Landfalls

by Naomi J. Williams

  What looked like a wall was really just a thick curtain and parted easily at his touch, revealing a path beyond. Stepping through, he felt like the prince in the story of Sleeping Beauty. But no castle of enchanted sleepers awaited at the end—just a humble leaf-and-wood structure smaller than the hut he shared with Oriela. He ducked into its entrance and stood, listening to the dense silence while his eyes adjusted to the darkness. And then he saw them—shelf upon shelf of skulls, arranged in tidy rows from floor to ceiling, some forty or fifty altogether, joined in the unbreakable spell of death.

  Everything about the place surprised him—its nearness to the village; the care with which the structure was maintained; the deliberation with which each skull, some decorated with seashell rings, had been placed within; the ease with which he was able to identify the fourteen newest skulls, nestled on their own shelf, as belonging to his shipmates. Most were cracked or broken, evidence of the violent ends they had met. He wondered for one pulse-racing moment if honor required him to avenge their deaths, even if it meant, as it surely would, that he too would die. He recoiled at the thought of what this would mean for Oriela, for Iri, for his friends on the island, like Alu. Then he noticed that many of the other skulls in the house were marked by similar injuries, and he began to understand that this was where the villagers placed those who had fallen in battle, friends and enemies alike.

  He did not tell Oriela what he had seen, and she did not ask. He asked no more about Oriela’s parentage. He never mentioned the broken cross, which he never replaced. Oriela never asked about Iri’s hair. He did announce his daughter’s name, and the villagers stopped calling her Half-Child. He would continue to hope for rescue, to long for a return to France, but neither he nor Oriela spoke again of the English frigate that had sailed past the island. No other ship returned during their lifetime.

  Their Paeu neighbors knew everything, of course. They knew Vo had tried to make off with the head elder’s canoe, a story that became funnier with each retelling. They knew Vo had learned about the skull house. At first they feared he might try to avenge his people, but after a few restless nights, the men sleeping with knives under their mats, the fear spent itself, and then it seemed laughable to think that the pale, skinny man who had agreed to take Oriela might act against them. For a few days, little work got done as everyone ignored their weaving and fish traps and taro patches to watch the ocean for another ship. But before long, they resumed their more pressing occupations and amusements. One of the boys thought it would be funny to shout “Vaso!” and watch everyone come running, but after the third time he did it, his older sister pinched him very hard, and he never did it again.

  THIRTEEN

  PERMISSION

  Villefranche-de-Rouergue, France, April 1816

  Isn’t it enough to bear the twin indignities of womanhood and old age without also having to fix the mistakes of men? Take, for instance, the mishandling of my late brother’s name. How many different governments have we petitioned for permission to use it? Now the permission is finally granted, but the name is misspelled. My husband, our eldest son, Victor, and our youngest son, François, attended the tribunal at city hall where the name change was officially registered—and didn’t even notice! Indeed, they returned in high spirits, my husband shouting to the household to come greet the “Messieurs Dalmas de Lapérouse!” I was the only one who heard—I’d banished the four visiting grandchildren to the garden—and after making my way to the library, I find the three of them practicing their new names on the expensive writing paper.

  Pierre-Jean-Antoine Dalmas de Lapeyrouse

  Pierre-Antoine-Victor Dalmas de Lapeyrouse

  Philippe-François Dalmas de Lapeyrouse

  “There’s no y,” I say.

  “What do you mean, my dear?” my husband asks. He peers at me through a fringe of thick hair like a graying schoolboy.

  “It should be an e with an accent.” I draw the letter in the air before them.

  Antoine and our sons look at one another, then Victor points to the paper before them. “Mother, this is the official spelling,” he says. “The magistrate at the tribunal—he showed us.”

  I turn to my husband. “How could you fail to notice it was misspelled?”

  “Lapérouse with an e, Lapeyrouse with a y,” Antoine says. “What difference does it make?”

  “It makes a great deal of difference.”

  “How?”

  “One is correct and the other is not.”

