by Liza Wieland
It is foolish, Elizabeth says. I don’t like it either.
You remind me of her, Clara says. I’ve told you that before. And you—I see myself, too. You think privacy will protect you. But it won’t. You need to come back into the world. That was what I said to Suzanne. You’re so dreamy, so impractical. You can’t live outside the world.
Well, now she does, Elizabeth says.
Clara moves to stand behind the sofa. She places her hands on Elizabeth’s shoulders. Elizabeth leans her head back to look up into Clara’s face. The expression is both tender and wolfish, full of need.
You’ll come to Normandy with me, yes? Clara says. As Suzanne would have?
Elizabeth doesn’t answer. She hears Suzanne’s dead voice: I hate the Mona Lisa even more now because I’ll never have a chance to see that smile on myself. Because now I won’t ever again be in the ladies’ lounge in a bar, looking at myself in the brightly lit mirror, practicing that smile of invitation, that clairvoyant gaze, so when I go back out into the murk and smoke and the crowded tables, I can get what I want.
Since the postcard, Robert Seaver’s mother has begun to call from New York. Every day at five. Like clockwork. Like everything else in this apartment.
Did he say anything to you? Mrs. Seaver wants to know. Did he ever write about his difficulties?
No. Never. Elizabeth says this emphatically, every day.
But Mrs. Seaver persists. Then she is silent for five days, but on the sixth morning, there she is, looking as if she has walked the entire distance, even over the ocean, ringing the bell of 58 rue de Vaugirard.
For a moment, Elizabeth experiences an electric confusion. It is Robert, but dressed incoherently, in a woman’s hat and coat, come back from the dead, or not dead at all. Adrenaline fizzes her skin, darkens her vision at the corners.
Then Mrs. Seaver collapses in Elizabeth’s arms. The taxi driver helps Elizabeth get her to a chair, suggests a drink of water. He leaves, then returns with Mrs. Seaver’s coat and baggage, which she has left in his taxi. She has apparently traveled with only one small suitcase.
I had to see you, Elizabeth, Mrs. Seaver says. Even though everyone said not to. It’s too dangerous. You won’t be able to get home. That’s what they said. There are soldiers everywhere. So many Germans. A woman traveling alone isn’t safe from them.
It’s all right, Elizabeth says. You’re here now.
Mrs. Seaver seems unable to breathe.
I had to talk to you, she says. You have to tell me why he did this. You’re the only one who might know.
Elizabeth pays the driver, helps Mrs. Seaver upstairs and into the guest bed. She sends the cook and the maid home early. The only way to comfort Robert’s mother might be to lie to her or tell her about the postcard. Or both.
* * *
As the sun sets, the bedroom door opens slowly, and Elizabeth has the sensation that Robert will be the one to appear, that she deserves such a haunting. The being that will emerge from the guest bedroom will be hideous, a sort of gargoyle come down off the sheer façade of Notre-Dame. She waits, heart hammering. Mrs. Seaver clutches the door frame and the wainscoting as she makes her way down the hall.
Oh, Elizabeth, she says. I don’t think I can go on without him. How can you?
I don’t know, Elizabeth says. I have to, I guess. We both do.
The doves woke me, Mrs. Seaver says.
Not the clocks?
The clocks are just music. Who are the children in the photograph?
Elizabeth tells her.
The poor mother, Mrs. Seaver says. She must have had a terribly hard time.
Elizabeth suddenly remembers years ago her mother telling her to say goodbye to her dead cousin, Arthur, and lifting her up so she could see inside the coffin. She remembers how small Arthur was, like a doll. How the roads were so completely obscured by snow, and the snow still fell, blinding them. They had a hard time getting to the graveyard. And then, of course, they had an even harder time leaving Arthur there alone.
Elizabeth nods, afraid to speak. She doesn’t want to say that even now, more than ten years later, Clara is nearly paralyzed by the death of her child. Sadness never ends, and regret is impossible to escape.
