News of Our Loved Ones

by Abigail DeWitt

  She was gazing down at the prepared dishes—the greasy rillettes and the smooth pâté, the speckled quiche and the golden flan—as if she were afraid to speak. Then, suddenly, she was placing her order, her voice breaking into the silence not like the soprano flute I expected from such delicate features, but like a cello, deep and almost painful. One baguette and two pieces of flan, please.

  After she had paid, when she turned to leave, I smiled at her—I who never smiled at anyone. She smiled back, her teeth as small and even as a child’s, and hesitated for a moment, as if we should speak, but of course we didn’t. Still, there was that startled smile, the pause, and after that I smiled whenever I saw her and she smiled back, a smile so warm it was as if we knew each other’s secrets. I thought she knew how lonely I’d been and that I didn’t judge her, and I believed she loved me.

  * * *

  Winter came, and there was talk of the boys going to the front, but none of them had yet, and the war still seemed far away. Or maybe it’s only now, knowing what came later, that the early days of the war seem so harmless. What I remember is how the world felt new to me, the snow itself like a thing I’d never witnessed: the flakes melting on my tongue, and the deepening drifts, the ache of the wind—an ache inseparable from my own desire, but whether that desire was for Mathilde or Marcel, I hardly knew, could hardly tell them apart, the one so small and good, the other so gangly and solemn. I wanted Marcel to touch me and I wanted Mathilde to ask after me.

  On Sundays, when they walked past our chalet to mass, he towered over her, his head bent toward hers as if he were confiding in her, but it was just bad posture. He barely spoke to his mother any more than he spoke to anyone else.

  The only real similarity between them was how pale they were, and I came to see their complexion—his especially, with all its freckles—as a sign of vulnerability, the flush of his cheeks evidence of his perpetual mortification. He must know what people said about him and his mother, how they discounted the existence of his father. What could he do but look away?

  Mathilde wouldn’t know. Surely she wouldn’t be able to fathom what everyone else was imagining, and that was why she was so much lovelier than Marcel. She was no more capable of gossip than she was of sin.

  But Marcel! The more he wanted to express—even feelings of love, of kindness—the more withdrawn he grew. This was how I explained the fact that he had not once glanced in my direction. Of course, he looked at no one, but I was sure he avoided me most of all.

  I prayed for bad weather so that we could ride the train, so that I could watch him as he leaned skillfully now into the curves, could see his Adam’s apple jump as the space below us came into view—as I myself swallowed, imagining the rush of air. No one else on the train even seemed to notice the drop.

  I pictured going to church with him and Mathilde, sitting beside him and feeling the fabric of his trousers against my knee. I would have gone—I would have put aside my horror of the crucifixion to sit beside them—but I didn’t want to hurt my mother.

  * * *

  I can’t explain what it was like to be young in those days, how heady it all was, with the war spreading across Europe, and desire all tangled up with death. I was thrilled that cold spring morning in 1940, when our boys went off to fight. The sky was crystal blue, fog drifted across the valley, and Mont Blanc rose in the distance like the entrance to Paradise. Across from the snow-covered massif, the Aiguilles glistened blackly.

  Marcel slumped against the station wall in an overcoat whose sleeves were too short, staring at the ground. I stood a little ways from him, behind a post, daring myself to go up to him, to throw my arms around his neck and kiss his cheeks. Everyone was crying and kissing—who would even notice my display? I imagined Marcel blushing, stammering maybe. He’d have to look at me. My father, whose eyes I inherited, sometimes said how pretty mine were when he still lived with us. Marcel would gaze into them and put his arms around me. I touched my mouth: he’d press his red, chapped lips against mine.

  Mathilde wept, like all the mothers, but she wasn’t clinging to her son the way they were, and she seemed more out of place than she’d ever seemed at the boulangerie or in the square. She’d come down to the station without a coat—all she wore with her dress was an old cardigan and boots—and her arms hung helplessly at her sides. She looked even younger than the village women claimed, and it seemed she barely knew Marcel. It seemed as if she wept for no reason.

