If there’s one thing I’ve found in the time I’ve spent doing this kind of research, it’s that every so often one gets slammed up flat against the limits of our modern ability to get our hands on information. Here I was, having traveled halfway across the world to look at a photograph that a complex bureaucracy had managed to preserve behind cardboard and string. And what a fantastic achievement, what a scientific wonder the invention of the snapshot was, because there in front of me I had an image of my mother just as she’d looked in an unguarded moment half a century ago. But even with all that luck and preservation, all it took to keep me from knowing what she’d been wearing on her feet was a china teapot that I would never in a thousand years of technological advancement have the power to move five inches to the left.
I made notes on all of it in as much detail as I could, and I hardly noticed how much time had passed until the archivist, the same one I’d spoken to that morning, tapped me on the shoulder to say that they were closing for the day. And sure enough, everyone else in the big reading room had put away their things and was standing in a long line to have their bags checked before they went out the door. I packed the carton up in a hurry, though as carefully as I could because I could feel the archivist watching me with arms crossed a few feet back, making sure I didn’t fold over any corners.
I ought to have felt as hungry and dispirited as I had the day before. The lunch I’d brought had sat all day forgotten in the locker and the information I’d found seemed only to reinforce Carter Bristol’s version of events. But just the fact that I had found anything at all made the details seem unimportant. I forgot my resolution not to pass the art gallery again and I hurried in that direction, hoping that the owner would be standing outside. And when I turned down the little street, sure enough, he was.
Now, I didn’t want to be a nuisance, and I wasn’t sure he’d feel like translating the pages of notes I’d copied down. But he seemed glad enough to see me, and I had the Hirondelle to tell him about. I started off with that, saying that during my research I had, by chance, stumbled on the very subject we had been discussing the day before.
“Ah-ha, she was having money difficulties, this comtesse,” he said when I showed him the notes from the Hirondelle file.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think she was quite wealthy.”
“Classe touriste, this is the second class,” he said. “On the Hirondelle in the second class they had a swimming pool and there are some fine pieces left from the dining room, but for the wealthy it must be classe cabine I think.”
“But the ticket wasn’t for her,” I said. “The ticket was for my mother, she was a friend of hers,” and I showed him what I’d copied down from the steamship company’s receipt. “Here—it says ‘Passenger Beart and a guardian’—I’m assuming a caretaker, maybe a nurse,” I said. “She wasn’t well.”
He took the notebook from me and looked at it a moment, as if he couldn’t quite read my handwriting.
“Gardienne, yes, this is one who would be responsible for her,” he said. “And here, passager Beart, this is your mother? So I think it must be the feminine, a small mistake of the e. And also here, there will be an accent.” He took out a pen and fixed the spelling to passagère.
“Sorry about that,” I said. “I was writing quickly.”
I showed him the other notes I had, from letters back and forth between the comtesse and Inga Beart, and the comtesse’s letters to the doctors. I didn’t want to come right out and tell him my mother had been having a romantic relationship with this woman, but he seemed to figure it out, because he laughed a little to himself and said, “Well!”
“Can you make anything out?” I asked.
“This Lucette, your mother’s friend, she is saying she knows what will be best for your mother, your mother must trust her and on like this, but also that the husband—or perhaps it is another woman?—must not find out. And then, if you’ll excuse me, there are some details which are more—”
“Oh, well yes,” I said, remembering certain parts of Bristol’s book. “I think I’ve already heard those. Just, if you can, what does it say there, where it talks about a voyage?”
“Ah, here this Lucette is referring to something that must have been said before. She is asking this person, which will be your mother, not to leave Paris, that in fact there will be something important to happen for her here. Important for her benefit. It seems your mother has been talking of some trip, yes, about leaving for some time. Lucette is writing, ‘You are always running looking for peace’ and—is this an r that you have written here?—yes, ‘you are always running looking for peace, but I will make you happy here,’ and so on. Something like this.”
“Thank you, really, thanks so much,” I said.
“But it is strange that you found this in the files of this comtesse,” he said. “Perhaps the letter was never sent.”
“Either that or she kept a draft, it was hard to tell exactly.”
He turned to the next page of my notebook. “Ah, and this too is interesting,” he said. “This you found in the same place?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think it’s a letter from a doctor.”
“Mm, it must be. He is telling madame that her friend is suffering with a certain alienation—there is a void, he says, in her relations. He is recommending that this friend must put her face to certain unhappy realities, and so on.”
“Unhappy realities?” I asked.
“Something like this. She must look to certain facts which can be difficult to bear. This doctor is telling madame that she may help her friend to do this if she wishes.” He studied the page a moment more. “Ah, but come in,” he said. We were still standing on the sidewalk in front of his shop. “Perhaps you would like another cup of tea?”
Throughout her life Inga Beart seemed to have a need to defy the domesticity expected of women in those days—leaving a rural childhood behind for the glitter of first Los Angeles and then New York and Paris, marrying exotic men and leaving them, never able to stay long in one place. The comtesse was not the first to suggest that she had something to outrun. It gave her an air of tragic adventure that the critics appreciated and the artistic set couldn’t get enough of. Something in her suggested an exhilarating proximity to the edge of an abyss, and people—certain kinds of people—were drawn to her because of it, as if by getting close to her they would be able to see what lay beyond.
