The Paramour's Daughter

by Wendy Hornsby

  Claude asked Grand-mère, interested, not challenging her, “You signed?”

  “We considered it, yes. The state Isabelle was in when we saw her at Christmas, we thought it might be best for all to let Mr. Duchamps care for Maggie, at least for the time being. He was from a good French family, and we knew she would be well cared for. Her circumstances would be more stable, though we would miss her terribly.”

  This time, Max squeezed my knee to keep me from saying the wrong thing. We weren’t a French family. When my grandfather emigrated from Eastern Europe bearing one of those names without vowels, an immigration officer spelled the name the way he heard it, Duchamps; happened to a lot of people. My grandfather thought Duchamps sounded a little classier than the name he was born with, so he kept it. We wondered if maybe having a new name helped him start over, avoid some issues he left behind in the old country, but he was no longer around to ask.

  I covered a spontaneous chortle with a little cough: if my grandfather had kept his Bohunk name, as he referred to it, would Élodie have been so accommodating to Dad?

  Claude was thoughtful. “I never knew any of that was happening. But it explains a great deal. As fatigued as she was during the autumn, Isabelle had seemed to be happy, quite content, expectant, if you will, of something wonderful—our baby, of course. But that changed suddenly with the approach of the holidays. She was volatile, quick to tears. I could do nothing to please her. I confess, I was exasperated. When she announced that we had to go and get you right away, we went.”

  “She wanted to reestablish custody,” Max said, “before we got here.”

  “I understand that now.”

  “Why did she decide to relinquish me to Dad in the end?” I asked.

  “She reached the end of her endurance.” An ironic little smile crossed his face. “Forgive me if I say, ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’ ”

  Max laughed, a nervous little Ha!

  Claude continued: “Isabelle and I were in bed. We had not been together as a husband with his wife for a very long time, but that night, a nice meal at a good restaurant, a little wine...” He dropped his eyes as his voice caught, remembering. “There was a storm, and Marguerite, who was always afraid of thunder and lightning, came running into our room, crying.”

  “As two-year-olds do,” Max said.

  “Yes, of course,” Claude acknowledged. “But well, it was normal that I was a bit angry for the interruption; it was a very inopportune moment. I told her to go back to bed.”

  “You called me a petite merdeuse, a little shit,” I added.

  His eyes were wide with surprise and mortification. “You remember?”

  “I think I do.”

  “How mad did you get, Claude?” Max wanted to know.

  “A bit of a scolding, that was all. I took you by the hand, Marguerite, to put you back in bed, and told you to stay there. But Isabelle exploded. She pulled you away from me and started screaming, saying crazy things.”

  “Like what?” Max asked.

  “Doesn’t matter what she said,” I said. “What did she do?”

  “She twisted your arm to make you stop crying, but you only cried harder. She was thoroughly distraught, out of control. When I tried to take you from her she ran to the window, opened it...” Claude dissolved into pitiful weeping. He finally managed to gasp out, “She threw you out the window.”

  The rest of the room fell silent. Grand-mère poured tea with shaking hands, something to do. I was worried about her. I took a cup from her hand and met her eyes, deep pools full of grief.

  Dauvin rose, muttered something about a glass of water, and wandered off toward the kitchen, taking the errant pillow with him. I thought Claude’s show of raw emotion might have embarrassed him.

  I asked Grand-mère, “Do you believe Claude?”

  She leaned toward Claude. “You would never tell us how Maggie was injured. Were you protecting Isabelle?”

  “What else could I do?” He wiped his face with the back of his hand. “You remember how it was for her?”

  To me, she said, “Yes, I believe him.”

  Claude gulped air like a drowning man finally breaking to the surface. But he seemed, in sum, relieved to have shed the burden of this secret. Calmer now, he continued.

  “I called an ambulance and ran outside. The neighbors had found you and wrapped you in a coat and called the police. I took you from them, looked you over, fearing the worst. They told me they saw you slide down an awning and land in the chrysanthemum bed. You had some bruises, some scrapes.”

  “And a broken arm,” I said.

