Indelible

by Adelia Saunders

  But Paris was the end rather than the beginning for Inga Beart, and as I found when I first began my research, only a few photographs from those years made it back to the United States. American magazines reported occasionally on her having been seen with one or another literary personality, but by then the articles had gone from the front pages to the back, where they were stuck in between the ads for nylon stockings and the House and Garden columns, often with titles like “Beart appears disoriented in Paris sighting” or “Reclusive American author refuses French literary honor,” and they do not come with pictures.

  There is one photograph of Inga Beart in Paris that everyone knows: She is sitting at a little table with a TABAC sign behind her and a small forest of empty glasses in front of her. The picture is dated August 1, 1954—presumably it was the last photograph taken of her before the events of August 10. In it, the ash on her cigarette is nearly as long as the cigarette itself and she is wrapped in some kind of silk. At first glance she looks young, but with a closer look one can see that her skin seems to have taken a deep breath and is holding it just a moment more before the inevitable release. Her pale eyes are looking at something just beyond the camera, so that no matter where you put yourself in relation to that photograph, she will never look at you.

  I’d been trying to catch the waiter’s eye for some time before I finally put on my hat, stepped inside to say “Thank you anyway” to the bartender, and continued on along the street. Up ahead was a grand-looking arch. I wondered for a moment if it was the Arc de Triomphe, though I knew that one came at the end of the Champs-Élysées, which could hardly be the street I was on—I’d ended up in the kind of neighborhood with sex shops and young men selling DVDs from blankets spread across the sidewalk. A woman in very high heels and a low décolletage stood in a doorway, and it took me a moment to realize that she was there on business. A few doorways up the street was another lady and another. I paused for a moment to watch as a man in an overcoat approached one of them. He and the lady stepped into the shadows to confer, then the man walked away. The woman laughed and called him back. Her eyebrows were painted on at an almost comic angle, as if, though she clearly had been selling her charms for some years now, she was still surprised. The man returned, and in the shadow of the doorway I saw money change hands—I couldn’t see how much. The woman pointed to someplace up the street, and the man walked in that direction. The woman took out her compact and looked into it for a moment, then followed in the direction the man had gone.

  The lady in the nearest doorway must have noticed I’d been watching because she said something to me in French as I passed. “I’m sorry?” I said, then wished I hadn’t; the lady clearly assumed I was after the same thing as the man in the overcoat. “No, no,” I said. “No, thank you.” Her hand was on my sleeve. I was close enough to see the state of her teeth, the soft puckering of skin between her breasts, a red welt on her arm. She’d covered her arm with makeup, but the skin around her wrist was swollen and shiny, the makeup wouldn’t stick. She said something else to me and I could hear laughter coming from the next doorway and the one I had just passed. My face was hot, and feeling like an albino under a full moon in those white pants, I hurried on.

  But I couldn’t quite shake the sight of the mark on the woman’s arm, angry red under flakes of concealer. The tone of whatever it was she’d said to me had been light, an easy joke at the expense of a foreigner. Still, it wasn’t hard to imagine the kind of things that might happen to a woman like her in those deep-set doorways. I reminded myself that it was none of my business. For all I knew she might have scalded herself making tea.

  It was the way she’d painted her arm with makeup, the trouble she’d gone to—I’d seen that sort of thing before. I walked as quickly as I could, but the memory caught me anyhow: a deep bruise on the inside of a young person’s thigh, the way she’d covered it with layers of her mother’s foundation, taking such care. I’d tried to help her hide it, one of many mistakes.

  I turned off that street, thinking I’d take a quieter route back to my hotel, even at the risk of getting lost. I tried to bring my mind back around to my project, telling myself that my brief encounter with the demimonde had been useful after all. It had reminded me of some research I’d been wanting to do, and I made a plan to go to the Bibliothèque nationale to have a look at the microfilm.

