Within a month, the walls of every room in our house, including my bedroom, including the bathroom and the pantry, were full of photographs. The one time Alexis came to my house, my mother cooked dinner for the three of us. She had made chicken and rice—bland, considering what an inventive, excellent cook she otherwise was, and I have always thought she did it on purpose. What’s more, it was the first and only occasion on which I had seen Alexis almost speechless. Usually she was quite the live-wire chatterbox. And I loved that, because she could hold the conversations while I listened in, which was my preference most of the time. But that evening at dinner, Alexis mainly gazed silently at the walls. Just before dessert and coffee, she excused herself to use the bathroom, and when she came back, she looked almost pale. She could not have missed the hundreds of photographs everywhere. My mother and Alexis had said no more than ten words to each other. The long silences were deafening. When I had cleared the dishes and was standing in the kitchen, I heard my mother finally say, “If I thought you were going to be part of this family, Alexis, I would take you through the pictures one by one and tell you the full story. It would probably give you, healthy as you appear to be, a heart attack, the full story would.”
Alexis shot right back, “I draw the same birch tree every single day. I don’t need to be part of your family.”
“Oh, well,” my mother said, seeming to ignore Alexis’s response, “I’m afraid I’m off to bed. An early meeting tomorrow. Lovely to meet you.”
On our walk back to her apartment, Alexis said, “I now identify with the survivors of the Titanic.”
For the time being, since I had to keep living at home, I became a kind of scholar of my mother’s photographs—to me, time well spent. Because when I’d overheard my mother say to Alexis, “If I thought you were going to be part of this family,” I thought, Well, I am part of this family, and I myself don’t know half a thing about what’s in these photographs. At the time I didn’t recognize it as such, but now I realize that studying these photographs was an engagement with the first phase of my mother’s fall from grace. Her obsession, her becoming derailed. Still, on the evenings I was home, I’d sit with her and discuss a given photograph. I’d take it down from the wall, and she’d give me its bona fides.
There’s a Russian proverb: To taste the ocean, all you need is one gulp. So here I’ll describe what happened with just one photograph, and say that the experience was, over a six-month period, repeated a total of 416 times, which was the number of photographs on the walls, and I mean right up to the day my mother was taken away to Nova Scotia Rest Hospital, on March 18, 1974. From the sheer number of photographs, I wondered if my mother had somehow sensed that Bernard would not be returning. Some days she had taken as many as thirty photographs of him.
All the photographs were taken between the day of their marriage, December 19, 1943, and the day before Bernard Rigolet left for the war, March 28, 1944. Going by what was written on the front or back of a given photograph, I knew that some had been taken by my mother, some by Bernard, but most by people unnamed. But it is the one taken on my mother and Bernard’s wedding day that I want to tell about. “This was taken by a court stenographer. Her name was Gabrielle Deitzel,” my mother said, sipping tea and cleaning the glass of the photograph with a cloth.
“Why do I remember that name? Well, I suppose you remember everything of your wedding day. Miss Deitzel worked at the courthouse, and she was asked by the justice of the peace who married us to be the legal witness. Gabrielle had the poise and wherewithal to suggest a wedding photograph. I’m not sure Bernard and I would’ve even thought of it. We were in such a tizzy. I’d almost forgotten that I had my Brownie box camera in my handbag. And look here—right behind us, you see that building? That’s City Hall on Argyle Street. That’s where we got married. The justice of the peace’s name was Gustav Selig. See, I remember that too. Our legal witness was Gabrielle Deitzel, whom Gustav Selig just grabbed out of the hallway.
“Let’s skip our wedding night, shall we?” my mother said to me. “For propriety’s sake. We bought this house a week later. All four of our parents had already died, and so we were orphans setting up house. Bernard had a brother, Zeke, who also died in the war, and Zeke came to visit for a week and helped us pay for furniture. Zeke liked to say he bought a sofa so he would have a place to sleep, which was true. I got a job at the library, and Bernard went off to die near Leipzig.”
