News of Our Loved Ones

by Abigail DeWitt

  My son, Bernard, climbed on everything. He never broke a bone, though, never even bloodied his nose. When my husband was shot at Château-Thierry three months after our wedding, when my infant daughter died of the flu—none of that could have been helped, but Bernard was another story. I fell asleep by the river. We’d gone there for a picnic the morning of his sixth birthday, just the two of us—we were all that was left, after his father and sister had died. My strong little Bernard, with his thin, blue lips, and the swampy weight of him in my arms.

  It’s nothing. The chair didn’t break, and my ankle’s fine. Not even a sprain, just a little throbbing. I can walk on it perfectly well. But this floor! It’s caked with dirt. I should have thought of that before I washed the windows and let the sun pour in all over everything. I should have told André to meet me in a café!

  I still don’t know how he found me, who told him I was at the Salpêtrière. My gown was falling open in the back, a detail I remember not because it embarrassed me, but because it seemed the whole world might rush in from behind. There’s no safety in an open-backed gown. André would have been in medical school by then; perhaps that’s why they let him see me. Many times, he came and sat beside me on the stone floor, his hand on my knee. We never spoke. I couldn’t—hysteria, that was my diagnosis. The patient does not utter a sound. The doctors tried to hypnotize me, inquisition by a swinging watch, as if a perfect recollection of my sins would ease my suffering. Between sessions, they ordered the lights dimmed and the food bland to ready me for the next trance, but they made no progress; I would have spoken to get rid of them, but I could not find my voice. Nothing but a dry trickle at the back of my throat. André just sat, his breath beside me steady and mild. He took my arm one day, lifted me to my feet, and led me out to walk the grounds; my feet swung awkwardly, uncertain where to land. It was a bright winter day, the paths sparkling, and the branches of the trees as smooth as metal. I’d been given my own coat to wear and a pair of my shoes. It had surprised me to see them, those pieces of my old life—the little buckles on the shoes, the coat’s fur collar. I shrank from them, but André helped me with the sleeves, and then he knelt and slid each foot into its shoe. Afterward, he walked with me whenever the weather was fine, until I was pronounced well enough to leave the Salpêtrière. I’d learned to sound words again, though I never said what the doctors wanted me to say. I could not confess that I’d fallen asleep.

  I was sent to my parents’ home to finish recuperating. My mother hovered nervously and my father flinched at the sight of me and I didn’t stay long. On one of our walks, André had given me the address of this studio, with its view of the Luxembourg all along one wall and its sleeping nook behind a curtain. No hallways, no doors opening to empty rooms. I never thanked him. I have lived here for forty-three years, letting the dust turn to grime and I did not even send him a note. I hope I wrote to him when I heard about his family, but I’m not sure I did even that much.

  So much is lost: Who I spent time with between the wars, what I did on the weekends, besides grade papers. Even the second war is blurry. I remember how nervous I was, bringing potatoes to my colleague when she was hiding in a basement on rue Jean Bart, and I remember Michelle running down the street, calling out the names of the dead as if she’d triumphed over them. Little else. It’s the war of ’14 I recall; it’s always a person’s first war that stays with her. My hospital volunteer’s apron over my pregnant belly, and the stunning smell of gangrene.

  The windows are shining, the dishes done, the floor swept. This will have to do. Flowers, then, and éclairs from Dalloyau. My back hurts—these bones weren’t meant to carry so much weight. It’s a miracle I didn’t break the chair. If I can find my purse—there—and now down the stairs. Madame Silva is sweeping the entryway, bent in half so that her torso’s parallel with the floor. She still pushes her broom morning and night, keeping a low eye on the comings and goings.

  “Madame Silva,” I say, brightly. The more ordinary I seem, the less she pries into my life.

  She stops, rests her shoulder against the broom handle and grunts hello without lifting her head. “You’re going out?”

  “I’m off to get a few things from Dalloyau. I have company coming.” But as soon as I say it, I feel a wave of nausea. What can we talk about, André and I? What did we ever talk about, besides our desire for each other?

