News of Our Loved Ones

by Abigail DeWitt

  I have to agree to wear the alarm necklace when I’m in the States, call one of them every night when I’m in France. They blame each other for everything that happens to me—for my arithmetic errors! How could you fucking forget to look over her checkbook? Past middle age and they still yell profanities at each other. I did not raise them very well.

  They say I wasn’t “there” for them, but it was hard to pay them enough attention when they were growing up. They needed so much! Toys, television, doughnuts. Like giant furnaces I could not stoke fast enough, though, in fairness, there were times I barely stoked them at all. I was too sad.

  It’s ridiculous to take the metro. I don’t know why I insist upon it. Someone always gives me a seat, of course, but I can’t read the signs rushing past. I have to ask where we are, and then everyone is so worried. Are you all alone, Madame? Is there no one to help you? Where are your children?

  It never occurred to me that marrying an American meant I’d have American children. But nothing comes into focus when you’re young. You rush forward through life and it’s all so noisy—the war and the end of the war, the world in ruins, and the American soldier taking your arm in the back of the church where they are playing a Mendelssohn string quartet, the F minor. The soldier tells you in English how pretty you are, can he take you dancing?

  Nearly everyone is dead, so why not? Dance with him, let him slip your dress off your shoulders and enter you. He had no idea I was a virgin, and though it didn’t hurt, I wept, so grateful for his body. His clean, living body in my arms. I wanted him to come back inside me, over and over and over again, I wanted to stay in that bed with him forever and he laughed finally. “You French, it sure is true what they say about you, isn’t it?”

  I hated him then, of course, but what could I do? Hate him or love him, I could not tear myself away from his living, pulsing, clean body.

  And then, suddenly, I was in Raleigh, North Carolina, with four children and an enormous refrigerator full of pasteurized cheese and iceberg lettuce. For myself, a Valium. Valium. The same word in French and English, such lovely syllables, like water, or a bell. A valley. Vallée.

  I was so scared that first year in America. I could understand Peter, his pronunciation almost like the English I’d learned in school, but I could not understand the others. Y’all. Wanna. Yonder. We lived three miles from a shopping center, in a brick house with a closed gazebo in the back where Peter played the cello. He went out there before dawn and did not return until nightfall. I used to walk to the stores along the smooth, cement sidewalks, trying to understand where I was. The big, swift automobiles and the wide lawns; the blond schoolchildren in the windows of the yellow buses; and the housewives in their bright clothes, watching the street.

  The first time I went inside the A&P, I wandered the aisles, tracing my fingers over the labels on all the jars and cans. Ketchup, peanut butter, Spam, pork ’n beans, Hershey bars, coffee. I was supposed to buy food for Peter’s dinner, to think of what he’d like and how I might prepare it, but it was my sister I was thinking of, Françoise. She was home on D-day, but she didn’t die. She crouched in the garden and watched the house collapse on our mother, sister, grandmother; and while she crouched, I stood before the faculty of the National Conservatory in Paris, two hundred and fifty kilometers away, playing the violin.

  Françoise, with her long black braids, and her body like an eleven-year-old’s, even at fifteen. She didn’t get enough protein during the war. Afterward, she developed tuberculosis, had to spend a year in the Alps in a sanatorium. She was our mother’s favorite.

  I stood in the A&P and thought of the apartment in Paris where Françoise and our stepfather were living now—he’d crouched next to her that day in the garden—furnished with things they’d dug out from the rubble: an embroidered tablecloth, my mother’s sewing kit, an old bell, a photo album. I left the A&P with nothing.

  My heart was racing so fast when I got home that I had to disturb Peter in his gazebo. I was shaking, drenched with sweat. “I cannot,” I said. “What? What can’t you?” “I cannot,” I answered, over and over. He led me back into the house—the sky so brilliant it hurt my eyes—and then he made me drink a glass of water and lie down. I interrupted him another day, he was practicing a Haydn concerto, and he set his bow down and sighed. “If this is going to become a habit.” Then he put me to bed, went out to his car, and drove away. When he returned, he had a small bottle from the pharmacy. “Dr. Jameson saw me without an appointment,” he said, so I would appreciate the trouble I’d caused. “You’re to take these when you get upset.”

