by Mary Gordon
Yes, she had laughed.
And the students had laughed.
But Genevieve had not laughed, because she hadn’t thought that what Mlle Weil said was funny, or not funny enough to laugh at, and she was afraid that the others felt the same and were just pretending. And this would have been, this pretending, this deceiving of Mlle Weil, this would have been below Mlle Weil’s standards for truth.
And if Mlle Weil didn’t know that she was being deceived, being humored, what could that mean? About her intelligence, her wisdom, her knowledge of the world?
She didn’t know that her mother and Genevieve’s mother were in league to deceive her.
Genevieve understands that this is why she had not liked to remember that Mlle Weil had laughed.
Mlle Weil isn’t laughing now. All the expression on her face is taken up with the effort of furious blinking. The sun is very bright; it is high noon; the vivid colors of the leaves exaggerate the brightness.
How weak her eyes look, as if seeing must be, for her, a perpetual strain.
Her eyes are tired.
Her glasses are the thickest Genevieve has ever seen.
And now something must be said. Something ridiculous.
“How are you?”
Without a pause, as if waiting to speak had nearly suffocated her, as if she were taking her first breath in much too long, “I am trying to get out of here. I must get back to Europe. To join de Gaulle and the Free French in London.”
“And will that be difficult?”
Mlle Weil makes a face—screwing up her tired eyes, tightening her thin lips—that suggests that the idea of difficulty is in itself ridiculous.
“And is this child yours?”
“Yes. My son, Aaron. He is thirteen months old.”
Mlle Weil bends over the baby, puts her face close to him. She makes cooing noises, as anyone might with a baby. This surprises Genevieve.
“A fine little man,” she says. “And so you must be well. But Laurent, I have thought of him often. How is your brother?”
Laurent. One of the afflicted, his body broken from birth. My brother, for love of whom, in outrage on whose behalf I refuse to bend the knee to any God. Any God who would have allowed the fate of Laurent’s body could only be a monster.
Misshapen in his mother’s womb.
Our mother, in whose womb I was, strictly by chance, not misshapen.
Cerebral palsy.
Sporadic control, only, of his limbs. A bent spine, so that most days he presents to the world the shape of an upside-down L, his spine a flat table, parallel almost to the ground. Usually, he tried to talk to people only when he was sitting down, but if he had to talk to people when he was standing or walking, he would have to awkwardly twist his head, look up at them from a sidewise angle. Which made people more uncomfortable still.
Genevieve can only love people who are able to look at Laurent without looking away.
“I was quite fond of your brother. I would like to see him.”
Genevieve takes the words as a command. Now there is no choice. Because of the way she had been with Laurent, Genevieve would owe Mlle Weil fealty.
I love my brother.
I love my brother without question.
I may have loved my brother from before my birth. From my time, well formed as he was not, in our mother’s womb.
Of everyone whom she had observed in Laurent’s presence, Mlle Weil seemed to have the least trouble looking at him. She had appeared to have no trouble at all. Of everyone who had looked at him, only with Mlle Weil had there been no catch, no taking hold of the reins to check the horse of recoil, of revulsion, the impulse Genevieve had seen so often. The effort to control disgust. Genevieve had many times tried to understand the position of people seeing Laurent for the first time. Tried not to judge them, to forgive their look of shock. But she could not forgive. She knew that Laurent saw it, was hurt by it. So how could she forgive?
Was it possible that Mlle Weil didn’t notice Laurent’s distorted body? That she saw only his mind?
Yes, this was possible. For this, Genevieve would always owe her fealty. Beyond question. A knight’s fealty. Unto death.
It was how Mlle Weil had first come to their house. She had, of course, been Genevieve’s teacher. But there was a distance there, a formality. People were careful not to bring the scent of home into the clear air of the lycée. It would be like whispering about your boyfriend as you knelt in church. Not that she had ever knelt in church, coming as she did from a family of unbelievers. Nevertheless, there were things that, as a native of the land of France, she had always known.
Mlle Weil was also the colleague of Genevieve’s mother, but even that would not have meant that she would have entered the house.
It was because Laurent had been quite ill with pneumonia that winter of 1933, and had missed so much school. (He was always susceptible to illness, particularly of the lungs.) He was falling behind in Greek.
Their mother would not allow that anything connected to Laurent’s illness would result in his falling behind. And so she had hired Mlle Weil to tutor him in Greek.
Only Mlle Weil would not take money.
And so, their mother had said, then you must take your evening meal with us.
And Mlle Weil had said, “Sometimes I do not like to eat.”
How Genevieve’s heart had beaten, so painfully, when she waited for Mlle Weil’s knock the days she came to tutor Laurent. Waiting to answer the door, waiting to be the one, and yet feeling as if, in doing so, she overstepped some mark. Stole grace.
“Answer the door, for heaven’s sake,” her mother had said, settling Laurent against pillows on the sofa.
“I am very much looking forward to seeing Laurent,” Mlle Weil is saying, nine years later, older now, looking older than she really is—thirty-two is it, thirty-three? Her shoulders stooped, her back bent like an old woman’s.
