Polly said nothing. She scooped sand from the moat but ended up putting it in the wrong place, and Jean-Marie pushed her out of the way. Tante Françoise yanked him up by his fat, sandy wrist. Couldn’t he see that Polly was sad? Why did he have to be a bully? Jean-Marie’s eyes turned red, as if he might cry, too, and Polly’s throat burned; but when Tante Françoise walloped him, his eyes stayed perfectly dry, he did not even flinch.
* * *
Then it was time for snack. Un petit goûter. An interlude, their father called it, when they had goûter in North Carolina. No one was mad while they ate; Polly chewed the soft bread and sucked on the square of chocolate and no one scolded her. Tante Chouchotte and Tante Françoise discussed the afternoon’s plans between bites.
There were many things to do, because the day was eternal: the cemetery, lunch, nap, the market, and still the sun would be high in the sky—but Polly loved the cemetery; they went straight from the beach, carrying their pails and shovels, and holding hands so no one would get hurt. In the cemetery, everyone was quiet and everything was laid out in rows like in America. Long straight paths and between them, the square marble slabs. Even in the older part of the cemetery, where the pocked and blackened slabs were different sizes and often tilted, the paths were straight, and everyone was quiet. There was a nice smell in the cemetery, something dusty and fresh, like seagulls.
The family stone was high and wide, like a big bed, with many names. Tante Françoise and Tante Chouchotte stopped talking. All the children had to do was look at the stone and not make any noise. It was an easy thing to do and even the twins knew enough to stand still.
Polly could read her own name, “Pauline,” on the stone—that was her grandmother—and beneath “Pauline,” “Yvonne,” her mother’s sister, who died when she was sixteen. Yvonne was Evie’s name, too. Her mother had named all the girls after people who died in the war.
In the photographs in the box at home, in North Carolina, Grandmère Pauline and Tante Yvonne leaned into the shade, their faces speckled with light. You couldn’t see Tante Françoise’s face, because she was leaning against Grandmère Pauline, her head on Grandmère Pauline’s shoulder, her face turned away.
* * *
When I am young, I am a serious musician—it is difficult to believe, but I am! That is why I survive the war. We are living in Normandy, but I go to Paris for an audition. The audition, it is schedule for the six of June—I am not saying a lie!—so I am not home on D-day. I am in Paris playing the Bach Chaconne. I am too fortunate! This is why I survive. My family, they are everyone bombarded except my little sister Françoise.
It was Polly’s favorite story. Her mother told it over and over, holding Polly on her lap and reciting it whenever they had guests—other musicians, artists, her mother’s papier-mâché teacher. It was the only story that never changed. Other stories had different endings, depending on who was listening, but this one was always the same, so that Polly knew every breath, every pause, by heart. The guests gave low whistles, or said goddamn. Afterward, there was always a long silence during which Polly’s mother held her close and she could smell the Nina Ricci her mother put on for company. She could feel her mother’s pulse in her throat, and below that, hard and steady against her ribs, her mother’s heart.
Polly would rub her thumb over the polish on her mother’s fingernails and play with her diamond ring. The stone was big and the band was platinum, but if you covered up the diamond, it looked as simple and plain as a metal washer. Polly pulled it off and tried it on her own fingers. Once, when no one was looking, she put it in her mouth. She kept very still, so that she would not swallow the ring, feeling the weight of the diamond on her tongue. Then she let it slip forward, and she curled her tongue through it. The band clicked against her teeth, and the taste of the metal made them ache. She was afraid it would slide off her tongue and back down her throat, but she could not let the ring go, holding it in her mouth as if it were a living thing.
It was very expensive, her mother said, but it wasn’t an engagement ring. It was a ransom ring. She had bought it for herself after the war so that, if she was ever captured, she might exchange the ring for her freedom. That doesn’t make sense, the older children said, every time. What if the interrogators kill you? Her mother shrugged, but Polly was certain the ring would work. The beauty, it is a diversion. You offer your beauty, and you are free.
