by Tom Drury
“It’s Sargent,” he said enticingly. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow. This massaging would go better if we could lift your nightgown.”
“Forget that too.”
“We do this, Carlo leaves us alone.”
“Carlo wants it?” said Mary “God, Carlo Record . . . How is he?”
“Not very well.”
Paul worked her shoulder muscles, lifting and squeezing. “And what’s with Rosine? She just pretended I wasn’t in the barn.”
“Maybe she thought you hadn’t been.”
“I was in the barn at the time.”
“She says, ‘Il me tape sur les nerfs.’ That you get on her nerves. She’s mad at you. We all are. We’ve learned to manage without you. The truth — and you should know this — is things are very good, right here, right now.”
“Well, I’m glad.”
Mary said nothing. He could feel the tidal rhythm of her breathing. How excellent are bodies, he thought. To get a machine to do all that they do would cost a fortune, and even then, the machine would be covered in steel or dull plastic instead of this warm, responsive skin.
“I’m drifting off,” she said.
Paul went downstairs for a cup of tea. The Canadian, whose name was Glover, sat at a desk in the library studying a map of the Battle of the Ardennes.
“This is where the Germans made their last great effort,” he said. He opened a leather case full of sharp colored pencils. “They wanted to get back to Antwerp. Antwerp was the goal, but of course they came nowhere near it.”
“They didn’t even get Bastogne,” said Paul.
“They were all around Bastogne.”
“What did the American commander say? ‘Nuts to you.’”
“No,” said Glover. “What he said was ‘Nuts!’ That was Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe.”
“Our monastery ‘fell to the Allied bombing.’”
“Some people today find the discipline of the Wehrmacht inviting,” said Glover.
“Let them go live under it,” said Paul.
“Or die under it,” said Glover. “I’ve been to Dachau. Arbeit Macht Frei is written on the gate. ‘Work makes you free.’ It’s hard to accept this was our century.”
“What do you do for a living?” said Paul.
Glover sketched with a colored pencil on the map. “I’m a professor, but I’m on sabbatical,” he said. “This is the famous bulge that we speak of. Here is where the Third Army came in, directed by the mighty Patton. Up here is where the Ninth and the First came in. And here the British Second.”
“We had a guy here one time from the British Second,” said Paul. “Geoffrey.”
“How I would have liked to speak to him. Eisenhower saw the German push into the Ardennes not as the disaster that everyone else saw but as an opportunity.”
In the kitchen, a taut bag of fresh goat cheese hung dripping slowly over the sink, and Paul pivoted the faucet away from the cheese to run the water into an electric kettle. Rosine sat in one of two chairs on either side of the empty fireplace reading the Vertige newspaper. “They’re going to build that radio tower despite environmental concerns,” she said in English. “The European Union has issued a commemorative pen and pencil.”
Paul plugged the kettle in and pressed a button on the handle. He was thinking of Rosine’s name, of Mary’s letter. “Rosine, I’m going to have tea. Would you like to join me?”
“Yes, I think that I would.”
He took two white porcelain mugs from the sideboard. “I’m going to have whiskey in my tea. This combination comes with my highest recommendation.”
“Whiskey, yes,” said Rosine.
Paul uncorked a bottle and poured Scotch over the tea bags in the cups. He sat down in the chair opposite Rosine’s and put his feet on the woodbin. “What else is in the newspaper?”
“A chimney man fell, but he will be all right.”
“A sweep.”
“Yes, a chimney sweep, but he will be all right.”
The boiling of the kettle came gradually to the foreground. “And here we are,” said Paul.
The diamond merchant Pierrick Gilloteaux came back from London on Sunday. He and Paul and Axel and Judy spent the afternoon putting up first-cut hay in the barn. Axel and Judy unloaded the hay from a pickup onto an elevator, and Paul and Pierrick collected and stacked the bales in the loft of the barn. Pierrick slung the heavy bales with ease. He wore Carhartt jeans with big pockets and a gray work shirt.
