News of Our Loved Ones

by Abigail DeWitt

  It was beautiful outdoors, the sky above the tall, lovely buildings like blue silk, a breeze blowing in off the Atlantic, flattening women’s skirts against their legs, and ruffling the fur of a poodle relieving himself in the Luxembourg. I was still full from the night before, and if I softened my gaze, I could imagine, as we hurried toward rue Soufflot, that the patisserie was full of bread and croissants, that they were serving real coffee at Le Rostand, but just then Simon and Michelle appeared, running toward us.

  Michelle had the exalted look of someone who, for once, has been proven right. “Your mother’s dead,” she called out, her eyes feverish. “Your mother, your grandmother, the darling Yvonne. A bomb fell on your house. Only your stepfather and Françoise survived!”

  Before the words could sort themselves in my mind, my stomach dissolved, my bones turned to water. Maman is dead, Maman, Yvonne, Grandmère. I felt the warmth of my bladder emptying onto the sidewalk, the breezy warmth of the summer day.

  * * *

  Years later, when we were already very old, and hardly anyone alive even remembered the war, Simon told me that Tante Chouchotte stood on the sidewalk screaming. He’d never heard a scream like that before.

  “That’s all you remember?” I asked. “Nothing else?”

  “I knew then I’d have to divorce Michelle.”

  “But nothing else from that day? You don’t remember me?”

  “You didn’t show up—we were all so worried.”

  “But I was there.”

  “No, it was just Chouchotte, screaming.”

  I couldn’t imagine Chouchotte screaming—Chouchotte, who had long ceased to be the chain-smoking aunt of my youth and who had become, in the end, simply an old woman, fat and gossipy, with a bag of candy in her pocket for the little children.

  But I remembered the sensation of peeing in front of everyone. I hadn’t been embarrassed, I hadn’t been able to see anyone clearly enough to be embarrassed; the sky had darkened, and nothing held together. The knowledge of my mother’s death kept coming at me, over and over, but I didn’t faint, I held my head up to the dark, shattering sky and raised my arms, “Lord, they are with you!” Someone slapped me, I stumbled back on the pavement, and then I could see again: Simon in his brown suit and Michelle with her little pink hat, the patisserie with its empty shelves, and next to it, the café where all the customers sat motionless, watching us.

  I saw everything: the bright, blue, silken sky; the trembling leaves of the plane trees; the dappled shadows on the sidewalk almost camouflaging the splash of urine between my feet; and Chouchotte, with her hand still raised, as if she meant to slap me again. “Don’t you dare bring God into this.”

  And although Chouchotte apologized to me later, and everyone was very kind, what I would carry with me for the rest of my life was the feel of Chouchotte’s palm against my cheekbone, the hard, flat sting of it, like my mother’s.

  The Mother

  There are guards in front of Raphaël’s house, swastikas hanging from his windows. The sight knocks the wind out of me and I stop like a fool in the middle of the street. A bicycle weaves past me, and Madame Fleury, walking back from the square, wishes me good morning, but I can’t stop looking at the house. Black-and-red banners fluttering against the stone. If one of my girls behaved this way, I’d slap her, tell her to get hold of herself—I need to get to the butcher’s, see if he has anything besides horse marrow today—but I don’t move.

  The street rises toward me, as if I might faint, but the moment passes. Why should the swastikas on Raphaël’s house make me dizzy? There are swastikas all over town. My son Louis was killed in the Battle of France two years ago and I didn’t faint then. I didn’t faint when half the city fled, their belongings piled into wheelbarrows and baby carriages, or when Huntziger signed the surrender and gave everything to the Germans. I learned to turn rabbits into coats and stews, make bread from cornmeal and molasses, stretch out a turnip soup to last the week. I taught the children I still had not to cry.

  But now, when there’s a whole day’s shopping still ahead of me—the lines, the jostling, the possibility, if I hurry, of getting something better than horse marrow, a bit of liver, maybe—I can’t move. The guards could shoot the pavement, scare me off like a stray dog, but they won’t. I’m not worth the trouble, a middle-aged housewife listing before them in the breeze.