Genevieve wonders what it is that Mlle Weil sees. Is it more or less than what others see? The real, true, deep, high reality … or is it a kind of careless seeing … not noticing that people are selling you filet mignon and calling it horsemeat. Not noticing that you are wearing your clothes backwards, that you are ruining your health. Not seeing what is being done for you, what people are doing for you so that you can see only what you want to see. Rather than trying to get the truth of what is there.
Once, this question would have mattered to Genevieve. She had believed, once, that it was possible to grasp reality through thought. That it was a human being’s most important responsibility: to understand reality through the labor of the mind.
She no longer thinks this way.
What has taken its place?
Something she calls getting on with life. Something she calls, now, living.
And yet the other was a kind of living.
Does it mean that she has lost a life?
Yes and no.
It was fortunate that there had been no need to choose.
She has not lost her mind. She is not mad, or entirely incapable of thought. In the first moments of waking, when she nurses the baby, in the moments stolen for reading while he sleeps. And there is her study of the Hebrew language.
She had set Laurent the task of finding someone who could teach her Hebrew. Rabbi Cohen, on the faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary, two blocks from her apartment, where he comes once every two weeks, surprised that a woman, a non-Jew, is interested in the Hebrew language. He is kind about the slowness of her progress, and impressed, she thinks, in spite of himself, at her determination. He assumes that she is studying the language out of intellectual curiosity. What she does not tell him: her motive is not primarily intellectual. She is doing it to make a connection with the Jewishness of her husband and her son, without ever invoking the name or idea of God. She loves the look of the letters, the sound of the words in her throat: coming from someplace deeper than French words, or English ones.
And so she knows her mind is
still alive. In some ways more than ever. But she knows, too, that she makes nothing of what is done with her mind. The work of her mind leaves no trace. The fact of there being no product of her mind’s work does not mean that the work has not been done.
Like Mlle Weil, Genevieve knows herself the inferior younger sister of the brilliant older brother. Laurent’s career at the lycée was brilliant, despite time lost from illness. His career at university was brilliant.
Because he would be studying at the University of Bordeaux, she and her mother move there, too. Pull up stakes. Her mother, the lioness mother of the wounded cub, makes it all happen, as she always made everything happen for Laurent. She gets a job in the lycée, once again teaching chemistry, and finds a place there for Genevieve. They leave the town where all of them have lived all their life for a new life. For Laurent’s new life. Not questioning, even for a second, whether it was the right thing to do. Not worrying if it would cause problems for Genevieve. Only now does it occur to her that perhaps, in this way (were there others?), she had been neglected.
He studies psychology. He turns his attention to people who have afflictions, but have not been given the gift of language, as he has. He begins with veterans of the War, and moves on to those struck from birth.
He perceives that severely disabled people, who were thought to have no intelligence, no mind even, in fact had intelligence, had mind, only they had no access to language, and were imprisoned by this lack. He invents both an object and a technique that gives these people, who were as good as dead, a new life. Language. He invents what they come to call the board. They call it that, as if it were a domestic animal that had become part of their daily life. They say “the board” as other families would say “the dog.”
It is because of “the board” that they are where they are. Safe in New York instead of in ravished France. That she is Mrs. Howard Levy, mother of Aaron, of the beautiful perfect limbs, traceable to her brother’s broken body.
Her husband, Howard, a neurologist, had written Laurent from America. He had read an article Laurent had written about his work. His board, his great invention. Howard had traveled to Bordeaux just to meet Laurent. 1937. This is how it had happened.
In some ways, a love story, like any other.
But strangely brought about.
A love story linked to the tragedy of a brother’s broken body.
She is thinking of Howard’s body. How aroused she had been when she first knew him by the sight of him walking down the street. She would sneak out the door so she could watch him from the back without his knowing. His walk was the first thing she desired. His long loping strides, eating up the road, so American, so confident of his getting to the place he meant to get to. A walk far more horizontal than a Frenchman’s. Compared to Howard, she had thought then, most French men walked as if they were riding a unicycle: excessively vertical, their torsos stiff, their arms immobile. When she watched Howard walk she thought: this is a man who never thinks of distance as a problem. As the sister of Laurent, she had always had to calculate the possible negative implications of any distance. When she took her first walks with Howard she felt, for the first time, that she could, for a little while at least, stop doing that.
She thinks of his comically long, thin legs, the line of dark hair traveling down his chest—so black against the surprisingly white skin, the line of black making its way in an even line exactly halfway between his nipples, which were a dark maroon. Now that she is nursing, she thinks how odd it is that men have nipples. What do they need them for? But she had been fascinated by the look of Howard’s torso, as if it were a map of something, a blueprint, a chart. And she loved his thin fingers, almost feminine, except for a thumb that was surprisingly wedge-shaped, blunt. And how shockingly aroused she had been when he rolled up the sleeves of his shirt to help her with the dishes. His chin: perhaps too pointed for real beauty, maybe his worst feature. And the enormous eyes, dog’s eyes, he called them, but she said, it was a very intelligent dog, a good dog, a faithful dog.
