Lorna Mott Comes Home

by Diane Johnson

  —

  Ran and Amy talked to Gilda every day, often more than once, and they hadn’t been alarmed by her daily symptoms until New Year’s morning, when she had told them about a trace of pink mucous coming out of her vagina.

  “It isn’t pee,” she said. “It’s some kind of discharge.” Ran took the phone and asked a few terse questions. Did she have back pain or cramps? Headache?

  “None of that, just a sort of a menstrual feeling from time to time. About an hour ago, but now I’m fine. It’s not that bad,” Gilda assured them, “it’s like a period, but no real blood, it’s more pink traces.” Yet again, her lifelong acquaintance with health emergencies had given her considerable calm and dispassionate frankness.

  After a few more questions, Ran had learned everything he dreaded: Gilda a million miles away, almost three months too early, in danger of a miscarriage, or, in the best case, of giving birth to a premature infant, and they needed to line up somewhere with the proper neonatal equipment.

  He told her to lie down immediately and call him back if she experienced any cramps. “Take it easy,” Ran insisted, knowing that Gilda would do as she pleased. He felt his own breathing grow shortened with anxiety, a wake-up call to calm down about Gilda, Curt, Harvey Avon, Peggy, the financial crash—all the things that were constricting his arteries with panic and plaque. It’ll be better on the plane, he told himself.

  49

  The ceremony for reburying Saint Brigitte, Russell Woods, and the other accidentally unearthed dead of the village would be at eleven on January 2. The weather was not raining so far. The young Americans had been interested to see the preparations the day before: the ground bare and newly turned, like a turnip field in winter. The polished, shining tombstones, with the air of having been set up all at the same time, resembled a new game of dominoes. Small family sarcophagi sprouted among the graves, looking almost livable, like marble pup tents. “You might think the tombs had been moved from somewhere else, or that the place was recovering from some disastrous flood,” Carla said. They were rapt at the smell of the loamy, newly dug earth, at the menacing gaping open graves, with the tombstones already labeled; it might be the day of the Resurrection with the people already raptured away. This, too, had occurred to Carla, who had had more religious education than Gilda or Julie: the dead people had left their tombs and had ascended to paradise.

  Gilda had called her parents again, to ask if they would get there in time for this event. “When are you coming? There’ll be ceremonies tomorrow, where they are reburying the bones that got washed out of the cemetery, or something like that,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  The order of the ceremony had been planned for months. Le Père François would say prayers over the bones of Saint Brigitte but had hesitated about what to say about the case of Russell Woods in case he was Jewish. He had consulted a list of Jewish surnames and found it there with two spellings, “Woods” and “Wood.” Lorna Mott didn’t know Russ’s religion but didn’t think he was Jewish—she only knew he came from Iowa; Russ had preferred not to speak of his earlier life. His fascination with painting churches, he had said, was purely aesthetic. Nonetheless Father François did not wish to compromise the spiritual destiny of a person of another faith or impinge on the prerogatives of another pastor, and so had asked a rabbi he knew to come down from Lyon for the event; and together they devised a few nondenominational words of remembrance.

  Just to be sure, they had also invited a woman they knew who also lived in La Charce, who conducted pagan festivals and alternative religious rites for the numerous Protestants in the area, she having been ordained in the Universal Light Church of—something, no one was quite sure about its name. And other uncertainties remained. For one thing, the bones of Pont-les-Puits, having been buried once before, wouldn’t the appended souls have long since flown to wherever they were going? Father François could find no theological rules about the reburial of bones of people whose souls had already moved on. The best they could do was obey the dictates of humane good taste and renew their good wishes for smooth sailing in the afterlife.

  The headstones had been cleaned and put to right, and holes had been dug, but a ceremonious simultaneous burial of dozens of new or rebuilt coffins was out of the question because of the manpower required, so it was left to each family to cope with the practicalities of filling in the graves in the days to come; Saint Brigitte’s reburial would symbolize the others, too. Armand-Loup had successfully argued for Russell Woods’s bones to be dealt with at the same time as Saint Brigitte’s—the saint and Russell the two leading stars of the forthcoming obsèques.

