“Don’t you think it’s your fault now, Ricky, don’t you think like that,” Aunt Cat had said, standing at the fence with the jagged end of the chicken wire caught on her sleeve the day I came home from college mad as anything, having learned that my mother’s death had been precipitated by an act of self-destruction I’d never known a thing about. I remember her saying that, because later on as I turned the conversation over in my mind I reasoned to myself that Aunt Cat must have been talking about why my mother left me as a baby, all those years ago.
Aunt Cat also said another funny thing that day, that, I confess, I never thought too much about until I stood in the medical archives looking at my own name on a hospital form all in French. I’d said, “Didn’t you think I’d find out someday?”—meaning that sooner or later I was sure to learn the cause of my mother’s fatal infection of the sinuses. Aunt Cat, who must have misunderstood the question, said something like, “But you were delirious. You had a fever so bad they told me you wouldn’t remember a thing.” She put her hands on my shoulders and took a breath, but I pulled away from her.
“I’m not delirious,” I’d said, misunderstanding in my turn.
And then, perhaps realizing that I didn’t know as much as she’d assumed at first, that no fever-locked memory had burst its dam, Aunt Cat let that long breath go and said, “Well, you just don’t tell that sort of thing to a child.” She set her jaw and went back to the chicken wire, and that may have been the last and longest conversation we ever had about my mother.
Of course, what I learned at the medical archives set me to thinking about a lot of things, reinterpreting conversations of thirty and forty years ago, and with the final days of my stay in Paris spent rushing around trying to get documents translated and copies made, it’s only now, on the plane back home, that I’ve thought back to what my Uncle Walt said just before he died.
It might not have come to mind at all, except that I’ve got the window seat next to a nice young couple from the suburbs of Paris. They told me, in very good English, that this is their first overseas holiday together. They’re going to New York to see Rockefeller Center and Niagara Falls. I leaned back in my seat so they could get a better view of their hometown from the air as we circled Paris and banked to the left. Of all the people in the world this young couple might make me think of, the ones that come to mind are Cat and Walt, who were once that age, fingers intertwined without even thinking about it.
By now they’ve fallen asleep with the armrest uncomfortably between them. The girl’s head is on the young man’s shoulder, his cheek against her forehead, and it occurs to me that of course it must have been Aunt Cat and not my mother that Uncle Walt was talking to as he slipped away. In those last moments, when the nurse turned down the ping of the monitor and a veil on the hereafter lifted, Cat is the one Walt would have seen.
“Don’t you be mad at her,” he’d said to me, and I see now how he might have looked to where Aunt Cat was waiting for him just beyond this life and figured there would never be a better time to patch things up between us.
And to her he said, “You didn’t want to take him off to Paris.” It wasn’t abandonment my Uncle Walt was talking about, it was something more like love: Aunt Cat didn’t want to give me to my mother. For all the trouble I was to her, my Aunt Cat would just as soon have kept me. And before he left this earth it was the one thing Walt thought I ought to know.
And if I’m right about that, then things begin to fit. My memory of my mother’s shoes is clearer than it ought to be because I saw them when Inga Beart was already in Paris; I was five, not three. It wasn’t Aunt Cat’s kitchen table I remember hiding under, of course it wasn’t: The tablecloth was made of lace. And what Bristol and all the others say is true. My mother never came to see me.
Well, I might be feeling the influence of an especially long dawn as we fly with the sun from east to west, more time than I’ve ever had before to watch the beginning of a day, or it might be my unfamiliar vantage point above the clouds. It isn’t often that one sees the world from way up here. But it seems as good a place as any to let an old idea go.
Instead, I imagine a long-distance telephone call from Paris, the comtesse arguing with Aunt Cat, telling her a boy ought to be with his mother. My Aunt Cat agreeing, in the end, to make the long trip with me to Paris. And when it was all over and we boarded the ship back to America together, I’d like to think that maybe Aunt Cat forgot for a moment that I was one more mouth to feed and felt half-glad that the comtesse’s plan had gone so wrong and she hadn’t gotten rid of me.
As for the red shoes, I guess I’ll never know. It’s likely that they were taken off sometime before my mother reached the hospital. Along with the catalog of ocular lacerations that, even without knowing French, I can’t manage to read without feeling a little ill, the doctor’s notes show that Inga Beart was also treated for an oblique fracture to the fifth metatarsal: a broken little toe. That kind of break most commonly occurs when a toe meets with axial force, for example, when it is stubbed against the corner of a step or a curb. And because it implies that the toe has been wrenched from the foot, it almost always happens barefoot. It’s possible that Inga Beart’s shoes were removed during the ambulance ride, but it’s more likely, to my mind, that Aunt Cat took them off of her before she went about getting her sister down the stairs, and left them there on the floor of the apartment.
