by Todd Babiak
Given his choice of career, he had made an art form out of keeping his temper: to lose it was always to lose. Evelyn mumbled. He held her hot left hand. None of this had been part of their birthing class curriculum. Finally, Lily was wrapped in pink felt and he kissed Evelyn’s hand and they placed the baby in his arms. He had no idea how to hold her. Now at the end of her long screaming fit she slept with heaving and tinny breaths that were, they assured him, entirely normal. Nothing seemed normal: he had never seen a child born with what they called a unilateral incomplete cleft palate. The obstetrician, with a British accent, took him aside and delivered a speech. Kruse’s parents had died suddenly when he was a teenager, thousands of kilometres from home, and he was young enough that he had never heard any bad news directly from a doctor. In the years since his parents had died, doctors joshed him in the examination room, reassured him about his cuts and fractures, complimented him on his fitness, his commitment to clean living. There would be a series of surgeries, the obstetrician said. Upper-class British accent or middle-class? He had learned the difference for a client, a risk assessment, but he was both exhausted and radically awake at once. What was he supposed to focus on? Would she live? Would her face heal? Why was she crying so much? Evelyn called out for him and he moved toward her with the baby, but the obstetrician stopped him. Kruse had competed for a couple of years, in his teens and early twenties, and if he took a punch square in the face the referee would look at him the way the doctor looked at him now. Was he fit to continue?
In the end, the doctor said, Lily would look and sound extremely close to normal. How long was “in the end”? The word “extremely” sounded extreme, a fib, a plea.
It would take years.
“In my experience, having a child like this, a child with uncommon needs, brings a husband and a wife closer together.”
“Uncommon needs?”
“Emotionally and otherwise, Christopher, it’s hard work. You feel ready for it. Already you love this little thing more than yourself, yes? Yes.” The doctor stepped in closer. He held Kruse’s arm, to prevent him for another moment from presenting Lily to her mother. “But be aware: sometimes it doesn’t bring a husband and a wife closer together.”
On November 1, All Saints’ Day, the day of the dead, one of the priests in the cold cathedral recognized him. The afternoon papers had come out. No, the priest had not seen Madame Kruse. He delivered a short sermon about how this might seem to be about his daughter and his wife and Jean-François and Pascale de Musset. But it was really about God.
Kruse interrupted the priest to tell him the truth, as calmly as he could manage: none of what he was saying made the remotest sense. He spoke rubbish for a living. The priest listened and agreed. Where had sense brought any of them?
Evelyn was nowhere that made any sense so he searched the hair salon. She wasn’t at the swimming pool and no one had seen her at the fitness centre. The museum was closed. The rented Renault was still in its parking spot next to the post office. Buses departed from a bar-tabac on the other side of the Roman ruins. Had anyone seen her? The men and women in the bar-tabac, tucked into their noontime pastis, usually keen to talk to l’étranger, shook their heads with something like shame. The room smelled of licorice and smoke. Only two buses had departed this morning, one on the north route and the other on the south. Kruse looked at the map. Each route had between fifteen and twenty stops.
It was peculiar to use air conditioning in November. He drove to Villedieu, past the farmers in their tall boots. A man and a woman walked on the side of the departmental highway with rifles. The sky in the east and the north carried an ominous, ghostly green. He parked in the lot and walked up to the square past the lime and the gravel still stained with blood. The waiter from Café du Centre was wiping tables. All the tricolour balloons Evelyn had tied for Jean-François had been tossed into the corner, against the village hall. All of the Front National posters and banners had disappeared, along with the political strategists from Paris. Most of the helium had leaked out of the balloons that remained, yet he still had an urge to bring one home for Lily. The waiter looked as though it had happened to him too. He had just shaved and his skin shone. One of his eyes was smaller than the other, as though it were infected. No, he had not seen Madame.
“Would you take a drink with me?”
“I don’t think I can.”
“Please, Monsieur Kruse.”
“I have to keep looking.”
