Landfalls

by Naomi J. Williams

  So we are. That’s why the children are here, to accompany us to the country estate of my husband’s family. A long day’s coach ride to the southeast, La Bessière is a dull, restful place, perfect for cows, sheep, and children. Ordinarily I welcome the temporary respite from the narrow streets, petty town gossip, and love-starved penitents of Villefranche-de-Rouergue. I also look forward to the company of Jacques, our Bordeaux mastiff, a large, tranquil animal quite devoted to me. But we’re likely to be at La Bessière till the end of May. I can’t wait that long.

  “I’ll go to the office myself,” I say.

  “I need the carriage.”

  “I’ll walk.”

  “Jacquette. You can scarcely make it to the end of the street.”

  I look away, not wishing to give him the satisfaction of knowing he’s hurt me. Nor do I wish to be accused of manipulating him with womanly emotions. A hasty, scorching gulp of coffee brings more excusable tears to my eyes. “I’m going today,” I say, waving my hand before my scalded mouth.

  * * *

  The reception room to which we’re conveyed appears designed to make the perusal of government records as difficult and unpleasant as possible. The room manages to be both airless and cold, the light dim, the long oak table too high, the chairs hard and too low, the registry book a dense, cube-like tome, hard to open, and the handwriting in it crabbed and spidery. I end up standing and leaning over the table to get the proper distance from the page. My right hip aches with the effort.

  “Are you the one who wrote this?” I demand of the pimply young man who brought us the registry and stands fidgeting while we examine it.

  “I’m not sure, madame,” he says. “There are several clerks here.” He nervously pinches a bit of skin at his throat.

  I point to the entry. “This judgment was entered yesterday. The ink is barely dry. Don’t you recognize your own hand?”

  He peers down at the book, then clears his throat, pulling harder at his throat, as if that might help. “Yes, I—I believe that was me.”

  “Do you realize that you’ve written our name three times in three different ways?”

  “Madame?”

  “Look,” I command. He bends over the page. “Here, it’s ‘Lapeyrouse’ with a y. And here, ‘Lapeirouse’ with an i. And finally, here”—I jab the page—“it’s ‘La Peyrouse,’ two words. As it happens, not one of these is correct.”

  “I’m—I’m sorry,” he stammers. “I’m always very careful, and—”

  “And?”

  “And I very much need this position, madame.”

  “What did the official decree from the king say?”

  “It says exactly what this says.”

  “The king’s decree also wrote the name three different ways?”

  “No, madame—I’m sure it did not.”

  “I would like to see it.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “If you show us the decree, I will not complain to the head clerk about your orthographic inconstancy.”

  The young man, whose neck now sports an angry red welt, excuses himself from the room.

  Antoine, seated at the table, sighs. “Is this really necessary?”

  I ignore him, watching instead a cloud of motes swirling in a weak shaft of light coming through a high window. Does the light make visible the dust already present in the air, I wonder, or is the dust attracted to the light? As a child I used to ask such questions all the time. It drove my poor mother to distraction. But Jean-François would gamely try to satisfy my curiosity. “It’s too bad you’re not a boy, Jacquette,” he told me once. “You could become a great savant and make speeches before the Academy of Sciences.” The old questions still intrigue me, but I’ve stopped asking them aloud, much less expecting any answers.

  The young man returns with a superior, an entirely bald individual carrying a thin document case. Though obviously older than the first clerk, his age is impossible to guess: he might be an old man with an unlined face or a still-young man who’s lost his hair early.

  “Do you know who we are?” I ask him. Antoine stirs discontentedly beside me but says nothing.

  “Yes,” the bald man says. “Madame Dalmas. Your brother was the great navigator Lapérouse who was tragically lost at sea.”

  “Exactly. We’ve waited many years for permission to use his name.”

  “Yes, madame.” He coughs. “Now, how is it you believe the name ought to be written?”

  I spell it out for him: L-A-P-É-R-O-U-S-E. “That is how we spelled it when my brother was alive.”