  I imagine the officers inside: a dozen of them, sitting down to breakfast. Croissants so warm and tender that even the officers are moved to tears, the finest coffee, and for each man, his own bowl of sugar. But what difference does any of that make? What difference if, even now, some lieutenant is bathing in Raphaël’s bathtub and another one is spitting in his sink? If a third, washed and fed, is sitting idly at the piano, running his fingers over the keys?

  What matters is that Raphaël is gone, that he escaped just in time and the rumor is that they’re still looking for him, which means they haven’t found him, which means he’s safe. And though it’s sickening to see Germans living in his house, the only surprise is that they did not requisition it long ago. They let him stay there—a Jew!—and didn’t move in until he left.

  For two years, we begged him to go. He shrugged us off, he even grinned. He wasn’t a practicing Jew, he said, he was a Frenchman, as if that made a difference. He knew it didn’t—he’d sent his wife south right after the surrender—but even after they stripped him of his license, forced him to pin a star to his jacket, he didn’t follow her. He stayed in Caen, for the ocean breeze, he insisted. And if a child was sick, he went discreetly to the patient’s house. He had no medicine, but he could diagnose a rash, set a dislocated limb, apply a poultice. He kept laughing as if nothing had changed, performing his card and coin tricks to distract the children from their pain.

  “The man’s a fool,” my mother said, and then, as if she knew everything: “Like you, Pauline.”

  But Raphaël did leave, finally. Two weeks ago, his parents were arrested and he was gone the next day. God keep him safe.

  Beneath the ruffling banners, the guards stand perfectly still, indifferent to my gawking. I taste something metallic, like a storm, but the air is light today, the sky clear.

  I’ve never told anyone about Raphaël, not even the priest. I have other sins to reveal in the confessional, and I wouldn’t know what to say about Raphaël. It was all such a long time ago! Almost twenty years. We were still reeling from the last war, could not have dreamed up this one. I was a newlywed still, simpleminded as a child, and I suppose my innocence was the start of everything. When I’d told my mother I was marrying Daniel Delasalle, she burst into tears. “A diabetic!” she cried. “You’ll be a widow before you’re twenty-five.”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “I would die for him.” Daniel seemed so strong to me. He was a handsome man—broad shoulders; thick, wild eyebrows—but I can’t remember if his eyes were hazel or brown.

  Within a year, Daniel himself suggested an annulment. We were nineteen and twenty and we spent our days laughing, making up pet names for each other, who knows what. He said our marriage hadn’t been properly consummated, that he might never be able to be a true husband. I had no idea what he was talking about. We clung to each other every night and he touched me in places I did not know the names of. Not a stitch of clothing between us. It was something I could not permit myself to think of for more than a minute or two in the light of day. How could I have known a marriage required anything else? The nuns had taught me to change my clothes and bathe without fully undressing and, until my wedding night, I’d never seen myself naked.

  “We may never be able to have children,” he went on.

  I’d been heating the milk for his coffee and I turned the stove off so sharply the knob fell into my hand. “Stop it,” I said and I went to sit on his lap. I breathed in the sweet, diabetic smell of him, a smell I loved beyond all reason. “You’re all I need.”

  He wasn’t, of course. A few months later, Raphaël—he was still
Docteur Naquet to me then—mentioned a pair of four-year-old twin orphans in need of a home. I can’t remember why we were talking, or even where we ran into each other. I took Raphaël’s hand in mine though I barely knew him and said I’d take the twins. Simon and Louis. Raphaël laughed, that easy laugh of his, as if the whole world were a delightful joke. “Your husband will agree, Madame?”

  “He’ll be so happy,” I said, imagining him reading to them at night while I darned socks.

  “Very well, then, Madame.” Raphaël laughed again. “The boys will be happy, too.”

  I can see his eyes perfectly: round and blue as a robin’s eggs. He’s a short, plump man, but all the mothers adored him.

  When Simon came down with polio, Raphaël drove him to the hospital—Daniel was at work—and afterward, he came back to the house, where I was waiting with Louis on my lap, afraid to let him out of my sight. Raphaël patted my hand. “It’s an excellent hospital, Madame, and we’ve caught it early.” And then, because Louis kept squirming, he pretended to find a coin behind Louis’s ear. “Again!” Louis begged, and Raphaël produced coin after magical coin.

