by Mary Fleming
“I’m afraid she probably will.”
“The doctor said she’s likely to be in a great deal of pain.” More silence.
Finally Edward took a step forward and said: “At least she’ll have all of us around her.” He pressed the key in the direction of the car. The lights flashed and all the locks on his shiny silver BMW station wagon opened in unison. “Can I give you a lift?”
As we pulled out of the clinic, I wondered how much Edward knew. The few times I’d heard him mention our father’s death, he’d said it was an accident as if he really believed it. I thought, as we passed the sign telling us we were back in Paris, I could tell him, tell him right here and now. Instead I said: “Are you ever going to let me meet Anne-Sophie?” Though she’d taken shifts with Mother at the clinic too, our paths had never crossed.
“You mean will I trust you?” He smiled.
“Sort of, yes,” I said.
“Of course. There will be the family lunch, remember?”
“Right.” And then I couldn’t help asking what had been on my mind since our peace summit at the café. “What news from New York?”
“She’s always swamped with work, though she did find the time to remarry. Bruce is his name. I’m surprised you don’t know all this.” He gave an arch look as he glanced at the side mirror and pulled out ahead of another car.
“Mother mentioned it once on the phone,” I said. “Another lawyer, I understand.”
“All they do is work and earn enough to acquire the necessary appurtenances of a successful Wall Street life. They have a roomy apartment on the Upper East Side and are building a large house for themselves on Nantucket.” He accelerated too quickly at the green light.
“So you’re still furious at her.”
“No, no. After all, what’s so different about my life? I work all the time too and live in a nice apartment in the 7ème. It’s her increasing disinterest in the kids that infuriates me,” he said, a mixture of distaste and satisfaction on his face. “At first, she made noises about seeing them all the time, though she could never take them for the full school vacations. She used to call a lot. Now, she phones twice a week, always at the same time. Anne-Sophie says it’s as if she’s written it into her diary, like an appointment. And this summer, she can only take them for two weeks because she’s working ‘flat out’ on a telecommunications merger and the house on Nantucket probably won’t be finished. Even then, she’s planning to get a nanny, because Bruce gets ‘stressed,’ was I think the word she used.”
“She must miss Mother’s services,” I said but then wished I hadn’t. My remark made me feel disloyal to everyone.
“The funny thing—the good thing, really—is that the kids still adore her. Even Henri, who remembers nothing of her in Paris. It seems to be built into the DNA. And Caroline can give Anne-Sophie a really tough time.”
“Stephanie’s never mentioned taking them back?”
“She mentions boarding school in America sometimes.”
We drove the rest of the way in silence. Edward was in a hurry to get back to the office, so he swung around the place de la Concorde and dropped me at the entrance to the Tuileries. His silver car shot around the obelisk, out of sight, and I entered the gardens. Now that I walked the dog on the elevated terraces, I had become used to seeing the main section from a certain treelevel distance. Down here everything looked huge, magnified. The chestnuts towered over my head. The fountains and the statues loomed larger, and the expanse of white, chalky gravel seemed to stretch forever. I felt very small.
When my sister died, my six-year-old self was racked with guilt. I was convinced that if I hadn’t insisted on going to Tom Rogers’s house that day—selfishly, just so I could jump on his new trampoline—Franny wouldn’t have died. If only I’d been a responsible child, had stayed with my mother, as she’d wanted me to that hot July day, I would have seen the car coming, put my hand up and stopped it, before it could flatten my little sister. When I got older and could think abstractly, the simple fact of my presence, it seemed to me, would have reordered events and avoided the tragedy.
A year later, I felt guilty again when I found my father lying on the driveway gravel. Though it was said he must have fallen during the night, when he went up to fiddle with the television antenna, I was convinced that if only I’d gotten up earlier, found him sooner, I would have been able to call for help in time to save him.
