The Balcony

by Jane Delury

  “It’s been a long time,” Jacques said.

  “I moved back. My mother’s not well. I’ve been taking care of her and helping out at René’s garage.” He looked into the ditch. “I guess this will be the end of that.”

  “We can go back to the house and call René,” Jacques’s father said. “He has the tow truck.”

  “Only thing to do, I guess.” Louis took a cigarette from a pack in his pocket.

  “Let’s give it a try,” Jacques said. “I’ll push. You drive.”

  He told the boys to stand back with his father. He stepped into the ditch, the muddy water rising over his ankles. He dug his heels in and pushed the bed of the truck as Louis gunned the engine. Mud smacked his face and his shirt.

  “That’s never going to work,” his father called. “We need René. I’ll talk to him,” he told Louis, who had climbed out of the truck again. “Ask him to give you another chance.”

  “Merci, Monsieur Havre,” Louis said, “but I don’t think he’ll listen.”

  “He’ll listen to me,” Jacques’s father said. “He was two years behind you, as I remember. Bon en maths et médiocre en français.”

  “Wait,” Jacques said. “There’s something else we could try.”

  “Nothing will work,” his father said.

  “He’s right,” Louis said to Jacques.

  “Help me get a few of those logs,” Jacques told Alexis and Emmanuel. The idea had come out of nowhere, something of him and outside of him, telling him what to do. Alexis and Emmanuel took a log by each end and carried it to the ditch. Jacques dragged another log over the road. His father interjected with “This won’t work.” Louis tried to roll a log from the stack, then gave up and lit another cigarette. With the help of Alexis and Emmanuel, Jacques wedged the logs under the front tires of the truck. He told Louis to gun the engine again. “Move away with the boys,” he said to his father, who did, explaining why the logs would only be buried deeper into the mud and that they needed a tow truck. The engine kicked. Jacques pushed. The bed wobbled and started to rise. He pushed harder, feet slipping. From behind, Alexis and Emmanuel yelled, “Allez, Papa!” The tires squealed, the engine whined, and the truck lurched out of the ditch. Jacques fell onto his hands and knees. Louis Nevers yelled his thanks and honked the horn. Alexis and Emmanuel cheered and chased the truck as it drove away.

  “He isn’t even going straight,” Jacques’s father said. “He’ll end up in another ditch.”

  “At least it won’t be this one,” Jacques said.

  Back at the cottage, his shoes and socks off and his pants rolled to his calves to keep mud off the floor, Jacques stood in the living room as Alexis and Emmanuel told Jacques’s mother and Hélène the story: They’d seen an “homme tordu” veer off the road and Jacques had figured out how to get the truck out of the ditch. “The logs were the secret,” Alexis said. “Pauvre Louis,” Jacques’s mother said to Henri, who said that Louis hadn’t seemed to care at all. “He was probably trying to lose that job with René. He was always lazy at school.” He went to light a fire. Hélène told the boys, “That’s impressive, but I don’t want you wandering off alone, whatever anyone says. And you shouldn’t talk to strangers.” She lifted her eyebrows at Jacques. They had to get going, Jacques said. He’d go clean up for the drive. “Yes,” his father said from the fireplace, “otherwise you’ll hit traffic on the périphérique.”

  In the shower, Jacques watched the mud run off his arms and legs and into the drain, wondering if the pipe would clog. If so, he would hear about it from his father. When they got back to Paris, he would call Guy and tell him that he had a box of vegetables from the garden that he could drop off. Guy would say that he didn’t like vegetables, and that Jacques was the one with a family to feed. Jacques would say, All right, then. He closed his eyes and put his face into the stream of water. He would wait for the next time he and Guy had dinner to ask whether the coins had been francs or centimes.

  Plunder

  1999

  The night before Herman’s treatment, Charlotte dreamed that she was back in the manor in Benneville for the first time in years. She was standing in the parlor, in front of the fireplace, pulling stones from the mantel. Whenever one stone came off, another one appeared in its place. One more and she’d see something. Only one more. “Don’t stain your good dress,” her mother’s voice said. Charlotte looked down and saw that her hands were bleeding.