Without a bit of evidence to back it up, I imagine the comtesse waking from her faint a few moments later, perhaps with the sound of sirens on the street below. Finding herself alone on the scene of what the police and reporters were sure to recognize was the final act of a bizarre and gruesome drama, I imagine her slipping quietly away. But the comtesse was a woman who saved the drafts of her love letters; she had an eye for posterity. So maybe on her way out she picked up those red shoes from where they lay in a jumble on the floor and kept them—for her records. And yet even as I imagine this—the comtesse hurrying through the courtyard with my mother’s shoes clutched in her handbag—I can hardly fault her. I hung on to those shoes as my single memory of Inga Beart, why shouldn’t the comtesse have felt she had a right to do the same? Aunt Cat, with her practical tastes and the way she felt about her sister, wouldn’t have cared a thing about them, and the gawkers and scavengers who were sure to arrive hardly deserved them. But for the comtesse, and for me too, it was different. We’d come as close as we ever would to something bright and rare. I suppose we both wanted a souvenir.
I haven’t made up my mind just yet about what do with the information in those medical files. I could make quite a splash with an article in the American Literary Review or one of the other journals, a brand-new chapter in the life of Inga Beart. The knowledge of her sister’s visit, the comtesse’s plan, and, of course, who it was she was so desperate not to see would add a new layer to the debate over why she blinded herself. It would certainly prove Carter Bristol’s theory wrong; with a scene like the one that must have taken place in Inga Beart’s Paris apartment brought to light, Bristol would hardly be able to go on claiming that Inga Beart’s child meant nothing to her, that she was pathologically short on emotion.
On the other hand, I’m not sure I want to be in the business of telling my mother’s secrets to the world. Bristol and the others will conclude that, whatever my mother felt for me, it was a far cry from maternal affection. A woman who couldn’t stand the sight of her own child, that’s how Bristol will put it. He’ll say she tore her eyes out in a rage after she was forced to look at me. I may just let those documents continue their slow progression into dust in the archives of the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris, and keep my mouth shut.
But there is one person I will tell. This was a family affair, after all, and as Inga Beart’s grandson, it’s Neil’s story as much as mine. I’ll call him up when I get home and let him know what I’ve found. He’s got a head for this kind of thing, and I’d like to hear what he makes of it. But knowing me, I’ll mix up the imp
ortant points, I’ll forget to say how it was that I happened to open that Hirondelle file, or that I thought of him as I watched the young kids sitting along the Seine. I’ve loved words all my life, but when it’s mattered most, I’ve never been too good with them. I’ll mess it up when I try to tell him that I hope he never has to piece together old documents and scraps of memory to figure out what he meant to his father.
The captain says we’ve hit a bumpy patch just over Nova Scotia, and my tomato juice is rippling in its plastic cup. I’ll take these notes and type them up when I get home, to give to Neil when I see him next. I’ve gone on longer than I meant to and let all sorts of extra bits creep in, and when it comes to Inga Beart and what exactly happened that day in August a good half-century ago, he’ll have to draw his own conclusions.
But as for me, I believe my mother blinded herself before she ever saw me, because starting in the Santa Fe hospital when she turned her head away as I took my first breath, and ending in that Paris apartment, it seems that was the way she wanted it. And if this is true, and Inga Beart managed to put out her eyes in time to spare herself the sight of me, then I suppose there will come a day in the not so distant future when I will choose to believe she had her own good reasons. Maybe I’ll be sitting out in the old truck watching the pond, thinking it over. How my Aunt Cat pushed me, five years old and flushed with fever, under the table when she saw what was about to happen; and my child’s mind fixed not on the screams or the blood but on my mother’s shoes and a china teacup falling to the floor. Other people will assume that it was shame transformed into a kind of crazed resentment that made Inga Beart blind herself rather than look her child in the eye, or see a face that had her nose or—I’ve been told—something of her smile. And yet. As I look out at the cattails or walk down to the water’s edge, maybe I too will find myself able to choose what not to see.
They say that once her eyes were gone, for her last few months Inga Beart was happy. The experts may someday take a second look at what she said before she died, starting with the interview she gave to a reporter after they’d transferred her to a hospital for the blind in another part of Paris. She was tired of reading, she told him. They may find the account the ship’s doctor gave of the voyage back to New York a month or so later, in October 1954, and think again about what he said: Inga Beart had contracted an infection on the boat, and as she lay on fever-soaked sheets, her face still in bandages, she covered the wall beside her with words. According to the doctor, who told a reporter about it later on, she recorded a kind of hallucination. He said it was hard to read exactly—something about bodies marked with ink and how blindness shut out what she’d rather not see. When they got her to New York they realized the infection had gone to her brain and none of it was taken seriously. But it might be time for a young Ph.D. student somewhere to argue that, for Inga Beart, who said once that she’d been trapped into a life as a writer, blindness was an escape.
But there will be other articles to write, and the scholars might never get around to it. I may decide that, as the only witness left to wonder, maybe the puzzle is mine to solve. When I get home I’ll walk down to the pond to see how much water has been lost in the time I’ve been away, and I’ll sit a while, turning it over in my head: My mother chose darkness rather than be made to look at me. I’ll measure the space at the edge of the pond where the water has receded and the mud is cracked and dry, and a thought will strike me, a perfect explanation. I don’t know just yet what it will be, but I have time. The rain will come, the pond will fill on up again, and one of these days I’ll find a way to see it as an act of love, the kind no one will believe.
