“The Amish get phones nowadays?” He waggled a piece of toast in the air.
“It’s Silas’s. His cell. While they’re away. Eula’s not exactly traditional, anyway.” For no reason, I got suddenly shy, but Lucius reached to lift my face, my chin in his hand. I felt fifteen and melty. We were still like that when the waitress came to clear our plates, and we were a maudlin sight that evening in the parking lot: two old fogies, faces pressed together in the shopping-strip dusk, in tears. When we let go and Lucius opened his car, I saw the books—his books that I’d asked him for—on the passenger seat. “For me?” I reached in.
“This is really how you want to think of me while I’m away?” Lucius grimaced. “The guy obsessed with French Nazis?”
“Collaborationists,” I corrected. “It was a complicated time.” From the seat I collected a stack of his books. There’s actual heft to the evidence of this man’s life, his work here in this world. I make no apology for my admiration, nor for my envy. It must be very satisfying to know you’ve made something—other than a child, which any dumb fuck can do. Friends of the Führer: Collaborators in the Vichy Regime. Give Me Your Watch and I’ll Tell You the Time: The French Under Nazi Occupation. We Were All Comrades: The Legion of French Volunteers in the Anti-Bolshevik Crusade. This But Begins the Woe: From Cooperation to Collaboration. The Carrot and the Stick: How Hitler Controlled the Masses. Blood Will Have Blood: The Occupiers and the Occupied, France 1940—1944. A Past That Does Not Pass: Repression in French Memory of the Vichy Era. An oeuvre of titles and subtitles, overarching ideas and pointed explorations. Lucius Bocelli, PhD, is a man who long ago found his calling in the world, and I am moth-drawn to the flame of such purpose.
It was nearly seven-thirty before we were in our separate cars, ready to steer our noses in opposite directions down that black swath of road. I-80, the bulging empire waistline of our thick-waisted nation. When Lucius started his car, I looked up at the rumble, forced a smile to show him I was okay, and waved him off, a gesture to say, I’ll go in a second. He waved back, nodding sad and slow, and backed out of his parking spot. I let myself bawl as he pulled away, just sat there in my car and sobbed, the stack of his books on my passenger seat, his name printed thousands of times over, but such a desperate and pathetic substitute for him, for his being, his body. When my phone rang, I answered without speaking. He said: “You’re not moving.” I looked up. His Honda sat at the parking lot exit, blinkers flashing.
“Oh, can’t you let a woman sob in peace?!”
“A man born in 1939 can’t leave a lady crying under any circumstance.”
I laughed through my tears.
“Okay, good. That’s a start. You can laugh and drive, but no crying and driving.”
“Which is why I’m getting it out now. So would you just get out of here already, please?”
“I love you,” he said.
“Oh, stop that!” I wailed. “You’ll start me all over. I love you. Now get out of here!”
We hung up. He switched off his flashers and pulled onto the I-80 East ramp. I sobbed as I watched him go, digging in my purse for a Kleenex. My bag—my enormous satchel—a Coach I’d wanted and Michael bought me years ago, then teased me about forever after because of course I’d asked for the Mary Poppins bag, a kitchen sink lost somewhere at the bottom. The joke was born tired. Maybe it was time to get myself a new damn handbag.
Finally I found a tissue. And, also—in a side pocket I slip things into and then forget about—I found the photograph of the three little girls that Bernadette had tried to burn. It smelled of char, and so would everything I put in that pocket forever after. I sat in my car in the hazy dusk, the strip-mall sodium vapor lights buzzing on as I tried to stop crying. Staring bleary-eyed at the photo—the “Harmon” girls, the three young daughters of “Ida and John” as presented, Compliments of Hazel, in the “family album”—I wondered if anything in Bernadette’s life didn’t warrant scare quotes. Such a bizarre woman, the deceits—her accent, for God’s sake! I could hear her voice in my head, her own name the way she spoke it—Behr-na-det—lips spreading, tongue pressing back, the sounds catching as she ground out those hard, phlegmy r’s. Her concession to French and deaf ancestry made sense, if it wasn’t just one more evasion. French, not German. Or Alsatian, maybe, the French spoken along the Rhine, on either side of the Franco-German border. Behr-na-det Ahr-maw. I said it aloud to myself, consonants scraping my throat. Behr-na-det Ahr-maw, a name like a cat hacking hairballs. Futile tears for Lucius were still wet on my face, and a fresh wave of rage at Bernadette swept over me, a flood of anger on behalf of those discarded little girls. She disowned them—her sisters, herself—stripped their names and identities, took a match to their images, left them smoldering in a nursing home trash basket.
