In the morning, when he could see that I’d barely slept, that my eyes were red, he sat me down and said, very sternly—it was the only time I ever saw him angry and it cauterized something in me—“Don’t ever pity me, Pauline. I am the happiest of men.”
It was only the one time with Raphaël. His father-in-law died and his wife was gone for a long time, but I did not go to check on him, not even to bring him some of the apples from our tree, though we had more than we could eat that year, more than I could even turn into applesauce. Sometime after his wife came back, she fired their maid and the last time anyone saw Mathilde, she was at the station, boarding the train for Paris, as lovely as ever with her silky hair and her porcelain skin, but noticeably plumper, everyone agreed.
I was visibly pregnant myself by then, the child in my womb so restless I thought the whole town could see its turning and kicking. My body seemed to double in size, my face growing so round I could have been a Naquet myself. I loved the feel of the baby swimming inside my body, but, God forgive me, I was glad about Mathilde. Glad at the expense of that poor, ruined girl, because the scandal kept all eyes off me.
Not that anyone suspected what I’d done. No one besides Daniel and Raphaël had reason to make assumptions, especially since all the mothers blushed at the sight of Raphaël. I was just the one who had appeared when his wife was out of town, before Mathilde had learned that she should not disturb the good doctor except for a medical emergency, that she was company enough in his wife’s absence.
All through my pregnancy, I dreamed of Raphaël. When I awoke from those dreams, my skin was sore and it was hard to swallow anything, but Daniel treated all my symptoms as morning sickness. I mustn’t tire myself, he said. I was giving him the greatest possible gift. The two of us were more tender with each other than we’d ever been.
I never took Raphaël another dessert, not even after he took care of Simon when he had the measles or fixed Louis’s broken arm or, miraculously, cured Geneviève of her colic. He did not treat Geneviève any differently from the other children, although once he said she was a beautiful baby in a way that was different from the way he complimented most children. I gave him a thin, disapproving smile, as if I had no idea why he’d talk to me that way. As if I never thought of him when I was alone, remembering the practiced feel of his hands.
Once, a few years later, I overheard Daniel talking to him. Raphaël had come to see Louis, who had tonsillitis, and I stayed back with Louis for a few minutes after Raphaël went downstairs. When I followed him a few minutes later to settle the bill, I found him in the living room with Daniel and Geneviève. She was kneeling on the carpet, talking to her dolls, and Raphaël and Daniel were standing side by side, watching her, chuckling. She started to sing a little song she’d learned—she was two or three and the words were all mixed up—and Daniel, nearly a head taller than Raphaël, put his hand on Raphaël’s shoulder. “She doesn’t miss a note, Docteur. She has your ear.”
* * *
After Daniel died, I married Henri Manier. That was ten years ago. Henri had known Daniel when they were boys, and he was very helpful those last years, when Daniel was confined to his sickbed. Henri is the most resourceful man I know, and I couldn’t have managed without him. I’d given birth to two more daughters by the time I buried Daniel, and though it must be obvious to everyone that Henri is Yvonne’s and Françoise’s father—they look exactly like him, and he’s more attentive toward them than the others—no one would guess about Geneviève. Only her eyes are Raphaël’s.
And yet Daniel was my true love, the boy I grew up with. I was thirteen when we met, a girl still playing a child’s games. He carved a doll for me once, from a bit of wood. Sometimes I dream he’s alive, and it’s just the two of us, alone in the world. I’m so happy to be with him, and then I begin to notice the others—Henri, Raphaël, the children—and the dream splinters off in a thousand directions. I forget Daniel altogether, until the middle of the next day, when the beginning of the dream comes back to me, an ache in my sternum.
But other days, it’s Raphaël’s company I crave. Not to make love with, just to sit beside me, talk to me about Geneviève. To remind me that, although Daniel is dead, she still has a father. Henri is a good man, but he doesn’t love Geneviève or the boys the way Daniel loved all our children.
* * *
The guards haven’t moved. If they’ve noticed me, staring up at them, they don’t show it. Be safe, Docteur, I think, snapping out of it, finally, and I turn away from Raphaël’s house, and head toward the square.
