The Vexations Page 4

  Uncle Fortin was a keen photographer, and had chronicled, in painstaking detail, the building works. His earliest images were daguerreotypes, and people showed up only as ghosts, blurry smudges like ash piles left in the streets. Uncle Fortin described the photographic processes involved in such exhausting detail that I once went literally to sleep and a glass plate negative slipped from my hands and shattered on the wood floor. I don’t remember what the image was, but I remember the whipping I took for it. It would have been some wall or moat or maybe one of the equally abundant pictures of his dead daughter, Berthe.

  Uncle Fortin was not all Christian duty, after all. For him and his wife I was a replacement, like a new pet, though not quite as loved, not quite as clever or purring as loudly—the wrong color, with coarse fur, inferior all around but better than nothing. I’m surprised Uncle Fortin didn’t put a ribbon around my neck when he presented me to Estelle. And maybe a bell, so they could hear me coming. At first I crept about the house; then I tried to make as much noise as possible, so that I would interrupt fewer conversations about how generally dissatisfying they found me. Uncle Fortin suggested at first that I call Estelle “Maman,” but none of us could bear it.

  He had been a rich man when they married, Estelle told me. “Wood and charcoal,” she said, like that was an occupation, and I suppose it was. Especially there, at the edge of the country, where things came in and out, occupations could be objects—the acquiring and dispersal of them, anyway. Wood and charcoal had gone sour, and now he was in copper. “In copper” was the only description anyone ever gave me of what he did, and as a child I pictured him encased, a statue standing in a busy square with seagulls landing on his head. I did not question how this might bring an income. It made as much sense as anything else that had happened to me that year.

  The longer no one came for me, the more impractical my dreams became. I dreamed of Eric trotting up on horseback, or swooping in on feathered wings, peering through the small window with his toes curled around the windowsill. His toenails were little pink oyster shells, sharpened to kick Uncle Fortin away if he woke and staggered after me, creaking and armored, his skin the greening shine of copper. Eric was my angel, my nightingale, my last best chance. I sometimes imagined him arriving in Osprey’s boat, the white sail a wing. The wood was so polished we could see our faces, could feel the oil when we put our hands on the railing. It made the boat feel like something alive, an animal we could tame and ride through the woods, past all the witches. In my dreams we caught and ate fish: Conrad ate the flesh, Eric the scales, I the bones, and we were all somehow satisfied. Occasionally I knew the dream for the fantasy it was even as it was happening, and spent all night trying to convince Eric that he wasn’t really there, that none of this was real, that he had to make our father come back and rescue me properly. More often I believed in every moment, and wept frantically at waking. Either way, I awoke blaming Eric, and the longer the dream didn’t come true, the more I blamed him. I know, of course, how unreasonable this is. I know that children have no power. I think I have learned this every day of my life.

  Berthe had been twenty when she died of typhus. At the time she was engaged to a man I heard still lived in Le Havre, so that I looked for him everywhere, wondering if I would somehow recognize him—wondering if I was meant to take Berthe’s place in that way, too. Estelle had already done all the hard work of mothering, had rejoiced at seeing her daughter on the threshold of being safely packed off into matrimony. She met the prospect of starting over not with pleasure but exhaustion. I wondered if she had been consulted as to this plan of Uncle Fortin’s, or if I really was like a kitten, picked up for free from an unwelcome litter and brought home as a surprise. Would Agnès have drowned me in a burlap sack if I hadn’t been claimed?

  My father eventually returned to France, though not to the north. He settled back in Paris, looked again for a wife. Older and more encumbered than when he’d courted my mother, he understood that his choices had narrowed. No longer young herself, Eugénie worried that she’d missed her chance at marriage and children. She’d spent all those hours at the piano instead, and nothing had come of them except crow’s-feet from squinting and a permanent ache in her wrists. Then along came Alfred, flush with a modest inheritance—his mother had recently drowned while out walking, either a fall or a freak wave, he’d been told. No one had quite seen how it happened. It was cruel, capricious luck, especially for a woman who strove to spend as much of her life as possible indoors, but after the deaths of his wife and infant daughter years earlier, Alfred had concluded that the world was indeed capricious and cruel, and his mother’s drowning simply provided further proof.