“They put uncut diamonds in lots,” he explained. He and Paul stood in the open doorway of the loft with the elevator canted between them and wind in their faces. “It’s tricky how it’s done. Sometimes, in order to get the stone you want, you have to buy other stones you are indifferent about.”
“How do you feel about the stone you gave Mary?”
“I’m fond of it,” he said. “I showed it to her one day to illustrate the story of its return. A woman had agreed to buy it but wanted it independently appraised. I encourage this. ‘By all means,’ I say. Then she came back saying there was a crack. Now, there is no crack, and that is out of the question. There is a blemish, but not a crack. We spent some time talking in an inconclusive way. So I took back the stone, and when Mary showed an interest, I had it set for her.”
“The message you’re sending is, Here’s some debris I can’t get rid of.”
Pierrick shrugged. “She wears it, so she must like it. That’s all I can say”
“How did you find our estaminet?”
“All day long I hunch over a desk, looking through a loupe,” said Pierrick Gilloteaux. “That’s not strictly true. Sometimes I walk a diamond around a bit. I believe natural light is critical, although some prefer filament. It would be a protracted discussion. Sometimes I walk to the zoo while tossing the diamond in my hand. If you have never seen the zoo in Antwerp, you should. The dolphinarium I find quite fascinating. I had come down to Vertige only a few times before Mary’s condition became apparent.” He pronounced her name the French way, Marie. “I happen to believe that Vertige has great potential. So one night we went to a film. English with French subtitles. Like all movies these days, this one had a scattering of suggestive scenarios, and I became very conscious of Mary, seated as she was at my side.”
“She’ll do that to you,” said Paul.
“Now I divide my time between here and Antwerp,” said Pierrick. “My apartment in Deurne has nine stark rooms. But I realize the situation is uncommon. Perhaps my generosity has been a charade. Perhaps a frank approach might not work with a woman who is going to have a child. My own mind is mysterious to me on this question.”
That night Mary went into labor. Paul drove her to the hospital in Moeurs-de-Province, where she was given a room with a view of the Pont des Ardennes. The contractions were long and gradual and did not seem too painful at first. Then they seemed very painful. The doctors gave Mary an anesthetic that made her apologetic and loopy. “I’m sorry” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” said the doctor.
“I know, I’m sorry.”
Near the end, she surprised Paul by murmuring the punch line of an ancient joke concerning Toulouse-Lautrec’s tailor: “Is it too tight, Toulouse?”
The baby was a girl. She squalled with an exhilarating anger that split the wall of medical expertise separating the doctors from Paul and Mary. Everyone’s eyes shone above their masks. Paul went along to an adjoining room where doctors suctioned the baby’s lungs with a tube that seemed to have gone all the way down to her toes. The baby hated the suctioning. She glistened, scarlet and barrel-chested, with fists knotted and face reflecting nuances of pain and surprise. Paul carried her back to the delivery room. There she opened her dark eyes for the first time at the taste of the milk.
Later a beautiful midwife stood over the baby and put silver nitrate in her eyes.
Pierrick Gilloteaux arrived at the hospital carrying a video camera with which he recorded the sight of the infant hiccuping and wailing soundlessly behind the glass of the nursery. Paul stood beside him.
“Now I go and film the mother,” he said.
“You have a lot to learn about Mary.”
“The record will not be complete.”
“In our minds it will be.”
Paul could not leave the glass wall. He stood on his toes watching the round red face. Sometimes he looked at the other babies as well. They would go on to be messed up, dressed up, proud and miserable. And this was happening in every hospital in every town in every country. He wondered at the sense of accomplishment a normal parent must feel, because his own sense of accomplishment was great, and all he had done was to sleep with Mary on a hillside in New Hampshire one afternoon at the end of a marriage.
Mary and Paul named the baby Françoise and brought her home to the Auberge des Moines three days after she was born. Glover, the Canadian, was the only guest, as Rosine had been turning people away in anticipation. Breast-feeding had become more and more difficult since that first time in the delivery room, and one evening when Mary, Paul, and Françoise were not getting anywhere a midwife came to the inn. This was not the one who had helped out in the delivery but another one, from Vertige, but also beautiful. The midwife placed a rubber nipple over the real one, and Françoise caught on to this unusual arrangement, and the midwife petted Mary’s hair, saying, “Mettez-vous l’esprit en repos.” Set your spirit at rest.
