Indelible

by Adelia Saunders

  “Yes, a terrific vessel,” he said. “A reinforced hull quite advanced for its time—it survived several U-boat attacks and was taken for use by the British navy during the Second World War. And then, after all this, one day in 1959 while the sun is shining and the sea is calm, it sank not far from the port of Southampton. The reasons are not entirely understood, even to this day. Sugar?” he said, offering me a spoon shaped like the forked tail of a songbird. “Hirondelle,” he said. “I have forgotten this word in English. A delicate bird, she makes her nests in the eaves with bits of earth.”

  “Might be a swallow,” I said. “I have them in my barn back home.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said. “She has the weight of a handkerchief but she flies each autumn some ten thousand kilometers and returns with the spring. Lemon?” he asked. “I’m afraid I have no cream.”

  “I’m fine, thank you,” I said.

  There was paint underneath his fingernails and the room smelled faintly of turpentine. “I hope I’m not interrupting your work,” I said.

  The man gave a little laugh in the direction of the canvas in the corner. “No, no, this is nothing. Some small adjustments to the current exposition.” He touched the corner of the plastic sheeting. “I try to be discreet.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “A matter of perfecting the balance. The fellow I’m showing now, he has got such a very nice way with the light. But the subject, it slips from the eye.” He nodded to the canvas. “This one here has been hanging for months. Such potential, and yet I watch the customers—they look to the frame, then to the ticket with the price, then to their watches. Then they are gone.”

  “So you’re repainting it?” I asked.

  “Repainting, no, never this. I allow to be seen what was there before. Minimal rearrangements, nothing beyond the small correction of a line.” When I didn’t say anything he said, “You will understand, I’m sure. In our professions—you say you are a schoolteacher? What material do you teach?”

  “English,” I said. “The middle grades.”

  “Yes, yes, of course. So you will understand exactly. When one sees such possibility, hasn’t one a duty?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” I said.

  “To develop the potential. Of a painting, a student. One must give what one has.”

  I had to smile at that. “I’m not sure my former employers would agree,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “I’m retired,” I said. “The circumstances were, well, they were not what I’d expected. It was that,” I said, nodding toward the plastic sheeting. “Developing potential. But the school board didn’t see it that way.”

  “Oh?” he said again.

  I shrugged, wishing I hadn’t said anything at all. “That sort of thing can be misunderstood.”

  He nodded. “Well, yes, for a schoolteacher there are always difficulties, I’m sure. An underappreciated profession. And the children now, one hears they can be quite difficult to manage.”

  “Oh, no, not really,” I said. “I enjoyed teaching. Kids that age, like you say—there’s so much potential. There was one student in particular, I took an interest. We got to be quite close.”

  The man took a sip of tea. “Ah,” he said, and he looked at me closely. “A young lady?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Well, certainly, these things can happen. And between a teacher and a student, quite common I’m sure.”

  “No, no,” I said. “It was nothing like that.”

  “No, of course,” the man said.

  He took another sip of tea. I took one too and burned my mouth. More than anything I wanted to stand up and walk out of his shop, hurry back to my hotel room and close the blinds, put my mind on my files and documents and a cold glass of milk, maybe a ham sandwich too. But the gallery owner was refilling my cup, edging a bowl of sugar cubes politely in my direction. His interest was familiar—I got plenty of that sort of thing during the school board hearing: the curiosity of people who’ve already made up their minds. I set my tea cup down hard on its saucer, then remembered that I was his guest, that he’d been awfully nice to invite me in. “I’m sorry,” I said. I ran my finger around the underside of the cup, afraid I’d chipped it.

  The man waved his hand. “Very high quality ceramic, made to endure the storms at sea.”

  “It’s just that everyone thought the same thing. About the girl.”

  The man set his own cup down. “I apologize. These things, it isn’t necessary to discuss.”

  “No, it’s all right,” I said. “To be honest, no one even asks about it anymore.”

