by Aimee Phan
The only area Hoa avoided was Hung’s desk in the spare room. He specifically requested she not come near it when he was away from the apartment. He had been the same way about his study in their house in Nha Trang, which irritated Hoa. The entire study, which was a pleasant space—good windows with afternoon sun—would collect dust and he wouldn’t care. Hung and Hoa shared the spare room, half of it his office, the other half her knitting and prayer space. Though Hung hardly kept anything on the desktop, Hoa couldn’t help but linger over that corner of the room. The items of significance, his journals and letter correspondence, which he’d carried over on the boat and protected all those months in the refugee camp, lay secure in one of the three drawers on the right side.
There was no padlock. Hoa easily could have read all she pleased. But she knew that Hung would find out. It had happened once, early in their marriage. Hoa did not ever wish to incur that level of wrath again.
Still, she felt free to privately speculate about the journals and letters. She assumed they contained information about his business dealings, correspondence with the educated elite of Nha Trang, scholars that included both French and Vietnamese women. It no longer bothered Hoa that Hung once kept mistresses. When she first learned of these poets and artists, she had been pregnant with Yen. Hung’s older sister assured her that continuing to bear sons secured Hoa’s status as his only wife. Now, Hung was frankly too old and tired to indulge in such frivolous relations, but it irritated her that he kept such tangible evidence of his indiscretions. Sometimes, she walked past the room and saw him reading these letters. While she was busy cooking and cleaning for their family, he was reminiscing about his shameful past.
Hoa truly didn’t want to know any more of Hung’s thoughts. She knew enough of his stubbornness, his denigrating opinions; to read them in print would give them more significance than they deserved. He never hid his disappointment concerning the kind of wife she turned out to be. If my father only knew before he died, Hung would say to her on difficult days, he would have driven that matchmaker out of Nha Trang.
While Hoa cleaned, Ngoan and Trinh left to pick up groceries for dinner. Ngoan had favorite grocers spanning the arrondissements, though she preferred the open-air markets, which reminded her of Saigon. She had grown up on a sugar plantation and still relished buying the freshest produce available. Hoa usually stayed home. She did not like to go out unless the rest of her family was with her.
When Hoa did leave the house, she preferred remaining either in the 5th or 13th Arrondissement, where other Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants frequented. She remembered when Yen took the family to the Eiffel Tower for the first time. On the balcony, a small blond boy, cheeks sticky with chocolate ice cream, stared open-mouthed at Hoa. When Hoa grinned at the child—she was only trying to be nice—his face crumbled and he burst into tears. After Yen exchanged words, apologies, and much laughter with the boy’s father, he finally explained the confusion to his mother.
“He was scared of your teeth,” Yen said. “He’s never seen a woman with black teeth before.”
Just a little boy. He did not know and probably would not care how many hours Hoa’s mother spent soaking those teeth with red sticklac and betel nuts so they would look that dark. It was fashionable back then to have lacquered teeth, the darkest in all of Vietnam, her mother would proudly say. With a lacquered smile, suitors knew you came from a respectable family. During their matchmaking ceremony, Hung complimented her teeth; one of the few compliments he ever gave her. Since the Eiffel Tower, Hoa tried to smile as little as possible. When her children weren’t around to help and she was forced to speak with native Parisians, she kept her head low, lips close together. No one had cried or laughed at her since.
When the girls returned from the markets, Hoa would prepare a simple lunch of leftovers. Afterward, if it were either a Monday or Thursday, she’d sit at the dining room table and write letters to Sanh and his family. She used three sheets of paper: one for Sanh, one for Lum, and one for Cherry. For Tuyet, she included her name on Sanh’s letter, but Hoa rarely thought of her daughter-in-law. She spent most of her time on Cherry’s letter, the granddaughter she’d only seen three times. Hoa wondered if the five-year-old girl could tell how much she was loved by the words Hoa carefully printed on the paper. Tuyet’s mother and family had recently arrived in America, and Hoa was ashamed to admit she worried what the Vo relatives would tell the grandchildren. She prayed that her son would have enough sense to protect the children from such unpleasant memories.
