by Lily Tuck
Nor was Fides known to be especially warmhearted or maternal. She drove her children hard, making them study and learn their lessons by heart. In fact, Rudolf already had had a glimpse of this quality when he first went to court her: on his arrival at her house in Alzey, his horse shied suddenly, throwing Rudolf off, and Fides, who was looking out the window, laughed. Rudolf got back on his horse and rode off, vowing, at the time, never to see Fides again as he thought her “hard-hearted.”
Standing up, Emilie tells Liliane, “Shall we keep walking? And I just remembered something else. On his way back to Germany in 1861, Rudolf happens to stop off in Washington on the very day of the presidential inauguration. He manages to get inside the White House and, although Rudolf’s sympathies lie with the South, he has the good fortune to meet Abraham Lincoln.”
“Is this true?” Liliane asks again.
“Congratulations, Mr. President,” always polite, Rudolf says, taking Abraham Lincoln’s hand.
“Thank you, sir,” equally polite, Abraham Lincoln replies, shaking Rudolf’s hand. Detecting a slight foreign accent, he also asks, “Whereabouts are you from, sir?”
“Germany, from the Rhineland. You must come and visit us one day, Mr. President. The countryside is very beautiful and we make excellent wine.”
“Yes, one day, I would like to visit your country,” Abraham Lincoln answers. “God willing, if we do not go to war,” he adds.
VII
Her eyes open, Liliane is sitting up in bed screaming.
“Chérie, chérie, what is it?” Wearing only a sheer silk nightgown, Irène tries to calm her.
Liliane does not seem to hear her. When Irène puts her arms around her, Liliane roughly pushes her away.
“Get me a washcloth with cold water,” Irène tells Gaby, who is standing at the bedroom door. Instead of pajamas, he wears boxer shorts.
“Jesus!” he says. “What’s going on? She woke me up.”
“Please, a cold washcloth,” Irène repeats.
When she tries to apply the cold washcloth to Liliane’s face, Liliane slaps away Irène’s hand and stands up. Jumping up and down on the bed, she continues to scream.
More than a nightmare, what Liliane experiences is closer in intensity to what is known as an incubus attack or pavor nocturnus. These night terrors occur in children between the ages of four and twelve and usually disappear during adolescence. Symptoms include sweating, rapid respiration and heart rate, thrashing of limbs such as punching and hitting, and screaming. The child may appear to be awake but he or she will also be inconsolable and unresponsive to efforts to communicate with him or her and also may not recognize those familiar attempting to do so. Chances are, too, the child will be unable to describe the dream.
For the next few years, Liliane will continue to experience night terrors and have the same recurring dream. The dream has to do with numbers. An infinite set of numbers.
In school, Liliane is good at math—algebra, geometry, calculus are a breeze. In fact, once she has mastered the English language, she does well in all subjects—she is an A student. At commencement, she gets prizes: one year, the complete works of Robert Frost for the highest average in examinations in the upper school; another year, the complete works of T. S. Eliot for the highest average in daily work in the upper school. She acts in school plays (Brutus in Julius Caesar, Myrtle Webb in Our Town, Black Dog in Treasure Island), she is president of the Lit Club and co-editor of the yearbook. In addition, she is on the volleyball and basketball teams—one of her long shots determines the winning score of a crucial game.
She also makes friends: Mary Lou Harvey, Jane Mackintosh, Alice Zimmer (Zimmy for short), Marion (Mimi) Holbrook, Sarah Cohen, and her best friend—now that Margo Maximov has moved to Philadelphia—Pamela Wylie. Pamela wants to be a poet and her poems—poems heavily influenced by the work of e. e. cummings—are published regularly in the school magazine under a single moniker, which she pronounces Pa-MAY-LA, accenting the last two syllables. One of her poems goes like this:
i skip past the evening sky
past the boughs of trees
fat green fingers reaching for
the clouds
the dinner bell rings
And i skip home
Pamela lives a few blocks from Liliane and, often, instead of going home from school right away, Liliane goes to Pamela’s apartment. There, they drink Cokes laced with rum and smoke cigarettes—Pamela’s mother is either out or too inebriated to notice or care. Janice, Pamela’s pretty younger sister, however, does care and complains that the smoke makes it hard for her to breathe. Janice suffers from asthma. Poor Janice.
