by Mary Fleming
Edward, whose usual style was to take charge, pulled back, moving into the background. True, he had a lot of work at that time, and the banking business had no truck with personal problems. “Illness, death, divorce,” Anne-Sophie said with an ironic smile on her heart-shaped lips, “are no excuse for leaving the office before midnight. Fortunately he seems to thrive on it,” she added with a shrug. Having Mother thrown into Edward’s already complicated juggling act of work, wife, and children must have been one too many balls in the air, even for him.
But there was more to the shift in roles than too much work at the bank or his large family. I was now dealing with the nurses, with both Mother’s American and French lawyers, even with the formerly supercilious Monsieur Petitdemange who was still at the bank, still losing his hair. Now that my situation intenable was long over, now that I was speaking for my mother, he even showed me a certain amount of obsequious respect.
For the first time in my life, I was assuming the role of the older son.
Mother soon slipped into a constant state of semiconsciousness. But she lingered on day after day, for almost a month, until we all began to hope for death. There was no point, absolutely none, in her hanging on to life by a drugged thread. I began to wonder if my theory on the evolutionary mechanism that should have finished Mother off didn’t work the other way around. Perhaps an excruciatingly protracted death was meant to help the survivors cope, by assuring that they would feel a certain relief when the person finally died.
At Mélo-Vélo, for my sake, Piotr and Wanda had put off their travel plans to Poland until August, and Wanda had slipped right into my place. One afternoon I spent a few hours showing her how to reorder bicycles and supplies, and from then on, she took over that job. The following week I showed her how to keep the books, and she latched on to that tedious task with more enthusiasm than I thought possible. She noted the numbers with careful, clear figures, caressingly running her pen up and down the columns, as if she’d be sorry to turn the page. Now all her quick, efficient movements—sleeves shoved above her elbows, watch adjusted on her wrist—had a satisfied rather than a sour snap to them. Although she still treated Piotr like an incompetent child, her fussing had a more loving tone to it. And I could see, too, that she admired Piotr’s dexterity, his ability to fix anything that passed by his large, able hands. I often left Cassie with them, though that part I didn’t enjoy. I missed her at my side, felt treacherous at her pleading looks when I walked away.
But it was Béa’s absence I really felt. She was in London, staying with her brother and working on a commission, a family portrait, which she had at first hoped would only take a week but which she now saw would take much longer. I couldn’t even complain out loud; she’d been very low on money. “It’s divine intervention,” she’d said to me when announcing her departure. “I’m not sure how I’d have made it through next month otherwise.” My only compensation was speaking to her every evening on the phone. I lived for those calls and the sound of her deep voice and airy accent, the rising laugh. Partly, I suppose, because she was a lifeline, a world outside my dying mother and the rue de Verneuil. Mostly, though, because she was on my mind, either front and center or lurking in the shadows, every minute of the night and day.
FOUR
THE ARRIVAL OF Aunt Tiffy, my godmother and Mother’s best, oldest friend in the world, ushered in the final scene of the final act.
Mother and Tiffany Marshall had been friends since they were girls in New York City. My grandparents, realizing their only child had a lonely life, allowed her to become as much a part of Tiffy’s larger family as she wanted. “I was the Marshalls’ fourth child,” Mother had always said. They’d gone to the same girls’ school in New York, to the same boarding school in Connecticut, and had only parted ways for four years of college, before ending up back in New York together. Both briefly worked—Mother as a French translator, Aunt Tiffy as a secretary—before getting married within a year of one another. They both had three children, and neither marriage had lasted. A few years after my father had died and we’d moved to Paris, Aunt Tiffy walked out on her husband, a handsome, trust-fund drunk who’d never worked a day in his life, except to gamble away the family fortune on backgammon and cards.
In my memory of my godmother, she had streaked blonde hair and always wore black clothes, adorned with an abundance of gold jewelry. Though tall, she loved food and had a tendency to “hip problems,” as she put it. But roundness didn’t stop her from wearing tight-fitting trousers and tops because Aunt Tiffy was unabashed about everything. I was always happy to see her; her self-confidence and easy laughter made the world almost seem a more manageable place. Her exuberance meant that she talked incessantly but without being dull or self-centered. Whenever I saw her, she immediately asked me twenty questions about what I was doing, who I was seeing, and how I thought other members of my family were doing. She never seemed to get depressed, though she had passed many difficult years with her soak of a husband, and then even more difficult ones when she’d tried to divorce him. He’d stayed sober enough to refuse child support or alimony, until the money was wrung from him by court order. Even then, the amounts were not generous, so she got a job that she ended up loving in real estate. Now she refused to retire.
She wafted into the rue de Verneuil the first week of August, after everyone else in the city had left. I’d offered to pick her up at the airport, but she’d insisted on a taxi. “Don’t make me feel old,” she’d said over the phone. I was at the apartment when she arrived. Even indomitable Aunt Tiffy would need warning about how bad Mother looked. The nurse had just left, Lisette was out shopping, and Edmond had taken their Renault Clio for a checkup. In the last week, he’d come out of his slump and had embarked on a frenzy of activity. He’d rewritten his own will, had the apartment revalued by the insurance company, and drawn up a list of his assets, as if he were going to die with Mother and wanted to tie up all loose ends first.