There’s a line down the street at the butcher’s, and I stand with everyone else in the bright sunshine, waiting my turn for a bit of horse marrow to last the week, thinking I’ll go ahead and cook up the old rabbit I’ve been saving, too. Madame Vilnier asks after the children and I smile at her. “They’re fine,” and then, not to be outdone in small talk, I say what a nice day it is, I’ll be happy if the good weather keeps up. I shake my head in dismay when Madame Grouls says there isn’t even any cornmeal left at the grocer’s and again when Madame Marcher says her son-in-law has been called up to work in Germany.
And then I take my horse marrow home, where Louis’s horse tack is still hanging inside the back door, and there’s a letter from Simon on the kitchen table—he lives in Paris now, spared from combat by his limp. Yvonne is lying on the sofa, planning mischief, no doubt; my littlest, Françoise—so much more dutiful than her siblings!—is scrubbing the front hall; and Geneviève is shut up in her room, playing the violin. She shouldn’t spend so much time by herself, it isn’t healthy. I make my way upstairs to look in at her, with her blue, blue eyes, her face distorted like all great musicians’ faces, though Henri says she isn’t very good, and what would I know? I was going to tell her to come downstairs and help me with the supper, but she’s so lovely, standing there, not even aware of me, the bow of her violin coming down and down and down.
Mathilde
I am old enough that people congratulate me on the simple fact of being alive—Marie-Claire, they say, you’re astonishing—but until I was this old I always thought, Please, God, not me. Please let me die before I’ve lost my senses and no one wants to listen to me anymore. My children pause, We know, Maman, you’ve told us that already. Five sons, all so mysterious to me. When they wheel me out to take the air, they watch for my last breath and I can’t tell if they’re afraid of what’s to come or, poor souls, just tired of waiting.
I always loved heights, could hardly keep myself from jumping just for the thrill of it, but now it’s as if I stood on the far edge of the world, hesitating. There are still things I want to say, even if I have already said them. Judgments I’d like to retract. What I thought of Mathilde Antonna, for example.
I was seventeen when Mathilde and her son, Marcel, came to us, and I believed her claim, circulated throughout the village, that she was a widow. Why would she lie? No one, I thought, not even a divorced woman, would invent a dead husband. My own mother was divorced and she bore her shame bravely.
The women in the village whispered among themselves that Mathilde Antonna was a girlmother. That much was obvious, they said; the only question was why she had come to us: Why not go to the seaside? It’s a hard life in the mountains, with snow half the year and so little room to grow anything.
The women took their gossip with them, trailing it from store to store, and I trailed along behind. Mathilde, they insisted, was too pretty. She couldn’t be much past—what? Thirty? And the boy was surely sixteen.
The expression itself—“girlmother”—made no sense to me. I didn’t know it was possible to conceive a child outside of marriage. Despite all I’d seen of cows and dogs and cats and goats, I didn’t realize humans went about things in the same way. I heard “girlmother” and pictured a child playing house. But I knew that wasn’t right; it was clear the village women meant something monstrous and, because Mathilde’s sin was connected to her beauty, I thought my ugliness must be a virtue
. Of course I wasn’t truly ugly—the young are beautiful, no matter what—but I was poor, tall as a boy, and bony.
Mathilde and Marcel arrived in the fall, when the leaves here turn so fast a fire seems to rage throughout the valley, though the wind is damp and raw. I remember that I heard about them on a Sunday. On Sundays, I went to the boulangerie and the butcher’s so that my mother would be spared the embarrassment of coming from a different direction than everyone else. The embarrassment of not making her way down the steps of the church with the rest of the village and crossing the square with two or three other women to the stores on the other side. I didn’t go to church either, but I hadn’t been excommunicated. I avoided church out of loyalty to my mother and also because, though I believe in God, the idea of a father orchestrating his son’s crucifixion strikes me as the stuff of nightmares. Abraham and Isaac, God and Jesus—I never liked those stories.
