The Vexations Read online

  “Well,” Eric says dismissively, “a hundred years is a long time to wait.”

  “They didn’t know it would be a hundred years. And the war wasn’t really like that. It kept stopping and starting.” Eric senses his father’s impatience, as if Alfred knows he is not getting through. “They might have thought the war would be over in days, and they’d have all the stonemasons they wanted. No one knows these things when they’re living inside them. Wars only have their names put to them later.”

  Eric can make no sense of a war lasting a century, of how long that might be. He can make no sense of a war fought with England, a place the family vacationed once, at the seaside in Brighton. A voice whispers in his head that his mother will be dead for a century, and a century after that, and all the centuries after.

  That Eric’s own name will last a century after his death, a century at least, does not enter his mind. He does not feel born to fame, nor entitled to it. Greatness sounds like a lot of work, frankly, and he is not given to study, or to practicing his piano. But however long Eric’s name lasts, it will be longer than his mother’s, longer than his sister’s or his grandmother’s or his father’s. Conrad will one day publish a chemistry manual, so that his name will molder, if not in people’s consciousnesses, then indefinitely in the catalogs of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. But none of this has happened yet. Lives, like wars, carry names assigned to them only once they’re over.

  St. Catherine’s sits on a slope overlooking the harbor, separated from its bell tower by a stone courtyard. The height of the tower invites lightning, and the largest wooden church in France is also the most vulnerable to fire. The family climbs the steps of the tower up to the small belfry. The roof shingling is green with moss, and there is a moist, rotting smell. Alfred lifts the children so they can see through the wooden window slats: the harbor, the town, the city of Le Havre across the narrow channel, all divided into dim narrow slices. In an effort to share a joke, their father tells Eric that the townspeople here call Le Havre “the city on the other coast.” But to Eric the distance looks vast enough for the name to be entirely appropriate. On the way back to his grandmother’s house, he whispers words of his mother’s English: “House, house, house,” he says, and does not think to say “home.” He traces the letters on his leg, his finger moving through the fabric of his pocket, an anxious charm against forgetting.

  Their uncle, Alfred’s younger brother, insists on being called Osprey, in English, by everybody: the children, his parents, friends and business associates, and the passersby who wave at him in the Old Basin. He owns a boat there that never leaves its mooring, although he pays a sailor to look after it, keep the sails mended, ropes coiled, railings freshly varnished. On weekends and evenings, after he leaves his stationer’s shop, Osprey sits on the boat smoking his pipe. Alfred and the children occasionally join him, and Osprey teaches Eric how to tie knots while Louise and Conrad pretend to fish over the side with sticks and string. Osprey has a wife and three children of his own, but his wife bitterly resents the expense of the boat and rarely brings her children to see their cousins. Agnès and Alfred grouse about Osprey’s finances over dinner, their disapproval couched as concern for his family. This is the only thing that seems to console Agnès about her influx of Parisian grandchildren; there are now new people to whom she can complain.

  When Osprey comes to Sunday dinner, Alfred rattles off old grievances, how Osprey used to short-sheet their bed, how he planted dead mice under the coverlet. And there was the time he placed under the covers a baked potato so hot that Alfred burned the bottom of his foot and limped for a week. Eric supposes he should feel loyal to his father, but mostly he feels embarrassed at his father’s feebleness at pranks. Alfred complains about misplacing his pocketknife, eyeing Osprey as if he might be somehow responsible for that, too. The main course is a briny lamb, raised on salt marshes near the coast, a local specialty Agnès prizes and the children loathe, and before it’s even finished Osprey retreats to the garden to smoke. Agnès soldiers on with dessert, an apple tart drenched in eggy custard. Eric tries extracting the apple slices, but his father makes him eat the entire quivering yellow square.

  When Agnès finally excuses Eric from the table he finds Osprey sitting on a wooden bench in the back garden, tapping his pipe out and rubbing ash into the gravel with his shoe. “You’re still here,” the boy says, surprised.

