by Jane Delury
“Papa thought you’d want these for tonight,” he said. He put the leeks on the table. Yes, his mother said, she and Hélène were going to make “a nice little poêlée de poireaux” to go with the gigot, trimmed perfectly for her by the butcher Marcel, and the “bons petits champignons” that Jacques’s father would go find in the forest after his nap. She wrapped the carrot and potato peelings in the sheet of newspaper for the compost pile.
Hélène took the leeks to the sink. “You have some dirt on your cheek,” she said to Jacques as she passed by. His mother reached up and brushed it off. Her thin hair was permed into tight curls, her face chalky with the pancake makeup she used to hide the broken capillaries on her nose, which was as long and thin as a shark fin. Jacques, like her, had a large nose, his rounder and thicker, a square jaw like his father, and hair that tended to bushiness. Although he and Guy were fraternal twins, they looked nothing alike. Guy had apparently inherited the recessive genes in the family: his hair was red and his skin pale and freckled—he burned easily, and when he was upset, his face flamed. Even before his illness fully showed, he had been quick to anger, unlike Jacques, and considered “off” and “strange” by the other boys. There had been a persistent rumor at school that he wasn’t really Jacques’s twin and had been secretly adopted.
“How are Alexis and Emmanuel?” Jacques asked Hélène.
“They seem fine.” Hélène was washing the leeks, gold bracelets clinking. “They’re upstairs in our room. Your mother found a game for them.”
“Your old peg solitaire,” Jacques’s mother said. “Remember how you and Guy used to love to play?”
The rest of the afternoon went by pleasantly enough. The boys were, indeed, playing peg solitaire in the upstairs bedroom, and Alexis seemed perfectly fine. Jacques did a sudoku as his mother did a crossword. Hélène embroidered. When Henri came back with the mushrooms, there was the usual scurry, then they all settled back into their seats. At six, night fell, and they had their kirs and aperitif biscuits by the fireplace, as the boys drank the Oranginas that Jacques’s mother kept for their visits. Henri made a fire, burned the newspaper, the paper in which the butcher had wrapped the gigot, and the silver wrapping from the box of chocolates that Hélène had brought from Paris. Jacques’s mother set a pan of chestnuts in the flames for the boys. Henri poured himself a second kir. He said several things that were incorrect about inflation and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s policies and the strikes taking place that month. Jacques listened and nodded and had a second kir too. He counted his father’s inaccuracies. When Henri started in on the national deficit, Hélène raised her eyebrows at Jacques, an expression that said: We are in this together. Jacques possessed a degree in math and another in economics. He was a fonctionnaire de catégorie A at the Ministère de l’Economie et des Finances. And here was his father lecturing him about the deficit as if Jacques were a hairdresser or a professor of the visual arts. But what can you do with someone like that? Hélène would say—one of her favorite expressions.
“The most recent numbers are lower than that, actually,” Jacques said, and his father shook his head.
“Even if they are”—and then he was on to the benefits of Marxism, where he always ended up.
Still, as the fire burned and the chestnuts let off their steamy, meaty smell, and the kirs softened the edges, Jacques felt affection for his father, this stern homme de principes from a retreating world. The same tenacity that Henri Havre displayed in his vegetable garden had made him a local hero during the war, which he’d spent passing messages in his schoolmaster’s bag. When the Americans bombed Benneville, he was lying with both legs broken in a Gestapo cell. And Jacques felt terribly in love with Hélène as the shadows of the fire flowed over her face, and in love with his boys, on their stomachs in front of the television, watching an American Western. He took another handful of aperitif biscuits from the box his mother passed him. There were only fifteen hours left of this visit, and he would be asleep for eight of them.
But then, as they sat at the table with the gigot and pans of sautéed leeks, caramelized tomatoes from the freezer, and mushrooms from the forest, Jacques’s father started in again on the boys. Hélène had admired the flavor of the leeks, and said that Jacques’s father had such the green hand, and Jacques’s father said, “It was not passed down to your children,” with one of his ironic smiles that felt like the cut of a switchblade. He pointed his fork at Emmanuel.
