News of Our Loved Ones

by Abigail DeWitt

  But you and your wife will have no children of your own. You won’t discuss it, though others—people who don’t realize “Naquet” is Jewish—will mention the importance of rebuilding the nation, the maternal fulfillment every woman requires, the optimism restored to us by our progeny. You’ll shrug a little, or your wife will. You might exchange a glance, though you won’t need a glance to know what the other is thinking. Such excellent children you could have had! Smart, funny, beautiful. And so many names to choose from: your parents, hers, her siblings, Raphaël, Suzanne. But the problem is not exactly—or not only—the long history of Jewish persecution. The problem is how easily the world rips open, how closely darkness hews to light.

  At last you’ll be too old, and no one will bother you about rebuilding the nation anymore. Most of the world will be too young to imagine that you ever really had a life. Still, they’ll adore you, with your bright blue eyes, your grin, such a kind doctor.

  At seventy, you’ll retire to Ile d’Yeu, and in the ocean you’ll find that you’re as flexible as a boy again. You’ll give thanks for all of it: the smell of the Atlantic and the shimmering taste of oysters and your wife’s hair, fading from gray to white until it’s no more than dandelion fluff. She’ll make you laugh until your eyes well up with tears, and then she’ll bring you plates of food so lovely they make you gasp. Every morning, you’ll sit in the sand with her, wearing a cloth cap, shucking oysters, cleaning mussels.

  After the War

  Ash

  Françoise has always been the quiet one, so good and amenable that at first no one notices her silence. Oncle Henri tells the others—Tante Chouchotte, Geneviève, Simon—about the weeks of digging, how they slept in the basement of the church with the rest of the town, how difficult it was to arrange the burials. He explains that they had to bury Yvonne in a suitcase because, by the time they found any part of her, there were no more caskets or lumber. After the war, he says, he’d like to move the graves down to Brittany, where Maman’s people were from. His voice is measured and slow. He has had plenty of time to think about this, during the three weeks they spent in the rubble and the two weeks on the road to Paris, where the whole family is staying now, in Simon and Michelle’s apartment.

  No one thinks to ask Françoise any questions, until, one day, they do. The war is over; Françoise has had tuberculosis, gone to a sanatorium, returned. Simon and Michelle are divorced.

  Michelle accosts Françoise on the street one afternoon as she’s leaving school; she wants to know everything that happened in Caen. “Simon was never the same afterward,” she says, though Simon was nowhere near Caen when the house was bombed. Her eyes are wide with bewilderment and outrage, but Françoise shakes her head and hurries home.

  She thinks the question is an aberration. Michelle is more erratic than ever, but who can blame her? Françoise thinks what Simon has done—divorcing her outright—is unforgivable. But a few weeks later, when Geneviève and Françoise are washing the dishes, Geneviève turns to her. “Do you want to tell me how it was?” she asks. “You can tell me anything.” Her voice is lilting and gentle, the way their mother’s was, but there’s a hunger in it, too, and Françoise gazes silently down into the soapy water. For weeks afterward, Françoise can feel Geneviève watching her and then Geneviève meets an American, and is gone. She sets sail for America as easily as if they had never been sisters at all.

  To console herself, Françoise considers that no one will ask her anything now. She marries a professor of history with a beautiful speaking voice. The things he talks about barely interest her, but she likes the sound of him, and she lets him go on, nodding and murmuring as she chops vegetables for their supper, heats the stew, sets and clears the table, washes the dishes. She dusts their apartment every day, sweeps and mops the floor, cleans the windows, and when he follows her from room to room, telling her about his lectures, the prizes he is being considered for, the people he has met, she wonders if there isn’t a better way to remove the scuff marks from the floor.

  “For the love of God,” he says, finally. “Will you just sit? The floor is clean enough!” He’s sorry, he continues, he didn’t mean to yell, but he wants a wife, not a servant. An equal. He asks her about her past, explaining that they should have no secrets.

  “There’s not much to tell,” she shrugs. “I’m not very interesting.”

