Serpentine

by Thomas Thompson

  After a few months of separation, Jimmy telephoned and pleaded for a meeting. He had straightened himself out, or so his sales talk went. He was in a therapy group, and there he had recognized his immaturity and coincidental dependence on alcohol. His voice was earnest. Against her better judgment, Annabella gave in. But any “meeting” would have to take place on neutral ground, and she would bring along her friend Sally as moral support.

  The three dined with strain and talked around the issues. In mid-meal, Jimmy ordered a bottle of wine to celebrate the reunion. He saw Annabella’s look of anxiety, and he soothed her. “It’s only for a toast,” he insisted. But he drank most of the bottle himself, then another half bottle, and excused himself twice to go to the men’s room, where, Annabella assumed, he was nipping at a pint that showed suspiciously in his jean jacket.

  Afterwards, in Annabella’s Honda, driving in the nearby town of Santa Cruz, Jimmy began to cry. He begged to go home. “That’s where I’m taking you,” said Annabella. “To your mama’s.”

  “No, honey,” pleaded Jimmy, trying to grab the wheel and change direction. “I mean our home. Just for one night. You’ll see. It’ll be wonderful.” In the back seat, Sally watched the scene with great discomfort. She had recently broken up with her lover, and the unpleasantness was an echo of what she had gone through. Annabella put up with her husband’s pleadings for a few more minutes, then stopped at a traffic light and extricated herself from Jimmy’s lurching embrace. “I will let you come home when you stop drinking,” she said. “And I mean stop. Once and for all. Period. Not until then.”

  Jimmy took his wife’s face in his hands and held it tenderly. “I really love you,” he said softly. Then, abruptly, he opened the car door, jumped out, and ran down a dark street. Annabella watched him disappear. The light turned to green and she drove on. She shrugged. She was used to theatrical scenes like this. Besides, it was a wet Saturday night and people acted crazy on wet Saturday nights.

  But she slept poorly and the next day began to worry. Jimmy’s parents answered her telephone inquiry. No, they had not heard from their son since yesterday; they assumed he was with Annabella. Hanging up, she quickly canvassed all of their friends. It was a very long Sunday. Annabella stayed at her parents’ home, some unexplainable force keeping her away from the cabin in the woods. On Monday afternoon, Annabella asked her father to accompany her to the cabin. She had decided that Jimmy was surely there, holed up, probably passed out. If her suspicions were true, she would need Dick to help get him out.

  When father and daughter arrived at the clearing, an eerie silence hung over the forest. The animals were outside, but strangely silent. Light filtered gray and leaden through the pine trees. Her heart constricted. Things were out of balance. They opened the front door and went inside. They saw Jimmy right away. He was lying on the floor, face pressed against the rug that Annabella had made. One arm was outstretched in a futile cry for help. Jimmy was dead, his stomach full of barbiturates.

  A psychiatric resident at the hospital was summoned to Annabella’s bed to treat her depression—so severe that sedatives failed to give her rest. The doctor’s counsel was for the young woman to stop blaming herself. The words did no good. And when Sally came to comfort her friend, Annabella turned her head to the wall and refused to speak. She was consumed by guilt. She felt like an agent of death.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  She came here often, alone, to the palisades of the St. Lawrence, to a special place where she could sit in silence and feel the presence of history and the promise of something more, over there, just out of reach. Across the powerful river, a haze often rises from the water and shrouds Quebec City, where mossy cannons guard the ghosts of medieval walls like the sentinels of Elsinore. In the late afternoon, the sun drives out the gray and transforms cathedral spires into towers of silver and fire. But having meditated on these wonders, she dutifully turned her back and accepted the banality of life in a hard and ugly little town called Lévis.

  Here, where once Iroquois and Huron war parties fought Cartier and Champlain, where Americans under the command of Benedict Arnold vaingloriously failed to drive out the British, forests were hewn in the twentieth century and fertile land bulldozed to build a bleak community void of charm save its position on the riverbank and its view of a great city. A visitor newly come to Lévis might imagine that some demented urban planner tore out great chunks of America-at-its-worst and grafted them onto this place of history. The blight was cement plants—trailer parks—cut-rate motels—shopping centers with parking lots big enough to accommodate third-rate carnivals—sulfurous smoke—and potholes to savage tires.