On the other days, Hoa crocheted or knitted, skills she picked up from another grandmother at the community center. She embraced the new hobby, appreciating its substantial results: sweaters, scarves, and hats, but mostly blankets, one for every Truong. When she noticed during morning cleanups that one was fraying, she’d begin another. There was always a blanket waiting to be replaced.
At three o’clock, Trinh left to pick up the children from school and Ngoan and Hoa started dinner preparations. The children and men came home. The house once again bulged with her sons’ stories and Cam and Xuan’s laughter. Full of food and exhausted from the day’s activities, her family slept, the walls and ceilings leaking their snores, mumbles, and bed creaks, and Hoa felt secure knowing she could hear every sound.
* * *
A few days after brunch, Émilie called to say that Michel had reserved a time-share for the last weekend in October. Lourdes was a five-and-a-half-hour train ride away on the TGV. They would leave on Friday.
Although Phung and Ngoan were staying home, Cam begged to go to Lourdes with the rest of the Truongs.
“Why do you care about Lourdes?” Ngoan asked. “You don’t even like going to Mass in your own neighborhood.” But she eventually agreed to allow Hoa to watch Cam over the holiday.
One morning, Hoa noticed during her cleanup that Yen’s desk in his dining room had been cleared. In the kitchen next to the wastebasket, Hoa found his lamp, desk clock, assorted files and folders, pens, and calendar carelessly tossed into a stained fruit carton.
After staring at it for a moment, Hoa emptied out the fruit carton and restored Yen’s belongings to the desk, trying to recall as best she could their original arrangement. The next day, Hoa found the desk cleared again, this time with Yen’s things thrown in the corner of his bedroom.
“Trinh needs to use the desk for prayer space,” Yen explained to his mother that evening. “She wants to buy a Virgin Mary statue when we go to Lourdes and she is trying to decide where it should sit.”
Hung and Hoa’s apartment contained the only prayer altar in the house. Yen had a metal cross on the wall and Phung and Ngoan kept a small portrait of Jesus on a coffee end table. Since the church was close to their home, there wasn’t even a need for rosary prayer in the apartment.
“Don’t you need a desk for your work?” Hoa asked.
“I’ll get another desk.”
“This is ridiculous. We don’t leave for two more weeks. Can’t you use your desk until then?”
“Trinh really wants the space now.”
Hoa stared at Yen. Over the years, she’d tried her best to stay out of her sons’ relations with their wives. She loved them and respected their judgments, grateful they hadn’t inherited their father’s methods in marriage. But they’d gone too far to the other side. She couldn’t understand how all three of her sons could have such weak dispositions to their wives, especially smart, industrious Yen.
“Mother,” Yen said. “I appreciate your concern, but Trinh can have the desk. I want her to have it. She’s endured enough because of me.”
It wasn’t until the next morning that Hoa understood. After breakfast, Hoa watched from the window as Trinh led the children across the street. On the sidewalk, Trinh and the children appeared to be engulfed by French businessmen and women hustling past them on their way to work. With Cam walking slightly ahead, it looked for a moment like Trinh and Xuan were alone in the crowd. No matter how much Yen tried to
fill their future with desks and trips to Lourdes, Trinh and Xuan would always remember and would serve as a reminder of those five years when he wasn’t there.
* * *
Despite the frosty bite in the air, the baths at Lourdes attracted lines that looped throughout the grotto. At the basilica’s central kiosk, Yen read that the average wait time for general entrance was three hours.
“That’s too long for me,” Michel said. “Besides, I only came for the procession.”
The line for parents and children was significantly shorter, promising only a one-hour wait for each child and accompanying parent. While the men went into town for some coffee and reading, the women and children went to the baths.
Shuffling along in line, Hoa yawned. She was still recovering from the train ride from Paris. Hoa disliked traveling. After half a decade of living in France, Hoa had little interest in traveling beyond Paris. What was the difference? The French were French. If Paris was the largest and most diverse city in the country, she saw no reason to subject herself to anything outside its city limits.
