by Mary Fleming
“No, you go back to your paper,” I said, trying to conceal surprise at this unusual display of attention. “I’ll get myself a glass of water and wait until she wakes up.” We walked back down the corridor, Edmond peeling off to his study, while the dog and I walked through to the kitchen. Almost nothing had changed here since I was a boy. The refrigerator had been replaced when the old one finally died, but that was it. Otherwise, the big stove was the most recent acquisition, bought when we moved in over thirty years ago. Every few years when I was a teenager, Mother would campaign for a remodeling job, but Lisette wouldn’t hear of it. The tiled counters, the handmade wood cupboards, the painted table in the middle where I used to eat my goûters, were familiar and friendly, whereas she viewed possible modern replacements as hostile interlopers. “I know just where everything is, and everything works sans problème,” she said with emphasis. “Why change what’s already perfect?” Then she’d finish drying the bowl in her hand and put it back in its cupboard with a flourish. Mother would always admit defeat; the kitchen was unquestionably Lisette’s domain.
When I was a boy, in fact, I hadn’t liked coming in here on her days off. I’d found the clean surfaces cold, the huge stainless steel sink glaring, the whole place spooky. The kitchen needed Lisette. But today I found its unchanging surfaces reassuring. Edmond’s breakfast dishes lay in the sink, where they would remain until Lisette returned the next day. The dented red tin that had held the coffee for as long as I could remember sat on the table, with a box of filters next to it. I opened the fridge for some mineral water, and there were the lunch and dinner that Lisette had prepared, as she always had. Except now, with Mother ill, each was also labeled, with instructions on how long and at what temperature each dish should be reheated. There was a large bowl of broth for Mother.
After giving Cassie some water, then cleaning the bowl and the slop she’d left, I took my glass of water and returned to the bedroom, taking my place on one of the two chairs that stood near the bed. Cassie, as if sensing the solemnity of the scene, lay immediately at my feet. Mother looked a breath away from death. Her hair, which was almost completely grey now, hung lankly around her gaunt, equally grey face, instead of being pulled back pertly in tortoiseshell combs. Her droopy skin, it seemed to me, had begun to look like an imitation of the real thing, already losing whatever it was that made it vital. I sat tensely, afraid that one of her visions would take hold right then and there, but instead she finally stirred, in slow motion.
“Hello, Mother,” I said. She looked at her watch. “I’m a little early. Sorry.”
“That’s all right.” Her voice had taken on the same half-departed quality as her skin. She pulled herself up, with difficulty. I leaned forward to help her, and she was so light. Just bones collected in a thin casing. She was beyond notice of my scruffy head. “Can you hand me some water?” she asked. I took a glass from the side table, next to my blue pottery dog.
“I finished The Emigrants. It’s the best book I’ve read in a long time. Most original, too.”
“I thought you might like it. It’s the last novel—if that’s what you’d call it—that I managed to read through to the end.”
“It’s interesting, the way he inserts photos and drawings,” I said.
“Yes.”
Normally this would have been the extent to our discussion of a book, but I continued: “They add, somehow, to the ache one feels reading about those displaced souls. People who have suffered and lost so much.”
Hands tightly around the glass of water, she looked up at me, then back at the glass. “Yes.”
“Maybe that’s why you suggested it to me.”
She gave something between a shrug and a nod.
“I have been wondering . . .” I paused, hoping she’d know what I meant, but she just stared at her glass. “Wondering about, you know . . .” I didn’t even know how to refer to my own father. When he died, I called him Daddy, but that childish moniker had been buried with him. “About our own story. About what happened in Connecticut.”
She closed her eyes, then opened them slowly, saying: “Yes, your father.” She paused. Her veined, bony hands still clutched the water glass. She was staring into it like a crystal ball. “I’m sorry. I have been wrong not to talk to you more about him.”
Silence again. For long enough that I began to worry that she wasn’t going to say any more. Especially when I saw her eyes welling up, her chin trembling, and her lips pressing together, disappearing into her mouth. My heart was pounding, my skin prickled all over, but it was now or never: “He didn’t fall, did he?”