  Osprey asks him if he gets along with his brother and sister.

  “Mostly.”

  “Well, good for you.”

  Eric feels that he’s disappointed his uncle. Both stare at their shoes. Osprey’s feet, Eric notices, are exceptionally large.

  “Have you found the mermaid?” Osprey finally asks.

  Eric shakes his head.

  “Come for a walk.”

  They leave by the back gate and circle around the block, passing the front of his grandmother’s house and turning left up a pedestrian stairway, one of many shortcuts that mount the steep slope rising from the harbor. The sides of the staircase are the ivy-covered walls of private gardens.

  Halfway up Osprey pauses, looks around as if to mark his bearings, then pulls at the ivy, searching for something. “Here it is,” he finally says, and holds the vines aside.

  Inlaid in the brickwork is a large brass plaque without words, just the relief of a mermaid, her tail curled into a J and her hair streaming down around it. She is topless, with rounded breasts and tiny nubs of nipples. The plaque is a weathered, greenish color, except for the golden breasts.

  “Boys used to rub her for luck,” Osprey says. “They would pass her every day on the way to school, and there were little spells people would say, for extra luck, or to conjure the mermaid in real life.”

  Eric isn’t sure if he’s allowed to rub the breasts. Is his uncle inviting him to carry on the game, or to mock the gullibility of the village boys?

  “Go ahead,” Osprey says. “Make a wish.”

  Eric thinks at the mermaid, harder and harder, until his brain feels the way his eyes do when he pushes on the lids. He strokes the mermaid’s hair, dabs the tip of his finger to the two fins at the end of her tail.

  “Now you know the secret of the mermaid,” Osprey says. “You must be a good steward.”

  That night Eric worries over what it means to be the steward of the secret of the mermaid. Should he share it with Conrad, or Louise? There are those bright scandalous breasts. There’s the risk that Louise might tell Agnès, and that Agnès will find some way to ruin it for everybody. Eric decides that he can wish hard enough for everyone. He’ll keep the secret to himself. Is that all right? he thinks into the air, imagining the darkness of a sea at night, the moonlight catching on the silver streaks of fish, a pale woman with a finned tail. He presses his hands to his eyes until she flickers into movement. Of course, she says. That’s fine.

  The next morning their father is gone. “On the first train,” Agnès tells them at the breakfast table. “He’s…traveling.”

  Eric sets aside a part of himself to be especially angry that his grandmother has rehearsed no better explanation than this. He does not really expect adults to be truthful with him, but surely they could take their lies more seriously.

  “It’s impossible,” Agnès says. “A man trying to mother three children. That’s why I told him to bring you here.”

  That afternoon she walks Eric to the shops in the town center. From a crisp envelope she unfolds a list of everything the school will require him to have: one mirror, two combs, a brush, a shoehorn, a prayer book, a glass and set of silverware, bed linens, twelve handkerchiefs, eight shirts, twelve cloth napkins, twelve small towels, six pairs of summer stockings and six winter. Three pairs of plain leather shoes. At the shoemaker Agnès orders three different sizes, the largest so big Eric needs two pairs of stockings and crumpled paper in the toe to keep his feet in them.

  “So they won’t get outgrown before they get outworn,” she says.

  For the sh
irts and towels and sheets, she buys yards of fabric. She does not buy the finest of anything, nor does she buy the cheapest. This, Eric thinks, is as much love as she has shown him.

  “You can take flatware from the house,” she says. “And a glass.”

  “Take it where?” Eric says.

  She ignores him, but at the cabinetmaker she reads off precise dimensions for a box, absolutely no more than a quarter meter high. “I don’t know why,” his grandmother says, “but those are the instructions.”

  “So they fit under the beds,” the cabinetmaker says. “Dormitory size. I’m sure we’ve got one ready-made. Do you want it delivered to the house or the school?”

  “The house, for now,” Agnès says. “He’ll start next week.”

  Agnès walks him home past the Collège de Honfleur, the same one his father attended as a day student. It is one street over and one above his grandmother’s house, a five-minute walk.

