The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (52 page)

“I called her to my office, that day he arrived. I didn't want to let her go, but he insisted; he had the papers. A father. Oh, I did hesitate. We loved her, our little daughter. Whatever she had been through; we didn't know what it was. When she saw him, she went to him as though she had known him all her life. She went right to him and held out her hand.

“‘Mother, I feel I know him,' she said. I did not know whether it was right, my dear. I prayed about it that night. While the gentleman was here taking the waters, attending the masses, I met with him again; I felt that he was not the most abject of sinners; he had a heart in him, this man. He had been in India, had started a school there for the poor. He also wanted to speak to us about transporting French Bibles there.”

“I don't think—” I began, but stopped.

“It was not that, that moved me. But when he was to leave, he asked her if she wanted to go with him. He gave her the choice and I knew in my heart she would go. I was torn, you see—I did not understand. I believe she was perplexed herself, at first. I went to pray with her and when we were finished she spoke. She did not—she did not want to become a nun, she said. It nearly broke my heart; and I knew that I was too attached to her. It was a caution to me, that bond.

“Do not blame yourself, my dear. She was to be found one way or another. You missed them only by a matter of days.” She was quiet for a moment, then dropped her head as if in prayer. “I have been in this order all my life. The world—it still astonishes me. That little girl—Berthe Sophia—so many wanting her after she was so long abandoned. All of our sisters here, this father, you. It is the work of the Holies, it is a mystery. But there are many orphans here. Children and the grown, as well. Your daughter will have what is needed, I think. But you must look to your own soul, Eugénie. Lourdes is a place of miracles; and one may be hovering over us even now. Do not travel from here as you came: in anger, in recrimination.”

“I do not—I am sorry, Mother. Faith is not to me what it is to you. I don't say I have none—but . . .” I stopped, tried to breathe deeply into my constricted lungs.

“Go to the Grotto, my dear. Pray there. Do not go with the crowds. If you go now,” she glanced at the clock, “you will be there when most of the others are at Mass. It is a good time. Quiet. Allow yourself some healing, after what you have been through in Paris.” She bowed her head, then raised it, smiling.

And so, helpless and exhausted; my tears now a dried, poisonlike fury on my cheeks, I followed the parade of push chairs, nuns, and pilgrims; stretchers with those unable even to stand, who wanted to die in front of a rock. As the sister had promised, they broke off and filed up to the church, where the bells were ringing. And I carried on to the Grotto. An attendant was removing spent tapers and replacing them with fresh ones on an enormous standing candelabra.

The attendant paid no attention and in a few steps I walked up inside the Grotto, the very place where Bernadette had scraped in the dirt and found a miracle. Rules and restrictions, at least, seemed to have fallen away; I did not even need a ticket to enter. It was cool and damp, at least; the interior itself a comfort after the sunny heat.
The place of the mothers,
the sister had said. I glanced over my shoulder. Still no one interfered, nor seemed to care at all what I might be doing. I had the instinct to unclasp my boots and slip them off, to stand on the Grotto's bare earth. Undid the traveling cape; and since it did not seem to matter, shed the coat as well, placing it over a shelf of rock. I shivered, slightly, in the cool; a Pyrenees breeze came through—a small gust like those I remembered from my own province—and all around was quiet but for the sound of trickling water; rivulets running down the side of the cavern. Near me, by the Grotto's opposite wall, a well-dressed man dabbed his handkerchief on one of the rivulets and pressed the dampened cloth to his brow. Like mine, his trouble, whatever it was, was not apparent.

A strange feeling stole over me, a relief from thoughts because it was different, other. I would put words to it if I could; but I cannot. The sensation, a slight tremulous feeling, whether from the rock or from my own body, passed through me as I touched the mottled, damp surface, ran my palm over the cavern's craggy, damp interior. A humble place, similar to dozens of others, it reminded me of the springs of my childhood, those places of wishes and rags, where my aunt had mumbled and the village had strung up their tokens and supplicated the spirits. It was that feeling, that kind of place; and very strong. My aunt would not have been amazed at all.
The more you listen, the more you shall hear,
she used to say—and perhaps it was true.