“I don’t know,” she said, now shaking her head against the pillow, the tears running freely down her cheeks. “I can’t know, for certain. There was never any proof,” and she looked at me desperately, as if I might provide it, then looked back at her glass of water. “But no, I don’t think it was an accident. Or maybe it was half an accident. I’ve always believed that he didn’t actually jump. That he maybe let himself fall.” She took a short, half-choked breath and looked at me again, then at the ceiling. “He, he . . . he took your sister’s death very hard. We both did, of course, but him in particular.” She paused again and looked back at me. “He was never the same, afterward. There was also his career, which he believed was going nowhere. Since her accident, he hadn’t been able to work, and he was afraid he’d never be offered a full professorship and tenure. He was not someone who took life easily. Like you,” she said. I shrugged. “You are a lot like him,” she continued, “in more than just looks.” She took another sip of water; I could hear the gulp go down her throat. “Could you?” She held it up to me. I put it back down next to the blue dog. “For a long time I couldn’t talk to anyone about all that had happened—couldn’t even much think about it myself. But then your Aunt Tiffy made me talk. And Edmond too.”
She took a deep breath that convulsed her whole frail frame as it turned into a sob. Her face contorted; tears streamed. Her voice came out almost a squeak. “But I couldn’t find a way to talk about all that had happened to you.” She looked at me pleadingly. “You were just a child. And how do you talk about such horrible, unresolved things to a child?” She was now fretting with the duvet cover. Her face was a mess—eyes and nose running—even though there was a box of tissues on the bed, right next to her, but she seemed oblivious. “And you were so angry, which created its own kind of barrier. I just didn’t know what to do.” Another tremor shook her. “So I did nothing, and eventually it seemed too late, too strange to speak about what had happened all those years ago.” Then the sobs came again, with even greater force, and I thought they might kill her right here and now. “I’m so, so sorry.”
I stood up, snatched a Kleenex from the box, and gave it to her, putting a hand on her trembling, bony shoulder. I’d never seen her in such a state. She looked up at me pleadingly: “Can you forgive me?”
“Mother, please,” I said.
She blew her nose, wiped her face, took one more shuddering breath, exhaled audibly, closed her eyes, and laid her head back on the pillows. Again, I thought this is it, her sick and tired body can’t take such emotion. But after a minute, more or less composed, she raised her head: “Have you ever talked to anyone? About your father? About all that happened?”
“A little, to Cédric. Once,” I said. I couldn’t bring myself to mention Jacqueline, whom she’d never liked, and she didn’t know Béa, though it crossed my mind then that she wouldn’t disapprove of her.
“Do you think, T,” she said, fretting again with the duvet cover. “Do you think you are, you may be—I was going to say, ‘growing out of it,’ but I guess you’re too old for that. Do you think you might be moving on?”
“It’s possible,” I said. Béa Fairbank, wherever she was, damn her, flashed through my mind again.
She took another Kleenex, blew her nose, and wiped her eyes again. Edmond tapped the door.
“Everything all right?” he asked my mother tensely.
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br /> “Yes,” she said, pouring much relief into that one syllable. “Under the circumstances, things couldn’t be better,” she said, looking at me.
“Good,” he said, visibly relaxing. “How about a little lunch. I’ve got the oven on one hundred eighty degrees and the casserole has been in for fifteen minutes. It will be ready in five.” He consulted his watch, not wanting to stray even half a minute from Lisette’s instructions. “What do you think, Hélène? Something besides that dreadful gruel today?”
“Yes, I think I will. I’ll try at least.”
“Excellent.” Edmond smiled so that I could see his teeth, not something that generally occurred, at least not when I was around.
And it was here I had my flash of hope. Maybe Revelation was powerful enough to kill those cancer cells. She did look a little better, a little less grey. She was hungry. “Will you join us?” she asked me shyly.
“I will, but let me get it ready, BP. Where do we eat?”
“Here is best,” said Edmond. “We have these new little tables. ‘TV tables’ Hélène tells me they are called. Dreadful name, but as with all things of American inspiration, they are practical. They do make life easier.” He began unfolding the trays on spindly metal legs.
