Love & Death in Burgundy

by Susan C. Shea

  Two crude, ten-foot-tall puppets led the villagers, their papier-mâché faces and sloppy costumes causing laughter and applause. “What are they supposed to be?” Michael said.

  “Women, maybe saints? Although they don’t look very holy to me,” Katherine said.

  Behind the figures was a rudimentary float, a truck with an open back on which two old men dressed as women sat holding on to the equipment that was providing the sound. They held up wineglasses as they sang, or, rather, yelled, along with the music.

  “Can you make out what they’re singing?” Katherine said, as much to herself as to Michael. The quality of the speakers was so bad—loud and fuzzy—that Katherine couldn’t catch the words of the song. The live chorus belting out the words on the street in back of the truck wasn’t much better. But it was a parade, and parades always made her want to rush into the crowd and become part of the moment. She straightened her back, tilted her head to one side, and began a jaunty shuffle and riff step in her hard-soled boots, hampered by the flea market finds she was holding. Grinning at the passing crowd, she was feeling part of the fun until a pinch-faced woman standing nearby looked sharply at her, and the moment was spoiled. She stilled her feet and felt, as she was wont to do when faced with seeming disapproval, foolish and old. The feeling didn’t go away when the woman took off down the street in the opposite direction from the raggedy rows of cross-dressing men.

  The dancers were exclusively men dressed as bizarre parodies of females. The large group danced in formation, having rehearsed some vague choreography that called for periodically waving one leg in the air in unison and throwing their arms high above wigged heads. Most of the heavily made-up men carried old-fashioned pocketbooks, which were either slipped into their armpits or swung wildly around their heads when they raised their arms, causing bystanders to duck and howl with laughter. Wine had been drunk and inhibitions set aside, and the result, Katherine decided, was not what she looked for in a summer fête.

  Suddenly, a hand grabbed her arm and she almost lost the pincushion.

  “Mme Goff,” roared a six-foot-tall character in a red wig, a tentlike dress, and a frightening smear of brilliant orange lipstick.

  Squinting, Katherine looked up at the clownish figure. Could it be—yes, it was—the nice mechanic who had brought their Citroën back to life at least twice last year. “Is that you, Nick? Look, Michael,” she said, determined not to be stuck with a drunken car repairman on her own. But Nick-the-Female had already broken contact and was prancing across the road, joining hands with another fellow and shouting out the refrain of the song with glee.

  Looking at the goods being offered from people’s closets and attics was impossible in the chaos and she was about to suggest to Michael that they give up and go home. But at that moment a particularly loud uproar from the bystanders made her turn. A young man, swarthy and muscular behind his platinum tresses and five-o’clock shadow, had begun a flirtatious dance with someone on the sidelines. The dancer grinned, tossed back his mane of ill-fitting hair, and stroked his huge false breasts, which were set, Katherine noted, so high on his chest as to be a joke in themselves. He shimmied over to his target on high-heeled shoes, mincing as the tight skirt hobbled his normal movements.

  Whomever he was pretending to romance reached out and grabbed at the breasts. The dancer mugged in pretend horror, holding his handbag up as if to hit the lecher.

  “Michael, look. Isn’t that Brett fooling around with the guy in drag?” At this moment, in the heat of the afternoon and with the adrenaline of the crowd feeding him, the teenager’s cheeks were flushed, his lips were rosy, and his hair flopped over his forehead. He reminded Katherine of the surly models that decorated perfume ads for scents with names like Perversion and Trouble. The bystanders clapped and the dancer skittered back, still smiling and waggling a finger to admonish his would-be seducer as he melted back into the line of dancers moving down the street in a loose rhythm, shouting out their song. “Betty Lou and J.B. must be around. We should say hi.” But Michael was half a block away, moving in the other direction.

  “Too crowded,” was all he said over his shoulder. Katherine didn’t protest. He was right, and, anyway, once her husband made up his mind, he was unlikely to budge. The route away from the parade was quieter, and Katherine had time to consider buying a hat (too loose on her head), a pair of gloves (too tight on her hands), and a pair of garden boots (so large she couldn’t take a step in them) before the tables set up against the stone houses tapered off and then disappeared.

