I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (35 page)

Josée said that she was perfectly capable of talking to herself for free. My mother, searching for backup, asked me if my experiences in therapy had been similar.

“Not really,” I said. “Maybe because I was sixteen. I really wanted my therapist to like me.”

“And your parents were paying for it,” my mother said. “That makes a big difference. You wanted to go, but your parents were paying.”

“I didn't want to go!” I said. “You sent me because you thought I was crazy.”

“Josée also sent me to therapy because she thought I was crazy,” my mother said.

“Yes, well,” Josée said, “everyone gets told they're crazy when they're sixteen years old.”

“I wasn't sixteen,” my mother said with little-girl hurt. “I was thirteen.”

“You always were precocious,” Josée said.

Somehow, the conversation wound around to the summers they had spent in Ussel, the summers when my mother, forbidden from playing with Andrée, had grown desperate with boredom and loneliness.

“How old were you?” I asked my mother, although I already knew the answer.

“Twelve,” she said with leaden heaviness.

“You were perturbing her,” Josée said. And then, seeing my mother's face, “You were perturbing her, but it wasn't kind of me anyway, I'm sorry.”

My mother brushed the apology aside uncomfortably. She talked about the solitary walks she'd taken in the woods.

“But I didn't know you were so lonely!” Josée exclaimed. “Why didn't you play tennis?” Doubles matches with visiting friends had occupied Josée's summer months, but her three daughters remembered only being made to chase the balls and rake the court flat after the games.

“I had no partner,” my mother said.

“You could have played against the wall,” Josée said.

“There was no wall,” my mother said.

“Why didn't you tell me!” Josée said. “I would have built you a wall.”

After lunch, the three of us sat in beach chairs in the sun, reading quietly. I got up to go fetch sunscreen, and my mother offered to accompany me. When I turned around to see if she had followed, she was still standing behind Josée's chair. She had bent over to cover her mother's neck with kisses. Josée reached up, put her hands in her daughter's hair, kissed her cheek in return. A happy warmth spread through me. My mother looked up at me,
her chin in the crook of Josée's neck, and I clasped both hands together over my heart. But my mother pulled her mouth down sharply to one side and arched her brows, an expression I knew meant
Something's wrong
.

“So?” I said as she joined my side and we turned to walk together. “That looked so sweet from afar.”

“You know what she said to me?” my mother asked. “She said, ‘But I had no idea you'd been so miserable, my poor Cosette.'”

“And that upset you?” I said.

“Cosette like in
Les Misérables,
” my mother said angrily. “I don't need apologies from her.”

Back in the hotel room, my mother ran her fingers through her hair before the bathroom mirror, styling the curls that fell in her eyes. I had cut her hair that morning on our terrace. It was a tradition I had with her, my father, and my brother whenever we were on vacation—they would sit and I would touch their necks and ears, talking softly as I worked the scissors around their heads.

My mother told me she felt uncomfortable with the turns our conversations with Josée were taking.

“I love discovering who my mother was as a little girl,” she said. “But I don't want to talk to her about my own adolescence. I don't want to get into recriminations.”

“But,” I said.

“Several years ago, I decided to save her number in my phone as ‘Maman,'” she said. “It's my present to myself. To let myself have a mother I love. That's all I want.” I was silent, and she spoke again.

“You don't understand. It wasn't neutral. It's so painful, to bring all this to the surface. I don't want to settle scores. I don't need her to apologize.”

“I understand,” I said. “But . . . for me this tension of your
shared pasts is interesting. I don't want to make you uncomfortable. And yet I get the sense that Josée is searching for this as well. No one asked her to apologize just now—she offered that on her own.”

My mother sighed. She turned to contemplate me for a moment.

“Okay. I trust you,” she said. “And Josée trusts you. I suppose it's comforting to both of us that you have an agenda.” She readied herself to leave the room. I trailed behind her, rubbing worriedly at the back of my neck.

—

T
HE
NEXT MORNING
, we woke up to rain. We ate breakfast together under an overhang on the hotel's roof terrace. We were quiet as we watched the ripples on the thermal pools below.

“This is an island of lemons,” Josée said. She ordered herself a fresh-squeezed lemon juice from a passing waiter. She poured water and a packet of sugar into the cloudy liquid.

“I'm going to do a lemon cure,” she said. “I want to nourish myself from all these lemons.” I took a sip of her drink, knowing that she did not like to share her food but would allow me to do so. The acidity was bracing. It felt cleansing. I ordered one as well.

After breakfast, the three of us went downstairs to Josée's room. We lay on her bed, my mother in the middle with her feet by our heads. She grabbed a pillow to prop herself up, “so I can
see
you,” she said. We talked idly, half listening to the soft patter of rain on the parking lot outside. Under my questioning, Josée began to tell us about her boarding school days. But then she interrupted herself to say that none of this was very interesting at all. This was something my mother said to me often when I asked her about her life, and she reacted now just as I always had.

“But for me it's fascinating,” my mother said.

“It's interesting
now,
maybe, to talk about it, because it's raining and we have nothing else to do,” Josée said. “But otherwise no. You might as well read a good book.”

“Discovering that you spent your whole childhood . . . it blows me away,” my mother said.

“That I was a child?” Josée said archly.

“No,” my mother said, unsmiling. “That you so rarely lived with your mother. I didn't know.”

“We never really talked, did we, you and I?” Josée said. “I was a wife more than a mother. And then you left for America . . . It's only thanks to this troublemaker here and her endless interrogations . . .” She swatted me gently, leaning over my mother's feet.

“Did you talk about it with my sisters?” my mother asked.

“No, I never talked about it with anyone,” Josée said. “I still don't see why anyone would be interested.”