  The man and I sat without saying anything. He looked down at his cup, and I remembered the ugliest stretch of that conversation with Pearl and Eddie out behind the post office. “You’re an embarrassment to us,” Pearl had said. “Eddie’s lost business because of you, did you know that?”

  “Jesus, Pearl,” Eddie said.

  “Jerry Deitch got someone else to do his deck, you told me that,” Pearl said. When Eddie didn’t say anything she turned to me. “His daughters were in your class. He said if he’d known he would have pulled them out of school.”

  It’s not what you think, I might have said. There’s been a mistake. But it was all still so fresh—it wasn’t even clear, at the time of that conversation, that I wouldn’t be teaching again the next fall, and I had my reasons for keeping quiet. The gallery owner put more water on to boil, and I thought about how many times in the years since then I’ve told the whole thing through to a sympathetic audience all in my own head—the flesh-and-blood people who might have been interested having long ago stopped asking.

  “It was five or six years ago now,” I told the man. “At the end of the semester I used to have my classes do a bit of fiction writing. And that year I had a very bright student. She’d shown some interest in my mother’s work. My mother, like I said, was a writer. And so I assigned one of her short stories to the class—it wasn’t what I usually did. What my mother wrote was always based on real people and actual events, and I told my students that I wanted them to do the same, write about something they knew, something they really understood, but give it the guise of fiction. Let those lines blur, I said, for the sake of a good story. In any case, when this particular student turned in her assignment, well, there were problems at home and she turned in a story about a girl who was being mistreated. You know. By a very close relative.”

  “I see,” the man said.

  “It was clear she wasn’t making it up. It had to be taken seriously. I told her to come see me after class. It was the father, a very bad situation. I should have sensed it before. Maybe I did, but not to the extent.”

  “Mm, yes,” the man said. “What does one do?”

  “Well, I was in a difficult position,” I said. “I handled it poorly.”

  I would have liked to have left it at that, but the man poured the rest of the tea into my cup and asked me to go on. So I did my best to explain. I told him I should have known that what this student needed most just then was someone she could trust to keep a secret. But after all those years of working with young people, I was still naive. “There are rules,” I said to her. “I can’t let this go.”

  I thought she was just upset when she threatened to bring me into it. “How come you like me so much, anyway?” she said. “You could get in trouble for that.” I should have taken her seriously when she reminded me of how I’d patted her hand, given her a ride home once or twice, written something friendly in an old copy of Mrs. Dalloway I’d given her. “You’re not supposed to do things like that,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. But that is not what we’re talking about. I need you to see someone about what’s been happening to you.”

  In the end she agreed to go to the school nurse. There were bruises on her arms. “And other places too,” she said, and she showed me one on the inside of her leg. I knew the nurse woul
d recognize right off what was happening. In return I promised that her family would never see what she’d written—a promise I have kept, despite it all.

  A little bell sounded at the front of the gallery and the door chimed open and closed. “One moment,” the gallery owner said. He went into the front room, saying something in French. “Tourists,” he said when he sat down again. “They will not buy. Go on. The nurse.”

  “Well, I assumed things were being handled,” I told him. “And then—it was strange. People started to stop talking when I walked into the room. At school, in the teachers’ lounge. I didn’t understand. But what she’d told the nurse—somehow the facts got rearranged. It was me, she said, I had done it. Of course at that point the school board got involved. I told them what she’d said to me, but by then it was too late. They said, ‘Why didn’t you report it immediately?’ and I tried to explain, but the girl denied everything. And no wonder—they had a hearing, and the rules said the parents had to be present when she gave her side.”

