Paris Was the Place

by Susan Conley

  I stand in the kitchen in my T-shirt and pants and watch Macon take a bucket out to the well. Dozens of insect bites itch on my thighs—small, raised bumps that I can’t stop scratching.

  “All the birds talk about is rain,” Macon says and puts the bucket into the sink. “They are amazing.” He kisses me on the lips. “How are your cramps? Do you want to rest?”

  “The cramps come and go, but they’re better. I’m still bleeding, but the doctor said that might go on for weeks. I can’t rest. We have a date with Sarojini’s daughter. I’m so excited I can’t think straight.”

  I change into my skirt and the cleanest-looking T-shirt in my pack. Then we walk into town, toward a teahouse Padmaja gave me the name of over the phone. Little boys and girls play in the tall grass outside their houses. A woman in a burlap dress walks out of what looks like an animal stall and smiles at us and waves. I kick a stone along the road. When it falls over the side of the mountain, I start with another one. The mountains are steep, and the trees are green and lush. I want to go back to the hours when I was pregnant but didn’t know it—before the bleeding started. The surprise of the miscarriage hits me again. “Wow,” I say. “There was going to be a baby.”

  Macon pulls on my shoulder. “Let’s go back to the house. This is too much. We can meet Padmaja tomorrow.”

  “Oh no we can’t. You haven’t talked to her. You don’t change plans on her. I’ll meet her at the café at ten or I’ll never see those manuscripts. I’m okay. There was going to be a baby. I’m just thinking. It’s pretty incredible.”

  “It will happen again when we’re ready.”

  “You know what you’re saying, don’t you?”

  “I’m a lawyer. I always measure my words.” He kisses me on the side of the road.

  “I hope she takes me seriously. Padmaja will either like me or finish her tea and never talk to me again.”

  “I bet on her liking you.”

  “I’ve thought about this meeting so damn much and planned what I would say to win her over—a small speech about the importance of Sarojini’s work being released to a Western audience and the great opportunity to spread her poems. But now that we’re here, I don’t know what I’ll say. I’m so nervous. I’m tired.”

  “Tell me what you know about her.”

  “She’s in her seventies. When I called her from Delhi, she told me to look for an old woman with white hair in a French twist.”

  We get to the teahouse, and Macon puts his hands on both my shoulders. “Are you sure you don’t want me to come in with you?”

  “No, she asked to see me alone. Just me.”

  “Then I’ll go for a walk and meet you back here.” I feel too self-conscious to kiss him on the street, so I squeeze his hand. Then I open the door to the café and step inside the cool darkness.

  “You are here,” Padmaja says from a small table in the corner. The cooking fire snaps. “We will speak English, you and me. I don’t speak French.” I smile. “Here.” She pats the red cushion on the chair next to her. “Have a seat. My mother spoke Urdu, Telugu, English, French, Bengali, and Persian. I am lucky to have the Bengali and the English and the Urdu!” She takes my hand in hers, then lets it go and reaches for the tea. On the phone she had a deep, throaty voice. In person, she’s much larger than I imagined and wears an expensive pink-and-gold sari, with gold chains around her neck. “I am lucky in other ways, too,” she says. “No husband anymore. He was boorish, and brought me here for diplomacy with the Tibetans. He’s been gone five years. I have stayed. Sometimes I like it here. I have no children left in Himachal Pradesh. They all went back to Bengal when my husband died. But I have my mother’s poems, and I have my memory, when it serves me. You want the poems, don’t you? I can tell. I may let you see them. The poems are why I am here still—the library is good. The officials offered to house my mother’s poetry, and they offered to house me.”

  “How kind.”

  “You are too thin. Why don’t you eat more? American girls are always too thin.” I smile and take a sip of my tea. “But you are smart, too.” Her face is wide and wrinkled in that androgynous, handsome way that older women’s faces can become. “I can tell you are smart by your face and that you are in love with that man I saw out on the road.”

  “You mean Macon.”

