The Liar's Wife

by Mary Gordon

  Laurent comes home in one of his irritable moods, impatient for his tea. The thought comes to her: If only I could give him the baby to hold while I prepare it, but I can’t; he can’t control his spasms, the baby would be in danger, and I, in turn, in spasms of anxiety. So she must hold the baby, pour the water into the kettle, prepare the tea, the crackers. He will be a wonderful uncle when Aaron is older. He will make up magical stories for him. She knows that they will be devoted.

  And she knows, too, that her news of Mlle Weil will put him into a good humor.

  “Mlle Weil has become a Christian mystic.”

  “The Red Virgin? Has she forgotten that she is here courtesy of Herr Hitler? And that if they were in France she and her parents would be in danger for their lives?”

  “I didn’t want to press her on it, she was talking about feeling that it was impossible for her to believe that anyone could feel friendship for her, that there was anyone who didn’t have the impulse to hurt her. So I didn’t want to say anything that might hurt.”

  “Genevieve, protector of the wounded bird.”

  She’s not sure he means it kindly, because the next thing he says is “She doesn’t know your son will be raised a Jew?”

  She thinks of Mlle Weil’s image of the hen pecked by the other birds, and of the Chinatown dancing chicken. “I didn’t think I needed to tell her at that moment.”

  “But you will.”

  She raises her shoulders in a way that no one in America does, in a way that she knows is entirely French. “It is always Mlle Weil who determines the subject of the conversation.”

  OCTOBER 14, 1942

  When Genevieve answers the telephone, she is surprised to hear Mlle Weil’s voice. Surprised that she has been able to master the telephone, surprised to connect to Mlle Weil through a contrivance so modern, so American, so uneternal as the telephone. She asks if she can come to tea the next day, and once again Genevieve is pleased when Mlle Weil says, “That’s fine,” when she says Laurent will be at work.

  OCTOBER 15, 1942

  When she opens the door, it isn’t Mlle Weil but her mother, who seems not to have changed in the decade since they last met.

  She looks nothing like her daughter. She is short, squat, soft-looking; her large nose dominates her wide face … whereas it is her daughter’s eyes that so dominate her face that they make the rest of the face irrelevant.

  Genevieve is uneasy. There must be something wrong with Mlle Weil. But there is another cause for her unease. It is the first time a Frenchwoman has visited the apartment. She worries that she has forgotten, or overlooked, or neglected the French way of doing things. But the furnishings were not chosen by her, they were a gift from her in-laws—and it is wartime. She imagines that Mme Weil finds the furniture too large, the pattern in the carpet too pronouncedly floral.

  “And what age is the baby? I myself am a new grandmother. A baby girl, two weeks old. Perhaps we should betroth the two babies immediately to save them future trouble.”

  Genevieve laughs, with French politesse, and asks, “Is Mlle Weil all right?”

  “I am here because Simone is not well, not well at all. You know she has terrible headaches, everything has been tried; you know of course that my husband is a doctor, and every specialist has been consulted, surgery even has been considered, but there seems to be no recourse.”

  “It must be very difficult.”

  Mme Weil replies with a surprising vehemence—is it anger?—“It is only one of my daughter’s difficulties, most of which she creates for herself. My daughter is romantic about danger. She runs after it, as some young girls run after actors.

  “Do you know about her time fighting in Spain, with the Anarchists? It did not turn out well. She stepped in a vat of hot cooking oil and badly burned her leg. My husband and I had to sneak over the Spanish border; and it was very dangerous, in a time of war. And then for days we wandered from place to place—rooming houses, hospitals—all over Barcelona, looking for Simone. You are a mother; now I am sure you can imagine my terror for my daughter. The whole time, terrified. A daughter, in a war zone. And not any daughter. A clumsy daughter, a nearsighted daughter. But of all the dangers I had imagined, among them was not my daughter’s stepping into a pot of oil. And if her father hadn’t arrived in time to rescue her, she might have lost her leg. I’m sure you remember that my daughter is exceptionally clumsy.”