“That one barely got a cabbage out of the ground before he was off to chase butterflies.” He pivoted the fork. “And this one thought the parsley was lettuce.”
He went on to describe the shallots with the broken roots, and the “yanking as if pulling a tooth.” Emmanuel didn’t seem to have heard his grandfather’s insults—everything rolled off of him. But Alexis’s chin trembled.
Hélène patted his shoulder and simultaneously grabbed Emmanuel’s hand to stop him from mining out the inside of his piece of baguette and rolling it into a ball. She was sitting between them. Jacques was on the other side of the table, his parents at each head.
“They live in Paris,” Jacques said to his father.
“Have some more of the nice little tomatoes from the garden,” Jacques’s mother said. She leaned across the table to scoop another spoonful onto Alexis’s plate.
“Wherever they live, they are old enough to know the difference between parsley and lettuce,” Henri said.
“I like eating bread this way,” Emmanuel whispered to Hélène.
“You are making a mess all over the table,” she whispered back.
“It’s all right,” Jacques’s mother said. “We will shake the cloth off outside for the birds. Would you help me, Alexis?”
“The next time we visit,” Jacques said to Henri, “we won’t have the boys help in the garden.”
“So that’s what you’re teaching them? To give up?” Henri passed the green salad to Alexis. “Eat some,” he said. “Your grandmother put your shallots in the dressing. You will improve. You and I will go out together alone next time.”
All through the next course, into dessert, Jacques ate quietly as Hélène cast warning glances across the table. Alexis’s chin stilled again. Jacques’s mother sent him and Emmanuel to the freezer for homemade strawberry sorbet that they ate with ladyfingers. Jacques’s throat felt frozen even before he took a spoonful. This was not the same room he’d sat in for dinner as a boy, although the puce paint color was the same, and so was the wax tablecloth. Still, it seemed that Alexis was he and Emmanuel was Guy. Or the opposite. It wasn’t clear. What was clear was that his father was a bully. A hero, maybe, but also a bully. Nothing was ever or would ever be enough for him. He used to stand behind Guy’s chair, making him sit still as he did his homework. “Stop moving your leg,” he would say. “Focus.” When Guy doodled on his cahier—sketches of jellyfish rising over a forest, a man with two heads, a skeleton holding an umbrella, their father ripped out the pages. At fifteen, when Guy began to string random words together—apple, lamb, bicycle, moon—their father said, “Stop, and make a sentence. No, that is not a proper sentence. Sujet. Verbe.” The next year, when Guy started to hear voices, their father said that he’d indulged his imagination too much and removed all of the books from the house. When Guy cut his palms with a razor, their father started to shave in the schoolhouse and locked the kitchen knives in the trunk of his car. Jacques knew that it didn’t make sense to think that Guy wouldn’t have gone crazy if their father had let him go crazy, but sitting at the table, watching Alexis eat his sorbet, he remembered that hopeless feeling of watching his brother become someone his father couldn’t stand.
“What is wrong with you?” Hélène whispered that night as they sat in bed under the slick run of a sateen comforter. “You aren’t acting like yourself at all. You’re picking fights with your father.”
“Did you see how he’s treating Alexis?”
“He’s being who he always is. Alexis is reacting to you.
We all are. Tu es stressé, donc il est stressé.”
She was twisting her hair into the knot she wore to sleep, her head tilted against the slant of the ceiling. He could see the outline of her breast through her nightgown. He moved down in the bed and touched the small of her back. She shook her head.
“Your parents will hear. They’re right next door and your father is awake half the night going to the bathroom.”
They wouldn’t hear anything, though, because Hélène no longer made a sound when they had sex. Jacques watched her squeeze a meringue of lotion into the palm of her hand, braiding it between her fingers.
“Let’s go home early tomorrow,” he said. “I can’t do another eleven hours.”