  “It’s so close,” Eric says. But he doesn’t say, “Don’t send me away.” He doesn’t say, “Please.”

  Agnès says nothing. She hems the towels and sheets, begins work on the shirts, poking Eric with pins by lamplight. After she’s cut and joined the pieces, Louise counts out the buttons.

  “Will I go to school, too?” she asks.

  “One at a time,” Agnès says. “I have to figure out what to do with you children one at a time.”

  There has been no word from their father. As the shirts are finished Agnès folds them into the wooden box delivered from the cabinetmaker’s. Eric slides it in and out under his bed to be sure that it fits. He dreams entire nightmares of arriving at school with a box too big to fit under the bed. One night he opens the box and finds a packet of licorice, tied with a ribbon, tucked inside one of his new shoes. When Agnès suggests on Sunday morning that he leave for school early, to settle in before Monday’s classes, he is prepared. He begs for one more day; he loves the salt-marsh lamb, he claims, the eggy apple tart. Agnès twitches an eyebrow in victory.

  While he’s still here, she says, he should see if he can do something about Conrad’s toenails. The boy hasn’t let anyone touch them since leaving Paris, has bitten and scratched Agnès whenever she tried. She hands Eric a small silver pair of nail scissors and shoos them upstairs. Conrad pulls his stockings up past his knees, grips them as high on his thighs as he can make them stretch.

  “They’re so long you’ll trip on them,” Eric says, “and then you won’t be able to run away with us.”

  Conrad blinks.

  “We’re going to leave together,” Eric says. “On Osprey’s boat.”

  All afternoon the children plan their escape, divide Eric’s school bounty into neat piles, although Louise is dismayed at the thought of dressing like a boy. Eric announces that they will sail all the way to Argentina.

  “That’s too far,” Louise says, sensible even in play.

  At least, Eric assumes they’re only playing, until Louise runs to her bedroom and returns with their father’s pocketknife. She’s kept it secret since the train, she says, hidden from Agnès.

  Eric thinks that he could have told Louise about the mermaid, after all, that she would have kept that secret safe, too. “Where should we go?” he asks, sincerely.

  “To Paris, down the river,” Louise suggests, and Conrad agrees.

  Eric gives Louise and Conrad his licorice, draws maps and makes provision lists until it’s a game again, just a game, until the daylight runs out and their bellies are podgy with custard and Louise and Conrad are yawning. Agnès sends them all to bed and Eric follows his sister, watches as she tucks the pocketknife between mattress and bed frame. They wish each other good night, sweet dreams. He returns to the horsehair mattress, where Conrad tries to wind himself around his brother like an octopus. With Conrad’s toenails now safely shorn, Eric lets him. He doesn’t tell his brother or sister what their father told him, that the river flows north, to the sea, and that there will be no going back the way they came.

  From the school office, where he sits with his grandmother and the headmaster, Eric can hear the full-time boarders clattering in the rectory. The hallway gets rowdier as his fellow Monday-through-Saturday boarders and the day students arrive. While the headmaster chats interminably with Agnès, Eric pushes his head through the open office door. In the white hallway a herd of dark-uniformed boys mills about. They remind him of the cows out the train window, black spots against white flanks. Then he remembers that he is wearing the same dark uniform jacket, that he’ll soon be a splotch of the same cow. A boy turns and makes eye contact and Eric pulls back, embarrassed, and scratches his temple on the brass edge of the strike plate.

  “Your father was a student here too,” the headmaster says.

  Eric presses his left palm against his temple. The office is a cavern of bloodred wallpaper and mahogany furniture, with a heavy leather blotter and silver coffee service on a side table. His grandmother looks so at home in the visitor’s chair, her dress nearly matching the upholstery. He thinks this is probably the velvety sort of space she once hoped to live in but never had quite enough money for, even before four grief-ragged people fell into her starched lap. A dangerous empathy begins to uncurl inside him and he tamps it down.

