by Lily King
She wouldn’t get scolded. Maman wasn’t home. To them, he was selfish. To them, he had no sense of humor.
Lola ducked to the side so quickly from his attempted swipe that two chair legs gave out and she fell to the floor. There was a loud crack.
“Get out,” Papa told him as he bent down to her. “Get out and stay out!”
His father’s voice was like acid in his ears. He turned and went. A slat of the chair had split, not Lola’s skull. At the door he heard Lola. She was laughing.
In his room he knelt down on the patch of bare floor between the carpet and the closet.
Dearest Christ, please please. I am wicked and undeserving but only say the word and I please please I beg you to pardon my behavior and please help me in the future to respond appropriately to acts of ill will. Please help me to forgive as you forgive me.
He thought of Thérèse Lisieux at age five and her string of beads, one for every sacrifice, and how she smacked her sister and it was days before she could secure God’s forgiveness.
I am not worthy.
He was still on his knees when Maman came in. He liked it when she found him praying.
He told himself he wouldn’t cry when he saw her, but just her “Guillou?” behind him made a sob rise to the surface. She sat beside him and he fell into her, into her cashmere shoulder, her fragrant neck, her cold gold hoops.
“What happened? What happened?” she whispered.
He hugged her tighter but her embrace remained the same. He wished she’d hold him closer, closer.
“That hurts,” she said, loosening his arms. “Tell me.”
He knew he could stop crying now and speak but he didn’t, wanting still to hold and be held, wanting so fiercely, and fearing the want would never end. He pressed his closed eye into her shoulder until it began to sparkle and great wheels of red turned gold and then the brilliant white of heaven.
“Tell me,” Maman said again, unhooking his arms like a strand of pearls from around her neck. “Guillaume.” Her voice was impatient. Her eyes were shallow, lighter than usual, the light green of a fountain basin, so shallow they might not forgive him.
“Please forgive me,” he said softly.
“Did you try and hit her? Is that true?”
“I am evil. Please forgive me.”
“Don’t be absurd, Guillaume.”
“I am, Maman. I am.”
“Brothers are expected to hit their sisters.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s right.” He wished he could shed the child he was like another layer of bad skin.
“No, of course it’s not right.”
“It’s a sin and I’ve sinned. I’m always sinning.”
On the floor of the closet she spotted her purple scarf in the pocket of the discarded robe. She pulled it out and spread it over his shoulders. “You’re not always sinning.” She stroked the silk on his arms. “My little saint never sins.”
Lola
THEY WERE FINALLY GOING. AFTER THEIR FIGHT OVER THE HOT CHOCOLATE, MAMAN had arranged for Guillaume to meet a priest up north that she knew from when she was a little girl. But they didn’t go and they didn’t go—this Père Lafond had a baptism one week, two weddings the next, Papa was away, Maman got the flu—but now they were finally going to have tea with a priest.
Maman was wearing white and beige. Papa was in a foul mood, having to drive so far on a bright Saturday, and would not compliment her.
“You look beautiful, Maman,” Lola said, and it was true. She did look beautiful, particularly beautiful in this soft, weightless shirt that let through, where a gold cross pressed it close to her skin, the slightest bit of lace of her bra. She wore a hat, a simple beige hat, to match her skirt, and her hair peeked out perfectly as if it had been cut especially for the hat that morning. Her cheeks were rosy already, though she hadn’t yet been out in the cold.
Guillaume appeared, his cheeks red too from Maman’s powder puff that Lola had refused. He looked silly, all tucked up in a gray suit and a gray-and-red striped bow tie that was far too big beneath his small chin. Lola said nothing, knowing how important this day was to him and also knowing that one comment, one word, would set back their leaving for at least another hour.
They hovered over each other in the hall, Maman straightening Guillaume’s tie, Papa finally putting on his own, a long thin blue and yellow one, complaining, demanding to know if five days a week in this getup wasn’t enough. Lola knew Papa got to his office, took off his tie, and wore his doctor’s coat all day long, but she didn’t say anything to that, either.