She held out her hand and Polly slipped the damp ring back onto her finger.
* * *
Françoise, she dig under the rocks for the body: my mother, my grandmother, my sister Yvonne. She has not found Yvonne, only her arm.
If there was no company, the children could draw the story out: Tell us again where Tante Françoise was standing, why she wasn’t crushed. How did she know it was Yvonne’s arm?
Polly wanted to lie down on the tombstone, that wide, flat, sun-warmed rock; she liked seeing her own name and Evie’s, and she felt as if the stone belonged to her, as if this were her home and Tante Françoise and Tante Chouchotte were merely guests.
She thought of Tante Yvonne’s arm and pictured her sister’s, tan and muscular because Evie played tennis, with the ring Evie had gotten from the gumball machine at the A&P. Evie had promised the ring to Polly if she could ever get another one to drop down. Polly imagined a hinged box, a velvet-lined case, like the one in which her mother kept her violin. In it, the arm lay whole and smooth and smelling of Johnson’s baby oil.
But it was time to go. Tante Chouchotte blew her nose and Tante Françoise glared at the children as if she meant to spank each and every one of them.
* * *
After the cemetery, after lunch, Tante Chouchotte herded them upstairs for a nap, swatting them and lifting herself painfully from step to step because her legs were swollen; she closed the shutters in the long room with all the beds and told them to shut their eyes.
As soon as she was gone, the Jean-Maries began whispering. Polly lay on her back, staring up into the shadows, breathing in the damp, salty air. She wouldn’t have minded lying quietly; she could have closed her eyes, pretended her mother was right beside her—but Jean and Jean-Marie and Marie-Jeanne and even the twins’ high, whispery voices tightened around her ribs and throat, so that it was hard to breathe, and then there was a square of light in the room: Marie-Jeanne was calling down to the grown-ups, telling them that Polly was sad again.
* * *
When she awoke, she was alone. The shutters had all been thrown open and she could hear the others in the yard below, playing the rhyming game. They were laughing, their voices ringing out into the afternoon light, and she realized all at once that she understood the game, as if, while she slept, she had crossed over, become fully French. She lay with her hands on her chest, breathing fast—it was like being home, to understand so perfectly—and she did not want to be left out anymore; only she didn’t want them to turn and look at her when she came down, she wanted it to be as if she had always been one of them.
She made her way down the long staircase, trembling with the strange, new sense of her own Frenchness. At the bottom of the staircase, the tiles were old and uneven and Polly was careful not to step on the cracks, but she hurried through the deep gloom of the kitchen, the soot-stained ceiling so low she’d be able to touch it in a few years, half-running as she wove between the stove and the garde-manger and the pail of scraps she could smell more than see. You weren’t allowed to run inside, but she had missed so much already, and she threw open the back door into the brilliant afternoon sun: the flagstones burned her feet, and she squinted, opening her mouth to join in the game—and stopped.
They had disappeared, vanishing at the sound of her, it seemed, and though she’d only loved them for a few minutes, she cried out, alarmed—even though she knew better, knew it was only a trick of light, and she could hear their voices—and then they came into focus, appearing in the sunshine as swarms of dots until they solidified, became colorful, animate—
&nbs
p; Mais enfin! Tante Chouchotte said, furiously. Why are you yelping? Did you step on something? A little rock? You should have put your shoes on. Go get them and you can play with the other children.
Tante Françoise stood up, the flat of her palm in the air. That’s enough, ça suffit. You wear me out.
The others paused, waiting to see if Tante Françoise would spank her.
But then it came to Polly, the answer, the thing she could say that would throw them off her scent just long enough to allow her to escape into the woods: “My mother called me.” Ma mère appelle moi. She could feel that there was something wrong with the way she’d said it, but they understood her.
“What?” Tante Françoise’s hand was still in the air. “Qu’est-ce-que c’est que cette histoire?” What kind of story is this?
“She misses me.” Elle manque moi.
“What do you mean?” Tante Chouchotte asked. “What do you mean, she called you?”
“She called me on the telephone.” The sun warmed the top of her head.