I was not ready to cast my lot with the hordes and masses, but had a feeling in this place connected with something in the past—like two bells rung together, one distant, the other near. I stood in the interior of that rocky outcropping and experienced peace, for the first time that day; the first for a very long time.

I sensed that I had passed through a long struggle . . . Could that be?
Passed through
—when such fresh hurt as the sister's words had caused—had hardly even begun? I stood, rock-still, for a long time.
Not wanting to move from there.

 

But then the masses were over; the throng began to trickle along the path, first two or three, then hundreds behind them. The tower of candles was lit for the procession then, sparkling in the midday sunlight. They came and kneeled; they filled their bottles and jars and vessels from the Grotto's spring. And I passed out of the cavern. No longer angry; no longer blinking with tears.

M
UST EVERY TALE
have its villain, or are we all of us, from salt spoon to carving knife, complicit in the evil of our own lives? Was this to be a journey of retrieval, then—a restitution not of what I most desired but what I wished to deny—a full serving of life's heartbreak? Berthe, my mother, casts a long shadow. She always did.

The Hôtel de Gascogne's
terrace was decorated with flower boxes; the petals protected by a fine mesh screen, not bee-stung to death. Tomorrow there was to be a tasting of the local foie gras. Tonight, it seemed, beds were at a premium, the hotelier harried as he served a portly woman in a silk bonnet with a shrill, trumpeting voice. Another customer stood at the desk, his voice the edge of a whine. He wanted many beds—two beds, three beds, one bed additional. At Lourdes, the hospital beds were made ready for as many as came. Nor did the dying demand or rush, though they may have traveled a thousand miles for a cup of water. And yet I was more attached to this world than that other.

 

I came away altered from Lourdes, and not just because of what I had learned. Indeed—Stephan had so long played the villain, it would be easy to continue to cast him in that role. But much of the news, as I now reflected, was good. Berthe was alive; she had been brought up in some way that had made her kind and civilized. Even hard truths could be faced, at least in my little whitewashed room near the Grotto; and in quiet conversation with the sister, who had embraced me as we parted, told me to be of good courage. I did not bathe nor go to mass, visit the stations of the cross, nor did I have the strength to push the sick and suffering up the hill. Yet it was enough. Lourdes gave what was needed and offered no reproach. It was a rare place on earth, for that. But the Grotto was the Grotto; and Auch was Auch. My boots were back on; and on my ring finger lay a gold band from a Limoges pawnshop; it gleamed palely, strange and heavy. My trunk, left in Limoges with instructions to be sent on, had arrived, disgorging every trapping of conventionality I could drape over myself. Boots, crinoline, gloves, hat, and veil. My umbrella—a good one from Lafarge, in the Galerie Feydeau on the
Passage des Panoramas in Paris. A man's umbrella, not a flimsy woman's parasol. Black, with a silver head. I wrapped my hand around it.

 

My grandfather's house, which now belonged to Uncle Charles, was off the place Salinis in the shadow of the pale stone Tour d'Armagnac, not far from the center of the upper part of the town. High and lower Auch were linked by a network of steep, narrow alley stepways, the
poustrelles.
Poustrelle de las Houmettos, Poustrelle des Couloumats
.
The names still had a ghostly magic; I had made many trips up and down them during my school days, studies forgotten; counting the moments until I was able to get back home to the finches and linnets and fields, the gusts of perfumed wind.

“Madame Auguste Maillard.” I announced myself to the maid at the door. Her face was impassive as a plank.

 

Uncle Charles rubbed his shiny-pated head, now fringed with gray; he wore small, rounded, gold-framed spectacles. His young, second wife was called Christiane, and they had two small daughters, Susanne and Sabine. After they had gone to bed, and Christiane retired to instruct the cook and housekeepers, we sat alone in front of the fire, my uncle and I, with a bottle of his good
vieille resérve
Armagnac. Fiery stuff, liquid gold, fragrant with oak and sun on the vineyards. My uncle, a capable and optimistic man, owned vineyards around Auch and a good part of the town. For him, to build was to invest and what was broken merely waited for repair—he was less certain when confronted with the vagaries and contradictions of women. And war.