  My heart was racing. They don’t know what to do with themselves, I thought, how to be a family. If I went up to Marcel, if I touched him, Mathilde would smile through her tears, so grateful for my presence in their lives. I held on to the post, giddy and shivering. We would only have a few minutes together before the train came, but it would be enough, a promise. Afterward, Mathilde and I would leave the station together, arm in arm. We would send him letters in the same envelope, and his letters to us would arrive in a single packet, too.

  Just as I stepped forward to go to Marcel, Mathilde put her hand on his wrist. Like any mother. As if every evening she kissed him good night, brushed his hair out of his eyes, rubbed his feet. She stroked his skin, a gesture so familiar, so effortless, that I could hardly breathe.

  Their lives were with each other, and when he did fall in love, it would be with a girl as beautiful as Mathilde. My eyes stung, and I pulled my coat closed against the cold air, a coat that fit me as poorly as Marcel’s fit him. I would have left the station, run out past the edge of the village and up into the high mountains, where the snow was still waist deep—but I couldn’t tear my eyes from them.

  Marcel looked down at Mathilde and she reached up to touch his shoulder. Please, cheri, she mouthed. Don’t go.

  Marcel shrugged her off so brusquely that she stumbled onto the tracks. I gasped, as mortified as if I’d pushed her myself, and when her face reddened, my own skin burned. She stepped back up onto the platform, smiling a little, as if she’d stumbled out of clumsiness. I wanted to run to her and apologize—for Marcel, for myself, for everyone who had ever been unkind to her—and for a second, I considered how I’d abandoned my own mother. She was back at our chalet, unwelcome even now, when the village was sending off its boys. When I was small, I had practiced my stitches with her every evening, trying to copy not just the fine motions of my mother’s hands, but the shallow rhythm of her breathing. Now I barely noticed her.

  Maybe Marcel did love me, I thought. Who could say? A boy who shoved his mother was not a boy who would reveal the tenderness of his heart, but when he came home from the war, when he tore my well-stitched clothing from my body, I would tame him and teach him to be kind. I’d do what his own mother couldn’t.

  The train pulled into the station—the same small, red train we took to school, already full of soldiers—and I noticed that the fog had burned off the valley. The boys would be able to look out and see the chasms below: the rocky cliffs and the stunted trees, the white, churning river at the bottom.

  * * *

  For the first few days after the boys left, the village was quiet. The mothers and fathers went solemnly about their business, and the very old grew vague, wandering the streets as if they had nowhere to go. But the young girls, dreaming of soldiers—we all walked a little taller, as if the world belonged to us.

  On the fourth or fifth evening, as my mother and I sat in front of the fire, I spoke to her: “Maman,” I said, though we rarely called each other by name, since we were mostly alone and didn’t waste words.

  She didn’t look up from her sewing. Her hair in the firelight was beautiful, still brown and glossy as horse chestnuts, though she was past fifty, and if she’d not pulled it back so tightly, if she’d smiled more easily, she might have been pretty.

  “Maman,” I repeated. “I’d like to go to church.”

  Her sewing needle dove in and out, in and out, her thimble glinting. When she was done, she tied a knot, snipped the thread, and put the garment down; then she rose and went into her r
oom. I thought she’d gone to bed. When she disapproved of me, she let me know by her deepening silence. After a few minutes, though, she came back, carrying the veil I’d worn to mass the year before my parents’ divorce. She held it up, inspecting it with her small fingers, and then she pulled a white spool from her basket, mended its frayed edge, and handed it to me. It was so contrary to the way she’d acted my whole life—to what I thought of as her pride and stubbornness—that I realize now I didn’t know her at all.

  But I wasn’t thinking about her then. I was only thinking of myself.

  * * *

  Mathilde was already in church when I arrived. I slipped into the pew behind her and, during the whole hour of kneeling and standing and sitting and kneeling, during all those cries of Domine, non sum dignus, I copied her motions, imagining that we were the same person, with the same fine hair and slender arms. I slammed my fist against my heart in time with her. If anyone stared at me, surprised by my return to the fold, I didn’t notice.

  After mass, I fell into step beside Mathilde and crossed the square with her. I waited in line with her at the boulangerie and, as soon as we’d made our purchases and were alone, I asked if she’d heard from Marcel. She gave a small, pained smile and shook her head. It didn’t occur to me that she was afraid for his life. I thought she was dismayed because he was such a terrible son, and I wanted to console her, to let her know that, through me, she would always have him. It’s just a mercy that I lacked the words.

