The Cabinet of Earths

by Anne Nesbet

  “Maya Davidson,” said Maya, shaking the boy’s hand. He had appeared so suddenly that she didn’t even have time to feel shy. “You were really at that school? You’re American!”

  “No, no,” said the boy. “Actually: Bulgarian. But, you know, I lived in New York for four years, so . . .”

  He shrugged and smiled.

  Maya couldn’t help smiling herself: the first honest smile to cross her face since who knows when.

  “Why were you in New York?” she asked.

  “Parents are diplomats,” he said. “So then they got posted to Paris. Too bad for me! Had to start all over again. Tons of fun.”

  “What’s your name?” asked Maya.

  “Valko,” he said. “Means ‘wolf.’ V-A-L-K-O. That’s how they spell it here, anyway. In Bulgaria it’s different. Are you here for good?”

  “Oh, no,” said Maya. “Just a year. My dad’s working in some laboratory.”

  “How’s your French?”

  “I’m working on it,” said Maya. And then remembered. “Oh, yes! This is my Cousin Louise.”

  Valko looked rather taken aback for a moment. Quite the way you’d look, in fact, if an empty chair turned out, on third glance, not to be empty, after all. He shook Cousin Louise’s hand with an apologetic smile. And then looked puzzled.

  Oh! thought Maya. Maybe he feels it, too!

  But you can’t just up and ask someone if his hand has gone numb. Not with Cousin Louise right beside you, more or less.

  “Delighted,” said Cousin Louise, everything about her, as ever, nondescript. And faded back into her chair.

  “Well, then,” said Valko, hesitating for a moment. He kind of gathered himself together to leave—a moment of decision—and then pulled a stool over from a neighboring table and sat down instead. Maya found she had been holding her breath; she let go of it with a flustered cough and scooted over to give Valko some room at the table.

  “I was in your shoes a year ago,” he said to Maya. “That’s why I wanted to say hi. I know what it’s like. I’ve been new a million times. It gets better, really it does. Some of the kids at school are all right. Of course—”

  He gave a quick nod toward the other end of the café, where the flock of stylish students had clustered around a boy with very well-combed hair.

  “That’s the Dauphin,” said Valko. “His crowd, I would avoid.”

  “Dolphin?” said Maya.

  “Dauphin, not dolphin. Eugène de Raousset-Boulbon—that’s his name. He comes from a family of Beautiful People. No, wait, I’m not kidding. You should see his parents. They look like they’re about twenty-five years old. Do your parents look like they’re twenty-five? Nope, mine neither.”

  He gave his left palm an expressive jab with his thumb.

  “Local aristocrats, that’s what,” he said. “Secret societies and fancy clothes. Seriously! What the heck is ‘Philosophical Chemistry’ supposed to be? It’s not really chemistry, because chemistry is science. The Beautiful People have nothing to do with science. They don’t like foreigners, either. I’d stay away; that’s what I advise.”

  “So why is he a dolphin?” asked Maya. Inside her head, the words were still humming: Philosophical Chemistry? Like the building? Like the people who had brought all the Davidsons to Paris?

  “Oldest son of the king, that’s what a dauphin used to be. Not related to the sea. Not like fish. Thinks his daddy’s the King of Paris or something. Well, never mind them.”

  He laughed.

  “Really, though, welcome to the most uneventful quartier in Paris,” he said. “Except for the occasional abducted child”—he waved at the fountain—“nothing has ever happened here, and nothing ever will.”

  And then he looked at his watch, gave another friendly nod, and took off down the avenue with the quick lope of a wolfhound.

  Rosalie, 1951; Amandine, 1954; Laurent, 1955; Adèle, 1957—missing, but not forgotten, said the sad cherubs’ banner, as Valko retreated into the distance beyond it. Edouard, 1959; Marie-Jeanne, 1960; Stéphane—

  “And have you much homework tonight?” said Cousin Louise, whom Maya had again completely forgotten for three or four minutes—not just forgotten the way we forget our parents when their presence might be a problem, but forgotten entirely. If Maya had been a bus driver, she would have driven right past her without a second thought. It chilled your bones somehow, thinking about what it must be like to be so forgotten, all of the time.

