by Jim Nelson
Hagar's Mother
Jim Nelson
Copyediting: Beth at bzhercules.com
Cover photo: vvvita/123RF
Merci de votre aide: Jacques Cressaty
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and situations within its pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and coincidental.
No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
Copyright © 2017 Jim Nelson
All rights reserved
ISBN 0-9904802-3-2
ISBN-13 978-0-9904802-3-5
Also by Jim Nelson
Bridge Daughter
Edward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People
A Concordance of One's Life
Everywhere Man
Visit the author on the web at j-nelson.net
for Helen Langston
one strong woman
Contents
Rouen, France
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert; it was the spring that is beside the road to Shur. And he said, “Hagar, bridge daughter of Sarah, where have you come from, and where are you going?”
Genesis 16:7-8
Rouen, France
January 31, 1933
Any other midmorning, the shutters over the doctor’s office windows would have been open to announce he was taking patients. This day the shutters were secured shut to warn people away. The gefyriatrician was accepting no patients that snowy January day.
Inside the waiting room, the lights off, Dr. Victor Blanchard stood smoking a cigarette. His fingers made the cigarette tremble, and the cigarette trembled when it was between his lips. The pot-bellied stove in the corner was unlit and the waiting room was bitingly cold.
Dr. Blanchard stubbed out the remainder of his Gauloises in the ashtray. He paced back to the waiting room’s rear exit, which led to the examination room and the rest of his home. He thought he might have a small glass of port, then decided against it. He dug his hands in the pockets of his trousers, first the right, then the left, then found his package of cigarettes in his breast pocket. As the tongue of the match’s flame touched the tip of his Gauloises, two quick knocks sounded from the waiting room door.
“Victor,” called a familiar voice through the door. The bolt rattled. “C’est moi.” Grateful, Dr. Blanchard threw back the bolt and swung the door open.
The snow had fallen all morning. The street cobblestones were dusted white. A man hurried inside with a teenaged girl trailing behind him. Both were bundled in layers of fleece and cotton with snow powder in the folds and crevices, as though they’d been dusted with sugar. In with the pair came a numbing blast of wind and flakes.
Dr. Blanchard slammed and bolted the door. He assisted as they unwound themselves from their scarves and mufflers and long coats. Soon, a ruddy-faced man with bulbous cheeks and a mushroom-shaped nose stood before Victor Blanchard. Short in stature, the colorfully-dressed man had to lift his chin to look Dr. Blanchard in the eye. The man adjusted his tie and jacket and slapped the last bits of snow off his shirt cuffs. He turned to the girl behind him and said sharply, “Dites bonjour au Docteur Blanchard.”
“Bonjour,” emerged from the side of the girl’s petite mouth.
The girl wore clothes markedly plainer than her father’s, a man who fancied himself a bit of a bohemian. Her brown dress had no lace or embroidery; none of the finery a girl her age would normally gravitate toward. The dress hung to her ankles and its sleeves ran to her wrists. She wore black rubber boots suitable for the clime and a cream-white bonnet on her head, again, one lacking lace or embroidery.
“Bonjour, passerelle,” Dr. Blanchard said to the girl. He leaned down to brush a clump of snow from her hair. “Merci de votre aide.”
Denis Doisneau shook hands with Dr. Blanchard. “Of course Paige will be happy to assist,” he said in French. “We are here to help you.”
Dr. Blanchard grasped Denis by one shoulder while clenching hands. “If you wish to back out, I understand—no, stop, listen,” he said over Denis’ protests. “I would not be offended if you could not go through with this.”
“Victor,” Denis said with a broad smile. “We are both here to help any way we can. Isn’t that right?” he said to the girl.
Paige Doisneau nodded her head once. She stood behind her father, just as she’d been trained since childhood to present herself, back erect and shoulders up, hands clasped at her sternum and elbows straight out.
Dr. Blanchard went to the waiting room’s rear door and called into the house. “Violette! Come greet Monsieur Doisneau.”
After a moment, a thirteen-year-old girl appeared in the doorway drying her hands with a kitchen towel. Her hair was held in a lavender charwoman’s bandana. She wore a dark blue apron over her royal-blue dress, its cut similar to Paige’s dress. Unlike Paige, Violette was well into her pons anno. Her dress bulged egg-shaped at her midsection. “Bonjour, Monsieur Doisneau,” she said.
“Four weeks remain, I would say.” Dr. Blanchard placed a hand spread wide on Violette’s distended belly. “The finality will arrive before you know it. There will be no turning back.”
Denis could not tell if his friend was speaking to him, to Violette, or to himself.
“I take it you’ve not eaten?” Dr. Blanchard said to Denis.
“Spent the morning standing in lines at the Place Saint Marc,” Denis said. “If it’s no trouble—”
“None at all,” Dr. Blanchard said. “Violette, if you would.”
Without a word of instruction, Paige broke away from her father to assist Violette in the preparation and serving of an early lunch.
Denis accepted a cigarette and a light from Dr. Blanchard. Together they strode to the rear of the Blanchard household.
