Interviewed by police at the hospital at approximately 7h00, the adult subject identified himself as Daniel Abend, a physician practicing in New York (United States). Temporary resident of Paris since last May, subject stated he had been vacationing in Nevers, staying in the campground (27, rue de la Blanchisserie). Subject stated that while in the campground, he had been approached by a younger male. Subject did not know the name of the man but had met him several days earlier. The man at that time was in the company of a young woman, whom subject described as “heavily pregnant and probably approaching term.” The young man, believing that the young woman had fallen ill in the course of premature labor, had gone to the campground to request assistance from subject, whom he knew to be an American doctor. Subject stated his belief that he was approached because the mother was of foreign nationality and consequently reluctant to involve French authorities. Subject and the young man then proceeded to the construction site on the young man’s motorbike. There they found the child delivered and alive but the woman unresponsive. At this point or shortly thereafter, subject believes the young man fled the scene. Unable to revive the woman, the doctor left the construction site in order to alert the authorities and seek medical help for the infant and mother.
Report CZ090102 corroborates Abend’s account. At an abandoned construction site (19, rue Saint-Saturnin) responding officers and paramedics found a female subject approximately twenty years of age, in cardiac arrest, with nonreactive pupils. Efforts at resuscitation, including administration of naloxone and atropine, were unsuccessful. Patient was transported to Hôpital Colbert, where after further interventions patient was declared dead at 6h02.
At 19, rue Saint-Saturnin, officers collected drug paraphernalia and a small quantity of what appeared to be a controlled substance. Pending the coroner’s report, it is suspected that the female subject’s death was brought about or accelerated by opiate overdose. There were no indications of foul play. As of this writing, the identity of the deceased has yet to be established, and the young man mentioned in Abend’s statement (see report CZ090097) has not been located.
When I read these accounts the first time, in the office of my lawyer, I adopted them and claimed them as my own. The memories they supplied have sustained me, a stolen cache of fact. While it is true that the events they record elicit in me no sense of active recollection, these secondhand memories are as vivid as any others. Who should be surprised by this? What parent does not remember the moment his child came into the world?
My correspondent, on the other hand, has taken no chances. With what care he attends to the slightest detail. In his latest communication, today’s letter, he is, once again, thorough beyond reproach. Photocopies of these same police reports arrived in the post office box, collated and stapled in sequence. Appended to these are additional statements made by one ABEND (Daniel) along with the hospital records from Nevers, including admission papers for a newborn girl. On each of these documents, in the space marked “Guardian,” I see the twitchy ghost of my own signature. This same signature, sturdier now, appears with several others at the bottom of another police document, a release stating that the death of the as-yet-unidentified mother has been ruled an accidental overdose, and that the presence of Monsieur Abend (Daniel) is no longer required in Nevers. Altogether, these papers made for a thick envelope, one that had fit only with difficulty in the postal box. It was only in flipping through them the second time that I discovered two other documents I had not encountered during the hearings eighteen years ago. The first group consisted of a work order and an invoice from a private ambulance firm, for the transportation of a female infant, in the company of two medics and a pediatrician, from Hôpital Colbert in Nevers to the neonatal care unit at Hôpital Necker in Paris. The bill, for an astounding sum, had been marked payé en totalité. Paid in full.
The last item, a stub for a train ticket issued to “Abend D” on the date of the ambulance transfer, one way, Nevers to Paris. They were on the reverse side of the ticket stub, the last four lines of the poem, the words written out longhand in painstaking block capitals:
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.
FORTY-TWO
You have your ticket, I have mine. That is what Miriam had said. I can hear her saying it. I can see her lips move, can feel, as she speaks, her breath on my own lips.
À chacun son billet.
It is what each of us said, and yet each of us made the same mistake: we believed we knew our respective destinations. Miriam believed her destination was the monastery. For my part, I believed that my ticket was an airplane ticket back to New York. It would be in my jacket pocket, nested inside my passport, when I handed my apartment keys to the concierge and walked my single suitcase two blocks to the taxi stand. When I passed through U.S. Customs, the stub of my ticket would still be in my passport, the passport agent would glance at it and return it to me with a brusque “Welcome home, Mr. Abend.” After I retrieved my bag, I would drop the stub into the trash, along with the newspaper and a roman policier I’d read on the plane.
But of course Miriam’s ticket was not for the monastery. It was, instead, her token to cross the last river, the river without an opposite bank. And as for me, I was not to leave France that month, or the next. Two years would pass before I finally handed over my apartment keys to the concierge. I would hand in another key as well, the one to the office I’d leased in a cabinet de psychiatrie, a practice maintained by colleagues from my year at the American Hospital. There, in a small consultation room, I would see patients in the morning and evening, American or British citizens ineligible for reimbursement by French health services, professionals and diplomats wealthy enough to pay my full fee. In fact it was in Paris, as a temporary partner in that cabinet, that I established a pattern of work I have maintained throughout my professional life: two blocks of appointments, early and late, with the midday held open. Midday in Paris, I would make my way across the city to the Maison Nôtre Dame, where a community of Ursuline sisters, assisted by a staff of therapists and social workers, cared for a dozen or so orphans and other wards of the state.