  He sighs and, eventually, turns to other, younger women, who seem to have nothing to hide. Because he’s a man of principle, he doesn’t conceal his affairs and, when he’s not with someone else, he still sleeps with his wife. What can she do? He’s a man, she thinks, with a man’s needs. She tries to do the deep cleaning when he’s away, but since she doesn’t always know when he’ll come home, he often finds her on her knees, scrubbing.

  * * *

  For years, there is nothing. A stillness in her heart, as if nothing happened. As if she herself had not happened. She has children—a twin boy and girl, and then another boy, another girl—and she knits, she volunteers for charities—but all of it, the click of knitting needles, the meetings, the sight of her children asleep in their beds, seems like a shadow play. She knits more, collects more bags of clothes for the poor, organizes her children’s holidays, oversees their schoolwork, but she cannot feel herself anywhere. It doesn’t worry her because she can’t remember anything else. She’s a good person, she hopes. She has helped many people and her children are well behaved.

  Every Sunday, she takes the children to have lunch with Oncle Henri, who beams at the sight of them and praises her for raising them so well. Then he sends the children out to play in the Luxembourg or, if it’s raining, to explore the Louvre. She sits with him in the parlor, knitting while he reads the paper. This is her favorite part of the week, these hours of easy, companionable silence. He’s happy in her company, he says, so she’s happy.

  * * *

  The spring after Oncle Henri dies—her children are grown by now and out of the house—she’s walking home with the groceries on a sunny day when the sky suddenly takes on a greenish cast. The air turns gray, cold, and the shadows on the pavement appear angular, like geometry problems. It doesn’t last long—it’s only a partial eclipse—but her vision blurs and her legs are so weak that she stops in a café and takes a seat in the corner, as far from the door as possible. When the waiter comes, she orders a hot chocolate, though she has not drunk hot chocolate since she was a little girl, and she needs to get home with the groceries.

  For days afterward, she is sore and irritable. Her skin is too sensitive and her eyes hurt, as if she is coming down with the flu. When she begins to cough, she hopes it’s not a recurrence of tuberculosis. The cough doesn’t worsen, but, still, there is something inside her, dark and poisonous, that makes it hard to breathe. She wonders if she has cancer, if she might be dying, and is surprised that the thought doesn’t trouble her. She wouldn’t mind dying, she thinks, but the moment she thinks it, she knows that’s not it, and is filled with despair.

  Memory floats through her like ash.

  She remembers, now, being thirsty. She remembers piles of rocks and a stone floor, the plaid of her mother’s apron. Glass shattering in another room.

  The images coalesce: utter blackness, and then twilight. She thought Oncle Henri was a ghost, and then she blinked the dust from her eyes and saw that she, too, was covered from head to toe with a fine, white powder. People were running in the street, all of them coated white, all racing toward the church.

  Dust sifted from their eyes, their ears, their mouths, onto the floor of the church basement, and the nuns’ habits dragged through the dust, turning white and soft, as if their hems were trimmed with fur. There was no food that day, and only small amounts of water.

  All afternoon and into the night, they sat in the basement, listening to the explosions up above, the blast-force crashing of the windows in the sanctuary. In the morning, Oncle Henri told her to stay put, but she crept behind him, back toward the house. He didn’t s
ee her until it was too late—what could he do? It would be as dangerous to return as to keep going. Bombs fell on the horizon, the sky lit with flames.

  When they had pulled the first beam from the rubble, he scrambled down through the shards of glass, the stones, and wept. Maman lay beneath a broken window frame, hardly bruised at all, her arms thrown over her head, little half-moons of sweat staining her apron.

  * * *

  There are other memories, too, now, older ones: her siblings playing in the garden, Maman and Oncle Henri drinking coffee in the shade of the apple tree. She remembers the honeysuckle growing up the side of the house, and Yvonne’s laughter, the way it tumbled out of her, sending her running to the privy. I’m going to pee, I’m going to pee, I’m going to pee!

  * * *

  She could not get the dust out of her lungs; it clogged her windpipe for days.