She slid down next to him in the bed, smelling of violets. “I know it’s hard. Your father, c’est un homme impossible.” She moved her hips against his. “You need to stay patient,” she said. “Here’s what wouldn’t make sense: We put up with your father for all these years, and then you antagonize him and he changes his will and we don’t get the cottage.” Hélène reached into his boxers and rubbed her thumb along the ridge of his penis, working his erection.
“He wouldn’t do that. And I don’t know why you want this house so much, anyway.”
“Because it’s the only way we will ever afford a place in the country.”
She kissed him to stop him from talking. She was managing him, he knew, but he succumbed. As she stroked him, he thought of how it would be, their place in the country with the rooms painted white and the heavy furniture gone and his father’s vegetable garden replaced by a patio. Their friends from Paris would visit, drink kirs, count the stars, wander off to the forest with walking sticks and cardigans slung over their shoulders. Maybe he could convince Guy to come for a weekend and sleep in this guestroom under the skylight that Hélène planned to punch into the roof.
“Papa is going to die at one hundred, you know,” he said.
“I don’t think so. Not with his high blood pressure. Your mother told me the doctor is concerned.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say.” He stopped her hand.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” she said. “And I’m only expressing what we’re both thinking.”
“No, you aren’t.” He turned to his side. “Bonne nuit.”
The next morning, he slept late. When he came down the hall, his mother was ironing napkins at the dining room table. She told him that Hélène had gone to mass. “The boys were up early. They’re outside, and Henri’s in the garden.”
She got him a bowl of coffee and biscottes with raspberry preserves. She asked him about work, his recent promotion.
“Have you seen your brother lately?” She poured more coffee into his bowl.
“About a month ago. He has a dog now.”
His mother smiled. “It’s good that he has a dog.”
Jacques knew that she meant it was good because it suggested that Guy could have a dog with no harm coming to the dog. Their mother had been the one to find the skinned cat in Guy’s armoire. Jacques was in his first year at university, Guy having dropped out of school, and his mother called him at the dormitory. “Your father has had your brother taken away in an ambulance, and he won’t tell me where.”
Now Jacques’s mother patted his arm. “You’ll bring him his vegetables and he’ll know I’m thinking of him,” she said.
Hélène came into the kitchen, unwinding a scarf from her neck. “You’re up, finally,” she said. “I should start packing. Emmanuel has fencing lessons this afternoon. Where are the boys?”
“Outside,” Jacques’s mother said.
“I didn’t see them.” She pulled off her gloves, one finger at a time.
“I’ll go,” Jacques said. He was glad that last night’s fight seemed to be over. He looked for Alexis and Emmanuel in front of the cottage and down the road, and then went around back to the garden, where his father was cutting dead raspberry brambles from the fence.
“I told them to take a walk in the forest,” he said when Jacques asked if he’d seen the boys. “They were running around the lawn like lunatics.”
“You sent them to the forest alone?”
“I didn’t send them. I suggested they go.”
“How long have they been out there?”
“I don’t know. Une heure?”
“They’re probably lost.”
“I told them exactly where to go. I said stay on the logging road. Don’t take the trail to the pond. You and your brother used to go there all the time. You’re being overly protective.”
Jacques looked back at his father, throat frozen again. This was what always happened. Even now. Even when Jacques was almost forty years old, had people constantly knocking on his office door to ask him how to do this or do that, balance that spreadsheet, explain that figure. Every time he thought that he was right, his father said something that made that feeling turn to sand. “I needed to make a decision,” he had said about Guy. “He killed a cat. He was hurting himself. He could have hurt someone else. And if I’d asked you or your mother first, you would have said no.”
