“Perfect,” she’d replied. “The kids can’t wait to see you.”
“Tell them I’m eager to see them, too,” I said. “And, of course, you.”
After we said goodbye, I mixed myself a martini and sat on the deck overlooking Salt Island. Several neighboring flagpoles, newly stripped of their flags as sunset approached, cast long thin, undulating shadows over the sand. I stared at the shadows while metal hooks on the halyards clanked raggedly against the poles.
I stared at the shadows and remembered.
Later that day, when we pull off the road and stop for a rest, Élodie goes off by herself into a stand of walnut trees. She unpacks her violin and plays “Song of the Birds” so slowly and so sadly, we can only listen without speaking. A listless cloud shadow undulates over the rolling hills like a long, slow, oboe accompaniment. In the distance, there is thunder. Not long after she finishes playing, the rain begins. Élodie places the violin in its case and hovers over it, like a mother over a child, to keep it dry. “He was some mother’s little boy,” she whispers.
I don’t have to ask. I know she means the German boy. I embrace her. Rain streaks our faces. I feel her body tense with a sadness so deep, tears won’t come. “Fuck following orders!” I whisper.
Early the next morning, we arrive at a small commune in the Corrèze department about 180 kilometers north of Toulouse. Sensing something amiss, we stop abruptly at the outskirts of the village and hide the car behind some trees.
In the cemetery, some 200 yards away, the rising sun projects long, thin shadows that stretch along the ground and ripple over tombstones in the hillside cemetery like drifting smoke. In the rising light, these are revealed to be the elongated shadows of black-robed women who stand motionless atop tombs.
At first, I see three women near the top of the hill. But as the sun rises, it’s light travels down the hill until, one after the other, a dozen motionless women are revealed to me, all with long, black diaphanous robes fluttering in the wind, floating behind them in waves as elongated as the women are tall. The robes appear to be transparent gossamer ending at the knees, and the low sun seems to penetrate the material, revealing the nakedness of the women under the fabric—black transparent gossamer drifting behind them like angry, soot-filled smoke. Transparent, except for the veil over the faces of the women, faces which remain hidden.
“What the hell is happening?” I whisper.
“Look to the left, at the base of the hill,” replies Élodie in a quiet monotone, fragile and dry and trembling like the last leaf to fall from a tree in autumn. “There are four or five new graves.”
I look. I see the freshly turned earth. And I see a small procession of carts and people on foot following their lengthy shadows to the new graves. They are guarded by German soldiers with drawn machine pistols.
Élodie says. “When the Boche kill resistance fighters, they insist they be buried quickly at dawn so as not to arouse the people. No doubt, that is what’s happening.”
“But why are the women standing on tombs?” I ask.
“The Corréziens have a custom. Whenever someone is buried, the women stand on their own family tombs. It’s a show of respect for the newly dead. It’s a way for the ancestors, going back through the years, to participate.”
“But why are their robes transparent? Why are they naked underneath?”
“What are you talking about?” Élodie asks. “The robes are not transparent at all. We must wean you off the morphine. You don’t need it, and it’s been known to cause hallucinations.”
The elongated shadows of the flagpoles on the sands of Good Harbor Beach morph into twelve black-robed women, which, in turn, by some trick of my mind, become a lone woman standing with her back to the sea. Somehow, over the years, the near-naked women (whose robes were solid black, not diaphanous as my addled mind had insisted), are like an over-painting that has faded and summoned Élodie to appear half-formed at the surface, a pentimento rising from the ocean. Now it is her legs I see below the hem of the diaphanous robe, it’s her body both hidden and revealed by the transparent fabric, backlit by the moon-streaked waves. It’s her face veiled by layers of gossamer. And I know, with certainty, what will happen next. The face behind the black, smoky veils will slowly resolve into Anna’s face as if my wife were appearing to reassert some sort of jura possessionis, a kind of right-of-possession, to my thoughts and affections.
I raise my martini glass to my lips with an unsteady hand. The mingled gin and vermouth rock in the glass and emit low refracted moonlight, an acoustic map of sine waves that I feel dance across my face. “Don’t have more than two,” I hear Anna say from somewhere among the deep synapses of my brain. “Remember what the doctor said.”
I nod and hold my glass at arm’s length toward the moon. It is my third martini. “I loved her,” I mutter.
“Of course, you loved her,” says Anna. “I would have loved her, too. She was so committed, so loving, so compassionate. And killing was so entirely against her nature.”
“But she had to do it,” I say with a shudder. The martini has me on the edge of tears.
“Of course, she did. It was war.”
“She felt things deeply.”
“Haven’t you told me many times how passions become more intense during wartime?”
“Yes, they do,” I say. I hold the glass toward the moonlight and examine the prism of light I’ve created.
“So, you see,” Anna says. “You can’t blame yourself for loving her.”
“No.”
“It was long before we met.”
“Yes. But there were other things she felt. We felt. Not just the passion. I was never able to tell you the whole story about those other things. Mainly because I didn’t fully understand it. There was Oradour. Other things that happened. The German boy-soldiers. She would play beautiful music. Later, there were the children.”