  On the day itself, Gilda, Carla, and Julie were among the first attendees standing on the damp slopes of the cemetery. The weather was not terribly propitious. There was the smell of damp in the air, but the form in which it would declare itself was unclear. The geologists and the contingent of the new visitors from the Dumas house added to the general excitement of the occasion. The locals remembered Julie as a tot, Mademoiselle Peggy’s daughter—if you remembered Mademoiselle Peggy, Madame Dumas’s daughter. Her old neighbors were especially delighted to see Madame Dumas after her half a year’s absence, and apparently she was still perfectly friendly with Monsieur Dumas despite rumors of their divorce. They all agreed that little Julie was now grown into a very beautiful young woman in her own right, plus now there was a young woman who did the marketing and errands and a very young, pale, very pregnant adolescent. The village also enjoyed some new, especially titillating gossip: up at Monsieur Dumas’s house—though he himself was still living over the bakery—Madame Dumas’s first husband, the father of Mademoiselle Peggy, was soon expected with his second wife as tenants.

  At about eleven, Lorna and Armand-Loup approached the cemetery from the top of the hill. A small crowd had gathered in random clusters at various distances from the central graves. A little procession of seven or eight townspeople approached the cemetery, which lay on the downhill slope below the road at the southern end of the town. Two villagers bore between them a small stretcher upon which sat a large black cube, evidently a funerary box. On top of the box lay an artist’s palette and brushes, painted gold.

  “Put the Woods bones next to his fosse for now,” instructed Mayor Barbara Levier to Monsieur Flores, coming along from the mairie with his shovel. “Bonjour, Armand; bonjour, Lorna.”

  Another small coffin-shaped box was lowered into the grave marked with an imposing stone cross; the artist’s smaller box went into another hole nearby, as yet unmarked by a monument. A couple of people dropped clods into the saint’s grave, but otherwise the troughs were not filled in.

  Since they were a distance away and everyone wore dark coats and hats or headscarves and shivered in the drizzle, Armand and Lorna didn’t see whether the tenants of their house, among them her grandchild Julie, were there, though surely they’d make an effort to attend this big civic event?

  Down below them, standing next to Father François, a tall woman in a long white robe, whose voice carried up to them, began to speak: “We know that these bones are still suffused with the energy of the living, these bones contain life. Similarly these tombs, besides being reliquaries for the bones of our loved departed, are passages between the material world and the spiritual world. The rites we observe today were conducted by our ancestors in this very glen, preparing us all for the passage between the two worlds, which our beloved friends have already trod and are now retracing their steps.”

  * * *

  —

  Almost without willing it, Gilda, Carla, and Julie had drawn closer to the procession and fallen in among the mourners. Ahead of the procession, a small grave had been dug at the foot of an imposing marble plinth, a spire perhaps ten feet high. In her newbie French, Carla asked another of the mourners who it was being buried: “C’est qui?”

  “These are the bones of Mons
ieur Woods, and there are Saint Brigitte’s bones. Attendez, the box will be lowered and there will be speeches.”

  Deep peace of the rising wave to you

  Deep peace of the sweet air to you

  Deep peace of the slumbering earth to you,

  Deep peace of the night stars to you

  Infinite peace to you…,

  intoned the priestess. Armand and Lorna continued to watch for a few minutes before concluding that similar words were going to be spoken over every newly dug grave. They decided to head back to the bakery but instead found themselves watching to the end.

  “Deep peace, Lorna chérie,” said Armand.

  “Sweetheart,” Lorna agreed.

  * * *

  —

  It suddenly began to rain, which lent to the scene a bleakness suitable to the burial of whatever poor creatures were leaving the light of the world for darkness and mud. People stirred and put up umbrellas or the hoods of their anoraks. The priestess began to speak more quickly. As she spoke, she appeared distracted by the sight of a strange being gracing this ceremony, and sure to vanish: a young—very young—pregnant virgin wearing a raincoat, with a halo around her head, an effect created by the feeble sun shining behind Gilda’s crown of silver braids.