  “I see.” He pulls a sheet from the document holder. “Now, as you’ll see from this copy of the royal decree, that is not the spelling authorized by His Majesty.”

  I hold it at arm’s length and read while Antoine looks over my shoulder:

  Louis, by the grace of God, King of France and Navarre, ordains the following: That the honorable Pierre-Jean-Antoine Dalmas, Philippe-François Dalmas, François-Marie-Léon Dalmas, Pierre-Antoine-Victor Dalmas, and Jean-François-Charles-Salvy de Barthès, be permitted to add to their names that of La Peyrouse.

  Paris, Tuileries Chateau, signed, Louis

  Well, there it is: La Peyrouse with a y, two words. And appended to—not in place of—our current family name. Did the spelling change every time a new person encountered it—or, in the case of our pimply clerk, every time it was encountered? Oh, how many men worked in mindless concert over a quarter century to mistake my lost brother’s name?

  But that isn’t all. I actually find myself preoccupied less with the name itself than with the list of people authorized to use it. It shouldn’t surprise me, of course—there they are, my husband, our three sons, and Victoire’s son, Charles. I know how the world works; I was just explaining it to Pierre yesterday. Names belong to men, while women belong to names. Yet I am surprised—and dismayed—to find myself and Victoire entirely absent from the judgment. Isn’t it by virtue of their connection to us, Jean-François’s sisters, that the men in our lives are permitted to take on his name? I can’t stifle a sigh as I hand the document back to the bald clerk.

  “Madame,” he says, “if I may make so bold, it is my belief that this spelling, with the y, is more in keeping with the family’s Languedocian roots.”

  I stare hard at him until he blushes right to the top of his smooth pate.

  “Of course, the family may submit a petition asking that the spelling be altered,” he quickly adds. “But that may take some time.”

  * * *

  Sometimes a husband knows when to remain silent: an occasional gift of long marriage. Antoine says nothing as we drive, nothing when we stop before our house on the rue Basse Saint-Jean, nothing as he helps me down from the carriage and to our front door, only squeezing my hand by way of farewell before setting off on his errands.

  In the drawing room, the three older grandchildren look up with entirely-too-innocent faces from what looks like a hastily arranged game of piquet. “Grandmother!” Martiane calls out much too brightly. “Will you play with us?”

  “Where’s nurse?” I ask.

  “She still has a headache,” Delphine says.

  Still? She’s altogether too prone to headaches, this nurse.

  “And Pierre?” I ask.

  All three children shrug and won’t meet my eyes.

  “What happened?” I demand.

  “Nothing—” Delphine begins, but I put up my hand to silence her and point to Émile. At ten, he’s less practiced at dissembling than his older sister and cousin. Right now he’s visibly wriggling behind the hand he’s been dealt.

  “I don’t know,” the boy mumbles, fanning and unfanning his cards. “He’s just crying.”

  “And the three of you had nothing to do with that, I suppose.”

  Another collective shrug.

  I find Pierre sniffling in a far corner of the library, where he’s pulled several volumes of Diderot’s Encyclopedia from the shelves and is bent over an illustration s
howing two men fencing. “Are you going to challenge your cousins to a duel?” I ask.

  “Grandmother!” he cries. “Where were you?”

  I lower myself into a tufted settee. “City hall.”

  He sets the books aside and climbs up next to me. “They chased me and called me ‘Levain Pêche-louche.’”

  “What for?”

  He slaps a fist against the cushion in frustration. “They’re making fun of me because I can’t be a Lapérouse.”

  “I see.” Pierre Louvain-Pescheloche. Levain Pêche-louche. Suspicious sourdough fishing? “It’s not a very imaginative insult,” I say.

  He folds his arms and pouts beside me. I can’t remember my siblings and me—or our cousins—teasing one another as much as my grandchildren do. Perhaps we were too busy trying not to die to indulge in such play. We had our nicknames, of course. As a small child, I’d been unable to pronounce “Jean-François.” “Sois, Sois, Sois,” I used to call him, following him around our house in Albi, commanding him to be. He in turn took to calling me by the last syllable of my name—“Quette,” or sometimes “Quette-quette.” Even when we were older, both married, he would call me that if we chanced to be alone.

