“It’s just that there are things I don’t know,” Samantha pleads, “and they drive me …” You have to be extremely careful, Jacob warns, about what you reveal. “The gaps keep me awake sometimes,” she says. “That’s all. Well, they keep me awake a lot, actually. I hoped you might fill in some blanks.”
Lou’s hand is shaking. Lou is Samantha’s mother’s sister and Sam knows everything and nothing about her.
“For me, Samantha …” Lou says, but her sentence peters out.
“Can I see the photograph again?”
“This is hard for me.”
Samantha pulls the photograph album from her aunt’s hands.
“It’s not what I was expecting,” Lou says in a low voice. “When you called. After such a long time.”
“What were you expecting?”
Lou turns away and makes a dismissive gesture which Sam translates as: That’s of no consequence now. She leaves the room so abruptly, she trips on the rug and almost falls into the hall. Sam hears her locking herself in the bathroom. She decides to wait.
There is turbulent history between Lou and Sam. There is something more complex and more volatile than aunt and niece, and how could it not be so? When Lou came to collect Sam from the warehouse of camp cots and frightened children in Germany, Sam kicked her simply because she was Lou. She was not Sam’s mother. This is not something that Sam has ever let her aunt forget, not in principals’ offices nor counselors’ rooms, not in police stations, and not when teachers came to call. “Lou is my legal guardian,” Samantha would say, sulky. She would roll her eyes. “But she thinks she’s my mother.” Her aunt’s tolerance has been without limit. It is as though her aunt has worn Sam’s labels as penance: runaway, disturbed child, troubled teen.
Ten minutes pass, fifteen, and then Sam knocks on the bathroom door. “Lou?” she says. “Are you all right in there?”
Silence.
“Lou?”
“I’ll just be a minute,” Lou says, though her voice sounds strange.
In the living room, she speaks quite calmly again. “Would you like more tea?”
“I have to relive it all the time,” Samantha says, defensive.
“I know that, Sam. Whereas I try not to. I try to stay back here in the photo album, before it happened.” The muscles in Lou’s shoulders and back are taut. “Two different ways of coping, that’s all.”
“You have more before than I have,” Sam accuses.
Lou breathes slowly. Samantha can see her counting silently to keep her agitation in check. “Sam, don’t you think this is pointless? You’ve already won the gold medal for suffering—I’ll sign a certificate if you like—and I’m not even a runner-up. Nothing we do will change the past, will it?”
“I would just like to have a past.”
Samantha’s aunt presses her fingertips against her brows, the way Jacob does when his migraines come. She pushes hard at the edge of her skull. She presses the pads of her thumbs against her temples. She speaks so quietly, Sam has to lean forward to hear. “I’m sorry, Sam, I don’t know what more I can tell you. I can’t do it. I can’t give you what you want.”
“Won’t, you mean.”
“The truth is, I don’t see you for six months at a time, I miss you, I feel so happy when you call to say you’ll come by, and then it takes me weeks to recover when you do.”
“Okay, then I won’t visit anymore.”
“I think that would be best,” Lou says, and Samantha feels a small lurch of panic.
“Fine,” she says bitterly. “I’ll head for the escape hatch, then.”
“Sam, Sam.”
Even Sam is embarrassed by herself, though she does feel queasy. She can see the dark nothing below the hatch, before she was pushed from the plane. “I’m sorry. That was cheap. I didn’t mean—”
“Of course you didn’t, of course you didn’t. I’ll try, Sam. What exactly did you want to know this time?”
“What were we all doing in Paris? I’ve never known that.”
“You never let me talk about it.”
“Now I’m letting you. Why were we there?”
“You were there because I was,” Lou sighs. “Officially I was studying French painting.”
“We were there because you were. All these years and you never once said.”