“But weren't you interested in your own mother's story?” I asked.

“She never told me her story,” Josée said.

She told us how, after Mina had had a hip operation late in life, they'd gone for a walk outside the hospital and sat on a bench together. “I asked her if she'd ever had the desire to run around on my father—or no, I said, ‘My father, did he have other women? He offered you lovely vacations, to have you forgive him.' I told her about a photo I had of her as a young woman on a cruise ship, where she looked radiantly beautiful. And she clapped her hands together and said, ‘
Si! Si! Le capitaine!
' She smiled this smile I'd never seen before, the one she must have had at twenty years old. She told me she'd had an affair with the Greek ship captain. Apparently, she cheated on my father once. In 1935.”

“So you were asking a question, about the relationship between
your parents,” my mother said thoughtfully, more to herself than to us. “Did I ever tell you what Mina told
me
about her life?”

“You must have, but I've forgotten,” Josée said.

And so my mother began to tell the story as Mina had told it to her, in 1978. My mother and father were in France on a visit, and my father had just made one of the first outlines for
Maus
. My mother had translated it into French and typed it up for a small French magazine. When she went to see her grandmother, her head was filled with the stories of Vladek and Anja and she shared them with her.

“You're looking for stories?” Mina said. “I have a story to tell.” Over the course of two days, she told my mother her life.

I had heard the story from my mother several times over the years. At first she had told me that I had been there, too, a baby cradled in her arms. But later she'd corrected herself and said that I had not been there that day after all. She had been alone with Mina, she was sure of it. I felt something deep inside me being taken away. The traces I had conjured—Had a teakettle whistled? Had I grasped a cool white porcelain statue in my fist?—began to fade.

This was Mina's story, as she told it to my mother.

—

M
INA HAD BEEN
christened Fernande, but she'd never liked her name. She went by the nickname Nanda until late in her life, when Beppo gave her the pet name Mina, which she loved.

Her parents, Mélanie and Alfred, ran an auto shop with a small
buvette,
a canteen counter, attached. I do not know where they lived in 1904, when Mina was born, but in later years they lived together as a family in rooms over the
buvette.
This was in Boulogne-Billancourt, home to the Renault factories, where the
Seine exited the southwestern confines of Paris before making its sharp U-turn back up toward Neuilly. It was a proletarian neighborhood, a typical French lower-class setting, and Mina dreamed of a grand escape. She threw herself into her studies. She was first in her class. But when she was fourteen, her parents declared that her schooling was over. She had received her
certificat d'études,
completing her legally mandated education, and now she was an adult. She was to take a job and help support the family. Mina's teacher came to their home—an extraordinary occurrence—to plead Mina's case. The girl showed such promise. Who knew what a few more years of schooling might bring? But her father refused, and Mélanie didn't take Mina's side. Mina never forgave her mother for that, Françoise often said.

In 1918, Mina took a course in stenography. “She did her formation,” one would say in French, so that learning is another act of being shaped, and through being shaped, becoming. World War I had pulled women into the workforce in the vacuum left behind by all the dead young men. Young female workers were organized into vast well-trained secretarial pools.

To capture speech back then was as elusive as capturing emotion, and stenography was as much an art as a technique. One method used a series of strokes to capture consonants, another captured phonemes; one used five hundred characters annotated with dots, another used semicircles that moved like phases of the moon. Secretaries could not decipher one another's notes. Only the woman who had made the markings could expand them back into language. In that way, shorthand was like memory, condensing the gone-by-too-fast into symbols intelligible only to the one who held the key. Secretary, ghostwriter, editor—I called upon the three generations like muses. But I was none of these things.
I was the narrator, giving shape to memories that weren't my own. And that, I was learning, was a much more violent act.

In the 1920s, the image of the young secretary, with her short hair and hemline, represented a popular sexualized fantasy. It was taken for granted that her only dream was to marry her boss. But though Mina knew other secretaries who had tried to go that route, she kept her eyes squarely on her work.

She found her pleasure in the open-air
guinguettes
on the banks of the Seine, where she went dancing every Saturday. The wine flowed freely and the artists mixed with the factory workers. With her wide eyes, heart-shaped face, and Cupid's-bow mouth, Mina was a beauty made for the era.

A young man took her for a spin. He was a
beau parleur,
a smooth talker, and he told her stories about all the things he could show her. He asked for her hand in marriage. By then, Mina was eighteen or nineteen years old. She saw in him her freedom, and she agreed. As soon as the wedding plans were in place, the man announced that they would temporarily move into the rooms upstairs from her parents. His salary was not quite what he'd told her, he said, though it would be soon, of course.

Mina's mother had not told her what to expect on her wedding night. In one gesture, her new husband revealed himself to her. His genitals were diseased. He told her that he had been ravaged by syphilis. They would never sleep together, never have children.

“I married you to be my nurse,” Mina remembered him saying.

The following day at work, Mina could not contain her tears. Her boss, Eugène, demanded to know what was wrong, but Mina refused to speak. Another secretary, her best friend, filled him in on the details. Eugène called Mina into his office. He was many
years her senior and round as a Buddha. He was married. He wore a pince-nez over his wet eyes.

“I heard about what happened to you,” he said. “I can take care of it.”

“What do you mean?” Mina asked. Eugène told her what he would ask of her in exchange. Mina could not turn to her parents, her authoritarian father or her unsupportive mother, who would surely only scold her for getting into such a mess. And so she agreed.

Eugène sent Mina to the countryside for a few days. He went to see her husband in the rooms above the
buvette.
He told him that either he could accept a large sum of money and have the marriage annulled or Eugène would arrange to break his legs. The man took the money. Mina returned to Paris, and Eugène installed her in a nice apartment. He visited a few times a week.