But in both those cases my guilt was that of the survivor. Even while my gut told me I could have done something to prevent the tragedies, my head knew that neither death was my fault. That my feelings of guilt were misplaced. In the Edward-Stephanie triangle, however, my culpability had been that of a perpetrator. I had been a full-blown actor, a catalyst, an antagonist, a villain. And that, I thought as I left the gardens to join the street traffic, was guilt I could never rationalize, much less shed. That what I had done would haunt me for the rest of my life.
When I walked into the shop, Piotr was busy making plans for a new tool rack. He looked up at me, pencil in one hand, ruler in the other. I collapsed on the stool.
“You look terrible,” he said, squinting. “Go home. I close.”
“You’re the one who should go home,” I answered. “You’ve been here day after day, with the shop and the dog to look after.” Cassie was dancing at my side. It was hard to imagine that once upon a time, I’d seen Piotr as a stopgap, someone to help me ride out the transport strike before I closed up shop definitively.
“I’m good here,” Piotr said. “I got to finish this job. Another day.”
In the end, I stayed too, because I couldn’t face an entire afternoon and evening alone in my cell. I went into an organizational frenzy, tidying the small desk that had grown into a mountain range of papers. I took an informal inventory of what was left on the shelves, making a list of supplies to reorder. By the end of the afternoon, I felt marginally better. Restoring practical order is a great palliative, even if its soothing effects are quickly eroded by the relentless return of more chaos.
When I returned to the rue des Martyrs early evening, Madame Picquot was just opening her door, dirty nylon shopping bag in hand, all stocked up for an evening alone. She leaned over and patted Cassie.
“I left a letter and a plastic bag for you at the bottom of the stairs,” she said, putting down her bag inside the door and slipping Cassie the end of her baguette. “A woman dropped them off this afternoon.” She looked hard at me, never having observed a female anywhere near me.
“Thank you,” I said, thinking it was probably Jacqueline, in urgent need of something. She always seemed to pop up just as I was beginning to forget about her.
But as I picked up the off-white envelope, I saw immediately that it was not her hand. This writing was loopy, and the ink was a sepia tone Jacqueline never would have used. And in the plastic bag were my shirt and sweater. When I got upstairs, I placed the envelope on the table while I fed Cassie. I filled her water bowl and washed my morning’s coffee cup. I collected a stack of old newspapers and put them next to the door to be recycled. I looked at some of my recent photos taken along the quais during my morning walks, particularly ones of the five-meter stone wall that masons had been working on all spring. Every day they chipped away another patch of the crépi, the roughcast that had been smothering the great slabs of limestone, probably since not long after the war, when the country slapped it on every surface they could find. The letter sat like an eye on the table.
Finally I took it over to the window, where a shaft of late afternoon sun slipped between two buildings into my room, and I slit open the cream-colored envelope with my kitchen knife. Inside was a postcard from which Béa’s face stared back at me. It was a self-portrait, from the shoulders up, her face turned a quarter away from the viewer so that her prominent features—the broad, flat forehead above slightly bulging eyes and long nose that had a small bump at the top, her delicate chin—were outlined and accentuated by the wall behind her. The wall wi
th straggling vines resembled the garden at Hautebranche, and she looked as if she were turning to leave, to go out the gate for a run, except that her hair was loose on her shoulders. The colors were muted, the textures thick. She had captured her healthy complexion well. I turned over the card, where it was printed in the corner: “Beatrice Fairbank, Auto-Portrait, 2000.” Underneath was her swirling hand in the sepia ink: “Dear Trevor, The bicycle is great! I haven’t taken the métro once and what a pleasure it is to live above ground. Many thanks for your kindness (clothes included!). Hope you enjoyed the jazz. Amitiés, Béa”
It was the handwriting that I looked at most closely. The hand that was able to produce such controlled extravagance seemed to tell me more about Beatrice Fairbank than the self-portrait or the words. I thought about her determined pursuit of a difficult career as a painter, and the chaos of her jack-in-the-box handbag, of her being late at the shop and forgetting an umbrella on a rainy day. Her trouble settling down, even at age thirty-five.
