Noah got out Margot’s photos for another look.
The empty street might be the Prom, he supposed, because of its wide sidewalk; parts of buildings, a bicycle propped against a wall, a parked car, a seagull picking at garbage. But if so, this snapshot had none of the picturesque aspects that centuries of artists had captured: the skirts, the parasols, the human flow. As if Margot had gone out of her way to pick a moment when nothing worth recording had been happening.
In the shot of himself, smiling little Noé, he looked about three or four. Had she kept it as a memento, after having to leave him on that ship in Marseilles? It was the only one of the set that seemed not to have been taken in a rush.
When Noah scanned it into the image search, the answer was almost comically guarded. “Best guess: person,” with a link to a definition: “A person is a being, such as a human, that has certain capacities or attributes constituting personhood.”
“Great,” he muttered. “Google can tell it’s a person! That one has to be me, though someone’s put RJ on the back.”
“The kid? He’s not you.” Michael reached over to pick up the photo.
“I know the resemblance isn’t striking, but who else…” Noah’s voice died away as he looked at the picture.
“Nah.”
Michael was right. There was none of that indefinable likeness that made adults recognizable in their baby pictures. “Of course she could have photographed one of my friends,” he said weakly. (Though he couldn’t remember any, except perhaps Madame Dupont’s little girl. Corine, was it? Caroline? Camille?) “But to hold on to it all her life…”
“You didn’t have any brothers?”
He shook his head.
Michael spoke with a certain delicacy: “You a hundred percent sure about that?”
Noah’s unease was growing. Could Margot and Marc possibly have had a first child, earlier in the ’30s, who had died? No, he couldn’t believe they’d have kept such a secret. Anyway, the boy in the photo didn’t look particularly like any of the family. (Though of course genetic resemblance wasn’t always obvious.) This boy had dark hair, a pale face, had recently been ill, perhaps—or did all black-and-white images of children carry a shadow of mortality?
“One of my friends, he was playing handball with this kid that turned out to have the same dad.”
“No, no.” Noah’s pulse was loud in his throat. If the dandy had been Margot’s lover—If they’d had a secret son, with the initials R.J.—
This was absurd. Fathering a child might be kept hidden, but giving birth to one?
After she sent me away, maybe.
No: the reason she’d sent him away. Because pregnancy was something Margot might just possibly have hidden from her aged father, but not from the boy climbing into her lap, so she’d had to put Noah on that ship. If Père Sonne’s sharp eye had let him guess, or if Margot had confessed—the photographer would have kept such a shameful secret in the family, wouldn’t he?
Oh Christ. That unexplained absence of Margot’s that Madame Dupont had mentioned to the journalist; those two missing nights, three days. In a hospital, giving birth to this R.J.? Such rage, rushing through Noah’s veins. The treacherous bitch! To bring this other baby into the world, and then—
Then what? The house cleaner would have said something if Madame Selvaggio had had an infant in tow when she finally came home. Could Margot’s lover have taken responsibility for the child? Or had the guilty pair stashed him somewhere—an orphanage? Noah thought a vein might pop in his head. Think.
“No,” he said hoarsely. “Definitely not a brother of mine. Even if they were, ah, involved, there wasn’t enough time.” If Margot had given birth during those three missing days, this abandoned child would have been only a few months old when she’d moved to New York after burying her father. And even if he’d been born earlier, soon after she’d packed Noah off on the ship… “The kid can’t have been any older than two when Margot left France herself.” What kid? This boy in the photo was not Margot’s. “This fellow has to be three or four,” Noah said, punching his finger at the print, “and she wasn’t even here then.”
Michael squinted at it. “How do you know it was her took it?”
But it went with the others, Noah thought: the same small format, the same lack of a studio stamp, preserved all these decades in the same envelope.
“Or any of these pics,” the boy added.
Could someone else have shot and developed them, sent them on to Margot years after the war?