The question is whether to introduce Clara and Mrs. Seaver, bring grief to grief, mothers who do not know how to go on. Louise says no, absolutely not, a meeting will terrify them. But Elizabeth looks at it differently, selfishly. She imagines sitting with them, between the two mothers, listening to the clocks tick and chime.
Come up sometime, Elizabeth tells Clara. When you’re out walking in the morning. If you feel like it. I have become a hopeless insomniac, and at dawn, Louise has just come in and gone to bed. She sleeps like a rock. She doesn’t say she has a visitor or that Mrs. Seaver likes early mornings best, sitting quietly with her American coffee and staring down into the courtyard where nothing grows and into which no one ever enters.
And so one morning, very early, Clara arrives with a paper parcel of warm brioches. Introductions are made. Clara sits in the large blue armchair. Mrs. Seaver and Elizabeth arrange themselves on the sofa. And then only the clocks speak. Elizabeth remembers sitting in the pitch black of her grandmother’s house when she was ten. Her aunt and grandmother occupied the darkness, and no one said a word. Still, the room was raucous with feeling: anger, regret, longing. Her grandmother’s knitting needles tsk-tsked. Occasionally her aunt sighed, a sound like ripples on water.
It’s as if we were all strangers, Elizabeth thinks, my aunt and my grandmother. Myself, too.
Now, in Paris, so many years later, it’s the same. Why is that? The clocks jabber, jitter, their cries unsteady, overlapping. Listening to them, one has the sense that they are trying to come into union, order, agreement. They are very near to reconciliation, the chimes and bells moving closer together the way it happens on a bright day outside that a person’s shadow aligns and unifies with her body as the sun climbs higher in the sky.
Finally Mrs. Seaver stands and raises her coffee cup toward Clara and Elizabeth, then walks into the kitchen, pours more from the pot on the stove. She does not return to the sofa or to her preferred seat overlooking the courtyard. Instead she crosses behind to stand at the large casement windows that give on to the Medici Fountain. Elizabeth glances at Clara, who does not seem to see her or anything else.
I don’t know what to do, Mrs. Seaver says. I think I might as well let myself go mad. Just give in to it.
You can do that for a while, Clara says.
That’s not what she means, Elizabeth says. She means forever.
If that were the case, Clara replies, she would already have done it. She would not be here. Suddenly, she lunges out of the blue chair and hurries across the room to stand beside Mrs. Seaver. You would not have been able to cross the ocean!
The last word is nearly a shout.
You can’t dishonor him that way, Clara says.
Mrs. Seaver says nothing. She might step away from the window, go into the guest room, and close the door, but she doesn’t move.
I travel, Clara says. My husband and I keep moving. We don’t dwell on it.
That’s not true, Elizabeth says.
Clara turns. What are you talking about? she says.
Elizabeth shakes her head. Every single minute we’ve spent together you’ve been doing just that. Dwelling.
Clara glares at her. That’s private, she says, biting off the last consonant.
All at once, Elizabeth sees the mother Clara must have been to Suzanne. She wants to refuse this vision. She wants all mothers to be perfect, devoted, sane. She wants to believe her own mother had been the one exception to a great rule of the universe.
Mrs. Seaver nods, as if to resolve some inner quarrel. It was the polio, she says. That, and losing you, Elizabeth. She turns away from the window.
I’m sorry, Elizabeth says.
He loved your voice. He told me that. Many times. Her voice has so much life and color in it, he
said. It’s so rare. I don’t think he could bear the thought of never hearing your voice again.
What did he mean by rare? Elizabeth says.
I’m not sure.
This, Clara says. Look.
Elizabeth rises from the sofa and stands between Clara and Mrs. Seaver, and they watch the bands of rose and violet and gold arc and blaze over the Luxembourg Gardens. They stare hard, as if they must get the full meaning. They stare until the color fades into nothing, into plain daylight. The clocks sing like a drunken girl, first a little growling, then a bit of tune, high notes and low.
Louise lets herself in the front door, and still Elizabeth and the grieving mothers do not turn, even after she disappears into her bedroom, even after they hear a splash of singing, a long, contented sigh, and the ringing of her shoes, dropped, one and then the other, to the floor.