My mother closed her eyes for a few moments and said, “I’ve just now remembered when I received news of Bernard’s being killed. I was working at the library. An official-looking man in a suit and tie walked in and said something to the head librarian, Mrs. Doughretty. Mrs. Doughretty—God, I remember this like it was yesterday—she didn’t even have to point me out. She just looked across the room at me. I was putting books on a wheeled cart. She looked at me, and the fellow in the suit looked at me, and I knew. I folded like an accordion right down to the floor.
“You see, Bernard was sent quite late to the war. Oh, he was already in the service nearly a year. But he was held up, because of his needing surgery. He had his appendix removed. He’d had an appendicitis attack and had to recover from that. He’d already had his combat training. Had his appendix only waited to burst until he’d got to Germany, he might have been alive today. They’d have taken him right out of combat, maybe to some peaceful little village hospital somewhere. Nice clean sheets on the bed. Flowers in the room. It was only about a month after he joined the First Army in Germany that he was killed.
“Bernard’s body was shipped home to Vermont, where he was born and raised. And I’ve told you he’s buried in Montpelier, which is the state capital. And a few days after the funeral, I got a ten-dollar-per-month raise. I hadn’t even asked for it. That small gesture. I knew the library was the place for me.”
I later learned that it was during her first year as head librarian, in 1973, that things at the Halifax Free Library really began to unravel for my mother. The basic reality, let alone how close she was to a complete breakdown, was unknown to me at the time. At first her staff thought the discord was the result of all the stresses and strains of her new position. Her temper flared at nothing of importance. After such an incident, she would call a librarian or librarian’s assistant into her office, where her apology extended into an opportunity to chastise and admonish. In the first two months, one librarian gave her notice, and a librarian’s assistant gave my mother an old-fashioned dunce cap she’d found in an antique store—the cap was the sort an elementary school teacher would force a student to wear as the student sat on a stool in the corner, facing the wall—and said, “Nora, maybe you want one of us to wear this when you get upset about things.” To show she was not without humor, my mother wore the dunce cap all the rest of that working day. But then she began to wear it around our house too. At breakfast, at dinner.
The last weekend in August, I was working at John W. Doull, Bookseller, taking inventory, when I noticed a box marked SAVE FOR NORA RIGOLET—HALIFAX FREE LIBRARY. There was a purchase order taped to the box as well. Inside I discovered ten books of World War II photographs. Among them was a book that had a section dedicated to the work of Robert Capa. I didn’t know then how estimable a figure Robert Capa was, nor that he had taken Death on a Leipzig Balcony, which almost certainly was represented in the book I paged through, as it had been prominently featured in the May 14, 1945, issue of Life magazine. I decided to drive the box home in our Ford station wagon, placing it in clear view on the dining room table.
It was that box of books, I think, that finally triggered my mother’s fall from grace. Things at the library went from bad to worse. By November 1973 my mother had requested, one by one, the resignation of every member of her staff, all of whom refused. When she called a staff meeting, nobody attended. At home one evening she said, “My staff is preparing a coup d’état.” My mother suffered insomnia; I’d hear her at all hours in the kitchen, listening to the radio, and often I h
ad to ask her to turn the volume down so I could sleep.
“Mother, what’s the matter?” I asked. We were out having dinner at Halloran’s restaurant, on Water Street.
“It’s not one thing,” she said. “It’s many things.”
But her tone was dismissive and I dropped the subject.
I was nervous as a sparrow about my mother. It seemed like I was getting an ulcer or something. I often had stomach cramps. I drank a lot of Pepto-Bismol. I had a pink tongue for days on end. Everything to do with my mother’s comportment had become deeply worrisome and perniciously mysterious, in the sense that I felt I was being poisoned by what I could not comprehend.
Then, on March 18, 1974, I stopped by the Halifax Free Library fifteen minutes before closing time, at 4:45 p.m., to see if my mother would come out for coffee or an early dinner. I was going to finally insist we talk about, for starters, her wearing that dunce cap at home. But nothing could have prepared me for what I encountered next.