  How could a church falling on your head do that, make you forgettable?

  But that reminded her of something. She had thought about it last night as she was brushing her teeth. She had been watching her face in the mirror and thinking about photographs, and then this other thought had come and sat down, like a stubborn dog, in the middle of her brain.

  “Cousin Louise,” she said. “You were smiling in that photo, the one we have back home.”

  It was not unlike talking to a wall, or a haystack, or an empty chair. But the thought wouldn’t budge, so she plowed gamely on.

  “The photo from the newspaper,” she said. “It’s in an old album my grandmother had.”

  “Excuse me?” said Cousin Louise, looking at her as if from a long way off.

  “From when the church fell on you. There’s a picture from when they dug you out, and you’re smiling and waving your arms—”

  Cousin Louise made a vague sound, but she did not interrupt.

  “And the headline says it was a miracle. Mom translated it for us. And they found you because—because—you were singing in the ruins. You were almost a baby, but you were singing, and they could hear you, and they could see you, and they pulled you out, safe and sound. That’s what it says.”

  This time Cousin Louise made no sound at all. Just sat there, like a blank space, waiting for something.

  “It’s just that Mom said you were hurt by the church,” Maya said at last, all that silence making her cheeks burn with awkwardness. It had seemed important, last night in the bathroom. But now—

  The blank space that was Cousin Louise shifted a little in its chair. And sighed. And began, after all, to talk.

  “Well,” said Cousin Louise. “A miracle. Now that is very strange. Because I am sure something happened to me at some point. An accident. Damage done somehow, all the same. I don’t know. A question for that uncle, I suppose, if I can find him.”

  “What uncle?”

  “The one who took me in first,” said Cousin Louise. “After the accident, you know. I have no memory of him, but I know his name: Henri de Fourcroy. They sent me to so many different people when I was a child. Nobody wanted to keep me. I made them uncomfortable, even then. They are made uncomfortable, you know, or they do not notice me at all.”

  “My mother said it was like autism, what you have,” said Maya, surprising herself. It wasn’t like her, to blurt such things out. She almost clapped an anxious hand to her mouth. But Cousin Louise didn’t seem perturbed. She just shook her head.

  “Autism? Non. Not that,” said Cousin Louise. “I have read about that. How the minds of others can be opaque, they say, to people with autism. Probably I describe it badly. But that is not the case with me. No—”

  It was just so difficult to keep herself focused on what Cousin Louise was saying. Maya was trying very hard, and still her mind was straining at the leash, like Boofer on a walk, whenever a squirrel would come dancing across the road.

  “—The inverse of autism, Maya,” Cousin Louise was saying. “I myself am opaque, for some reason. Their eyes cannot see me. Yes, that’s it: The world is autistic with respect to me. There! Pay this waiter, and we will go.”

  She stood up, almost too suddenly. Maya blinked.

  “Yes, come along!” she said to Maya. “Because I think you are right: If not the falling church, then what can it have been? You will look him up in the phone book, if he is still alive, and we will go ask him those very questions. Come! We are going to find this uncle, you and I, this Henri
de Fourcroy.”

  Chapter 5

  The Cabinet of Earths

  They found him tucked away down an alley off the old rue du Four, in the very center of Paris. Henri-Pierre de Fourcroy, it said on the mailbox at the street door. Second courtyard, ground floor.

  “You can say that you’re a cousin, visiting from America,” said Cousin Louise, as they followed the passage back into the hush and the shade. “True enough, yes? Tell him that.”

  The second courtyard was small and crooked, the cobblestones very rough underfoot and the walls rising up all around them slightly green with age and dampness, as if, with another few days of rain, they might just sprout right out in a thick layer of moss.

  And along the back wall, the lower section of one of the buildings sprawled out into the courtyard itself, a fantastic construction of wood and windows that looked like something James might love—the perfect tree house—though here it hugged the ground, far from anything even resembling a tree.