They stopped in the examination room. A pot-bellied stove stood in the room’s corner, a twin of the one in the waiting room. Dr. Blanchard lit a small fire of kindling and added two wood splits. Once the wood was smoking, he closed the stove door, adjusted the flue, and led his friend to the dining room.
Denis’ bridge daughter brought a bottle of red wine and twin amber goblets to the table. Dr. Blanchard poured healthy amounts for each of them. Paige returned with a half-loaf of bread sliced into strips and piled into a woven basket. A jar of cherry preserves and a pot of salted butter always stood on the Blanchard table alongside the salt and pepper. The men ate and drank while the bridges prepared the remainder of the luncheon.
“I must apologize,” Dr. Blanchard said to Denis. “I’m afraid Violette did not have time to plan a better meal for us. I’ve kept her busy all morning readying for the procedure.”
“It’s nothing
,” Denis said. He refilled his glass. He held the bottle’s spout over Dr. Blanchard’s glass. “You?”
Dr. Blanchard waved it off. “Just this one.”
More food began arriving at the table. Denis ate with gusto, welcoming each plate as it landed. Madame Doisneau had taught Paige to prepare healthful meals, plenty of fresh vegetables and small portions of lean white meat. Dr. Blanchard, on the other hand, did not instruct Violette at all in the kitchen, or in any household task or responsibility, and so her meals tended to be less considered.
Without time to reach the market that morning, Violette assembled a meal from leftovers and odds-and-ends from the larder. She and Paige presented the men a cold lunch of cut meats and cheeses, sliced cucumbers, chopped apples, and sugared prunes. Incongruously, Violette brought out a jar of peanut butter, a delicacy Dr. Blanchard developed a taste for while traveling in the United States three years earlier.
Feeling a bachelor once more, Denis made sandwiches ad hoc from the bounty before him. He waved off his friend’s repeated apologies for the unrefined meal.
“Madame Doisneau would never let me eat so at home,” he said with a full mouth.
As he was eating his second sandwich, Denis stopped. Dr. Blanchard had barely touched his bread and peanut butter, merely swirling a puddle of wine about in his cup.
“Eat,” Denis instructed him. “You will need your focus.”
“I will get the guillotine for this,” Dr. Blanchard said.
“You are doing what you think is right,” Denis said.
“What I think is right.” Dr. Blanchard shook his head disdainfully.
“You are making history,” Denis insisted.
“This is not for posterity,” Dr. Blanchard said. “It’s for my daughter.” He hung his head. “Or is it for myself?”
Denis leaned back in his chair and peered into the kitchen. The bridge daughters worked together, washing dishes, hanging wet linen on a rack beside the kitchen fire, and so on. A bridge’s work is never finished.
Years earlier Dr. Blanchard pointed out to Denis the naturalness of bridge daughters as teams. Dr. Blanchard admired the way they worked wordlessly side-by-side, one bridge starting a task and handing it off for another to complete without instruction or explanation.
“They are special,” Dr. Blanchard told Denis. “Bridge daughters represent the best of us all. They are more human than we are, than we ever will be.”
Violette was due to give birth in a month. When the cord linking her to the child was cut, Violette would die, leaving Dr. Blanchard with an infant who would grow to be Violette’s twin. The finality completed the bridge cycle, the circle of life and death defining reproduction for humankind.
Paige had turned thirteen a few days earlier. She did not appear pregnant yet, although she was born bearing her parents’ child. Dr. Blanchard was Paige’s gefyriatrician. A week before, he’d informed Denis and Madame Doisneau that Paige had crossed into pons anno. Her pregnancy would grow visible in six to eight weeks. In eight months, Paige would produce for Denis and Madame Doisneau a new infant to raise; Eloise if it was a girl, Renaud if a boy. Like Violette, Paige would expire after childbirth, the natural outcome of all bridge daughters.
As Denis peered into the kitchen, his eyes caught Violette’s. Her hair was tied back and a smear of brown grime ran down her right cheek. She paused her work to stare back at him with hard, unforgiving eyes, as blue as the icicles hanging from the eaves beyond the windows.
“She’s a beautiful passerelle,” he told Dr. Blanchard. “Her mother would have been proud.”
“Yes, she would have,” Dr. Blanchard said absently.
Denis returned to his lunch, eating noisily, as was his wont. Denis only utilized a napkin at the conclusion of a meal, allowing crumbs to accumulate in the corners of his mouth and across his shirt collar. Dr. Blanchard did not mind this about his friend, a pleasant man who seemed comfortable wherever he landed, no matter the circumstances. He preferred Denis’ company to that of the well-bred Rouennais, their lineages and family histories, and especially their damnable games of one-upmanship, an American word he found characteristically apt and frank.
Dr. Blanchard said, “Madame Doisneau does not know, I take it.”
“She does not,” Denis said, lips smacking. “Madame Doisneau would not approve.”
“No one will approve,” Dr. Blanchard said. “You’re certain Paige will not tell her mother?”