  The priestess gave in to the temptation to wind up her speech and get out her cell-phone camera, dissembling her objective—Gilda—with a show of photographing the whole assembly, a growing crowd of celebrants, or mourners, whoever they were. She captured a significant image.

  Julie said to Gilda and Carla, “Look, there’s my grandmother.” Turning, Gilda slipped and fell. Her fall was minor enough: on the slippery grass of the slope above the diggings; on account of her unfamiliar center of gravity she lost her footing, tipped over like a teapot, and slid a little distance toward the graves, unhurt but getting muddy and feeling humiliated.

  The sight of a pregnant female sustaining a fall, even that mere slip, had brought people rushing to her side, and this was what enraged her—her new category of fragile, dependent female valued only for her role in perpetuating the human race. In a furious voice, as they walked back to the house, she protested that she was fine, but she was not. The injustice of it all had finally seized her.

  * * *

  —

  Back at the house, Gilda went to take off her muddy clothes, unsure about whether to lie down as she ought to do before lunch, call her parents as usual at this time, or go back outside to try to get a closer look at her father’s first wife, a person of immense interest. Gilda had never seen Lorna, mother of her half siblings and Julie’s grandmother, but she had spotted the person she thought Julie was pointing out, the woman standing with their landlord, Monsieur Dumas. But they had been too far away to tell much.

  She took off her muddy pants and shoes, wondering whether her mother would approve of her meeting Dad’s other wife, a situation which had never come up in Gilda’s experience, which had always been that Lorna was hardly to be spoken of.

  The mud was clingy, slimy, all over her shins and forearms; she had to have a bath, and noticed more of the funny viscous substance in the bathwater, a trail of rose pigment, as if she’d floated a length of pink thread in the tub. She decided it must have been something already there from a frayed cleaning rag or something. She got dressed and walked over to the inn with Carla, who was waiting for her. But she felt a little funny, probably from the fall.

  The discharge came back during the night, and another pinkish trail stained her pajamas. In the morning, she thought she better tell Carla. “I rinsed it out,” she said. “Kind of a slithery red thing.” Carla called Ran and Amy straightaway and left a message.

  * * *

  —

  Amy and Ran had been flying to Paris to see Gilda at intervals throughout the fall, but it had been almost eight weeks since they had been there, delayed by the ongoing national financial troubles that affected Amy’s business affairs. Gilda had called her parents from Pont-les-Puits on New Year’s Day about headaches and mounting blood pressure, and other strange symptoms, and as a result they were already preparing to leave for France when they connected with Gilda about the slithery red string.

  From Paris they would take the train to Valence, and rent a car for the drive to the village, to the house they had taken at Peggy’s recommendation, a house large enough for a big family New Year’s vacation. Ran and Amy had been unable to find the village of Pont on maps, but they counted on GPS when they got there, and they knew Carla and Gilda had reliably found it.

  They had been a little worried by the Google Earth views of this region of France, the Drôme—nothing but the tiniest medieval villages and slow, stony roads; if Gilda should go into labor, say, or have some other medical emergency, it would be at least an hour to any town of size. Luckily, though the area was mountainous, there were enough flat fields to land a helicopter.

  Ran had figured that the only responsible adult in Pont-les-Puits to see to Gilda was Carla, but he had also heard from Ursula, who had heard from Ian, who had heard from Julie via email, that Lorna was in Pont-les-Puits; he speculated that it had to do with her marital situation. Ran didn’t know whether he could rely on her. Though he and Lorna had spoken from time to time in California since their lunch, they had recently spiked some new irritation over an issue relating to Hams and had sunk back into their official long-term estrangement. But she would know the region.

  On the phone, he asked Carla to find Lorna, and Carla had already learned enough about the sociology of Pont-les-Puits to go directly to the bar at Hôtel La Périchole, known for its finger on the pulse of village activities as well as for its little cocktail meatballs, to ask where Madame Dumas was apt to be.

