The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (53 page)

“Jean-Louis,” said my uncle, before I could speak, “Your sister, Madame Maillard.”

“Eugénie, of course,” I said, rising to meet him.

The boy was tall and graceful for his thirteen and a half years, with a shock of silky hair falling over his face. As a male of the Daudet line, he was set to lose it in about three more years, but he seemed quite vain of it now. And Jean-Louis was the very mark of my mother's spirit; he wore her like his unnecessarily ragged coat. He had Berthe's eyes, and my own.

“You are here to see Maman,” he said. “But you are supposed to be dead.”

Susanne and Sabine were quiet and round-eyed; Christiane held herself very still, at an artificial angle, at Charles's side.

“As you can see, I am not. Just living in Paris.”

“Do you know artists there?” he said, somewhat in spite of himself. “I am an artist.” Uncle Charles sighed and Susanne suppressed a giggle.

“You take after our mother, then.”

“Monsieur Maillard, your sister's husband, is an engineer,” said Charles. I swallowed.

“Monsieur Maillard's first patent was for a table extender,” I said, with a silent apology to the man. “That is for when a table must be more generous than was previously planned. As this one has been to me; and I thank you, Christiane.”

 

“Maman has told me about you,” Jean-Louis said. He and I were alone, walking back to the Hôtel de Gascogne. Past the old narrow, blackened
poustrelle.
One could get lost among them, even though by Paris standards, the area was small. Poustrelle de las Houmettos
.
It sounded like a place the ghosts would live, and I thought they did.

“Has she? Other than my death, that is?”

Jean-Louis made an unintelligible scoffing sound. “I knew you weren't dead. Only that you had shamed the family. Are you a thief?”

“No, Jean-Louis. And what does our mother think of your artistic ambitions?”

“She has always said we were alike, and I will do what she could not. When she dies, I will go to Paris, to the Beaux-Arts,” he added. “In Paris, you were inside, during the siege?” His eyes round.

“Yes.”

“They say you ate rats; is it true? How?”

“How would you eat them if you had to?”

“With a lot of sauce!”

“Indeed. And the brewery ones were much tastier than those from the sewers.”

“Did you kill them yourself?”

“No, we bought them at the butcher.” Tales of the siege were made for such boys.

“What about the zoo animals? Camels and bears and monkeys?”

“I saw them in the butcher's window, just like chickens and ducks. But you know—it was a serious business, Jean-Louis.”

The Basilique Sainte-Marie was made of pale stone blocks, like the Préfecture in Paris; only it had huge windows and a garnished gothic entry, below which we stood.

“Do you want to see your epitaph? I can get inside.”

Beyond the archways, an arcaded porch, two strong square towers. Jean-Louis led me past carved oak choir stalls (like caskets for the seated), then to a small chapel, tucked under a stone carving and hidden behind a stack of old chairs. All of the dust and mildew tickled my nose, and I began to sneeze. Affixed to the wall was the usual plastering of plaques, emblazoned with commemorative platitudes.

 

JEAN-JACQUES RIGAULT, 1818–1860. IN LOVING MEMORY.

EUGéNIE LOUISE RIGAULT,
1845–1861.
MAY MERCIFUL GOD FIND AND WALK WITH HER
.

 

“She blames herself for your life,” said Jean-Louis. And suddenly he was half an orphan, a boy whose mother was ill and dying and had been bitter for as long as he could remember. He did not remember her when she was young, when she was an artist herself.

The false gold band pressed against my finger; my heart snagged. Because of it, I would vanish from here like a ghost. Sometime in the future, Jean-Louis would remember, perhaps, and wonder if our meeting had happened at all . . . Madame Maillard? Why, no such person exists . . . or she does, but she is someone very different.

“Do you remember our father?” asked Jean-Louis sadly.

“Of course,” I said. “I have an idea. Let's go taste the foie gras they are offering at the hotel, and I'll tell you about him. To begin with, he didn't like the stuff, said it tasted like geese smelled . . .”

By the time I sent Jean-Louis back across the square, the last of the foie gras tasters had left, the staff were clearing champagne glasses and sweeping up the leavings. Toast crumbs. Empty bottles. A rind of cheese. Slipped under my door was a note from my uncle. I was to come to the place Salinis at three the next day to see my mother.