  Max took my hand. “I think that happened before you went out the window, honey. It was a spiral fracture, a twisted arm.” He turned to Claude. “Did Isabelle break Maggie’s arm before she threw her out the window?”

  “Yes. I heard it.” His face went white as he remembered. He glanced at my arm, looking for scars, maybe? “I told the police that you were frightened by the storm and tried to run away from it, and that you must have fallen and hurt yourself. They were skeptical, so they went inside to ask your mother what she knew. When they found her, they didn’t ask any more questions.”

  He lost it again, buried his face in his hands and sobbed.

  Grand-mère came and sat beside him, began to gently pat him on the back. “Claude went to the hospital in the ambulance with you, Maggie. Shortly after you arrived, your mother was brought in.”

  “She tried to kill herself, and our baby,” Claude managed to say between gasps. “After I ran from the house, she called your father, Marguerite, and told him that she gave up, he could come and get you. Then she slit her wrists.”

  “Dear God,” Max uttered.

  “The police were right there?” I said. “They saved her?”

  He nodded.

  Grand-mère stopped patting Claude’s back and handed him a cup of tea. As she watched him sip, she said, “Claude brought you both here, Maggie. We took your mother back to Ma Mère at the convent, where she had gone for sanctuary before. Ma Mère gave her quiet, watched over her, oversaw the doctors who came to care for her, as before.”

  “As before?” I asked. “How much like before? When before?”

  “Just before you were born.”

  “That’s why she was at the convent when I was born? She had tried to kill herself?”

  Grand-mère’s answer was the slightest tilt of her head: Yes.

  “Some women have a very rough time with pregnancy. We could not risk putting Isabelle through that a third time.” Claude made scissors with two fingers. “I got a vasectomy.”

  Max squeezed my knee: the things Claude did not know. Among them, Isabelle told Dad that Freddy was his child, and she wanted them to run off together with, as Dad said, two babies. That tidbit was better left quiet.

  I asked Claude, “Did you ever meet my dad?”

  “No.”

  Probably a good thing, I thought, considering how much Freddy looked like Dad.

  “Have I told you what you wanted to know?” Claude asked.

  “Yes, thank you. I’m sorry to have brought back bad memories,” I said. “If I may, just one more question?”

  “Oh dear, oh dear, what now?” but said with surprisingly good humor.

  “The pony. Why did Isabelle send it over to me?”

  “To punish Freddy for doing something naughty. He loved Amie very much.”

  When he rose to leave, Claude apologized to Grand-mère for being so difficult all day. She let him off the hook, telling him that we all live private lives, and no one can really know the pressures we’re under. Then she kissed me and headed upstairs for bed, obviously grateful to have Max’s arm to lean on; he did look swanky in my grandfather’s velvet robe.

  I saw Claude to the door. He embraced me, kissed both of my cheeks before he bade me good night. There was, odd as it is to say, a sweetness in the gesture. I stayed in the open door, watching his back until he arrived safely at Isabelle’s house. Fredd
y had waited up for him. He opened the door before his father reached for the latch, wrapped an arm around Claude’s shoulders and took him inside.

  For Claude, our conversation seemed to have been cathartic. It was an ugly story to have kept locked up for so long. By the end, we had all learned a great deal. There were still secrets, some of them now mine. Some of them I intended to keep. At least for the time being.

  As I turned after closing the door I almost tripped over Inspector Dauvin. He was on his knees behind me looking at the jumble of muddy shoes piled under the coat hooks in the entry. He sorted the wet from the dry, putting Casey’s and Bébé’s dryish ones aside. There was a pair of muddy prints where Claude’s boots had been. The inspector held up the clogs Grand-mère had brought outside to me.

  “You wore these?” he asked. When I said I did, he asked about the others: Grand-mère wore the black galoshes with her mink coat, the leather house slippers were Max’s. Dauvin acknowledged the rubber overshoes he had worn over his brogans. Who else came inside with us?