  Madame Silva shrugs at the floor, resumes sweeping a little pile of dust, which scatters in the breeze when I open the front door. I want to apologize, but I hurry out instead.

  In the Luxembourg, the pigeons strut their iridescent breasts, the trees shiver from green to silver and back again. I’d like to spend one more summer here before I die, but I promised Françoise I’d help with the children. And I do like the train ride to the coast, with the view of the sunset over the water and the damp, salty wind coming through the windows. If it weren’t for the children, I wouldn’t mind going to Pornic for the holidays, but the little ones wear me out with their frenzied jumping, the way they scream every time a wave comes. I’ve never much liked small children, except for Geneviève. So pale and quiet, with her enormous eyes, her thin arms around my neck. I love her still, but I hardly see her now. She rushes off, leaving her son and her daughters with anyone who will keep them; she barely seems to miss them. They’re difficult children. The older ones can’t go five minutes without hitting each other and Polly weeps at the sight of me.

  The only children I loved completely were my own. Even with the soldiers’ cries echoing into the maternity ward and my husband dead, I was so happy when I learned I’d given birth to twins. Two children make a family. Curled together in the crib, as they’d been in the womb, Thérèse sucked Bernard’s thumb.

  But here is Dalloyau, with its bright little door chime and the smell of chocolate. Shopgirls in their crisp white coats, like doctors. I ask for two miniature coffee éclairs, two chocolate ones, two raspberry tarts, two lemon tarts, and a box of caramels.

  The florist’s is impossible—such a profusion of colors and smells, and it’s difficult not to stroke the petals, the waxy ones and the velvety ones, the silken ones that have barely unfurled. I settle on a dozen apricot roses and a small bouquet of lilies of the valley. In the thin mirror around the florist’s door, I am a beggar woman with my gray hair, my long, dirty dress, but a beggar with flowers, with a beautifully wrapped package from Dalloyau.

  The Luxembourg is full of students now, murmuring in pairs, their heads bent earnestly together, hands clasped behind their backs; little boys shouting by the fountain because their boats are going sideways, falling over; and at the merry-go-round the old man is scolding his customers. The light dapples onto the garden paths and floods the street outside the gates. I’m holding my packages carefully, the box of pastries in front of me, the flowers cradled gently in my left arm, so that nothing will get crushed, which is why I don’t see André standing at my door.

  How is it that we recognize each other? But we do. My hands are trembling again. I need to tell him something, but I can’t think what.

  “Chouchotte!” he exclaims, smiling the way he always did, a secret grin. He has his own pink-edged roses, of course. That’s how it’s done, the guest brings flowers. “Let me help you.” He takes my apricot roses and the lilies of the valley, adds them to his bouquet, and kisses me on the cheeks.

  “You’re here,” I say when he steps back.

  “I just arrived.” His hair is graying at the temples and there’s a shiny bald circle at the top, but his eyes are unchanged—those round, laughing eyes. Geneviève’s are the same shape and color, a blue so rich they seem to have been painted on, though hers never laugh. “This very minute,” André adds. His aftershave smells of lavender.

  “Come in,” I say, my heart leaping. I don’t know where to look, but the key always sticks, so that’s something to concentrate on. “I wanted to have you over for tea,” I add, stupidly. My gaze is still fixed on the lock, even though I’ve found
the spot where the key catches. I detest it when people state the obvious. I wanted to have you over for tea! “There! I always have a bit of trouble, but I manage it eventually!” I laugh, determined, it seems, to play the daft old woman. “I always manage!”

  Madame Silva is still leaning into her broom, her little pile of dust waiting to be disturbed, but she flicks her eyes up at us and nods in a way that seems friendly enough. And then we are making our way single file up the three flights, and though I go up and down these stairs every day without any trouble—fat or no fat—I feel suddenly as if my heart will give out.