But this, she recognized, as she observed the small children in wheelchairs inching ahead in line with them, was worth the hassle. The morning sun had stained the clouds pink across the snow-capped Pyrenees Mountains, adding temporary warmth to the gray sky. Hoa had never been to a sanctuary before. The Virgin Mary didn’t appear in too many places in the world and it was a lucky coincidence she had in France.
While the children happily chatted with a blind boy from Switzerland, Trinh related to Émilie all the facts she learned from her well-worn Lourdes guidebook, which detailed every apparition Saint Bernadette experienced. It was a poor, sick French girl’s relentless loyalty and vision that had transformed Lourdes into the most visited pilgrimage shrine for Catholics and Christians to this day.
“She didn’t care what others thought of her,” Trinh said, “even when the priests were threatening to silence her. She believed the Blessed Virgin was speaking through her.”
“I wish I had more faith when I was younger,” Émilie said. “It could have saved Joan.”
“Didn’t your daughter die of leukemia?” Trinh asked.
“We trusted science,” Émilie said. “We weren’t attending church every Sunday, because we were at the hospital. All the drugs they forced into our daughter killed her, and not peacefully. The doctors took our little girl and squeezed every ounce of happiness out of her. All I remember is her crying on the day she died.”
“We can be saved here,” Trinh said. “Our children and ourselves.”
Émilie smiled. “But Trinh, you’re healthy.”
Trinh leaned forward. “You can’t see it,” she whispered. “But inside, I’m broken. I’ve come here to heal myself, so the Holy Mary can give me back my virginity and I can be whole again.”
Émilie stepped back, smiling nervously at Trinh. Hoa didn’t blame her. Leave it to Trinh to embarrass herself once again, even when Madame Bourdain was showing such compassion by confiding in her. As Émilie called for Petit Michel so she could rebutton his peacoat, Hoa dug her fingers into Trinh’s arm.
“Be careful what you say,” she fiercely whispered to Trinh in Vietnamese. “They don’t always understand your sense of humor.”
Trinh’s expression didn’t change as she smoothly pried Hoa’s hand off of her. “I wasn’t being funny, Mother Truong,” she said. “Not at all.”
After an hour, the women and children stepped into a bare dressing room with a small bench in the corner. Hoa offered to go last. She didn’t want to disrobe until the rest had all gone into their cubicles. Cam flashed her grandmother a mischievous smile as she skipped behind the curtain, unabashed about her nakedness. Hoa disliked undressing in front of anyone. She clung her ao dai to her chest for as long as she could before a volunteer gestured that her bath was ready.
She walked into a cubicle with stone walls and no windows. The large rectangular bathtub was filled with slightly gray water. She clung to the volunteers’ arms as they slowly coaxed her arms to relax, to release. Hoa closed her eyes as the cold spring water swathed her legs, back, breasts, shoulders. She took a small breath as her head immersed. Her eyes opened. The volunteers blurred, transforming into celestial spirits from underneath the water. A chill tickled down her spine and she wondered if this was what a miracle felt like. This was a remarkably different cold, one she found quite welcoming.
* * *
Hoa didn’t know who to confide in. She was afraid to bring this up to Yen, who looked so happy at dinner, eagerly reciprocating all of Trinh’s hugs and kisses. If Phung or Ngoan were here, she would have consulted them first. Hung remained her only option.
“I think something is wrong with Trinh,” Hoa announced to her husband. Outside the sanctuary, countless rows of gift shops unfolded along winding roads, like unending legs of a spider. The Bourdains and Yen’s family were among the many tourists milling through the shops, perusing identical assortments of prayer cards, rosaries, apparition medals, and Mary statuettes. Hung and Hoa rested on a bench near the entrance of the basilica.
“She’s sick?” Hung asked, his eyes squinting as he continued to read his magazine from the dim streetlamp light.
“No,” Hoa said. “Not like a cold. Like in her head. She’s not right.” Hoa recounted in detail what she witnessed at the baths.