  Antoine raises his hands in a familiar gesture of exasperation.

  “And I thought we were dropping ‘Dalmas,’” I add, knowing I’m going too far but unable to resist.

  “Oh, now you’re ashamed of my name?” he says, then strides from the room. I watch him go, jealous of his still youthful gait.

  My sons look at me reproachfully. “Why do you do that, Mother?” François says. “We thought you would be pleased. Isn’t this what you wanted, you and Aunt Victoire?”

  I pick up the piece of paper on which my husband has been practicing his new, misspelled name. “This is not how we wrote it,” I say. The sheet flutters in my hand, evidence of an intermittent palsy that began a few years ago, after my seventieth birthday.

  “Don’t you mean this is not how you’ve been writing it?” Victor says.

  “What are you talking about?”

  He takes my hand and stills it, then extricates the sheet from between my fingers. His own hands are large and rough and unexpected: the hands not just of a grown man, but of a man no longer young. “Mother,” he says, “we all know that whenever you’re back in Albi with Aunt Victoire—or anywhere away from the rest of us—or with your fellow Pénitents Bleus—you call yourself Madame de Lapérouse.”

  “And why shouldn’t I?”

  Victor exchanges a glance with François, then looks pointedly back at me, as if he can think of any number of reasons why I shouldn’t. “Well, now you’re officially Madame Dalmas de Lapeyrouse,” he says, holding the page before me. “Does the exact spelling really matter?”

  I think of the many letters I wrote to my brother over the years, addressed at first to Jean-François de Galaup de Lapérouse, marine, and later, ensign, then years later, in quick succession, lieutenant, captain, commodore. At some point, although he never officially received the title, we began referring to him as Count. The Count de Lapérouse. That’s what most people say nowadays when they speak of him. Jean-François himself was careless about spelling, signing his name as one word or two, with or without the accent, ignoring capitalization, just as he pleased. But I was always careful. The name had been my idea, after all. No one remembers this now, but it’s true. “Jean-François needs a finer name,” I said one night after we knew he was going to the naval school in Brest. And so it was. After my father wrote to the right people and paid the right fee, Jean-François de Galaup became Jean-François de Galaup de Lapérouse, ready to hold his own among the sons of the best families in France.

  “Of course it matters,” I say to Victor, snatching back the paper.

  The children rush in at this moment—Antoine has apparently gone outside and instructed them to see their grandmother straightaway about their new names. I hate being accosted by the children, and Antoine knows it. But perhaps I deserve this. In our long marriage, we have both come to excel at the small, tailored acts of revenge.

  “We have a new name?” Victor’s daughter Delphine shouts, standing too close. “Is it Lapérouse? It is, isn’t it? I knew it!” At eleven years old, she’s already taller than I am. Her brown ringlets dance in my face. The other children crowd around as well, bouncing and hollering. Someone is stepping on my dress.

  “Victor!” I call over their heads. “Make them settle down.”

  “Where is their nursemaid?” he asks. So typical—a man’s first impulse when asked to help in a domestic matter is to see if there isn’t someone else on whom he can fob off the task.

  “She’s sick!”

&n
bsp; He frowns as if it’s my fault that the woman I hired to help look after his daughter is ill, and it’s François, my unmarried, childless son, who intervenes. “Delphine,” he calls, drawing his niece away. “You’re quite right. You are now Mademoiselle Delphine Dalmas de Lapérouse.”

  “Oh!” she cries, pleased by the additional syllables in her name. And she’s right: “Dalmas de Lapérouse” has a wonderful, patrician ring.

  Her twelve-year-old cousin, Martiane, our second son Léon’s child, visiting from Vannes, cries, “And me, Uncle?”

  He pats her pretty blond head. “You are now Mademoiselle Martiane Dalmas de Lapérouse.”

  “And me?” her younger brother Émile asks.

  “You, my lad, are Émile Dalmas de Lapérouse.”

