Theory of Remainders (18 page)

“But not at all,” Morin puffed. “This is precisely the topic. You’re the one who brought up the question of order.” He threw up his hands, turning to Suardet. “What a pity. I had hoped for better. I think I may as well return to my hole.” He stood up.

Philip took a shot in the dark. “Tell me, Édouard, what was it like for you to lose your father?”

Morin’s look hardened. “
Cállate
,” he snapped in Spanish. “
C’est un sacrilège.
Du weisst nicht wovon du sprichst
.” He massaged his jaw again as he rotated through languages.

“Settle down, now,” Suardet grumbled, looking at his watch.

“I only mentioned your father,” Philip continued, “so you could understand my own concern. How would it make you feel if you didn’t know where your father was buried?”

Morin glared. “You have no right to speak of my father, Mr. Adler.”

“I knew your father. Not well, but I spoke with him. He was a good man.”

“Stop it,” he snapped. “It’s a desecration in your mouth.”

Philip had found a nerve. He knew he’d only have a moment before Suardet intervened. “Help me,” he said to Morin. “And perhaps I can help you.”

“I don’t need anyone’s help,” Morin glowered. “It won’t be long now anyway. And then I’ll be with him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, don’t pretend you don’t know,” he spat. “Everyone knows.”

Now it was Suardet’s turn to raise his hands in frustration. “Good grief! Not this again,” he sputtered in French, turning to Philip. “He’s convinced he has cancer. In the tongue. But it’s ridiculous. Entirely psychosomatic.”

The announcement took Philip by surprise, but suddenly the humming accent made sense, along with the way Morin clutched at his jaw. If there was a tumor, the nerves might have been damaged by treatment. Even the shape of the tongue might have been altered, affecting his ability to produce certain sounds.

“It started over a year ago,” Suardet continued. Then he addressed Édouard. “There’s nothing the matter with your tongue, and you know it. We’ve done all the tests.”

“Don’t hide it from me,” Morin shot back. “I know I’m rotting away. I can feel it. Why do you insist on treating me like a child?”

Suardet snapped his pen down on the table and sighed. “We are done, here, gentlemen. I have a full slate of patients to see today.”

“Just a few more minutes,” Philip said.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Adler,” Suardet replied, already rising, moving to Morin’s side. “I have work to attend to.”

As Morin headed for the door with Suardet at his side, Philip scraped his chair back and rose to his feet. “Édouard,” he said. The other man stopped. “Please.”

Morin turned and examined him, breaking into a smile. “Have a good stay in Yvetot, Mr. Adler,” he said. “This region is full of history. Perhaps you will avail yourself of your holiday to learn more about it.”

“I am hardly on holiday.”

“I myself am particularly interested in the Second World War. Like the rest of the north, Yvetot was under German control, you know.”

“I don’t care a whit about German history. I care about my daughter.”

Morin stared at him, then winced and drew his hand back up to his cheek. He stepped back to the table, planting his hands on the top and leaning toward Philip, peering into his eyes before standing upright again. “You think I am your enemy, Mr. Adler. But I am eager to help you. Believe me, everyone should know about history. When the Germans approached Yvetot on Monday, June 10, 1940, the inhabitants were very clever. They changed some of the road signs in the countryside, moving them or turning them around. People did this to send the Germans in the wrong direction, to slow them down. A wonderful idea, don’t you think?”

Philip took a deep breath. He had tired of the game.

Suardet tugged at Morin’s elbow, but he refused to turn. “And then the Germans set up blockades around Yvetot,” he continued, “on the roads to Sorquainville, Malamare, and Adonville. They were blocking access to the coast, stopping the French retreat. But some people knew better than to approach the blockades. They just went around them on the smaller roads. They knew the land. They found other ways. Isn’t that fascinating?”

Philip didn’t answer.

“I have appointments to get to,” Suardet called out, and again he tried to guide Édouard toward the door.

“You are wrong not to care about this, Mr. Adler,” Morin said. “History is an excellent teacher.”

Dipping his head in farewell, Morin finally yielded to Suardet, turning and exiting from the room, bouncing along with his happy gait.

The doctor closed the door and turned back to Philip, shaking his head. “You’ve had your meeting, Monsieur Adler. Don’t say I didn’t warn you in advance.”

He ate lunch alone in a bustling café in Rouen, staring blankly at his food. In the blue diary he jotted down thoughts with Yvonne’s pilfered pen. The meeting had been the most bewildering conversation of his entire practice. As he tried to distill what he’d learned, he faltered. His notes were a jumble, a log of odd phrases and strange behaviors.

Was any of it significant? Morin had spoken to him in a language that was not his own, and errors or quirks may merely have signaled lapses in his English. Unless he could calibrate himself to Morin’s brand of English, Philip wouldn’t be able to tell which apparent mistakes might have hit secret targets—mis-accomplishments produced by the unconscious.

Before heading back to Yvetot, he wandered through the old quarter of Rouen, mulling over the encounter, filtering the torrent of images. He passed by medieval half-timbered houses, then under the arch with the gilt Renaissance clock, and through the square where Joan of Arc had been burned alive. He’d not been in this city for over a decade.

In any case, Morin had been not been the cowed, timid soul he had expected. At times he exuded exaggerated confidence. There were flickers of rage. But no shame that Philip could detect.
Intrigued
was the word. Yes, Morin had been intrigued to meet the father of his victim.