At the last moment, Odile announced she wasn’t going. Justine d’Eveille was having a lunch. She’d completely forgotten.
Lola didn’t care that it was a lie. “Can Rosie come, then?” she asked. “There’s enough room now.”
“She’s running some errands for me. Another time,” Maman said.
They climbed the stairs, shocked to find such a cold bright day above. Lola waited for Guillaume, who was the last to emerge from the small door out onto the deck. He saw her but he turned toward the river, to its choppy green water and hard flints of sunlight.
“You’re awfully quiet. Are you excited or nervous?” She reached to tousle his hair, but he ducked and blocked her arm with his own.
“Don’t. Maman put stuff in it.”
“Sorry.” She tried to think of some way to tell him that if he didn’t relax a bit he’d ruin this day that he’d been looking forward to for so long. She remembered the times she’d done that, ruined events with seriousness and expectations, but she also remembered that even after she’d learned this, after she’d warned herself, it still happened all over again. She knew warning Guillaume would be useless. It was something you had to learn slowly, going forward and backward and forward again.
Guillaume’s hand trembled. She watched him try to lock the car door. It made her sad, how his fingers trembled.
Papa told them about the town they were headed for, how it was never discovered by the Germans as a central Resistance cantonment. He was born just before the war broke out, and Maman was born just after. This fact has always seemed significant to Lola, as if it somehow explained all the differences between them.
Guillaume gazed blankly at the seat back in front of him, his pallid face balanced above the big bow tie. Lola tried to imagine what he felt at this moment. Though he went to mass every week, he had never spoken to the priest, had only let his small hand be swallowed for a few seconds in the old man’s soft flesh and white cuffs as they filed out of the church. Each Sunday, Guillaume planned to speak. Lola often caught him practicing his lines when they were stuck together in the tall wall of dark coats and shawls and scarves with frayed ends that itched her nose if she was pushed too close. As they stepped outside onto the stone steps and into the light, Guillaume was always defeated by the cool unfocused gaze of the priest, which was always one person ahead of the one whose hand he held in his.
That’s Paris, Maman had said, reassuring him that they would go soon to see the priest she knew personally up north. It was perhaps the only time Lola had ever heard Maman apologize for Paris. She’d come up from the south at sixteen, and still she claimed that she’d never soak up enough of this city into her bones. Papa wanted to move away, they all knew, but it would never happen. Living on a boat is bad enough, Maman would say, but living in the country! The boat was her one concession to his desire for more rustic living.
Everyone but Lola seemed to have passion for a place: Papa for a little village in a foreign country, Maman for a wide sidewalk thick with shoppers, Odile for the open doorways of dinners and dances, Guillaume for a dark aisle and a high altar. And even if Lola had one, Maman would never indulge it as she indulged Guillaume. They wouldn’t drive two hours to take her there.
When had Guillaume become so devout? Lola could believe in God in a crisis; she could feel him then. But Guillaume prayed all the time. He prayed to Christ. She’d heard him. Not to God but to Christ
. He told her Christ was the same thing, one and the same, part and whole of the Trinity. Then why didn’t he pray to God or the Holy Spirit? she asked. Because Christ suffered and died on the cross. Because he bled, he told her. He showed her, the next Sunday, an enormous painting on the side of the cathedral and the drops of blood that had seeped into the shroud that covered Christ’s body as he lay in his mother’s arms. I pray to him because he bled for my sins.
How was it that they were brother and sister? They had eaten the same foods, read the same books, gone to the same Sunday Mass (Lola, being three years older, to perhaps a hundred and fifty more), and yet he was the one who could explain to her in complete earnestness, I pray to him because he bled for my sins.
“He believes that,” she told Papa in private. Like her, he felt nothing. He had only been to church a handful of times in his life.
“I know it.”
“Does Maman?”
“I think so. That’s why she goes.”
“She goes to take us.”