A Sunday, then, and I was doing the shopping. From the store side of the square, you can see Mont Blanc, rising up behind the church. It has nothing to do with my story, but how to speak of my village without naming the mountains all around? Mont Blanc, the Aiguilles, the Grandes Jorasses, Mont Maudit, Mont Blanc du Tacul. The sky was the deep, rich, icy blue you only see in the Alps, and the racks and bins at the boulangerie were still full of bread, the smell of yeast so tantalizing it seemed almost visible, as if it hung suspended in the midday light. This was 1939, when we still had plenty of food.
The Widow Charles, who was half blind, announced to the store at large that Mathilde’s gait said it all, and the others murmured in agreement, a gentle, fascist chorus. Nicole Lagrange, the mayor’s wife, leaned toward the Widow Charles, shaping the air with her slender fingers. She seemed to cup the words—“girl” “mother”—in her hands, as if she meant to fling them outside onto the cobblestones.
Ever since my mother had found a decorated hairpin in the pocket of my father’s coat and demanded that he leave, she and I had been the lowest of the low; in those days, a wife was supposed to tolerate a bit of infidelity. I was eight at the time, and I thought my mother was simply angry that my father had forgotten to empty his pockets—she was a meticulous woman—but in the years since, waiting in one line or another, I’d overheard enough to piece together the truth: my father was living with a woman in Annecy. My mother, the village women said, had done nothing to make herself appealing, as if her plainness were the crime, so I was only mildly curious about Mathilde and Marcel now; what fascinated me was this new connection between homeliness and salvation. I gazed down happily at my big, chapped hands, my worn boots, and stopped trying to make sense of what a “girlmother” was or how a person could be a round bread, which was the only meaning I knew for bâtard.
But the very next day Marcel appeared on the train to school, and, however beautiful his mother might be, he reminded me of a giraffe, with his long neck and thin, freckled forehead.
We took the train to school only if the weather was too bad for bikes or skis—if it was sleeting, or the wind was especially strong, or the fog too heavy. All of us from the surrounding villages would take over a single coach, though once we reached Chamonix, of course, the boys went one way and the girls went another. While the others laughed and told stories, I read fitfully, distracted by the rain and the wind, and the sensation I love so much of being suspended above the gorges. Because of the bad weather, I couldn’t see how precipitously the earth fell away, first on one side, then another, as the train wound along its tracks, but I felt it. I imagined the railcars tumbling out into nothingness and the thought of so much space thrilled me.
The older students—the ones in my grade—sat on one side of the railcar and the little ones sat on the other, but I took a bench by myself, near the door. Marcel stood not far from me, holding on to a strap and swaying with the train’s movement. I could tell he wasn’t used to the mountains, the way he lost his balance every time the train went around a curve—he wasn’t used to the winding, or the sheets of rain, or the black cliffs appearing suddenly in the windows, and I wondered if he was glancing at me as I glanced at him. I blushed, embarrassed, and suddenly I understood that we belonged together, with our lonely mothers and our clumsy bodies. Ugliness wasn’t, after all, a virtue. I could see my own raw, knobby knees swimming in my peripheral vision, and his boots and the bottoms of his trousers. The fabric was too thin; those trousers wouldn’t do him any good once winter came, and his boots, though adequate, looked as if they’d never been worn before. I gazed up the length of his leg, forgetting my embarrassment. I tended to swing between imagining that everyone was talking about me and imagining that I didn’t exist, and in my nonexistent moments, I’d developed a bad habit of staring. Since I stayed away from my peers and wore thick glasses, people rarely noticed, but Marcel stood maybe a meter from where I sat.
When I reached his crotch—which, after all, was right at eye level—the blood seemed to drain out of me. If I had failed to understand that humans procreate the way animals do, it’s because it had never occurred to me that our genitals were so like theirs. I’d never given any thought to the workings of a boy’s body, but now, with Marcel so close, I pictured all those bulls and dogs and cats and goats I’d seen, and I understood that being smooth-skinned and walking on two legs changed nothing.