  He encouraged me to play the violin, and I did sometimes, but I had mostly lost interest. I’d never really been interested, to tell the truth. The audition at the conservatory was simply a way to get out of the house. To get away from my mother’s watchful eye, my stepfather’s disapproval.

  * * *

  It’s nice and warm in the metro, that’s part of what I like. Everyone sweating and fanning themselves and for once it isn’t because I’ve turned the heat up too high. Besides, I like seeing the young people, with their gadgets and tattoos. Bobbing to music no one else can hear.

  Peter would have loved an iPod. All he wanted all day long was music; it didn’t bother him that I was not like other wives. He had me at night in his bed, and he was perfectly happy not to interrupt his playing with a meal. If I could remember to bring him peanut butter sandwiches at noon and six, he was satisfied.

  And then, one afternoon, after we’d been married two years, he came into the house to get something. “Oh, Jesus,” he said, because I was sitting at the kitchen table, crying. “Are you out of pills?”

  I shook my head, surprised that he would ask. I always cried in the middle of the day—those long, bright, empty hours in front of the picture window, looking out over the bright and empty lawns.

  “Well, Jesus, Jenny, why are you crying?”

  He couldn’t say Geneviève.

  I tried to think of a story—bad news from home that I could use as an excuse for my tears—but I couldn’t think of anything terrible enough. “Bad luck,” he’d said when I’d told him about D-day. “What a mess.”

  “Did you actually take your pill?”

  I nodded. “I cannot—it is difficult to do things alone,” I said, finally.

  “You want a maid?” He looked around the kitchen, which was easy to clean, since I never cooked. “What for?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “That is not what I mean.” I did not want someone to get down on her knees and scrub my floor, I wanted a woman to talk to, someone besides my neighbors: Mary O’Brien next door said she was dying to go to Paris, had I ever been to the Champs-Elysées? Chomps-Elley-zays. Joanne Greene across the street had visited Paris before the war, but her hotel room was small and dirty, the shopkeepers were rude, and she could not believe that a civilized people still used squat toilets.

  I followed Peter’s gaze around the kitchen: the starched gingham curtains, the big refrigerator, the “Home Sweet Home” needlepoint his mother had made. “What I am trying to say,” I said. “I would like to go home.”

  He laughed, but he was not smiling. “A goddamned divorce? Is that it, Jenny? I thought you were a Catholic.”

  “No,” I said, “I do not want a divorce.” I was pregnant, though I hadn’t told him yet, but he was right, anyway: I was a Catholic. I could hardly bring myself to say the word “divorce.” “A visit. I would like to visit home.”

  He chuckled then, more easily. “Jesus, Jenny. You had me scared. A maid would be cheaper, though. You sure a trip is what you want? I can’t do both.”

  I’d only had to ask. He said I should go for the whole summer, because I hated the heat so much and it wasn’t worth the expense for a short visit, anyway. In the weeks leading up to my departure, I stopped crying, I didn’t need so many pills, I even cooked. Peter didn’t like my cooking—the first meal I made for him was sautéed sweetbreads and he pushed them away, expla
ining that his people didn’t eat organs—but it didn’t matter. He preferred his peanut butter sandwiches in his gazebo to any proper meal, and I was happy to eat alone. I was sick in the mornings, but by midday, I was as ravenous as I’d been during the war, only now I could eat whatever I wanted: pork roast, cold tongue, veal, cake. I gained two kilos in two weeks.

  I bought presents for Françoise and for my older brother, Simon, who’d left home when I was still a child: a dress for Françoise—white dotted Swiss with a red belt—and a book about Frank Lloyd Wright for Simon. For my stepfather and my aunt Chouchotte, books about de Tocqueville.

