Indelible

by Adelia Saunders

  “Bravo,” the man said. “I will try this myself the next time. You say you are a schoolteacher?”

  “Retired,” I said. I didn’t want to discuss it, so I said, “I was admiring these little figures in the window.”

  “Ah yes. Well, the owner, he is a funny sort. Every year he makes a pèlerinage, a trip for the purposes of religious devotion, to visit the bones of, I believe, this one here—” The man pointed inside to one of the little figures. “He has to walk to the very end of land, as they call it, which is in the north of Spain.”

  “My goodness,” I said.

  “Yes, he does this every year in June, and every year I would say it takes some weeks. And when he comes back he has got sore feet and he has missed the customers like yourself. But he has been going now for many years. He tells me there was a time when all the men of his profession were quite devoted to this saint, who made such business for the shoemakers. People would walk great distances to make a visit to his tomb, and when they did, they must have boots. For many centuries the travelers to this site, they have left from just there—” he pointed over the rooftops to the same tower I’d been using as a landmark. “It is the tower of Saint Jacques. Saint James, I believe you say in English.”

  “I can see why they chose that tower,” I said. “I noticed it the first morning I was here. It’s been keeping me from getting lost, my hotel is just on the other side.”

  “Yes, but they are making improvements now, it is covered over. I think you must return when they have finished, they say it will look very nice.”

  “I’d sure like to see it,” I said.

  “Yes, and this is important, I think, for it was in a bad state since years and years. Pieces of it would come crashing onto the street, and there were several deaths among the people below. In fact, I have a very personal link to this reconstruction, because my own mother was hit by a stone that fell from this tower, and it is a true miracle that she was not killed instantly on the place where she stood.”

  “When was that?” I asked.

  “Long ago. It is already quite some years since they began to cover it to protect the pedestrians.”

  I’m afraid I was smiling. It hardly suited the story I was being told, but I couldn’t help it. In a flash I saw myself rapping on the door of Carter Bristol’s window office at the university where he teaches, saying, “Well, Carter, you got it wrong.” I imagined myself personally supervising the sewing of the addendum he would have to write into the spine of each of my mother’s biographies. But I was getting ahead of myself.

  “Do you remember what year it happened in?” I asked.

  “I think it was ’99, though perhaps before, when they put a sort of net around it. But if you are interested the city has put a sign saying the length of these renovations.”

  “I mean your mother’s accident,” I said.

  “Ah,” he said. “Well, it would have had to be many years earlier. Yes, I was just a child. My father was always agitating for the mairie to do something about this tower.”

  “As early as 1953 or ’54?” I said.

  “It is possible,” he said. “I’m afraid I cannot ask her. My mother passed away not long ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m very sorry to hear that.”

  “Yes, well, it had been expected. And still it is not the same. When your parents are gone—and my father died some years before—when both of them are gone, then you feel differently. Who is left to remember the first time I clapped my hands or stood tout seul? One begins to think about such things.”

  “Yes,” I said, but I was thinking of the bricks falling from the tower of Saint Jacques.

  “But we are of that age,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said again, and thanked him for his help.

  With the exception of a few short stories and a little bit of poetry, once Inga Beart got to Paris all she wrote were letters, mostly to a few close friends back in New York. Several of those letters are available in archival collections, and it’s clear from reading them that in the months leading up to August 1954 Inga Beart was losing her grip on reality. She spent whole pages listing mundane events in the lives of unnamed characters, as if the letters served as a reservoir for an excess of words she no longer had the strength to organize into novels.

  But when Carter Bristol was writing his biography of my mother, he apparently discovered in the files of that Parisian comtesse several letters that scholars hadn’t seen before. In one, Inga Beart seems to be sketching the outline for a character based on her neighborhood druggist. According to Bristol’s book, the letter went like this: “Have been studying the apothecary’s assistant, seems he’ll be crushed by rocks falling out of the sky. So you see? The French is coming along. Must admit I had to take him home with me for a glass of pernod . . .”