  His mother had been caring for his sons when she died, he told Eugénie during their courtship. The boys were with him now. Would that be all right with her?

  Eugénie had no reason to suspect that there was also a daughter. When she learned much later of the omission, Alfred explained that I had been in the care of his uncle since I was small. After Agnès’s death, the boys were the more pressing problem. I had been taken into the bosom of my great-uncle’s family, he told her, and to uproot me would have been no kindness, the two of them decided.

  At least, this is the story I told myself. It might even be true. I clung to an image of Eugénie and Alfred putting their heads together—for some reason their heads were literally pressed together in the vision I had of this moment, forehead to forehead—and determining that I was loved and happy where I was, and that my father might continue best loving me from afar. They could be excused for thinking this. I could excuse them for thinking this, or try to, anyway.

  I knew the truth might be far colder. Perhaps without regular bills from a boarding school to remind him, my father simply forgot I existed. So far as I could tell, Uncle Fortin never asked for money, never asked for help. Never even asked to be thanked. One does one’s Christian duty. Those were the habits I was raised with, dutiful silences piled to the ceiling. Sometimes walking in that house felt like swimming, and one does not speak underwater. If you open your mouth to ask why you weren’t sent for—why them but not me?—too much else might rush in.

  It took fifteen years, but my father finally sent for me. Eric was absolutely not dying, he insisted. There was no chance of it—none! he’d make a complete recovery!—but still, perhaps a trip to Paris was in order. Perhaps a train ticket should be purchased, arrangements made, so I could see my older brother. Just in case.

  In case of what? I wrote back. An ornery question. Why did I want to make him say it? Why would I want the possibility committed to paper?

  Conrad will meet you at the station, my father wrote, ignoring me. It was a great talent of his, ignoring, and it seemed that Eric’s illness had created no disruption.

  At the Gare Saint-Lazare, steam and smoke from the locomotives hung in clouds under the glass roof, dimming the light. I’d been in Paris for three minutes and already felt like a moth asphyxiating in a glass jar. What memories I had of my life here were a jumble of objects and interiors, like my mother’s best dress and the loudly ticking clock with brass feet that had sat on our mantel. The city itself was utterly alien. Since leaving I’d been in no place larger than Le Havre—Fortin traveled seldom for business, and Estelle and I not at all.

  Conrad and I had failed to make a code, no indication that he would be, say, holding a black cap, or that I would be wearing a red shawl. We had not wanted to admit that we would need such a code. But as I scanned the crowd I was forced to acknowledge I had no real idea whom I was searching for. We found each other eventually, though only because the platform emptied of other young people. When we met each other’s eyes, the only recognition was a shared mathematics, the calculation of years and ages. He walked toward me but made no greeting.

  “Conrad?” I said, quick to speak first, because his lips seemed perilously close to forming the word Mademoiselle, just in case he was wrong, and I did not think I could bear to hear my little brother call
me by anything other than my name.

  We did not look alike, even when we searched for a family resemblance, or for traces of the children we’d once been together. Conrad was gangly and awkward, swinging helplessly between childhood and adulthood as if he’d had a chair kicked out from under him. There was no trace of the tidy, compact roundness of the toddler I’d last seen. A toddler, I thought, just a toddler. Did he even recall ever having had a sister?

  Conrad took my luggage and walked us to the cabstand, where the driver misinterpreted our shyness and asked if we wanted to drive the short way or the long way. “A detour, with the curtains down,” the driver said, when Conrad expressed confusion. “Give you two sweethearts a little private time.”

  “The short way!” Conrad yelped, his voice breaking.