  I wasn’t afraid to go up in an airplane, to feel the sudden lift in my body, the tilting side to side. The moon shone in the window, and beneath the moon, a field of clouds. All night long, flying over the Atlantic, I kept thinking, I am happy, and I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to tell my mother how happy I was—to tell her I was pregnant, which I still hadn’t told Peter—and I was sad that I couldn’t do that, but for the first time since D-day, not so sad that I could not be happy, too.

  No one was pleased to see me—no, that’s not right. At first, they held on to me as if I’d come back from the dead. They were all beautiful, even my stepfather. All waiting for me at the airport: my stepfather, Françoise, Simon, Tante Chouchotte. We could not speak for a moment, and then, suddenly and all at once, their voices! I had gone such a long time without hearing them, without hearing any French at all. I was so happy to walk out into the gray morning, to smell the air, so much lighter and softer than the air in North Carolina. I could barely form my words, I was too happy, too unused to speaking French. And the shops on the way to the apartment, the shopkeepers rolling up their grates; the street cleaners sweeping the gutters; the old, beautiful buildings—I wept openly, though I had been raised not to make a spectacle of my feelings.

  But their warmth only lasted a few days. I could feel them shrinking from me, from my sudden, careless wealth. The books I’d brought were nice, of course, but the dress was ridiculous. Three sizes too big. Françoise was still rail thin. When I saw her standing in it, the dotted Swiss hanging off her narrow shoulders, I asked her if she’d like to come back to America with me at the end of the summer. She looked away, said nothing. It embarrasses me now to think of how, too late, I tried to mother her.

  I’d never been like the others, even before I married Peter. Something had been off about me, the way I looked—pale and blond, like no one else in the family—the way I kept to myself. Before the war, my stepfather teased me about the violin, mocking every missed note; now he barely spoke to me. And yet he insisted I stay with him and Françoise. I would have been happier with Tante Chouchotte or Simon, but Simon was recently divorced, excommunicated—my stepfather would never have let me stay with him—and Tante Chouchotte, who loved me in a brusque, fierce way, had only a single room. So I slept with Françoise, in her narrow bed. Françoise talked to me about the weather, or how we’d slept, or what we’d have for dinner, but she wouldn’t speak about our mother, our sister, our grandmother. If anyone mentioned the war, she gave a strange, brittle smile and said how lucky we’d been. And who could dispute her? We were alive.

  Every day, my stepfather sat in the living room, reading, and Françoise knitted by his side. Dozens of scarves, gloves, socks, sweaters, hats, as if she lived in terror of ever being cold again. I tried joining her, but my knitting was clumsy, and I could feel her irritation when I dropped a stitch and started over. Our mother had been so good with her hands.

  I began to go for walks. Along the river, around the Luxembourg, all the way out to the Bois de Boulogne. In the shifting summer light, America seemed like a fever dream. The shadows of clouds flowed through the trees, golden one moment, dusk green the next, and I drank in the cool smell of the river, forgetting all about Peter, as if I had conceived the child in my belly on my own. I did not have to strain to understand the bits of conversation drifting past: I was as much a part of this world as the paths, the breeze, the deep cold water of the Seine.

  One day, walking past a patisserie on rue d’Assas, I saw a young man come out with a baguette. I’d been too sick to eat breakfast that morning, but, struck by a sudden craving, I stared at the bread in his hands as if he were offering it to me. Then I noticed his red hair, his bright blue eyes. I had seen him before, but where? I remembered a bicycle, and suddenly it came to me: an image of him, paused on his bike outside our home in Caen, my stepfather waving him away angrily. My stepfather had wheeled around and slapped my sister Yvonne, and then he stormed up the steps to our house. I couldn’t picture Yvonne’s reaction—she was so wild she might have laughed—but I remembered the boy’s: his eyes like shattered glass, and the color rising to his cheeks.

  “It’s you!” I said, going up to him. I didn’t know his name. Yvonne herself had never learned it. She told me, after our stepfather slapped her, that he rode past our house every day and that she loved him, though they’d never spoken until the instant our stepfather caught them.

