Indelible

by Adelia Saunders

  My Aunt Cat was not a sentimental woman, but those boxes of knickknacks must have meant something to her because she mentioned them in her will—otherwise we never would have known they were there. They were the one thing she left specifically to me. It became a source of tension between Pearl and me, not because there was anything of real monetary value, but they were family things and I suppose Pearl felt they should have gone to her.

  The argument we had about those boxes was part of the reason Pearl was so set against my moving back to the ranch after Aunt Cat died. But somebody had to keep an eye on Walt. Pearl had her kids in school up in Denver and Eddie had his business to run, but I wasn’t teaching anymore. My son was about to start high school and there was nothing to keep me in town.

  What settled it was Uncle Walt. He broke his hip when he slipped on the ice trying to water the cows in the middle of winter and the doctor said it wouldn’t do to move him. He said a broken hip was generally the beginning of the end for old folks like Walt, and when Pearl mentioned selling the ranch and getting him settled in a nursing home, Walt made the kind of racket I don’t think any of us had ever heard from him before. So Pearl and Eddie figured they’d let him die there, and they said it was all right if I wanted to stay out at the ranch and keep him company until he did.

  We called the farm the ranch and we called the house the ranch too, because even though Pearl and Eddie and I had been just tiny kids when Uncle Walt bought it, it was never the kind of place you could plain call home. It had been built as a dude ranch back in the early thirties, and it could have slept a full staff and maybe forty guests if you included the little cabins out back. After knowing my Uncle Walt for nearly sixty years, I still can’t imagine why he bought that place. It makes me wonder if maybe there was more to him than any of us kids ever knew. Uncle Walt, who wore the same hat every non-Sunday of his life and outside of the war never went farther than Walsenburg if he didn’t have to—I’ll never understand what made him so attached to a house with two dining rooms, a chapel out back, and its own dance floor.

  Well, I knew Pearl thought I was angling to inherit the place, and so I did my best to make it clear that I wasn’t after anything more from Uncle Walt than what we knew he’d already put aside for me. I have my teacher’s pension and I get royalty checks from the Beart estate now and then, and it adds up nicely. But Pearl was still mad about the boxes from Aunt Cat, so I told her I’d set aside the china and any jewelry for her, and I promised that when the time came, I’d be sure Walt’s Purple Heart got passed on to her boys. When she realized that my moving out there would mean they wouldn’t have to hire a home health aide for Walt, Pearl relaxed a little bit.

  We had a frank discussion, the three of us in the post office parking lot the day Eddie picked Walt up from the hospital and Pearl and I met him in town to do the paperwork. It was maybe too public a place for all sorts of things to come out, but we put a good forty years of grievances in the sun that day, each of us saying what was on our minds. How the money from my mother’s estate meant I was the one who got to go to college, though Pearl’s grades were just as good; how Eddie had to share his popgun with me; how my getting scarlet fever when I was five practically bankrupted the family; how as kids they always made sure I knew I was somewhere between a nephew and a burden to Aunt Cat and Uncle Walt, but never a son; and on and on, a big wave of past hurts and secret resentments that washed over us standing outside the post office that afternoon while Uncle Walt waited in Eddie’s truck for us to figure out what to do with him.

  And finally it was decided: I’d stay out at the ranch for as long as it took, and then after Walt we-all-knew-what I’d move back to town, maybe go back to work at the middle school in the fall. But Walt didn’t die for another five years, the problem I had with the school board never did blow over, and with hay prices up Pearl and Eddie stopped talking about selling the land.

  I often play that conversation over to myself, and though I’d finished my breakfast I sat in the park a while longer, thinking of all the things I might have said to Pearl and Eddie that day. My thoughts vaulted the ocean and brought me right back home, and before I knew it I was calculating acre-feet of irrigation and wondering if I’d left the stove on back at the ranch.