  Noir novels were all the rage in France when Inga Beart arrived in Paris in the early 1950s. It was a trend that baffled literary critics, who saw the genre itself as a chalk line drawn around the corpse of French intellectual preeminence. Ghastly crimes were committed on the dark streets of Paris, then solved by cunning detectives with a weakness for unredeemable women; various iterations of the formula came in color-coded series and could be purchased for a franc or two on the platforms of railway stations.

  It was this popular preoccupation with macabre plot twists that I hoped might have prompted an ambitious French editor to put more reporters on the Inga Beart story than, say, his counterparts at the Paris bureau of the Herald Tribune. Each of the major papers would have surely sent someone to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital on August 10, 1954, to try to get a look at her, but it was possible that Le Monde or Le Figaro put a second reporter on the job, sending him to Inga Beart’s apartment to get some color, as they say. Perhaps a newspaper photographer came along. Knowing his audience’s appreciation for the banality of a crime scene, he might have duplicated the shots the police photographer would have taken before him: a coffee cup standing half-full, a slip left hanging on the back of a chair, dark drops like a scattering of buttons across the floor.

  And then, perhaps, the photographer would take out a second camera, loaded with color film. The film was expensive, so he’d frame the shot with special care, appreciating with an artist’s eye the way a pair of red high-heeled shoes that had been left in a jumble on the mat matched the glossy red of the drops on the floor.

  Of course, all this was quite unlikely, and I had a sense that in 1954 the use of color photography in newspapers was still some years off. But I woke up the next morning with the idea still in my head. The Bibliothèque nationale was clearly marked on my map, though it was some distance away, and it was after lunchtime when I finally arrived.

  I found myself a little cubby with a microfilm machine that the librarian had to show me twice how to switch on. It was only then that I realized, of course, that the newspapers were all going to be in French. It was more out of embarrassment than anything else that I went ahead and looked through all the articles from that week until I found the ones with her name in them. To my disappointment, only one of them had a picture, the same publicity shot I’ve seen a thousand times before. The librarian was watching me, so I bent in close to read the story, which is to say I looked at all the words. I didn’t understand them, but I already knew what they said.

  On the tenth of August 1954, a woman was taken to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in the center of Paris with severe knife wounds to her eyes. It turned out that this woman was an American author who, despite having lived in one of the more fashionably intellectual quarters of Paris for several years, seemed unable or unwilling to speak a word of French to the authorities to tell them how it had happened, except to insist in English that, really, everything was all right. It was quickly established that the wounds had been self-inflicted and fears of an eye-gouging maniac loose in Montmartre subsided, replaced by horrified gossip when it turned out that the woman was Inga Beart, acclaimed novelist and iconic beauty—although now that her eyes were out the papers tended to put those facts in the opposite order. Why had she done it? Some said it was plain craziness, and there may be some truth to that, for her behavior had become more and more erratic during her time in France, and she’d stopped writing altogether toward the end. The cynics said she’d done it to sell more books, and if so, it worked. Inga Beart novels became popular again, and upon second reading everyone agreed that, after all, they were terribly dark—and wasn’t there some
thing that each of her characters was trying so desperately not to see?

  I, of course, knew nothing about my mother’s eyes. I would have been five when it happened, and even if I’d been old enough to read about it in the newspapers, I would have missed those headlines altogether, because it was in the late summer of 1954 that I came down with my case of scarlet fever. Inga Beart returned to the States in October 1954 and died soon after in a New York hospital. The cause was complications of an infection of the sinuses—apparently quite common in cases in which the eye socket is punctured through. I was only informed, rather tersely as I remember it, by Aunt Cat that my mother had died, and if any reporters came around I was to holler for her and to keep my mouth shut, instructions I found contradictory even then.

  I don’t remember wondering why the cause of that sinus infection was never discussed in front of me, or why, when my mother’s last days were mentioned at all, it was behind a folded palm or in such low tones that I couldn’t catch all the words. It wasn’t until I was a freshman in college, trying to impress a girl at a party by telling her that I was Inga Beart’s son, that I learned of the circumstances that led to my mother’s death.