“You always storm out before I get to that.” Lou goes to her shelves and takes down books on the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, large heavy tomes of colored plates. “I was twenty-four. When you’re twenty-four, you think living in Paris will be the most glamorous thing you’ll ever do. You think you’ll be in seventh heaven, and in fact you live in some miserable little studio apartment in the thirteenth arrondissement where it’s cheap, and you have to share it with someone you don’t much like, and you’re so lonely you’d take the next plane home except your pride and your scholarship won’t let you.” She stares for a long time at Manet’s White Peonies with Secateurs. “My roommate was a French girl and we didn’t like each other much. She was moody and strange and she despised Americans.”
“Why?”
“She had an American father, she said. I guess she didn’t think much of him, but he wasn’t around, so she took it out on me.”
“And that’s why you were miserable.”
“Françoise didn’t help, but it wasn’t her fault.” Lou traces Manet’s secateurs with a fingertip. Only the black blades are visible; the handles are outside the frame. “I was depressed when I went and I got into one of those—”
“Depressed.”
“—downward spirals …”
“Why were you depressed?”
Lou studies Sam without speaking for some time, and her melancholy eyes irritate her niece. “I’d really gone away to get over someone,” she says.
“Oh. A broken heart.” Sam gives the statement a sardonic edge.
“Yes.”
In the page of text opposite the peonies, Samantha manages to read: Manet’s “Olympia” caused a tremendous scandal in 1865 because of its subversive reinterpretation of the past and its almost satirical echo of Titian’s—Her aunt turns the page. There is a double spread of Olympia, the center fold passing through the creamy thighs of the woman lounging on satin sheets. “When you’re desperate,” Lou says, “you do things that you—”
“I know about desperate.”
“I suppose you do, Sam.” But Lou is lost in the desolation of thirteen years ago in Paris.
“So what did you do?” Sam demands.
Lou turns away and presses her forehead against Manet’s brushstrokes, but Samantha does not relent. “What did you do?” she prods.
“I gave in and called my big sister.”
Big sister. A rush of excitement seizes Samantha: a new angle; another puzzle piece; something that might jar a two-dimensional image into life.
“You were close.” Samantha keeps her voice neutral. “You and my mother.”
“Of course we were. We used to be so close that you couldn’t have put—”
“Used to be.”
“Before you came along. Before she got married.”
“You resented me.” Samantha pounces on an undernote and will not let go. “You resented my father and me.”
“Nothing’s that simple, Sam.” Lou studies her niece, deciding what to tell. “I needed to see you again so badly—”
“Me?” Samantha says, startled.
“All of you, I mean. When your mother had Matthew, I went into a tailspin. I can’t explain. I just had to—Rosalie and you, and the new baby, and Jonathan, before you all dis—” Lou’s hand flies to her mouth. “It had been so long.”
“You were going to say disappeared.” Samantha is watching Lou closely, riveted. She does not believe in chance or coincidence. Every thread, in her experience, leads into the knot.
“I was going to say: disappeared into terminal respectability. You wouldn’t understand.”
A word comes back to Samantha from nowhere. Disre
putable. Your sister is so disreputable.
“Were you disreputable, Lou?”
Lou gives her niece a strange look. “What made you say that?”
“My father said it. Grandma and Grandpa used to say it.”
Lou looks as though Samantha has struck her. She stretches her fingers out flat and covers Olympia with them. Her veins crisscross the backs of her hands like string. She picks up the photo album and turns the pages. She stops. She points to a photograph. Sam’s mother and Sam’s aunt, her father between them—a happy threesome—are ankle-deep in white sand. All three are in swimsuits. Sam’s mother wears a one-piece suit, demure; her aunt is in a bikini and has a flower in her hair. Her father, in the middle, has his arms around them both. “The good sister and the disreputable sister on the beach at Isle of Palms, South Carolina,” Sam’s aunt says in a sardonic tone. “The summer after my high school graduation. Rosalie and Jonathan were engaged already. Look, you can see her ring in the photograph. And I was supposed to be getting ready for the College of Charleston in the fall, but I ran away to New York instead.”