I opened the plastic bag and took out my shirt and sweater. I propped up the card on the table as I took a beer out of the refrigerator, slit the bread down the side, and slid in sausage, cheese, and tomato. After my sandwich in the company of Béa’s card, I watched a bit of television. It helped get the morning out of my mind, the sharp medicinal smell of the clinic room mixed with the rotting flowers we’d left behind. Mother’s clothes were now way too big and looked totally out of place on her. Her decline could almost be measured in hours, rather than days or weeks or months. Standing in the doorway of her clinic room, I’d found this so distressing, I’d offered to fetch the wheelchair. That rush away from death had surprised me, since most of the time I found living such an arduous chore.
When I took the dog out, it was still light; the towers of the Sacré Coeur were bathed in pink, a soft blue sky behind. It reminded me of Béa’s complexion. Maybe she really was becoming a friend. That was a happy thought. I looked down at Cassie, who was intently sniffing the corner of the building. She made me happy too. My family taking me back made me both happy and relieved. On the other hand, my mother’s slipping from the picture was both sad and terrifying and made me very unhappy. I looked back up at the towers and the fleeting evening light. It was all very intense and confusing, this happy-sad business. But at least, finally, I was feeling something other than melancholy and rancor.
How do you talk to your dying mother about things that have been off limits for more than thirty years, I was desperately asking myself as I climbed the stairs at the rue de Verneuil the next day, the dog dancing around me. The answer was another question: how do you live for the next thirty without finally getting a few things spoken out loud?
Edmond answered the door for perhaps the first time ever, and it occurred to me that in the past, he’d probably actively avoided letting me into the apartment. His reading glasses were halfway down his nose, a book in his hand. It was an awkward moment because for the first time too, I felt we should kiss hello. The way I kissed Mother or Lisette hello when they answered the door, the way Edward kissed Edmond, in the filial way all French family members, male and female, greet one another. Fortunately, we were both spared by the dog, whose great excitement over a new place and a new person diverted our attention from one another.
“How is she?” I asked.
“Happy to be home. Better than she was in the clinic. But you know . . .” he trailed off. “When you called to say you were coming, she perked up. Go see her.” Edmond took his book back to his study, and I walked down the dark corridor to the bedroom, Cassie lurching on her leash, right and left.
Mother was in bed, with books and magazines strewn about, as if she were having une grasse matinée, a fat, lazy morning. Except there was nothing gras about the scene. The room had the same sharp medicinal smell as the clinic, except here it mixed uneasily with the usual scent of her perfume. And it was afternoon, not morning. Her face was about the same color as the pillowcase behind it. And though it seemed impossible, she looked even thinner in the wide bed.
“Hello, T,” Mother said with no bounce. Cassie now lurched toward the bed, and I followed to kiss her hello. Up close I noticed her streaked-blonde hair dye was growing out, exposing a few centimeters of grey, mixed with the odd strand of brown. Shortly after we’d moved to Paris, still living near the Luxembourg gardens, she had returned one day from the coiffeur with it dyed. I had gone into an uncontrollable rage, had locked myself in the bathroom for several hours, until she’d started to sob outside the door. Today, seeing the neglected dye was almost as painful. I sat on a chair next to the bed. “Hello, Dog,” she said, letting Cassie lick her veined hand. “I hope you’re not coming today to tell me you won’t be here tomorrow for lunch.”
“No, no. I just thought I’d stop by today too. I hope you don’t mind I brought the dog.” I’d let her off the leash, and she was sniffing every corner of the room. “Cassie is her name.”
“She’s sweet,” Mother said absently.
“She’ll calm down in a minute,” I said. “What are you reading?” It had been a long time since we’d passed books back and forth, using literature as a code to communicate, a place to leave messages for one another.