  “Next time they make fun of you,” I say to Pierre, “tell them their name is wrong.”

  He looks up at me. “Wrong?”

  “It’s misspelled.”

  “Is that why you went to city hall?”

  “It is.”

  “And did you fix it?”

  His big round eyes are still watery but no longer sad. I never cease to be amazed by the rapidity with which children’s feelings change. Was I like this as a child—morose one moment and hopeful the next? “We have to ask the king to fix it,” I explain.

  “So why don’t you?”

  “We can, Pierre. But it may take a very long time.” Indeed, it exhausts me just thinking of it. Our original petition was sent to King Louis XVI. Then resubmitted to the National Assembly. Then Emperor Napoleon. And finally, after the Restoration, to the current king, Louis XVIII. “It took twenty-five years to get permission to use the name in the first place,” I muse aloud. “How many years will it take to fix the spelling?”

  “I don’t know,” Pierre says. “How many?”

  I shrug, conscious of imitating the other grandchildren.

  “Another twenty-five years?” he says.

  “Could be.”

  “How old will I be then?”

  “You tell me, Pierre.”

  He doesn’t have to think long. He may be tiresome, but at least he’s not stupid. “Thirty-two!”

  “You’ll be a grown man.”

  “And how old will you be?”

  “Me?” I laugh. “I’ll be long dead.”

  Pierre falls silent for a moment, then tugs at my sleeve. I expect him to say something sentimental and childish—perhaps expressing the hope that I will never die. Or making an outrageous guess at my age: “Two hundred?” But instead he says, “Grandmother, did you find out if you could give me the name too?”

  “Oh, child,” I say, my heart pulled between impatience and sympathy. “It’s not mine to give. The king didn’t grant me or Aunt Victoire permission to use the name. That went only to our husbands and sons.”

  “But you said—”

  “Enough talk of names,” I say. I haul myself to my feet, groaning with the effort. Every day it gets a little harder to stand up from a chair, to raise myself out of bed, to fight the downward pull of the earth.

  * * *

  After lunch, I send for a cab, no mean task in our town. When it finally arrives, it’s an equipage so shabby I’m embarrassed to be seen in it. But it can’t be helped. “Take me to the chapel of the Pénitents Bleus,” I tell the driver, a droopy man who bears an alarming resemblance to his horse. When we get to the chapel entrance on the rue du Sénéchal, I instruct him to ring at the side door and tell Père Armand that Madame de Lapérouse is there.

  The chapel looks much like other such chapels—a simple rectangular box symmetrically punctuated by stained-glass windows and topped with a lanterned dome. Antoine and I owned the building for a time, acquiring it in 1796—the Year Four, we were obliged to call it then—when the misbegotten Republic was filling its empty coffers by selling off church properties. I had joined the lay order after marrying Antoine and moving to Villefranche-de-Rouergue, and hated to think of the building being turned into a theater or tavern—or worse, falling into the hands of our rivals, the upstart Pénitents Noirs. After the horrors of the Revolution finally abated, we had the building restored, then donated it to the association. It flourishes in its way—we have our own priest who reads Mass once daily and twice on Sundays, and every September our people lead the procession on the feast day of St. Jerome. Last year I was named the chapel’s “prioress,” which sounds very ecclesiastical and even a little nunnish but really just means I have the thankless task of collecting dues from wealthy-enough members who seem to believe that the Christian duty of stewardship does not apply to them. When some of these same individuals fawn over my husband after Mass, it’s all I can do to keep from flinging my missal at their heads.

  I compensate myself for these vexations by coming to the chapel whenever I need solitude. Père Armand and I have an understanding about this. And indeed, here he is, coming through the double front doors and bounding down the steps to help me out of the shabby carriage. I lean on his shoulder as I step out, struck as always by the firmness of the muscles I can feel through his brown serge.

  “I’m delighted to see you, Madame de Lapérouse,” he says. A clever young man who knows exactly where his stipend comes from, Père Armand has always called me Madame de Lapérouse in private and Madame Dalmas in front of my family.

