We spent many hours with these old photographs, demanding details from our mother as to their subjects and locations and occasions. In my family, my mother was the storyteller. She had an innate understanding of structure and pace, the ability to make the most mundane events sound exciting and magical. She was a spinner of drama, a master of the reveal, and so we would pester her for stories, and she became a kind of verbal text to the picture book we found in that box. She told us that the little girl in curls and bows had a younger sister she had loved dearly who was killed in an accident when the family chauffeur was drunk, that later her engagement to the devastatingly handsome young man in the portrait was broken off when he became a communist while studying in Edinburgh. That the two were eventually reconciled and married in a spectacular wedding that united two of the great houses of Sri Lanka. She allowed us to play with the exquisite dressing-table set that the then prime minister of Sri Lanka had given them as a wedding present and described the other riches gifted by foreign dignitaries and grand guests.
We knew that little girl, of course. She was our grandmother. Small, quiet, distant. She had traveled with us for part of our grand tour, and though we had become accustomed to her presence, to us she remained enigmatic. We had only snippets of memories of our grandfather, still handsome in old age. He smoked a pipe and seemed vaguely English, though he wore a sarong. Perhaps because we didn’t really know them, it was easy to imagine them as young, the hero and heroine of a story to rival that of Elizabeth Bennet and her Mr. Darcy.
And then there were the photographs of the children. Girls in white dresses, boys in oversized shorts and collared shirts. Pictures taken on the estate, posing with bicycles, sitting in banyan trees, walking by the lake, and formal photos of the children together, direct, unsmiling gazes. My mother was the youngest by a long way, so she was not in all these group sittings, which is probably why it took me so long to notice that the numbers didn’t add up. I knew I had two aunts and three uncles, one of whom had died as a teenager. That made six children born to the union of Elizabeth and Darcy. And, indeed, the group photos always had six. Even when my mother was not among them. I must have been about ten when I realized that in some of these photographs there was an extra child. A boy. Now, these were pictures of children I knew only as middle-aged men and women, and so I could not tell which of the four boys was the extra child.
There were many plausible reasons why there might be an extra child in a photograph. The pictures of my father’s family often included cousins or friends or servants. And so, when I asked my mother, I was not particularly intrigued. I might have thought no more about it if she hadn’t flat-out denied what was before me in black-and-white. “There’s no extra child—you miscounted.”
“No, Mum; you aren’t in that photo, but there are still six kids.”
“One of my brothers died when he was young. It must be him.”
“No… there are four boys. I’ve only ever had three uncles.”
“You must be making a mistake.… I hope you haven’t been pulling out photos and not putting them back. Clean your room, by the way… and can you walk to the shops and get some milk?”
But ten-year-olds are persistent. I brought the photo to her and counted out my uncles. “Him!” I said triumphantly, once we’d eliminated the others. A thin boy with light eyes and ears like open cab doors. “Who is he?”
My mother picked up the photograph and stared at it for just a couple of beats too long. And when she spoke, there was something in her voice. A hesitation cut with sadness. “Must be some cousin… I don’t remember who.”
And that was that. She would say no more. I took the photo to my father and pointed out the extra child. “Do you know who he is, Dad?”
Now, if my father had simply said no, I probably would have forgotten all about it. But he said, “Who does your mother say it is?”
“She says it was some cousin.”
“That must be right, then.”
A ring-in cousin who visited so often he was in a number of different family photographs but whose name was forgotten. I was underwhelmed by the explanation, but it was what it was. If I’d had easy access to other family, I might have kept asking, but I was ten, and I didn’t.
I did think about the boy from time to time. While I accepted my mother’s half-hearted explanation, I never believed it. I wondered occasionally if he was a ghost accidentally caught on film or a criminal child who had been disowned. But mostly I didn’t think about him. He returned to the box of photographs, an unclaimed child with no name.