It’s hard to believe I’d been so obtuse until that moment, but when I consider my life, it’s all one long story of obtuseness. In any case, gazing straight at Marcel’s crotch clarified a great deal for me: what a girlmother was, a bastard, even the full extent of my father’s offense. And though at first I felt sick, as if the ground had opened up beneath me, I was also thrilled: the ground had opened up beneath me.
* * *
My mother never spoke of the way she was treated, but she never spoke much at all. When she confronted my father with the hairpin, she set it on the kitchen table instead of the bowl of soup he was expecting, and returned to the stove to ladle out my dinner. More discussion would have struck her as ridiculous as the hairpin itself. She was so averse to waste of any kind—of words, time, money—that even the slenderness of her bones seemed a measure of her thrift.
I could have told anyone who’d care to listen how sad she was. When Nicole Lagrange and the other women looked away from me or her, or made it clear that they were talking about us—even if my mother was safely at home, bent over the fine-stitch sewing that earned our keep—I felt the tightness in my mother’s ribs, her echoing loneliness, and I couldn’t swallow.
She wanted me to go to Paris someday, to study at Sèvres and become a teacher, and, while I studied, she took in sewing and did the housework. The other children in the village milked and herded cows, cleaned stalls, cut hay, split wood, and shoveled snow, but I sat and read while my mother scrubbed our floors and windows, washed our laundry, fed our fire, made our supper; while she sewed baptismal and communion and wedding gowns that were famous in six villages for the precision of their stitching, their fine and elaborate pleats and smocking and tucks and gathers. Her stitches, our house, her soul—everything she tended to was flawless.
Except for me. I overspilled my bounds, wanting the world. I didn’t want to be a girlmother, but I wanted Marcel for my own. Once I understood the possibilities, I couldn’t think of anything else. It could have been anyone, but Marcel was the only option I could see—what did I care that he was a bastard?
That evening, while my mother said her prayers—despite everything, she still believed in Jesus and Mary and all the rest—I tried to picture Marcel without his clothes, and, as Jesus was the only notion I had of a naked man, that’s how I saw him, wounds and all, a cloth across his lap, his arms wide open.
* * *
The first time I saw Mathilde, I was near enough to touch her, and I almost did. It was another Sunday, and I had stepped into the boulangerie for a baguette. Before the fog of my glasses evaporated, I was startled by the silence—no one was talking at all, as if some awful thing had just happened—and t
hen my glasses cleared, and I saw her, saw the little space around her the others had left while they carried out their wordless transactions. It wasn’t as if the usual banter had ever been necessary—the boulanger already knew what each woman wanted—but Mathilde didn’t understand the patois we spoke amongst ourselves. Their silence was just as unnecessary. She was last in line, and I took my place behind her, my heart beating so fast I imagined she could feel its vibration. By now I had seen Marcel several times, and though we had never looked at each other directly, I was more and more sure of our bond. Here was his mother—and by extension, I felt, mine, as if we were already in-laws. She was looking down, studying the prepared dishes, so that I could see her profile. It wasn’t her white-blond hair or her translucent skin that struck me first, the way they had everyone else; it was her meekness. Shoulders bowed, her hair fixed in a small bun, she looked like a girl called up before the Mother Superior. I stared at the faint down on the curve of her neck, her simple white collar, the gold cross dangling from her throat—she had clearly been to mass with the others—and I knew she was innocent of all the accusations made against her. She was no more capable of sin than my own mother.
I wanted to go up to each woman in line and tell her how wrong she’d been: Nicole Lagrange, the Widow Charles, fat old Madame Carreaux, and jolly Madame Désailloux with her two jolly married daughters. I would have liked to grab them by the hair and slap them for all the times they’d whispered about my mother, stared at her, glanced at the two of us with their false smiles. I may have been a quiet girl, but I had a good imagination. I saw myself knocking their heads together, pair by pair, and then taking Mathilde’s hand and running away with her. I’d take her down to the stream I liked to go to when the weather was nice and we’d sit on the flat rock beneath the poplars, the water parting around us. I’d brush out her hair.
News of Our Loved Ones Page 5