  The letter is dated July 18, 1954, placing it among the last things she ever wrote. The tone is rushed, as if she’d dashed it off without stopping to think, and none of it makes much sense.

  But Carter Bristol claims that this letter and others like it exhibit the same emotional detachment one finds in the writing samples of the criminally insane. He tells us that Inga Beart had come to believe she had the ability to actually shape the lives—and deaths—of the people she used for her characters. It was a grandiose delusion typical of the sociopathic personality: She thought she could make the sky itself fall in on the unfortunate druggist, just by power of suggestion.

  In fact, Inga Beart’s entire body of work was coercive, Bristol says. He has a whole chapter on a divorcée named Mary Hamlin whom Inga Beart met in New York. She is said to have been the model for the character of Anna-Lee: a woman who once worked at her father’s roadside diner and who, years after the book was published, actually did end up swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills, just like Anna-Lee. What most people see as a tragic coincidence, Bristol takes as proof of my mother’s power over her subjects: After reading her own life’s story all the way through and watching Bette Davis play her in the movie version, the poor woman went ahead and lived it, just as Inga Beart had written.

  Of course, I never knew most of the people who appeared as characters in my mother’s books; the similarity between my Aunt Cat and Verna, the rancher’s wife, is the only example I can speak to personally. But that one relatively minor character is enough to convince me that Bristol has got it all wrong. Inga Beart didn’t prescribe events; she took her cues from what was already there. While I hid under the table absorbing the image of my mother’s shoes, my mother would have had the chance to catalog a whole range of spot-on details about the life of the woman her older sister had become.

  When I try to imagine things as they must have appeared to her as she sat in Aunt Cat’s kitchen in 1951 or ’52, I can see how my mother might have come up with a life for Verna that ended up being similar, in some ways, to Aunt Cat’s. She would only have had to look out the window at the sloping pastures that were always hard to irrigate, the weeds just waiting for an opportunity along the edges of the field, to figure that, with the price of beef falling as the big cattle operations got bigger, the ranch wasn’t going to be able to support the five of us for long—the natural conclusion being that Aunt Cat, like her neighbors, like Verna, would have to get a job in town. In my mother’s book there’s a mention of Verna having found work at a dental surgery; my Aunt Cat began cleaning teeth for Dr. Braun in Walsenburg around the time I was finishing junior high. But there’s nothing too odd about that; dental assistant was one of the few professions open to women of that era. When you take into account their shared manual dexterity, it seems logical enough that both the fictional Verna and my Aunt Cat wound up with their steady fingers effectively, if not always gently, scraping and polishing away the residue of so many Sunday candied hams, black coffee, chewing tobacco, and other enemies of rural tooth enamel. In any event, it’s ridiculous to think of my Aunt Cat even subconsciously mimicking the life choices of a character in an Inga Beart novel; as
far as I know, she never read a single published word her sister wrote.

  But Bristol brushes these sorts of particulars aside and spends the rest of his book analyzing my mother’s interviews, her relationships with men, even the things her teachers wrote about her in grade school, to come up with the idea that she had a near-complete inability to feel emotions of empathy, which run from pity all the way to love. She was unable to imagine the emotional lives of her characters, and so she borrowed—some say stole—the most intimate experiences of the people around her. It never troubled her that those details had been given in confidence; even the act of betrayal left her numb. And Carter Bristol knows all this because he has a Ph.D. in literature and another in abnormal psychology, because in her wedding pictures Inga Beart’s eyes are looking just beyond each husband’s head, because none of those husbands could even speak English very well, which, Bristol says, helped her put off a little longer their discovery that she could not feel, just like some people have no ear for music and others can’t tell the difference between red and green.