In the end, it was my mother who told me who the boy was on the day that he died. My sisters and I had arrived home from school in our usual noisy straggle, all schoolbags and bickering. My mother had been crying. She met us with “I have to speak to you girls about something.”
She told us then about the extra boy in the photo, her eldest brother, the first-born son of the little girl in curls and lace and the handsome young man who’d been a communist, the heir to wealth and status from both sides of his family, a future doctor or barrister or prime minister. But it had been a difficult birth, a forceps delivery that somehow damaged the baby, and he had stayed a five-year-old child. Celebration became tragedy. He grew up in a town where his father was the local doctor, surrounded by brothers and sisters in a grand house with many servants. My mother’s family are not demonstrative people, but I do think they loved him. They certainly protected and cared for him, perhaps even indulged him. And then, when he was nineteen, that all changed.
His five-year-old mind, it seemed, was susceptible to the frustrations and rages of that age, which, when expressed with the strength and body of a young man, were becoming difficult to manage. In a fit of temper, he’d flung a pair of scissors that had struck my grandmother and drawn blood. And that was it. It was decided that he could no longer live at home, and he was sent away.
My mother told us of the asylum, which housed patients with all sorts of mental fragility. Where my uncle lived for the rest of his life, sharing a room with a man who believed he was the king of England. She recounted funny conversations, anecdotes that made the asylum seem like a privileged boarding school.
When we asked why we’d never heard of this uncle, she said it was my grandfather’s wish that no one know. My mother, the youngest child, had been barely four when her eldest brother had last lived at home. Her memories of him were few and faded: he would place her on top of cupboards when they fought—she a small child, he a grown man with the mind of a child. Like all my mother’s stories, they were funny and light and beautifully constructed. They made us laugh and think warmly of the uncle we’d never known existed.
Once every couple of months my grandmother would visit the asylum, taking bribes for the staff and treats for her firstborn son. The last time we’d been in Sri Lanka, my mother had gone to see her brother for the first time in many years. Now she told us that he’d recognized her. She narrated the funny exchanges, the innocent honesty, the childlike questions, and then, with an instinctive understanding of pathos, she revealed that before they’d left, he’d warned her not to be naughty lest their father send her there, too.
That was probably the first hint I had that the asylum was not akin to some mythical English boarding school where everything was jolly.
I do remember being deeply troubled by the fact that my uncle had still been alive when last we’d been in Sri Lanka. We could have met him if we’d been allowed to know he existed. And now it was too late. An opportunity missed; a connection never made.
It was we who told our father that our uncle had died. My mother had gone to bed before he came home from work. This method of avoidance wasn’t particularly unusual in my family. My mother was possessive of her family. She would not share them with my father; she barely shared them with her daughters. And, it seemed, she had never told him she had a brother in the Angoda Asylum.
But my father knew. He is six years my mother’s senior, and as a c
hild, he’d lived in the same town in the highlands of Sri Lanka. My grandfather had been the doctor on the hill, an important and wealthy man. Dad’s family was poor, but he attended the same local school as the doctor’s children until they were packed off to elite boarding schools.
In whispers, my father told us what he remembered of our late uncle. The handsomest of the doctor’s brood, he was tall and green-eyed. Both features made him distinctive in Sri Lanka. Dad told us that as a young man, the eldest son of Elizabeth and Darcy would wander the streets in the town that was his home, where everyone knew him, as the people of Maycomb, Alabama, knew Arthur “Boo” Radley. That he would walk casually into people’s houses and request a drink or something to eat, as small children do. That the townspeople all knew he was a “bit silly” but harmless.
Later my father would confess that he’d first raised the subject of my uncle with my mother when they were newlyweds. She had denied having such a brother so absolutely that he’d never mentioned it again… though he knew. He complied with the pretense because it was the cause of such shame, and my mother’s people were very proud.