  When she saw what was left of Yvonne, she screamed. “Sh-sh,” Oncle Henri murmured. “Sh-sh. Try to be brave. You’re my only child now.” He lifted the arm from the ashes and cradled it as if it were an infant, indifferent to the smell of it, rotting red and purple in his arms. “You’re all I have left,” he said, his eyes bloodshot. “Do you understand, Françoise?”

  “We have Geneviève,” she said, trying to control her voice. “Geneviève and Simon.” But Oncle Henri shook his head, as if he did not believe in Geneviève or Simon.

  At night, Oncle Henri held her as close as her mother always had, and she clung to the sturdiness of his body, the tightness of his arms.

  * * *

  She has no memory of her real father, who died when she was a baby, though she remembers sunlight streaming in through the slats of the nursery shutters, Yvonne singing to her dolls, and Maman telling Yvonne to hush.

  The darkness in her lungs, the flulike symptoms, come and go for months, but she does not succumb to them. She keeps the house clean, prepares her husband’s meals, delivers food to the poor.

  One day, when her husband is spending the weekend with a girlfriend, she hears her mother’s voice as clearly as if Maman were holding her, a murmur next to her ear, and she sits down on the edge of the bed and weeps.

  * * *

  After they’d found Maman, after they’d carried away the broken window frame and picked the shards of glass from Maman’s hair, Oncle Henri carried Maman out to the garden. He went back to the house to look for the others, but she stayed in the garden with Maman. Soot drifted onto Maman’s face, her arms, her chest, and Françoise brushed it away with her own soot-blackened hand. She has never loved another body as much as she loved her mother’s.

  * * *

  She’s sad for a long time after she hears her mother’s voice, but everyone thinks it’s because of her husband’s too-public infidelity. Her children tell her not to put up with it; Simon disparages the whole institution of marriage. Geneviève knows nothing of what’s going on, she lives in North Carolina, married to her American; but Geneviève’s old friend, Marie-Claire, invites Françoise to the Alps for a change of scene. Why not? she thinks. She likes Marie-Claire. They were in the same sanatorium for a while, their beds side by side.

  She watches the evening light wash across Mont Blanc from Marie-Claire’s balcony and drinks too much of the blueberry liqueur Marie-Claire offers her. She hears herself talking on and on about her husband’s mistresses, as if she could possibly care about them! But she cannot shut up, she has turned into a chatterbox. She thinks of Oncle Henri, and realizes that he’s the only person she wants to talk to, because he carried Maman to the garden, because he cradled Yvonne’s arm without flinching. She remembers the way he called her, Françoise, his child, and she wonders suddenly if she was.

  She begins to shake and Marie-Claire puts a blanket over her, asks if she wants to go inside, but, despite her drunkenness, the way the balcony rocks and the mountains vibrate in the distance, she holds her tongue, finally. It’s all with her now as clearly as if the planes were still diving overhead: the smell of the fires, the blackened rubble, Maman’s perfect, unbruised body. She can see the sooty tomato vines growing beside her mother, hear the terrified, starving chickens, the scrabbling rabbits. It was all a lie, she thinks, the house with the honeysuckle and the garden in back, the flock of chickens, and the fat little rabbits. Her older siblings busy with their lives—Louis and his girlfriends, Simon and his books, Geneviève playing the violin, and Yvonne always getting into trouble—while she stayed by her mother’s side, the dutiful one, her mother’s best girl. The bastard child.

  She stumbles to her feet, certain she’ll be sick, and Marie-Claire tries to follow her, but she pushes her away. In the bathroom, she kneels over the toilet, a fifty-year-old woman, heaving air.

  But in the morning, she wakes from a dreamless sleep with nothing more than a headache and a dry mouth, retaining nothing of the previous evening except the vague sense that she was a fool. Then she remembers that she suspected her mother and Oncle Henri of having an affair before they were married and she laughs harshly: a cheating husband has made her imagine the worst of everyone. She hopes she said nothing about it to Marie-Claire. No, it was the girlfriends she went on about. What nonsense!