“You won’t find her. Not now.” The waiter placed his tray on an adjacent table and sat down. Kruse pulled out a hollow silver chair and sat across from him. The waiter adjusted the table so it would not wobble. “Is it true, what they’re saying in the newspapers? And on the news?”
Kruse still hadn’t seen or heard any of it. “You were here last night.”
“It’s not really about what happened here, the things they’re saying.”
If it wasn’t about Lily, about the end of his family, what the hell was it about? There was a faint roar in the air, a storm in the distance or an airplane. He wanted, like a boy, to go back in time. He wanted to pick up one of these chairs, five of them, and throw them as far as they would go. Down the hills, through the windows.
“The police were here again, today.”
“Asking about my daughter?”
“Different police. I’ve never seen police like these before. Not like on television. They asked about your wife and J.F. and the Front National.” The waiter’s accent was strong, a country accent. His voice took a turn when he said “Front National,” as though it were the name of an illness. “They showed me pictures of men. Did I recognize any of them?”
“What men?”
“I didn’t recognize them.”
“What did they ask about Evelyn?”
“What she did for the party, your party.”
“It isn’t my party. It isn’t Evelyn’s party either. We’re foreigners.”
“They say it’s her party.”
When she was a teenager and a competitive athlete, Evelyn fell in love with Benjamin Disraeli. He had been dead nearly one hundred years, but at the end of her family’s wealth and in the humiliation that came with it she discovered and embraced the politician, who had grown up outside power, who had endured financial ruin, and who had embodied a careful and romantic sort of conservatism. While some girls had posters and photographs of Barry Gibb on their bedroom walls, Evelyn had an 1878 photograph of the sad-eyed Earl of Beaconsfield on hers. He wore a top hat for the picture and carried a newspaper on his lap. When she had spoken of her love affair with a dead man, Evelyn didn’t smile: her admission contained just as much wayward passion as screams for the Bee Gees. She memorized whole speeches Disraeli had delivered. From time to time, at dinner parties or at the intermission of the symphony, she would quote from them to prove a point. Evelyn insisted Kruse read a short biography of him, so he might understand. He couldn’t finish the book and she caught him out. She believed, as her childhood mentor had believed, that individuals are the source of all that is beautiful and transcendent and noble in the world. The role of the state is to create a safe environment for them and to get out of their way. Success is the child of audacity. Kruse could never really understand, or even remember, why these strange heroes of hers—first Disraeli, then Chateaubriand, then Edmund Burke—were conservative instead of liberal, or where one word bled into the other. She never wavered from that early love and where it took her, even as it seemed destined to stall or cripple her career in the academy. Her time would come, as Disraeli’s time had come. She merely had to dress well and wait patiently for her Queen Victoria.
Her Queen Victoria was Jean-François de Musset.
“What else did they ask?”
“About J.F. and Pascale. Questions I couldn’t answer. Honestly, I didn’t know her, your wife. I served her wine. The party had meetings here and I barely listened to what they said.” The waiter rubbed his bare arms. He hadn’t done a push-up
since leaving school. He shouted to be heard over slamming shutters. “I don’t know about politics.”
It was called the mistral, this wind.
Before the wedding and again when Evelyn was having her troubles he had read a book about marriage: “You can never really know her heart.”
“Are you a professor, like Madame?”
“No.”
The flimsy silver chairs were beginning to topple over now, crash after crash.
“I asked you for a drink but I didn’t get us drinks. What would you like? We’ll move inside.”
Kruse thanked the waiter for his kindness and for his offer and walked the way he had walked with his daughter. Leaves collected in the shallow stone gutter. Dust whipped into his eyes. He was fifteen minutes late for his meeting at the gendarmerie, seven kilometres away in Vaison-la-Romaine, but he didn’t hurry.