At the time, I accepted this, though I did wonder whether it was my uncle or where they’d left him that made them ashamed. I desperately wanted to be his champion, but it was too late. Occasionally I would retrieve the pictures from the box in the cupboard and look at the extra boy in the family photos, knowing now that he’d had green eyes, that his mind was that of a five-year-old child, and that he was my uncle. But aside from that, the sadness of him faded.
It wasn’t until well after my sons were born that my thoughts turned again to my late uncle. My eldest son is now eighteen, and while I love the young man he’s become, I do remember, with a sense of bittersweet loss, the five-year-old boy he once was. There is something so beautiful about the mind and heart of a child that age: the honesty, the innocence, the wide-eyed wonder at the world, the beginnings of humor, that fierce, uninhibited love. It was a mind like this that my grandparents had consigned to the Angoda Asylum, an institution that a little Googling reveals had more in common with the sanatorium in Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest than any of my mother’s stories ever revealed, a place that housed the intellectually challenged together with the criminally insane, a place that gained a reputation for brutality.
My uncle lived at Angoda for over thirty years. He died in the body of a man in his fifties, but his mind was still that of a child. He would have been as hurt and scared and confused as a child. His mother went to see him once every two months. My grandfather could not bear it and stayed away entirely. I don’t know how often his brothers and sisters, the other children in those photographs, visited, but I doubt it was more than rarely. He had many nieces and nephews, born to a more accepting generation, but they were not allowed to know of his existence.
I look now at those old photos. My dapper, modern grandfather who forsook the sarong for a suit and pipe. My grandmother, who was born to such wealth and privilege but who, even as a child in curls and bows, never seemed to smile. Perhaps she had some sense even then of the anguish life had in store for her, what circumstance and society would demand she bear. I look at that extra boy in the family portrait, and I wonder what he thought, what he felt, what he wanted. He remains a mystery. But he’s no longer a secret.
FIELD NOTES À LA MAIGRET FROM PARIS
– Cara Black –
I BLAME MY ENTRY INTO CRIME WRITING ON INSPECTOR Maigret, the protagonist of Georges Simenon’s novels about a Parisian police inspector. Georges Simenon, originally from Belgium, first arrived in Paris as an outsider. While Agatha Christie is known all over the world as the queen of crime, Georges Simenon has sold almost as many books—between 500 and 700 million copies worldwide of his 570 books.
His Inspector Maigret novels captured my imagination. Fascination with Paris is a family trait. My uncle and my father, two brothers from Chicago with not a French vein in their bodies, were devoted Francophiles. No clue as to why, but I think French cuisine and wine were probably factors. When I was a child, my father had read me Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, a nineteenth-century edition illustrated with scary woodcuts. In that story, Paris is peopled by revolutionaries, men in frock coats, and Madame Defarge knitting with a malevolent eye.
My uncle, who lived with us, had stayed on the Left Bank. “Studying art,” he claimed, but really drinking a lot of vin rouge. He’d talk about how, after a night of partying, they’d end up at five A.M. in their tuxedoes at Les Halles, Paris’s famous fresh-food market, where they’d eat onion soup next to the butchers working in their bloodstained aprons. How his teacher Georges Braque’s studio was so cold, and the artist such a tightwad, that when my uncle asked the master to put more coals in the stove because the model was turning blue, Braque gestured for him to leave and kicked him downstairs. His stories offered an earthy side to the photos I’d seen in Vogue, with slim, tousle-haired women, effortlessly chic in Chanel jackets, carrying dogs in their handbags. The glamor and the grit seemed to go hand in hand.
You always remember the first time… the first time you felt Paris. For me, it was reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, exploring the gritty side with Inspector Maigret, listening to Edith Piaf songs. The city of light exuded sensuality and a hard, visceral beauty.
I first came to Paris in a long-ago September. What I owned lay in my rucksack carried on my back. My travelmate and I woke up in the École de Médecine student dormitory somewhere in the Latin Quarter. Two medical students, who were on call all night, had given us their beds. Needless to say, they expected to share them with us the following morning. I remember that peculiar feeling of a fluffy duvet, sun pouring in the tall window, and two grinning male students greeting us with soup bowls of bitter coffee and peaches. Peaches whose sweet juice stained our chins. We thanked them, maneuvering our way out by promising to come back. Somehow, we never did.