But according to the biographers, a change took place around 1949, which, coincidentally or not, was the year of my birth. Though she continued to produce novels at the rate of about one a year until 1952, by the end of the forties most scholars agree that Inga Beart’s best work was behind her. She developed a well-known appetite for opiates and became a frequent guest at gin-soaked dinner parties where her drinking took on a kind of savagery that friends and acquaintances hadn’t seen before. Whether this in fact had anything to do with me, or whether it was the inevitable disintegration of a psyche held together somewhat tenuously in the first place, is a matter of debate.
In any case, the Comtesse Labat-Poussin wasn’t the first to try to cure Inga Beart. Before my mother left for France she’d spent time in several high-priced sanatoriums and spas, probably similar to the luxury rehab centers one hears about for celebrities today. She underwent electric shock treatments at Bellevue Hospital in New York and, at the urging of her publishers, who were concerned with the decline in the quality of her work, she saw several well-respected analysts. I’ve often wondered if it was one of them who convinced her to come back home, if it was at the behest of a New York doctor that my mother sat down at Aunt Cat’s kitchen table, hands with a bit of a tremor, perhaps, one foot tapping against the table leg. In my memory of her feet I can see a tension there; the delicate muscles from ankle to toe are stretched tight. Perhaps I hid from her on purpose, crawling under the table because I was afraid of this strange woman. She would still have looked the part of the glamorous lady novelist, “a woman of quick
wit and exquisite eyebrows” as Vogue described her once. But in my child’s way I might have sensed that she was tensed to run.
The gallery owner and I sat down in the back room and he poured our tea into a different set of Hirondelle cups. Breakfast dishes from the upper dining room, he told me, recently purchased at an excellent price from a dealer in Marseille.
“What do you think, it is possible?” he asked, holding his teacup up to the light. “Perhaps your mother on her voyage drank from this very cup. On the Hirondelle fine Arabic coffee was served all day on the upper decks—they say it was better than anything you could find in Paris.”
I started to explain about the dates and my mother’s injury and how it wasn’t possible she’d actually used the ticket, but I stopped, letting myself believe for a moment that Inga Beart’s life had gone a different way. I pictured her on board the Hirondelle, steaming back across the ocean toward a little boy, a sunburned child whose days were spent thigh-high in alfalfa, who fell asleep each night to the memory of his mother’s shoes. I imagined her looking out over the ocean, raising a cup to her lips, leaving a mark on the china from the lipstick she painted on thick to cover stray stains of ink.
“My goodness,” I said, and I held my cup up too. “Now wouldn’t that be something?”
{NEIL}
Vilnius, June
Dijana Bikauskienė lived in a big block apartment building in the suburbs of Vilnius, and it took Neil longer to get there than he’d expected. He got lost and had to show the address to several people before an old man, looking at him suspiciously, pointed toward the third in a row of identical buildings. In between them lines of laundry had been hung out to dry, and though it was after eight o’clock the summer sun wasn’t close to setting. White sheets and baby clothes, a little girl’s dress, men’s undershirts, the blouse and skirt of an airline stewardess, some hipster jeans, large cotton underpants, and a checkered tablecloth waved in the breeze. Neil tried to remember what Magdalena had been wearing at the train station in Paris, but he didn’t see anything that looked her size.
The stairs up to the apartment were dark, and there was a row of mailboxes with Russian letters on them. That was the kind of artifact Professor Piot especially loved. The Soviet Union might be dead, but Lithuanian postmen still had to read Cyrillic to deliver the mail. Neil climbed the stairs. Someone had spray-painted BROOKLYN in big letters on the wall.
He found the door and double-checked the number, then remembered to swallow his gum. He knocked. A woman opened the door with a big smile on her face that went away as soon as she saw him. She said something in Lithuanian.
“Hi,” Neil said, “I’m Neil. We spoke on the phone yesterday, and I—Sorry, do you speak English? Is this number thirty-four?”
“Yes,” she said. “You are who?”
“Neil,” Neil said. “Neil Beart. I’m Rick’s son. We spoke on the phone—”
“Ah,” she said. Then, “Ah, Ni-yell! Hello! And very welcome!” She said his name just like Magdalena did. “Yah, I’m sorry, I am not even understanding you will be here. Ah, this is great. Your father is arriving, yes?”
“Oh, no, actually. My dad’s still back in the States. I’m here on my own.” Dijana seemed surprised to hear that. “Sorry, I guess I didn’t really make that clear on the phone.”
“This is you on the phone?” Dijana said.
“Yeah,” Neil said.
Dijana stared at him a moment, then she started laughing in a way that left her steadying herself against the wall. Neil stood in the hall uncomfortably, wondering what the neighbors would think. Magdalena couldn’t possibly have missed all the commotion; he wondered why she hadn’t come to the door. It was then that he noticed that Dijana was awfully dressed up. She had on a red checkered skirt and matching high heels and a flower in her hair.