  “My husband did not have a kind face. He was in tea and shipped it from Darjeeling around the country. Now I find myself an old woman, talking to a girl from America. Who could have predicted this? Maybe you will take me back to America with you. Could you do that? Find room for me on your plane and take me back. It is a country I have always wanted to see.”

  “America has great beauty,” I say. Does Padmaja really want to come to the States? “I live in France now.”

  “France! Ah! My mother went as far west as England. King’s College London and later Girton College, Cambridge. She met famous men of her time—Arthur Symons and Edmund Gosse. It was Gosse who convinced her to stick to the great Indian themes: our rivers and temples, our inequality, our textured society. I never got over the Indian border. It is a good life here, though. The books are well taken care of at the library. There are three of them, you know.”

  “I do know.”

  “My mother and Gandhi were both sent to prison, she for almost two years. I have a memory of him talking to my mother in his courtyard with that smiling face of his, reaching for my head with his open hand. She was part of the independence movement. My mother called him Mickey Mouse. Can you imagine? She had a nickname for Gandhi.” I smile. “Don’t worry.” She laughs out loud and throws her head back. “I am not keeping you hostage here much longer. You want to see the poems.”

  “I would like to, yes.”

  “But why? Why do you want the poems?”

  “I want to see what your mother was thinking while she wrote them. Everyone in India read her poetry.”

  “It is a mystery, isn’t it? My mother got first in the matriculation examination at the University of Madras. She was only twelve. A child prodigy. She was a mathematician. Then she wrote poems about daily life in India and began calling for women’s rights. She became famous and married out of caste. No one was doing this then. She was speaking the truth, and the women listened. There is no other way for me to explain it. She was the second Indian woman to become the president of the National Congress and the first woman to become the governor of Uttar Pradesh. They have made her birthday into Women’s Day here. Now come. We must go.” She gets up and leans on a red lacquered cane that’s been against the wall. “It is time for my nap. We will meet at the library in the morning. Nine o’clock. Do not be late.”

  30

  Inheritance: the acquisition of a possession, condition, or trait from past generations

  I’m awake before the birds the next morning. Dressed by six with a bucket of water pulled from the well for tea. Macon wakes up, and we eat the bread and cheese he got in town while I was with Padmaja. The library’s a half mile toward the main street, then left up a steady hill. We get to the stone building and sit on a wooden bench outside the front door to wait.

  She arrives in a silver Oldsmobile sedan. The driver gets out and opens the back door. Padmaja emerges with her cane and a flowing magenta-colored sari. “You have brought the man this time. Good. Macon, is it?” She extends her arm as she walks slowly toward the bench. He stands and meets her on the path.

  “It is Macon, and you are Padmaja, the keeper of the manuscripts?”

  “They are my inheritance,” she says. “Under lock and key. I am deciding whether or not you get to see them.”

  I stand next to Macon and I smile but it’s excruciating. The manuscripts are close now—right inside the library. It will be a quiet book if I get to write it. A small book. But it will have sound research and it will be thorough. I will do the poems justice. Is Padmaja really going to deny me?

  “She is a fine scholar,” Macon says. “She will write a good book on your mother. I would bet
on this.”

  “I am not a betting woman. Follow me.” Padmaja walks past us, into the dark library, and takes us to a small room way back with white plaster walls and wooden beams across the ceiling. “This is where we sit.” She points to the oval table with a brass lamp in the middle. She hooks her cane over the back of a chair and leans over and turns the lamp on. Then she takes two steps to a painted armoire that sits against the wall. A steel padlock hangs on the metal latch, and Padmaja takes a key from a long chain around her neck. She opens the doors of the armoire, and they swing wide. The shelves are filled with cardboard boxes of papers and notebooks and bound books.

  “Macon,” she says. “Please take everything out and put it on the table. Then keep me company. Willie won’t want to talk to us once she gets into this. So you stay.” She reaches out and puts her hand on Macon’s arm. He smiles at me and begins stacking boxes on the table.