The library had a dramatic display of the war photographs of Robert Capa, which my mother, I learned later, had browbeat the staff into agreeing to mount. Enormous reproductions, hanging by wires, filled all three of the street-side windows of the library. I especially remember the photographs of the Spanish Civil War, and photographs of French women, heads shaved, holding their babies, being harassed by French citizens because their children had been fathered by German occupiers. A book of Capa’s photographs, which was part of a series on famous photographers, was featured prominently in the center front window.
That display would’ve been quite enough to, literally and figuratively, put my mother’s obsession, her fragility, on high exhibit. But when I stepped into the library, none of the staff would look at me, let alone greet me, in their usual friendly and familiar fashion. My mother’s closest friend, a wonderful woman and senior librarian named Jinx Faltenbourg, walked up, took me by the hand, and marched me into the recently staged room, originally designed as a reading room. “Nora hired some people, and they came in last night and spent the night setting all this up,” Jinx said. “Did you know anything about this, Jacob?”
“I was dead to the world last night,” I said. “I thought Mom was asleep in her bedroom.”
The reading room, still smelling slightly of sawdust and paint, was festooned with ribbons as if for a birthday party. There was a jukebox in one corner. The song “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive,” by the Andrews Sisters, was playing. Stretching almost the entire length of the back wall was a banner that read, in large block lettering, THE END OF THE WAR CAFé. There were three round tables with checkered tablecloths, and candles in wine bottles. There were cakes on another table, plastic spoons and forks, and paper plates. There were paper cups and pitchers of cider. Prices were marked for each food item. My mother was dancing by herself near the jukebox, facing away from us.
“We aren’t licensed for this,” Jinx said, “so we’re going to have to lock the front door. And I’m worried that Nora advertised a party in the newspaper. I’m going to send the rest of the staff home, Jacob. It has to be done.”
When the song ended, my mother pressed more buttons and on came “Shoo Shoo Baby,” again by the Andrews Sisters. Still, my mother did not turn toward Jinx and me. She leaned heavily against the curved glass of the jukebox and sang along, quite loudly, and my mother did not have an especially good voice. Jinx got the rest of the staff and the last lingering patrons out the front door, locked it, and joined me back in the former reading room. Through the glass front door I could see a dozen or so people looking puzzled, unhappy to be turned away. On came a jitterbug song, the title of which I didn’t know, though my mother often played the Andrews Sisters at home, and she began to jitterbug toward me. She grabbed my hands and yanked me out on what now served as the dance floor. As I stood stiffly, probably with a sour expression, my mother let go of my hands and began tossing herself about wildly, and finally stumbled backward, slamming into the jukebox. She slid to the floor. I ran over and said, “Mom, are you okay?” and she said, “How could I not be okay? The war’s over. Bernie’s coming home. I won’t have to deal with Robert Emil anymore.”
“Who?” I said. I looked at Jinx, and she just shrugged her shoulders.
“The hideous policeman Robert Emil,” my mother said.
I had no earthly idea whom she was referring to.
“Okay, it’s okay, let me help you up,” I said. But she pushed me violently away, stood, walked to a table, took up her handbag, walked back to the jukebox, reached into her handbag, and began to jam coins in the slot, and many of them were spilling to the floor. She must’ve put in five dollars’ worth of coins. “Bernie will be here any minute. I mean, this whole welcome party is for him, right?”
By this time Jinx had called the police and explained the situation, and in no more than twenty minutes an ambulance arrived at the library. Two attendants got my mother into a straitjacket, the type I’d seen only in the movies. It tore me up to see this. Jinx kept close to my mother, telling the attendants to take it easy, take it easy, please.
Before they led her out of the library, I had a moment to embrace my mother, and said, “Mom, what is happening to you?”
“It’s going to be fine, Jacob. Life will provide. It’s okay, it’s all right. I’m experiencing a fall from grace,” she said. “I hope I’m not embarrassing my son. But I’m experiencing a fall from grace.”
Jinx unplugged the jukebox.
My mother said to the attendants, “Okay, boys, we’re off to the paddy wagon.”