  She woke with a start and held on to Herman until she felt his chest rise with breath. Then she changed out of her nightgown, put on boots and an anorak, and went outside with the bucket that hung by the front door. The house, built of granite and trimmed in the slate blue of Brittany, backed off a cliff facing the Atlantic. A lawn of fennel and thistle ran to a patio with plastic lawn furniture. When Charlotte and Herman had bought the property two years before and moved to Belle-Île from Nantes, they’d taken everything comme ça: the tacky lawn furniture, the bad electric, the roof that let in the wind, an attic filled with old shrimping nets, and a cow that grazed in a field out back and seemed to belong to no one.

  Charlotte walked down the steps carved into the jagged spill of cliff. The path led to a cove and to a beach, “notre plage,” she and Herman called it, although the beach was public, open during the season to sunbathing tourists and to cyclists who parked their bikes on the patio and knocked on the door for directions to Sarah Bernhardt’s former home a few miles away. Dawn had broken not long ago, and the fog was just starting to peel off the shore. The Atlantic thrashed, the pale green gone gray with December. Gulls wheeled and shrieked, tilted off-course by the wind. Charlotte checked the horizon but found no clouds. Last night’s forecast said today would be clear despite yesterday’s storm.

  By the time she got to the sand, she’d shaken off the discomfort of the dream. Her anorak flapped and whistled as she walked the tide line, wind sanding her face. Claws of seaweed stretched from the reach of the foam. She picked up what she thought was a piece of sea glass but turned out to be a shard of plastic. Crabs skittered into holes ahead of her steps. At the end of the beach, where the water smashed against rock, she stopped, then made her way back. Halfway up the steps, bucket empty, she checked the horizon again. Yesterday had been so bad that the nine o’clock ferry to Quiberon didn’t run on schedule. She would make sure that she and Herman left early and gave themselves plenty of time.

  * * *

  Charlotte first visited the manor when she was five, several years into the war. In her good shoes and best dress, hair braided tight to her shoulders, she stood on the steps one April morning with her mother, who had put on her church hat and drawn seams on the backs of her legs with a charcoal pencil. They were there for Charlotte’s first piano lesson with the widow Vouette.

  “Remember what I told you,” her mother said, as she lifted the lion head knocker. Charlotte must say please and thank you and listen to the widow at the piano. She must keep her voice low and not cross her legs on the bench and sit up straight. She must be une petite fille adorable.

  “J’arrive,” a voice called at the clunk of the knocker. Then the door opened and the widow appeared, holding a basket of laundry. “So this must be Charlotte,” she said, looking down.

  Charlotte had seen the widow a few times before in Benneville, lined up for rations, in a pew at mass. Up close, she looked soft, as if she were made of melting wax. Her back hunched like a turtle shell, and a hair corkscrewed from her chin. Once, Charlotte’s mother had told her, the widow had been une grande dame, served by a maid and a gardener at the manor, eating croissants for breakfast each morning, driving around in a silver car, sunning herself in her pergola as she drank a thimbleful of wine. But the war had taken away the widow’s croissants and car, the sugar and flour, the wood for the fires, the chocolate, and most of the men in the village, including Charlotte’s father. The widow was no longer grande, and she didn’t have anyone to do her laundry. She still had a piano, though, which made beautiful, roll
ing music that Charlotte could hear as she and her mother walked by the manor, into the forest. “Do you think I could learn to play the piano?” she had asked her mother one day, and her mother had said, “You’ve had worse ideas.” That evening Charlotte’s mother had gone to the manor to ask the widow if they could make un petit échange de services.

  “The little one is terribly excited,” Charlotte’s mother said now. She pushed Charlotte forward. “It is so good of you, madame, to teach her.”

  The widow gave Charlotte’s mother the basket of laundry and opened the door wide enough for Charlotte.

  “The ironing is on top,” she said. “We will see you in an hour.”

  The door closed behind Charlotte. Ahead, a staircase swept like a dove’s wing under a chandelier dripping with crystals. Wedding cake moldings frosted the ceilings. The walls glistened, wine-red with a pattern of blossoms, and through a set of enormous wooden doors, she could see the blare of gold.