 

“I will let you be; ring if you require anything,” Charles said to me, and gestured to a bell pull to the side of the hearth. He softly departed and the room narrowed; darkened. We stood, facing each other, my mother and I; because she refused to seat herself even though she was hardly able to stand. Her penumbral cloud had descended; settled and spread in the room like an infection; and indeed, she was like the
malades
at Lourdes: suffused with illness. The table on which her hand rested had a marble surface and dark, whorled legs. On it were her miniatures, made so long ago—small painted jewels in their gilt frames, the ivory now as sallow as the whites of her eyes. There was my father, my uncles, my grandparents; the baby Charles. My own small portrait had once stood among them.

I felt dizzy and needed to touch something solid. On my finger, the Limoges wedding band felt cold and heavy. Oh, Maman.
So proud, lovely—
but the face in front of me could hardly be translated from the original. Her thin-lipped mouth was set above a heavy neck; her wrists and ankles, once so beautifully turned, were creased with the bloat of flesh on bone. There was a sickly sweet smell that was vaguely familiar—medicine and eau de vie? My mother's fingers, once slim and tapered, with strong, perfectly oval nails, were discolored; swollen. Her old wedding band could never have fit on these hands; the one she wore was larger, and plain. My grandmother's ring. I recognized it.

The tip of her tongue, caught by her teeth from long habit, protruded just slightly.
And her eyes, their whites yellow-tinged, glittered like jet; the licking flame, faint, veiled; a sly, hungry fire. Her step forward was a laborious, burdened movement, the flesh of another woman heaped upon her once-graceful form. Her hands groped for a support. That much, at least—stubborn pride—was Berthe all over. She must usually rely on a cane, one that she had refused today.

“Maman—let me help you.”

She stared at me, up and down. Her glance rested, solid as a rock, on my left hand. White lies, black magic; broken crockery; a boy's kisses still warm on my lips . . . nothing could touch what she knew. I was sixteen again, and transparent to her.

“You have no right to that word in this house,” she said, at last. Her voice issued from a ravaged throat, but it was the same voice. My heart, that absurd, hopeful instrument, turned to stone, and the sick and queasy nausea of a lifetime welled up. I groped behind me and sat down; which I immediately realized was a mistake, on this battlefield. A cunning, satisfied expression traced my mother's face as she stared at me.

“I wore black for five years. The first and second for your father. The third and fourth for your grandfather; the fifth for you.”

She stared back, her eyes cold, and the room was silent, but for the heavy wheeze of her breath. It was cold, but there was no fire, nor hope of one, it seemed. She shifted slightly; continued to look at me with the same glittering stare.

“You didn't think you would just be permitted to run off? A Rigault daughter? A Daudet granddaughter? With that—criminal who stole the harvest, bought it cheap, starved out your aunt and cousin and half the village, if it weren't for Besson to lend?” I closed my eyes.
Blink,
and let Berthe tell the story her way.
Blink,
and it is true.
Blink,
and you believe what she says, for half a lifetime. What she says bends lives; contours them to her meaning. It was always this way. It is no different now. “Yes. A fine business for
you
to be mixed up with.”

“You left,” I said, quietly, helplessly.

“Your grandfather and I searched every town from here to Rouen.”

I looked up.

“We would have taken you back—even so. We investigated the matter thoroughly. My father tracked you down in Paris, through the police. We did not want to give you up,
I
did not want to give you up. But it was definitive. It was too late.” Her voice dropped from a throaty whisper to a scratch. “How dare you come to this house.” Scratch like rat's feet; like the nib of a pen . . . Sickness engulfed me, rising from my gut, that dizziness—the old feeling—that had followed me everywhere, everywhere, since Tillac, or even before . . . when had it begun? Perhaps it had always been there. Perhaps it had begun with her.

“The authorities in Paris wrote you off for a thief and a whore. My own daughter.” She spat the words. “I doubted at first, how could I not? I would not believe it until I saw it with my own eyes. And so they finally sent it to me, a copy of the police register that bore your name. Your name, and mine—I tore out my own heart to think of what you had done. I refused to sign the paper. A notary had to do it for me. Then his silence was bought.”