I never forgot the actual boots-down feeling of this place. Paris comes to me with the scent of ripe Montreuil peaches, the high heels clicking over the cobbles, the dripping plane-tree branches leaving shadows on the quai, the flowing of the khaki-colored Seine. Always that shiver from cold stone inside soot-stained, centuries-old churches, relics of history and mystery under a piercing blue sky. But feeling Paris is not the same as knowing it, and I have spent my life trying to connect to this city as one of my own, à la Maigret.
That first September, wearing a déclassé flannel shirt and jeans, I haunted the cafés where famous writers wrote. Those cafés encouraged my resolve that I would write someday. But it wasn’t until years later in Paris, during another September, that I found a story. My friend Sarah took me to the Marais, then ungentrified, and showed me where her mother, at the age of fourteen, had hidden during the German occupation. Sarah’s mother’s family had been taken by the French police, and she’d lived, hidden, wearing a yellow star and going to school, until the liberation of Paris. Sadly, her family never returned.
The war had never felt close to me until that moment, standing on the narrow rue des Rosiers in front of a building where a tragedy—so many more than one in this old Jewish part of Paris—had occurred. It was the collision between the present and the past that floated in front of me as I imagined Sarah’s mother’s life. Almost as if the ghosts hovered out of reach, but there in the shadowy stone recesses of the building. I never forgot that shiver of encountering the past.
When my father heard the story of Sarah’s mother hiding in the Marais during the war, he handed me a slim crime novel by Georges Simenon and said, “Read this. It’s set in Paris.”
But it’s old-fashioned, I thought.
“It might be a way to tell this story you’re going on about,” said my father, tired of the obsession consuming me after hearing about Sarah’s family.
So my life of crime began with reading Inspector Maigret’s investigations. Could I approach understanding Parisians like an investigation, a case to crack, as in
those slender Inspector Maigret novels that intrigued me? Maybe I could understand Parisians, blend in at least for a moment before I opened my mouth. Figure out the code they communicated in, discover if their flair disguised another reality. The seething passions below the surface that led to spilling blood. What better way than an investigation for someone like me—not as a voyeur but as an observer who noted details, caught a nuance, dug below the surface, always searching for motive, opportunity?
I identified with an investigator because I was always on the outside looking for a way in. And crime fiction sets Paris against a backdrop of gray, an overcast sky, and perhaps a corpse or two in the cobbled streets—discovered, of course, by Georges Simenon’s pipe-smoking Inspector Jules Maigret.
Though Maigret’s era passed long ago, it’s not all history. His “old office” in the police department at 36 Quai des Orfèvres, the Paris Préfecture (often referred to as “36”), now belongs to a trim forty-something commissaire with a laptop; gone is the charcoal-burning stove. Maigret’s unit, the Sûreté, is no more, but has been restructured and renamed the Brigade Criminelle, Paris’s elite homicide squad. From time immemorial, officers have hung bloody clothing from crime scenes to dry under the rafters in the attic at 36. This tradition hasn’t changed. Nor has the rooftop view, courteously shown to me by a member of the Brigade Criminelle. A vista with the Seine and all of Paris before us. Breathtaking. And beneath us are 36’s underground holding cells, which date from the Revolution, if not further back.
That’s become my job: to write stories about crime and murder à la parisienne, set in contemporary Paris. A way for me, an outsider, to explore and scratch that itch of curiosity.
The streets are the same as they were in Maigret’s time, but today’s Fifth Republic Paris is a blended wealth of cultural traditions from all over the world. For me, this means there are new enclaves and hidden worlds to encounter, no matter how well I think I know these cobbled streets.
Private Investigations Page 4