  But that couldn’t go on all day. I had just over a week to spend in Paris, and thoughts of home weren’t going to get me any closer to finding a record of Inga Beart’s red shoes. The day was getting warm and I was thirsty, so I got up from my bench and went across the street to a little supermarket.

  I found a carton of milk in the canned goods section. It wasn’t refrigerated, but I bought it anyway and went back to my bench to drink it. The carton was made of thick paper and it took some doing to unfold one edge into a kind of spout. I took a sip; it was warm and it had a different taste from the milk we have back home. And with that taste came an experience I’m not sure I’ve ever had before. A brand-new memory came into my mind: my Aunt Cat opening a cardboard container of milk. The cardboard is folded in a sort of a pyramid shape that can’t be set down without tipping over, and Aunt Cat is trying to hold the thing upright while digging at one corner with her fingers. When she finally gets it open the paper is frayed and soft.

  The memory itself was nothing much, it was just that its newness startled me. It was a strange sensation, to be so many thousands of miles from home, in a foreign city where everything looked and felt so different, and then to suddenly feel the pull of an invisible string as now cinched itself tight against then, here against there.

  I was inspecting my new recollection, sort of turning it over in my mind, the way you might examine a piece of a meteorite, when I realized that the memory almost certainly couldn’t be real. We always got our milk in glass bottles from the dairy up the road, and when they stopped delivering Aunt Cat used to tape quarters to our jacket pockets for me and Pearl and Eddie to pick up a bottle each on our way home from the school bus.

  It worried me. I no longer bother trying to remember where I put my glasses, I just look in all the usual places, and when my son calls me on my birthday I try not to sound surprised. But I didn’t think I was to the point of manufacturing memories. Still, there is something calming in a good long drink of milk, albeit funny-tasting. I let the memory be and drank the whole thing, wondering at the strange joke my subconscious must be playing on poor Aunt Cat, to put into her hands a carton of sterilized store-bought milk.

  The Beart girls grew up on a dairy farm outside Rye, Colorado, on land better suited to beef. My grandfather broke his health putting in the railroad down around Santa Fe and they moved up to the Front Range with the idea that the Rocky Mountains would catch the good life and funnel it on down. But my grandfather didn’t know much about the dairy business, and neither did my grandmother, whose family had run a grocery back east, and in the early thirties when things were just starting to go bad for other folks, the Bearts were already deep in debt. The cows were always getting sick, or else they were being sold off, and after what customers they had were taken care of there was never more than a bit of the skim for the family—or so Eddie, Pearl, and I were told most mealtimes, as Aunt Cat filled our jelly glasses to the bottom lip and waited while we drank them down.

  The Beart sisters had the same dark hair and fine features, though only Inga took after Great Aunt Effie, a spinster who, it was said, never left the house because of eyes so light she couldn’t stand the sun. Aunt Cat’s eyes were bottle-blue, and to hear her tell it, growing up it had been Cat who was considered the prettier of the two. But it was Inga who got married first, at the age of seventeen, to a Hungarian by the name of Laszlo Karpati, a foreigner who was just passing through town. “God knows what she saw in him,” Aunt Cat always said. “The man could hardly put two English words together in a way that made any sense.” Inga Beart’s biographers tell it somewhat differently—the classic escape from a weathered gray house and a neurasthenic mother who wouldn’t allow anyone to mention the fact that the high C
olorado air had done nothing to change the rattle in her husband’s cough.

  It was 1936 and the Karpatis were headed for California, but I don’t know if they made it there together; a divorce was granted in Nevada later on that year. No one knows much about that period, but Inga Beart apparently took back her own name and found her way to Hollywood, where she was credited for bit parts in several of the “movie musicals” they were making then.

  I’ve seen those films. In one, Inga Beart and a crowd of other young things are made up to look like Egyptians. In another, she dances the cancan. It’s terrible stuff, but to my mind it’s no coincidence she found her way into the movie business. Whatever it was that got those Hollywood types to give an anonymous girl from the heartland a spot in the chorus was what the literary set discovered some years later: a spark of glamor, a hint of the exotic that was heightened by the unmistakable sense—even when she was just one of the girls doing kicks—that Inga Beart was already far away.