  “No one,” I said, after he repeated the question a couple of times; he was using very elementary French and speaking very slowly for me. I ran through the list of people: After the brouhaha, Freddy took his dad home, cleaned him up and brought him over for our talk, but Freddy did not come inside. I was to have a private conversation with Claude, at Claude’s request. Dauvin insisted on staying, and so Max, my lawyer, needed to be there, too. Grand-mère asked everyone else to go home and go to bed.

  “The four of you came through the front door?” Dauvin asked.

  “Yes.”

  “No one else came in?”

  “The only other people in the house, as far as I know, were asleep in bed,” I said. He nodded.

  I asked him how he got to us so quickly, and he said he had the compound under surveillance from the bocage along the drive. Just to be safe. When he saw me run out of the house with Max following and Claude coming out of Isabelle’s, and then a fist fight—actually, a wrestling match—he thought he needed to take a look.

  “Tell me again how it all got started,” he said.

  I tried, but I needed a translator. Max stretched out on the sofa after he tucked in Grand-mère and was nursing a snifter of brandy, looking like the lord of the manor lounging in my grandfather’s robe. I asked him to help us. He lumbered to his feet, encased in white socks, and waited for us to come to him; it was warm in front of the fire.

  “I was frightened by the storm,” I told Dauvin, with Max’s help. “I ran outside.”

  “I heard what Desmoulins said earlier, and I saw you react at the church.” Dauvin studied me through narrowed eyes. “Tonight you were frightened and you ran outside.”

  “Yes.”

  “But before you ran outside, what happened?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. I was asleep, having a bad dream, I panicked when I heard the storm, and that was all I knew until I was outside and Claude grabbed me.”

  Dauvin pointed upstairs with his thumb. “Please show me where you were.”

  The three of us traipsed upstairs.

  Earlier, after the big mud wrestling bout, I was in my room only long enough to pick up clean clothes before showering. When the three of us opened the bedroom door, nothing had changed: the room was still a shambles. During my nightmare I had put up quite a struggle with the bedding. Sheets were in a tangle, pillows tossed here and there. I must have dragged the duvet halfway across the floor as I ran out.

  I started to pull the bed back together, but Dauvin stopped me. He asked Max and me to wait by the door while he made a circuit around the room, looking things over. He got down on his knees on the far side of the bed. When he stood up again, he said, “Please tell me what you remember.”

  “I was asleep, as I told you,” I said. I was so tired I was woozy. “Dreaming.”

  “Un cauchemar?” he asked, a nightmare? When I nodded, he asked me to tell him what I remembered of the dream.

  I had to think for a moment. “I was falling through water. It got very deep. I felt pressure on my chest, something was on my face, I couldn’t breathe, it was dark.”

  “Very dark?” Dauvin asked.

  “Pitch black. I heard thunder, I fought, I cleared my face, I saw lightning, I panicked, I ran. The rest you know.”

  “You dreamed for a long time?”

  “That part? A nanosecond.”

  He thought for a moment, looked around some more. He asked me to pass him the box of tissues on the bedside table. As he took it, he said, “Will you please drop by the clinic sometime today to give a blood sample? I will leave the order.”

  Max translated, but held up a hand and stopped me from responding as he slipped into lawyer mode. I didn’t need to say anything; he asked the question I was about to.

  “What the hell for?” Max asked loudly enough that a very sleepy Bébé appeared at my door.”

  “Ça va?” he asked around a yawn: How’s it going?

  “You were across the hall all evening?” Dauvin asked him.

  A moment of confusion before he gave a nod, yes.

  “Did you hear anything unusual or see anyone other than Madame Flint in or around this room earlier tonight?”

  “Maggie, what’s happening?”

  “Bébé, please answer,” Dauvin said.

  “Hear anything, Pierre? Absolutely. It was a bloody noisy night. Big storm, plenty of kaboom, a light show.”

  “You didn’t hear people outside?”

  Bébé shook his head.

  I offered, “His room is on the back side of the house. These walls are thick.”

  Bébé brightened as a thought occurred to him. “I did hear someone go down the hall toward the stairs. I thought it was probably Maggie or Casey going to the loo.”

  “Did you see anyone?”