Before Clementine took occupancy of her bassinet at the Maison Nôtre Dame, however, she spent the first nine weeks of her life in a neonatal unit in l’Hôpital Necker, the chief pediatric hospital in Paris, where the private ambulance had brought her. Whether she had in fact been born eight weeks before term, as her measurements indicated, or whether her low birth weight, liver enzyme irregularities, and respiratory difficulties were complications from the opiate addiction she had inherited from her mother, her doctors never specified. Although I was not one of her physicians, it was assumed from the beginning that I should attend all meetings concerning her care. I had saved her. I had arranged and paid for her costly private transfer to l’Hôpital Necker. And even after weeks had passed, I could always be found in the waiting room, reading a book about infant care or detaining the nurses with premeditated experiments in small talk.
One day, one of these nurses, the shift supervisor, looked up from some paperwork she was completing and remarked that such a lovely, scrappy little girl needed a proper name.
“Jeanne DuPont seems to suit her well,” I said. This was the name on her file, the name on the little card affixed to her bassinet.
“Ah, surtout pas!” said the shift supervisor, laughing. “That is the name for anybody without a name. Her mother, I am sure she was registered as Jeanne DuPont too.”
In my confusion I heard myself asking if she had any suggestions.
“Vous demandez ça à moi, Docteur?” she said. “Ça c’est au papa de décider! Enfin, ou au résponsable légal—” That’s for the dad to decide—I mean, the responsible party—
“Ah, oui, the responsible par
ty—” I said.
“Otherwise, a social worker will provide one,” she said, indicating with a gesture that nothing would be more foolish than letting a social worker think up a name.
So why did I say “Clementine” then? Had I ever known a Clementine? Had I overheard the name somewhere? These questions occurred to me only later, but there, when the shift supervisor asked me, I said it as though Clementine had been Clementine from the beginning, as though her name had been my secret.
“Ah, Clémentine! J’adore!” said the nurse. “A French name, for a French little girl!”
* * *
—
Months would pass before a magistrate, satisfied that no parent or other ascendant had come forward, would name me Clementine’s legal guardian, on the grounds of my involvement in her care since her birth. Long before that, the nurses on the neonatal unit at Necker had taken to addressing me as Meester Ze Godfazzer. Once the hearings were under way and Clementine had been moved to the Maison Nôtre Dame, the sisters there addressed me simply as Papa.
“And will she return to the States with her papa?” asked portly Sister Yvonne from Cameroon, in sloping sub-Saharan cadence.
I said I supposed that would depend very heavily on who the adoptive parents were.
“Non, mais, Monsieur Daniel, it must be you!” Sister Yvonne said. “Nothing else would be fair.” This, at least, was the opinion of Sister Yvonne—and evidently that of the other sisters. Each day when I arrived at the Maison Nôtre Dame, they greeted me with a hearty “Bonjour, Papa!” and presented me with Clementine, still groggy, her cheek flushed and creased from her morning nap. It was not, however, the opinion of French law. It was one thing to be awarded guardianship of an abandoned child, quite another to win full legal parenthood. From the first day I made my inquiries, I was informed—and frequently—that the likelihood of an American adopting a French baby in good health was infinitesimal at best.
“But you must fight for it, then!” said Sister Yvonne. “Do you think God brought her out of a disgusting basement to put her in foster care all her life?” Whatever I might have replied, Sister Yvonne in her indignation stampeded ahead. “What good are lawyers, what good are the courts, if they cannot keep you and your daughter together! I ask you that! Franchement, on se demande!”
My daughter! At times, in the years after our return to New York, I would lie awake at night wondering when it was that Clementine became, definitively, my daughter. Was it when the shift supervisor had asked me in that impromptu ceremony to pick a name? Was it when the nuns decided, spontaneously, to declare me Papa? Was it when Clementine herself, a little more than a year old and fattening rapidly in the bustle of the Maison Nôtre Dame, addressed me for the first time as “Pa-po-pa” to the clucking delight of the nuns? Or was it when at the nuns’ insistence she was baptized, the priest taking her from my arms and pouring water from a silver dish over her head? After the service, Yvonne crushed me in her colossal embrace: “Now she is truly yours.” Would you, Father, have agreed with her? Would you maintain that in the brief sacrament, a power of some sort had gone forth and made us each other’s? Would you say, further, that such a power accounted for the surge of joy I felt when Clementine, drenched and wide-eyed, was returned to my arms?
But enough. Let it be enough that when the priest said, “Name this child,” he looked to me. Let it be enough that I was the one who replied, “Clementine Levaux Abend.”