  The young woman who sat beside the river was named Marie-Andrée Leclerc, and hers was a predicament of poignance. Huddled on her bench, biting river winds whipping about her, she watched the ferryboats prowl from one bank to the other. How simple it is to board the ferry, pay the dollar, and a quarter of an hour later set foot in a city where Roosevelt and Churchill twice met, where the rhythm is that of modern France yet the architecture and narrow cobbled streets left over from centuries past, where sleek people read Paris-Match and linger three hours over dinner and speak of Montego Bay and a place to have a Citroën best tuned.

  Marie-Andrée was more than fifteen minutes and a dollar away from the seduction of Quebec City. Her horizons stopped at river’s edge. In her heart she wanted desperately to cross the river and find a place behind the Citadel’s ancient walls. But it had taken Marie-Andrée twenty-eight years just to get this far. And she knew her chances of ever leaving Lévis were between slim and meager. She was small-town in every way, and she accepted it. When a woman nears thirty, dreams are replaced by reality. Or should have been.

  Twenty miles deeper inland was the place where Marie-Andrée was born and reared, a farming village called St. Charles de Bellechasse, snuggled in a valley of rolling hills and taking about a minute and a half to drive through, even if one slows to glance at the church and graveyard. Two forces dominated village life—the Catholic church and the Canadian Pacific Railway—and both were important in the home of Augustin Leclerc. He was a conductor for the railroad, a job of some prominence in a town of 1,500 people. Once he had been a strong and strapping lad with thick wavy hair and an ambition to claim, or at least see, the world. Then he fell in love with the local belle, a merry young girl named Marie-Paule. She was short and tended toward plump, he was tall and soon to turn gaunt save his round belly.

  Dutiful Catholics, Augustin and Marie-Paule produced six children—four girls and two boys—and though each birth was cause for rejoicing in the Leclercs’ neat but modest frame house on the street grandly called Avenue Royale, slowly died the conductor’s dream of shedding the anonymity of life in a place so small it was not on the map. Augustin’s hair turned gray and he looked old before it was time. So did his wife, although she retained an infectious laugh and a sweet face that resembled that of the actress Spring Byington. The color to describe them, their lives, their town was gray. The church was gray and so were the tombstones adjoining. The Couvent des Soeurs, founded in 1878, had only ivory lace curtains that flapped in the windows of the classrooms to relieve the bleakness. “There was no spice, no fun, and nothing to do in St. Charles,” once recalled Marie-Andrée, “but there was love in our house and at the time it seemed enough.”

  Marie-Andrée was the third child, the classic one in the middle who had to scrap for an identity. Of the four daughters, she was the most slender, with a sharp, pinched face and a pointed nose that her spectacles could not get a grasp on. They always slid down the slope and gave her, even as a teen-ager, the look of a careless older woman. Three of the Leclerc girls shared the same bedroom in the house, and though Marie-Andrée was the quietest, the one to whom least attention was paid, she was the most romantic, concealing Madame Bovary under her pillow and staring at her face in the mirror to search desperately for latent beauty. On holidays, she signed gift cards to her father “From Marie-Andrée
, la plus belle.” The name stuck and became something to mock. Her sisters and brothers took to calling her “La Plus Belle” and she did not recognize the tint of derision, so happy was she to be ranked—by self-acclaim—as the most beautiful. Only when some of the farm boys in the village began leaping out and making grotesque faces and yelling, “Embrasse-moi, La Plus Belle,” did Marie-Andrée understand. And suffer mortification.

  After that, she decided the only thing open to her was to become a Carmelite nun, reasoning that a life of sacrificing prayer, locked away from the world as the bride of Christ, would fulfill her needs. There was, moreover, an air of the exotic about Carmelites. Once the commitment was made, it meant total withdrawal from the world. One of the families in the village had a relative in the severe order, and when the nun was visited in the convent, she could be glimpsed only behind bars, shadows over her face, serenely blessing her kin and lingering but for a few moments. Marie-Andrée read about the Carmelites and discovered that a sister in the order begins her day at 3 A.M. by flinging herself to the cold stone floor in front of the Cross and spending three hours in silent prayer. Thus was the girl discovered one morning at sunrise, face down, arms outstretched like a dutiful nun, but asleep on the kitchen floor. When it was established that Marie-Andrée was not ill, only rehearsing her life plan, the others laughed and teased so relentlessly that she put aside her calling.

