The Art of Regret

by Mary Fleming

  Around that time, Mother had made Edward and me attend the Sunday school and I hated every minute of it. Many of the other American children went to the same school; their parents were friends. I felt doubly miserable at being excluded where I believed I should still fit in. Edward, of course, was too young to be aware of fitting or not fitting. I remember him sitting at the little table with a large grin on his face, a Crayola crayon gripped in his fist like a scepter, while I sat slumped across from him, counting the seconds until Mother came to rescue me.

  Being August, it was a small service. With the help of the reverend, we’d chosen a couple of hymns we thought she’d have liked and a Bach organ piece. Being the older son, I was designated to read something. I spent hours looking through the Bible but finally decided on a Shakespeare sonnet.

  I was so nervous about the reading that I remember nothing of the service until I was standing in front of the mourners, focusing on the page in front of me, trying to master my quaking voice: “That time of year thou mayst in me behold, / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang / Upon these boughs which shake against the cold, / Bare ruin’d choirs . . .”

  Then the words took me over; I could feel my voice getting stronger, and by the time I got to “This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, / To love that well which thou must leave ere long,” I was able to look at the people seated in front of me. There were wet eyes all around, though at least half the mourners wouldn’t have understood much of what I’d read. So maybe the words meant nothing. Maybe it was just seeing the intractable and impossible Trevor McFarquhar read a poem for his long-suffering mother that brought tears to their eyes. For my part, it felt pretty monumental to be eliciting some other sentiment than annoyance, exasperation, or shame at a family gathering.

  Since no one else was able to face the idea of Mother’s body being cremated, as she’d requested, I had volunteered to accompany her to the flames. Edward lent me his car again, saying it was undignified to take the métro on such an occasion. I’d been to Père-Lachaise many times—not surprisingly, walking among the dead was an activity I enjoyed—but had always skirted the crematorium, which sits in the middle at the top of the hill, two big smoke stacks jutting to the sky. I was greeted at the door by a man in a charcoal suit who spoke in a hushed voice and looked fittingly grave. The body had arrived, he said, and led me downstairs to the incineration room. It had rows of chairs, like a church, but instead of the altar, there was a metal grille and a screen. My mother’s casket was in the middle of the room, draped in a purple cloth.

  “Are you waiting for anyone else?” asked the man.

  “No. I’m alone.”

  “Have you prepared any kind of ceremony? Readings? Music?”

  I shook my head; a couple more men appeared from nowhere and removed the purple cloth, lifting the casket onto the conveyor belt where an altar might have stood. The machine was put into motion and the coffin moved slowly, like a piece of luggage at the arrival area of an airport, except here it descended and disappeared into flames, visible now behind the plate glass. Some music began to play, but it was impossible to catch more than the odd note over the powerful noise of the furnace that was enveloping my mother’s body. I endured the flames by imagining the alternative: her cold, chemical-filled body being eaten by maggots underground.

  After it was over, back in the foyer, he said the ashes would be ready in about two hours.

  So I meandered around the cemetery, under majestic trees that towered over abandoned mausoleums with broken locks and rusted doors, while the tree roots, having run out of space, grew at right angles around and between the cobblestones. And amid hundreds of tourists, who helped create an odd energy: life humming through the corridors of death.

  Suddenly there was a large group in front of me. It was Oscar Wilde’s tomb, covered with lipstick kisses. Minus the crowd, I might have walked right by it. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the placement of bodies; the names of those who made up the indexes of French history books were littered randomly amid the concierges and the taxi drivers. The tombs might vary in size and grandeur according to the occupant’s stature on earth, but underground everyone was humbly jumbled together.

  Just beyond Oscar’s tomb, a cluster of people was facing an arrangement of bushes on a narrow lawn. The bushes formed a semicircle around a tombstone that read jardin du souvenir, garden of memory. A cemetery official had placed a canister on a marble circle that stood in front of the tombstone, and the couple was taking photographs. They stood there for quite some time, until finally the official picked up the canister and moved to a patch of grass at the side. As the group of mourners watched, the official swung the canister, releasing the ashes, presumably of the loved one, as if dispensing lawn-care product. When I got a bit closer, I saw that the narrow strip of grass in fact had line after line of ashes. That this garden of memory was a mass grave of sorts.

  I stared and stared at two of these lines and somehow was reminded of the day Béa and I had lain on our backs in the grass at Hautebranche, just after Marie had died. How despite the circumstances of a dead baby and a dying mother, it had been a sublime moment. And then I started thinking that if I ended up as a white line in the grass, I would like Béa’s white line next to mine, and in the meantime, I wished she were here to witness this curious scene with me. Experiencing it alone was, well, lonely. And that no matter how well I described it to her, or described it later on paper, it wouldn’t be the same as her actually being here at my side.

  The sound of lawn mowers and the friendly, summery smell of the fresh-cut grass roused me from my reverie. Part of the garden of memory, I could see, had been cordoned off. For all the signs telling people to have some respect and not walk over all these dead people on this lieu de mémoire, two municipal employees were leaning dutifully into their lawn mowers, and ashen bodies were flying through the blades by the dozen. One minute you’re lying in the grass on a sunny summer’s day; the next you’re a line of ashes, about to be mown over in the garden of memory. There’s no more to it than that. I wasn’t sure if this was reassuring or terrifying.