  Four and a half months later, when Simon was discharged with nothing more than a limp, the hospital said it was Raphaël’s early diagnosis that had saved Simon’s life. I made an apple cake to celebrate his homecoming, though I didn’t often make desserts, since Daniel couldn’t eat them.

  We stood together on the terrace after we’d put the boys to bed, taking in the evening air. “You should bake something for the doctor,” Daniel said.

  A breeze lifted toward us, carrying with it the smell of honeysuckle. Or maybe I was just smelling Daniel.

  “Oh,” I said. “I don’t want to be like the other mothers. You have no idea, Daniel. They give the doctor little presents all the time, wear their best dresses when they go to see him.”

  “One cake,” he said. “That’s perfectly respectable.”

  And so I took Raphaël and his wife a cake. It was a delicate little almond cake, warm from the oven, but then, because Simon was sick again that fall, I took over some profiteroles. When Louis broke his arm, I made a tarte tatin, the apples perfectly caramelized. Later—I can’t remember the occasion—an opera cake. Once I had started baking, it seemed, I couldn’t stop.

  All that time alone in the kitchen was too much. A girl ought to avoid daydreams. I’d figured out by then how our marriage was unusual, though I never worried about Daniel’s health. I could no more imagine his mortality than my own, but the lives of children seemed so fragile, like seedlings loose in the ground. It was Simon who could have died!

  Louis tore up the garden with his games—Simon, still weak, leaned against the apple tree, laughing—and all that time, while I was beating egg whites, melting chocolate, grinding nuts, I thought of nothing but babies, as if a dozen children could protect me from the loss of any one. Not just any babies: my own. The warmth of a newborn in my arms, my body sufficient for its needs. A pleasure I’d never know, I thought.

  * * *

  You’re spoiling us, Raphaël’s wife said, each time I showed up with dessert.

  Oh, I’d say. We had extra. We are so grateful to your husband.

  An extra tarte tatin? Whoever heard of such a thing? I made a fool of myself like all the other mothers, but Raphaël’s wife barely let on. There was only the briefest flash of irritation in her eyes. She was a tall woman, very striking, with hair as black as an Oriental’s and beautiful posture. She would accept my gift at the front door without inviting me in, and I’d smile at her a little too eagerly. I never saw Raphaël when I brought him gifts, but I could hear him in the back of the house, playing the piano, and I strained to listen. I have no ear, so it wasn’t the music that moved me, but the fact of his playing after a long day of soothing brows and taking temperatures.

  Sometime around the opera cake, or maybe it was when I took over a chocolate torte, his wife didn’t answer the door. The housemaid appeared, Mathilde, so delicate and blond I could not help gaping at her. “Madame is out of town,” she said and she ushered me in as if I were an important guest. She went to the back of the house and the piano stopped abruptly. Raphaël came out with his bag already in hand, saw me, and asked if everyone was all right. “Oh, yes,” I said. I had just brought him a little something. He smiled at Mathilde, nodding as if to say it’s all right, you can go, but in the future, I’m only to be disturbed if a child is sick. Mathilde blushed, the color rising from her collarbone to her crown, and I handed her the dessert, marveling at her nearly transparent skin. I had a flash of jealousy, some annoyance that all the women in the Naquet household were so beautiful, and I was about to leave when Raphaël sighed suddenly. “Come in, Madame Delasalle,” he said, and helped me out of my coat.

  He led me down the hall, into the room with the piano, and we sat facing each other, not saying a word. For once, his eyes weren’t full of laughter and I was so uncomfortable I could not stop jiggling my knee. He asked after the family, finally, and I said everyone was well and that I was terribly sorry to disturb him. He smiled a little and lit a cigarette. “Nonsense, Madame Delasalle. I’m happy to be disturbed, as you say. My wife has gone to visit her relatives in Nantes and it’s nice to have a bit of company.”