  “I never noticed it,” Genevieve says; a lie, but she knows where her loyalties are.

  “This apartment is comfortable and homelike. What is your husband’s profession?”

  When Genevieve tells her that he is a doctor, she wipes her mouth with a handkerchief. In her eyes, Genevieve sees a look of discontent.

  “There was a time when I thought Simone might have an ordinary life. A husband. She was a very pretty child. People used to stop me on the street to say what a pretty child she was. I had to give up the idea that she would have an ordinary life. I realized long ago that she is not like other people. In the family, we call her the troll. The trollesse, actually.”

  “But Mme Weil, your daughter is a genius,” Genevieve says, feeling once more that she must protect Mlle Weil. This time from her mother.

  “I hope, Genevieve, that yours is not the fate of being the mother of a genius. I would much rather be the mother of a happy child.”

  Genevieve is offended on Mlle Weil’s behalf, but there is no way of expressing her offense.

  “Simone’s latest scheme terrifies me. Parachuting nurses into battlefields, insisting she be one of the first. My only hope is that the authorities will find the plan unfeasible. But I know that Simone will leave America, precisely because she’s safer here.”

  She leans forward and grabs Genevieve’s wrist, not gently. “My daughter is fond of you; if you talked to her, she might listen.”

  “I don’t think she listens to anyone, Mme Weil.”

  And Mme Weil closes her eyes, leans her head against the back of the chair, rubs the palm of her hand across her closed eyes. She crosses and uncrosses her surprisingly delicate ankles, of which, Genevieve imagines, as she is a product of the nineteenth century, she must still be quite proud.

  “And it will be the death of her, I fear,” she says, rising and walking over to the playpen. “A lovely child,” she says, but Genevieve can see that her mind is somewhere else.

  OCTOBER 18, 1942

  The last time she saw him, Joe asked if Genevieve would be his “guinea pig.” She asked him what he meant, and he laughed and explained that he needed to try out a new hairdo.

  She often forgets that Joe is a successful hairdresser with a salon on the East Side. Sixty-Third and Lex, he says. She doesn’t know exactly what he means by Lex, but she knows it’s something she should know, so she doesn’t ask. Sometimes he leaves copies of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar for her. It seems slightly wrong for her to be looking at them, but she enjoys it, admiring the beautiful women, their skin so clear, their lips so perfectly rouged, their hair so impossibly clean. She finds it strange that American women are so concerned to be always washing their hair, but, never having even heard of bidets, they are not so careful of their private parts, and often she detects a faint but unmistakable female odor.

  Sometimes when she is most worried about Howard, about the War, about their future in America, it is a solace to look at Joe’s magazines, and those impossibly perfect women.

  When she knows Mlle Weil is coming, she hides the magazines.

  Joe announces himself by playing a little tune on the doorbell, dump de dump dump dump dump. He is always excited, always enthusiastic, and Genevieve doesn’t understand where this comes from, this hopefulness when his life is difficult, living with a wife he loathes, sneaking to be with his beloved. And the War, the War, which could drain anybody’s hope. He arrives carrying a bunch of chrysanthemums and a bunch of purple grapes.

  “Here’s the deal,” he says. He opens a magazine. There is a picture of an actress she
vaguely knows: Claudette Colbert.

  “I have to say I’ve always thought of you as ‘a Claudette Colbert type.’ You see, honey, now the fashion is for women to wear their hair long, pompadours and upsweeps. I’ve been on the lookout for some shorter hairdos. It makes sense, doesn’t it, that women who are working have less time for their hair, they might be happy with shorter hair, but they want to be ‘in the swim.’ And long hair’s not for everyone, particularly some of my older ladies. Now for example I think Claudette Colbert looks better in a shorter cut.”

  He points to an older picture of Claudette Colbert, with short hair and bangs.

  “Now Lily won’t let me try out my idea on her,” he says. “She won’t let me cut an inch off her hair. But would you do me a favor? I promise I’ll make you look like a pink peony.”