Come to think of it, what if they were random rejects, preserved by accident, that Fernande had mistaken for precious relics? Noah had spun this whole web out of his imagination. The story of R.J. the love child might be technically possible, but so were a million other parallel universes.
“I’m hungry.”
Noah was jolted out of his brooding state. It was on the tip of his tongue to ask, “Again?” But that wasn’t fair. Michael was a growing boy. “OK, we’ll go out soon. Though first—” The demands of the present fell heavy on Noah; almost a relief. “I should tell Rosa how you’re doing.” But how was Michael doing? “What should I say?” he asked over his shoulder, getting out his tablet.
The boy was back on his phone, what sounded like some kind of race-car game.
“Michael?”
“Like, a report?” Apprehensive. “You going to rat on me about the knife?”
“What knife?”
“In the restaurant. I wasn’t—”
“Don’t be scared,” Noah told him.
“I’m not scared.”
“I just meant I’m not ratting on you about anything.” He sighed. “Would you prefer to write it yourself, and I won’t look?”
“Nah.”
Noah composed a one-liner to the social worker, telling her they’d arrived safely in France and everything was going all right so far. Seems to be, he substituted for was. It still felt like a lie, but it was technically correct. “What about your mom, now?”
“What about her?”
“How do you usually stay in touch?”
Michael shrugged glumly. “She calls sometimes.”
Noah looked up the prison’s Communications page. “Outgoing calls FROM inmates only. No collect calls to cellphones permitted.” Damn. Could Noah send Amber a message to call them at the hotel? But then they’d have to time it just right, allowing for the six-hour time difference, and what if Amber tried and the guy at the front desk said he wouldn’t accept a collect call, or didn’t understand the American operator’s English, and the whole arrangement fell through, with Amber left furious or panicking?
“We had a video visitation on my birthday,” Michael said.
“Really? That sounds nice.”
The small mouth twitched down at the corners. “It’s hard to remember all the stuff I want to tell her. If I say bye before the half hour’s up, Grandma’s like”—a fierce hiss—“‘That’s a waste of money,’ and Mom says, ‘Let him go,’ but I can tell she’s crying.”
Noah gnawed his lip.
There was a “convenient prepaid collect-call option” for cellphones, he found after further digging, but this had to be set up through a third-party vendor by calling an 800 number from within the territorial United States. Jesus, it might be simpler to use a carrier pigeon. “What about email? Can you email your mom?”
“I guess.”
“Sorry, but I don’t know what that means. Yes or no?”
“Special emails. Grandma knew how.” Very low, muttered into his phone.
Noah’s head was pounding with fatigue. He could always send a message via Rosa, but the woman was busy enough with her twenty-three other cases. (He thought, dizzily, of the multiple complications of all those children’s lives.)
He went back to the web page. There turned out to be a rudimentary pay-per-message system: a hefty charge for every page, every picture, every video that would be free to send if you were in the outside world. Sickening, how thes
e companies milked desperate families of millions of dollars. “OK,” Noah said once he’d managed to set up an account with his credit-card details and downloaded the Correctional Communications app, “we’re through. Go ahead, write your mom a message.” He laid the tablet on the camp bed beside Michael. “Tell her about the flight, what we’ve been up to so far.” Eating, walking, squabbling. “I’ll be back. Just don’t hit Return till you’re all done, OK?”
“’Kay.”
In the bathroom, Noah ran the water till it was very cold, and splashed his face with it.
Outside a fruiterie about six feet wide, cherries and kumquats were piled lavishly on shelves. “Choose a piece of fruit,” Noah said.
“Are they free?”
“No, no—you go inside to pay.”
The boy’s eyes shifted from side to side. “Don’t people just grab them and run?”
“I suppose…” Noah looked for a camera and found only a tilted circular mirror. He pointed it out. “The staff keep an eye on the mirror. Anyway, pick something.”
“What’s up with the grapes?”
“They’re just bigger than you’re used to, maybe. They’ve got seeds in them over here,” Noah explained. “But it’s easy to spit them out.”