“Of course. From what you say, she was a beautiful person.”
“It was impossible not to fall in love with her.”
“You were young and impressionable.”
“We were all young. Some younger than others. But that explains nothing.”
“It explains everything,” Anna says. “And it was before you knew me.”
“Of course, it was.”
“I think you were just in love with the idea of being in love.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No,” I insist. “I truly loved her.”
“Did you love her more than me?”
I jerk forward in my chair. “No! No!” Quickly, I shake my head. What am I thinking? Anna would never have asked that! Never! I sip from my martini. I watch my ancient hand shake. The ice clinks against the side of the glass. For the briefest of instants, Élodie appears before me, and I suck in a breath. But just as quickly, she’s gone, impossible to grasp, no more animated than the olives that wink back at me. Anna’s voice comes again, from deep in my mind. “Is she the reason we always traveled to Italy and Switzerland and Greece, but never to France? Is she the reason you never took me to France?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t you remember how I always wanted to rent a river boat or a barge and go along that … what was it called?”
“The Canal du Midi?”
“Yes, that. Why did we never do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Were you afraid she would appear, and it would cause trouble between us?”
“Of course not. She was dead.”
“Was she?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Yes, of course she was.”
“Well, what does that matter? I’m also dead, but I have a hold on you, still.”
I have no answer. I wait and watch the moon slip behind a cloud and the beach fade into darkness and the shadows of the flagpoles dissolve into the sand and disappear and I wait, but Anna’s voice has gone silent.
The cloud passes and a
bright streak of moonlight lays heavily on the undulant waves.
Anna! I remember her almost child-like excitement when we first saw the house on Salt Island Road in Gloucester. It was a small Dutch colonial with brown, weathered shingles, a deck overlooking Good Harbor Beach and Salt Island, and a spacious, insulated sunroom abutting the deck for when the weather was less welcoming. The house was as old as I, and just as battered by hostile storms and scoured by salt-laden Atlantic winds. A flight of steps descended from the deck to a small lawn where a flagpole vibrated with the thrashing of a wind-whipped flag. The metal snaphooks of the halyard beat an erratic rhythm against the pole. From the lawn, a path of flagstones led to a concrete staircase that wound its way downward through boulders before emerging onto the beach. The rocks were sun-bleached white and brown above the high-tide line, and dark and barnacle-encrusted where they were submerged twice a day with the diurnal tide cycle.
Next to the door opening out to the deck hung a polished brass tide clock that Anna and I would consult frequently because we liked to time our daily walks to the hour or two on either side of low tide when the beach was flat and exposed below the high-water mark and the sand was compressed smooth as a clay tennis court. Sometimes we walked at sunrise, sometimes at sunset, sometimes in the middle of the day. We allowed ourselves to fall into the rhythm of the tides, varying the time of our walks by almost an hour as each day passed. When the water, which often snaked down from the Labrador Current, wasn’t too cold, we walked ankle-deep at the razor-thin edge of the ocean. Even in the winter, we seldom missed a day. We stepped into boots, and the salt-encrusted rime crunched under our feet as we watched the play of horses with their riders, and dogs chasing tennis balls launched by their owners. These were the people, and animals, who reclaimed the beach each year after the tourist season. Anna and I especially liked walking hand in hand, when the night draped itself over the sand and waves spilled dense diamonds of moonlight onto the shore.
But on this day of the family gathering, it was mid-afternoon when Callie arrived with my great grandchildren, Danny and Ashley. Like a child with a new puppy, I introduced them to the little eight-pound rescue dog I’d recently adopted. The children oohed and aahed and patted the dog whose tail wagged excitedly.
“What’s her name?” Ashley asked.
“His name is Arlequin.”
Both Danny and Ashley repeated the name softly.
I looked at Callie and said, “It’s the French form of Harlequin, one of the stock characters in commedia dell’arte. Kind of a zany character.”
“That’s unusual. Whatever possessed you to choose that name?” Callie asked.
I shrugged.
“When did you get him?”
“A few weeks ago, from the Northeast Animal Shelter in Salem. It was getting a little lonely around here.”
Callie placed a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “We all miss Nana, but I can’t imagine how it must be for you.”
Something caught in my throat.
“What breed is he?” asked Callie, to my relief
“Papillon,” I answered. “It’s French for ‘butterfly.’ Because of the ears.”
“The Northeast Animal Shelter?”
“Yes.”
“Papa, that’s a pure breed dog. It’s highly unlikely you’d find him at Northeast. Where did you really get him?”
“Can’t get anything by you, can I?”
“No.”
“Londonderry, New Hampshire.”
“You drove all the way to New Hampshire to get a dog?”
“It’s only up ninety-three. Exit four after the border. An hour and a half, tops.”
“Why was it necessary to get a papillon? Why not a lab or a hound or a mix? They have lots of those at the shelter and it’s nearby.”
All I could do was shrug and say, “I like papillons, I guess. And he won’t get much bigger, and he’ll likely outlive me. I made sure to check with them.”
“You asked them how long he might live?” she asked with a rising inflection.
I nodded.
“Why?”
I shrugged. “Didn’t want to go through losing him, I suppose.”