  “Here it is,” said Cousin Louise, who had been examining the courtyard’s various doors, and as she spoke, the door itself squeaked open. A man’s wrinkled head peered out at them, all worry and suspicion. His hair was thin, tufty, and gray, and his eyes a shy and watery color.

  “Oui? he said, in a voice made slightly crackly by age. “Who are you? I take no more deliveries, you understand! Not from Them!”

  Cousin Louise stepped very slightly to one side, her sign that Maya should do the speaking for them. As usual, Maya had to let go of a slight feeling of irritation—of put-upon-ness—before she could get down to the hard work of stringing French words together.

  “Bonjour, monsieur,” she began, a safe way to buy some time. “I don’t know who Them are—” (She knew right away that she had messed up the grammar; a faint click of disapproval came from the general area of Cousin Louise, on her left.) “—But I am Maya Davidson, from California. And I think we are cousins.”

  Somewhere above their heads a pigeon added some mournful comment of its own: Oo, oo. Ooo-oo. . . .

  “‘Cousins,’ you say?” said the old man, in a wondering sort of way. “I have no cousins.”

  “Not a close cousin,” said Maya, wondering how one really said any of this in proper French. “Distant. Far away. My grandmother was French.”

  “Oh?” said the old man. He looked rather puzzled. “Well, what was her name?”

  “Anne-Sophie,” said Maya. “Anne-Sophie Miller.”

  “But I have no Millers in my family,” said the old man (and of course in his mouth it sounded like this: “Meellaihr”). “I’m afraid you must be mistaken, mademoiselle.”

  “She means Lavirotte,” said Cousin Louise, in her bland, gray voice. The old man looked up at her, almost in alarm, and then looked away again.

  “Lavirotte,” he said. “Ah.”

  Of course, that was right. Maya felt foolish all over again. The French grandmother had had a different name before she married Maya’s American grandfather and moved away.

  “But then—” he said, and peered at them with, if anything, renewed suspicion. “You are sent by the Société, after all? I told you very plain, did I not? ‘No deliveries,’ I said. I still say it. I am done with all that.”

  “What Society?” said Maya. “Deliveries of what?”

  “BOTTLES,” said the old man, a deep frown furrowing the lower half of his wrinkled face.

  Maya felt a giggle bubbling up in her throat, but the old man seemed so very earnest about it all that she worked very hard to keep the giggle under wraps.

  “I promise we don’t have any bottles, Monsieur Fourcroy,” she said. “Really, truly.”

  “Not sent—you’re quite sure—by the Society—?”

  “No!”

  “—of Philosophical Chemistry?”

  The bubble of laughter inside Maya vanished just like that. Evaporated. Popped. The Society of Philosophical Chemistry! The same Society that had given her father all that money so he could bring them along to France? And paid for their apartment? And had a rather riveting young director who lived in a house with a salamander on the door? Was there any corner of Paris free of them?

  All she could do was shake her head, while that trickle of surprise danced up and down her spine. But the old man seemed not to notice. In fact, he was already stepping back to hold the door open for them.

  “Well, come in, then, I suppose,” he said. His face had softened, all at once, into the shy ghost of a smile, a curious smile. It made him look almost like a boy, for all that his skin was so wrinkled and his hair so sparse. “My grandmother was a Lavirotte, yes, when she was a girl.”

  There was an odd vestibule just beyond the door, with a couple of old winter coats hanging on pegs and a weather-beaten umbrella propped up in the corner.

  And through the doorway to the left, again another world: rows of large windows (for this was the earthbound tree house, seen from the inside) letting in the light of late afternoon, and rough workbenches covered with tools and materials, and everywhere boxes, the most extraordinary boxes, filled with tiny chairs and people in strange costumes and animals and books the size of a thumbnail and cups and mirrors and things Maya could think of no name for.

  “Oh!” she said aloud, her eyes and mind entirely amazed. “Dollhouses!”