  Marie-Andrée was intelligent—the nuns traditionally wrote praise on her report cards—and she had tiny shoots of ambition that might have flourished under different cultivation. She entered the convent’s oratory competition and won not only the village prize but a regional one as well. Her trophy became an icon in the Leclerc living room, a symbol of potential escape from the banality of her world. With that triumph, Marie-Andrée spoke of becoming an actress, or perhaps a political leader with a seat in the Quebec provincial government. She devoured biographies of Sarah Bernhardt and Jeanne d’Arc. As she neared eighteen, her father realized that the plainest and quietest daughter was perhaps the one who held most promise, with the potential to push beyond the limits of St. Charles de Bellechasse. From the early years, Augustin had taken Marie-Andrée for occasional rides on the train, on short runs that went from no place to nowhere.

  Now, recognizing her abilities, the conductor spoke with great feeling of his own lost youth. Trains go everywhere, he told Marie-Andrée. Trains go to Quebec City, to New York, to the bottom of the world, and around it as well. Find one, he said. Don’t settle for a short run to oblivion.

  But not long thereafter, Augustin’s heart, which had been pumping blood through narrowed arteries, began to fail, and he was forced into semi-retirement. He moved his family to Lévis, where better doctors were available. Their new home was a larger but drab house, half of an old duplex a block or two from the St. Lawrence, with a peeling, painted gray front porch on a street that seemed for the old and forgotten, like a terminal patient waiting to die. Inside, his wife made little attempt at decorating, most of the money having to go for Augustin’s heart medicines and food for six children. The only spots of color were the gold frames of family pictures, the Sunday china in a corner curio cabinet, and pictures of the saints and the Virgin who ruled the rooms.

  What hopes Marie-Andrée nurtured of attending college were put away by her father’s illness. Instead she chose a year’s course at a school that taught young women how to be medical secretaries. With a certificate, she found work at the Clinique d’Orthopédie, only a few blocks from home. Though she wanted to find a place of her own, Marie-Andrée remained at home, the dutiful French daughter, bound by the powerful apron strings of the French matriarchy. She did not move out until she was twenty-eight, and then only to a small apartment a block or so down the street, the same street, knowing that if a day went by without checking in at home, she best have a good explanation for her mother.

  Life in Lévis was as predictable and ordinary as a boiled egg. Each morning she rose at six, prayed for a quarter of an hour, read her Bible, brushed her long and attractive brunette hair, which by twenty-one had already contained rude strands of silver, dressed in something simple, a wool skirt and sweater of modest cut and color, stopped at her parents’ home for coffee and to inquire about Augustin’s health, then walked ten minutes cross town to the gray and grim-looking clinic where her desk was in an office below the sidewalk level with a view of people’s passing feet. Her route to work and home was along streets lined with elderly maples, past aging houses with gingerbread trim that once, perhaps, had color and cheer but that had long since become gray veterans. Few of them even had flowers. The only two “landmarks” in her path were Benoit Fourrures, where the mannequins in the window fitted in perfectly, being old and weary despite the minks and sealskin they offered on yellowing forms, and the Hôtel Dieu, a hospital whose planners obviously had to eliminate any architectural embellishment and which loomed like the most anonymous government office building.

  She dated rarely, due not only to the shortage of eligible young men in the town—those with ambition or ability early on crossed the river to seek fortunes in Quebec City—but because she could not deny the mirror. She was plain. And shy. And condemned.