23
Paul found a portfolio of Sargent prints in the book-market town of Redu, and just as he had hoped, the beauty of the painting convinced Mary to remake The Black Brook. She wanted to know how the painter had captured such a subtle moment with such coarse strokes. And so they traveled to London in June to see the work firsthand at the Tate Gallery. The baby stayed with Rosine in Vertige while Paul and Mary took the Eurostar out of Midi Station in Brussels. The train sped across the countryside and through the Channel Tunnel, arriving at Waterloo Station in late afternoon. They walked across Waterloo Bridge, looped around Aldwych, and headed up Kingsway and Southampton Row to Bloomsbury, where they got a room on the fifth floor of the Russell Hotel. It was a small and comfortable room with a balcony, a huge bathroom, and a freestanding trouser press.
“You and Pierrick should get one of these for the inn,” said Paul. “You could attract more of the trouser-press crowd.”
Mary and Paul stepped out onto the wrought-iron balcony overlooking Russell Square.
“I miss Françoise,” said Mary.
Paul watched a band of yelling students as they swarmed to a teller machine below. Then two bald men got into a cab in front of the hotel, holding their jackets to their stomachs with that little Napoleonic gesture. Then another cab pulled up, and a third bald man got out.
“Probably just a coincidence,” said Paul.
In the morning they had breakfast in the hotel dining room, where the banquet offered biscuits, croissants, fruit in syrup, twiglike cereal, muesli, some sort of flakes, and, in a series of silver bins with rollback tops, damp tomatoes, beans, fish patties, scrambled eggs, mushrooms, fried eggs, sausage, and ham. They looked at all the food and went back to their table, where they drank coffee and ate toast from a silver rack.
Later they walked along the Thames on Victoria Embankment and stopped to examine Cleopatra’s Needle, an obelisk flanked by sphinxes that had been damaged by a German bomb in September of 1917. Paul fitted his thumb into a hole in the left-rear paw of one of the sphinxes as Mary read from an inscription on the obelisk:
Through the patriotic zeal of Erasmus Wilson F.R.S. this obelisk was brought from Alexandria encased in an iron cylinder. It was abandoned during a storm on the Bay of Biscay. Recovered and erected on this spot by John Dixon C.E. in the 42nd year of the Reign of Queen Victoria 1878.
“No one has patriotic zeal anymore,” said Paul.
The Black Brook was not on display at the Tate. A woman at the information desk explained that there used to be a program through which works not on show could be seen privately, but this had been discontinued.
“She has to paint a copy for a gangster back in the States,” said Paul. “Otherwise we’ll be killed.”
“I’m terribly sorry.”
“We understand. You don’t make the rules.”
“I thought you called,” Mary said to Paul.
“The line was busy.”
They retreated to a large stone room, where they sat on the floor with their backs to the wall listening to the museum rumbling like a heart. A boy in a light blue shirt examined a sculpture by Henry Moore, a muted gray woman carved from Armenian marble. The boy yawned and rubbed his eyes while circling the sculpture. The woman’s left hand cupped her right elbow, and her right hand cupped her left breast. Her eyes and nostrils were just little holes in the marble.
“O.K., I’ll work from the print,” said Mary.
“Carlo will never see the original.”
“Clearly, since it’s not on view.”
With new resolution they got up and went into the Hogarth Room, where they looked at a painting by Allan Ramsay, 1713–1784, in which Thomas, 2nd Baron Mansel of Margam, holds a shotgun and a dead grouse, or pigeon, while surrounded by his half-brothers and half-sister. These are the children of Anne, daughter of Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell. Thomas’s half-sister wears a kerchief on her head and is resting her left hand on the pigeon, and Thomas glances at her with a friendly appraisal, as if to say, “You want the pigeon? It’s yours.”