  Thus Lorna got a surprising phone call as she was getting out of Armand’s bathtub—Ran, very agitated: “Lorna, I’m sorry to—it sounds like my daughter Gilda might need some help, at least from what she tells us. We’re on our way there, we’re in the airport. She’s there, in that village where you are, with her cousin Julie and others.

  “She’s only seven months along,” he went on, upset, slightly incoherent. “Did you know she was pregnant? It’s a—well— She’s there in the village—what’s it called? Seven months—a premature infant could live if there’s a hospital with adequate neonatal facilities, and we thought you probably can find that out, if they have them, or your husband would know, or you would, from living there, and could get her to a hospital if it looks like…”

  Of course she would help. “Is she at the house?” Lorna asked, seeing the problems: Was there a hospital in Valence that could deal with a teen having a baby? Would Armand-Loup know? What if they had to deliver a baby on the way to find a hospital? There was a kind of familiar joy—being of use and trusted.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll go see her—Gilda?—right away,” Lorna reassured him.

  “We’ve got a flight in an hour, thank you so much, Lorna, just worried to death. Here’s our phone number—you have my cell…?”

  “Yes, yes, what is it?” Lorna assured him, scrabbling in Armand’s drawer for a pencil.

  “I’ll call you when we know what’s going on. Don’t worry,” she said as heartily and reassuringly as she could, while wondering what on earth to do. Should she really interfere in her former husband’s life-and-death situation? No, but of course she had to. Despite a feeling of being drawn backward, she went to find Armand-Loup, who would know better than she about suitable hospitals. She knew there was none in Pont.

  * * *

  —

  At his side by the phone, Amy reached for Ran’s hand and pressed it against the side of her right breast.

  “Do you feel that? Is that a lump?” Ran pushed a little against the soft tissue.

  “Not really. I’ll see later.” He was used to Amy’s anxieties taking the form of breast lumps or sometimes leukemia. �
��I don’t feel anything,” he added. He heard her little intake of breath, reassured.

  50

  To see the right thing to do and not to do it is cowardice.

  In Pont, Lorna and Armand-Loup hurried up to their former house, where they found things in perfect order. There were their sofa cushions of blue velvet arranged as before, their Quimper plates on the kitchen wall. Lorna introduced herself to Gilda and Carla as Julie’s grandmother.

  “The mama of Peggy, Julie’s mother. I just talked to Gilda’s father. He asked me to look in on you, to make sure all is well.”

  “Thank you, Madame Dumas,” said Gilda in her best Saint Waltraud’s manner. “I’m fine, really.”

  Lorna thought Gilda a pretty child, though in her view not as pretty as her half sister, Peggy, had been at that age; but you could see a family resemblance. Gilda had a strange pallor. Lorna felt a motherly surge of concern for her, a child far too young to be having a baby, and so far from her parents. Lorna had heard most of the story from Peggy. Poor Ran. She was ashamed to have laughed maliciously to think his late-born child, with another woman, was having an unwed pregnancy at fifteen.

  After a short conversation, Lorna was reassured that all was well. “I did slip and fall down at the ceremony, but no harm done,” Gilda said. Lorna left them with her phone number and instructions to call if they needed her. She sent Ran a reassuring text.

  Only an hour later, though, Carla came rushing into the pâtisserie seeking Lorna, who had gone out for a late lunch with Armand and was just strolling up.

  “Mrs. Dumas, would you please come now? We think Gilda might be going into labor.”

  Lorna’s worst fear. The poor girl could not have fallen into more incompetent hands. Lorna and Armand followed Carla up to the house, where Julie was hovering excitedly over the frightened Gilda, belly swollen like a pack animal’s, sitting in a chair in the salon with a miserable though alert expression, as if expecting armed men to come in the door. She explained that she had had a bad pain, right after Lorna left, and was worried that she was going to have another one soon.