  Genevieve touches her hair, which she has worn, since she was no longer a schoolgirl, in a chignon.

  “I would quite like to look like a pink peony. I think people think of me as something much less exciting: a marigold, perhaps.”

  He runs over to a leather bag, rushes her to the kitchen sink, washes her hair. What a great pleasure it is to have her hair washed! The scent of the shampoo is delicious, some kind of lemon, some other kind of flower. Probably all chemical: a new invention in the time of war. She doesn’t care; the War has made the worship of the natural obsolete.

  Then there are clumps of hair on the linoleum.

  “My hair!” she cries out, against her will. But Joe is paying no attention to her as he cuts and combs. There is something almost brutal about his attention to her hair, as if it had no connection to anyone he’d ever known. Then he goes to the bag and takes out a machine that looks something like a gun.

  “It’s a new gismo, called a hair dryer.”

  It makes an enormous noise, like an airplane. She’s afraid it will wake the baby, but somehow it does not.

  There is a hot wind, almost burning the back of her neck. Then he snips a bit, and combs, and clucks. He takes a hand mirror from his bag and gives it to her to hold. “You see?” he says. “A pink peony.”

  She has only a second to consider her reflection before the baby cries. So she doesn’t know what to think, how to consider her new self. Does she look younger? Prettier? More American? She worries that Howard won’t like it. It is also possible she will never see him again.

  She comes out, holding the baby. “Am I a genius or am I a genius? Congratulations, Aaron, you have the prettiest mama on the Upper West Side.”

  She has barely got the baby down for his nap when Mlle Weil arrives at the door. She seems more flustered than Genevieve remembers seeing her.

  “I must apologize for my mother. My mother can’t get it through her head that I am not a child, that there are more important things in the world than her daughter’s safety.”

  “As a mother, I must say I think it is impossible for any mother to believe anything else.”

  “That is a great error,” Mlle Weil says. “People make idols of their children, and idolatry is always a sin. In some societies it was a crime.”

  Do I make an idol of Aaron? Genevieve asks herself. She considers the possibility. She is often tempted to kneel before him, to worship his beauty, the miracle that he is alive. It is the only time she has an impulse to pray, an impulse she resists, because whom would she pray to? She does not believe in a face that could protect him and receive her thanks. The only thing that really tempts her about Catholicism is Christmas. The worship of baby. A baby at the center of kneeling adults. And the animals’ warm breath, comforting the infant.

  “Your mother is concerned about your headaches.”

  Mlle Weil looks annoyed. “My mother had no business speaking of them. She doesn’t understand their place in my life. I am very grateful for my headaches; they have helped me to understand suffering. But they have marked me with a cruel brand; sometimes they have made me unknowable to myself. There was a time when the pain and exhaustion were so great that I was uncertain whether or not death was my imperative duty.”

  “I don’t understand how death could be a duty.”

  “It comes from a feeling of barrenness, like the fig tree Jesus cursed, and like that tree I consider it my duty not to live. In those states, I can only hate myself; I am repulsed by the idea of my barren, pain-ridden self. I become a repulsive thing to myself, and so I understand the repulsion people who have been turned into things arouse for the very reason of their affliction. They have lost themselves. They can only return the world’s hatred and repulsion onto themselves. This is why I can’t imagine anyone having the impulse of friendship towards me. It would be like having the impulse of friendship towards a crushed worm.”

  “Did you have these headaches while you were teaching us?”

  “I have had them all my life.”

  “Then you are very brave.”

  She looks displeased by the compliment. “Sometimes,” she says, “when I was suffering the worst headaches, all I wanted to do was strike someone else on the forehead, to cause pain in the very same place where I was experiencing it. To make someone suffer as I had suffered. How could I understand, how could I know myself after that?”

