Indelible

by Adelia Saunders

  When she’d finished with that I had her go through Aunt Cat’s boxes, though I knew Pearl would be mad if she ever found out. The will hadn’t been entirely clear about who they belonged to, saying just “For Ricky, the boxes in the back closet. There’s something of your mother’s you might as well have.” Both the lawyer and I interpreted that as meaning all the boxes in that closet, even though the only thing that had been my mother’s was a little doll trunk with Inga stenciled on it. Pearl didn’t agree, but though she’d gotten worked up about it right after Aunt Cat passed away, she hadn’t so much as set foot in the old bedroom in the years since, let alone looked in the closet, where Aunt Cat’s clothes were still on their hangers. So I figured it was as good a job as any for Diana. I set aside the doll trunk and I looked through a few of the other boxes—candlesticks and tablecloths and such from old Grandma Beart. I took what I could find of the silverware, thinking that Pearl’s daughter, Carly, might like to have it someday. It made me sad to think of getting rid of the things my Aunt Cat must have thought I’d be the only one with any patience for, but I knew Diana appreciated the work and I was running out of things to ask her to do. I told her to set aside any papers or photo albums, keep what she liked of the rest, and take everything else to Goodwill.

  On Tuesdays I’d go to Pueblo to pick her up, and sometimes as I drove her down to the ranch we’d get to talking—me doing most of the listening—about our kids and Uncle Walt’s health and those sorts of things. She was not an uncomplicated woman, I could see that, but she had a way of taking a subject that would otherwise fill me with apprehension—Uncle Walt’s trouble moving his legs, for example, or the problems a friend was having back home—and she would lift those things up into the daylight and show them for what they were: life’s simple, practical calamities, best considered head-on. I’d spend most of each week looking forward to her being there, planning conversations we might have. Then when Tuesday came, I’d find I didn’t have a thing to say to her—and be contented in her presence all the same.

  One day when I picked Diana up she was complaining of a toothache, and by the time we got to the ranch it was clear the tooth was really troubling her. I got her some aspirin and some ice, and I could see her cheek was puffing up. When Aunt Cat went back to school to be a dental hygienist she learned to assist in root canals. I remember her saying that a bad tooth will only get worse, and so I told Diana that I’d drive her into town to see the dentist. She didn’t have any kind of insurance, but I told her not to worry about the cost. As it turned out, they sent her to the emergency dental clinic in Pueblo. There was quite a wait, and though I kept bothering the nurse to get her in as quickly as possible we spent most of the day together in the emergency room waiting area. It might sound like I was unconcerned by the discomfort she was in, but that’s not what I mean when I say that I appreciated each moment of that afternoon. The two of us, side by side in our plastic chairs. I felt—for no good reason—that there wasn’t a thing more that I wanted from the world.

  To help her pass the time I told her about getting scarlet fever as a boy, which was complicated by an allergy to antibiotics and turned into double pneumonia, and how my cousins were always jealous that I got to go away to a big city hospital. I told her about the round windows in the walls that, in my delirium, spun and spun, and how the nurses put on a puppet show for me, with one of their old-fashioned white starched caps as a ship, how even now I can’t stand boats because they bring back the rocking feeling of that fever.

  I told her about the day my son was born, and how that was the happiest day of my life, and, though she was trying to open her mouth as little as possible, she told me about how her daughter came out more quickly than expected in a big Soviet hospital without enough doctors, where, if it hadn’t been for one of the other expectant mothers catching her in time, the baby would have slipped right off the delivery table and onto the floor.

  These were the thoughts that were going through my head as I walked to the medical archives, and it’s odd to say that as I was approaching what I imagine is as close as I’ll ever get to knowing my mother’s secrets, I wasn’t thinking about her at all. I didn’t know where Diana was at just that moment, but I made a plan to find out, and though the story of her daughter being born in that Soviet hospital was awful, in its way, telling it had made her laugh through her toothache—and me too, imagining the whale of a woman in the next bed lunging to catch a slick tiny person as she slid off the edge of the delivery table and into the world.