  My Aunt Cat, on the other hand, stayed home. She took care of things while my grandfather died of the tuberculosis no one, not even the doctor, was allowed to call by name. She was the one to look after my grandmother in the slow withering that followed her husband’s death. The day Grandma Beart passed, Aunt Cat walked out of the gray house forever. She married the Hurley boy from down the road, the one who used to put cherries in his mother’s empty milk bottles for the Beart girls to find when they washed and filled them up again.

  The war started. My Uncle Walt got his ring finger shot off during the assault on Okinawa and, if one can believe such stories, crawled through the mud to find it so as not to lose the wedding band. “Damn fool thing for a scrap of metal,” Aunt Cat liked to say. She spent the war working as a welder in an aviation plant in Colorado Springs, sealing up the bellies of bombers, not knowing or caring that her little sister had made her way to New York City and had just bought a pair of red high heels with the fifteen-dollar second-place prize she’d won for a short story about, as all the biographers point out, a young girl who dreams of going blind.

  It was after noon by then, somewhere around four A.M. back home, and I needed a nap. I tossed the empty milk carton in a garbage can and looked around for my lopsided tower. When I saw it sticking up over the rooftops I headed back in that direction, and this time I had no trouble finding my hotel. My room was now available, the lady said, and after some confusion about the key I carried Aunt Cat’s suitcase up four flights of stairs, then down a hall and up one flight more. I unlocked my door, set the suitcase on the floor, and lay down in bed without even bothering to shut the blinds.

  I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again it was to watch the sun come up. I’d slept into the evening and straight on through the night. The window of my room looked out over clusters of chimneys. They reminded me of the tin cans stuck on sticks Eddie and I used to shoot at when we were kids, and the sun broke apart when it hit their wet metal tops, which meant I must have slept more soundly than I had in years, because I hadn’t heard the rain.

  I shaved with the door shut so the steam would take the wrinkles out of the pants I’d worn on the plane. When I cut myself on the chin I stuck some toilet paper on it and tried to remember not to forget to take it off. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d gone out only to notice in a shop window the reflection of a person with a softer jaw than I remembered and a square of tissue stuck to his face.

  After I’d finished getting dressed I made the bed, then made it again, this time with the pillows on the outside. I cleaned around the sink to save the maid the trouble and then I watched the sun light up the tin-can chimney tops.

  The fact is, I was nervous, and a little afraid to go out into the day. Aside from the meeting I’d set up with the lady at the French National Archives, I didn’t have much of an idea of where to begin. The archivist had written to me to say that the “Fonds Labat-Poussin” Carter Bristol referred to in his book was one of the private collections donated to the National Archives by historically relevant individuals—in this case the Comtesse Lucette Labat-Poussin, whose name Bristol connects so intimately with my mother’s. But the archivist hadn’t been able to confirm whether any of what Bristol claims to have found in the comtesse’s papers was actually there—including the photographs of my mother and some personal correspondence of a very private nature. I’d have to look for those things myself.

  Of course, I hadn’t come all the way to Paris just to go through a file Carter Bristol had already seen. When I wrote to the archivist that I was also interested in seeing some old medical records, she told me that only a person’s own family could access that kind of thing. I wanted to ask her about finding the forms from Inga Beart’s admittance to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital on August 10, 1954, so before I left my hotel I gathered up all the documents I might need. I made sure I had the important pages marked in Bristol’s book and put my birth certificate inside to save it from getting bent, then I packed my notes into my briefcase and left my key at the front desk.

  But as it turned out, I didn’t even get the chance to start my research. I followed my map up rue des Archives, but when I got there and told the woman at the reception desk who I needed to see, she shook her head.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  The woman called a young man over, who explained that the archivist I’d corresponded with was unavailable until later that week.