Poor Janice, indeed. On August 28, 1963, Janice Wylie and her roommate, Emily Hoffert, are brutally murdered in their Upper East Side apartment. Both girls are stabbed more than sixty times with kitchen knives and Janice, who apparently had just stepped out of the shower wrapped in a towel, is found nude. She has been sexually assaulted as well as eviscerated—her intestines are lying on the floor next to her. The killings are dubbed the “Career Girls Murders” by the media because Janice, who works as a Newsweek researcher, is the niece of the writer Philip Wylie and Emily, an elementary-school teacher, is one of the thousands of young women who have come from all over the United States to New York City seeking a job. Hundreds of detectives are assigned to the case and the story is front-page news for months.
George Whitmore, a nineteen-year-old, unemployed African American with an IQ below 100, is wrongfully accused of the crime. His confession, it turns out, was coerced by the police. He is imprisoned for over two years, released on bond for nearly six years, and is finally exonerated in 1973. His treatment by the negligent and possibly racist police force plays a significant role in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to issue the guidelines for future police interrogations known as the Miranda rights. In addition, his particular case leads to the abolishment of the New York State death penalty. The real killer, Richard Robles, a twenty-two-year-old heroin addict, is arrested on January 26, 1965, and confesses to the murders, saying: “I went to pull a lousy burglary and I wound up killing two girls.” He is sentenced to life imprisonment; his repeated requests for parole are denied.
Pamela, the poet, dies young as well; her death, the result of untreated Legionnaires’ disease, goes unnoticed.
At age seven, Liliane nearly dies of diphtheria. As a disease, diphtheria has been nearly eradicated in industrialized nations by the DPT (diphtheria-pertussin-tetanus) vaccine. However before 1920, there were an estimated 200,000 cases of diphtheria annually in the United States, causing 15,000 deaths per year. The most famous outbreak occurred in 1925 in Nome, Alaska, which led to a serum run known as the “Great Race of Mercy,” where twenty mushers and more than one hundred dogs relayed diphtheria antitoxin by sled across Alaska for five and a half days over a distance of 674 grueling miles, thus saving the city of Nome from a deadly epidemic. A statue in New York City’s Central Park commemorates the lead dog, Balto, who arrived with the twenty-pound serum-filled cylinder in Nome on February 2 at 5:30 a.m. However, another dog, Togo, is considered the true hero as he covered the most hazardous stretch of the journey and carried the serum longer—91 miles, to Balto’s 53 miles.
The year is 1947 and Liliane and Irène are spending the summer in the French Alps. They are staying at a small hotel. The hotel is owned by a Monsieur Gruass. At mealtimes, Monsieur Gruass manages the hotel dining room and is overly punctilious. Everyone dislikes him. During lunch one day, to annoy him and to show off, Liliane says: “Monsieur Gruyère, may I have some Gruass?” That same afternoon, while she is playing “doctor” with the other children staying at the hotel, Liliane, who is the “patient,” starts to feel sick. Really sick. A punishment for her rudeness to Monsieur Gruass, she assumes. Too soon after the war, the hospital in Chamonix is small, underequipped, and staffed with nuns. No antitoxin vaccine for diph
theria is available. During the first few days, her throat closed, unable to breathe properly, with a fever of 40.6 degrees Celsius (105 degrees Fahrenheit), Liliane’s life hangs in the balance.
Irène leaves her only to get something to drink (she cannot think about food) or to try to telephone Rudy, who has stayed behind in Paris. The telephone is located in the hospital emergency waiting room and is unreliable—long-distance calls have to be placed in advance and are expensive—and, anyway, Irène is apprehensive. She and Rudy are about to separate and barely speak to each other or, if they do, they shout. When Irène finally reaches Rudy—again, on account of the bad connection, she has to shout—she has to tell him that Liliane is gravely ill and might . . . although she cannot bring herself to say the word.
“Her fever . . . ,” Irène starts to say.
“What about Liliane? I can barely hear you.”