  Now and then some man would ask her to go cross-country skiing, or to the Grand Theater across the St. Lawrence. But the rare night out in the city was tempered by the realization that when the play was done, when she had only begun to sip the wine, there was a ferry to catch and, on the next morning, a return of despair. Mostly she was alone, spending her private moments reading, or trying to play a guitar that she bought in a reckless moment of abundance. “I never saw a girl with more pain in her face,” said a neighbor woman. “She was like a little animal caught in a trap, and she didn’t know how to find the way out.” Her reputation in Lévis was that of a diligent, frill-less young woman, dutiful to family and church, probably virginal, and blessedly unlike those youth across the river who, emulating Americans, stuffed their bodies with drugs and treated sex casually. “Marie-Andrée is a good daughter,” everyone told her mother. And when she heard the compliments, Marie-Andrée murmured gratitude, even though the words fell on an empty heart.

  An automobile became a symbol of escape. If she could earn enough money to buy one, then perhaps it would be liberation for short trips away from home. Then, who knew? She found a second job, moonlighting as a waitress in the Marie-Antoinette Restaurant, a chain operation whose Lévis branch was on the main highway and which required its female employees to wear butterscotch plaid uniforms with lace caps and white nurse’s shoes. Marie-Andrée worked so hard that she grew painfully thin and dark circles appeared under her eyes. But within a year she had the down payment for a green Pinto. The achievement was remarkable in Lévis, and now everyone complimented the Leclercs on their thrifty and industrious daughter.

  But she was not allowed to enjoy it very long. Soon after its purchase, Marie-Andrée started to leave a store where she had been shopping and as she pushed the glass door to exit, it broke, showering shards over her like rain and driving slivers deep into her left knee. She fell in bewilderment, her leg torn open and bleeding. Rushed to the same hospital that she had passed each morning and afternoon of her adult life, Marie-Andrée was told she had suffered a dropped foot. The doctors explained that the glass had cut into the peroneal nerve that runs down the back of the leg and controls the muscles that make the toes curl up. When it is damaged, ordinarily a person must drag the foot all the way to the grave. Surgery might succeed in repairing or transferring the muscles, but Marie-Andrée refused. “I am going to walk again,” she said, “I refuse to be a cripple.”

  Her spunk and determination were remarkable. More than a year of therapy was required. She learned to push the toes and ball of her foot up, and if it required tens of thousands of times, then so be it. Her younger sister, Denise, drove the Pinto to the hospital parking lot and positioned it so that Marie-Andrée could look down and see another great goal in her life that had been
achieved.

  Two years after the accident, she was walking normally, save for a slight limp that came when she was tired. The scars on her knee faded to white but she knew they were there, she felt everyone looked at them as they would at a man with a goiter. Victor in a remarkable test of courage, Marie-Andrée nonetheless fell back emotionally to the shyness of her teens. She clamped a serious expression on her face and took a position in the corner, where the other wallflowers of life were huddled. For ten long years she worked at the clinic, typing medical reports on arthroplasty and anterior cervical fusion and lumbar laminectomy. She helped patients with their crutches and sometimes drove them home in her beloved Pinto. Her life was work and family and mass and sitting on the riverbank, alone, wondering why life had elected to pass her by.

  Then a man came into her routine and stayed there, wedged like a piece of bread caught in the throat. His name was Bernard and he was a kind, decent fellow whose body was plump and whose head was fast losing its hair and whose talk usually concerned his work as a bookkeeper with some government economics office. He was not the man of her dreams, but he was the only one ringing her doorbell. They dated for two or three years, drifting toward marriage like water running out of a tub. One date for a wedding was set, then canceled by mutual consent. When the subject arose again, Marie-Andrée said, with difficult candor, that she was not altogether certain she loved Bernard. Her friend smiled. Nor was he sure of a need for her. It was simply that everybody in Lévis expected them to wed, the medical secretary and the bookkeeper. They went together well, like a gray suit and a black tie.

  One night in the spring of 1975, the couple sat in the gloom of the Tahiti Lounge adjoining the Marie-Antoinette Restaurant, where Marie-Andrée had so long ago worn the butterscotch uniform. They sipped at rum drinks and listened to Hawaiian music. In Lévis, the Tahiti Lounge was as fanciful an escape as was available. Bernard, as solid and foursquare as the church’s foundation, suddenly produced a tempting and wicked idea. Why not go away together on a long holiday, to someplace in the sun? Besides having a good time, they could determine once and for all if there was enough compatibility to make a marriage.