  When I picked up my mother, the urn was still warm. Although the man who handed it over to me apologized for this, I was happy for the heat and clutched the thing to my chest, sitting with it on my lap in the car for quite some time before strapping it into the passenger seat and returning to the rue des Martyrs.

  Later, lying on my mattress, the urn sitting on the table, I could not get the line from “To His Coy Mistress” out of my head: “The grave’s a fine and private place but none I think do there embrace.” My room, in its rejection of life, certainly had something of the grave to it, and until Béa, no one had done any embracing in it. As I thought again about those lines of poetry and those lines of ashes in the garden of memory, I realized that I was lying flat on my back. In a brusque, almost violent movement, I turned on my side and bent my knees.

  Edmond was going to return to New York with Aunt Tiffy and Mother’s ashes. She had requested that her remains be placed under a particular tree next to the house on Long Island. Edward objected: “He can’t just put the ashes there.”

  “You’re not worried about scaring away prospective buyers, are you?” I asked with a smile.

  “No,” he said. “I’m worried about just leaving her there. I mean, how do we know there won’t be bits of bone or something?”

  “I can assure you,” I said, “that there are no bones. But you’re right. We should consider whether to bury or scatter them. She didn’t specify, did she. The trouble with burying the urn is it might be dug up by a stranger years from now. She wouldn’t have wanted that.”

  “You’re right.” Edward nodded.

  “BP should scatter,” I said. Then, thinking of those white lines and the lawn mowers: “Over a large area.”

  This was a strange reversal of roles, having me suggest solutions to problems, but around the time of Mother’s death, the first in his l
iving memory, Edward was at times almost befuddled. It was actually heartening to see that death at least could rattle him.

  A couple days before Edmond and Aunt Tiffy’s departure, I had just gotten off the phone with Béa in London. It was the first evening where practicalities had not been crowding my mind. I took a beer out of the fridge, sat down at my table, and there were the notebooks I’d been writing after talks with my mother. I started leafing through the pages, and all I could see was what hadn’t been said, what was missing: the story of Franny’s death and the reason why my anything but whimsical mother had decided to move herself and her remaining two children across an ocean. “A fun year in Paris,” plus a few years as a translator just didn’t add up to a plausible motive.

  There were of course two people who might know the answers to these questions, and asking Aunt Tiffy somehow seemed cowardly, inappropriate.

  I got up and paced the room with such agitation that Cassie got up too and stood wagging her tail at me in perplexed sympathy. I looked at my watch. It was too early to walk her. But not too late to make a phone call. I looked at my new phone. Sighed. Picked it up and punched in the number that when my mother had made me memorize and repeat to her in French was 705 52 57, but had over the years been stretched to 47 05 52 57 and finally 01 47 05 52 57.

  Late the next morning, Cassie at my side, I was once again ringing the brass buzzer, next to the discreet “H-L.” As I’d hoped, the approaching feet wore the soft rubber of my stepfather’s crepe soles.

  “Entre,” he said, standing aside. Now that Mother was dead, he had regained most of his old composure; he even seemed less stooped as he led me to his study, saying that Lisette was out shopping for lunch and Aunt Tiffy for presents for her grandchildren. Following him, I felt for the first time that Mother would never be coming back, that Edmond was there alone for good. That any time from now on when I came to the rue de Verneuil, I was entering his territory and his alone.

  “Please,” he said, pointing to a chair before seating himself on the leather-covered swivel chair he must have brought back from Frères Laporte when he’d left for good, after the merger.

  “Thank you,” I said, looking at his blue cotton shirt, his perfectly creased grey-flannel trousers, and his soft-soled brown-suede loafers, not a scuff in sight. I shifted slightly in my chair, uncomfortable at being alone with him, though technically, we did have company. Not just Cassie, who was sniffing around with ill-mannered curiosity, but also Mother, whose ashes were on the desk.

  “Well,” he said, crossing his arms defensively. “You wanted to speak to me.”

  “Yes,” I said. The camp bed that had been set up in the corner for him since Mother’s illness was still there, and it gave the place an air of a military headquarters. Though I had requested the meeting, it felt uncomfortably like a father-son chat.

  “I am all ready to go to New York tomorrow,” he said, breaking the awkward silence. “To carry out your mother’s wishes.” He placed his hand on the urn.

  “Yes. Well. As you may know,” I cleared my throat, “Mother and I spoke about certain things in the weeks before she died.” Edmond’s evasive nod told me I’d come to the right place. “About our life in the US, before we moved here, about my father.” I paused. “But there were some things Mother did not talk about.” My stepfather now crossed his legs too and stared at the floor, transfixed by the pattern in the carpet. “You know obviously that I had a sister. That she died a year before my father.”

  He nodded.

  “It seemed very painful for my mother to talk about her death, I assume because she was with her when the accident took place. But it has occurred to me that I don’t really know what happened.” He glanced at me for a split second. “And that you might.”