The two of us got plates and glasses and reheated casseroles laid out, and we began eating from our TV tables, while Mother tried to swallow from her bed tray. Edmond was practically chirpy. I felt so lightened, I even teased them: “If you two are allowing TV tables in the house, what will be next? BP’s study turned into a family room?” Once on Long Island, Edward had come back from a friend’s house and referred to what we called the library as a family room. Mother had informed him in the strongest terms that we did not nor never would have any area of the house carrying that name. “It’s so lower class,” she’d said, flaring her nostrils in distaste. “Next you’ll be asking for reclining chairs.”
We spent the rest of lunch remembering summers on Long Island. Today I found that even in these memories, which I had always viewed on balance as unhappy, there were salvageable moments. Swimming in the ocean, walking the long beaches. I had actually enjoyed playing tennis. The last couple of summers Mother and Edmond had had friends with horses, and I’d raced up and down the sand on Jelly Bean. How I’d missed that horse when we came back to Paris.
By the time I left, Mother could hardly lift her head from the pillows. I kissed her cheek, and despite her fatigue, she managed to wrap her bony arms around my neck. “I’m so sorry,” she repeated, and I could hear the tears coming again.
“Please,” I said. “But thank you.”
She dabbed her eyes with another Kleenex and gave me a little wave as the tears rolled again. “Come back soon.”
As Cassie and I walked out onto the rue de Verneuil, I too felt spent but in a loose-limbed, post-exercise kind of way. If Béa Fairbank had lightened my step after dinner that Saturday night, this exchange with my mother had practically given me wings. In no time at all, the great wall of silence had been razed, and the world looked a lighter, brighter place.
My euphoria didn’t last long, though. It never does. Questions and more questions always start rearing their ugly heads. Though my mother’s breakdown had moved me profoundly, by the time I was back on my mattress, staring at the ceiling, I was also wondering about what had been left in shadow, what had not really been discussed: Franny. Mother had not even been able to pronounce her name and had only obliquely referred to her death. Perhaps Franny was the real cause of those nightmarish visions. Or maybe those snakes and eagles were paying her back for another dark corner, our move to Paris and the quick remarriage. Maybe that was the real source of her guilt.
I tried Béa again, waiting impatiently for the dial to return to its place after every number. Once again, the phone rang and rang. Where could she possibly be? Why hadn’t she tried phoning me last night? Doubt came crashing down. She must be avoiding me. There was no other explanation possible. Either she was there and not answering, or she’d gone out, most likely with another man, and left the answering machine off intentionally. That way she wouldn’t have to feel guilty about not returning my calls. These thoughts caused me the most unusual agony. I did not want to be ditched by Béa Fairbank.
I put on the television for distraction, but it didn’t help. My mind continued to careen between Béa and my mother, the inexplicable absence of the one and the encroaching disappearance of the other.
TWO
THE NEXT DAY Piotr was back, with his shaved patch like a full moon behind his ear. The rest of his hair was longer than usual, but it still stuck straight out like a brush. It now looked as though he had received an extreme scare, which I suppose he had. Cassie was ecstatic, as if she’d feared he was gone forever. I tried to think of nothing but bicycles, but this proved impossible. Thoughts of my mother and Béa continued to thrash around my mind, even as I calmly helped a customer or answered Piotr’s questions about what had happened while he was gone. Midmorning, Wanda came in, and by the time she was finished, Mélo-Vélo was as clean as the day we’d moved in. Even better, Wanda seemed to enjoy the work. She hummed as she moved the broom vigorously across the floor and as she rubbed down the counters with a rag. I hadn’t seen her this content since their wedding day.
I took them both to lunch at Le Relais. Just as we walked back in, the phone was ringing. I picked it up.
“Where have you been?” the voice said urgently.
“I might ask you the same question. I’ve been phoning you since Sunday evening. No answer. No machine. No word from you.”
“I left rather precipitously. But I’ve been trying you at home since Sunday evening too. There was never any answer.”