Farmers had been burning grape wood in the valley below the village. Smoke hung and swirled in a deep green bowl. A moat of phantoms, Lily called it, in French: un fossé de fantômes. When they had arrived in May to repair themselves, this little family, Lily could hardly say hello and goodbye in her second language. After four months in the playground and two months in school she corrected her parents’ pronunciation. She had pulled him to the edge, the plateau, the perch, to show him this: the dark green valley meeting the blue sky and, at the bottom, the moat.
Kruse’s almost-four-year-old daughter had inherited his need for occasional stillness. Either that or she pretended to need it, to please him. She watched him and traced the scar that ran down the left side of his face. She leaned against his hard arm and looked out thoughtfully, imitating him. Autumn flowers bloomed. The wind changed and they could smell pizza from the plaza of Villedieu.
On Saturday, October 31, Lily wore a fairy costume. Evelyn had sewn it with swatches of baby blue satin from a shop on Cours de Taulignan, Vaison-la-Romaine’s main street. It would have been unimaginable a year ago: Evelyn with the time, the patience, the joy, the matrix of priorities to sew a Halloween costume.
They would have to leave early to make Lily’s seven o’clock bedtime, so they had arrived at three thirty to help out. It wasn’t a Halloween party because they did not celebrate Halloween in Provence. It was something else altogether. Evelyn had helped tie blue and white and red helium balloons to little bags of silty stone. Two men from Paris fixed a political banner over the arch that led to the church: “Front national pour l’unité française.” Orange lights had been strung from the branches of a wilting plane tree some years ago and many, most, had failed. Earlier that afternoon the mayor of Villedieu had ordered his sons to replace them.
“It’s starting, you two.” Evelyn stood under one of the arches separating the square from the edge of the hill.
Kruse had planned to watch from afar or avoid it altogether. Some of the villagers, he had heard, were appalled: the Front National in their public square. “Maybe we’ll stay over here.”
“The TV people want us in a group, so the crowd looks big.”
“I don’t want Lily on TV, at a political rally.”
Evelyn closed her eyes for a moment, as though it required every cell in her body to remain calm. “Please, Chris. I’m not asking for much. No one you know will see you.”
It wasn’t that. But it was a little of that.
Lily insisted they each take a hand and bounce her back down the path, to the smell of hot dough and the music. There were two restaurants in Place de la Libération, one specializing in pizza and the other in galettes. On Halloween-not-Halloween, Café du Centre added its own tables and chairs near the fountain. A France 2 television crew had set up in front of the village hall and some print journalists in wrinkled jackets sat smoking and waiting at corner tables, alone. The mayor and his sons carried five picnic tables from the courtyard of their own house.
Mothers sipped pastis. Ruddy men in soiled shirts, the grandfathers of the village, studied their cigarettes. A fancy ghetto blaster sat in an open window with impossibly blue shutters. It was Callas singing the Habanera: “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle.” Love is a rebellious bird. Evelyn had bought Kruse an opera appreciation class two birthdays ago. With opera, a small library of essential books, two serious magazine subscriptions, and a Woody Allen box set, she had resolved to make a man of culture of him, change him, inspire him to be someone else, someone in Europe who recognizes arias.
Autumn was the finest season, everyone said so, gentle enough even at sunset that Evelyn hung her thin sweater from the otherwise-ignored No Smoking sign next to the stone fountain and sat nearby. The fairy was not inclined to sit. Creatures in need—bugs mostly, and birds—demanded Lily’s attention, her special powers and her kind heart. The magic wand, la baguette magique, was made of bamboo.
Evelyn’s long legs were bare, crossed just above the knee. One of her black slip-on shoes swung from her unpainted toenails. The gay man who had fitted Evelyn for her wedding dress had called her legs exquisite. It was not a word Kruse could use but he carried it around, and her legs were no less exquisite with the red welts on her shins: evidence of recent nighttime attacks from continental insects. He did not understand her obsessions, she did not understand his, and nothing—not even a year in France—was going to repair that. But he was nearly finished his first glass of wine. Her skin was unusually tan and pretty in the late-day sun. She spoke to a man and woman from Nyons and caught him watching her.