The drinking helps until it doesn’t. But then it helps again the next day. At first, Elizabeth feels camaraderie with the entire world, every man, woman, and child, animal, vegetable, and mineral. After that, there is anger and irritation. Then sadness. Then (sometimes) sleep. In the morning, the sensation of walking along the edge of a very high precipice, below which lie sharp gray rocks, glinting shards of glass, raised tips of bayonets, explosive devices with wires trailing from them like a woman’s long hair. Elizabeth understands that she is not allowed to stop or step back—in fact, stepping back would mean falling off the other side, where the rocks below lie hidden in shadow. The person who best understands her does not write or call. The person whose touch means everything, the brush of lips, the touch on her back from this person, nothing.
Silence. Robert, Mother. A whisper of Suzanne, always, in this apartment.
Margaret, in a different way.
The drinking causes the pain, the loss, to feel farther away. The pain starts to get lost! First, the pain drifts into the next room, then out the front door. In a half hour, the pain stands outside the apartment building in the middle of rue de Vaugirard calling halfheartedly. Then it wanders over to the Medici Fountain and tries to wash its face. In an hour, it’s lighting a candle in Notre-Dame. Later it’s in Gare Saint-Lazare, stepping onto a northbound train. Then it is in Douarnenez, gazing out to sea. Douarnenez, in a rented sailboat.
The poems take too long to write—the lines, each word, each letter comes with excruciating slowness. All day long she sits at the window and watches the courtship of doves. Their breasts are pink and orange and brown. Not gray as is commonly believed. Spots on their backs like inkblots, like all those missteps in every poem. They dig into their own feathers with their beaks, a repeated, quick puncturing. It looks quite painful. They do this for hours, perched side by side, and what comes of it? Finally, they begin to groom each other, kiss with their beaks, which looks like fighting. Sometimes the wing feathers lift to reveal the sleek blue-gray bodies, as if they were the secret. Suddenly, the male hops on the back of the female, both staring off in the same direction. It’s very quick, this part. Then they fly off separately, east and west.
Sigrid. Where is Sigrid?
Just across the river. Of course.
I could fly over there, Elizabeth thinks. Over the Seine joining itself again off the prow of the île Saint-Louis and bearing countless schools of little fish running in verses. Above all the grim Haussmann buildings standing lined up like colonels looking for work, high above Margaret, her face turned away from me, Mother and Robert and Suzanne lying down in the dark. I could do it. I could fly. If only she would send me an invitation.
* * *
Remember the Germans who took us sailing? Elizabeth asks Louise.
They were fun, weren’t they? Louise says. I’ll call Ann.
Sigrid invites Elizabeth to meet her at 78 rue de Lille, the German embassy, and from there walk to a café for lunch. She waits for Elizabeth in the embassy’s front garden, then guides her inside to tour the building. The large reception rooms are lavishly decorated with bouquets of flowers the size of small children and hung with portraits of dour German statesmen and tapestries depicting scenes from the Nibelungenlied. There is a melancholy dilapidation about the sofas and chairs, covered in gray velvet, as if no one has time to sit anymore. Elizabeth is introduced to the deputy ambassador, Ernst vom Rath, whose attention becomes suddenly more focused when Sigrid tells him Elizabeth is an American, though perhaps Sigrid has also said something more. Then Elizabeth hears Dichter, and vom Rath seems suddenly lit from inside. He insists on showing them some of the private quarters, including a state apartment on the second floor. This, he says, is where the führer will stay when he comes to visit. Bien sûr, Sigrid says, her voice sounding oddly mechanical. Elizabeth notices that more bouquets of fresh flowers stand in the small entry hall, on the dining room table, and on a low dresser in the bedroom. She wonders if the visit is today or tomorrow. She realizes vom Rath thinks she writes for an American newspaper.
Vom Rath asks where they will have lunch, and when Sigrid tells him, he is very pleased. A writer should be there, he tells Elizabeth in English. But the most important writers dine at Le Boeuf sur le Toit, he says. André Gide, for example.