  Later, as they wove their way among the cars parked in someone’s field, Katherine saw a knot of teenagers clustered near the far corner, screeching with laughter. “It’s the Hollidays’ boy again. What’s he doing?” she said, reaching out to tap Michael’s arm. The boy had taken off his shirt, his hair had fallen onto his face, and while she watched, he upended a beer bottle and drank deeply. Someone in the group whooped and tried to grab the bottle, but the boy lifted it out of reach with one hand while lowering his other shoulder and butting the other kid. All of a sudden, the chatter turned into something more urgent.

  “Michael,” Katherine began.

  “No, Kay.” Obviously, he had seen it too. “They’re old enough to deal with it themselves. From what J.B. and Betty Lou say, he’s due for a lesson. J.B. will be around somewhere.” He unlocked their car, slid into the driver’s seat, and started the engine. She had no choice but to duck into her seat.

  As they pulled away and bounced down the makeshift lane between the cars, she twisted her head to watch the group. A shoving match had broken out and she got a glimpse of the bare-chested American boy glaring at someone. Then she saw J.B., immediately recognizable by his Hawaiian shirt, heading over to the group. A few other people in the vicinity had turned to watch.

  “Poor Betty Lou,” Katherine said as they left the town behind them and zoomed along a narrow back road between plowed fields. “I don’t envy her.

  “I meant to ask you. You said Betty Lou’s music isn’t popular anymore. Then why is she making another album?”

  “It’s the style that’s gone out of fashion—country music without rock. Still, she’s the best of her kind still recording, and she has a core of fans who’ll buy anything she puts out. She’s an icon, like Tammy Wynette or Dolly Parton. J.B. and I are trying to persuade her to move a little toward country rock. She’s a pro and she still has a great sound.”

  Katherine heard the warmth in her husband’s response and a little voice inside her wondered if it was too late to take singing lessons. Michael respected her for her commitment to painting, but it was hard to tell if he liked the work or was merely being supportive of her for trying. She picked at the fringe of her new shawl. “Then I guess we’ll be spending more time with them?”

  “I wouldn’t mind getting a shot at recording something with her,” Michael said, “but I have to wait and see. We need more time before J.B. says we’re ready, if he ever does.”

  Katherine opened her mouth but couldn’t figure out what to say. She was afraid of sounding too eager and making him feel worse later if it came to nothing. Again. Still, her husband and the singer were spending a lot of time together, in the intimate way musicians do when they’re making music. Fortunately, Betty Lou was not as pretty as her voice. Michael had always liked pretty women, and the fact that he was five years his wife’s junior, which hadn’t mattered a thing when they fell in love, had begun to make her a little self-conscious at odd moments. She reached up and smoothed her hair away from her forehead, lifted her chin, and sat up straighter. Yes, she wanted Michael to have another chance. He had suffered more than he would admit. But she had an uneasy feeling about these summer visitors who seemed destined to be part of their lives, at least for a few months. She would be careful not to ally herself too closely with them. Mme Pomfort would be watching.

  CHAPTER 12

  Jeannette wiped the dirt from Mme Pomfort’s vegetable bed off the stolen tomato before
biting into it. Juice squirted onto her T-shirt, but no matter. She would rinse the shirt in the morning. It was quiet tonight. The stars were visible when you turned away from the cluster of houses with lights on and looked instead over the fields. Late night was her favorite time in the summer. It was warm, her brothers were in bed, and her father was usually at the café or home sleeping off the wine he’d drunk. People had their inside lights on and their windows open, which made spying easier. No one suspected she was entertaining herself this way.

  She grinned. She was probably the only one in Reigny who knew that the husband and wife who moved into his family’s old farmhouse and were trying to start a cheese business had just found out they were going to have a baby. She had had to stuff her hand into her mouth, hidden behind the oleander bush outside their parlor window, to keep from laughing out loud when the husband put his big ear against his wife’s belly and cried when she told him the news.

