions until she gained enough composure to tell them she would talk to her husband to see if anything could be done to bring Barbereau to justice.
By this time, Maura had already led her sister halfway to the door. “Maman,” she ordered, “it’s time to go.” Offering Clarie an apologetic nod, Francesca got up to follow her daughters. The girls did not look back as they left.
Clarie sighed and closed her eyes. In this room, she was accustomed to young women obeying and adoring her. Perhaps that’s why she had reacted too quickly to Maura’s youthful resentments. What mattered is that a girl had been horribly abused. This time Bernard would have to listen to her story.
10
CLARIE DID NOT BRING UP the plight of the Italian girls until after supper. By the time she came out of Jean-Luc’s room, Bernard had settled into his chair, holding the staid Le Temps angled into the circle of light thrown by the kerosene lamp. In his pin-striped shirt and suspenders, one leg crossed over the other, he looked so dear, as engrossed as a child at serious play. She went over to him, bent down and kissed him on his forehead.
“And what is this about?” he asked, obviously pleased.
“I want to talk to you for a moment, ask your advice.”
Bernard straightened the newspaper and folded it on his lap. “A problem at school?” His blue-gray eyes were kind. He’d always shown a keen interest in her teaching and colleagues.
“Nothing like that.” She sat down across from him and laid one hand on the reading table as she leaned toward him. “It’s the Italian girls, the charwoman’s daughters. Remember, I told you about them.”
“Are they still missing?”
“No, they’re back. I actually saw them today.”
“Really. And?” He raised his eyebrows, his curiosity aroused.
“Francesca brought them to my classroom. They came to seek my advice. But I’m not sure how I can help them.” She cleared her throat, hesitating to say something that might alarm Martin. “It turns out they knew the anarchist who was killed. They don’t think he planted the bomb.”
“The Russian anarchist.” Martin sat up, displeasure overshadowing his curiosity. “If they were at all involved—”
“Don’t worry. They insisted that he didn’t do anything wrong, that he couldn’t.”
“And you believed them?”
Clarie withdrew her hand from the table. There was something in Bernard’s tone that she did not like, an assumption she had been gullible. “Actually, I didn’t know what to believe. They seemed intent on wanting to prove him innocent. They described him as gentle and generous. They said he would never plot to hurt anyone.”
Bernard shook his head. “That proves nothing, except that he was clever and the girls were naïve. Or perhaps they are being clever, too.”
“I don’t think so.” Heat flushed her cheeks.
“In any case,” Bernard went on, seemingly unaware of her pique, “whether he did it or not is a matter for the police and for the courts.”
“For men and for judges,” she responded rather too tartly.
“Yes, my dear,” his smile broadened into a grin. “Not for a beautiful wife and mother. Besides,” he said, becoming serious again, “if the Russian didn’t do it, who did? Did they have any ideas about that?”
“They thought it could be police.” She paused. When Bernard pressed his lips together without responding, she realized that this accusation was not as wild as she had thought. She had to wonder why he didn’t mention this suspicion to her last night.
“Or,” Clarie continued, “they thought it might be their boss. The man who beats one of them,” she emphasized. She had no desire to get involved with anarchists, or the police. She simply wanted to enlist Bernard to help her rescue Angela. “The older daughter is still very frightened of this Monsieur Barbereau,” she added.
Bernard straightened up, alert. “Barbereau? Marcel Barbereau?”
“Perhaps.” She could not imagine why her husband would know that name. Or be alarmed.
“That can’t be.” He rattled the paper open and turned to the second page. “It says right here, a body they found floating in the Basin yesterday morning has been identified as that of Marcel Barbereau, and he had been in the water for several days. If it’s the same man, he can’t still be threatening the girls. Nor could he have planted the bomb.”
Clarie slumped back in her seat. Her eyes roved over the floral pattern of the carpet. A bomb, a drowning. No, first a drowning, then a bomb? Both connected to the girls. “How do they know,” she murmured, “that he didn’t die after the bombing?”
“They seem sure, by this account. They do have their ways of estimating how long someone has been in the water.”
Of course Bernard, who had prosecuted many criminals, knew all the gruesome details of investigations at the morgue. Clarie did not even want to imagine what happens to a body left in the water for several days. “You think it was the same Barbereau?” She had to know for sure.
“They say he ran sweatshops in the Goutte-d’Or district.”
Clarie fell silent. It had to be him. She could feel Bernard scrutinizing her.
“Clarie, they think the man was murdered. Perhaps he was another victim of the Russian. Or those girls, for all we know. Do not get involved with these people.”
This was an order. An emphatic order. Bernard had never given her an order before. She didn’t like it. But the worst part was that he might be right. Especially if Maura Laurenzano had deliberately lied to her. Clasping her hands together, Clarie stood up. She’d been a fool. She didn’t face Bernard as she started walking past him to her desk. “I’ve still got some work to do to get ready for the preliminary examinations tomorrow.”