  My heart soars—I bet the typed manuscripts are inside there. “You are the first American to see the drafts of the poems like this. It is because of your book on the French poet Albiach. It is a good book. I did my research. The people here at the library helped me learn about you. I want you to do that for Sarojini. What you did in that first book. Do that for my mother. Do that for the Nightingale of India. Bring her out of India.”

  She rings a small bell on the table and a young man from somewhere in the library brings us tea. But I can’t drink it. I’m too excited. The first thing I do is get out my notebook and pen. Then I stand and move as quickly as I can through the materials to see what I have. The handwritten drafts are in the flowery cursive of a young girl. There are badly typed revisions on parchment paper that look like work Sarojini did herself. Then, finally, poems in three different roughly bound books: The Golden Threshold, The Bird of Time, and The Broken Wing. These also have many handwritten notes on them in the same cursive.

  I pick up the handwritten drafts first, because they’re what excite me most. I haven’t dared wish for many marginal notes, but there are several to a page and cross-outs and arrows and parentheses along the sides of the poems and notes she wrote to herself. Macon grins and holds up his cup of tea. “Is it all that you expected?”

  I can’t speak. It’s been such a week. Month. Year. “She is gone from us now,” Padmaja says. “We must leave her to it. She has the poems for one day to herself. You must tell me about France, Macon, and if I will like it there. I am planning to come for a long visit. I want you to take me to the top of the Eiffel Tower. My husband did not believe in travel. Why I married him I still don’t know. Be careful who you marry, Macon. They can appear to be one thing on the outside and end up being a different animal underneath.”

  “I married the wrong woman once already, Padmaja.” Macon sips his tea. I hope he doesn’t delve into past lives or tell her about his divorce and other small failures. I’m trying to gain the old woman’s trust.

  “This woman,” Padmaja says. “Will you marry her, Macon? We shall see what she is made of.”

  “She is a good writer, Padmaja. She will make you a book that you will want to read.”

  “Ah. But you did not answer my question.”

  “I know you are discerning enough to realize that I can’t possibly address that question in the presence of the woman about whom you are speaking.”

  “Oh, Macon,” Padmaja says. “You are old-fashioned in the end, aren’t you? This may be your downfall, being too tied to the past.”

  “I have a son, Padmaja. I am tied to my past and to my mistakes, and I am indebted to the future.”

  “Children make you honest,” she says. “They leave you and they don’t return your phone calls and they make you see yourself in the most unfavorable lights. Your envy. Your greed. Your malice. And also the size of your heart. I think your heart is big for your son.”

  She looks up at me while I stand furiously making notes with my pen. “When you write the book, I want you to call yourself Willow. Not Willie. I want everyone to know that the book was written by a woman, not a man.”

  I stop reading at noon. Padmaja has the librarian bring in tomato sandwiches and more tea. He’s an older man with white hair and bifocals, and he shakes my hand and says his name is Gobal. I’ve taken pages of notes by now, but there’s so much to read and decipher that I’m only through the first half of the first book and I’m panicking. The acrid sweat from my armpits drips down the inside of my T-shirt.

  After lunch Padmaja dozes in her chair and Macon goes outside for a walk. When it’s four o’clock, I can see the librarian turning off the lights in the main room, and I try to wake her. “Padmaja.” She opens her eyes and stares blankly at me for a moment.

  “Willow. How is your work?” She sits up and runs her hand over her hair to smooth it.

  “I need to ask you for more time. There is no way for me to finish in one day. Three books. Hundreds of notes. Because it is your mother’s notes that will turn my book into something that allows the reader inside her life. The notes tell us what your mother was thinking and why she used certain words and crossed out others and omitted whole poems from the final manuscripts. I know our agreement called for one day of reading. But I didn’t think there would be so much here, Padmaja. It could take weeks.” I’ve left everything else behind in these short hours. Luke. My mother. My father. Baby Lily and Sara. Even Macon. It’s just me and the poems. I’m high off of it. I only want more time.