  Mme Pomfort had been watching Danse avec les Stars and eating strawberries, holding each berry up to the light of her table lamp to inspect it with a deep frown before popping it in her mouth.

  Yves’s house was dark, but there wasn’t anything to see in any case since he lived upstairs, above what had been the parlor and dining room but was now his bookstore. When she had started dropping in for lack of anything better to do, he had explained that he didn’t have children’s books or magazines, or anything she might like to read. She had stolen a book anyway. It wasn’t so bad, old-fashioned, but a good story about a mysterious masked man who was in prison for years and who turned out to be the twin brother of the king of France. It had been handy to know about because she could tell it to the little ones before bedtime and get them to quiet down. She had memorized the author’s name so that if she had the chance, she could pinch another story by him.

  She avoided spying on the witch’s house at the far end of the village. It sat at the bottom of a long, wooded driveway and the back end of the house seemed to disappear into the forest of the Morvan. The forest was a bad place to go, filled with ghosts of the fighters killed there by the Boche in the war, her father once told her. The witch was really only a strange lady who spoke English with a funny accent and who had a hundred cats—well, maybe not a hundred, but a lot. One night, though, when Jeannette had gotten up her courage and tiptoed down to look in a window from across the grass, the woman had looked out, right into Jeannette’s eyes. Then she smiled and waved as if to say, “Come here.” Jeannette had run all the way up the driveway, up the street, and home without stopping, frightened by what she couldn’t say. She hadn’t been down there at night since, and though the woman drove past her at top speed often in her red car, she never seemed to see Jeannette and never waved at her again. She hadn’t seemed so scary at Katherine’s lunch party. Maybe her evil side came out only at night.

  Thinking about that scary night, she shivered as she walked up the street toward the sharp curve in the road, taking care to step only on the grass so she wouldn’t make noise.

  One of her favorite stops on her nighttime prowls was Mme and M. Goff’s house. They usually sat on their patio with a light on, and if Katherine wasn’t talking or reading aloud, he was playing the guitar softly and singing. Her mood lightened as she walked. Jeannette knew who he really was, of course. Like the man in the mask, he was in a kind of disguise, pretending to be nobody when he was really a famous rock-and-roll singer. Her suspicions were confirmed when Brett’s father arrived to start recording an album in secret. Why else would they be here?

  Brett had not told her much except that his mother was a professional singer who used to be famous before he was born. He told her that at their home in America, there were big posters of his mother on the walls. She was thin then, Brett said, and had dark hair down to her waist. There were pictures of her with famous people; at least Brett said they were famous. Most of the names meant nothing to Jeannette although she’d never admit it. But Mick Jagger, yes, she knew about him, of course. Mick Jagger, the Rolling Stones. Think of it, Brett’s mother was friends with the Stones, and now she was Brett’s girlfriend and Michael’s friend, also, and Michael was Brett’s mother’s friend, which proved Michael was famous. Maybe Reigny was not such a bad place to live.

  She melted into the overgrown lilacs that bordered Katherine’s fenced garden. The lilacs were finished blooming, but roses spilled over the fence and scented the air. Before the Goffs planted them, Jeannette and the older of her brothers used to climb the fence. Now, the roses had too many sharp thorns and the gate creaked, which made the dogs bark, so if she couldn’t climb into the pear tree unobserved, like she did sometimes at night, she couldn’t get closer to the house.

  The dogs must be sleeping, she thought, as she sat on the stone step below the gate to listen. The words of the song he was singing softly were in English and his odd accent made it hard for her to understand what they were. But the music was so cool, like something you’d hear on a CD or watch a band perform on TV. Katherine’s voice cut into the song, and she sounded upset. “J.B. must have gotten to you. You’ve been singing that for the last hour.”

  He said something that Jeannette couldn’t hear, then Katherine spoke again. “Have you thought about how we’ll fund a trip back? Will J.B. pay for it as part of the promotion?”

  “He’ll have to even if he takes it out of profits from the tour. But I’m not sure I can do it. What about the dogs?”