  The man leaned back in his chair and puffed out a breath in an understanding kind of way, so I went on. I told him how the committee figured out pretty quickly that there were problems with her story, but by the time the family issues fully came to light, the school board had it in for me. There was talk of sexual improprieties and accusations of the kind of clumsy innuendo that, as a teacher of the language arts, especially offended me. They didn’t like that I’d met with her outside of class or that we’d had a relationship based, I’d thought, on real affinity. I explained that I’d tried to be a friend, that I thought she needed one in a system that didn’t know how to nurture a kid like her, but they couldn’t understand that. All they cared about was whether I’d sat too close or touched her hair, imposing the school system’s code of conduct like a grid over a simple human relationship. I was tired of having the things I’d thought were real and good turned rotten in the eyes of other people, and I told them so. And when I’d finished they looked at me coolly, and said, “You seem very upset.” So I stopped trying to explain. “I didn’t put a hand on her,” I said, and for their purposes it was true enough. I finished out the semester and then I left without a fuss.

  Through it all, I did my best to make sure no one outside of the old battle-axes on the school board found out that the girl had confessed to me, unbidden, the afternoon it all began. I’ve wondered since if it was the right decision, but at the time I had genuine concerns about her safety if the truth came out. Once our local paper got hold of the story I could have done myself some good if I’d shown a reporter a copy of what she’d written in her homework assignment. And it would have been easier for me to get a teaching job in another district if the gossip they printed up like it was news wasn’t always followed by “Richard Beart declined to be interviewed for this article.” But there’s nothing like the combined effect of a school board investigatory committee and a small-town newspaper to make a person feel like he’s shouting at the wind. Whatever it cost me, keeping my end of our bargain seemed the least I could do to help protect that child from all that she was up against. And it was too bad. I’d taken an interest in her in the first place because I truly believed she had a gift. “You could be a great writer someday,” I’d said to her, never guessing that her first successful work of fiction would be at my expense.

  The gallery owner was quiet, and I sat for a moment, knowing my face was red and that I’d been talking too long. I remembered the ladies on the school board, listening with lips closed tight, sure that if they kept me talking long enough they’d catch me in a lie. And perhaps they had. I’ve learned by now that the truth is full of angles and refractions—and though everything I’d just told the man was true, it was also true that the school board hearing had left me with a kind of shame that was harder to bear than the public humiliation because it was entirely my own. I’d known from the beginning that the girl was troubled and I’d done nothing about it; I’d thought those troubles would be useful to her later on. I told her what they used to say about my mother, that she wrote to ease a sadness she could never quite explain.

  The man drained his teacup and stood up. I wasn’t sure from his expression what he thought of it all, and I half-expected him to tell me to get out of his shop. So I was surprised when he took a bottle down from the shelf and asked if I’d like a glass. I shook my head. “I really should be going,” I said.

  “Yes of course,” the man said. He took my cup and saucer and nodded to my notebook, which I’d set on the table. “Best of luck with your research,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said. “And thank you for the tea.”

  “Not at all. I hope you will stop by again while you are here in Paris.” He nodded toward the canvas in the corner. “Perhaps when the paint has dried. You can tell me what you think.”

  I thanked him again, saying I’d be sure to do that. I knew I ought to ask him to tell me more about his mother’s accident, but I hardly wanted to prolong our conversation. As I left the shop I told myself I’d just have to live without the knowledge, because I was not going to make the mistake of going down that street again. I’d told the man more than I’ve ever told anyone back home. I wondered if every traveler had the same experience—if there was something about being a stranger to a place that made things better left inside one’s own head want to heave themselves, uninvited, into the light.

  {NEIL}

  Paris, June

  Neil balanced his saucer on his knee, then thought better of it and set it on the table. He let Madame Piot carve him off a thick slice of foie gras. It came from the Piot family farm in Dordogne; Professor Piot’s sister-in-law had tube-fed the goose by hand, which was something Neil would rather not have known. Madame Piot sniffed the foie gras, frowned, and laid the slice across a piece of bread on Neil’s plate.

  “Eat,” she said. “It’s going to go bad by tomorrow.”