“I said she has a very high fever,” Irène repeats.
“Where is she?”
“The hospital is small but the nuns are competent.”
“She can’t stay in Chamonix,” Rudy shouts back. “You must bring her to Paris immediately.”
“She is in quarantine—”
The line goes dead.
While Irène tries to call Rudy back, the door to the hospital opens and a stretcher is brought in. The boy on the stretcher appears to be seventeen or eighteen years old; his face is smooth, unblemished. His blond hair sticks to his forehead and looks wet; he has on a dark blue windbreaker, and except for one booted foot that hangs over the stretcher at an unnatural angle, his body is covered with a blanket. A doctor, followed by a nun, comes running into the emergency waiting room. The doctor takes one of the boy’s hands in his, feels for his pulse, then, very gently, he lets the hand go.
Irène hangs up the receiver and asks, “Is he dead?”
She watches as the nun pulls up the blanket to cover the boy’s face.
“A mountain climbing accident,” the nun tells her, sighing. “On the Aiguille du Midi. It happens every summer.”
The reason Irène and Liliane are spending the summer in the French Alps is Claude. Claude and Irène first met in Lisbon, in 1940. During the war, Portugal had maintained its neutrality and was relatively safe—Antonio Salazar, the dictatorial prime minister, played a game of fence-sitting between the Allies and the Axis—and safe as long as one had not been refused or arrested at the border and had the prerequisite papers. In Irène’s case, she had the entry visa for Portugal and she was waiting for a transit visa to the United States (eventually, she obtained one for three days) and for another to Peru. Liliane, Jeanne, and Irène were staying at the Palácio Estoril, an elegant hotel situated on the coast, a dozen miles from Lisbon. The hotel had a casino, a golf course, tennis courts, and a pool, and was home to royals, spies, and double agents—including Dusko Popov, one of the most famous or infamous, who was said to be the model for James Bond. While Irène waited, she swam, sunbathed, and gambled.
Meanwhile, Claude and his cousin, Charles, answering General de Gaulle’s call to all Frenchmen to join him in Britain, were on their way from Oran, Algeria, via Gibraltar, to St. Athan, a pilot training center in Wales, when their plane made an unscheduled stop in Lisbon. The reason for this, the men on board were told, was that their commanding officer had arranged a secret meeting with the Portuguese minister of defense—only, to Charles, Claude joked that the secret meeting was probably with a woman. Everyone was told to wait until the next day or perhaps even the day after for the flight to England to resume. Claude and Charles found a room in a cheap hotel in the city center, washed up, had drinks, dinner, then made their way by taxi to the casino at the Palácio Estoril.
Irène was playing roulette. Very tanned from sunbathing by the pool, she wore a white silk dress and her blonde hair was swept back by a sparkling comb.
She was losing.
“À cheval,” she told the croupier, placing six chips on the pairs 0–3, 1–4, 2–5, 3–6, 7–8, 8–9.
The ball landed on 14.
“À cheval,” Irène said again, placing her last six chips on 0–1, 1–2, 2–3, 4–5, 5–6.
The ball landed on 32.
Sitting down next to her, Claude placed a stack of chips in front of Irène.
“What’s your favorite number?” he asked her.
“Seven,” Irène answered
Claude placed all the chips on numbers 7, 17, and 27.
“Finales en plein,” he told the croupier.
The ball landed on 27. The payout was 35 to 3.
“Let’s go. We don’t have much time,” Claude said to Irène, as he pocketed the chips and waved good-bye to Charles.
Claude, the love of Irène’s life—romantic, dashing, impetuous, charming, lucky, sexy Claude!
Married, Claude, from the start, has told Irène that he can never leave his wife. His wife is the daughter of a wealthy French banking family. One would never guess that Jacqueline is heir to one of the richest fortunes in France—she dresses simply and, except for her wedding ring, wears almost no jewelry. Nor is Jacqueline what the French call mondaine—social. She is a professor of literature at the Sorbonne and good friends with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir—Simone especially—and Nathalie Sarraute.
In the Planpraz cable car, on their way up to hike the Col du Brévent, Claude tells Irène, “I remember when they built it. 1928. The same year my family bought the chalet.”