  “It’s you,” I repeated. He flinched a little. “You’re from Caen, aren’t you?” That seemed to reassure him. “My sister,” I continued. “Do you remember a girl with long dark braids, watching you from her balcony? The summer of ’43.”

  He smiled then, his whole body relaxing. “Oh,” he said. “Yes. Yes, of course I remember. She’s your sister? Please tell her—I’d love to see her.” He laughed a little. “If I’m permitted.”

  “She’s dead,” I said. What was I expecting? That he would take me in his arms and console me? He stared blankly, as if he had no idea what I was talking about. “Our house was bombed,” I explained.

  “Oh,” he said, collecting himself. “Well, I—yes. Yes, of course. My condolences.” He turned abruptly and walked away, and I stared after him, watching his long stride, his bright hair, but then, suddenly, he came back. “Excuse me,” he said. “What was her name?”

  “Yvonne.” This time, when he started to leave, I said, “She loved you.”

  He smiled again. It was such a pretty smile, flashing across his whole face. “Thank you,” he said, but the smile was already fading. “I’m happy to know her name.”

  “And you are?” I asked, to stall him.

  He hesitated. “Rémy.”

  I put my hand out. “Geneviève,” I said. “Geneviève Miller.”

  “Miller?”

  “My husband is American. My maiden name was Delasalle. She was Yvonne Delasalle.”

  “Yes,” he said, taking my hand finally. “I knew your last name—your maiden name—from the mailbox. Rémy Schwarz.”

  “Oh,” I said, embarrassed. Of course we’d known of the Schwarzes—his father owned a men’s clothing shop—we’d heard when his parents were arrested. “You’re alive,” I said, stupidly, still holding on to his hand, though I could feel him pulling away, his calloused palm loosening itself from mine.

  “I am alive,” he agreed. His face had gone blank again, and I knew I should let go, I shouldn’t bother him further, but it seemed that if I could keep him there, if we could just stand on the sidewalk with the day brightening and fading around us, we would be all right. But I could feel his desire to get on with his afternoon, so I dropped his hand, he nodded, and we said our good-byes.

  The next time I saw him, he was by the river, fishing. This time, he smiled, reeled in his line, put his pole down. “We meet again,” he laughed, and offered me a cigarette, as if nothing bad had ever happened, anywhere. He invited me to get a cup of coffee with him. “A miracle,” he likes to say now, “that we should have found each other that day by the river. Out of everyone in the whole city.” He never mentions the patisserie.

  In the café, we didn’t speak of Yvonne. He wanted to hear about America, so I told him about the stores, the food, the wide streets, the damp, terrible heat.

  “And your husband?” Rémy asked. “He’s not with you?”

  “No,” I said. “He’s a cellist. He needs to practi
ce every day. He cannot take vacations.”

  Later, he said it was obvious that Peter and I didn’t love each other, but he did not imagine that he and I would come to love each other, either. It was pity that drove him to invite me home with him, and when we got there, to the little one-room apartment where he lived by himself, we sat on his sofa and did not speak. The dead were all around us, softer and more commanding than any living thing.

  At first, I had no idea what to make of Rémy—of his strange good cheer when we met the second time, or his invitation to go home with him. Apart from the sofa, his apartment was nearly empty: a camping stove, a little cupboard for food, a trunk for clothes, a bedroll. Nothing on the walls, no curtains in the windows. But sun streamed across the floor, and it did not feel gloomy, just quiet.

  I didn’t know where his parents had been sent after they were arrested, and yet it was clear that they had not survived. His father had been an excellent tailor, his mother a fine seamstress, but Rémy’s trousers were torn at the cuff, his shirt was missing a button. Rémy was all that was left of the Schwarzes. If he acted strangely, it was because he didn’t know how to be in the world anymore. We knew by then what had taken place in the camps; Rémy would have been forced to imagine it, to picture everything.

  We sat for a long time and then, because the light had faded from the windows and I thought Françoise and my stepfather would worry if I didn’t come home, I said I should leave.