  Genevieve thinks of her impulse towards Suzy’s parents: not just to strike them in the forehead, but to draw blood, to leave scars. She wants to tell Mlle Weil: You don’t even begin to know. She is grateful that Laurent isn’t home, and hopes that Mlle Weil won’t talk like this in front of him about the afflicted person’s sense of her own repulsiveness. Because Laurent is, without question, one of the afflicted. But it would be dreadful to remind him of the revulsion he causes in so many of the world’s eyes, to suggest that this revulsion is inevitably turned on the self, to suggest that the afflicted might consider it their duty to take their own lives.

  Genevieve suddenly understands, in a way that she knows will be permanent, that it is possible for Mlle Weil to be wrong. Grievously, dangerously wrong. Including but not limited to a category that could be called mistaken. She knows it because she knows her brother. He loves life. He doesn’t want to die. He would never imagine that it is his duty to die. He has struggled with everything in his power to keep alive. This is his greatness.

  Is it possible that her brother is greater than Mlle Weil? And she wonders: Which is greater, to be willing to die, or to fight death in the name of life?

  The broom is leaning against the wall that separates the kitchen from the living room; Genevieve left it there to answer the door. She carries it into the kitchen, where she will make the tea. Mlle Weil follows her. Genevieve apologizes for the clumps of hair on the kitchen floor, which she is sweeping as the kettle boils.

  “Joe just cut my hair,” she says. “He’s only just left.”

  “I see,” Mlle Weil says, as if this were something that required a lot of consideration. “You’ve got your hair cut. It will be more convenient.” She says nothing about how she thinks Genevieve’s hair looks. “I would like to ask you a favor. Will you cut my hair?”

  What can she possibly say? The request is so strange that she can’t come up with a response, and Mlle Weil goes on talking.

  “I have long understood that people respond more favorably to a woman if they consider her attractive. I have never imagined for a minute that anyone could consider me attractive, but if I conformed more to the conventional idea of a proper lady it might help me at the consulate, where I must go to arrange my papers to get back to Europe. My mother usually washes and cuts my hair, but I’m trying to train myself not to be so dependent on my parents. Soon I will be living without them, far away.”

  A bubble of nausea forms behind Genevieve’s lips. She doesn’t want to wash Mlle Weil’s hair. She doesn’t want to be touching Mlle Weil’s body, particularly knowing how much she dislikes being touched. And the truth is, she does not smell good. The truth is: Mlle Weil stinks. But Mlle Weil is a hero. So how can Genevieve not do this thing, this exceedingly simple thing?

 
“I will be happy to do it after I feed the baby and put him down for his nap.” What is there about this woman, so devoted to the truth, that requires the telling of so many lies?

  She puts her mouth and nose to the baby’s scalp: the smell of his hair is a pleasure. Silk and bread and milk, safety, nourishment, desire without danger, no prospect of harm. But Mlle Weil’s hair is not silky; it is almost a solid wire triangle from crown to chin. Possibly she never combs it. Genevieve opens her blouse, offers her breast to the baby, hoping he will take a long time today so that she can, in good faith, postpone the thing she dreads. Always for a mother, the unassailable moment: I have a baby at my breast. There is nothing else I can do.

  While he nurses, Mlle Weil reads a newspaper. She is making notes.

  Genevieve puts the baby in his crib and goes to the bathroom to get the one clean, dry towel. Olive green. A color she has never liked. A gift from Howard’s parents. Kindness. Blindness. In English, the words rhyme.

  She tries to duplicate everything that Joe did, hoping that she can provide the kind of pleasure Joe provided. Something in her lifts: she is pleased at the prospect of pleasing.

  She bends Mlle Weil’s head back to wash it. The thinness of the bones of her shoulders alarms her. How easily those bones could break. As if all the energy in her body went into the task of creating this uselessly lively, thick wire triangle of hair. No strength to spare for the necessary skeleton.

  Her hair is so thick, and perhaps so dirty, that the water won’t penetrate it. It is impossible to make a lather. Mlle Weil’s eyes are closed. It is the first time Genevieve has ever seen her without glasses, and it seems almost indecent, as if those eyes without glasses are too naked, too vulnerable. Genevieve hopes Mlle Weil will not open her eyes. If she does, Genevieve will turn her own eyes away.