  “He knows,” Agnès says. “About his father and uncle attending here.”

  Eric pictures his adult father walking among the children outside, his legs hairy above his stockings as he leans down to make fun of the boy with his face stuck through the headmaster’s office door. No bell has rung, but there is the sound of classroom doors being unlatched, students filing in.

  “I’ve kept you too long,” the headmaster says to Agnès, then turns to Eric. “Let’s get your things upstairs, and then to class with you.”

  Agnès stands and trains her eyes on Eric. He wonders if she’s going to embrace him to say goodbye, the way a mother would. He wonders if he wants her to.

  “Behave yourself,” she says. “I’ll see you Saturday. We’ll have apple tart, now that I know you like it.”

  The headmaster hefts Eric’s school box into the air and balances it on one shoulder like the men offloading boats in the harbor. Eric tries to pick up the rolled mattress, bound with twine and wrapped around the bedsheets like a pork roulade, but it’s heavy for him, and awkward, so the headmaster lifts that, too. The walk down the hallway is excruciating. The boys in the classrooms they pass have only notebooks and pencils in front of them, at most a small satchel hanging off their chairs. To have his box paraded down the hallway on the headmaster’s shoulder, filled with everything he owns, is hideous. His rolled mattress might as well be a flag made of underpants. He follows the headmaster up three flights of stairs to a long attic room with rows of iron beds. There are several bare metal frames, but the headmaster seems to know which is meant for Eric.

  “You’ll be on this end,” he says. “With the younger children.”

  The box slides easily under the bed, and Eric sighs, relinquishing some small corner of a larger fear he’s been holding. The headmaster puts the mattress roll on top of the metal frame. The nearest bed is neatly made and beside it stands a shared dresser. A window looks down upon his bed, but Eric doesn’t know if this is a desirable spot, because of the view, or a bad one, because of the cold. The gray water stretches outside the window, with the gray hump of Le Havre across the channel and the gray sky above it. The houses too are gray in their march down toward the harbor, and by counting the streets and chimneys, he can pick out his grandmother’s roof.

  Nailed to the wall above the neighboring bed are a small wooden cross and a photograph, a family portrait: mother, father, two tall sisters, a boy of about Eric’s age. Eric’s family never sat for a portrait together. It was expensive, and there was always a reason to delay—until his father’s business took off, or until his mother said she felt slim again, no longer big with Louise, then big with Conrad, then—

  “I’m sorry about your mother,” the headmaster says, and Eric’
s breathing grows jagged. He lunges at the basin on the dresser to splash his face with water. “Why don’t you skip penmanship?” the headmaster says. “Just for today. Here, on your schedule—you can see where to go after the bell for second lesson.”

  Eric nods gratefully, his face still turned away. The headmaster puts his hand on Eric’s shoulder, then leaves. When he’s gone Eric drags his box from under the bed and opens it. He needs his notebook and pencils, and a handkerchief. A folded paper slips from the notebook, a drawing Louise has snuck in. Eric is glad she’s labeled the figures—Eric, Louise, Conrad—because the sketch isn’t any good. All three children are composed of sticks and circles, Louise’s dress a black triangle. They stand close together in the center of the page, although Eric’s eyes are placed strangely, staring not at the viewer but somewhere beyond the edge of the paper. Louise’s eyes stare forward in accusation. He wonders if the drawing is the kind of thing he might tack above his bed, or if he would be made fun of.

  Do I put it up? he thinks toward the mermaid.

  How in the world would I know? she answers. You’ve seen where I live. Paper gets wet. We keep no pictures.

  So how do you remember the people you love?

  We don’t. Sea creatures are very forgetful.

  What did my uncle ask for, when he talked to you?

  I don’t remember.

  With no regular school classes on Wednesday afternoons, Agnès schedules music lessons. Eric is sent to a house in the Rue Bourdet where the only decoration is a black-and-white print of a piano hanging directly above the actual piano, as if without it Monsieur Vinot, the teacher, would not seem sufficiently musical.