  He also dissects in a very scientific way Inga Beart’s supposed lesbianism, and at the same time her penchant for men from far off places. He makes various guesses at my own paternity, and goes into all the other nasty details that keep a book like his on the bestseller list. He’s even done some interviews on the morning television talk shows, and he always gives the same rueful chuckle, as if he wished it were not his duty to inform the public of the most shocking aspects of my mother’s private life, then launches into the kind of head-shrink mumbo jumbo that puts one off one’s breakfast.

  Unfortunately, people watch those shows, and Bristol’s book really has changed the way the world sees Inga Beart. I suppose I shouldn’t mind so much, because her book sales have actually increased since his biography was published, and I get a one-eighth share. It comes to quite a sum now that it seems everybody wants to reread her novels, looking for signs of a sociopathic personality.

  But I do mind. For all she wasn’t, Inga Beart was my mother. I might be able to dismiss Carter Bristol’s interpretation of her life as just another fad the professor types have to make up to keep themselves relevant, if he hadn’t been so smug and short with me the time we spoke. Bristol never once tried to contact me himself, which is surprising, considering that his book mentions me more than any of the other biographies. But unlike the other recent biographers, who called me up for at least a cursory spell check of Aunt Cat’s married name and so on, I didn’t even know Bristol was writing the book until I saw it on the New Arrivals shelf at our local library. And by then of course it was too late.

  It wasn’t the scandalous bits I objected to. For what it’s worth, I think Bristol may be right when he says it’s time to do away with the cult that sprang up around Inga Beart after she ended the way she did. And while most of us would prefer that the more intimate details of our mothers’ private lives not be splashed around like that, I can understand and even appreciate the public’s curiosity. After all, Inga Beart wasn’t always considered a hallowed figure by the literary world. During her lifetime she was just another public personality, whose exploits were more often than not discussed in the tabloids in unflattering terms. No matter how I feel about it personally, I can accept that it is time to make her human once again.

  What I cannot accept is inaccuracies, particularly where I am concerned. I played only a small role in Inga Beart’s life, and no one, least of all me, is trying to deny that. But I was there. Why else would she have come back to see me, however briefly, before she went to France? Whatever was on her mind when she walked out of that Santa Fe hospital where I was born, she did not intend to leave me altogether, and this is crucial to disproving Bristol’s theory that my mother lacked the normal spectrum of emotion, that she felt none of the shades of love, regret, and loneliness so familiar to her characters.

  But when I called Bristol up to tell him the short list of what his book got wrong, he wouldn’t even talk to me. I tried to be reasonable. I told him, “You know best about the New York years, and you know best about Paris. I’m no psychologist,” I said, “but I thought you’d like to know that she did visit me once, so it’s not like you said.”

  I wanted to tell him about the shoes, how I remember them, but he cut me off with something like, “Well, you’re on your own on that one.” And then, as if he were trying to spare my feelings, he said, “She never went back to Colorado, alright? She never set foot there again. It’s a fact.”

  “You’re a shrink,” I said. “What do you know about facts?”

  “I know this is hard for you,” he said.

  “What about Verna and the needlework ribbon?” I said. “My aunt, Catherine Hurley, really won one of those, did you know that?—Huerfano County Fair Grand Champion, 1939—and my mother left home in ’36. She must have seen it when she visited—how else could she have known?” I would have told him about the smoothness of my Aunt Cat’s hands, how her fingers were delicate and cool, like Verna’s.

  “I’m not interested in arguing with you,” Bristol said. “I think I’ve made it clear that there are some unanswered questions. No denying that. But Inga never went back to see the family—your aunt said so herself in her interview with the PEN Foundation. I believe you’ll find the exact citation in my book.”

  I tried again to tell him. “Her red shoes,” I said. “I saw them, I promise you, when I was just a kid. She came to visit, it must have been in ’51 or ’52, before she went to Paris. I was under the table, I saw them right up close. They had a double strap that fastened at the ankle, a second crease on the strap at the third hole.” The call was costing me a fortune, he’s off in England after all, but I hardly cared. “How could I remember those shoes if she hadn’t come to see me?”