The one in the middle is so lovely I want to hold her safe, whisper, Sweet Mignon. Was that something Lucius said? To me? An endearment—Mignon, short for something, maybe, like Marianne, or Mallorie—or a nickname. Mignon: humble, those hooded eyes beaming steadily ahead, willing herself to lift them, though to look up is only to confirm what she already knows: that death is there, just ahead, hanging like a carrot, or a noose. She’s six years old at most, the wisped hair at her temples still downy as a newborn’s, and already death is right there on her small face. She’ll be a suicide, Mignon Armond. She’ll die young.
She probably won’t even be the first. I can imagine brothers, too—unpictured here, the brothers Armond. Small boys from a tiny French village just over the German border, swept up as young men and forced to fight in a German uniform. Or gone willingly—Lucius says plenty did—to die in borrowed Nazi duds. And if they don’t die in the war, they’ll take their own lives once it’s over, after liberation, when it’s clear what they’ve done and who they’ve been. Or one brother dies fighting, the other shoots himself in the woods with his Nazi-issue rifle, unable to bear the responsibility for his own acts. They won’t find his body, devoured by animals, his gun pilfered by another lost and wandering soul.
Or maybe, like Lucius’s collaborationist, he’s simply assumed dead, but isn’t, and the only person who knows it is his sister—his twin sister. The middle sister, the beautiful one, far left in the photo, the one who looks, truly, like Ginny. What’s the French form of Virginia? Virginie? Virginie knows that if a bullet entered her twin brother’s brain she’d’ve felt it, and she’s sure: he is not dead. But such knowledge can drive a person mad, and it does. Oh, Virginie, you’ll step into that madness so trustingly, and it will claim you, lock you in another world inside your own lovely, mad head. Poor girl. She’d have been so beautiful, too.
And then there’s little Bernadette. You never trusted a thing, did you? Little Berna, little Dettie, little Bena, little girl . . . How old are you, there, in your frouffy white gown, lopsided ribbons in your thin blond curls? Two? Three? Suspicion marked you from the start, your brow creased in worry even then. The youngest, and the smallest—small the way a runt is small: piggy, and grabby, and always wronged, right from the start. Not enough blood down the cord or milk at the teat, not enough attention, never enough time. You were set against the world before you entered it, Bernadette, set to face it down and show you wouldn’t stand for being shafted. I want to pity you, her, this angry girl in her frothy white dress beside her sisters, dead and mad. I try to pity her the life she’ll have to lead, but my resentment’s an obstacle to sympathy. What an unsympathetic person you became, Bernadette. Maybe hardening yourself was the only way through, steeling yourself against the world the only way to live. Were you brave, Bernadette, in your own way? Maybe all you really ever had going for you was that bullheaded, iron-gutted instinct for survival. You hated this life from the very start, little Bena, and you were the one who’d have to see it out, belligerently alive and wretchedly sane.
I WASN’T ON the road an hour before even Hello, Dolly! couldn’t keep me awake, and I had to stop at a rest area to nap. When I woke and opened my eyes to a st
ream of Mennonites flooding from a minivan like circus clowns, I thought I was dreaming. The line for the ladies’ room was like a Little House on the Prairie casting call.
It was one a.m. when I got home to River City. The door to our bedroom was closed, so I spent another night in Ginny’s room. My first class of the summer session was scheduled for three that afternoon, and I’d prepared nothing. They were undergrads; we’d play name games.
When I went downstairs at around ten in the morning, Bernadette wasn’t in sight, but Michael was ensconced on the living room sofa, a legal pad on his lap, the phone book splayed open at his side, telephone crooked between his cheek and shoulder. He seemed to be on hold. I lifted a hand in tentative greeting as I passed, and he raised his head stiffly, acknowledging my presence, but nothing more. He looked angry.