  Every Sunday of that sad, quick war, she smiled at me, asked after my mother, and when she saw something that amused her—little Georgette Mathias trying to skip, a small dog yapping at a big one—she touched my wrist the way she’d touched Marcel’s. Look, Marie-Claire, she said, chuckling. I tried to laugh the way she did, quietly, from the bottom of my throat.

  In May, a sudden, windy snow-shower made it seem for a moment as if winter had returned; Mathilde and I paused outside the boulangerie and she raised her voice over the wind: “It’s like being inside the mind of a madman. This whirling snow, without a point of rest.”

  Her complaint was so literary that I hoped she’d been like me—first in class, friendless, even homely—and as I wrapped my scarf around my head, I wondered where she was from, what sunny place that made a few hours of bad weather so alarming. It seemed indiscreet to ask, and anyway, the next Sunday was clear and warm. Just before we left the square and went our separate ways, she stopped by the fountain and nodded toward Mont Blanc. “I love it here,” she said. “This cold, fresh air. And soon—June? July? When do all the wildflowers come out? It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “You’re what’s beautiful!” I burst out, and she laughed, touching my arm.

  “Oh, Marie-Claire. You have no idea. All you have to do is stand up straighter.” I turned bright red, and she continued: “And when you feel bashful, smile.”

  I looked away, still blushing, but the following Sunday, she sat down on the edge of the fountain and motioned for me to sit beside her. “You mustn’t worry about your looks,” she said. “A girl only needs a few tricks. Shall I teach you?” She went on without waiting for an answer: “At night, before you go to bed, rub salad oil onto your skin and scalp to make them soft. And here . . .” She took a lock of my hair and twisted it into a tight rope. “See how the damaged ends stand out? Twist your hair this way when you’re at home and singe the flyaway ends with a match. Then brush your hair a hundred times. It will fall across your back like silk.” She laughed then, and squeezed my hand, and I laughed, too, as if we’d shared a great joke.

  * * *

  I can’t remember how I learned that Marcel had died. All at once, it seemed, the village knew, as if a flash had lit up the darkness and we had seen for an instant the whole geography of grief that lay around us—not only the boys who would die on the battlefield, but the ones our own police would later kill.

  I stood in the corner of my bedroom, thinking, Marcel is dead. He was alive and now he’s not, as if I were trying to solve an equation. I kept going over and over the same basic facts, getting nowhere. I was shocked, of course, and I cried, but more than anything, I was baffled. He was alive, and now he’s not.

  I should have rushed over to Mathilde’s chalet, taken her something to eat, sat with her while she grieved; I should have done what any ordinary friend would do, but I didn’t. The longer I didn’t, the more impossible it seemed. It embarrassed me to think of her being inconsolable.

  No one else went to her, either. Suddenly, I thought of myself as just another villager, and what did we really know about her? I told myself that if the Queen Anne’s lace were blooming, I’d bring her some, but the Queen Anne’s lace was still a month away. By the end of the week, Mathilde had left us.

  No one knew where she’d gone, though the Widow Charles’s son said he’d seen her on the road to Vaudagne. She had her suitcase, but he didn’t ask where she was headed or for how long. When we went to the chalet she’d been renting from la mère Lagrange—I tagged along behind Nicole Lagrange and a few other women—we saw that she had closed the shutters and put everything away in chests so that the mice wouldn’t eat them. The blankets and sheets and pillows and soap, a box of sugar and coffee and a few jars of jam (which we would come back to, of course, before the war was over) were all packed away and the mattresses tilted on their sides. She had weeded her garden, but even the tidy rows of turnips and radishes and carrots and potatoes, the heads of lettuce she’d left behind, did not suggest occupancy.

  I thought of her, righting herself after Marcel shrugged her off, and I knew that wherever she went, she would tidy up the evidence of every injury that was ever done to her. She would hold no one accountable. I felt as if I would be sick, but Nicole glared at me: I had no reason to look so gloomy, she said. Mathilde had only been passing through.