“I am thinking all the time this is Rick who is calling.”
“Gosh, I’m really sorry,” Neil said. “I should have explained better.”
“Come in, come in. I am making you stay in the door. Ah, the famous Ni-yell. No, this is great. On phone you have really voice like your father is all.”
The apartment smelled like something good was cooking slowly. The furniture inside was covered in lace. “I brought you these,” Neil said. He hadn’t been able to decide between flowers and wine, so in the end he bought both.
“Wow, so nice,” Dijana said.
She led him into the living room, which was small and doubled as a pantry. There were neat rows of pickles in jars and some containers of cooking oil under the TV. Porcelain dishes lined a glass case, and the lace curtains were drawn, diffusing the sunlight outside. There were plates of cold fish and mushrooms covered in plastic wrap on the table. Neil wondered if Magdalena was still at work. Dijana brought beet soup in on a tray.
“Oh, let me help you with that,” Neil said. There were only two bowls.
“No, no, sit. Eat.” She uncovered the plates of fish and poured them each some wine.
“Is Magdalena around?” Neil asked.
“Magdalena? No, she is in Swindon still,” Dijana said. “To health and thank you for visiting.” She touched her glass to his. “And also to your father.”
“Cheers,” Neil said. He accidentally banged his glass into Dijana’s. Had he misunderstood? Wasn’t Magdalena home to help her mother with the pizza restaurant?
“So you are liking Vilnius?” Dijana said.
“Oh yeah. Such a beautiful city,” Neil said. He’d gone with Magdalena to the counter and he’d bought her the bus ticket himself—Paris through Warsaw to Vilnius—so it wasn’t like the whole thing had been a story made up to get his sixty euros. She should have gotten there by last Thursday at the latest. Why didn’t her mother know she was home?
“Oh, yah, is very beautiful city, especially in center,” Dijana said. She brought a spoonful of soup to her mouth, then started laughing again and put it down. “Ah, Ni-yell. You must think so funny of me, all the time thinking it is your father coming visiting.”
“No, it was my fault,” he said. “I guess I didn’t really introduce myself.” Had something happened to Magdalena on the way home from Paris?
“Actually this day when you called, I am just thinking to your father, and thinking how nice if he is phoning me sometime. And then I’m hearing him on telephone, and wow, so amazing! And he is here in Vilnius, such nice surprise! But it is you are here now and—ah! You must think I am some funny person, how I look. You see, I have worn these things special.”
“You look really nice,” Neil said.
“Yah, your father is giving me these things, they are from his aunt.”
“Really?” Neil said. What exactly had Magdalena said at the train station? She was going home to Vilnius, she’d said that for sure. She’d lost her job in Swindon. She hadn’t had money for the bus ticket, so she probably didn’t have enough to be buying food for the last—what? Eight days? She’d seemed awfully hungry at the station. Was eight days long enough to starve? Good thing she wasn’t super skinny. God, he was such an idiot. Why hadn’t he insisted on giving her some extra cash for the trip?
“Well, he is giving me the skirt, yah, and the shoes also are from this aunt to your father. I think they are really old things. Really good value.”
“Gosh, yeah, I guess so,” Neil said. He took a deep breath and tried not to freak out. Magdalena was probably staying with friends. Maybe she wanted a little vacation before her mother put her to work making pizzas. But something wasn’t right. Wouldn’t she have told her mother she was planning to come home?
“She have some good style, this aunt to your father,” Dijana was saying. “I’m finding everything what I wear tonight in her closets. Your father, he’s asking me to clean them and saying to keep all what I want. It is cool, yah?” Neil nodded and smiled as if what she was saying were really interesting. The skirt Dijana was wearing looked like it was meant for square dancing and had a silver Navajo belt to go with it. Neil could al
most remember that skirt from a dress-up raid on Nan’s closet when he and his cousins were kids. But he couldn’t imagine that Nan had ever worn the shoes—red and witchy-looking with heels that left gashes in the carpet.
“Oh, yeah. Retro,” Neil said. It was surreal. He was having dinner with Magdalena’s mother, discussing the things in his great-aunt’s closet. It wasn’t the way he’d expected to spend the evening. He didn’t want to cause Dijana a lot of worry, but the more he thought about it, only half-listening as she went on about Nan’s old clothes, the more likely it seemed that Magdalena hadn’t been telling either of them exactly the truth. Obviously she wasn’t still in Swindon, but something must have happened between Paris and Vilnius, because she hadn’t come home either.
“So, have you heard from Magdalena recently?” Neil asked, doing his best to sound casual while Dijana filled his plate with the last of the fish.
“This is only for beginning,” Dijana said. “Eat, eat, the chickens will be cold.”
“Mmmm, wow, this is really good,” Neil said, swallowing whole a large piece of salmon. “So, Magdalena. Have you heard from her?”
“Oh, yes, she is sending me one phone text on Wednesday, saying she is very loving England.”
“Really?” Neil said. At least she was alive.
Indelible Page 26