As I reheated coffee and made cereal, I overheard a few things and gleaned that Michael was on the phone with someone at a nursing home or care facility, but not East Prairie. He seemed to be inquiring about vacancies. I took my coffee and stood in the doorway to wait for him to finish. He made a note—or just doodled—and looked distantly off, squinting in demonstrable calculation. When he hung up, he sat a minute, flipping through the phone book, as if to show he had important things to do. Finally he looked up and spoke, his tone accusing: “I cannot understand how you could possibly not tell me about the fire.”
“What?”
“We’ve been asked to remove my mother from East Prairie.”
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“Do I look like I’m kidding?”
I don’t think I replied; my face was screwed up in a bewilderment that spoke for itself.
“They feel,” Michael said, and then spoke as if quoting someone, “she poses a danger to the other residents and they’d like for us to find alternate accommodations for her. Stat.”
I made a sound of disgust. We’d been through this before.
“They’re hoping to reopen late next week, and they’d like her gone before then, to minimize the disruption to the other residents.”
I wasn’t speaking, just trying to process it all, and this clearly annoyed Michael, though there’s little I could have done that wouldn’t have annoyed Michael.
“She’s been accused of many things,” he began, “but attempted arson’s something new. They say if we get her out fast they won’t press charges.”
“Attempted arson?” I repeated. “That’s what they said?”
Michael widened his eyes and spread his hands to say, I only know what they told me.
“I didn’t tell you,” I began. “I wanted to, but I thought it would sound petty, like tattling. She tried to burn an old photo in a wastebasket. It wouldn’t light. There was no fire. She struck maybe three matches. It made no sense, but I have for a long time attempted to refrain—at your request—” My tone was growing self-righteous and I made an effort to temper it. “I didn’t tell you because I thought you’d find it catty. The incident was so insignificant.”
Michael was trying to figure out whether to believe me or not. “She was trying to burn an old photo?” He didn’t understand. “From the album? The family album thing?”
“Maybe?” I shrugged. “The girls in the photo weren’t elsewhere in the album . . . Of the same era, maybe, but the actual children—” And then I realized I could show it to him. I grabbed my bag, fished in the side pocket, pulled out the three little girls in their charry frame, and handed it to Michael. My fingers came away sooty, and I wiped them on my jeans. Then, instinctively, lifted my hand to my nose and inhaled the scent of burn.
I’m still not sure how to interpret Michael’s reaction to the photograph. Whatever he thought, he said nothing aloud, though he looked at the photo for a long time, his face registering shifting emotions. I don’t imagine he could possibly look at the little girl on the right and not think: That is my mother. That little girl is Bernadette Maakestad, or whatever her name really was—all of us Maakestads may well be going by a name born of someone’s imagination. I suppose it’s no stranger than Jews’ names getting Americanized or de-Jewified at Ellis Island, or hippies denouncing patriarchy and discarding their fathers’ names at Woodstock, their own offspring becoming Melissa Starlight or Leif Morningdew. Still, those people can trace back and learn that Topliss was Teplitzky, and Ms. Starlight might’ve been Ms. Strauss; there’s a lineage, a story. I married into a family name that could have been plucked from a phone book for all I know. Of the lives of my own parents and grandparents I have an attic full of documentation—photographs, marriage licenses, death certificates, other crap I should sort through: mortgage loan approvals from 1942, illegible mimeographed report cards, staple-bound synagogue community cookbooks. I have the artifacts of their lives. And I have the stories they told, more evocative than the ephemera. Michael has nothing. Nothing. He has this name, Maakestad, and he has Bernadette’s perfunctory, begrudging, highly suspect origin story. That’s it, in toto. Until this photograph. But he didn’t have time for ancestral speculation, not with so much else to deal with. Maybe he told himself he’d think about it someday, once his mother was gone. Whatever Michael might have liked to know about those little girls, he just couldn’t go there, not then. He handed back the photo and resumed his present concerns, though he seemed not so angry as before. “Well,” he said, “Operation Find Mother a Home begins yet again.” Then his tone turned dark. “There’s a seventy-six-person waiting list at Riverview.” The only river in view at Riverview Senior Residence is a sewage drain behind the meat-packing plant.