He stood up, caught her with one arm and held her in an embrace. He put his finger under her chin until she was willing to meet his eyes. “I never want anything to happen to you. You’re not used to dealing with criminals and deceivers, and you shouldn’t have to. You should enjoy your summer, relax, spend time with Jean-Luc. You’ve earned a rest,” he said as he planted a kiss on her forehead.
All very sweet. She kissed him on the cheek before striding over to her desk, where, instead of reading her students’ essays, she stared into space. She was angry. At Francesca, at Maura and Angela, even, not quite fairly, at Bernard. She tapped her pencil, thinking about how Emilie would often talk about her and her teacher husband “having words.” At least, Clarie thought sardonically, Emilie wasn’t married to an ex-judge who knew so much more than she about the world. Words. Angela’s pleas, Maura’s lies, her dear husband’s solicitous warnings. Clarie had words going through her mind all right: used, lied to, and patronized.
11
THE NEXT MORNING CLARIE RESOLVED to forget about Francesca and her daughters. She had her own girls and her position to think about. Six of her students, among those whom Mme Roubinovitch liked to refer to as the sharp ones or “the needles,” had signed up to take the preliminary written examination that was the first step to becoming a teacher. As the professor of the most advanced history classes, Clarie had prepared them for the humanities-and-classics section and was to monitor the three-hour test. If they passed, the
y would go on to take their orals before a panel of lycée and University professors. If they were successful at that stage, they would either receive an elementary school certificate or be invited to apply to the teachers’ college at Sèvres.
At exactly 8:45 that Wednesday, Clarie stood holding the exam questions close to her chest as her students, in their black pinafores and starched white collars, fluttered in, twittering and nervous. Her pulse quickened as she watched them. Since this was a city-wide examination, to be graded by men at the University, the results would be as much an evaluation of the female faculty at the Lycée Lamartine—of their training, their intelligence, their seriousness—as of their students’ knowledge. Her girls had to do well, for everyone’s sake.
“Please sit far apart,” Clarie ordered. She smiled as they settled in. She moved from girl to girl distributing the test booklets. When she returned to the front, she clapped her hands for attention. “You have three hours,” she told them. “And, if you feel you can’t answer the first question, go on to the second. If you can’t answer the second, try the third. Or,” she demonstrated in the most exaggerated way, “just take a deep breath.” This produced the relaxing giggles she had hoped for. She looked at her watch. “Time,” she said. In unison, their heads, all uniformly pinned up in topknots, bent over the papers.
These were her Alphonsines, as all the lycée’s students proudly called themselves in honor of the school’s namesake, the poet Alphonse Lamartine. Or rather, those laboring before her represented a particular portion of Alphonsines, among the smartest, but also among the least well off. At Lamartine, only the daughters of shopkeepers or teachers had to find a dignified path toward making their own way. The others, even the other “needles,” were not here. Many of her seniors had been withdrawn from afternoon classes in order to stay home with their mothers, to learn to pour tea, have visitors and make social calls. All with the goal of guaranteeing that they would enter an appropriate marriage. Clarie sighed. No matter where they ended up, she would miss all of them.
She opened her book, Mme de La Fayette’s The Princess of Cleves, a classic she had been intending to reread for a long time, but she could not concentrate. Her heart was with her girls, scribbling away, or staring into space, or even doing two things absolutely disallowed during the school year—chewing on their nails or pencils. She certainly had no intention of censuring them now, when they were under so much pressure.
She’d never forget all the anxieties and uncertainties she had suffered through. In her day there had been no lycées. Instead she had been educated by the nuns in Arles and, after leaving school, had had to study on her own for a long time to qualify. She smiled as she thought of her father, traveling with her to Nîmes to take the written examinations. When she finally passed, after two tries, he even took her on the long train ride north, to Paris, where she had stood alone before five men charged with enforcing the stiff standards of the new women’s education. It had been quite an adventure, and she had been so nervous that she held her hands behind her back to keep them from shaking. If it hadn’t been for the most indulgent of all fathers, she would never have made it.
At least, she thought, as she observed their bowed heads, it was easier for her Alphonsines. They were, in a sense, at home, part of a proud corps. The black-and-white uniforms, which set them apart from everyone else in the neighborhood, guaranteed that once inside the walls of the school, social differences did not matter. They were all part of the little meritocratic republic governed by the redoubtable Marie Roubinovitch. Clarie fingered the fringe on her bookmark. Even with these advantages, she feared for her test takers. There were so few teaching posts for women. Most of them would probably end up in shops or as clerks in offices or at one of the big department stores. All she could do for them now was to nod encouragement, which she did, each time a head popped up and gave her an anxious glance.
When the sun crept in, heating up the room, Clarie got up to fling open the windows and let in some air. Unfortunately, fat, lazy flies accompanied the breeze, buzzing and pestering her girls through the rest of the morning. Every fifteen minutes, Clarie wrote the time in big block letters on the blackboard, letting the test-takers know how long they had. At noon, the last two stragglers, wilted and exhausted but still offering a smile to a favorite teacher, laid their booklets on her desk. Clarie’s own starched collar was damp with sweat. She was more than ready to go home, to lunch and to her son.