“Then you should ask her what she believes.”
“I couldn’t.”
“Why?”
“Then she’d know I didn’t.”
“It’s your right, Lola, to believe what you believe.”
Of course she knew she had the right to doubt what she heard at mass, but didn’t he understand how fragile her relationship was with Maman already? She wasn’t pretty. She couldn’t share what Odile shared with her, and she couldn’t be her baby like Guillaume. It wasn’t church exactly that bound them, but their alienation from Guillaume’s intensity. In church he slipped away from them both. Odile hardly went anymore, for she got in so late every Saturday night that her mother permitted her to sleep in before starting her homework, so she and Maman were left alone together in the pew. The exchange of peace was perhaps their closest moment all week; Maman seemed to hold her tighter then, brush her hair away from her eyes with more tender concern. In that moment Lola was her only child, the child that mattered. No, she decided, she would definitely not mention it to Maman.
Maman was telling a story now, sitting sideways in her seat to see them all. Her lipstick was deep red against the white wool of her coat. What was beauty? What made the eye believe that this pattern was more beautiful than another? And yet if she stared hard at her mother she could separate the elements: the red lips an underwater creature in fluid motion, the eyes the soft center of something black and sharp-quilled, the nose delicate but growing great wings when she laughed.
And Papa, he wasn’t beautiful at all. But men were different somehow. With them it was harder to separate their whole nature from their face. One didn’t notice a terrible nose, if he was smart and funny. A woman with a terrible nose never became attractive, no matter how clever or hilarious she was. She just stayed the smart, funny woman with the unfortunate nose.
Guillaume had not spoken. It was so unlike him not to be whining, demanding that they stop talking about things that did not hold his interest. Maman was always the first to give in to him, apologizing, asking him to choose the topic. He was spoiled rotten, and Lola got in huge trouble for ever saying it. But today he sat still with his small Bible beneath his folded hands on his lap. His lips moved whenever he shut his eyes.
Finally they turned off the highway, and her mother read out the directions scribbled on the back of a dry cleaner’s bill. Her tone now implied that a mistake would be made. She made Papa repeat them.
“A right at the inn, straight down into the center of town, a left at the town hall, and the church is the third building on the left. Easy,” he said, but then they never came to an inn. They stopped at a corner to ask, and an old man leaned on the door with both his arms, looked into the car, and answered the question slowly. They had passed the inn. He lifted a finger crabbed like a ginger root and pointed behind him to the signless, ramshackle building. They spun around, took the turn, and went into the center of town. It was barren, empty of a fountain or open square, shop awnings, and people. There was no left, only a right at the town hall, and they had already passed three churches. Papa was getting irritated.
“Three churches!” he yelled. “A church for every person in this Godforsaken place.”
Maman chided him. They were going to see a priest, after all.
They found it on their first try back out of town. “Well, maybe there is a God,” her father said, when her mother nodded from the church steps.
Guillaume leapt out and cried to his mother, “Tell Papa he should stay in the car if he’s going to talk like this!” They were the first words he had spoken in over an hour and a half.
Père Lafond appeared in the door in a black robe. Lola had hoped they’d catch him in a ratty sweater and mud-colored pants. But there were no surprises, she suspected, with priests.
His face was pale and cushiony and not unlike the face of the Paris priest, she thought, though this one was younger. When Maman introduced him, Guillaume stood there as mute and stupid as he did every Sunday on the cathedral steps. Sweat beaded above his lip. The priest took his hand briefly, then embraced their mother again.
“How is your family?” he asked her.
“They’re right here. See for yourself.” She laughed. “All except the oldest, Odile. This is my husband, Marc.”
Papa gave him the handshake he used when they ran into one of his patients on the street: abrupt and one-handed. With friends he was warmer, often covering the greeting with his other hand. The priest took it impatiently. He had known Maman in Plaire, and it was that family he wanted to hear about.
“And this is Louise.”
Lola winced at her name and told him the one she preferred.