  The medical archives had a slightly antiseptic smell, though that might have been my imagination. The building had been an elementary school once; there was a water fountain sized for six-year-olds in between the bookshelves and over it a display of old-time photographs of nurses and midwives posing gravely with unnerving implements.

  A lady at a desk said something to me, then seeing I didn’t understand, she asked me in English what I was looking for.

  “I’d like to see a hospitalization record from the Hôtel-Dieu hospital,” I said.

  “What is the name?” she said, and I spelled it for her. She typed some commands into the computer, and I waited, wondering if she had read translations of Inga Beart’s books in school, if she would ask me what it was like to be her son, and what I would tell her if she did.

  “Ah, yes, okay,” she said. She began writing down a file number, then stopped. “Ah, but this is 1954.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “After 1939 these documents can go only to the patient.”

  “Well, but she was my mother,” I said. “Look, it says right here,” and I showed her my birth certificate, glad I’d brought it with me for just this kind of thing. I gave her my passport too, so she’d know I was who I said I was.

  “Okay,” she said. “But these documents can go only to the patient.”

  “But she’s dead,” I said. “She died in 1954.”

  “You have a paper showing this?”

  “No,” I said. I hadn’t thought to get a copy of the death certificate. “She died when I was very young, see, and I didn’t know till later—”

  “Yes, but we must have this document. Maybe she is still living, so we cannot give her file.”

  “She is not still living,” I said. “My mother was Inga Beart, the writer. She was very famous and she died just a few months after the record was made, in November 1954.”

  “Okay,” she said. “But I will have to see the document of her death.”

  “It was in all the newspapers,” I said. “Everyone knows about it.”

  “Please, you must be quieter. People are reading.”

  “Everyone knows,” I said, quieter.

  The woman typed something else into the computer. “I am looking, and we have no document of death for her. You can see only your own file, you do not have the right to look at what is hers.”

  It occurred to me that she was right. What claim do I have over the personal information of a woman I never knew? All my life in one way or another, people have been telling me the same thing. I stood there looking at the woman for a moment, and I believe I had every intention of turning to leave. But I saw the blue door framed by the edge of the tablecloth, I watched the cup fall and smash into four pieces, petals of a china flower blooming as it hit the floor. I saw the red shoes, and how a piece of the cup must have flown up and nicked a spot just below her anklebone, where a drop of red blood beaded but didn’t run.

  “But I’m her son,” I said.

  I saw the stitches that anchored the strap in place, the scuff across the heel. I saw the way the slim bones adjusted themselves under the skin when she stood up and how veins covered the arch of each foot with bluish lace.

  “Look,” I said. “I have the paper here. She was my mother.” I showed her my birth certificate again.

  “Yes, if you want only your file, it’s okay,” she said.

  “I want my mother’s file,” I said.

  “You cannot h
ave this file. Beart, Inga was in hospital in 1954. Files after 1939 can be released only to the patient.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said.

  “So you would like to see your documents?”

  “What documents?”

  “For Beart, Richard.”

  “No,” I said. “You don’t understand. I’m an American, I don’t have documents here. Only my mother has documents because she lived in Paris for a while, and I—at the time I wasn’t with her.”

  “They must be yours,” she said, looking at my birth certificate, then at the screen. “Documents for Beart, Richard at the hospital Hôtel-Dieu. You will have to fill out this form here, with the number of the fonds first, like this, okay? I can help you.”

  “No, no,” I said.

  “You want the documents or you don’t want?”

  “They’re not mine,” I said. “Richard Beart, it’s a common name.”

  The archivist paused a moment and looked back at my birth certificate. “Ah, okay,” she said. “Yes, it’s a mistake if you say you have not been there, but I see that the day of birth is the same.”

  “I’ve never been in France before.”

  She typed something more into the computer. “And also the day of inscription to hospital is the same.”

  “What day?” I asked.

  “It was 10 August 1954 for Beart, Inga also, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it is the same for Beart, Richard. Ah, maybe there was an accident and they went together?”

  “No, no accident,” I said.

  “Oh, yes, you are right.”