Jacques had taken the train to Benneville from his university, and the three of them drove up the road to the mental hospital, which was housed in a former convent. Hands on the wheel, Jacques’s father laid out the procedure done to Guy the day before, how it would help, the statistics, what the doctors had told him. “It is much like resetting a clock,” he said, “so that it ticks the right time.” Jacques had tried to explain it to Emmanuel and Alexis once. As he started, he stopped, because it was too terrible. A doctor pushed a spike into your uncle’s eye socket. He detached one part of his brain from another. The idea was to make him stop getting upset, yelling over nothing, hearing voices that told him to do strange things like take off his clothes and stand in the square, or trap stray cats and skin them. He was awful to be with, your uncle. That’s the truth. He frightened me. I was glad to be away from him at school. I wished that those schoolyard rumors had been true and he wasn’t really my twin, that he’d been adopted into the family, that I didn’t share his blood.
But the surgery didn’t work as it was supposed to, or maybe it worked too well. I walked into the hospital room with my parents, and the boy in the bed looking at me with those flat eyes wasn’t my brother. My brother was full of ideas, and before they became crazy, they had often been wonderful. When we were little, we would go to the forest after school. We started to run as we passed the old mill, Guy always ahead, slapping the tree trunks, counting them off. We chased rabbits and foxes. We climbed the trees and tried to see Paris. We swam in the pond and dived toward the bottom, looking for the rifle supposedly lost there by two brothers out hunting at the start of the century. We came back up together, took a breath, then pummeled our way back through the water again. “It has to be there,” Guy would say after I’d given up and swum to the bank. And then down he’d go again, kicking and splashing. I see now that this was the beginning of him hearing and seeing things that didn’t exist, but at the time I envied his determination.
“Hélène wants to get on the road,” Jacques said. He turned away from the fence. “I’ll go find the boys.”
“I’ll come with you,” his father said, “so you don’t get lost looking.”
Jacques waited for his father to put the clippers back in the shed, and they walked up the drive past the manor. “Olga’s having the roof patched,” Henri said of the men hammering the slate. “She does what she can when she can.” Jacques thought, as he had before, that his father had moved to this property because here he could remember every day that he had been on the right side during the war.
“Et voilà,” his father said when they’d entered the forest and turned onto the logging road. “Right there as I told you they’d be.”
The boys weren’t alone. They were standing with the driver of a truck that tilted off the road with the left tire in a drainage ditch. Jacques knew the man right away from his shoulder, whi
ch slumped so much that his hand hung almost to his knee. Quasimodo, the kids used to call him. Tin Back, Soldier Boy.
“What has Louis done now?” his father said.
Jacques called to the boys and they came running.
“We were over there”—Alexis pointed toward a trail near a pyramid of logs—“and we heard a noise.”
“His tires slipped,” Emmanuel said.
“We told him we could help him push it out.”
“Maybe we could use a rope or something?”
“How did you manage that?” Jacques’s father said to Louis Nevers, who was looking into the ditch, at the current of water running between the tires.
“Je ne sais pas,” he said glumly.
Jacques said hello. Louis and Guy had been friends, before Guy stopped having friends, sharing the bond of social outcasts. They’d fallen out, Jacques remembered, when Guy and Jacques were ten, after Guy convinced Louis that they should lay centimes—or was it francs?—on the train tracks that ran behind the village church. One afternoon, Guy stormed into the kitchen, where Jacques was doing his homework. He paced in front of the refrigerator, furious. He told Jacques how he and Louis had put the coins on the tracks, and how, after the train had gone by, they were nowhere to be found. “Louis took them,” Guy said. “I know he did. He’s a cripple witch thief.” Handicapé sorcier voleur. He raged and raged. Jacques said he doubted Louis stole the coins. They had probably flown far from the weight of the train. He went with Guy to the tracks to calm him down. They couldn’t see any coins in the gravel. Guy kicked the rails and let out a noise like a bull. Back home, Jacques gave him a handful of change from the jam jar in his room. Guy threw the coins at the wall. “It isn’t the same,” he screamed. Guy had never spoken to Louis again, as far as Jacques knew.
“I told your boys I’d be fine,” Louis said to Jacques. “You have kids that old now?”