  His father-in-law was very ill, he said, and I murmured my condolences. Then I asked him what he’d been playing on the piano, as if it would mean anything to me.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m being a poor host. The truth is—if you wouldn’t mind—may I finish the piece I was practicing? Then we can have a proper visit.”

  “Please,” I said. “Continue. I’d love to hear you.” I couldn’t offer to leave again, and force him to reassure me once more that I wasn’t a disturbance. I folded my hands on my lap, pressing down on my restless knee.

  He smiled at me, and then he went to the piano, lifted his hands, and began to play. His mouth fell open, twisting the way a musician’s mouth will do, revealing that depth of concentration which always riveted me more than any actual piece of music. His eyebrows arched, fell, and his head tilted from side to side. He seemed almost naked, and though I felt that I should look away, I couldn’t. He always looked at others, peering into throats and ears, examining backs, chests, the soles of feet, and his sudden exposure burned my eyes, made my heart leap in my throat. Even then, I didn’t understand the true nature of my feelings. He stopped suddenly, closed the lid of the piano, and rose, his face relaxed again and his eyes once more amused, as if I shouldn’t take anything—not even his music—too seriously.

  “You’re very kind,” he smiled, mistaking my obvious emotion for an appreciation of the music.

  “That was wonderful,” I said, glancing down at my hands. My fingernails were still dirty from planting daffodils earlier.

  “I didn’t know you were a music lover.”

  “Yes,” I murmured, embarrassed by my own act. My pretense of sophistication!

  “Well,” he said brightly, “let’s taste this lovely thing you’ve brought me.”

  “Oh, Docteur,” I said. “I couldn’t. It’s for you.”

  He laughed, patting his sturdy stomach. “With my wife gone, I’m in danger of eating the whole thing. Please, help me.” He laughed again: “I’m the beneficiary of far too many pastries, you know. And though I’m usually able to show some restraint, you seem to be the best patissier in Caen, Madame.”

  I flushed, thinking of Daniel, who could eat none of my pastries.

  “Surely you’re not worried about your figure?”

  I shook my head.

  “A glass of port, then? You won’t refuse me that, will you, after all your kindness?”

  “It’s you who are kind, Docteur.”

  “Come,” he laughed. “Let’s taste this.”

  I accepted the port then, relieved that I’d gone to his house in a plain housedress, though I couldn’t have known I’d see him. Still, it seemed like a mark of virtue.

  But the glass trem
bled in my hand and I had trouble forming words. He kept smiling at me, always on the point of laughter, as if I and my simple dress and the dessert I’d brought and the port we were drinking were the loveliest things he could imagine.

  I finished my glass too quickly and when I got up to leave, I wobbled a little. I wasn’t used to drinking anything strong. He caught me by the elbow. “Madame Delasalle,” he said. “Pauline.” He’d never used my first name before, and for an instant I bristled, thinking he saw me as one of his patients. A child.

  “Docteur Naquet,” I said.

  “Please, call me Raphaël.”

  “I should—” I said, but I couldn’t say what it was I should do. My hands were shaking.

  He urged me to sit down again, but I kept standing.

  “Shall I see you home?” he asked, finally.

  I looked away.

  He laughed a little. “I’m not sure if that’s a yes or a no.”

  I put my fingers to his lips. They were very full, and soft, like a woman’s.

  Afterward, I walked home alone. He called a taxi for me, but I got out as soon as it had turned the corner. It was misting out, and I remember the silence of the streets, the dark, slick cobblestones. I could have walked forever, down to the river and out to the edge of town, all the way to the ocean.

  Daniel was waiting for me in his bathrobe, reading the paper. I’d outstripped him, I thought, and that was the worst of it. I’d done what he couldn’t do. As if, with every kiss of Raphaël’s, I’d told Daniel, You’ll die. I’ll live on for years, do things you cannot dream of. It was the first time I believed I might lose him.

  Daniel knew what had happened, of course, what can happen so easily between a healthy young woman and a healthy man. I’d been gone over three hours. He said nothing, but I could see it in his face—a tension I’d never noticed in his features was gone, as if he’d been expecting this, waiting for it. He put down his paper, came to me, and held me for a long time. We went to bed without a word and I clung to him all night, alert with something I couldn’t name.