  There is more bouncing and jollity. I take refuge in a nearby armchair, but the seat cushion is soft and my hip aches as I ease myself down. It will hurt even more when I get up.

  “What about me, Uncle? What about me?” squeals the youngest, seven-year-old Pierre, my daughter Julie’s son.

  François purses his lips thoughtfully. “Well, Pierre,” he says, “you are still Pierre Louvain-Pescheloche.”

  “Why? Why can’t I be Lapérouse too?”

  “Because Louvain-Pescheloche is your father’s name.”

  “But I want to be Lapérouse too!” he whines.

  “You can’t, Pierre,” Martiane scolds. “Don’t be a baby.” She sounds just like her mother, Léon’s carping wife, Jeanne.

  I have no time to retreat before Pierre throws himself at me, sobbing aloud that he wants to be a Lapérouse too. “Don’t be silly, Pierre,” I say, trying to pry him off of me, but my arthritic fingers are no match for his strong, plump hands.

  “It’s not fair!” he cries, burying his head in my lap.

  I have seven living grandchildren, and only Pierre is openly affectionate. Somehow he alone has failed to learn—or doesn’t care—that I have no habit of tenderness.

  I try to reason with him. I remind him that children get their names from their fathers, which for his cousins was, till today, Dalmas, and for him, Louvain-Pescheloche. He follows me thus far, and nods through my recitation of the familiar story of his great-uncle Jean-François, who died while commanding a great voyage of exploration for the glory of France and had no children to carry on his name. But when I get to the part about how Grandfather and I petitioned the king for permission to use the name so it wouldn’t die out, Pierre refuses to understand why it can only be appended to the name Dalmas.

  “Because,” I say, “the permission was granted to the sisters of Lapérouse—that’s me and your great-aunt Victoire—and to their husbands and sons.”

  “Aunt Victoire?” Pierre says. “She’s not a Dalmas.”

  “No, she has her late husband’s name, Barthès.”

  “Then why—?”

  “Because Jean-François was our brother, mine and hers.”

  He falls silent, but his large brown eyes look off into the distance, following some line of argument. It makes me nervous, watching him think. “So,” he says at length, “you and Aunt Victoire get the name—and give it to your husbands—and they give it to their sons.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Then why do Delphine and Martiane get the name?” he asks. “They’re not sons.”

  “Well, they have their father’s names till they marry.”

  He looks at the ceiling, thinking again. “Then,” he says deliberately, “why can’t my mother get the name from Grandfather, like Delphine and Martiane from their fathers, then give it to my father, like you are giving the name to Grandfather?” A triumphant smile spreads over his tear-stained face.

  “What? No, Pierre, that’s not how it’s done.”

  “Why not?” he cries, more in anger than sorrow.

  “Oh, that’s enough,” I say. “You’re giving me a headache.” I sweep him off my lap, then try to get up to call for the maid.

  Antoine has returned to the library and is watching me, amused as always by my discomfiture. “Madame Dalmas de Lapérouse,” he says, pulling the bell he knows I was trying to reach, then bowing with a show at gallantry. “Come, children,” he calls, making his way back to the writing desk. “Let’s practice writing our new names. Your grandmother has one way of writing it, but the gentleman at city hall showed us another, which will suit us just as well.”

  This draws the three older children away but unleashes a new wave of misery from Pierre, who clings once more to my skirts. “You’re too old for this!” I cry, pushing him away. “Stop sniveling!” Even a seventy-four-year-old woman may have a favorite dress she wishes to keep safe from the depredations of a grandchild’s runny nose.

  When the maid finally arrives, I instruct her to take Pierre away and divert him for at least an hour. Leaning back in the armchair, I close my eyes against Pierre’s receding wails and the boisterous, inky enjoyment of the other grandchildren with their new names. Antoine always says I should be grateful for the clamor of children. “It’s a sign of life, Jacquette,” he used to tell me when our own children were small and loud. And when I complain now about noisy grandchildren, he says, “My dear, we have descendants.” I know he’s right, but—well, can one be grateful for a thing without liking it?