  “It’s like the castle in La belle et la bête,” she said.

  The widow laughed. “I must be the Beast, then,” she said. “Come along, Belle.”

  Once a week after that, for an hour, Charlotte sat with the widow on the piano bench in the parlor, the walls of which were papered in peacock-blue silk with white fleurs-de-lys. A fireplace, carved with butterflies and grapes, covered one wall. The floors were a glossy checkerboard of pale and dark wood. Sheets draped all of the furniture except for the piano, which gleamed in the light from the window.

  At first, the widow showed Charlotte how to do her scales, but on the third lesson, halfway into the A scale, she laid her hand on Charlotte’s. “Perhaps I should play for you instead,” she said. “If you watch me, you will learn well enough.”

  So Charlotte kept her hands in her lap and she shifted on the bench when the widow shifted, her bony hands dancing over the keys, music gushing from the piano.

  “C’était une rumba,” the widow would say, turning the page in the songbook. “And now, for a waltz.”

  Out the vast doors of the parlor and the vaster doors of the manor, down the drive that resembled spilled milk, in the kitchen of the cottage, Charlotte’s mother would be ironing the napkins and sheets on the table, sighing as she pushed the iron over the creases. Before Charlotte was born, she had been a laundress in Benneville, and then she met Charlotte’s father, the village mécanicien and a true catch. They had a daughter, Madeleine, and they lived next to the garage in a fine house with gas lights and indoor plumbing. When Madeleine was thirteen, Charlotte was born, long after Charlotte’s mother had stopped trying for another baby. Charlotte held only scant memories of the time that she lived with her mother and father and Madeleine in the house next to the garage: the smell of petrol on her father’s clothes, the flickering candles on the altar at mass as she sat on Madeleine’s lap, and the smell of her sister, too, balmy and sweet. They had been, Charlotte’s mother said, une petite famille heureuse—a happy little family. But the year Charlotte turned two, everything went wrong. First, Madeleine, “like that,” ran away with the gypsies. Then the Germans marched into Paris, and Charlotte’s father left for the front, where he died of a hole in his stomach. Now he was lying under a slab in the church graveyard, and he couldn’t even have a cross, because with his death Charlotte and her mother had become poor. Charlotte’s mother had to sell the garage and the house and move to the cottage, where the fireplace coughed out smoke and the water smelled like rotten eggs and came from a well.

  On the piano bench, though, Charlotte floated, far, far away from that sad story. The music swept up the air in the room and burst like sunbeams. The widow wasn’t an old woman with a hair in her chin. And Charlotte wasn’t a girl who had eaten a potato for breakfast, and who had lost a father and sister she could barely remember and who had a mother who sighed all the time and cried herself to sleep at night.

  “How is the little one progressing, madame?” Charlotte’s mother would ask when she returned to the door with the widow’s ironing folded over her arm.

  “Merveilleusement,” the widow said. “I’ll see you next week, Charlotte.”

  Charlotte told her mother that she was learning piano by not touching the keys, and her mother clucked her tongue. “As long as the widow is happy,” she said. “She does seem to like you, the old lemon. Maybe she’ll leave us a little something when she goes to the angels.”

  Then they walked back home to the cottage, where the widow’s undergarments hung, dripping, over the kitchen sink.

  * * *

  “Bring me anything good?” Herman called from the bedroom when Charlotte came back into the house from the beach, shucking off her boots in the hall.

  “Rien,” she called back.

  She stopped in the WC for a bowl of water and Herman’s razor and mirror and put them next to him on the bed. She leaned over to kiss his forehead, careful not to jiggle the mattress.

  He touched her nose. “You’re an ice cube.”

  “Il fait froid,” she said. “Not stormy like yesterday, though.”

  She helped him to sit up, hands under his armpits as she used to lift their children. A year before, he would have been up at dawn to take the same walk she’d just returned from, coming back to the house with a perfect fan of a coquille Saint-Jacques, a piece of driftwood shaped like an elephant, smooth chunks of sea glass that he claimed came from sunken pirate ships off the coast. He left his collections on the dining room table, saved the best pieces for their grandchildren, and tossed the rest back into the ocean during the next morning’s walk.