“Maman—” I whispered.
Why did you not help me—?

“You were dead to me after that. I mourned for a year and then put it away. Life—such as it was—went on. And now that I've had a good look at you—” Her voice changed, became a whine. High-pitched, out of body, like an insect's scream. “Do you know what I am? What you made me into? I will tell you. Oh, I'll go on—”

“I think you have said enough, Maman.”

“You did not write, you never came. Just walked away, with that man who ruined you, and even when you were dead you never came back. I ordered a crate from Condòm every few months.
Eau-de-vie de vin.
That is what your leaving did to me.” She steadied herself against the doorframe, gnarled old hands trembling. She was the very node of turmoil; a trouble inseparable from me, that webbed my life. She was every part of me; the knife edge of my own contamination. I didn't need Paris to find corruption.

 

“I'm sorry,” said my uncle, later. “I had hoped for a better outcome.” One of the maids brought tea, but I was too spent to pour.

“She was very beautiful once, your mother. You must remember her that way.”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever meet him, the man for whom she left Rigault?”

I looked up. Had my uncle abandoned his senses?

“Maman—”

“Petite salope,” she hissed.

Berthe had a lover in Auch .
.
 .
The old voices, faint.

 

Berthe turned her head when Uncle Charles asked me to return to the house on the place Salinis. Her hands lay blue-veined and swollen on the covers; her feet on a cushion, the toes blue-black and yellow with the gout. She sat, propped up on pillows, eyes fixed, until her head fell to the side, and she breathed the even breath of sleep. The cloying, fetid smell saturated the room.

My Uncle Louis came. Elderly and mustached, watch chain straining across his paunch. Still tall as a tower, but stooped, now.

“She was the most beautiful girl in Auch,” he said, and his dim blue eyes had a faraway look. “She made you think that she would do something extraordinary one day, our Berthe.”

The doctor passed in and out in his dark suit, carrying his black bag. For him, she lifted her head, thrust her neck from the pillows, smiled a little girl's supplication in a bloated death mask. Eyes darting for the dropper, the rubber-capped bottle he drew from his bag. After he tended her, the man drew me aside in the hall outside her door, spoke in a low voice. He did not feel that my presence was helping Berthe.

“Are you telling me that I should leave, Doctor?”

“You mother is not a forgiving woman.”

 

“Uncle Charles, the doctor feels I am having a bad effect,” I said, later that evening.

“Ridiculous. He may think he understands Berthe; these medical men all have their notions—but all she wants from him is the rubber bulb. I believe it is good for her to have you here.”

“She will not speak to me. I make her angrier, remind her of the past.”

Charles sighed. “Very well. Jean-Louis will make the decision. He is the one who has her confidence.”

And so my brother was brought to the bedside. Moodily he glanced from her face to mine. He didn't say much, Jean-Louis. Unlike everyone else, he did not doctor, soothe, feed, or fuss. He just sat, holding her hands by the hour, with a kind of gentleness not often seen in attendants of the dying, although I had seen it at Lourdes. His presence seemed to calm her. The maids passed in and out, with their sickroom routines. And we sat, and listened to the
tick-tick
of the clock.

The next day, quietly, clearly, and without her querulous sickbed manner, Berthe pulled herself up to sit, and in the way she had once peered through her magnifier, fixed her eyes to a mid-distant point on the wall. She took Jean-Louis's hand and spoke as though she was resuming a story. And maybe she was; one that had played long in her mind.

 

“My mother was just a country girl, the eldest of a big family. She had beautiful hair, and all the girls would cut their hair when it got long enough, send it off to the summer fair at Limoges where the wig makers from Paris came. That is how they got their dowries. But then the Revolution and no one in Paris wanted wigs anymore.

“She was thirteen when she left. All the little ones in the house were quiet by then, too hungry to cry. It was the silence in the house that let her know she had to go. All the way to Auch with hair to her waist, and when she arrived she saw the guillotine set up right in the place Salinis. But there was no work because the families were afraid to hire a servant, for fear their neighbors would think they were rich. But Maman had a bright, strong spirit and she found work at the hotel as a serving girl. Many were not as lucky.