  She had never cared very much for dolls, exactly, but miniature things she had always, always loved. Once, long ago, her mother had taken her to a museum filled with dollhouses, and Maya had stood in front of those miraculous tiny rooms and felt herself falling into them, everything about her ordinary life unsettled for a moment, magic slanting into her world like an odd beam of light. And here were perhaps more of those dollhouse rooms than any museum could hold. There were extra shelves built into the walls to hold them; even the workbenches and counters overflowed with boxes. A hundred different universes in a single human-sized room.

  “Mais non,” said the old man, full of pride. “Not dollhouses! Sets!”

  “Sets?” said Maya.

  “Why, yes!” said the old man. “I am a décorateur for the theater. These are scenes from the opera, mademoiselle. Not dollhouses.”

  “You make sets for operas?” said Maya.

  Operas were such large things: large people singing large arias in extremely large and velvety halls. It was hard to imagine all that largeness coming out of the little boxes hidden away in this back-courtyard room.

  “For one particular opera,” said the old man. “The Chemical Brothers. My life’s work, you understand: the tragic tale of the Fourcroys. How that curse settled on them, on us, long ago. See? I have been all morning making sheep.”

  And it was true: One of the worktables was covered with fluffy little sheep in various poses. The box next to them had a waiting green felt field unfurled across it, a tiny man in a small but elegant suit of gold cloth gesturing toward all that green as if saying, “All very well. But where are my moutons?”

  “An opera about sheep?” said Maya.

  “Ah, non,” said the old man. “One brief rustic scene. That man there, observing his sheep? He was the one we killed, we Fourcroys. The great man of science, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. You have heard of him?”

  No, Maya had not.

  “The construction of the table of chemical elements? The theory of the conservation of matter? The battle against alchemy and superstition?”

  Maya shook her head.

  The old man looked distressed.

  “The guinea pig in the ice calorimeter?” he said, in a smaller voice. “You’ve heard, perhaps, of the guinea pig?”

  In the next box, two itty-bitty men were indeed placing a tiny fluff ball of a guinea pig into the strangest apparatus, a kind of miniature double tub with blocks of plastic ice between the inner and outer walls.

  “Slow-burning fires in us,” said the old man, so close to her ear that Maya jumped. But he was just peering over her shoulder. “That’s what they learned from the guinea pig. The year 1780, my dear
. They measured the little furnace in him by the ice he melted. We are all little furnaces! Oh, yes! But the great chemist Lavoisier was the first to measure it properly. He was a true scientist, he was!”

  “Very nice,” said Maya politely, but really she was thinking that an opera about chemistry might not be very entertaining to sit through. Even assuming you liked operas at all.

  “The great Lavoisier,” said the old man, oblivious. “Father of modern chemistry. And we—we!—killed him. It is very sad, but true. All explained in the third act, you know, of The Chemical Brothers. Over here, dear girl. Come see!”

  More boxes. A courtroom scene, with judges hanging over their benches to waggle their cotton fingers at a small man with bound hands. Another figure stood to the side and turned his back. And in the next box, a sad line of men, their heads bowed, waiting for death beneath a miniature guillotine.

  “There they are,” said the old man, almost whispering in his enthusiasm, as if not to disturb the little characters in their boxes. “The great Lavoisier, condemned by the Revolution in 1794—and his fellow chemist, his brother in spirit, Antoine-François de Fourcroy, who turned away from him, you see—who betrayed him!—and let him go to his death. Oh! Here they sing both at once, but very different songs. The most terrible moment in the whole opera, mademoiselle. But beautiful, oh, my dear one—beautiful indeed.”

  “Fourcroy?” said Maya. “Like you?”

  “My great-great-great-great-grandfather, yes,” said the old man, adjusting the crook in the tail of a tiny cat curled up beneath the scaffold. “A traitor, I’m afraid, to the ideals of both science and friendship. An ambitious man. Preferred power, in the end, to the pure gaze of science. We carry that betrayal in our bones, his descendants. Cursed to repeat it. I speak too plainly, perhaps.”

  “Not in the least,” said Cousin Louise, from a few feet away.

  “Oh, right!” said Maya, suddenly remembering again why they were here, in this workshop full of small worlds in boxes. “Excuse me, monsieur, but could I ask you a question? Not about chemistry or opera, though. About 1964.”