* * *
—
After I was declared the guardian, anxious weeks passed, then anxious months, before I received another favorable ruling. Clementine had just celebrated her first birthday. The magistrate let it be known that the court affirmed the statutory particularity of Clementine’s case, ruling in effect that I had assumed the role of Clementine’s guardian prior to the intervention of the state. This august decree in fact concluded nothing, but once made, it meant that all procedural and bureaucratic delays could only work in my favor. With each passing month my case strengthened; no relative had appeared, and my participation in Clementine’s care continued as it always had, “faithfully and devotedly,” as the nuns attested in their affidavits.
On the day of the decisive ruling, the magistrate pronounced that enforcement of customary procedure would obstruct the state’s primary obligation to seek the child’s best interest and that the court acknowledged Daniel Abend of New York, États-Unis, as legitimate claimant for full adoptive custody of Clementine Abend, née Jeanne DuPont and formerly ward of the state, should the said Daniel Abend pursue such custody.
In the end, after twenty-eight months, when all orders and releases had been drafted, signed, and entered, I was awarded adoption of Clementine Levaux Abend on the exceptional grounds that the adoption had, in all but name, already occurred. Clementine was now mine because I had always been hers.
* * *
—
Her first passport picture was taken in the American embassy. By then Clementine was a rangy two-year-old with a tousle of black hair. The young clerk with the camera lent us a rubber band to tie her hair back from her face. “You better tell Mommy,” said the clerk, “it’s time for a haircut.” Clementine’s response—“My mommy is him”—earned me a look of confusion from the clerk.
* * *
—
The clinic directorship I’d planned to assume upon my return two years earlier had long before been assigned to someone else, but because so many of my patients in Paris had been not only American but from New York, once back in the States I had little trouble building a full practice, stacking my morning hours with brief, lucrative medication consultations, reserving my evenings for analytic sessions. Sometime during Clementine’s seventh or eighth year, it occurred to me that my practice was now indistinguishable from the practice I would have developed had I returned from Paris when I’d originally intended—indeed, had I never left New York in the first place. At times I could even believe—or almost believe—that we had always been here. After all, over the intervening years, had I not disguised myself perfectly as myself?
FORTY-THREE
À chacun son billet.
Even now, I can hear her, feel her say it, her breath on my lips.
My ticket has found me, or rather, my tickets, one for a flight, another for a train, and a photograph of the final destination. In the envelope, each is separated from the other by a little square of tissue paper. Having looked at the times of departure, I note that I will have a day, or the better part of a day, in Paris. Time enough for a walk over the Pont de Bercy, perhaps through the Jardin des Plantes and into the Quartier Latin. If the café is still there on the rue de Vaugirard, I will stop and order a drink, a pastis, I think, after all these years. Perhaps the same waiter will be there, grizzled now and weary. I will watch the passersby, the commerçants and the tourists, the students, no doubt some of them Clementine’s age, just eighteen. Will I think for an agonized instant that I glimpse Clementine in the crowd? The waiter will accept my payment with a nod, and I will leave.
There will be time to step inside a little nondescript church where a stranger once heard a weightless voice suspend itself in ether, then pour itself down through the difficult descending figures of Allegri’s Miserere. Perhaps I shall walk past an art gallery, long ago an English-language bookstore, where an American girl—now nearing forty, maybe divorced, maybe with teenage kids, living in Austin or Cincinnati or Portland—once took a part-time job. And there will be time to rest along the way, beneath a linden tree, in the shadow of its broad leaves, in the odor of its greenish flowers.
The train will not leave until nine, so there will be time to find my way back by another route, the longer way along the Seine. (I won’t, after all, have luggage. All I will carry is a single, heavy envelope.) In Nevers, at midnight, the streets will be empty or nearly so. I will follow the rue de la Gare down to the river. Even an unhurried walk from the stat
ion to the Pont de Loire will take no more than half an hour. On the bridge, I will run my fingers over the softened contours of my crude inscription, perhaps leaning against the parapet, watching the current shoal up and break over the dike. From then it will take no more than ten minutes to cross to the opposite bank. I will descend the embankment road to the riverside downstream of the bridge, the sandy stretch of shore where trees and shrubbery press up to the river’s edge and the fishermen’s paths disperse through the underbrush. It will not matter which path I take. They divide and meet and divide around the hummocks of willow and locust, and in the end all lead to the curved spit of sand hooked out where the river runs deepest.
Will I recognize my correspondent when I arrive? Will his face be familiar from my years in Paris? From all my years in New York? Will I know it as the face reflected in Jessica Burke’s face in the bathtub, in the still-pensive expression she wears in the photograph? No matter. He will recognize me.
He will know how to fasten the chain, around my wrists first and then through the spokes of the flywheel. He will have thought it through, many times, how to secure my wrists so that the hands do not pull free when the body is betrayed to panic. When the lock clicks shut, the key will already be on its way—folded in a note and posted to the commissariat de police. The note (in anonymous, block capitals) will state where I, Daniel Abend, the undersigned, may be found, down past the Île aux Sternes, in the deeper current off the curving spit.
The Waters & the Wild Page 24