  “Come in,” I say again, indicating my little table and the old armchair and the straight-backed chair where I can still make out my dusty footprints. But otherwise, the room is so clean I barely recognize it. I even wiped out the ashtrays and dusted the coffee table, though I don’t remember doing that. It’s not just years, faces, that I lose, but what I did earlier in the day: dampening a rag, apparently, and rubbing out ash stains. It was always like that, even when I was younger, whole conversations slipping out of my mind, though I’ve never forgotten a single book, all of them somehow back on the shelves now.

  I dare myself to look at André and he is just standing and smiling. The only time I ever saw him look unhappy was when I ended things. I needed to think of my future, I said, already infatuated with the man I would marry. It was a careless wedding, fueled mostly by the prospect of my husband-to-be returning to the front, and what I was most infatuated with was my husband-to-be’s air of authority. I never laughed with him the way I laughed with André, but André was a boy; we couldn’t go on forever as we were. “André,” I had said. “You have to understand.” He’d jerked his head toward the door and told me to leave. We didn’t speak again for years. Later, when he found me in my cell—he was unhappy then, too, I think.

  I fill three pitchers with water, put the flowers on the end tables on either side of the armchair, and when I turn to him again, he’s peering into the box of pastries. He makes a little sound of pleasure and says, “My goodness,” as if these were the first éclairs and tarts he’d ever seen.

  “I’ll just put the kettle on,” I say, my voice catching, and then there is nothing for us to do but sit down and stare at each other until the water boils. I insist he take the armchair, pretending I need the other one for my back. The silence doesn’t seem to bother him, but I pat my knees for a while—a gesture that reminds me, suddenly, of Pauline—and then I offer him a cigarette, though he never smoked. He lights mine, and then he looks around, taking in the bookcases and the tall windows, the velvet curtain that hides my bed.

  “I like your place,” he says. “It’s lovely, with all the windows.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Thank you. That was a great help.”

  He looks at me without understanding.

  “You gave me this address, referred me to Madame Silva.”

  “My God, I did, didn’t I? I’d forgotten. That was her, downstairs? Madame Silva? I’ll need to say hello on my way out.” He doesn’t mention how they were acquainted, or how he’d learned she had a studio to rent, but now he is full of chatter, recalling people we both knew, the conversation of everyone who grew up in Caen. I’m too nervous to pay attention to most of what he says.

  The kettle whistles and I get up to make tea, but instead all I do is turn the stove off and come back to my chair. He’s asking after Geneviève now, as if he knows that they’re related. Pauline and André were much closer in age than he and I were, and suddenly I wonder if he is Geneviève’s father. I assumed it was Raphaël, the way Pauline found every excuse to make elaborate pastries for him—and Raphaël was the ladies’ man, much more than André—but it could just as easily be André.

  I ask him: “Are you the uncle or the father?”

  He laughs. “One sister for each brother, don’t you think?”

  I laugh, too, the people we once were seeming, for a moment, as harmless as dollhouse figures to be positioned and repositioned any way we like.

  “I was in Paris when your niece—our niece!—was conceived. Raphaël told me about her—he was so proud of her musical talent.” He shakes his head, smiling. “What made you think I might be the father?”

  “Oh,” I say, shrugging. “Nothing. I don’t know.” I was in the Salpêtrière when Geneviève was born; I didn’t see her until she was six months old and when I did, I blurted out that she had Naquet eyes. Speech was still difficult for me. I couldn’t remember what was or wasn’t polite to say. Pauline turned red, so I knew for certain then. “I’ll have Geneviève’s youngest for the summer,” I say, to change the subject.

  “You have a summer place?”

  “In Brittany—a village not far from Nantes.”

  He smiles. “We have a place on Ile d’Yeu. My wife and I.”

  I didn’t know he had a wife. I’m embarrassed that I didn’t think to invite her, but where would she have sat? “You have children?” I ask, as casually as possible.