I had been telling him, as neutrally as possible, of the events in Paris during the siege; how the capital had felt in March, after the army surrendered to the Commune. Charles had been to Paris as a young man; now he pushed the flat of his hand against his scalp, as if to press it in place, and sighed. He was silent for a moment, and rested the heavy glass in his hand; the conversation turned back to Berthe.

“We believed for a long time that you had died. Your mother had a slab of marble put up at Sainte-Marie's, with an epitaph. It was not until recently that I began to doubt. And then I found the papers.” I must have turned quite white, for he said, after a pause, “Of course it has always been difficult. With my sister Berthe.” He sighed again and reached for the bottle.

“Are you familiar with the works of Augustin Benedict Morel?” he resumed. “The belief is very deep with your mother that a man, or a woman, can fall from the pure, original nature into a state of degeneration, and that these characteristics or qualities may be passed down from parent to child. Your mother believes that it was a very great sin of her own—that she was responsible for what happened to you—and that this is a part of a—
spiraling downward
—of society as a whole, to which she has contributed. Of course, science and medicine and even philosophy have come some distance since Morel, but she holds by her own thinking.”

“What—what sin does she believe she committed, Uncle Charles?”

A cloud crossed his face; he shook his head. “My sister has not risen from bed in weeks. We have run through all of the domestic help in town; Christiane has been a merciful angel, but it is perhaps you that she needs. I am glad you've come, Eugénie.”

“It may be the final straw to put her under,” I said wryly.

“According to the doctors, she could have been buried a year ago; the last six months beat the miracles at Lourdes. She'll have a crisis, but pull back. She's had last rites”—he counted on his fingers—“
eight
times. Every priest in the department has been here.”

“She may not let me in the door, Uncle.”

“Nonsense. You are a respectable married woman now. And priests—well, she tosses them on their ear, anyway.”

Later Uncle Charles walked me across the square and kissed me on both cheeks in front of the Hôtel de Gascogne. If he disapproved of a woman staying alone at a hotel, he never said as much, merely invited me to dine the next evening. After all, I was a respectable married woman; for some inexplicable reason traveling without her maid.

“And you will see Jean-Louis,” he said, with his gloved hand on my elbow. “Your brother . . . Oh, he hasn't answered to ‘Charles' in years. Now, get some rest.”

 

Tall tapers flickered in their holders on Christiane's table. Two table maids, a pair of clear-eyed, tight-lipped girls, both the very stamp of the older woman who had answered the door, moved on cat's paws in and out of the swinging door, with stacks of snowy folded napkins, wine and water glasses of cut crystal sparkling in their pale hands. The soup bowls had been set out. Gold-banded, white and ruby; their creamy interiors set off the rich gold of a translucent broth. A filigreed fuss of salvers and spoon holders, napkin rings and silver carafes. The damask was well-known to my fingertips; the fleur-de-lis pattern, hemstitches thin as threads of frost. My fingers had rubbed that silver until it shone; it was Berthe's dowry silver.

“It is a lovely table, Christiane.”

She was bare-shouldered and glowing—fashionably dressed, for a provincial wife—but Charles was wealthy and I should know better than to hold such prejudices.
Les auscitaines
had always been stylish, and Christiane's smile was warm and genuine.

The two girls, blonde-headed, hair tied up in ribbons, sat wide-eyed and bolt upright. Because of their new Paris relative and their—apparently—badly mannered cousin Jean-Louis, they were allowed to sit at the dining table with the adults. Sabine, the older of the two, had confided in me, earlier, in the drawing room.

“What is so impolite about your cousin, Sabine?” I had asked earlier; and she looked carefully around the room before answering. “Well, he is always late, with muddy shoes and no handkerchief, and he says terrible things out loud!” At table, she held her sister's hand, and they both barely controlled their giggles. The gold band on my third finger lay heavily against the damask, clicked softly against the wineglass. Our silver spoons had been set down, and the tureens and the ruby bowls cleared, when from the outer hall, my younger brother's arrival was announced.