  * * *

  On the trip back to Paris, she’s lulled by the train’s rhythm, the rushing fields. But then she thinks of Oncle Henri again, ashamed that she doubted him and doubted her own mother. It’s stupid to dwell on the past; it’s too far behind and you can’t see any of it clearly. What appears over your shoulder to be a turtle might have been a hat! Best to put it all out of your mind, once and for all. She’d allowed herself to wallow in the past, and what good had it done? It had given her a cough and made her skin hurt, that’s all.

  She reaches brusquely for her knitting basket, determined to get hold of herself, but she can’t shake her regret, the sense that she has wronged the two people who raised her to be what she is: a decent, hardworking wife and mother. And Oncle Henri wasn’t even obliged!

  Well, then, when she gets to Lyon, she’ll change trains. She’ll go to Pornic, where the family plot is, and tidy the grave. Throw away the dead flowers, replace them with a pot of something that will last awhile. Ivy. She nods, happy to have made up her mind, and then she pulls out her knitting needles and casts off.

  The Ransom Ring

  Tante Chouchotte said America was too far to see: what Polly was staring at so hard that she was going to ruin her eyes was not land. That strip of blue at the edge of the long gray ocean was only more water.

  Tante Chouchotte didn’t like Americans. Polly’s mother had married one—a cellist, of all things!—and left the family forever. Polly’s mother came back for the summers, but she spent the whole time in Paris, scattering her children around with friends and relatives in the countryside: the older ones, Evie and Louise and Pete Junior, to Marie-Claire’s, in the Alps; Polly to the beach with the little cousins.

  Polly was a pill—une pilule—gloomy and solemn and given to crying over nothing at all. Her siblings had gone to the countryside for the summer as soon as they could speak—Tante Chouchotte herself had taken care of them when they were babies—and their French was perfect, but Polly was five and this was her first summer with Chouchotte. Last summer she had still gone everywhere with her mother. Imagine! A four-year-old traipsing around to the kinds of cafés and bars Geneviève was known to frequent. Geneviève knew nothing of the work of disciplining children. She’d had a charmed life, Tante Chouchotte said. That was the trouble with her.

  And Polly had nothing to be sad about: the beach was lovely. If Polly had lived through the war, she wouldn’t keep asking to speak to her mother, as if you could just use the telephone whenever you felt like it, for no particular reason. The telephone was for grown-ups, it wasn’t a toy. If Polly had known the war, she would hush.

  * * *

  Polly had drunk the war in with her mother’s milk; she loved stories about the Germans. At home, in North Carolina, her mother had a box of shadowy, scallop-edged photog
raphs. The pictures were taken in a garden, and the people in the photographs sat at a round table beneath an apple tree, their faces tilted toward the shade. Polly’s mother would pull the photographs out one by one and hold them in her palm. This is your tante Françoise, and this is your grandmother; this is your step-grandfather and this is your tante Yvonne. It is not real coffee they drink—we have no coffee, only chicory—and there is no sugar to make a canard. The people in the photographs had been bombed a little later in the summer, buried beneath the rubble of the house, but you couldn’t see the house in any of the photographs, and when Polly was older—seven, eight—she would wonder why the family hadn’t stayed safely in the garden. But now, she questioned nothing except the horizon.

  The box of photographs was kept in a trunk, and next to the box, nestled in bits of old flannel, was a thin, rusted helmet with a ragged hole in its side. No one is knowing I have Louis’s helmet, Polly’s mother said one day, sitting on the floor of her bedroom, her back against the trunk. She was holding Polly in the V of her legs. You don’t tell. Here, she said. You hold the helmet. Not the photographs, only the helmet. The helmet is strong. She pulled Polly up onto her lap and laughed the way she did when she was sad. Not enough strong, but even so, strong. Louis had been her older brother. She put her hand on Polly’s forehead and stroked Polly’s hair; then she ran her fingernails lightly along the inside of Polly’s arm until Polly shivered and laughed and buried her face in her mother’s long, smooth neck.

  She was not like other French mothers. She told Polly secrets, let her do whatever she wanted.