“I was there,” I said piously. “So why didn’t I hear you trying?”
“How should I know?” she almost screamed.
I thought back. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a call at the rue des Martyrs, and suddenly, those exposed colored wires came to mind. The delicacy with which I’d been handling the phone so that they wouldn’t break. Maybe the one that makes the phone ring had snapped.
“The baby died.”
“What?” I said.
“Viviane’s baby died.”
“Who? André?”
“No—the one that wasn’t born yet. It strangled itself on the umbilical cord, in the womb. She. It’s, it was, a girl. Cédric and Viviane are at the hospital. I’m here with André.” I could hear the tears rising. “Do you think you can come out? I hate to ask you, but I’m losing it a bit. And Cédric . . .”
“I’ll be out by the end of the afternoon,” I said.
Within the next half hour I arranged to leave the shop in the hands of Piotr and Wanda for the next two days. And, though I hadn’t driven in years, to borrow one of Edward’s cars. He actually dropped off his silver BMW so that I wouldn’t have to walk over with the dog. When I arrived at Hautebranche, Béa answered the door, André on her hip, just as he’d been on Viviane’s the last time I’d visited and their life had seemed brimming with hope and good fortune.
“Let’s go outside,” she said. We went across the large sitting room to the walled garden behind. Béa shepherded the dogs out the door to the apple orchard, where they could play without disturbing us. Cassie gave me a quick look, then disappeared behind Fyodor, the dog I’d walked almost six years before.
I made room among the toys on the blanket Béa had laid out and sat down. Béa started building a tower of colored plastic beakers to distract André.
“According to Cédric, Viv got very quiet and withdrawn last week. At first, he thought it was a normal letdown after the euphoria she’d been living for the last few months. Or that maybe the weight of two children under one was finally beginning to dawn on her. He asked her what was wrong, but she said she was fine. It wasn’t until Friday that she admitted it had been some time since she’d felt the baby move. For a few days she’d tried to convince herself that she’d felt something—just less,
because there was less room—but then she couldn’t even tell herself that anymore. ‘Suddenly it was as if I just had a big stone in my stomach,’ she told Cédric. On Saturday they went to the hospital and the doctor confirmed that the baby was dead. She’d strangled on the umbilical cord. The doctor said it just happens sometimes. I can’t get the vision out of my head of a little baby, totally formed at seven months, floating contentedly in her liquid home and then getting tangled in her own lifeline, until the blood is no longer circulating.” She shook her head and shuddered; André took a swing at the beaker tower and burst into giggles. “I happened to ring on Sunday, just to say hello, and got Cédric, who was home with André. I dropped everything and left for the train station. I guess I’m helping, but I feel pretty useless. Viviane’s shattered. You know she had to give birth as if the baby were still alive. Contractions, all that breathing she was practicing, the whole thing. Can you imagine going through all that, just to get a dead baby in the end?” She pulled her knees up to her chest. André was now trying to build his own tower. I shook my head, partly in shame, for all my selfish, distrustful thoughts.
“How long will she be in the hospital?” I asked.
“Until tomorrow.” It was Cédric who spoke. He’d come in so quietly, not even André had noticed him. Now André began whining and stretching his arms toward the person he’d come to consider his father. I watched Cédric carefully, for traces of resentment that this was the one to live, but he had a stoic, resigned look on his uneven face. Melancholy, half-Hungarian Cédric had always believed tragedy was right around the corner. Now he was going to weather the storm he’d been mentally preparing for most of his life. I hoped he hadn’t heard Béa’s detailed vision of the dying fetus. “We’ve named her Marie,” he went on, picking up André in his arms. The child had gone suddenly quiet and solemn, tucking his head in the crook of Cédric’s neck, physically attaching himself as tightly as possible. “Viviane thought it was important that she have a name. I guess that’s right.” He shrugged and sat on the stool. “She wants to have a proper burial, even though she hasn’t been to church herself in over twenty years.” He shook his head. “‘What if there is a heaven?’ she asked me. How can I answer a question like that, after this?” And he looked from one to the other of us, as if he seriously expected an answer.