  “No,” he says, and something in me gathers, funnels down: I need to tell him right away about Bernard. Someone should know. I might as well have killed Bernard with my own hands. Everyone showed me such pity, the young widow losing her son in the Orne, but what did widowhood have to do with it? I barely knew my husband; if it weren’t for the wedding photo, I wouldn’t remember what he looked like. And Thérèse? Flesh of my flesh, but she was barely six weeks old, and I have no memory of her face. Bernard was the love of my life, the child who was given to me to keep. I try to imagine him pulling me toward a carousel—I have a photo of him riding a painted elephant—only I can’t remember the day it was taken. When I picture him clearly, he’s in the river. Sometimes I think I see his shadow, slipping in the reeds, but I know I’ve made that up. I was still asleep then.

  “I killed him,” I say. But have I said it? I can’t hear my own voice and the light in the windows hurts my eyes. My throat swells shut and the hot light presses in, too close. Someone should pull the curtains. He’s watching me, not saying anything, and I want to get up, leave now, but I can’t move, my face suddenly drenched with tears. The silence goes on and on, and the light keeps shifting, blurred and sparkling and then dark, as if we’d woken up in the middle of the night. My face sodden. I’d like to slap someone, this is intolerable, these tears—over what? What has happened? My mind is a blank.

  “Chouchotte,” he is saying, and for a moment, I can’t remember his name. André.

  “Chouchotte. Listen to me. Chouchotte. I was there. I was with you. Listen to me.”

  He crouches in front of me, holding my hands, and I want to push him away. He shouldn’t see me like this, an old woman with a runny nose.

  “Listen to me.”

  André, I think, over and over, so I won’t forget.

  “I saw you. It was the fourteenth of July picnic. Half the town was there. Listen.”

  What is there to listen to? The room is bright and dark by turns, the temperature rising and falling.

  “You closed your eyes for an instant, that’s all. What happened was terrible, but you’re not to blame. Why shouldn’t you close your eyes for an instant, with everyone there, watching the children?”

  Why has he come here? He is still crouched in front of me, still holding my hands. We were lovers once—does he want me back?

  “Chouchotte,” he says, and it strikes me that my name—my nickname, “Chouchotte”—is meant to quiet someone. Sh-sh. It’s funny that this never occurred to me before, and it makes me laugh, but he doesn’t laugh back. He looks upset, as if he wants me to hush, but that never stops a person’s laughing fit, it only makes it worse.

  “Chouchotte.”

  I can’t control myself, I’m laughing hysterically, though I can’t remember what set me off. It feels good to laugh, my breath rising and falling so helplessly—and suddenly I hear him, my Bernard, his own high, sweet laughter joining mine. I keep laughing because he’s laughing, we go on and on, setting each other off
, until we’re spent, and then I feel him throw his arms around my neck and rest his head on my shoulder. It’s the first time I’ve been able to imagine him this way, his fierce heart against mine, and it’s exactly as if he’s here, in his navy-blue shorts and his sailor shirt, his thin little body giving off a faint odor of wild carrots.

  “Chouchotte?”

  If I keep my eyes closed and breathe deeply, I can still smell Bernard, feel his breath on my neck.

  “Chouchotte . . .” Anxiety rises in his voice, a kind of despair, but if I open my eyes and speak, Bernard will vanish.

  “Look at me.”

  Please, I think, stop. I ought to be ashamed: André has shown me nothing but kindness and I have caused him nothing but trouble. Bernard, I think, but it’s hopeless now. I open my eyes into a moment as bright and sharp as a blade. My apartment scrubbed clean. André squeezes my hand and I can see the relief wash over him, so I squeeze his. “Sit,” I say, though it hurts to speak. “Please. Have a pastry.”

  He smiles a little, a tired smile, and sits back in the armchair. He lifts a raspberry tart from the box and takes a bite. “This is lovely,” he says, sadly, and for a moment, I think we’re both sad for the same reason.

  “Do you still paint?” I ask, not knowing what else to say.

  He chuckles. “Still poorly. Do you remember, Chouchotte, how I struggled to position your hands and wrists?”

  “Oh, André,” I say, without thinking. “I didn’t treat you well.”

  “Nonsense.” He pauses a moment and then he flashes me his old, boyish grin. “You taught me a great deal.”