The door creaked open as she was stacking her papers. She turned to face someone she had managed with great effort to put out of her mind, Francesca Laurenzano.
“Francesca,” she said warily. “I didn’t expect you at this time.”
“Professoressa, I came to apologize.” The charwoman limped toward the front of the room.
“Oh.” Feeling again the sting of last night’s contretemps with Bernard, Clarie was careful not to be too welcoming.
“I made Maura write a note.” The woman held out a folded piece of paper.
Clarie walked over to get it, before retreating behind her desk.
“I would have made her come, to apologize, but she’s afraid,” Francesca explained, her head bowed, not meeting Clarie’s eyes. “She and Angela hid when the police came last night asking about Monsieur Barbereau. Please forgive me and my daughters. I would’ve never allowed them to say something so bad about the dead.”
Speaking ill of the dead is hardly the issue, Clarie thought as she unfolded the paper. It read, in round, legible script: I am sorry that I said Barbereau might have killed Pieter. I did not know that he was dead. Clarie refolded the paper, her cheeks blotched with anger. This was hardly an apology, certainly not very polite, and quite possibly a lie. “There was no reason for you to have troubled yourself. Perhaps you, too, could have just sent a note.”
“Maura was so good in school,” Francesca said.
A comment so seemingly irrelevant that it left Clarie stunned into silence until the Italian woman added, with touching eagerness, “See how well she can write,” and Clarie realized that, of course, Francesca could not.
Clarie sat down and buried her head in her hands. Even if the daughters had lied, there was no evidence that Francesca had tried to deceive her. She must try to be kind.
By the time she looked up again, Francesca had sunk into a wooden chair in the front row, her hands folded in her lap, staring down. The only true way to help was to be honest and realistic. “Francesca,” she said gently, “do you think that your daughters could have been involved in Marcel Barbereau’s death?”
The charwoman’s mouth fell open slightly, and she began to shake her head, back and forth, slowly and mechanically. Clarie understood almost immediately that Francesca was not attempting to deny the implied accusation. Not at all. Rather she was making one last effort to vanquish the fear that must have been haunting her since the police started asking questions, the fear Clarie had made more real by speaking it aloud. Francesca’s face shriveled into a mask of pain, the pain of resignation, the pain of coming to grips with her worse nightmares, the pain of knowing her daughters could be in terrible trouble, and the ultimate and worst pain of all, which she cried out: “I can’t lose my babies.”
For Clarie, who had lost a child, this was a cry she could not ignore. “We don’t know yet if they were involved,” she said more gently. “Perhaps they’re just afraid of the police after what happened to their friend.”
Francesca shook her head, ignoring Clarie’s offer of hope. “It’s my fault. When their father left me, I made them work. They wanted to stay in school. I couldn’t do anything else, don’t you see?” she said, looking at Clarie, pleading.
“Of course not,” Clarie soothed. “It’s terrible that things are so difficult for so many.” How vapid, what mush, she thought as she got up and approached the charwoman. Clarie sat down and placed her hand over Francesca’s. She breathed in the scent of hard work and anxieties, the sharp, musty smell reminiscent of the forge, of her own I
talian father and the other men who worked there. “Your girls may not be involved,” she repeated. “And if they are accused, there is help. My husband assured me that you can go to the Palais de Justice and ask for a lawyer.” Of course, Clarie thought, as she struggled to keep her demeanor calm, this is not at all what Bernard had said. He had told her, in no uncertain terms, not to get involved. And she wouldn’t. Not after today. Not after she gave the only help a woman in her position was capable of, words of sympathy and advice.
“Come now.” Clarie placed her arm around Francesca’s shoulder. “You told me your girls were good, hard-working. I’m sure they’ll be all right.”
Francesca nodded, although she didn’t look at all convinced.
After a moment, Clarie got up. “I’m so sorry these terrible things are happening. But,” Clarie swallowed hard, knowing that once again she had so little to offer, “I have some work to do.” She tried to lighten the mood by adding, “We’re all getting ready for the fuss and commotion of graduation.”
It took some effort for Francesca to stand up. She pushed against the desk with both arms, slowly unbending her back, as if she carried the weight of Atlas on her shoulders. She sniffled and reached into her apron pocket to pull out a handkerchief. Clarie had seen it all before, a week ago. It pained her to realize how hard Francesca’s life must have been and would forever be. She went back to her desk and thumped her papers against it, straightening their edges. She could not bear to watch Francesca leave.
12
HOW CAN SHE KEEP ON doing it? Maura thought, as she watched her mother hobble through the courtyard on her way to the lycée. How can she bear to get down on her hands and knees to clean up for their damned graduation? Maura turned from the window of their fifth-floor room and stared at the crucifix over her mother’s bed. She claimed that Jesus and the Virgin Mary helped her. Helped her to be a slave, Maura silently countered. And if she didn’t watch out, she’d become one too.
The Missing Italian Girl Page 9