  It was a mixer for the English department, and I think the girl started out believing me—after all Inga Beart and I have the same last name. Then she asked me why she had done it, and of course I didn’t know what it meant. Then not only did the girl not believe that Inga Beart was my mother, she didn’t even believe I had been invited to that party, because how could an English major not know that Inga Beart had dug out her own eyes with a kitchen knife?

  I hadn’t gone back to the ranch since I left for college, not even for Christmas, but the next morning I skipped my classes and drove a friend’s old car down. The car made it all the way to the last turn off the highway—by then it had become the interstate—before it gave out completely, and I ran the rest of the way along the frontage road and up the driveway framed by the Russian olive trees that the dreamer who built the dude ranch had planted all those years before. I remember seeing Aunt Cat down by the ditch, doing something with a roll of chicken wire. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I remember thinking that she didn’t look all that surprised to see me there, like she had a pretty good idea of why I’d come. I don’t think I’d even said one intelligible word before she was setting down the chicken wire, not minding that it caught and tore her sleeve, saying, “Don’t you think it’s your fault now, Ricky, don’t you think like that,” as if the thought had even crossed my mind. I remember I was swearing and crying like a kid and saying some terrible things. Aunt Cat came up and put her hands on my shoulders, like men do when they’ve got something to explain, and I remember thinking how gray her hair had gotten, how that grim grip to her jaw had relaxed a little in the year I’d been away.

  The librarian poked her head in to check on me, and I turned the wheel of the microfilm machine, letting the news of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth of août 1954 go by, remembering that day down by the ditch with Aunt Cat and the chicken wire, me eighteen or nineteen years old with all the righteousness of the world behind me, demanding to know why Aunt Cat had never told me the details of my mother’s death. And Aunt Cat saying well, she’d decided back then that it was for the best, and so on. Even at the time I remember thinking that she was probably right.

  In fact, for the past forty years I’ve told myself I shouldn’t be too hard on Aunt Cat for keeping my mother’s injury a secret. I never thought too much about the details of that afternoon or why, as Aunt Cat held me by the shoulders, she took a deep breath, as if what she was going to say was long and saying it would take some doing. But then she hesitated for a moment. She looked at me, she let the breath out slowly.

  “You just don’t tell that sort of thing to a child,” she’d said, and turned back to the chicken wire. And in all the years since, it’s only now that it occurs to me to wonder what it was my Aunt Cat might have been about to say.

  {MAGDALENA}

  Swindon, May

  Magdalena left the apricot tree and walked around to the front of the church, where the nun who had given her the jam was digging a hole in a flowerbed for the bird.

  “Good-bye,” Magdalena said to her.

  “Good luck,” said the nun.

  She stopped at the drugstore on the way home, and kept her glasses on, reading all the words off the face and hands of the woman at the cash register. She learned that the woman had allowed her baby sister to drown in the bathtub, that she believed in God, kept her mother’s garden, and would die of something called lymphoma. Magdalena had to stare hard to read the path the lymphoma would take through the woman’s organs as it spread, which was written small across her jaw. It made the woman nervous, and she kept running her tongue along her teeth, like she was afraid food might have gotten caught there.