“The telephone?” Tante Françoise’s hand floated down, as if something about the telephone itself upset her, as if she wanted a phone call, too.
“She’s very sad.”
“The telephone rang,” Tante Françoise said, “and you answered it?”
“I’m very worried about her.” Polly knew exactly how to say that people were sad or worried in French. Je suis très inquiète.
“But why didn’t you tell us the phone was ringing? Why didn’t you say anything?” Tante Françoise was still standing, but her arms hung at her sides, and her voice was strangely high-pitched.
“I picked it up.” J’ai ramassé.
“You answered the phone,” Tante Chouchotte said sharply, as if Polly had done something dangerous, like turning on the stove, but still no one corrected the way Polly spoke. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I knew it was her, I knew she’d be in a hurry.”
Tante Chouchotte waved her hand as if she were shooing a fly. “Qu’est-ce-que c’est que cette histoire?” What kind of story is this?
“She told me she would call, so I knew.” She wasn’t cold, but her teeth had begun to chatter, and she dug her fingernails into her palms to stop them.
“The telephone rang,” Tante Chouchotte said, “and you answered it.”
“I knew. She told me she would call.” Elle dit à moi elle téléphone.
Tante Françoise sat down heavily. “Elle m’a dit qu’elle allait me téléphoner,” she murmured, offering a correction at last. “What did she say?”
“She said she was very sad.”
“What is this nonsense?” Tante Chouchotte kept shooing the air.
“She said she was sad because she misses me very much.”
“Your mother called you on the telephone to tell you she was sad?” Tante Chouchotte shook her head as if there were a plague of flies.
“Yes.”
“You answered the telephone?” Tante Françoise sighed.
“I knew it was her.”
“Do you think—?” Tante Françoise turned toward Tante Chouchotte: “Would Geneviève telephone from Paris?”
Tante Chouchotte’s head shook more and more slowly until, finally, it stopped altogether. “It’s possible,” she said after a while. “Who knows what she would do?”
The others had started rhyming again, but now they added in new twists, the way people do with rhyming games, and Polly had to strain to make sense of it. Tante Françoise and Tante Chouchotte weren’t looking at Polly anymore, so she sat on the ground at their feet: when they talked about her mother, it was as if her mother was there.
C’est quand même intéressant, said Tante Chouchotte: it was interesting.
Crois-tu que Geneviève est triste? Peut-être ce Schwarz—? Tante Chouchotte and Tante Françoise leaned in close to each other, the way Polly and her mother did when they had love auditions. Was Geneviève really sad? Had Schwarz—? Tante Françoise reached down to hand Polly a sugar cube dipped in coffee, a canard. What could Geneviève have to be sad about?
Years later, smoking with her friends beneath the broken awning of the old shopping center, Polly remembered that afternoon in the yard in Brittany as the occasion of her first lie, when she’d discovered how simple it was to fool everyone. She laughed out loud then, a wave of near-hysteria rising inside her. I’ve been lying my whole fucking life—my mother tongue is deception! But even stoned, she knew that wasn’t right: her mother tongue was an accent. A confusion of vocabularies and place: this is not where I should be, this world, this part of the country, this side of the garden. What she had known from the beginning was the language of dislocation, its meanings bent and scattered, like light, into a kind of iridescence.
She sucked slowly on the sugar cube, feeling it dissolve in her mouth, and she was suddenly sleepy, though she had napped a long time; but the sun made her drowsy, the sun, and the rhyming voices she could no longer keep up with, and the faint hum of knowledge that her life had begun: she was learning to invent stories, as elaborate as her mother’s, and as radiant as any jewel.
The Visit
Why bother? I could scour the sink, wash the windows, the walls, mop the floor, climb up on the table to scrub the ceiling, and the place would still seem derelict, as if a shut-in lived here. Chouchotte Laurent, you know her? She went mad when she was young, had to be sent to the Salpêtrière. Afterward, she went back to teaching, but you should have seen her apartment. Cigarette ash and dead flies everywhere, books scattered all over the floor.