I said, “Everyone in River City got old all of a sudden?” There was no waiting list at Riverview; word about Bernadette, Nursing Home Terror, must have simply gotten out.
Michael pursed his lips, shrugged, and turned back to the Yellow Pages.
“Does she know?” I asked.
He shook his head, a little ashamed at his reluctance to break the news. “I’ll tell her.”
“When will you go to—”
Michael cut in: “They don’t even want her on the premises.”
That was pretty absurd, as if Bernadette were actually dangerous. I wanted to offer something—help, something. “I teach this afternoon, but I can go with you tomorrow.”
Michael was ready to decline whatever I had to give. “You don’t have to.”
“Please, Michael, it’ll go a lot faster with two. It’s fine. I’m glad to help.”
Michael glumly nodded his acquiescence.
I excused myself on the pretense of class prep and went upstairs to search online for cheap flights to Paris. I listened in on Michael and Bernadette’s conversation. Within minutes they were both angry, with raised voices that neither seemed to care if I heard. Bernadette was very displeased by the news of her East Prairie expulsion and was, despite Michael’s defense of me, convinced that I’d ratted her out for the photo-burning, that I’d exaggerated, “like you know she does,” Bernadette said, “makes a mountain of a molehill.” Her eviction was, she felt, my fault. She also blamed the orderly—“that African,” she called him, which wouldn’t have been a racial epithet, as the man was African, except that Bernadette called all blacks Africans, with the implication that she’d put up no protest if someone shipped them back to that far-off continent from whence she figured they’d all come. God, I loathed her.
Bernadette said something, and Michael growled back, short-tempered and frazzled, “Do you really think Phillipa wants you here any more than you want to be here?”
Bernadette shot back: “Here?”
“You’ve just about exhausted your options in this town, Ma.”
“Well, stick me in that Riverview cesspool and be done with it.”
“You’d be lucky to get a room at Riverview.” He informed her of the wait list. “Unless you want Motel 6 or have a better idea, you’re staying here for now whether you like it or not.”
There was some further protest, but she came to accept the situation as she understo
od it: beyond her control, forced on her by Michael, acting as my agent. What surprised me was how little she argued about our clearing out her East Prairie room without her. Then I realized she’d already disposed of anything we might have discovered. And then the thought of spending a day with Michael—déjà vu all over again, packing his mother’s things—without any prospect of revelation or insight grew very depressing, more depressing even than the class I had to teach that day. Lucius was leaving for France so soon, and I wanted to ditch everything—job, family, all of it—and join him. I was a fifty-year-old delinquent teenager.
In the end I did not go with Michael to East Prairie; I stayed home with Bernadette. When Michael returned, I helped him load everything into the garage, and only then did we learn, via much huffing, that Bernadette had anticipated having her things with her in the basement, and she grew miffed when Michael refused to accommodate her. He remained hopeful about finding her another place to live.
Though I could not hear the argument that ensued, just their raised voices emanating from the basement, I imagine it was during this heated exchange that Michael let slip in anger that he and I were having problems—or told her outright that I’d had an affair. Whatever he said, Bernadette’s attitude and demeanor toward me changed dramatically. For twenty-seven years she had treated me with distrust, disdain, and forced, false solicitude, but the evening that Michael moved her things out of East Prairie and into our garage, I went from being an annoyance in Bernadette’s life to being a pest so loathsome she’d have exterminated me without a second thought. The next morning when I entered the kitchen, where she sat in her housecoat slurping weak coffee and crunching dry toast, I greeted her as usual and she looked at me, set down her toast as if suddenly nauseated, pushed back her chair, and stalked from the room.
It soon became clear that Bernadette intended to shun me such as to make Amish ostracism look downright benevolent, and I lasted another day and a half before I called Eula and begged to come stay with her and Oren in Prairie. I told her the situation with Bernadette had become untenable and, prudent or not, I also told her that Michael and I were having problems and needed time apart—never mind that we’d just had months apart. I did not tell Eula about Lucius, and whatever she may have thought or suspected, she asked nothing, simply welcomed me into her home. She was eighteen years old and the most gracious, mature, generous human being I think I have ever encountered.
Our Lady of the Prairie Page 11