  “How do you know? What does it say there?” I asked. “Would you just read me what it says right there on the screen?”

  “It says ‘quarantine,’ this is all. Quarantine paediatrique.”

  “Why was she in quarantine?”

  “No, this is for Beart, Richard. For Beart, Inga it says nothing more here. But for the quarantine they have a different system for the records, I can see that the file for Beart, Richard comes from a separate collection. In fact, for a time the children’s quarantine had its separate administration—”

  “What was he quarantined for?” I asked.

  “Well, that I cannot say,” she said.

  I remembered the hospital rocking, Aunt Cat’s cool hands on my cheeks and those round little windows like animal eyes—like the portals of a ship—their frames fastened with rivets to the wall. “Let me see the file,” I said.

  “Well, no, if it is not yours you must not see it.”

  And when the rocking stopped, the nurses with their starched white caps, a crack in the plaster ceiling, my head thick with fever, not able to understand what they said.

  “But I had scarlet fever,” I said.

  “Yes, but these are records from the hospital Hôtel-Dieu in Paris, and you say you have never been a patient in this place.”

  “But I had scarlet fever in 1954.”

  The archivist looked at me a moment, then back at my birth certificate, and then at the computer. She tapped her pen against her lips. “Okay,” she said, and she wrote some numbers on the forms she had given me. “Wait here.”

  She came back a few minutes later with a thin blue file and led me to a private room to look at it. “Please do not photograph the documents,” she said. “There are official photocopies only and for this there is a fee.”

  “Thank you,” I said. She went out and shut the door.

  The file was labeled in the blocky, almost imperceptibly uneven printing of an old typewriter, the last name all in capitals the way they do in France. For a moment or two I just looked at it, thinking about how one’s own name always seems so odd and unfamiliar if one sits right down and stares at it. I’d come a long way, and this was not the person I’d expected to find.

  “Hello there,” I said to little BEART, Richard—though when I opened the file it was my Aunt Cat I recognized first, in the handwriting on the hospital admittance form. She’d been in a rush, and the curving, graceful script that always seemed more feminine than the rest of her had a panicked slant, the end of one word trailing into the first letter of the next as if she couldn’t spare the time to lift the pen. But the curl to the R in my first name, the looping numbers of my birth date were unmistakably hers. The questions on the form were all in French; she’d left most of them blank and scrawled across the top FEVER CHILLS RASH TONGUE IS WHITE and with a double underline ALLERGIC TO AMOXICILLIN!! I turned the page.

  I’m very grateful to the woman at the medical archives, and I made myself a note to send her a box of chocolates and a card as soon as I get home. I’ll be sure not to be too specific in the card—I wouldn’t want one of her superiors to get ahold of it and find out she bent the rules. She told me in no uncertain terms when I came back to the desk to ask for her help—because of course the rest of the file was all in French—that the archivists absolutely did not do translations. But maybe I was just insistent enough or else there was something in my face that told her that my world and everything I’d believed up until that point hung ready to pivot on what that file said. She sighed, put a sign out on her desk, and followed me into the little reading room.

  When I think of my Aunt Cat a certain memory often comes to mind. It’s a story I would have liked to have told at her funeral, except that folks who hardly knew her wouldn’t have found it appropriate. One day when we were kids, someone—one of the men who worked around the farm, I think—came in at suppertime to say that there was a hurt dog out on the highway and someone’d better shoot it. It went unspoken in our house that it was Aunt Cat who handled that kind of thing. She put her boots on and gave Eddie a little pat on the shoulder—he’d gone all white thinking it was probably Goodboy, who was always chasing tires. She got Uncle Walt’s gun out of the closet and she and the farm hand went out. Eddie started crying all over his supper, but I knew that, things being as they were, the dog had a bit of luck to have Aunt Cat be the one to do it. It may not be much, but it’s the thing I’d like to have gotten up and said the day we buried her: Aunt Cat’s hands wouldn’t shake and she’d get it right on the first try.