She points to another photograph. Lou must be about eighteen, Rosalie twenty. They are standing in front of a church. “Someone else’s wedding,” Lou says. “Later that same summer.” In the photograph, Lou has bright red bad-girl lips and wears an off-the-shoulder dress. Her eyes are outlined in kohl. Sam’s mother looks sweet and shy. “The disreputable one,” Sam’s aunt says, tapping her own image on the head. “And you’re in the photograph too, though nobody knows it yet, not even your mother. Did you know your parents had to get married sooner than planned?”
Samantha closes her eyes for a moment, the better to rehear the pinprick of malice.
“I figured it out,” she says. “So what? Is that a big deal?”
“It was, back then. In Charleston, South Carolina, believe me, that sort of thing was still a very big deal. At least, in the best families it was. When she found out about the pregnancy, your grandmother was distraught. She was actually hospitalized with ‘nervous prostration’.”
“Is that why I was born in New York?”
“Yes. And that’s why your mother had to give up her Charleston wedding, which broke your grandmother’s heart. That’s why your parents were married in a registry office in Manhattan, and why they moved to Atlanta immediately afterwards, and why I stayed in New York.”
“Hurricane Sam, that’s me,” Samantha jokes, to hide her disturbance. “Cause of wholesale evacuation of Charleston”—and perhaps, she has always irrationally feared, of her parents’ deaths.
“That’s pretty much the way it was,” her aunt says. “Certainly as far as our parents—your grandparents—were concerned.”
Samantha studies the three people in the photograph, her mother Rosalie and her aunt Lou and her own invisible self.
“Who’s this?” she asks, pointing to a photograph of her aunt and another woman in front of the Tour Eiffel. The woman is frowning.
“That’s Françoise. The one I shared the apartment with.”
“She looks pretty glum.”
“I put up with her because I only had to pay a pittance for rent. She paid most of it, and she paid all utilities. Of course there was a downside. Sometimes her boyfriend would show up and I’d have to find somewhere else for the night.”
“Françoise,” Samantha says. “That’s a funny coincidence. There’s a Françoise who just contacted me through the website, the Flight 64 website. She lives in Paris.”
“It’s a very common name.”
“Did I meet her? Your roommate? Did we visit your apartment?”
“No, you stayed in a hotel.”
“Would she have known—your Françoise—that you had relatives on the flight?”
“It was her TV set that I was glued to for days, but then I moved out anyway to collect you in Germany.”
“And then we flew back to Charleston,” Sam says.
“You remember that?”
Sam remembers verandas, porch swings, jasmine. She remembers planes that exploded every night. She remembers tantrums. She remembers throwing things at her grandparents and at her aunt. “I remember we didn’t last long in Charleston.”
“No.”
“And then you and Grandma Hamilton had a big fight, and you brought me here to New York.”
“Yes,” Lou says sadly.
“You should have known it would never work,” Samantha says.
She remembers years of shuttling between her aunt Lou in New York and her grandparents in Charleston, fighting with all of them, always moody, always in trouble at school, until her grandparents paid for a boarding school in Vermont, which seemed to them an institution both sufficiently distinguished and sufficiently far away, and there Samantha discovered American history and American government, and then she discovered obsession. She became obsessed with the politics of hijacked planes and with the capacity of press and public for quick forgetting, and with the quiet erasure of events from government records. She decided that Washington, D.C., was where she needed to be, and she applied to Georgetown University and was accepted.
Samantha holds the magnifying glass again to the shot of the family boarding the plane. “Why is my father watching you like that?”
“I had the camera,” her aunt says.
“Why is my mother watching my father like that? She’s worried about something. What is she worried about?”
“Your mother never liked traveling much,” her aunt says.
Samantha jumps up and walks out to Lou’s kitchen and looks in her fridge and rummages there as though a different possible past is hidden somewhere behind the milk carton. Her head is deep inside the white-enameled cold. “If she hadn’t begged them to come to Paris, we would never have been on that flight,” Samantha says in a low voice to the back wall of the refrigerator, trying out the words. They bounce back from a tub of butter. She shuts the fridge door. She goes back into the living room and picks up the photo album and puts it down and goes out to the kitchen again. She goes to the sink. She turns on the cold tap, then the hot. She lets both of them run full blast. She watches her life running down the drain.