  I pulled the curtains back violently, letting in as much of the April light as I could, and the cab lurched as the driver whipped the horse forward.

  “How is he?” I asked.

  “He’ll be fine. He didn’t want Mother to send for you,” Conrad said, realizing a beat too late how that sounded. “Not that he didn’t want to see you, of course. He does. It’s just that he said it would make more sense for you to come when he was feeling better. So you could go out and do things.”

  “Mother?” Another ornery question. I knew whom he meant.

  “Eugénie,” Conrad said, more apologetically than he needed to, and I was sorry for needling him.

  None of this was his fault. Not Eric’s illness, or our father’s brief, clumsy letters, or the fact that Eugénie was the only mother Conrad would ever remember. It was not his fault that he had been loved every day of his life.

  Eric had gotten sick in February, up in Pas-de-Calais, where he was stationed with his regiment. He’d enlisted only a few months before that, and at twenty was a bit old to be starting his mandatory service. He’d been hoping to stay in school long enough to cut the required five years down to one, but when he left the Conservatory early, the army scooped him up. The army doctor had pronounced an all clear on his illness weeks earlier, only to put his patient on a train south, gray-faced and gasping, when the fever returned. Far from departing, the fever kept easing and surging in turns, and it was almost as if my invitation had also been an invitation to the illness to make up its mind one way or the other.

  He would recover, of course—of course!—and they’d all been doing a very good job of believing this until Eugénie insisted I be sent for.

  When I arrived at the family apartment, Eugénie was putting dinner on the table, although with such clattering that I imagined a maid must usually do the cooking, or at least that Eugénie preferred it when a maid did the cooking. As if she knew what I was thinking, she explained that she usually scheduled piano lessons at this hour, but that she’d canceled them all so the noise wouldn’t disturb Eric. She handed a fistful of silverware to Conrad, and he obediently began to lay the place settings.

  “Your father’s going over proofs at the printers’, but he’ll be home any minute,” she said.

  I asked the time and she pointed to what I recognized as the brass-footed clock from my childhood, ticking away loudly as ever. “Proofs of what?” I said.

  “A four-hand piano duet, which is probably why it’s taking forever, making sure everything lines up.”

  “He works for a music publisher?”

  “He is a music publisher. We are. He didn’t tell you?”

  The front door opened then, and I went into the hallway to greet my father. His face was younger than I’d braced myself to see, although hollowed out somehow. He’d lost something, the way Conrad had lost his toddler’s fluffy hair, and it wasn’t coming back.

  “Louise. You look just like your mother.” Instead of grief or joy his expression held gentle curiosity, as if my face were the answer to the idle, half-asked question of how I had turned out, after all these years.

  He stepped forward and embraced me, a plain, warm, fatherly embrace. I was nearly his height, and part of me wanted to lay my head on his shoulder, but a greater part was stiff and angry. I realized I’d wanted him to approach me warily, with an apology held on his flat palm like I was a wild animal to be lured. But he didn’t seem to think there was anything to apologize for.

  In novels, people who are terribly ill are always terribly honest, full of deathbed confessions, revelations of the heart. But Eric mostly sweated and slept. For the first day, I had to introduce myself at every waking, though the sting of doing so was lessened by the smile he gave me afterward. Then he’d tell me his dream, always the same dream, in which he was being chased by enormous asparagus stalks. As the days wore on, however, his sleep was easier, his periods of wakefulness longer. I read to him or listened to him complain about the invalid soups and broths Eugénie prepared. Otherwise I sat vigil and sewed, all the little repairs—buttons and hems and holes—that Eugénie didn’t have time for, what with giving piano lessons and running the music-publishing business she and Alfred had started. My father was at work during the day, and in the evenings he disappeared behind a newspaper or a music manuscript or Eric’s bedroom door. One evening I watched him holding Eric’s hand in both of his own, brushing each finger joint, as if making sure every piece of his child was accounted for. In that moment I hoped I’d catch what Eric had, so that my father might hold my hand like that. But mostly we avoided any conversation other than pleasantries. At least that way I could pretend there was something more beneath and beyond the pleasantries, whether we ever spoke of it or not.