“So she’s crazy,” Hung said, turning the page. “Haven’t we always known this?”
“Maybe,” Hoa admitted. “She hid it better before. But I think she’s getting worse. Yen is so busy with work. I worry about Xuan.”
“At least she’s crazy about religion. She could be crazy in more destructive ways. Unless she becomes physically dangerous, I’ve told Yen to encourage her religious path. What harm can come from more faith?”
Hoa sat back. “Yen has talked to you about this?”
“Of course,” Hung said. “I’m his father. He came to me for advice on how to deal with his wife. Why?” Even in the night, Hung’s smirk was obvious. “Were you expecting him to ask you?”
The children ran up to Hung and Hoa, showing off their new glow-in-the-dark rosaries. Yen and Trinh followed behind carrying two shopping bags full of plastic water bottles shaped in the image of the Virgin Mary with screw-on caps that looked like blue crowns. Trinh said pilgrims filled them with holy water from the taps in the sanctuary’s Massabielle Spring.
“Are those for gifts?” Hoa asked.
“They’re for us,” Trinh said. “So we’ll always have miracle water whenever we need it.”
At the pilgrimage in the grotto, Hoa realized she’d never been surrounded by so many Catholics. They all held long, white candles and chanted the Ave Maria. At one spectacular view from the hillside, the procession resembled a dazzling, golden snake slithering its way toward the basilica. At the stone archway, Hoa and Xuan stared up at a row of weathered, rusted crutches. There had to be at least twenty of them teetering majestically above, irrefutable proof of the sanctuary’s healing power.
“It is a miracle,” her grandson murmured, such wonder in his voice, his eyes so full of trust, that Hoa couldn’t help but also believe.
* * *
Their last morning in Lourdes, Trinh and Xuan returned to the sanctuary to collect more holy water in the Mary bottles and to recite the morning rosary, while the rest of the group relaxed at the château.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go, Grandmère?” Xuan asked as he pulled the knitted cap Hoa had made for him over his head.
“I am,” Hoa said. “But say a prayer for your grandmère. She is tired from all our activities yesterday.”
A few hours after they left, the sleet-gray clouds that had loomed over Lourdes all weekend finally sank to the ground, followed by a drizzle of rain that grew heavy on the roof.
“I expect they’ll be coming back soon,” Émilie said, peering out the window. “I hope they’ll stop to pick up an umbrella.”
Hoa occasionally looked up from he
r crocheting to the clock next to the fireplace. If they didn’t come back within the hour, she’d go to their bedroom to pack up their belongings to save them time. They couldn’t afford to miss the train.
As Hoa finished her last row of stitching, she heard the front door open. Trinh staggered into the living room, her hair and dark-blue coat clinging to her wet skin, dripping a small puddle onto the marble floor. Her bags of Mary bottles were equally soaked. She dropped them to the floor.
“Is Xuan here?” she asked, her eyes scanning the room.
Hoa put her blanket down. “Wasn’t he with you?” she asked.
Trinh’s hands came up to her cheeks, then over her mouth. She was shivering. She should have a blanket. Hoa should wrap the blanket she was crocheting and put it over Trinh’s shoulders. But instead, Hoa asked again. “Trinh! Where is Xuan?”
Her daughter-in-law’s eyes finally focused on Hoa. “I don’t know,” she whispered.
Hoa shouted for Yen and Hung to come downstairs. Émilie called the authorities. After Hoa told the men what happened, Yen reached for Trinh, gently eased her on the sofa, calmly stroked her shoulders, and asked her to tell him where Xuan went.
The girl bent forward, eyes closed, strips of hair pasted on her cheeks. “He ran away from me. He yelled at me to leave him alone, and then he ran away.”
“Where were you?” Yen asked, slipping his hands into hers.
“We were at the grotto,” Trinh said. “We were supposed to be praying. I looked for him.” She pushed Yen’s arms away, burying her face in her hands. “I walked down every street. I looked for him, I yelled his name. He wouldn’t answer.”