The boy shook his head nervously.
“A banana, then? An apple?”
“They’re scaly-looking.”
The apples were some lovely European variety, pinkish under a delicate filigree of brown. “I’m having one of those,” Noah said, taking one. “Come on, the bananas look identical to the ones in New York.”
Michael shrugged, so Noah grabbed a banana for him.
As they walked along he kept noticing store names in English, a sign of the creeping linguistic invasion: Star Hooks Shop, Azur Land, Bio City, Le Relooking, Modern’ Copy (but why that apostrophe?). Even the huge vacuum the street cleaner was riding on was called Glutton.
As he munched his apple Noah tilted his head back, resting his eyes on stone ribbons, flowering tendrils of plaster. “See that word?” A name high on a building. “That was the architect signing his building. Like a graffiti tagger,” he suggested.
Michael rolled his eyes. “Yeah, except I bet nobody arrested him.”
They boarded a silver bullet of a tram and leaned on poles opposite each other. “Kind of like a bus on train tracks,” said the boy.
“Cool, isn’t it?”
But Michael refused to go that far. He held his banana tightly as their tram curved around a corner.
The carriage filled up, and kept filling. A jolly woman kept murmuring “C’est fou!” to her friend—how crazy this crush was, especially around Carnival. Noah belatedly remembered that you had to punch your ticket; he couldn’t reach the machine, but another woman took the ten-ride card from his hand and fed it into the slot until it beeped twice, once for him and once for Michael. Her friend offered Noah her seat, which rather offended him. He shook his head, straightened up, and tried to look nearer seventy.
Each upcoming stop was announced with a different recorded voice, one of them a little girl’s. “Creepy,” Michael whispered.
“Eat your banana,” Noah told him.
Michael opened the stem end. One fastidious bite. Another.
“Tastes just like at home, am I right?”
In a robot voice: “Yes master thank you master.”
“You said you were hungry,” Noah reminded him.
“Changed my mind.”
It was true that appetite could come and go unpredictably when you were having a week like this boy was. Noah remembered not eating a bite at Joan’s funeral, then bingeing on leftovers a few nights later until he threw up.
They got down at Place Garibaldi, where bronze lions crouched in a fountain at the foot of a huge monument to the revolutionary. Michael ran along the guano-streaked stone edge, the half-peeled banana flapping like a bird.
Wasn’t there a calypso song about a yellow bird? “Don’t go in the fountain, though,” Noah called.
“And wet these kicks?” Michael sounded shocked at the idea.
“These what?”
“My Jordans. Grandma got me these for my birthday, on layaway.”
The woman had gone back month after month, paying an inflated price for these sneakers, before she was finally able to take them home to the boy with growing feet? “That was nice of her,” Noah said, dry-mouthed.
The boy jumped down, and the top half of his banana broke off.
“Michael!”
“Sorry.” The small face blank.
Noah couldn’t tell when Michael was genuinely cowed and when Noah was being played.
Michael picked up the pale banana half, now with a cigarette butt stuck to it. He held it as if ready to choke it down.
“Throw it in that trash can over there,” Noah snapped. When Michael came back—“Now eat the other half, at least.”
The boy took a few bites. “The bottom’s smushed.”
Because you’ve been holding it in a death grip for the last quarter of an hour. But Noah told himself to keep his powder dry; he had the whole week to get through. He took the limp banana out of Michael’s hand and went to the trash with it.
An obedient convoy of tourists glided between them on Segways, following a guide with her hair in multicolored braids. “Can we do that?”
“No.” But Noah seemed to be saying that every time the kid suggested something. “Not right now. Maybe another day when I’m less groggy.”
Flocks spun over Place Garibaldi, swallows in their thousands, making billowing fabric of the sky. Or were they swifts?