{MAGDALENA}
Santiago de Compostela, July
The pilgrimage had ended but Magdalena was nowhere near the sea. They had come to the town of Santiago de Compostela, finally finishing in front of a big church. Everyone else was hugging or praying or looking for a place to charge their phones, and Magdalena stood in the middle of a ring of souvenir stands selling scallop shells, wondering if she’d misunderstood.
“Where is the place where the bodies come up from the sea?” she asked Rachel, then Brit and Olaf. They didn’t know. But a Filipino nun from another group told her that she’d better continue on along the Camino Fisterra, the old pilgrim route to the town of Finisterre, if she wanted to see the place where Saint James had washed ashore covered in scallop shells. Some people would be leaving together the next morning.
Rachel stayed in Santiago, praying in the saint’s cathedral to have her sins erased. Magdalena didn’t have the heart to tell her that, as far as she could tell, they were all still there. Brit and Olaf decided to go with her, and they and Magdalena joined the Filipino nun, a German couple, and Father Malloy, a convict from Londonderry who said that so long as he was violating his parole he might as well make it to the end.
They left just as it was getting light, walking west. Olaf had a compass set into the top of his walking stick, and he called out directions as they went—west-north-west, west-west-north-west, west.
As they walked, Father Malloy talked. He wasn’t cut out to be a criminal, he said. In another life he might have been the philosophic type, but in those days there was no escaping politics, and he’d been caught running guns for the IRA. In prison he’d been such a model inmate that the guards used to drive him out to the bogs and leave him there, with a bag of crisps and a bit of plastic sheeting in case of rain, to give the dogs some practice. Father Malloy would walk for a while, then find a dry place to sit, maybe read the paper, and wait until they found him. Only Magdalena believed Father Malloy’s stories. Most of them were written out verbatim on his arms, in between homemade tattoos.
He had entered the priesthood by way of a correspondence course while he was in prison, and when he first started holding Mass in the exercise yard the attendance was low. But pretty soon other prisoners began coming to him for confession, or anointments, or to have him sprinkle holy water on handwritten appeals.
It was in prison that Father Malloy had learned about the pilgrimage of Saint James, and as Magdalena and the others walked through little towns where thick-legged women stood in doorways and watched them, expressionless, as they passed, and lichen slowly chewed the stones of ruined castles, he told them things from the books he’d requested at the prison library. If the pilgrimage to Finisterre wasn’t made during one’s lifetime, it was said, then it would have to be made after death, the soul traveling no farther than the length of its coffin each day.
“Look here,” he said, pointing to the faint outline of a cross carved into stone. The Crusaders had followed this path, leaving the sign of a cross to mark the way. The pilgrimage even had its mirror in the sky. That band of stars we call the Milky Way was called the Way of Saint James in medieval times, he said, because it guided pilgrims from the north toward Spain, and because those stars themselves were said to pave the path Saint James had taken when he rode down from heaven to help fight the Moors.
Father Malloy talked, Brit and Olaf and the German couple took pictures, and when they stopped to rest, Brit handed out granola bars. As they walked Magdalena picked yellow flowers off the scrubby bushes that grew along the road, rolling the petals between her fingers and counting her steps, as Father Malloy said the medieval travelers had done, using their pilgrim staffs to keep an even stride so they could measure the distance of their journey.
It took three more days to walk from Santiago to Finisterre. The roads were mostly empty and there were fewer pilgrims’ hostels. They walked farther each day than they had before, looking for a place to sleep. Father Malloy bought olive oil and anointed each person’s aching feet.
On the afternoon of the second day they saw the sea, still far off in the distance. Father Malloy climbed to the top of a rocky ledge and named it Montjoie, as medieval pilgrims had called the hills from which they first caught sight of a holy place.
They walked faster, smelling salt in the air. When they reached the ocean the
continent drew itself up. For the last few kilometers the path climbed a narrow peninsula, the land rising to make a last stand against the sea. No one talked as they walked; it was all uphill.
A stone cross marked the spot where the path ended, and all around it were the remains of little fires where pilgrims had burned their boots. Long before the Christians claimed it for their own, Father Malloy said, Finisterre had been a site of pagan worship, the westernmost point of all the known world. Past the horizon was the land of eternal youth, the place where the sun turned around. Rumor of it had traveled as far away as Ireland, and when the Romans arrived a century or so before the birth of Christ they stood on that bit of rock and watched the sun fall into the sea and named the place the End of the Earth.
The German couple took pictures of the ocean. Magdalena set down the shoebox and the others took off their packs and climbed down the rocks to a radio tower hung with pieces of clothing. Old shirts and worn-out socks flapped like flags, some of them recent, some of them threadbare from the wind. Brit and Olaf tied their parkas there, Father Malloy left his knee brace, and the Filipino nun took out an old felt hat no one had known she’d been carrying and fastened it around the metal bars with safety pins.
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