I was supposed to go to a party for him, Elizabeth says quickly. But I was too shy about my bad French.
Sigrid and vom Rath nod politely. They smile. Expressions of general solicitude flash, then diminish. Still vom Rath does not let them go, even though there is nothing left to see besides the room full of telephones and small desks where Sigrid works. It is as if they are silently conferring about something. They direct Elizabeth ahead, and she feels quite sure if she glanced over her shoulder, she would see them pointing at her back and exchanging looks.
The door to the German ambassador’s office is closed, though voices can be heard from inside. Sigrid and vom Rath stand for a moment, listening unabashedly. They step closer to the door. Elizabeth is stunned to see this. It’s a melodrama. She wishes Louise or Margaret were here to witness the comedy of it, the pure theater. She expects vom Rath will turn to her, put his finger to his lips, and wink. She wants badly to take her camera from her pocketbook and snap a picture of vom Rath. His large blue eyes give him a look of perpetual surprise, and his mouth twitches as if he’s holding back laughter or having a great deal of trouble keeping a secret.
Finally, there really is nothing left to show or tell, so vom Rath allows them to leave for lunch. He seems deflated, saddened, as he waves from the front steps of the embassy, as if left behind on dry land, while they are a ship setting sail.
He seems to think you’re never coming back, Elizabeth says.
He’s . . . How do you say it? Sigrid asks. She rubs her eyes with her fists to pantomime weeping.
Emotional?
Yes. At Le Boeuf, they call him Notre-Dame de Paris.
Elizabeth wants to laugh, but she understands the significance of what Sigrid has just told her. They walk one block and go into the café. They sit and order omelets and a pichet of wine, but then Sigrid suggests they move to a table outside so that the sun will warm them.
What do you write about? Sigrid asks when they are settled again.
Not very much, Elizabeth tells her. This and that, small things.
Small things can become larger.
That is my hope.
Sigrid reaches quickly across the table to touch Elizabeth’s hand, a gesture at once meaningful and abstract, automatic.
Marie and Ann, she says, they are my mothers.
Elizabeth waits for the sentence that will explain this turn in the conversation. The omelets arrive with a salad of lettuce and tomato. The colors on the plates seem electric and weighty, larger than the words for them: yellow, green, red. Even the steam rising off the omelets has a kind of heft. They wait for the wine, which the waiter brings in a green pitcher, a shade darker than the salad, with two small glasses.
At home, Elizabeth says, we would use these for juice.
Such as orange juice? But in France, you don’t have a wineglass
until evening.
That’s good. So the luxury is later.
Exactly. May I read your writing one day?
One day, Elizabeth says. I haven’t anything with me now.
This is very nice, Sigrid says, pointing her knife at the plates. She reverts to French, but slowly, so that Elizabeth can catch the words for eggs and for this afternoon. She taps the little wineglass with her knife. Elizabeth lifts the glass and drinks quickly, as if she has been instructed, and Sigrid laughs.
Speak to me in French, Elizabeth. Practice so you can meet Gide one day.
Elizabeth can make a sentence one word at a time: Vous me dites qu’est-ce que je dois faire. Tell me what I must do. It is flirtation, but also a very interesting and productive method of conversing: one can only express what is elementary and true, what can be done. It is impossible to say too much or tell a lie. One can talk about what’s on the table: les oeufs, la fourchette, du vin. La serviette—no, under the table, clutched in the fist, that one. La bouteille d’eau like a window between them, Sigrid’s fingerprints around the middle of the bottle where she has lifted it to pour. Everything else floats in gulfs of silence. Elizabeth wills herself to eat more slowly, take smaller sips of wine. Sigrid seems to be doing the same, dividing her tomato slice into eight (Elizabeth counts to herself in French), pouring the wine a finger at a time.
They comment on the passersby in a kind of shorthand or beginner’s language lesson. L’homme qui porte le chapeau brun. L’enfant pleure. La dame a perdu quelque chose, accurate observations but without context, whole empty worlds around them. It would be utterly frightening to know the story of the brown hat or the child’s tears or the woman’s loss. It would be overstatement. Too much.