Noah needed another coffee, so they went into a salon de thé. The glass case held mille feuilles, Opéras, crown-shaped Saint-Honorés, financiers. Amazing how the names were flooding back: had Noé’s childhood vocabulary mostly been acquired in patisseries? Paris-Brests covered in flaked almonds, macarons in dazzling shades… He remembered buying Joan an incredibly expensive tube of macarons somewhere in the West Village; every bright color had turned out to taste more or less the same. “Look, these are religieuses, nuns—see their little heads and brown robes?”
Michael grinned at that. He was eyeing chocolate plaques shaped like elaborate masks.
Noah chose something decadent called a palmier framboise, two squares of buttery pastry sandwiching raspberry jam.
And for the young man?
“Hungry again, are we, now there’s no fruit in sight?” Noah asked Michael. Then felt a little bad.
The boy picked out a pink pig with chocolate eyes.
Waiting for his coffee, Noah noticed daily papers hanging over dangling rods. He took down a local one and read about child migrants (mostly from sub-Saharan African countries) trying to get from Italy via Monaco into France, being kicked off the train at Nice by gendarmes. The police were said to steal the SIM cards out of the kids’ phones and cut the soles off their shoes before sending them all the way back on foot without water. Many of those kids were now selling themselves to drivers in exchange for a ride across the border into France…
“Votre crème, Monsieur.”
Noah jumped, and rushed to fold the paper over its rail again.
The interior of the tearoom was full of lean elderly ladies and their shopping bags, and anyway he wanted a cigarette, so he carried their tray out to a small table under the colonnade. The metal legs of his chair grated on the flagstones. He sipped his coffee and bit into his palmier, getting powdered sugar all over his pants.
Two men of Noah’s vintage went by, and he found he was searching their features for any resemblance to little R.J. in the photo. A war child, was that the phrase for it? (As if the war itself, rather than the suave dandy, might have seduced or forced Margot into letting it inside her, spawning a little version of itself.)
He tried to put his hypothetical half-brother out of his mind and followed Michael’s gaze to the young skateboarders—no, skaters—zooming, sliding, and leaping around the fountain, skimmi
ng along its edge; the grind and crash of their small wheels. It occurred to Noah that he might get Michael a board as a goodbye present, when Amber’s sister, Grace, turned up. Well, not goodbye, exactly—they wouldn’t be strangers anymore. Maybe Michael could come into Manhattan for the odd Saturday outing?
The boy sank his teeth into the pig’s head, then spat it out violently on his plate.
“What is it now?”
“That’s not chocolate.”
“Did anyone tell you it was?” Noah scrutinized the decapitated pig. “Looks like some kind of confectioner’s cream, or a mousse, maybe. Try another bite.”
“Try my ass.”
Noah tipped his face up to the sun and asked for patience. After a moment, “Would you like some of my palmier? It’s just raspberry jam.”
Michael shook his head. He was tugging off the tablecloth clips and attaching them to different parts of his body.
“What are you doing?”
“Seeing what hurts.”
Boyish curiosity, or another sign of trauma?
Noah couldn’t shake the image of Margot and her dandy man, and their hypothetical lost child, taking tea and cakes in Place Garibaldi.
Unless you’ve made up this whole rigmarole, Joan suggested.
Noah drew on his cigarette. Anchored only by the dishes and vase now, the paper tablecloth was flapping. “It’s going to blow away if you don’t put those clips back.”
Michael leaned his elbows on the table, phone in his hands. “No it’s not.”
Tipping his head back to follow the wheeling swifts, Noah spotted a plaque on the column beside his chair: ICI TOMBA, “Here fell.”
“A Resistance member called Paul Vallaghé was shot right here,” he remarked, “in the last days of the war. My mother could have seen it. He was only twenty-four.”
“OK, I get it,” Michael said, eyes on his screen. “Shit happens.”
Amber was in medium security because there was no room in minimum, Noah reminded himself. What was she witnessing, enduring, every day? And all because she’d let her family line get tangled with Victor’s. Why was Noah expecting this boy to give a damn about the long-ago sufferings of others?
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