Callie gazed at me and her eyes began to shine. “It breaks my heart to know how very, very deeply you feel Nana’s absence.”
I thought of Anna. And Élodie. And I gave Callie a weak smile. “He loves to walk on the beach. Come on, I’ll show you.”
“How terribly lonely you must feel!”
I force my lips not to tremble. “Come, let’s walk Arlequin. I grow old. I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. I shall wear white trousers and walk upon the beach.”
Callie said, “Eliot wrote ‘white flannel trousers.’”
“Close enough. Just can’t get anything by you! I’m impressed you know it so well.”
“Did you think I was just some uncultured doctor? I have a grandfather to live up to.”
She always knew the right things to say! I stopped and kissed her on the forehead. We walked down to the beach, the children before us, and removed our shoes. It was a nacreous sky, iridescent blue-white like the polished inside of an oyster shell. The sand, still wet from the ebbing tide, was cool on the soles of our feet. A gibbous moon, demure in the soft brightness of the afternoon sky—not looking so hunchbacked as it sometimes can—tugged at the seawater. We walked the gull-loud beach out to Salt Island along the sandbar that was exposed only at low tide as waves rippled toward us from both sides and sluiced around our feet with waters that still carried a cold rumor of the far-off Labrador Current.
In the filtered light, Callie, Ashley and Danny had sunglasses propped on the tops of their heads. My sunglasses were firmly fixed before my eyes. Since my cataract surgery, I am especially sensitive to sunlight. Also, advancing age—and martinis—often leave me lachrymose and the sunglasses hide the tears.
Some distance before us, a hermit crab scuttled toward the water. Arlequin bolted after it, barking. Ashley took off after the dog. The crab stopped momentarily at a gelatinous mass, then disappeared into the water seconds before Arlequin arrived, tail curled over his back like a comma.
“Eew!” Ashley cried, jumping back. What’s that?” she asked, as Arlequin nosed a small viscid object.
I raised my sunglasses and looked. It was a dead moon jelly that bobbed slowly on the rippling water. My whole body shivered, and I sucked in my breath.
“What’s wrong, Papa?” asked Callie.
My eyes filled. I couldn’t hide it.
Callie put a hand on my shoulder. She frowned. She looked to see the children were still gazing at the jellyfish, turned to look me in the eyes, and silently mouthed, “You’re crying!” I lowered the sunglasses back over my eyes. “Papa, what’s wrong?” Callie mouthed, her forehead creased.
I shook my head.
“Papa,” asked Danny, “How can the waves be going in opposite directions at the same time?”
“What?” I asked.
“The waves,” Danny said. “See how they go toward each other? What causes that?”
I forced a chuckle. “They didn’t always. Three hundred years ago they went in the same direction, but then a Swiss mathematician named Bernoulli came along and said fluids around an object can go in different directions.”
Callie shot me a skeptical glance.
I gave her a weak smile. “It’s true! Well, almost. The waves always behaved that way from the beginning of time. Bernoulli only explained why.”
“So, why is it?” asked Ashley who was a year younger than her brother.
“It’s called, if you can believe it, the Bernoulli Effect. See out past Salt Island? The waves are coming at us in a northwesterly direction. But when they run into the island, they must go around it. So, the wave splits and some of the water goes around the northern end of the island and some of it goes around the southern end. But, then, the two sides of the wave are like a brother and a sister who have been separated and want de
sperately to come back together again. So, after they pass the island, they rejoin from opposite directions, and the wave is happy once more. See how the water leaps for joy when they meet again?”
Danny and Ashley giggled.
“In fact,” I continued, “that’s why this sandbar exists. As the wave comes back together it scours up sand from the bottom at the two ends of the island and deposits it where the two parts of the wave meet.”
A cacophony of cries drew our attention to a flock of seagulls circling over a dark patch in the water fifty yards ahead of us.
Arlequin dashed toward the commotion.
“What’s got the seagulls so excited?” Danny asked.
“Probably a dead fish,” I replied.
“Why don’t you and Ashley run up ahead and see?” Callie said to Danny.
The children took off at a run, splashing water around their ankles. Callie turned to me. “Now, Papa, tell me what’s wrong. Please. And stop deflecting with arcane facts about wave formation.”
For a long time, I said nothing. There, in the wrathful moonlight, I saw the dead man hanging amidst the white blossoms of the hawthorne tree. We had leapt from the plane and descended like a bloom of moon jellies, sinking into the slaughter. I survived, but he, like some many others, did not.
“Papa?” Callie asked in an uneasy voice.
I saw the kids out of the corner of my eyes. “Here come Danny and Ashley back,” I said.
Callie snatched a glance over her shoulder, turned quickly back to me, and said, “Will you please, please, tell me what is wrong? I’m begging you!”
I shook my head. “It’s nothing.”
Danny and Ashley came up to us. “It was a fish,” Danny said.
“I thought so,” I said. I pointed to several seagulls perched on the rocks of Salt Island. “See how some of the seagulls are standing on one leg? Do you know why they do that?”
“They have sore feet?” Ashley replied with a giggle.
The Light from the Dark Side of the Moon Page 8