This was why they had crossed the ocean.
The waiter walked out of Café du Centre with a full tray of beer and muscat, and knitted around the tables and feet and baby carriages and dogs. Kruse made the briefest eye contact with him, to call him over without calling him over. The waiter raised his eyebrows and nodded, just like that. They had only been here a few months and already it was just like that. It was about calm now, and beauty, just as she had planned. Kruse drank wine among strangers. He had his own levain.
Jean-François and Pascale de Musset entered the plaza from the path that led to the church and the château. Two or three of the Front National organizers from Paris—men and women with pressed shirts and dresses, designer eyeglasses, cellular phones, pinched accents, and a lot of perfume—shouted and gestured like circus masters and everyone stood to applaud. A small group, two women and a young man, booed. Those around them cheered more loudly, stepped in front of them. Lily wanted Jean-François and Pascale to see her fairy costume so she jumped and waved. Kruse tried to stop her but it was too late. The de Mussets were a childless couple and had become once-a-week babysitters and regular gift-buyers. Jean-François stopped and picked Lily up, laughing, as the applause around them continued. He was a tall man with an enviable pile of grey hair and a long nose that made him more distinguished if less handsome. The television cameras caught it.
Lily shouted, in French. “What am I?”
Jean-François smelled her. “A bowl of soup?”
“No!”
“The president of the republic?”
“No!”
“I know: a wild boar.”
“No, no, no, Monsieur.”
“You’re a princess, it’s evident.” Jean-François put her down and pointed behind him. “And that is your château.”
He continued along and someone handed him a glass of champagne. Their newly famous landlord and best French friend entered the crowd and for the rest of the evening they did not speak to him. Instead they spoke of him as the next leader of the Front National, inheritor of French conservatism, rescuer of the French idea, true heir of de Gaulle. Lily was upset because she was not able to tell Jean-François that she and Maman had designed the fairy costume themselves. Why didn’t anyone even know it was Halloween around here? She did not have to trick-or-treat because, after her pizza, Kruse ordered her a crème brûlée.
Pascale lost Jean-François. She asked Kruse and Evelyn to look around, if they didn’t mind. It was becoming strange, his absence, all of these people had come for him. “He did
warn me.” Her hair, so black it appeared wet, was pulled back into a tight bun and she wore a blue dress with a white and red scarf: Madame Tricolore.
“About what?” Kruse held Lily so she wouldn’t run back to the fountain with her new friends.
“That some of the Parisians would take him aside, discuss strategy, make recommendations: say this and don’t say that, walk this way, be ambitious but not too ambitious. The movement has a leader, after all. One wouldn’t want to seem …”
There were only two possibilities: up here at the top of the hill or in the bar-tabac at the bottom. Evelyn went down and Kruse stayed up. He and Lily walked through the pizza and galette restaurants, toured the alley, peeked in the old church, and returned to the square.
Lily danced with the other little girls, looked for beetles and spiders and scorpions, dipped her magic wand in the fountain. Just after seven o’clock, Lily’s bedtime, Evelyn walked back into the square.
“He’s down there.”
“With Parisians?”
“Maybe Parisians. Two men in suits, and he’s drunk. Plastered.”
Jean-François drank wine but it was difficult to imagine him drunk. He was a courtly and careful man, vain in a crowd.
“I tried to speak to him, and the men, both of them, told me to fuck off. I mean, more politely than that but not much more politely.”
“You want me to go down there and …”
“No, Chris, but thanks. My honour is intact.”
Kruse led her across the plaza. “That’s the thing with fascists. One day they’re nice and the next …”
Evelyn squinted. “That isn’t funny here.”
They told Pascale he was at the bottom of the hill, leaving out his condition, and spent the next hour saying goodbye to her and to others, men in the party who had taken too much wine and wanted to thank Evelyn with hand-holding and multiple kisses and bits of devotional poetry they had memorized long ago. Lily hugged Pascale too long and too hard, one of those things she did.