“And you’ve come to Chamonix ever since?” Irène asks.
Instead of answering, Claude says, “It’s the highest cable car in the world and a great feat of engineering, but Jacqueline won’t ride in it.”
“How did you meet?” Irène asks.
“In school.”
“The Lycée Janson?”
“Of course,” Claude replies.
Then he adds, “Do you know the story of the lycée?”
Claude likes to tell stories.
Irène shakes her head. “Only that it is the most prestigious high school in France and that Jean Gabin and Roland Garros went there as students.”
“Monsieur Janson de Sailly was a very rich man, a lawyer, but, one day, to his immense chagrin, he discovered that his beloved wife was being unfaithful to him.”
“What did he do?” Irène makes a face. “Kill her?”
“Worse,” Claude says. “He disinherited her and left all his money to the state on condition that it establish a modern high school that offered an excellent education—the Lycée Janson turned out to be the first public school in France. Monsieur Janson made another condition,” Claude continues with a smile, “that women were not permitted in the lycée.”
Halfway up Le Brévent, he and Irène sit down on a secluded grassy spot, in the sun, off the hiking trail. Nearby, in the shade, are patches of dirty snow. They have stopped to eat lunch—bread, cheese, salami; they also have wine, a black market bottle of Swiss Fendant. Below them lies a small alpine lake, Lac Blanc, and beyond them rise the snow-covered Mont Blanc and the Aiguille du Midi.
“Every summer, Charles and I used to climb the Aiguille du Midi,” Claude tells Irène. “Poor Charles. I miss him. His plane was hit over Saint-Omer in the Pas-de-Calais.”
“You saw it?” Irène asks.
Stationed south of London at Biggin Hill during the war, Claude flew missions over France and Belgium. Often, on a clear day, he would catch a glimpse of his native country below—the Eiffel Tower once, the River Seine, winding through the countryside like a silver ribbon. He flew a Spitfire IX, equipped with a Rolls-Royce Merlin 63 engine and two-stage superchargers. The superchargers were a lifesaver, although it took two minutes—two minutes that felt to him like two years—before the blower was activated and before Claude was out of range from enemy fire. But Claude was lucky. Modest, too, he rarely speaks of his exploits—how often he came close to be
ing killed, how often he saw friends and enemies both killed.
And always his cousin, Charles. Over and over, Claude cannot help but relive in his mind’s eye the sight of Charles’s plane as the fuel tank is hit, and as it begins its spiral descent earthward, spewing black smoke, and how a small dark shape detaches itself from the cockpit, falls with the smoking plane, and, as the parachute opens, floats free of it. Then, no matter how much Claude hopes against hope, the inevitable always happens—a spark from the falling plane, the parachute catches fire, and, in an instant, is consumed. Over the Channel, that day, on Claude’s way back to Biggin Hill, the sky was a startling and unrelenting blue and, without a cloud cover, he flew at 30,000 feet to avoid detection. In pure oxygen, it was hard-going and cold—the outside temperature was minus 50 degrees, inside the cockpit minus 25 degrees—and the tears flowing down Claude’s cheeks froze.
“You would have liked Charles,” Claude says after a while, smiling. Claude’s smile is what first drew Irène. Claude is handsome in an easy, relaxed way for which the French have a saying: se sentir bien dans sa peau, which means “feeling comfortable in one’s skin.”
“One day, I’ll take you up there,” Claude says, pointing with his chin to the Aiguille du Midi.
“I’ll teach you how to rock climb.”
“I’d like that,” Irène says.
The stony path ascends steeply, beyond the tree line and past twisted scrub vegetation; they cross a moraine of rocks, then a little stream of melted snow. Claude holds out his hand to Irène and although she takes it, she says, “I am fine.”
When they reach a fixed metal ladder on a rock wall, Claude lets Irène go up first.
“In case you fall, I’ll catch you,” he tells her.
“I won’t fall,” Irène answers. She wants to show Claude that she is not afraid.
Irène is wearing shorts and, looking up at her calf muscles flexing right above his head, Claude starts to get an erection.