“I’ve not told her everything yet,” Denis said. “Don’t worry. She’s an obedient bridge daughter.”
“I’m afraid she’ll see me a monster after today. And Violette a freak.” For eleven years he’d examined and cared for Paige. “She will not want to be near me again.”
Denis forked up two slices of cold roast beef. “She’s made of tough stuff. She’ll surprise you.” He chuckled. “She sometimes even surprises me.”
Dr. Blanchard took a delicate bite of his peanut butter sandwich. He pushed the remainder away. He lit another Gauloises. He smoked and watched his friend eat.
“I love my daughter,” Dr. Blanchard said.
“You do not have to tell me,” Denis said.
“There will be people who say by allowing Violette to live, I killed my child.”
“You have always treated Violette as your child,” Denis said.
Violette cleared the dishes on the table. Dr. Blanchard smoked.
“Will I regret this?” he said.
Denis grew a touch cross at his friend’s uncharacteristic lack of resolve. He poured a healthy splash of red wine into Dr. Blanchard’s goblet and ordered him to drink. “Le vin c’est la vie, Docteur Blanchard.”
One
The photograph showed the profile of a young girl, pretty but plain, wearing a flat unadorned bridge daughter dress of the style thirty-five years earlier. With a Mona Lisa smile on her face, she dipped her nose in a bouquet of flowers she held at her chest. The mysterious smile withheld many secrets. It was all the more mysterious as four weeks after the photograph was taken, the girl was dead.
The two girls in the back seat of the Audi stretched against their seatbelts to view the photograph at the same time. The smaller of the two held the smartphone in both hands. The other larger one used her fingers to magnify the photo and move it about the glass screen in a vain attempt to discover more information about the girl in the photograph.
“This is Mama’s bridge mother,” Ruby, the smaller of the two, said.
“Give it to me,” Cynthia said.
Ruby held the phone beyond her sister’s reach. “I’m not finished looking yet.”
“No fighting with the phone,” their mother said from the driver’s seat. She alternately watched the road and watched the two squabble in the rearview mirror.
“What was your bridge mother like?” Ruby said to her.
“She died giving birth to mom,” Cynthia said.
“I know that,” Ruby said. “But what was she like?”
In the rearview, the mother saw Cynthia snatch the phone from Ruby’s grasp. Ruby cried out and called for their mother to intervene.
“We’re going to her old house right now,” the mother said. “She grew up there.”
“You grew up there too, right?” Ruby asked.
The mother watched Cynthia via the rearview mirror. The larger of the two, more muscular, more physically present, she hunched over the phone and tapped its screen. She was too engaged with the device to be looking at photos.
“No Internet,” the mother called to her.
“I’m not,” Cynthia murmured, mesmerized by the phone.
“Give it here,” the mother demanded as they arrived at their destination.
The house on Iris Way had been on the market for three weeks now. Fixer-upper! ran the copy on the realtor web site. Plenty of 1970s charm and classic styling printed beneath photos of avocado-green kitchen appliances and lemon-yellow cabinetry.
This Sunday in particular, the third Sunday o
f the month, the front door of the house on Iris Way was wide open. The front lawn had been cut earlier that day. Sticky green wheel marks ran across the sidewalk where the lawnmower had been pivoted to begin cutting another direction. The only unkempt patch of grass was about the base of the real estate sign where the lawnmower’s blades could not reach. A bright red OPEN HOUSE sandwich board on the sidewalk directed the curious and the interested inside.
Standing on the sidewalk at the end of the driveway, Hanna Driscoll drew in a deep breath. It was a necessary moment to prepare herself for what lay inside this house—the home her parents once tried to make a family in. Old memories, buried memories, ugly memories.
“Were you poor?” thirteen-year-old Cynthia asked Hanna.
“The neighborhood’s gone down since we lived here,” Hanna told her.
“You and Grandmother lived here?” thirteen-year-old Ruby asked.
“Grandmother and Grandpa,” Hanna said. “Until I was seven. Then me and Grandmother moved away.”
The girls nodded. Their mouths hung open, an indication of the awe within them at the moment. They’d never visited their mother’s old house before. It is always difficult for a child to imagine their parents as children.
Hanna led her bridge daughters up the vacant driveway. Islands of gritty mechanic’s absorbent covered the driveway’s oil stains. Hanna knew the texture of the driveway’s poured concrete from memory. She knew the feel of the cement scraping her bare knees when she fell running. She knew the burn of the concrete baking hot from the summer sun when she sat on it. She made chalk drawings on the cement of worlds where airplanes flew upside-down and cacti grew on the surface of the margarine-yellow sun.
The three of them stepped through the open front door and into the cool entry hallway. A realtor emerged from the kitchen. She wore a navy blazer over a long patterned dress that ran down to a pair of black high heels. She welcomed them inside with a sing-song greeting and directed Hanna to the guest sheet. Hanna signed her name but skipped over the blanks for phone and email. This was purely to satisfy Cynthia’s and Ruby’s curiosity, as well as to indulge in a little nostalgia herself.