  My own childhood was so quiet, I never learned to tolerate the ordinary din of family life. We were nearly always in mourning. Jean-François was the eldest, and I was next, and Victoire the youngest, but between me and Victoire there had been seven others—four sisters and three brothers—all dead by eighteen. And then Jean-François, to disappear like that, he and all his men, somewhere in the trackless South Pacific—

  I know how and where my other siblings died. And my own dear child Louis, gone after only a year. And Victor’s middle two, both boys, between his oldest son and Delphine. I know where they’re buried, I can lay flowers at their headstones if I wish, and I don’t feel so sad about them anymore. But of Jean-François I know nothing, nothing at all. And I can never completely surrender to grief, because even after a quarter century, there’s still a fool’s hope that he may return. This—this is mourning that never quite begins and therefore never ends.

  Ten of us, and only Victoire and I are still alive, with families of our own. Yes, I’m grateful. Of course I am. But perhaps I may be excused for preferring quiet.

  * * *

  After dinner, Antoine retires to the library to read, Victor and Delphine return to their home on the rue du Marteau, and François entertains the other children. I believe he’s teaching them how to play faro for small coins. I don’t like gambling, but I’m too tired to disapprove, so retreat to my own room to write a letter to Victoire. I can’t make too much of the misspelling: if I do, she’ll try to persuade me that it’s not important. But by casually mentioning it—“By the way, the name has been recorded as ‘Lapeyrouse’”—I’m sure of securing her as an ally in my outrage. In this way I’ve managed my younger sister for more than fifty years.

  After I finish the letter, my maid Thérèse comes in to help me undress. I send her away before she can start brushing my hair. She’s too rough—the brush is always cobwebbed with silver afterward. But even passing the brush gently over my own head does little to stem the thinning. Antoine, three years my senior, has more hair now than I do; he’s not even had the decency to gray completely. It’s terrible to look older than one’s husband. On Sundays after Mass at our chapel, I endure the greetings of scores of female parishioners, members, all of them, of our lay confraternal association, the Pénitents Bleus, their eyes lingering over Antoine’s still-youthful face and figure while darting resentfully in my direction, wondering that I am still alive. The widows and spinsters are the worst, but married women do it too, and occasionally, a man.

  Peering into the dressing table mirror, I try drawing what hair I have back over my forehead, and suddenly remember, with a stab of envy, Jean-François’s wife, Éléonore. His widow, I should say, tho
ugh she never called herself that, even after she’d given up hoping for his return. His late widow, actually. She died—it must be nine or ten years ago, in Paris, where she’d moved to be closer to news of Jean-François. News that never arrived, of course. A genteel woman, despite the disadvantages of her birth. She used to wear her hair pulled back. It was so thick it added a handbreadth to her height. When she powdered it, people told her she looked like the queen. That was before the queen lost her own head, of course. When Éléonore herself was still young, before she’d stopped waiting for Jean-François, when she still hoped to have children of her own one day.

  I lean toward the glass and try again to arrange my hair the way she once did. But on me, the effect is ghoulish. I blow out the candle to erase the image, then grope my way in the darkness toward bed and forgetting, not even bothering to say my prayers.

  * * *

  “Good morning, Madame Dalmas de Lapérouse,” Antoine says with a grin when I come down the next day. I can’t tell if he’s trying to restore harmony between us by addressing me this way—or making sure he fires the first salvo in an ongoing clash. Another symptom of long marriage: every statement may be taken kindly or unkindly.

  “I wish to go to the civil records office this morning,” I announce. It’s worth saying just to see my husband’s smile vanish.

  “What for, my dear?”

  I sit down. A servant brings me coffee. I blow lightly over the surface and take a sip. “Too much chicory,” I call to the retreating servant, then look across at Antoine. “I wish to see for myself how the name is written.”

  He sets down his own coffee with a show of exaggerated patience. “I can’t take you today,” he says. “I have too much to do. Remember we’re leaving for La Bessière tomorrow.”