  She wedged a pillow behind his back, watching his face for pain. The week before, she had sat with him in an examining room at the hospital in Quiberon, as his doctor held an x-ray to the window and mapped the constellations in Herman’s liver and stomach.

  “Je ne comprends pas,” she had said. “I thought the surgery helped.”

  “We got most of it,” the doctor said. “It only takes one bad cell.”

  “Take the rest out, then.”

  “Charlotte,” Herman said. “He can’t cut out everything.”

  There had been something new in his face, a calm that looked like resignation.

  “We’ll keep trying,” the doctor said. “Un autre traitement la semaine prochaine.”

  In the elevator, on their way to their car, as the floor numbers lit up one after the other, Charlotte broke the silence.

  “I know what you’re thinking. You can’t give up, Herman.”

  “I’ve had a good, long life,” he said. “It wouldn’t be a tragedy.”

  She kept her eyes on the numbers. “It would be to me.”

  * * *

  One afternoon in late June, two months after Charlotte had started piano, the widow Vouette didn’t reply to the knocker when Charlotte and her mother came to the door. The next week, Charlotte stood on the drive with her mother and watched as the widow’s son directed the furniture, still covered in sheets, into a truck. A group of men from the village carried the piano down the steps.

  “All of that and she didn’t leave us a sou,” Charlotte’s mother said. “And you didn’t learn a single song.”

  “Maybe the next people will ask us inside,” Charlotte said.

  “No one will be able to afford that place.” Her mother turned back to the cottage. “Viens. Stop looking sad. There’s no point in being sad over something you can’t have.”

  All that summer the manor sat empty, the shutters closed like sleeping eyes, as Charlotte and her mother walked by, to the forest. They had to forage for food because the rations kept getting smaller and the line of villagers waiting for bread in Benneville stretched all the way over the square. Charlotte’s mother wove branches from the willow trees by the pond into traps to catch rabbits, which she would strip down to the flesh and hang over the sink where she’d once hung the widow’s undergarments. They found mushrooms and wild onions, berries and snails. They drank soup made from watercress and dandelion leaves. They weren’t
the only ones in the forest, and by September the rabbit traps kept coming up empty. Charlotte’s mother dug up a square of grass behind the cottage. She let their potato rations grow eyes on the windowsill, then Charlotte helped her to push the potatoes into the soil. “This will feed us in winter,” Charlotte’s mother said as she hauled another bucket of water from the well and threw it on the plot.

  Mornings, her belly tight with hunger, Charlotte would look out her bedroom window to see if the potato plants had crawled out of the earth during the night. She remembered the view of the drive out the window of the parlor, the rise and fall of the widow’s music. Nights, she and her mother sat close to the fire, which smelled of horse turds, their faces glistening from the heat, as her mother mended clothes and darned socks and Charlotte practiced her letters on a piece of slate. She was getting ready for school. “You will learn yourself away from me,” her mother said once, and Charlotte knew that she was thinking about Madeleine. Her mother’s face in the flicker of flames was both sad and angry, as if she were about to cry and also to scream. She did scream a week later when they pulled up the plants in the garden and found scabbed, black potatoes stinking of rot. “Ils sont malades,” Charlotte said, trying to calm her mother, but her mother kept screaming and cursing and throwing the potato plants at the forest. Then she went inside and drank the last of the liquor she’d been saving for Christmas and stayed in bed until the next morning.

  In October, as they came out of the forest with baskets of chestnuts, a truck was parked in front of the manor and the shutters were open. “Keep walking,” Charlotte’s mother said. “I’ve heard bad things about those people.” As they stood in line for their bread that week, Charlotte’s mother whispered with the other villagers. The couple who had bought the manor were foreigners, by way of Russia. Riches, someone said, very rich. The man owned half of the banks in Paris. The woman tipped the workers at the station twice. An entire train car had been filled with their belongings. They seemed standoffish, spoke little, missed the Saturday market, never seemed to come to Benneville at all, must be living off their caviar eggs and champagne and counting their money. “Like rats in a nest,” someone said.