  * * *

  Jean-Luc Coiffier died a few days later, and then Claude Mason and one of the Manets from Vaudagne. We lost the war in six weeks. We were in the free zone, but collaborators or boches, what difference did it make? They were two faces of the same evil, and though we didn’t starve the way they did in the cities, we had lost our appetite.

  And yet the leaves filled out on the trees and the forest rustled all summer long with its deep shade, its shifting light; the meadows filled with blueberries, and at dusk, while the valley exhaled the warm scent of hay and lupine, the snow on the mountains turned pink.

  * * *

  By ’42, rumors of resistance were loud enough that even my mother heard them. The newspapers warned of Alpine terrorism and, though we’d always used the news for toilet paper, there was a special pleasure in it now. France would be redeemed by Maquisards. I didn’t know who might be involved in sabotage, just as I didn’t know who, besides our own government, was serving the enemy, but I suspected that my neighbor, Pierre Mason, was helping the Maquisards. I don’t know why I thought so, except that he had always been a popular, outgoing boy, and now he walked with his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched, and spoke to no one.

  Either way, I was proud of the rumors, but it wasn’t until I was older and discovered that the British and the Americans thought we were all cowards that I became so fierce in my pride. At the time, what I mostly felt was an electrified awareness of the world—“fear” isn’t the right word—and a dull ache of longing for my friendship with Mathilde.

  Still, the way I’d wanted Marcel, the way I’d tagged after Mathilde, came to seem like the stuff of childhood. They were such simple infatuations—to see the pair of them walk by my window, with their heads nearly touching, had excited me in a plain, straightforward way. When three policemen burned to death in an abandoned chalet outside our village, what I felt was a darker thrill.

  Of course, I was a coward. The kind our allies thought we all were. I kept my head down, followed orders, spoke politely to the police. I didn’t want to let on that I’d only attended church on Mathilde’s behalf, so I kept going. I
wanted to tell my mother the truth, that it was a sham, but an admission like that would only have hurt her. She had loved mass, had trembled when she took communion.

  She’d given her life to me and in my desperation to be like Mathilde, I’d forgotten her. I tried to make it up to her around the house, fixing her a tisane in the evening before she thought to ask, correcting her stitches without telling her, awakening before her to feed the fire so the house would be warm when she awoke, and she was grateful, but it was the gratitude you would show a stranger. I was part of the church now, and the church had cast her out.

  In the spring of ’43, around the same time that Pierre Mason and two other boys were taken in for questioning about the chalet fire, my mother began sewing a communion dress for Georgette Mathias. When it came time to do the smocking, she pricked herself—a thing she’d never done before—and then she put down her sewing, went to bed, and never got up again. Within a month, she had died.

  I barely remember the days that followed. I heard that our boys were still in custody, that three people had been hanged in Annecy, that the Désailloux sisters had given names, but none of it made sense to me. I knew only that my mother was dead. Old-timers, those of my classmates who are still alive, say that I went running into the road, crying; that when Nicole Lagrange wondered aloud if my mother had made her peace with God, I told her to go to the devil; that I refused all offers of food. I’m sure it’s true, but I can’t remember. What I do remember is my scalp stinging because I couldn’t stop pulling my hair. To this day, if my comb snags, tears spring to my eyes and I remember my mother, her small, delicate hands brushing my hair when I was little, showing me how to do French braids for church, in the days when we still went together.

  * * *

  I left Les Houches as Mathilde had. I had never been farther than Chamonix and I went all the way to Paris. I have no idea what I was thinking. Paris was crawling with boches and the Allies were bombing the trains. No one traveled who didn’t have to. Later, I told people I went to Paris to prepare for l’aggrégation so I could be a schoolteacher. That’s what I ended up doing, but I can’t remember what drove me there in the first place. For a while after my mother died, the world lost all its vividness for me. It’s true that I’ve never understood the beauty of a city, but the buildings were draped with swastikas and there were German signs on every corner. You’d think that would have startled me, but after the first wave of revulsion, I barely noticed. The war had been going on for so long, and the buildings crowded in on me, the clatter of footsteps hurt my ears, and I hurried through the streets, trying to hear, see, as little as possible.