  Magdalena let herself into Barry’s house and took off her shoes. She stepped into the same prints on the carpet she and Neil had made earlier that afternoon, so Barry wouldn’t know she was home if he happened to walk down the hall. She took the razors out of the bag from the drugstore quietly so the plastic wouldn’t rustle, but before she opened the package she went to her room and got out the papers from the inquest, just to be sure. They were still sealed in the envelope the policewoman had given her. Magdalena opened it and looked through them until she found the coroner’s report. Cause of death: Acute cyanide-induced respiratory failure after ingesting the seeds of 30–40 wild Turkish apricots. She’d seen those words exactly when she cut off Lina’s hair. Magdalena folded the papers and put them back in the envelope. She went into the bathroom and shut the door without making a sound. Her father had done it just this way, not leaving a mess. Magdalena got into the bathtub. It was easy. She thought about the nun burying the bird. She did not think she was committing a sin; all she was doing was giving God His secrets back. She wished she had gone to Stonehenge to see the people praying on rocks. She opened the pack of razors and took one out. Something pulled at her mind, something she’d wanted to think about, but when she tried all she saw was Lina, marked from the beginning with the text of her autopsy report. On the white inside of Magdalena’s wrist was the place where two blue veins ran together, and beside that she could see the faint tug of her pulse. She put the blade across all three and pushed. It hurt, but not too much. She laid her hand flat on the side of the tub and got a better grip on the razor. Was it better to do it across the veins or lengthwise along one of them? She didn’t know. She might only have one chance, she’d have to guess. Luck it said at just that spot on her mother’s wrist. Or was it Happiness? Barry laughed at her when she confused those English words. But on Magdalena’s wrist the spot was blank. Up the vein, she decided, and realigned the razor. She took a breath. She remembered the woman in the church telling her—what? A body on a beach. A bird hitting glass. An American boy with her name under his eye. What did it mean, that he had the name of a person he would only see once printed on his skin? It must be a mistake, she thought. She wanted to think more about it but she didn’t have the time. There was something else, it was important. She thought about putting the razor away and waiting—a day or a week, what could it matter? Give herself time to let the thought come. But there was no point, better to do it now. Imagine she was cutting lemons for her shift at the bar: a quick stroke that was easier the harder she pressed. The razor cut into her skin and a drop of blood came out. She felt a little dizzy and took a breath. She pressed harder. A body washed ashore covered in shells. The picture fixed itself in her mind. Perfectly whole, the woman at the church had said. That was important, but she couldn’t remember why. She needed time to remember, but she couldn’t take it. She readjusted her grip on the razor and pressed down harder.

  The door to the bathroom flew open. It banged against the towel rack so hard that the knob on the end of the rack broke a little hole in the door. All of a sudden Barry was scooping Magdalena up and dropping her and scooping her again, banging her shins on
the faucet and all the time shouting “OH NO OH NO OH NO,” patting up Magdalena’s arms looking for blood there and accidentally slicing his hand on the razor in the process, so in the end it was Magdalena who had to do the bandaging. And as it was all happening, Magdalena remembered Dov’s brother’s voice on the phone, saying that if only Lina’s body had been left whole, she and Dov might have been together in the end.

  For the first few weeks after Lina died, Magdalena had stayed out of the flat as much as she could, leaving with the camera in the mornings and not coming back until the light was gone. So she had no idea how long Dov had been waiting for her when she found him sitting on the stoop outside her building. In the light from the streetlamp Magdalena caught her breath. It was as if something of Lina, the curve of an eyebrow or the tilt of her head, had resisted being pulled out of the world so quickly and had settled, for an instant, on Dov. With the yellow shadows falling just so on his forehead and lips, they might have been siblings. But as Magdalena got closer and Dov looked up, the shadows rearranged themselves and the hints of Lina disappeared, leaving behind the face of a tanned, good-looking boy with raw red lids to his eyes. Lina had said that he was just her age, and he looked even younger. For all his advancement in the world of botanical engineering, Dov couldn’t have been more than twenty or twenty-one. He had a paper bag between his feet.

  “I’m really sorry,” he said. “I tried to call.”

  Magdalena was surprised how dark his skin was. Except for a shadow who stayed in the hall while Lina packed her things and a silhouette holding Lina’s hand inside the cab the day she watched them through the camera, Magdalena had only seen Dov in a picture Lina had on her phone—a pale face framed by dark hair. Lina had said it herself: His skin was like porcelain. On their first night together his heart beat so fast against her that she felt as if she’d trapped some delicate wild thing. Like a being from a fairy tale, Lina had said. Like the prince conjured from the body of a white arctic hare. But the skin of the person sitting in a heap on Magdalena’s steps was so dark she couldn’t make out a single word that was written there.