Over the next six months or so, I attended weekly meetings with the staff psychiatrists at Nova Scotia Rest Hospital. Sometimes my mother was present, sometimes not. My mother’s main attending psychiatrist was Peter Murdoch. I liked Dr. Murdoch, and he spoke to me with directness. I often talked to him in his private office. One day, about a year after my mother had been admitted, he said, “I had hoped not to have to be telling you this, Jacob, but the things that we determined were so radically obsessing Nora not only continue to do so, but in some ways have worsened. What do I mean by that? Well, take Arts and Crafts as an example. In Arts and Crafts Nora produces work—whether drawings, paintings, or other forms—more often than not about World War II. Not just about the war in general, but a particular battle. Now, we know that her husband, Bernard, died in the battle for Leipzig—”
“I knew that,” I said. “She told me that.”
“Yes, the battle for Leipzig, Germany. A number of American soldiers died there, and Bernard was one of them.”
“And so in Arts and Crafts, what? She’s re-creating the battle over and over again?”
“Basically, yes. We call it ‘retraumatizing.’ Except the original, actual physical trauma, of course, was inflicted on Bernard, killed as he was by a German soldier. But your mother is not only reenacting, in all these hundreds of Arts and Crafts compositions, Bernard’s death. In one sense Nora’s mentally stalled in the past.”
“Generally, I get what you’re saying. But why is this happening now? Why, after thirty years? It’s horrible.”
“One thing I can suggest is, this has been building very slowly for a long time. The mind holds subtle auditions, you might call them. Shall this be the right time to loose my demons? No, but how about now? She has been repressing things for years and years. Also, I’ve discussed with my staff the possibility of there being an intensifying element—something persistently haunting to Nora—that hasn’t revealed itself yet but definitely is a factor. Our hope is that it will be revealed in our weekly conversations.”
“‘Persistently haunting’? What can that possibly mean?”
“Something we can’t see yet. Perhaps the best way for me to describe it, or at least what I suspect it is: We think that there is some awful guilt attached to Bernard’s death in Leipzig. Something Nora cannot yet speak about. And she may never be able to. These things are deeply repressed. Our job is to draw it out if possible. We’re a little like det
ectives that way, if you’ll forgive the analogy.”
“What do you recommend, though?”
“At this point, I recommend electroshock therapy. To, if nothing else, relieve the pain of repression she is so powerfully experiencing. This may contradict our hope to get to the bottom of things, as it were.”
“How do you mean?”
“Electroshock therapy can cause memory loss.”
“What?”
“It has proven very successful, Jacob. As a treatment for trauma reenactment. But we would need you to sign a form of approval.”
I then told him about the photographs lining the walls of our house.
“Yes, that makes perfect sense to me,” Dr. Murdoch said. “Because Nora is attempting to reinstate a time before the trauma of Bernard’s death.”
“My mother calls it her portrait gallery of happy days.”
“I see.”
“Tell me more about this electroshock treatment. It sounds painful. I don’t want my mother in any pain.”
When he described the process, I stomped out of his office. I won’t repeat the language I used, calling back over my shoulder.
The Auction in London
In mid-August 1977, about five months after my mother had assaulted Death on a Leipzig Balcony, Mrs. Hamelin insisted that I judiciously prepare for my next auction. “You’ve been distracted lately, what with Martha Crauchet and your mother and whatnot. Did you even realize that you forgot to drive me and Mrs. Brevittmore for our antiquing out to Peggy’s Cove last Sunday?”
“I did forget and I’m very sorry.”
“You should know that it took every ounce of strength not to ask you to travel to Copenhagen this past May.”
“I take it there was an auction there.”
“Precisely. It was a sacrifice. But I felt I had to give you time, what with all of your distractions. But let me be direct. In Copenhagen, a photograph was on auction that I have very much desired for thirty years: Tombeau des Rois de Juda.” One of the few from Auguste Salzmann’s journey to the Holy Land in 1854. Salzmann was French born, his years were 1824 to 1872.”
My Darling Detective Page 5