Though more subdued than usual and not wearing tight black but flouncing turquoise, Aunt Tiffy was still a breath of fresh air in a stifled household. Impending death was, in a sense, contagious; its imminence had sapped and dulled all of us.
“Paris in the summer is even worse than Paris in the winter,” she said, dragging a suitcase on wheels behind her. It was a muggy, cloudy morning, the air sodden and cloying. “You’re still as handsome as ever,” she went on, pulling me to her perfumed breast and kissing one cheek. “Is she awake?”
“Not yet. Lisette’s made up my old room for you. Here,” I said, taking her suitcase and walking down the hall, “you can get settled first.” All the doors were closed and the silence was ponderous.
“I’m longing for a cup of good French coffee, Trevor,” said Aunt Tiffy, plopping down on the bed. “Would you be a dear and make me one, while I have a bath? Then I might feel human again. And your poor mother might be awake.” Though she had quit some years ago, she had kept her smoker’s voice; it was even rougher than I’d remembered. She also looked a bit stooped, and her face, which always looked tanned, was more lined. Age was gnawing away even at Aunt Tiffy. At least her limpid blue eyes still opened wide as a child’s when she spoke.
Just as I was putting the old copper kettle on the gas stove to boil, Lisette returned with her caddy full of shopping. She was happy to have Aunt Tiffy here because she’d have another healthy mouth to feed.
“Is she here, Trésor?” Lisette whispered in the confidential tone she reserved for the non-French. Whenever we had an American visitor in the house, even if the person spoke decent French, Lisette acted as if he or she couldn’t, as if communication were impossible. Foreignness went much deeper than the vocal chords in Lisette’s mind. “You let me make that coffee. I’ll prepare a little breakfast tray for her.”
“She just asked for coffee.”
“I know, but she’ll be happy to have something to eat with it.”
When it was ready and Aunt Tiffy was finished with her bath, I k
nocked on the door, tray in hand. “Lisette insisted,” I said, putting down toasted baguette, jam, and a pot of yogurt on the desk.
“She knows me, even if she can’t understand me,” Aunt Tiffy said, putting on her glasses and looking over the food. She poured herself some coffee and sat on the desk chair. “Sit there on the bed,” she said to me, “and tell me how bad she is.”
“Very bad,” I said. “She’s wasted away to nothing. You’ll hardly recognize her.”
“I hope she recognizes me,” she said, spreading jam on the bread.
“Most of the time, she’s not really conscious of much. The morphine also gives her terrible nightmares.” Though I had hoped that once our peace had been made, the snakes and birds would disappear, they hadn’t. The higher the dose, the worse the visions. “Sometimes, when she’s lying there, her face contorts, and her head starts rocking back and forth on the pillow. Then she’ll open her eyes wide and look at you with such terror, you have to wonder if the drugs are worth it.”
“Poor, poor Helen,” Aunt Tiffy said. Her knee crackled as she stood up slowly, one hand on the desk. “Now that you’ve warned me of the worst, take me to her.”
Mother had developed breathing problems, and when the doctor came later that morning, he quickly diagnosed pneumonia.
“It’s actually a blessing. It will carry her off quickly, without any additional pain. I can’t believe it will be more than a couple of days now.” Pulling the stethoscope from his ears, he added: “You should get a canister of oxygen from the pharmacy. That will soothe her breathing a bit. And prepare yourselves.”
After the doctor left, I went to the pharmacy and ordered the oxygen, then went back up to the rue des Martyrs with the dog. Madame Picquot had agreed to take Cassie for Mother’s last days. Despite her gruffness, which during the years had entrenched itself in every deepening crevice of her face, and her lack of sympathy for human beings, Madame Picquot liked dogs. She snuck treats to Cassie whenever she could, which meant I had to tug the dog by Madame Picquot’s door every time we passed. Since I’d asked her to take the dog, she’d been waiting with baited breath for my mother to die.
Late that afternoon, with bed and bowl and food in hand, I rapped on my gardienne’s door.
“Don’t worry,” she said, taking the leash greedily in one hand, offering a slice of sausage to Cassie with the other. “You can leave her here as long as you like.”
By the time I got back to the rue de Verneuil, my mother had tubes up her nose, and the oxygen machine was purring and spluttering at her side. The morphine doses were such that she was no longer conscious at all, though the nurse Solange assured me she could still hear what was going on around her. I sat in a chair near the bed reading a book I had found at the bottom of the same stack that had been topped by The Emigrants. Though she had not mentioned this book to me, I took it as her final message. Maybe I should say warning. It was Michel Houellebecq’s Les Particules élémentaires, a literary sensation a few years earlier, about a guy who has crippling problems with the world in general but most particularly his mother and women. While pulled along by Houellebecq’s no-fuss, ironic style, I was repulsed—there’s no other word for it—by his undiluted nihilism. It was too close to home. Or too close to the persona I was trying to shed. Reading it also made me realize how easy it is to be negative, to cast aspersions on everything and everyone. The greater challenge is seeing the world in its truer, more nuanced form.