  There was silence for a minute and then Jeannette heard Katherine’s laugh, which sounded like a pony she once rode at a traveling fair. “You’re joking. You are joking, aren’t you? Turn down a chance to poke a stick in Eric’s eye because of the dogs?”

  Jeannette wasn’t sure she’d heard right about hitting someone with a stick, but then she heard her own name.

  “Jeannette can feed and walk the dogs. The girl could use a little spending money of her own. God knows her father’s not giving her any.” And after something else Michael said that Jeannette couldn’t hear even though she had crept up so close a rose thorn was poking into her hair, “She’s plenty capable. She looks after those boys on her own, and she’s almost fifteen. Anyway, we’ll worry about that when we come to it. The important thing is this is your chance, darling, and you have to take it.”

  The guitar playing had stopped and Jeannette heard a chair scraping back on the patio stones and then the kitchen door banging shut. The Goffs had retreated to their house and from here it was impossible to follow what they were saying. To make it worse, the door squeaked open again and she heard the snuffling sounds of the dogs headed down the path to the garden gate. Silently, Jeannette slipped away, back down the street. Take care of those dogs? She wasn’t sure she liked the idea, but the money, yes. It would be nice to have money of her own. Maybe she’d buy a new dress or save for a bus ticket to the Riviera, if buses went there.

  That reminded her of Brett. She wondered if Brett knew that his father had gone to see the German man in the château the night he died. It had been so late that the living room lights in all the houses in the center of Reigny were out. But Brett’s family were staying in a big house farther out, one she never spied on because it would have been too long a walk in the dark to get there and back. She had ducked off the road and into the trees opposite the Bellegardes’ driveway when she saw the car lights approaching. But Brett had said nothing about his father having been there, so Jeannette decided not to mention it for now. She didn’t want to upset Brett, and he had already made a sarcastic remark about her creeping around.

  She yawned. Nothing more to see tonight, and the little ones would be jumping on her bed early in the morning, always wanting to eat and to be entertained. Time to go home.

  CHAPTER 13

  Katherine was preparing a salad of new potatoes, red and white rocket-shaped radishes, and the fat white asparagus she had splurged on at the outdoor market in Avallon. She had also indulged her taste buds with two delicious, lumpy “sausage of the Morvan” at the charcu
terie, seduced by the twinkling owner, whose brisk, smiling wife had wrapped them up in white paper before Katherine could think about the damage to her shopping budget. There was a knock on the door. She finished unwrapping a little pillow of goat cheese, a tangy crottin de chevre, and looked up. It was still early enough that the morning sun was shining behind the visitor. It took Katherine a moment to recognize Sophie Bellegarde.

  “Bonjour, Sophie,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron and steering the young woman to the wicker chairs under the pear tree since there was not enough room to invite her into the tiny kitchen. She was curious. Sophie had never been very social and, since her disappointment with Yves, wasn’t friendly because, Katherine surmised, she believed the Americans were sure to be on Penny’s side in the romantic tug-of-war over Yves’s affection.

  “I had to talk to someone who knows what’s going on. I hope you don’t mind,” Sophie said. “My mother has decided we will both be murdered in our beds, the woman who owns the boulangerie in the next village was muttering about Gypsies when I went in for a baguette, and Father’s office has called to say they need someone to sign for a shipment of wheel bearings coming in from Frankfurt. I’m not sure I can cope with anything more.”

  “You poor dear,” Katherine said, mostly because Sophie’s manner made it clear that was what she was supposed to say. Sophie’s sense of the unfairness of the world must have been boosted immeasurably by the events of the last few days. She looked as though she had fallen down some stairs herself. Her shoulder-length hair was straggly, her beige cardigan hung off one shoulder, and there were mascara streaks under her eyes. Katherine wondered if she had deliberately avoided refreshing her lipstick. There was something a bit stagey about her condition of dishabille, the sort of half-dressed look a suffering ingenue would aspire to in an off-Broadway play, only Sophie was hardly an ingenue.