They wandered from room to room. They looked at Turner’s big and tragic Parting of Hero and Leander and George Stubbs’s series of paintings of an unlucky horse happening on a lion beneath a ledge.
“The setting for this violent encounter,” Mary read from the wall, “‘and for others in the series, is the harsh, rocky landscape of Creswell Crags in the Peak District.’”
They looked at Constables and Romneys and Giacomettis and at John William Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott, in which a woman in a thin white dress with a black sash drifted toward Camelot and her own death in an ornate black boat with three candles burning in the bow. Her head tilted back with red-lidded eyes, and her long sandy hair fanned in the breeze.
And then, in a room containing a bronze athlete wrestling with a python, they saw an honest-to-God Sargent: Ena and Betty, Daughters of Asher and Mrs. Wertheimer. Betty was the taller of the two, and light seemed to slide down her off-white gown. She had her arm around the waist of Ena, who wore a red velvet dress. Unless Paul had Ena and Betty confused.
“You really want to feel that velvet,” said Paul.
“You can’t touch the painting,” said Mary, taking notes.
When they walked out of the Tate and into the river wind, they felt as if they had been through a trial; their bodies seemed lighter, out from under the oppression of so much genius. They laughed, fell into the back of a cab, and told the driver to take them anywhere a good meal could be had. They had been to London several times, and contrary to the prevailing opinion, they did not mind the food. The driver commented, as had Geoffrey before him, on the nuances separating British and American English. “Pavement here means ‘sidewalk’; in the States it means ‘not the sidewalk.’” The pub to which the cab driver delivered them had a welcoming dimness, worn brocade benches, and a tapestry commemorating the landing of a meteorite at the wedding of Elizabeth Sydenham in the sixteenth century
Afterward Mary and Paul walked along the Serpentine and saw a large man in a tight electric blue suit feeding the animals. He stood by an iron fence while squirrels walked up and down his arms. Paul and Mary agreed that this was partly naturalistic and partly pathetic. That night in th
e hotel, they faced again the question of whether to make love.
They did. They almost had to, after seeing so many paintings. Paul kept running his hands over her face, her forehead, her ears, as if trying to make sure she was really there.
Pierrick Gilloteaux gave a picnic when Mary and Paul returned from England. He lofted a blanket over the grass of the meadow behind the inn and laid out black bread, smoked venison, cheese, pickled trout, and a bottle of wine called Clos de la Zolette. The sun broke through the clouds from time to time, and the baby, Françoise, lay on her back with a blanket over her feet. Cats had followed the scent of the food up from the barn and now lay hypnotized on the grass. Paul wondered how old Scratch was making out. He had entrusted her to Carrie and Lonnie Wheeler, who said they would feed her only fish, and by this means make her better.
After the food the clouds split open, leaving a fair blue sky over the valley of the Torchon, and everyone fell asleep. Paul dreamed that grass had grown in his bathtub and he could not find a scythe. Mary and Paul awoke to the sound of Pierrick Gilloteaux putting plates and empty wrappers back into a basket. Mary lay on her back with the baby on her chest while Pierrick told about a couple from New Mexico he had overheard arguing about the significance of the Brabo Fountain in Antwerp.
“The fountain is peculiar, and you really cannot blame them,” he said. “A man is running and carrying a large severed hand. He is holding it by the index finger, as if he is about to throw it. The couple had no idea what they were looking at. The woman thought it was a fragment of a larger statue, and the man said it must be an allegory of European unity. They were both wrong, of course. The running man is the Roman soldier Sylvius Brabo, who is supposed to have chopped off the hand of a terrible giant and then thrown the hand into the Scheldt. So I told them this. The woman nodded, but the man did not want to abandon the allegorical interpretation he had worked out. He conceded that there might be a specific story behind the statue, but beyond that, the work must be about some larger idea. I said, ‘Yes, the giant Druon Antigonus.’ The woman said, ‘See, baby, that’s how come the hand that is cut off is way bigger than the man’s hands.’ But you know, this is what I love about American women, that even when their men are completely deluded, they will still help them out of a jam.”