  “No. I opened my door and looked out, but no one was there. So I got into bed.”

  “When did you close your door?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I thought you did it.”

  Dauvin thanked him and suggested that he go back to bed and close his door again.

  “Why a blood test?” Max wanted to know after Bébé was gone.

  In lieu of an answer, Dauvin asked me, “How did you hurt your lip?”

  I did a full-on palms-up shrug: I didn’t know.

  “A pillow was found in the kitchen with blood on it,” he said. “I would be interested to know whose, Madame.”

  I went around the room picking up pillows and piling them onto the bed. There were only three, one short. I didn’t remember running from my room, but I also couldn’t imagine how or why I would have detoured to dump a bed pillow in the kitchen when I was running in panic to get outside.

  Dauvin took a little digital camera from his pocket, turned on the Replay function and showed us some close-up pictures he had taken of the muddy shoeprints on the kitchen floor that Clara groused about, a trail that came from the back door and grew fainter as some inconsiderate lout traipsed muck across the floor and into the dining room. What did I think?

  “A pillow thief?” I asked.

  A small wag of the head was as close to a smile as I had seen the inspector give up. He put the camera away, reached over and pulled up the bed sheet with both hands, held it up to the light one length at a time, as if inspecting dress goods. When he finished, he asked to see my forearms.

  I looked at Max, who frowned but nodded assent. I pulled up my sleeves and reached my arms out for the inspector. He took my hands in his, one at a time, looked them over, examined my arms to the elbows. He pointed out a few little cuts on my knuckles and wrists.

  “How did you get those?”

  Again I shrugged. “Look at Max’s face. Gravel nicks. Probably happened when I was trying to separate Max and Claude.”

  “Your neck, please.”

  I showed him, he looked. “Good, nothing.”

  Max took my hands to look at the cuts. “What’s this all about, Dauvin?”
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  “I’ll show you.”

  He pulled a tissue out of the box I handed him earlier, took a plastic bag from his pocket, went around to the far side of the bed again, bent down and picked up an object with the tissue and dropped it into the bag.

  “Pruning knife,” he announced, holding up the bag for us to see: a wooden handle with a short, curved blade. “I assume you didn’t put it there.”

  “Correct,” I said.

  “Do you know, madame, what happened on this estate during the war?”

  “To the German soldiers?” I pointed my chin at the knife. “Yes.”

  “This little knife is very useful for getting rid of useless suckers growing from a tree.” He gripped the plastic-encased knife handle in his fist, held it near his throat and gave it a quick twist. “And other annoyances. You understand?”

  “Like me?” I asked.

  “It certainly appears someone feels that way about you, yes.”

  22

  I pressed the bandage over the end of my ring finger to make it stick as I walked out of the nurse’s station at the clinic. The nurse on duty had pricked the finger to take a blood sample, just a dab on a slide, another on a card.

  That morning, Sunday, I was the last one in the house to get out of bed—I managed to get about five hours of sleep after Dauvin left—and the last into the bathroom I shared with Casey and Bébé. I lingered over the shower, the croissants and coffee that followed, and had enjoyed being fussed over by Grand-mère a bit. Bébé and Casey, and various of their cousins, had left for the beach with David to set up for the volleyball game before I got downstairs.

  Grand-mère was exhausted that morning, certainly showed the beginnings of the great letdown that morning after the funeral. But more than that, she was burdened by a sort of free-floating remorse about my early life with Isabelle after hearing Claude’s account. She should have known, she should have done... It was a long time ago, I reminded her. And what should have been done probably was. In due course. By the time she went upstairs to dress for Mass, she seemed stronger.

  When Dauvin arrived to take me to the clinic to give a blood sample, I still wore the sweats I pulled on after my shower, and my damp hair was twisted under an alligator clip borrowed from Casey. I didn’t bother with makeup; the face looking back at me from the mirror just wasn’t worth the effort. The fat lip from the night before? Not pretty. After the stop at the clinic, Dauvin was to drive me to join the family for the volleyball game at Anneville-sur-Mer. How dressed does one need to be to play volleyball on the beach?