“Something Tiffy sent me, apparently all the rage in New York. I don’t think much of it. Or I can’t seem to get into it. I’m reading a lot of magazines.” Aunt Tiffy was my godmother and my mother’s oldest friend. They’d grown up together in New York, and since my mother was an only child, she thought of Tiffy almost as a sister. When I was a child, she’d been my subversive godmother, the person who had sent me books in English when my mother wanted me reading nothing but French.
As for Mother herself, she always had a book. She alternated between French and English, and in both languages she read quickly and with total absorption. Even a room full of people sharing a hilarious joke wouldn’t distract her. Befitting her general approach to life, she would only talk about what she’d read in the vaguest terms, as if the inner workings of a book also constituted too private a matter for public discourse. She’d go no farther than suggesting I read this or that: “It’s about a family. It’s well written.” And I’d gobble it up, looking for what she might be trying to tell me through somebody else’s story. And today, just for a minute, she brightened, lifting herself slightly from the pillows, and said: “Actually, the last really good book I read, also recommended by Tiffy, is right there, on top of that stack.” She pointed to her desk.
“Thank you,” I said, taking The Emigrants, by W. G. Sebald, an author I had not even heard of. The cover photo was promising: a group of about ten schoolboys, around the same age as me when I arrived in France, around the same era. Some smiled, some looked blank, and some downright unhappy. “How is Aunt Tiffy?”
“The same effervescent ball of fire as ever. Age hasn’t slowed her down one bit.” We sat in silence for a moment. She looked at Cassie, who was sitting at my side, panting: “Do you remember this?” She pointed to a blue object on her bedside table.
“I certainly do.”
“It’s never left that spot.” She looked down at Cassie, who was now lying attentively at my feet. “You finally got your wish.”
Mother had enrolled me in a pottery class, and in preparation for her birthday, I’d made a dog out of clay because for the previous year I had been begging for the real thing. Thinking a clay one might help my cause, I worked very hard on it, and I painted it blue, her favorite color. The morning of her birthday, I came in the bedroom with my gift. As I handed it to her, she thanked me for the sweet lamb. At which point I burst into tears and delivered my final plea. She’d stroked it, tried to console me, saying over and over how much she liked it, how it would never leave her bedside. But no real dog.
“And when the wish did come true, she seemed like a curse.”
“Really?”
“Just at first. Now I would even say Cassie was a stroke of luck.” I leaned over and touched her now supine back. Her tail t
humped.
“Good. Because I worry, you know.” She paused and fiddled with the stems of her reading glasses. “I worry that you never see anything in its better light.” I stayed silent. She went on: “Looking back on it now, I probably should have gotten you a dog. A small one. It might have helped you adjust. You had such trouble adjusting.”
“A lot had happened,” I said.
“Yes, a lot had happened.” My heart beat faster.
Lisette pushed the door open with the tea tray.
“Ah, Trésor,” she wheezed. “Why did no one tell me you were here? I must have had the vacuum cleaner on when you buzzed.” She put the tray down on the table near my chair. I stood up to embrace her soft, round body, which today smelled like spice cake. “This is the way it should be,” she babbled on. “You here with your maman. There is no better medicine, I’m sure of it. Do you want some tea and cake? I didn’t bring a cup or a plate for you.”
“He can use mine,” said Mother. “I don’t need anything right now.”
“Oh, Madame,” Lisette clucked. “Take some tea at least. Please.”
“All right. A little tea then,” Mother said.
“And I’ll have some of the cake,” I said as Lisette bustled the tea service into action. Sparkling silver spoons clinked against delicate porcelain, hot tea flooding the cup. A slice of cake was placed with a silver fork on a patterned plate. Once she’d finished with that, Lisette straightened the magazines on the bed and plumped Mother’s pillows as best as she could without moving her. When she finally waddled out, we were back to flitting across the surface of the here and now.