  It was forbidden to discuss work at the Piots’ Sunday afternoon teas. Something had given Professor Piot the idea to try to assimilate his research assistants into normal society by having them over to his house to speak French and eat unfamiliar foods off of china so thin it was nearly translucent and exposed each gap in conversation with a chorus of little clinks. Aside from Neil and Beth and Loren—Jean-Claude had made up some excuse about visiting a grandmother in Lyon—there were two rheumy-eyed Sorbonne kids who were doing the actual layout and text for the museum display on the Tour Saint-Jacques, and a German archaeology student who worked on the site. Madame Piot fluttered around them with an eagle eye for an empty plate or an emptyish glass, and everyone searched their brains for conversation topics that did not include the tower of the old church of Saint Jacques. “If it was written on calfskin or you found it under a rock, save it for Monday,” Professor Piot announced at the beginning of each Sunday afternoon, laughing as if it were the first time he’d said it. So they bit their lips and wracked their brains, trying to think of some normal everyday thing to talk about, while all anyone was really interested in were the pearls they’d pried out of that week’s research.

  They ended up talking about whether the falafel was better in the fourth arrondissement or the fifth, and the relative merits of the Châtelet movie theater versus the one up by school, while Madame Piot quizzed them about cultural activities: Had they seen the light show at Saint-Paul? Wouldn’t they like to see the absurdist play about nothing that had been playing in the same little theater for thirty years? Oh, definitely, they all agreed, all of them anxious for Monday, when they would cram themselves into Professor Piot’s office and sift through their notes on the past week’s discoveries, tacking and flattening time like a butterfly under glass. Historians are grave robbers, opening coffins and looking for jewels, Professor Piot had told them more than once, looking jolly and clapping his hands a little with delight at the thought of it. It was endearing until you realized that he was not necessarily speaking metaphorically. During Neil’s first week in Paris Professor Piot had taken t
he team to the catacombs to see the bones that had originally been buried in the graveyard of the old church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie. He’d been right in the middle of telling them all about how it had taken so many hundreds of midnight processions of carts draped in black to collect the thousands of bones from all over Paris, and everyone had been feeling eerie, imagining the noise all those carts of skeletons would have made across deserted cobbled streets. Priests had led the way, chanting the mass of the dead and swinging incense to cover the smell. Neil had been trying very hard not to step in the little puddles of water that had collected between the stacks of thigh bones and skulls, when all of a sudden Professor Piot paused, dug a tibia right out of the pile, and turned to them saying “voilà!”—to make some obscure point about nutrition during the Hundred Years’ War.

  But while Neil dreaded Sunday tea chez Piot as much as anyone else, it was a sign of how incurably uncool the whole group was that, for the first time in any social setting ever in his life, Neil found himself doing a lot of talking. This was his third Sunday at the Piots’, and he was still the only one who’d ever had anything to say when Professor Piot asked them what besides research they had been up to that week. Even when he hadn’t done something, Neil could think of an embarrassing personal experience to relate, if only to avoid one of Professor Piot’s lengthy dissections of French politics—which he usually gave while his mouth was filled with some kind of jellied meat. Neil thought about telling the story of spilling Magdalena’s friend’s ashes in the train station, but he didn’t feel up to it. He’d forgotten again what the word for ashes was, and it wasn’t even all that funny. So he kept quiet and ate another slab of foie gras, trying his best to pretend it was cheese.

  In the days since Tuesday, when Neil had seen Magdalena off at the station, he’d been feeling particularly distracted. He’d even skipped work at the archives, ostensibly to organize his notes, and ended up spending most of Friday wandering around the city. He kept replaying the meeting with Magdalena in his mind and giving it different endings. As often happened when Neil let his imagination go, the scene that he’d originally created as the most impossible of all had become his favorite, and his imagining of it had become so real that he could hardly believe that reality had failed to let it happen. A few days of intense daydreaming had closed the gap between fact and fantasy, not to the point that he believed it had happened, but that he believed it might have just as easily.