Every time her labored breathing became more strained, I looked up, stared at my struggling mother, and wondered if she’d been able to get through more than the first few pages of this story that must have reminded her of me. I imagined that I was getting the answer when her ashen, cadaverous brow grew worried and her breathing nothing more than coughing gasps, and I would administer the morphine under her tongue the way Solange had showed me. I found it impossible to stray farther than the kitchen or the living room, in case she died while I was gone. After everything I had put her through, the least I could give her was my presence when that lonely moment came.
It was also true that my way of coping with her death was to embrace it. Unlike both Edmond and Edward. The closer it came, the more they found reasons to be away, but for once—and this was a true sign of progress—I did not resent them for their coping mechanism. As for Lisette, she just cleaned and cooked; carrying on the routine was her method. Aunt Tiffy came and went but spent a good part of her time trying to distract Edmond.
The third day the nurse told us the time was near. That evening the whole family gathered around the dining room table, the children included. Though Edward had resisted, Anne-Sophie had insisted that they see their grandmother one more time. It was especially important for Caroline, who wrapped her arms around my mother and whispered something into her ear before kissing her gently on the forehead and marching solemnly out of the room, but in fact all four of them took the farewell to their grandmother in stride.
“I told you,” Anne-Sophie said as we prepared to sit down for supper. “Children are tougher than you think. And they need to say good-bye as much as you do.”
The meal that followed was surprisingly festive. We reminisced about Mother, already talking about her in the past tense, but this seemed normal, even healthy. We actually laughed, especially at some of Tiffy’s stories from when they were girls.
That night, not long after I fell asleep, I heard a knock at the door.
“It’s time,” Solange said.
I woke up Edmond and Tiffy, phoned Edward, then Lisette in her room upstairs, and within twenty minutes, we were all gathered in the room. Sitting in the chair next to the bed while the others remained at some distance, I took Mother’s hand and put my head very close to hers. Her breath, coming out in coughing spurts, smelled of morphine. I told her we were all there, naming everyone in the room. I told her about the weather and what time it was—I rambled, just so that she would die with the sound of my voice in her ears. So that she would not feel abandoned by the living.
After what seemed a long time, Solange said: “She’s just expelling air. She’s gone.” Edmond gave a painful sigh.
“Really we have to thank God it’s over,” said Aunt Tiffy. That made Lisette heave a sob and bury her face in her bathrobe, a pink, frilly thing Mother had given her many years ago for Christmas. Anne-Sophie took Edward’s inert arm.
It was too early to phone the doctor for the death certificate. Edward and Anne-Sophie went back to their children. I helped Lisette make coffee. Aunt Tiffy disappeared into her room. When I went back into Mother’s room, Edmond was now sitting on the chair next to the bed. He looked just as he had when I came upon him in the clinic, after Mother’s operation—slightly on the edge of his seat, waiting for her to wake up.
“C’est fini,” I said gently to my stepfather, putting my hand on his shoulder.
“Oh, I know,” he said, standing and looking at me right in the eye. “I was wondering where she’s gone. Can’t you feel it? Hélène is no longer there.” He pointed to the bed. I looked down at my mother. Her mouth hung open and her eyes were slightly open, just the whites showing. The skin was waxy and bloodless. Edmond was right: the body of Helen Stanford McFarquhar Harcourt-Laporte was lying before us, but she was no longer giving out warmth, feeling, mood—all those invisible particles that fly through the air and constitute human vitality. Even when Mother was unconscious, they were still palpable. Now they were not. Her spirit had indeed gone.
“But where has she gone?” he asked. “Her spirit—the energy it gave off—cannot have disappeared into thin air. It has to have gone somewhere.” He paused and sat down again, folding his hairless, spotted hands on his lap. “My faith, you know, has always been of a conventional, unconsidered nature. I have always believed in God because my generation, my world, believed in God.” He paused. “Until my parents died, I did what they told me, believed what they told me.” He shook his head. “Anyway, look here—she’s been taken away.”
“You’re right, her energy’s gone,” I said. “But where?”
“Maybe to heaven,” he said simply, his voice actually sounding stronger.
He left the room, and I sat there alone with my dead mother. I kissed her forehead and it was cold as stone. Maybe it was just exhaustion and a certain relief that her suffering was finally over, but I felt that early morning sitting next to her that I knew exactly where her spirit had gone: it had gone into me.
I really did feel a transformation after Mother’s death. It had made me want to grab onto life and the living—to leave Michel Houellebecq’s world far behind me—to run out in the street and make noise. It had made me feel like a bigger, more expansive person, one full of compassion, almost love, I would have to say, for the whole human race. I felt that I had experienced something so profound, that from one day to the next, I was changed forever.
There was, however, little time for reflection or even grief. Death means reams of paperwork, bureaucracy. There’s a funeral to plan. Mother’s was to be held, per her request, at the American Cathedral, where she and Edmond had been married. It was a ceremony that I remembered with funereal gloom.