  It’s the steadiness of my Aunt Cat’s hands I think of now when I imagine her leading me up to the blue door, and the door opening into a room with a table covered in lace. My hand would have felt hot in hers. She had been checking my temperature, the file said, and told the doctors that I’d been a bit flushed since a few days before we landed at Le Havre—though it seems she thought it was just seasickness that had kept me in bed through most of the voyage. She’d been planning to take me to a doctor as soon as we landed but—I suspect—the comtesse insisted that I be brought straightaway to Paris, where, Aunt Cat told the doctors, I had vomited during a visit to a Parisian department store. The medical file doesn’t mention why I was taken shopping, though I imagine the comtesse had something to do with it, perhaps buying me a new outfit in which to meet my mother. It must have been there that I stood under a marquee with a grid of light bulbs stuck up against the sky and, dizzy with the crowd and the fever, looked up and saw my Universe.

  From what I pieced together over the next few days from the comtesse’s papers and the information in the file, it seems that a number of specialists had agreed that a new psychotherapeutic technique that translates to something like “emotional shock therapy” was just the thing to rid Inga Beart of her most persistent demons. The plan was to jolt her back to health not by electric current, as was the fashion, but by the sight of her living, breathing—and, by that point, flushed and dizzy—child. And so the comtesse, who spared no expense, agreed to pay my passage, and Aunt Cat’s too, all the way to Paris.

  I wonder if, as she half-carried me up those stairs to her sister’s apartment, Aunt Cat hoped that the comtesse and the specialists were right, that my unnaturally pink cheeks, along with a new sailor suit and the pacifying effect of the fever, would help make Inga Beart love me, or keep me. If Aunt Cat stood waiting for the blue door t
o open, hoping that she’d be boarding the ship back to the States alone, back to a husband and two small kids who were already plenty enough to handle.

  Exactly what happened next will probably never be known. Even after I got Inga Beart’s estate manager to send me a copy of her death certificate by express mail and had the notes in my mother’s own medical file translated by a professional service the archivist referred me to, there are still gaps in the story that may never be filled. Now that Inga Beart, Aunt Cat, and the Comtesse Labat-Poussin are all dead, I’m the only one left who witnessed it, and I don’t remember a thing about that afternoon except for the blue door, the falling cup, my mother’s shoes, and—was it?—a drop of blood on her ankle.

  I don’t know if my mother tried to shield her eyes or run into another room, or if the comtesse forced her hands down to her sides or blocked the door to keep her there, though I’m sure it’s not fair to credit cruelty like that to a woman who, it seems, had only Inga Beart’s best interests at heart. All it says in my mother’s file is that Inga Beart begged them not to make her look at the child. There was an argument between her and the comtesse—all of this according to “the sister,” who told the story to the receiving doctor. At one point Inga Beart apparently appealed to Aunt Cat, expressing what the doctor called “acute distress” and saying that “she did not want to see what was going to happen”—an indication, perhaps, that she recognized she was on the brink of a dangerous loss of self-control. Then, somehow, she was made to uncover her eyes and turn her face to me.

  I assume that Aunt Cat pushed me under the table when Inga Beart went for the knife, probably thinking that she meant to use it on me. According to the medical file, it was a small kitchen knife with a curved blade, the kind used for peeling fruit. Maybe it had been left on the table that morning after my mother had her breakfast; maybe, when the doorbell rang, she was taking the skin off a peach. I know that sometime soon afterward the comtesse fainted, and it was Aunt Cat who clamped a dish towel over her sister’s face and, possibly with help from a neighbor, called for an ambulance to take them—and me—to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, where it didn’t take long for someone to notice that my coloring couldn’t be due to shock alone. I had a fever of 41.7 degrees Celsius, according to the records, 107 degrees Fahrenheit by my calculation and extremely serious for a child of five. They packed me in ice; no doubt they lectured Aunt Cat about dragging a child brimming with microbes all over the country, and, according to the records, they forbade her from entering my room. But, a nurse noted, she did anyway, and stayed to watch me turn from red to white to blue as the fever eased and they unpacked me from the ice, and then from blue to white to red as it flared back up again.