But he didn’t seem to hear her. “Marie-Jo,” he said softly. Blotches of color rose instantly on his face and on the sides of his neck.
“Lola,” she said again.
He turned back to Maman. “It’s an incredible likeness, isn’t it?”
“I don’t see it,” she said curtly.
“How is she, Nicole?” he implored.
Lola knew little about any of her aunts and listened carefully. Marie-Jo’s husband was a fruit farmer, Maman said, and they had four children, all married. In the one picture Lola had ever seen, Marie-Jo was the tallest and most graceful-looking aunt.
“She’s fine, Frederí,” her mother said, looking past him to the door as a hint that he might let them in out of the cold wind.
But the priest was not satisfied. “Is she? Is she well?”
“I think she must be.”
Unlike Maman, Père Lafond spoke with a thick southern accent. He clearly wanted to ask more, but Papa interrupted to ask about the grounds that sprawled behind the church in a great unkempt meadow. Soon the church would have to sell, the priest said. To whom? Lola wondered. Who would buy land in such a place?
The priest let them pass through the door. The pews of this chapel were mere slabs of wood placed at perpendicular angles. On the low altar stood a square table bereft of even a cloth, and behind it hung a simple pine cross—or what looked like a cross until you saw that the horizontal plank was missing and what remained was the light shadow of where it had once protected the wall from grime.
The priest’s own quarters were plush. In his living room there were bright soft places for everyone. The priest sat in a red leather chair whose dents and puckers were molded to his large body. He smiled at Lola, pointing to a puffy chair beside him, but Maman steered her to the sofa along the far wall, and Guillaume sat in the chair beside the priest.
An elderly woman brought in a tray of tea and small chocolate cakes.
“The tea,” he said to the silver pot, as it came to rest on the table beside him. The woman disappeared back down the unlit hallway. No one spoke. The brief noises in the room became palpable: the purling of the tea into shallow teacups, the scrape of the clawed prongs as they seized the sugar cubes, the splat of milk before the cup was set on a saucer and passed off. When each lap held a cup an
d a cake, they came upon a more uncomfortable silence. Lola, feeling the priest’s stare, kept her eyes cast down, moving from cup to bare knees to brown shoes and back. In the periphery, she could see Papa’s hand stirring. He was wordlessly telling Maman, I take no responsibility for this disaster. He wanted the visit to be a failure and Guillaume to stop talking about becoming a priest.
Her mother searched frantically for conversation. She brought up the difficulty of finding work in the region, the needs of his parishioners, the charcoal clouds that loomed above the hills through the patio doors. And as if Maman were painstakingly lighting candles, this priest, with fat wetted fingers, went about snuffing out each flame.
“I have read about the unemployment, that here it is perhaps the worst in all of France,” she said.
“This is a mistake they make, I think, to say what is bad and what is worse. Isn’t bad bad enough?”
“Yes, of course it is.” She waited for him to elaborate, and when he didn’t she continued. “It must affect the lives of your parishioners a great deal.”
The priest nodded, eyes shut.
Maman persisted. “It must be difficult to console them.”
“Console?” he asked softly, and held his face up to her with a sweetly puzzled look, which he kept long after she nodded and they all waited for an answer that was never going to come.
About the clouds, he simply said, “Rain again,” as if it were the beginning of a song. He stood up to pour more tea into empty cups, even into her father’s, which was full and overflowed onto the saucer, then sat back down again, forgetting or refusing to refill milk and sugar.
Unlike all other men, the priest was not affected by her mother’s beauty.
There was a strange snapping sound. Lola looked up and saw that the priest had a hand to his neck and was flicking the bottom of the stiff collar with his long thumbnail. His eyes bored into hers, and she looked quickly away.
Guillaume said, “I want to be a priest.” His voice was shrill and impatient. The priest shifted his body beneath the robe to face Guillaume, who buckled slightly at the sudden attention, then said, “At least, I think it would interest me.”
