by Edmund White
CHAPTER 21
Dear Yvette,
Today is our birthday. Thirty-five years and two months after your death. Before he left this world, I told Father Pierre that I missed writing you and he said I should write you a letter and burn it on the altar of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome and the letter would be delivered intact to you in Heaven. I’m heading to Rome the day after tomorrow. I’ll be staying in a house on the Appian Way that belongs to Father Pal, Father Pierre’s charming Norwegian “friend” and loyal companion (truth be told, I found the house for them). Pal is a bit feeble now (old ski injuries) but he’s still an avid gardener and keeps both a jardin potager and a spectacular jardin de plaisance. He has a handsome, unsmiling young Norwegian homme à tout faire living with him who does all the hoeing and toting.
I’m sure you have lots of activities in Heaven, especially as a saint-in-waiting, but you may have been keeping an eye on your old twin (I suppose people don’t age in Heaven—at least I prefer to see you as eternally young). You no doubt know (or saw) that Ghislaine killed herself. She became so disagreeable for a while, then turned eerily docile and anorexic and began to cut herself. We sent her to a sort of boot camp in upstate New York, where she was bound to a chair and force-fed. She came back to France plump and almost comatose. We gave her a giant eighteenth-birthday party and her friends from Rosey, her school, flew in from all over the world. We put them all up at the castle and in adjoining hotels and inns and conveyed them about in a fleet of cars. We had horses for those who wanted to ride. I hired twelve more staff to make beds and cook and serve and iron. The château never looked more lovely (we’d filled in the white quarry spots with new lawn, we’d gotten the Arethusa fountain up to speed, Addy’s garish Four Continents fountain was repaired). Ghislaine was happy, I think, or maybe just hysterical. A day after everyone left she killed herself—a gunshot to the head, which they say is unusual for females, who prefer pills. If I sound cold, it’s because I’ve lived so long, with the guilt and constant nightmares, running through alternate scenarios that might have saved her. Some of my friends—Helen and Ercole, Prince Eddie, that old Duke Willens from Dallas, remember him?—were there and had stayed on to comfort me, I guess you could call it that. Foulques, who builds harpsichords in Rome and seems to like boys, drove up for the party and dance. He was just as uncomfortable as you at my debut, remember? How you were sealed naked into that tube of a dress and had had your hair peroxided but still cut short, you looked like a Nordic Saint Joan … He’s a dear boy but still very shy; he’s a whiz at restoring those slender Italian harpsichords and those more complicated, bigger French ones. He even paints little pastoral scenes on the harpsichord lid—who knew he was so talented? Of course, I understand firsthand how devastating it is to lose a twin, although technically you didn’t kill yourself. He sits by the Arethusa fountain for hours and has even begun to ask me questions for the first time about his father. I paint a rosy picture, of course. It was a little tricky to get Ghislaine buried in holy ground, but the chaplain is a young local a bit awestruck by the Courcys and he was willing to buy the story that she had had an anaphylactic shock from eating a dish prepared elsewhere, somewhere the cooks didn’t know about her peanut allergy. The local retired doctor, a gay English doctor who’s a friend, confirmed our alibi. They say the doctor was the model for the gay Jewish doctor in Sunday Bloody Sunday, played by Peter Finch (Glenda Jackson was in that, too). Anyway, he’s very civilized and Church of England if he’s church of anything. He and Foulques are friends, though there’s a fifty-years age difference.
Eudes died of a stroke and Victorine a year later of dementia; I was always nice to them and patient with them. They lived in the château full-time and were very comfortable here (the castle has seventeen fireplaces). I gave them a nice allowance, which Addy never did. Of course, they had their suspicions about me, but they were ultra-discreet. Luckily they didn’t live to witness Ghislaine’s death. Their life was irreproachable, at least by their lights, though I’d say they were useless.
You could say I’ve been pretty useless, too, most of my life. Rich people in France think that’s totally normal. They have no concept of charity and think the state should do everything. Back in Texas we thought you should have a life of service, and big sit-down gala dinners were always, remember, for cancer or muscular dystrophy. In France they’re just for fun.
In the last few years I’ve been doing some good works; I’ve been raising money for AIDS and even visiting sick patients. Lots of ladies here are afraid of touching men with AIDS, but I’m fearless. I may have always been a spoiled brat, but remember how I was a good jumper on horseback? I was never afraid. Maybe even reckless. Anyway, now we know you can’t get AIDS by touching someone or from saliva or mosquitos, but back then we didn’t know anything—that you get it only from blood or sperm. In France we had all these contaminated blood scandals for hemophiliacs, just because France didn’t want to pay for a perfectly good American detection system that was already in place.
Why AIDS, you may wonder. I don’t think Foulques has ever had sex or if he has he probably left his underpants on, but since he’s part of the “at-risk” population I thought I should devote myself to that cause. A gay cause. Don’t forget that you and I are a little bit gay around the edges, though lesbians never catch it. In recent years I’ve spent more and more time with Foxy, Adhéaume’s German cousin, the music critic. When she’s not covering opera in Orange or Cleveland or Palermo, she’s here with me at the château.
When I look back at my life I think I haven’t changed that much. And though I’ve recopied all your letters, leaving out the lesbian or questioning parts, I’m perfectly aware how similar we are. We’re both sensualists, you even a bit more than me, I suspect. We both believe in a life of service. Remember how our real mother used to tell us there’s nothing more important in life than serving others? You served the Lord and His saints. I served fashion and served men. We both ended up far from Texas but in the end we were good Texas girls.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Michael Carroll and Giuseppe Gullo listened to every word of this book as I wrote it. Richard Bates helped me prepare the beginning of the manuscript. Keith McDermott, Rick Whitaker, and my sister, Margaret Fleming, encouraged me along the way. Paul Halsall gave me some Catholic advice, but the mistakes are all my own. Diane DeSanders corrected some of my Dallas mistakes. Nicolas Gaviria gave me great suggestions about Colombia. Paul Eprile helped me with the French. David McConnell let me use his studio.
I am grateful to my editor, Liese Mayer, and to Barbara Darko, for her careful reading of the text.
I consulted hundreds of books. The most helpful ones were Making Saints by Kenneth L. Woodward, and various books by saints and about Saints Óscar Romero and Laura Montoya and about Dorothy Day. The memoirs of Élisabeth de Gramont inspired me.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
EDMUND WHITE is the author of many novels, including A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, The Farewell Symphony, and Our Young Man. His favorite of his own novels is Hotel de Dream. His nonfiction includes City Boy (listed by the New York Times as one of the fifty best memoirs of the last fifty years), Inside a Pearl, The Unpunished Vice, and other memoirs; The Flâneur, about Paris; and literary biographies and essays. He was named the 2018 winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. In 2019 he won the National Book Award Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. White lives in New York with his husband, Michael Carroll.
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-63557-255-1; EBOOK: 978-1-63557-256-8
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: White, Edmund, 1940– author.
Title: A saint from Texas : a novel / Edmund White.
Description: New York : Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020002373 (print) | LCCN 2020002374 (ebook) | ISBN 9781635572551 (hardback) | ISBN 9781635572568 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Domestic fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3573.H463 S25 2020 (print) | LCC PS3573.H463 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002373
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002374
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