And Suardet had been right. He was not an apathetic schizoid, as Philip had assumed all those years ago. He was instead schizotypal—so sensitive that he had built up a bulwark of language to protect him. There was even a hint of magical thinking, and Philip wondered if he had delusions. That could account for the pain in the tongue, which produced the speech impediment, or the accent—the buzzing of the S. Suardet had said they’d run all the tests, that there was no physical problem.

The cobblestone alley opened to the plaza where Rouen’s great cathedral rose overhead, broad and tall, its weathered stone darkened by the centuries, teeming with a bedlam of ornaments. High across the front stood a gallery of crowned statues—kings of France or of the Bible, he didn’t know which. He entered.

Philip had brushed up against Catholicism by way of Yvonne, handling it like one more foreign language he would never make his own. The lexicon of this tongue took the form of sculpture and rose windows, visible words that twined into awkward phrases he could barely decipher. The murmur of stone and glass recited the acts of God the creator, then the story of Adam, the father of all mankind. Floods mixed with massacres and rebirths. In one window Abraham brandished a knife over Isaac’s head; in another, a tree of descendants sprouted from the fertile loins of Jesse. Then a younger story joined and repeated the first—that of the child destined to be lost.

Before the north portal Philip paused to study the bas-relief of the Last Judgment. The lowest panel told of the resurrection of the dead, where revived cadavers clambered from sepulchers. Above was pictured the weighing of souls. At God’s right hand the blessed stood in orderly beatitude, awaiting entrance to heaven. To the left, grinning demons prodded the hordes headed for damnation. Some of the condemned shielded their faces with their hands while others offered bags of gold to bribe their torturers. One woman gaped, her stone face frozen in the realization that all hope was lost. Souls stewed in a cauldron held in the maw of a gigantic beast. A young man roasted on a spit. Demons tormented men on the wheel or devoured them whole. A weird, squat devil, nothing more than a sneering stomach on legs, surveyed the work of his fellows, ready to engulf whatever might offer itself to him.

And at the very bottom of this hell, one desperate soul had evaded his captors, seeking to claw his way up the other side and sneak back into the realm of simple purgatory. A damned man unwilling to settle for his lot. The sculptor had portrayed him falling back into the fires just as he reached the brink of salvation.

Shoehorned back into the Smart Car, he curled through the streets on the way out of town, driving by a handsome nineteenth-century building converted into a medical clinic. He slowed. It was Hervé’s group, the reproductive specialists. So this was where Yvonne’s husband coaxed new life out of barren souls.

Yvonne’s existence in Rouen had seemed somehow abstract to him before, but the clinic with the Legrand name made it real.

Stopping at a gas station he consulted a phone book and picked up a map of the city. Then he set out again. The roads twisted as the terrain rose away from the Seine, and soon he arrived at the university campus at Mont-Saint-Aignan, an assortment of charmless brick-and-glass structures. One of these buildings would house the language departments. For all he knew, Yvonne was in a classroom right now, leading a group of skinny, intense students through the mysteries of Petrarch.

He finished by tracking down the house where she and Hervé lived, a two-story brick structure of standard Norman construction, with a small yard enclosed behind a stone wall and a metal grill. Gazing through the bars of the gate from his car window, Philip made out rose trellises splayed along the south side of the house. A plump cat lay in the sun, licking its front paw.

While sitting in the car outside Yvonne’s house, Philip opened his blue diary to a new page. Clicking the pen absentmindedly, he thought for a long while, finally writing one word:
Yvonne
. Nothing else came to mind.

The jacket cuff below his closed hand still lacked a button, and he recalled the sharp image of his ex-wife bending over and biting off the threads.

Two blocks down, a city bus passed through the intersection, and a moment later an adolescent girl with dark hair turned the corner, headed in Philip’s direction. She was dressed in skintight jeans, a school backpack slung over her shoulder as she walked jauntily, white cords dangling from buds in her ears. For an instant it was Melanie Patterson that came to mind, but of course it was Margaux, whom he’d not seen since the party, now coming home after school. Something about her—he thought it was her gait, perhaps the length of her stride or the way she carried her arms—reminded him of Yvonne.

He’d promised to be discreet, and yet there he was, practically staking out Yvonne’s home, with her daughter less than a block away. It was reckless, pointless. Or worse: maybe it was deliberate. Yes, that made more sense. How stupid of him! It was perfectly transparent: he’d dallied here precisely because he knew he might catch a glimpse of Margaux, a ghost of Sophie, herself haunted by the very girl she resembled.

How could Yvonne bear to let her walk alone like this? How could she allow Margaux to wander out of her sight? And how could Roger—who still left flowers on Sophie’s grave—stand to watch another niece strolling about without a worry in the world?

He started up the car and pulled away, whizzing past Margaux a moment later, forcing himself to keep his eyes on the road. He was reasonably sure she hadn’t noticed him.

Ten

Once he left Rouen in the distance, the road sank into wooded stretches of countryside, and dwindling sunlight flashed in the gaps between branches. It was compact landscape, every meter accounted for, and yet the terrain varied considerably, changing from manicured meadows with tall, lazy cattle, to handsome stands of oaks clustered between fields, interrupted by rugged strips of forest cut through by streams and creeks. Half an hour later, just before the hills opened to the plain, he passed the turn-off for Le Mont de l’If. What had Morin called it? The Mountain of If, the Mountain of Possibilities. Yvetot felt like the opposite.