Her aunt follows and puts her hands on Samantha’s shoulders. Samantha has a sudden violent wish to push Lou’s hands into the Cuisinart and turn it on. “Grandma Hamilton calls you the black sheep of the family,” she says, wanting to draw blood. “You slept around.” The tap water is plunging ferociously down the drain. “There would even have been a baby, Grandma says, if the family hadn’t taken care of the matter.”
Sam can see the sudden pain in Lou’s eyes, but nevertheless the eyes rest on her niece’s face, calm and assessing, disappointed perhaps. Is she embarrassed for me? Sam asks herself. This makes her furious. She puts her head under the rush of water and hears chance. It roars like Niagara. She can see the fog, angry-colored, that hangs over Porte 12, between her aunt’s camera and herself. There is something about the camera that sends rockets of anger scudding under the surface of Sam’s skin. This anger beats in and out like a bass drum in her ears and it signals war, but the truth is, she does not really understand why she is so furiously angry with her aunt and the awkwardness of being in the wrong makes her angrier.
“Let it go, Sam,” Lou says. “Let them be. Let them rest in peace.”
“I can’t,” Samantha says.
She wants to show the world photographs that don’t exist. Look at this, she wants to say: my mother’s eyes. These are my mother’s eyes at the moment when Matthew finally stopped crying altogether. And here is something else, she wants to say: here are the eyes of the children all around me, some time later (days later, airports later, negotiations, ultimatums, deadlines later) when we huddled together watching TV—we were crowded on makeshift cots in some vast room, I think it was a high school gym, I know it was somewhere in Germany—forty pairs of eyes, opened wide, unblinking, watching the fate of their parents on one small screen. The plane, before it turned into an u
nderwater sun, before it branched into red and orange coral, seemed to swim in blue haze like a fish. We knew we had been dropped like tiny eggs from its belly, we were vague about when. Pow, pow, one little boy said, pointing his fingers at the screen. No one cried then. All the eyes were so dry, they prickled. There was an eerie silence in the room.
Here is a photograph, Samantha wants to say to the world. Here is a photograph, never taken, which I would like you to see: the eyes of forty frightened children as they step off the lip of an abyss.
2. Chien Bleu
Onstage, back in Washington, D.C., Samantha blazes with light and looks into the dark. Chien Bleu is murkily lit. This is a basement dive, thick with perfume and blues and jazz and the hot scent of illicit assignations. Chien Bleu caters to the lower levels, so to speak, but the baseness is exclusive. Inside the Washington Beltway, all sex is costly and the Chien Bleu’s cover price is high. Tables are so close that the waiters must pass between them sideways, trays held aloft. Couple by couple, even one by one, clients sift in past the bouncers. No standees are allowed. In the heat of the overhead spotlight, Samantha dabs at her forehead—she has tissues tucked into her bra—but she can feel her makeup melting on her face. She waits for the sax backstage to well up and flow over the din of conversation and she rides the wave.
“Hi,” she says huskily, floating herself out on an arpeggio. The soft curl of attention washes back toward her.
“I can’t sing,” she tells them, almost touching the mike with her lips. “I’m the entr’acte between musical sets.” She makes this sound like a proposition, low and sultry.
She takes a clasp out of her hair and lets it cascade around her shoulders. She unbuttons the cuffs on her long white sleeves. (She is dressed like a schoolteacher or a librarian: prim white blouse with high collar, a plain gray skirt which is ankle-length and severe.) She gives a quick tug to each sleeve, and as each pulls away from the armhole, she discards it, tossing it into the crowd. “Ahh,” she says languidly. “That feels better.” There is a thin scatter of laughter as men reach for the floating sleeves and then a heightened attentiveness that even in the dark she can feel. She unbuttons her blouse very slowly. From backstage, a riff of cool jazz rises like mist. “No, I don’t sing,” she says. “I’m the stand-up comic.”
Due Preparations for the Plague Page 6