  “But I have an appointment for today,” I told him. “We set the date months ago. She has some things to show me. I need to speak with her—I’m only here until next Sunday.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “There is a formation on the preservation of old texts, and she has been required to attend. It is quite important—in our collections are documents more than one thousand years old, and quite vulnerable to humidity. But, if you will please come back Friday in the morning? She will see you then at half past nine.”

  I didn’t know what to do with myself for the rest of the day, so I made my way back toward my hotel. I’d heard that Inga Beart’s books are making something of a comeback in Europe, and as I went I kept seeing them in bookshop windows: It seemed a new translation of the first novel had just come out. I was surprised to see that Carter Bristol’s biography has already been translated into French; one store I passed had her book and his displayed together. They’d used a different picture for the cover of the French edition of Bristol’s book: a grainy newspaper photograph of a bandaged woman leaning against the railing of a ship. It’s a well-known image, taken from the dock in Le Havre by a photographer for the Herald Tribune: an American novelist returning home from France with her head wrapped in white gauze. The photograph has been cropped to fit the cover of Bristol’s book, but if you have the ability to enlarge the original by two or three hundred percent, and if you can look beyond the dark stains on the dressings wrapped around her face, you will see that her feet, which are nearly hidden in the shadow of a steamer trunk, are bare.

  Inside the bookshop a half dozen copies of Bristol’s biography had been set out on a display table. Inga Beart’s own work was apparently of secondary interest. When I asked about the book of hers I’d seen in the window, the saleswoman pointed me to the Littérature étrangère section at the back of the shop, where only the first novel and a short story collection were kept in stock. I thumbed through them, wondering how they fared in translation.

  It wasn’t until I was in high school that I first read my mother’s books. By that time Inga Beart had been dead for nearly a decade. Her novels were popular again and a new generation of scholars and critics were busy rehabilitating her image. I wasn’t aware of any of that at the time. I knew, dimly, that my mother was famous, and that mentioning her would set my aunt’s jaw tight. If I saw something about her in the paper—having once been a local girl, news items like her candidacy for a postage stamp were covered in-depth—I knew better than to bring it up at supper. But I had never actually seen one of my mother’s books, and I remember the qui
et chill I felt as I went along the fiction shelf of the school library; Ba’s gave way to Be’s, Baldwin, Barnes, and then Beart, Beart, Beart, a whole half-shelf of books, their stiff library dust-jacket covers smudged a little bit, corners blunted enough to show that I was not the first student at Walsenburg Senior High to discover them. I was too shy to check them out; I was afraid the librarian would give me a knowing smile or intrude in some other way on that first meeting between my mother and me. I don’t remember which I started with; I may have gone from left to right across the shelf or I may have chosen one because I liked the cover. What I do remember is the afternoons that followed. I’d sit in the stacks, too tall at fifteen for my knees to fold comfortably against me, sneaking bites of my sandwich and reading my mother’s books. The sandwich was against the library rules, and the books broke an unspoken covenant of my life in Aunt Cat’s house, but I read and chewed with a criminal thrill all through my high school lunch periods.

  I imagine that at first I didn’t absorb much of the stories. I was more interested in the feel of the pages against my fingers, the weight of the books, paper and spine and thick cardboard covers, the first pieces of my mother I could hold in my hands. But as I made my way across that half-shelf and back again, I found myself drawn into the bounded, bittersweet worlds of my mother’s characters. They say she created a new American realism; characters that are by every definition ordinary come alight and blaze briefly—none of her books were long. The critics back then made a scene when it came out that each character was based almost entirely on an actual human being, and it’s commonly assumed that Inga Beart’s crisis began when she lost her publisher, having been accused of writing true life stories—a genre that didn’t sell as well then as it does today. Now, of course, she’s seen as a pioneer, one of the first to turn the facts of unembellished lives into literature. But even before I knew any of it, I read my mother’s books with the sense that I was eavesdropping, the feeling that I ought to turn the pages quietly so the people inside wouldn’t know I was there.