  “Yes. My mother had a strong mind. A trained mind. She was strict, and she insisted I marry my husband. He came from a wealthy family. I never met him until our wedding day. It was bad luck that brought us together. Are you sure you do not want to bring me to America? I could give lectures with you. I could help.”

  “Padmaja, it is a very good idea, but I teach in Paris now and I won’t be going back to the United States soon. I have to ask you a favor.” If I’m overstepping, she’ll refuse me. I could write some version of my book now. At least I’ve seen the manuscripts and can explain their veracity, but there’s so much more I could do with the original material.

  The old woman puts her hand in the air. “I know. I know. You are going to ask me if you can take the poems.”

  “Copies of the poems. Only copies. I saw a machine in the office here. A copy machine.” I hold my breath. The woman makes me feel about twelve years old. Maybe thirteen. Does she trust me?

  “I have been thinking on it. I knew you would ask. They told me here that you would ask, and that I would have to decide. Where is Macon? Where has he gone?”

  “You fell asleep and he wanted to see more of your village on foot. He has gone for a walk.”

  I sit down in my chair. My face is flushed. There’s no ventilation in the room, and I’ve been working intently all day. Padmaja sucks air in between her teeth and makes a whistling sound. Then she points to the door and says, “Go. Go now. Give Gobal all the papers. Tell him I have ordered you. Tell him to begin the copying now. He has been waiting for me to decide. I will follow in a moment. I am an old woman. I am too slow. You must write a good book and bring me to America. So you go.”

  “Really? Oh, Padmaja. This is great news. This is going to be fantastic! Thank you. Thank you. It will take at least another full day to make the copies!” I gather up the papers in my arms and carry them into the library’s office. I want to shout I’m so happy.

  Macon finds us a half hour later in the library office, where I’m watching a young Tibetan clerk painstakingly copy each page of notes. I bet he won’t get to the actual books until sometime tomorrow. Gobal is here too, instructing the clerk on how to position the pages on the glass of the copy machine, then stepping back to watch.

  “You have moved,” Macon says. I try not to grin too much.

  “She has prevailed.” Padmaja waves at me. “Get me a chair, Macon. I am too old to stand. Some water, too. You will come back here with Willow tomorrow and watch the work be completed.”

  “This is wonderful news.” Macon steps into th
e reading room and brings a wooden chair back for her. Then he finds an empty glass on the librarian’s desk near the front door and fills it with water from the faucet in the bathroom.

  She drinks the water slowly. “There will be no rain today. Why does anyone spend the summer in India? I am too old to be hot like this. We must go now. Our work is done for the day.”

  It’s hard for me to leave the photocopying. The manuscripts give me a focus. All my worry for Luke and guilt and fear for Gita have been replaced by questions about the poems. We follow Padmaja to the car. Her driver jumps out of the front seat and opens the back door of the Oldsmobile. His tin lunch canister sits on the dashboard, with a newspaper in the passenger seat next to a red pillow. Padmaja slowly climbs in the back and hands him her cane. He closes the door, and she puts her hand up to the window for a moment in a wave.

  “Follow me,” Macon says when she’s gone. “You’ll like where I’m taking you.” He grabs my hand.

  “You cannot believe it, Macon!” I scream when I’m sure she’s out of earshot. “There are so many notes. There’s so much work!”

  “It’s good. I knew it would be good for you to get here.”

  “It’s almost as if I’m there in the room with Sarojini! She chose her words so carefully. Then this amazing thing happened—her poems were read by hundreds of thousands of Indians. They were a call for education. A call to marry out of caste. A call for women to leave the fields.”

  He walks me back down the road, toward our little house. Then we leave the road and take a dirt path into the woods. “I followed two students in here,” he says. “I mean, they knew I was behind them, but I don’t think they understood I had no idea where we were going.” We get to a group of buildings in the woods down behind the library. “It’s an ashram. I think they like visitors. I think they depend on visitors in some ways.”