  “Look, I really don’t have time for this,” he said. “If you have concerns about the book, you can address them to my publisher, and otherwise I’ll thank you not to call my office again.”

  I didn’t stand a chance with the publisher and he knew it. A high school language arts teacher on early retirement, against Dr. Carter Bristol, professor of literary psychology at one of those schools where they wear the hoods. But. That was before I knew that Inga Beart’s letter about the druggist was not necessarily the product of a depraved imagination that Bristol made it out to be; that Parisians in the 1950s sometimes did get hit by falling rocks. Just that little hole in Bristol’s theory made me feel that I was onto something. I pictured my Aunt Cat, holding up a hand-knit mitten, looking for the place where one of us kids had snagged it on barbed wire. In my mind she was wetting the frayed ends of the yarn between her lips, knotting them together again, reminding me or Pearl or Eddie that the whole thing’s just one thread and a little tear unravels everything.

  {NEIL}

  Paris, June

  It was the final hour before the archives closed for the day. Everyone was bent at a sharper angle over their fiches and dossiers and old books supported on rolls of green velvet like frail kings, all of them leaning into the last minutes of the day. Usually Neil was one of them, waiting until the third announcement of closing time to put the documents back in their cartons and return them to the cross-eyed man in the gray smock at the counter. But that day, after seeing Magdalena off at Gare du Nord, Neil hadn’t been able to get much done. He’d arranged his notes around him and put in his request for the monk’s papers from the Saint-Jean-d’Angély abbey again, then started paging through a carton of documents about monastic communities in Rouen.

  The problem was that Neil still had a little bit of Magdalena’s friend’s ashes under his fingernails, and it was making it hard to concentrate. The things he usually loved about the archives—like the way two old papers might be stuck together with a pin that was shaped differently from the pins of nowadays, or how a document might be dated according to the Revolutionary calendar, the fifth day of the month of Brumaire in the year III, for example—weren’t holding his attention.

&
nbsp; Neil looked through a bundle of papers and found a reference to a twelfth- or thirteenth-century document by the abbot of Vendôme, forbidding monks to go on pilgrimages and citing a decree by the pope that said the same thing. That was interesting, because it meant that the monk from Rouen was violating the pope’s edict—or maybe he had a special dispensation—when he set off on the road to Spain. It was something to bring up at the next project meeting with Professor Piot. The personal motivations of medieval pilgrims was one of the themes they were considering for the Tour Saint-Jacques exhibition, and Professor Piot might like the idea of a rebellious monk, wriggling free of monastic life and setting off on an unsanctioned adventure. Neil turned to a new page of his notebook and wrote Monk from Rouen—why? And underneath it, adventure?

  Neil had been a little sloppy in what he’d said to Magdalena at the station. The pilgrimage that left Paris from the Tour Saint-Jacques technically ended in the town of Santiago de Compostela, which meant “field of stars” and didn’t sound as interesting as going all the way to Finisterre, the “end of the earth,” like he’d told Magdalena—though there were some scholars who said that Finisterre, which was a bit farther west on the Spanish coast, had been the original destination. According to them, the symbol of the scallop came from the shells pilgrims collected there as a way to prove that they’d really been to the edge of the world. And the legend of the body of the saint washing ashore at Finisterre covered with scallop shells and surprisingly preserved was only one of the miracles associated with Saint Jacques— or James, as he was called in English. But it was an image Neil particularly liked because it seemed like the kind of miracle one could almost believe in. There were hundreds of miracle stories dating as far back as the tenth century, and Saint Jacques was generally credited with bringing people back from the dead and doing other things that, in Neil’s opinion, only saddled the faithful with impossible hopes. But in that particular miracle story the saint’s divinity served simply to keep his skin and eyeballs intact for the arrival at his burial place, and that was enough.