  For a moment he sat very still, eyes back to the carpet, but finally he sighed, unfolding arms and legs. Then he looked me dead in the eye. “It was your father who was with your sister the day she died.”

  He might just as well have hit me over the head with a board. My ears were ringing. “But it was Mother who dropped me off. Mother who went shopping and who let go of her hand.” Beyond the shock, I did indeed feel enraged at him for telling me. And I felt betrayed all over again by my mother for not telling me, for her telling Edmond instead. It felt as if he were trespassing on my story.

  “No.” Edmond shook his head. “It was your father who was with her.”

  “Why wouldn’t she have told me that herself?”

  “You know why.” He looked at me with pained defiance. “She didn’t want to tarnish your image of your father.”

  “But you’re only too happy to.”

  “You asked me the question, Trevor,” he said very quietly. “I’m giving you the answer.”

  I nodded.

  “And it shouldn’t tarnish anything. An accident is nobody’s fault. I told your mother that, I don’t know how many times, right from your first days in Paris.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, feeling a tingling at the back of my neck. “Our first days in Paris? You didn’t know her then.”

  “You didn’t really think that your mother just picked up and moved to Paris on a whim, did you?”

  “But there was the whole year abroad thing, the translating work . . .”

  “She moved to Paris for me.”

  “For you?” I half screamed. Cassie slunk out of the room, tail between her legs.

  “Your mother and I met when she was a student here. The family Hélène was staying with were friends of my parents. I was just a few years older and was asked to escort your mother on certain evenings. For some reason, it never occurred to anyone that something might happen between us. When it did, when I told my parents not long before she left that I wanted to marry her, they forbade it. They were very, very old-fashioned and wouldn’t hear of me marrying an American. And I obeyed.” He shook his head. “As I always did. Anyway, your mother went back and finished her college, met your father, and married him. We did not speak for quite a few years; she had been very hurt. But I came to New York for a visit once, after my parents’ death. I had dinner with both your parents.”

  “You met my father?” I had completely lost control of my voice.

  “Yes. A lovely and gentle man. You look very much like him.” He paused again. “Anyway, your mother and I also had lunch. Several lunches, in fact. All innocent, of course. We always had such an easy time talking, your mother and I.” He took a deep breath. “Then not long after your father died, she contacted me to tell me. It just seemed so obvious what should happen,” he said, shaking his head, as if still stumped by such inexplicable forces. He looked right at me, now almost pleadingly: “Do you know what I mean?”

  If my stepfather had asked me that question several months earlier, it would only have fed the crackling flames of my fury and resentment; I would have sneered at two cowards running into each other’s arms, once the coast was clear. But several weeks ago, I had met Béa Fairbank. In the meantime I had experienced my mother’s death. Now indeed, I knew exactly what he meant. My anger evaporated, and in its place I felt a pang of sorrow and longing for my mother. Sorrow that she had tried to keep my father’s image untarnished in my eyes, even at the expense of her own. And longing for the lost chance to tell her that it was okay, I understood that she had moved us across an ocean for love.

  Aunt Tiffy came back, and Lisette too. We talked about checking the ashes at the airport, the prospects for the sale of the house. Aunt Tiffy, of course, would take care of everything. “That place will be sold before I push the send button on my computer,” she said. “You have no idea how desperate people are for a house on Long Island. The life of a successful New Yorker these days isn’t complete without one.”

  They asked me to stay for lunch, but I needed to be alone with this bruising new information. With the added twists to my story that made such perfect sense. I wondered, in fact, if my sub- or semiconscious hadn’t already sensed the truth because after my
meeting with Edmond, I had a strange feeling of having just woken from dream. My imagined version of events had targeted my mother partly because she was the one to drop me off at Tom Rogers’s, but partly because I wanted to blame her for everything. Of course, that’s why my father couldn’t live with Franny’s death; he was the one to let go. And of course, now that I looked back carefully, Mother already knew Edmond. He was walking with us in the Luxembourg Gardens right after our arrival; it was obvious even then the two had not just met. I remembered too the argument after which my father had stormed out, the line that had dangled in my memory: “You should have married a banker.” Maybe I had misunderstood, or misremembered, the article. Maybe he’d said: “You should have married the banker.”

  For the first time ever, I felt sympathy and a certain admiration for my stepfather. Not only had he stoically put up with me over the years, he’d also sustained a misperception that had fed my spite toward him. After all I had put him through, how had he resisted the temptation to shout the truth at me?

  And I realized that he was not trespassing on my story; it was his life too.

  Despite this newfound sympathy, I doubted that I would ever feel any real closeness to him. But I also thought, so what? Just because I don’t adore him doesn’t mean I have to hate him. I can like him well enough, do what I can to help him get used to life without his beloved wife, my mother.

  Maybe I was growing up after all.

  FIVE

  HAVING VOLUNTEERED TO sort through Mother’s things while Edmond was gone, I spent the last week that Béa would be in London at the rue de Verneuil. First I saw Lisette off to Brittany for the holiday she had not taken as usual at the beginning of August. I helped her on to the train, placing her small bag on the rack above the seat. In a way, she was the most bereft; she had so little in her life already.