Now he is fighting in the South Pacific, or because he is a doctor perhaps not fighting but tending the shattered bodies of the fighters. She believes that he is faithful. She will not allow herself to think of it. She understands that in some ways they don’t know each other very well. She knows him first as her brother’s friend, a kind man (he, too, does not look on her brother with revulsion; he is one of the rare ones who does not find Laurent impossible, even difficult to look at). An American. Is it that they both liked the way their bodies took up space in relation to each other’s, she containing space, and he expanding it, the easy way their footsteps chimed as they walked up the stony streets? He found her pretty. She thought that was a less satisfactory word than jolie or mignon. “I think you may be the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen,” he said to her in English, though sometimes they spoke in French. And he would laugh at her inability to make anything of his name except Ow Ard, and she liked the way he would play with her glove when she laid it on the table in the café, after he’d placed their order.
But did they know each other? What did it mean to know someone? Certainly she did not know him as she knew Laurent. And would he be the same person when the War was over? And who did he think he’d married? A pretty French girl. The kind, caretaking sister of his afflicted friend. Sometimes they talked about books. She was impressed that he, an American, had read Proust; he was impressed that she, a woman, knew Descartes more thoroughly than he, and that she adored geometry. He did not know that both these things could be traced directly to Mlle Weil. She had never mentioned Mlle Weil to him.
She is used, now, to living in the house with Laurent and Aaron, walking the New York streets, a wife without a husband, the mother of a child who doesn’t even know his father’s face. Would she like it better when she had to consult, to compromise? Would the assuaging of her loneliness be worth her loss of authority? Of course. Of course it would. She couldn’t wait to see Howard. She longed for him. But who was the man for whom she longed?
She thinks of “the board,” made of highly polished, highly finished wood—oak, she guesses, though it’s not the kind of thing she ever asked herself before. Two feet square, three quarters of an inch thick. Two painted lines divide the surface into four squares. Within each square there is a sort of square dish, a depression six inches square and a quarter of an inch deep, its bottom edges smooth and polished.
The blocks are arranged in sets of four, each set constituting a puzzle. She remembers how Laurent explained it to her for the first time. “Listen, GeGe,” he said (as if she had ever not listened). “Three of the four blocks show an image closely related in type or subject to the others, but the fourth block, though resembling the others, has some feature that does not fit. Four blocks would represent foods, but three are fruits, the fourth a vegetable. Three blocks will show a problem of addition: 2 + 6 = 8, 22 + 20 = 42, 9 + 3 = 12. The fourth block will be a problem in subtraction: 14 - 2 = 12. I set up the blocks, then I ask the person, ‘Which doesn’t fit?’ He or she need not speak. All he or she has to do is make a crude gesture towards the block that doesn’t fit. If he or she can’t even gesture, I or one of the assistants can do the pointing, only asking for responses by the blinking of eyes.”
Genevieve thinks of how her brother is described. A hero. A revolutionary. A savior of the disabled, disabled himself. He is, in Mlle Weil’s terms, one of the afflicted. Terrible in his afflictions. His mind: brilliant; his nature: kindly, except for outbursts of unaccountable pique, often connected to food. Only Genevieve knows about this. Laurent may not be aware of it himself. And so it isn’t even a shared secret, only hers to keep. She had shared the secret with her mother.
It had been their secret, almost their joke, although they felt disloyal in it, would not have called it a joke or even acknowledged the complicit smiles that passed between them when Laurent would complain about the saltiness of the soup or the piecrust’s failure at an ideal of flakiness. A
n unspoken understanding: food is the only physical pleasure unequivocally open to him. And so we must see that it is a source of great, unalloyed pleasure.
Now, years later, in a place thousands of miles distant from Le Puy, or even Bordeaux, now that she is a citizen of wartime New York, the problem of Laurent’s pleasure in his food has become a great headache for Genevieve. Rationing! The calculations, the little stamps and stickers: red for meat, blue for milk and butter. Sugar like gold. She imagines that her mother would have been better at it. Her mother. Their mother. Impossible, sometimes, to believe that she is dead, by which was meant no longer in this world. Her mother: sharp, competent, almost not maternal—parsimonious with caresses, creating a determination in Genevieve to be extravagant in caresses with her son. Her mother: the chemistry mistress, la maîtresse de chimie. Stricken with stomach cancer, said to be the most painful of all cancers. Her greatest concern when dying: that Laurent would not be properly cared for, that Genevieve on her own would not measure up. Along with her stifled groans and cries, the constant anxious articulations: You’ll make sure he’ll be all right. No question, then, they both knew, of Genevieve going on with her studies at the university. She had a place in the Department of Philosophy, although she would have preferred literature, but understood that, for her mother, literature was not serious: a leisure pursuit. She consoled herself that, not studying at the university, she would have more time to read the literature she loved. She would be keeping house.
Keep house. Keep the house from what? Keep the house as shelter for the afflicted body, the broken body. They would be orphans now. As a family they had been unlucky. She had never even known her father. A victim of the terrible influenza epidemic. One of the dead, not the war dead, but the plague dead. 1919. Genevieve had been less than a year old. Laurent, three: he had some memories. A tall man, kindly. The physics teacher. Le maître de la physique.