I don’t want André to see me living like this. André Naquet! They gave him the Médaille de la Résistance after the war. He’d been part of a group in Caen, blowing up train tracks, I had no idea. I wonder if I wrote to him then, or if I wrote when I learned his family had died. I hope I did. Who was it who told me about the Médaille de la Résistance, anyway? What living person knew we’d been acquainted? Not that they’d need to know, it was enough that we’d all come from Caen. Month after month of naming our dead, until we had named them all and could begin to name our heroes.
I haven’t laid eyes on André since the twenties. It’s 1965 now. Forty years. And suddenly I get it into my head to invite him to tea! Tea, as if we were British! There he was, in an old address book, so I wrote to him. It’s been forty-three years. I’m seventy-seven, I was thirty-four when they let me out of the Salpêtrière, twenty-eight when André and I were lovers. He was nineteen, barely older than my students. I had no business with him, but I couldn’t resist, telling myself that a young man needs an older woman, though André was born already knowing anything I might teach him. Night after night, I insisted I had classes to prepare, and he just laughed and pulled me into bed. He had an easel in his bedroom and he’d paint me in the mornings when I was too sleepy to object. Amateurish paintings that I loved for their sincerity, and the way he stood at the easel, tilting his round head from side to side. He wasn’t handsome, but he was beautiful the way all the Naquets were, with their startling blue eyes and their olive skin. Every member of the family possessed a grace and confidence that no one, not even Pauline, with her rosaries and her tidy house, could resist. Baking all day for Raphaël and thinking no one would notice!
But which part was I remembering when I invited André? Our few months in his bed near the university, or the Salpêtrière, where he found me, six years later? We were lovers, and I threw him over to marry a man my age; and then, when I landed in the hospital, when he owed me nothing at all, André visited me. He was very kind and now I’m going to serve him tea.
I don’t think I was remembering anything. It was an impulse. An old woman’s foolishness. I cannot stop my hands from shaking. People say they feel this way—this anxiety—when they’re in love, but when I was near André, I felt something different—a dissolving, a weightlessness.
I’ll run down to the florist’s. Get the place cleaned up and fill it with flowers. Lilies, roses, an armful of sunflowers.
Potted geraniums for the windowsills. And I’ll buy pastries from Dalloyau—of course! But I need to hurry. Wash the dishes, shake out the rug, sweep the floor. If I focus I can clean the whole place in an hour—it’s not an actual apartment, just a long room with a kitchenette on one side and a sitting area on the other—but is there no more dish soap? Scrapings of hand soap, then.
No doubt he doesn’t care about a clean room. He’s sixty-seven, his parents and siblings killed long ago at Auschwitz. How a person goes on living is not the mystery. Terrible things happen to you, and they might put you in the Salpêtrière for a while, or they might not, but either way, you eat, you drink, you take a little air. Hold yourself apart, from yourself most of all, so that you don’t bump into anything, the terrifying dreams and the bits of memory. The mystery is why.
He wrote back right away—how nice to receive your note, I should be delighted to have tea—just like him, so polite. The thought came to me yesterday that I should tell him the truth about the Salpêtrière, why I was sent there. I’ve never told a soul, but suddenly I felt that André should know. He should be made to understand that the pity and kindness he showed me at the Salpêtrière was misguided. But to what end? To show him that the world is even darker than he imagined? What can that do except add to his suffering?
And then again, perhaps he won’t care. Why should I and my crimes matter to him after what he has survived?
Look at me! An old, fat woman with not one dress that isn’t stained. And I’ve nothing to scrub the sink with. It’s good that I have old newspapers. They make a mess of the hands, but there is nothing better for cleaning windows. No streaks at all, I should have been a charwoman. There—what a difference, to be able to see the trees so clearly, the young people ambling along the sidewalks! Roofs of cars glinting in the sun. It’s like getting a new pair of glasses. God willing, this chair will hold me and I can get the upper panes. If I can keep my balance.
News of Our Loved Ones Page 12