  Eugénie played piano mornings and evenings. Evenings were for new compositions, her own or those submitted for consideration to the publishing concern, which as far as I could tell was little more than a desk that a kindhearted music-shop owner had allowed my father to set up in the back of his store. Most of the family’s money came instead from a string of office jobs my father held, and from the inheritance he’d received after Agnès died and her house in Honfleur was sold. The marginal publishing concern specialized in light music, chansons and café-concert novelties and dance tunes, love songs and songs about spring. Eugénie would play and warble along with herself. Eric groaned whenever he was awake enough to notice the lyrics, all those dresses and caresses, rhymes of rose with knows or little toes. In the mornings, however, Eugénie played a ferocious classical repertoire. I was impressed at first, until I realized she always played the same seven pieces, a different one each day. It turned out they were the most difficult things she’d learned by the time she left formal instruction, each piece neatly preserved, like sealed jars of summer vegetables.

  “Good Christ,” Eric said, and rolled onto his side, making a show of pulling the pillow up over his ear. “The Hiller again. Tuesday, is it?”

  “She’s good, though,” I said. “Better than she is at singing.”

  “You’d hope so, the number of years she’s been playing it.”

  “Would you say she’s good generally? Is she musical?”

  “Why are you asking me?”

  “You were at the Conservatory.”

  “I got kicked out.”

  “I thought you quit.” I poured him a glass of water and waited for him to explain. When he felt well enough he liked to talk, especially about himself. This had been true when we were small and I was pleased, mostly, that it still was, that his self-regard was something I could recognize.

  He’d quit practicing, he said. Had toddled his way through his examination piece and then flubbed the sight-reading. He needed to win at least an honorable mention every few years to stay enrolled, and it wasn’t going to happen. “It’s a shithole anyway,” he said. “They all play like she does, mechanical Turks. Listening in on each other in the practice rooms. Whenever I try to play here she’s always shouting corrections from the next room. There’s no getting away from it.”

  “You think she plays mechanically?”

  “I think she’s awful. That’s my expert opinion. She plays like a windup toy.”
/>   More silence, more sewing.

  “You don’t think she’s good, do you?” he said.

  “No, of course not.” But in truth I’d been learning the Hiller with my teacher in Le Havre, and I thought Eugénie played it a little like me. I knew we weren’t magnificent, but it would have been nice to hear that we sounded all right.

  Eugénie boiled pots of water in the kitchen and when Eric was strong enough she made him come in and sit with his face over them, a towel on his head, to clear his lungs with the steam. She boiled so much water she steamed the wallpaper right off the hallway leading to the kitchen. It wrinkled and pulled away from the plaster in long sheets. When these sheets fell in the night, I woke to the sound of what I thought were birds rustling down the chimney. One morning, the first to awake, I found a panel of paper slumped on the floor like something dead. I rolled it up and leaned it in a corner to get it out of the way. But the glue was still soft and tacky, and when Eugénie tried to pull the roll apart again later, it ruined the floral pattern. She yelled at me, then demonstrated how she was storing the panels to let the glue dry so they could be rehung. Once all this was over, one way or another, the paper would be going back on the walls. No sense in losing one’s décor as well as one’s stepson.

  “Did you change something in here?” Eric asked groggily, as Eugénie shepherded him down the now-bare hallway, its walls a dull white smeared with old glue. “It was nicer before.”

  “It was,” we agreed.

  “I follow the doctor’s recommendations,” Eugénie said later that night, after Eric was back in bed, the water boiled to nothing, the kitchen muggy, with only the two of us awake. “But it feels like there should be something else. It always feels like there’s something else one ought to be doing.”