  “It’s now Madame Dalmas de Lapérouse,” I tell him.

  “Indeed?” He takes my arm to help me up the four shallow steps to the entrance. “It’s official, then?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Not so much a name change as a name … enhancement, as it turns out. And they’ve misspelled Lapérouse.” I try to say this lightly, but my voice unaccountably catches.

  “Oh, madame.”

  The sympathy in his voice nearly makes me burst into tears. “It’s nothing,” I say as briskly as I can manage. “What can one expect, after all? We had our little revolution, but they killed all the wrong people. The bureaucrats remain our oppressors.”

  He guides me up the remaining steps and into the building. The place never fails to soothe me. It’s the resonant silence of the long, narrow sanctuary with its unadorned stone walls. It’s the tamed light streaming through the eight hexagonal stained-glass windows. It’s the satisfaction of knowing that something pleasing in the world exists because of my money and my effort. It’s also the sureness of the young priest’s hand under my elbow as he escorts me to the tiny side-chapel at the back of the nave, my favorite spot in the building. It’s the comfort of having someone in my life who knows what I need without being asked.

  Père Armand helps me to the iron rail, waits while I light a candle, then leads me to the small wooden stool kept there for my especial use. I shut my eyes against the pain in my hip as I ease myself down. At home, this ache is a depressing reminder of my physical deterioration, but here it feels more purposeful, as if it were part of my devotional practice. When it subsides, I open my eyes. I can hear Armand’s footfalls receding as he retreats to the apse. Before me, a simple white vase filled with jonquils graces the plain oak altar. No doubt left over from Easter Sunday, the bright yellow flowers seem to emit their own light and warmth.

  Éléonore would love this, I think, my mind turning again, unbidden, to Jean-François’s wife. She had excelled at the simple flower arrangement. Whenever I visited her in Albi, she had something in every room—a glassful of woodland flowers she’d picked on a walk, a bouquet of roses spilling from a pitcher, camellia blossoms floating in a bowl. Not that I visited all that often. Villefranche-de-Rouergue is a half-day�
�s journey from Albi. And we were never intimate, she and I. None of us had approved of the marriage, of course. She didn’t hold that against us, for she wasn’t a resentful person, and anyway, she could hardly blame us. She was a Creole, for goodness’ sake—the daughter of a hospital administrator in Île de France. Once Jean-François left, the distance between all of us became harder to ignore. When she eventually decamped for Paris, we were relieved, I think Éléonore not least of all.

  I last saw her in 1803, back in Albi, on the occasion of my niece’s marriage. I hadn’t seen Éléonore in some years and was shocked by the change in her appearance. She’d grown skinny and pale, her steps slow, her breathing labored. She wasn’t yet fifty but looked older. It rather confirmed a theory I had, that while childbirth aged women in their earlier years, women who’d never had children more than made up for it later. It’s not an idea I dwell on much these days; a woman who’s survived to seventy looks old regardless.

  Weddings don’t, as a rule, allow for much in the way of meaningful conversation with others. I spent most of that week managing Victoire’s nerves by pretending to care about every little setback; in mollifying me, the mother of the bride rose above each problem, a model of calm and grace. But one afternoon, Éléonore and I found ourselves alone and unoccupied in my sister’s drawing room. After dispensing with pointless pleasantries about the bride and groom’s prospects for lasting happiness, an awkward silence fell between us, broken even more awkwardly when a maid appeared with a tea tray and said, “I thought you might like some tea, Madame de Lapérouse,” and we both said, “Thank you.”

  Éléonore looked up, her blue eyes regarding me with a kind of surprised empathy. I’d never told her that Victoire and I had petitioned to use Jean-François’s name, much less that we’d already started using it in Albi, where people knew us first as Jean-François’s sisters and secondarily as our husbands’ wives. Antoine said we ought to seek Éléonore’s blessing before submitting the petition, but I hadn’t seen the need for that. It was only her name by marriage, and a brief enough marriage at that.