The Vexations Page 5

  “I know,” I said, then stiffened like a cornered animal when she started to cry.

  “I’m not a nurse,” she insisted. “I don’t know what I’m doing. Like being a mother,” she added. “It’s better if it doesn’t just happen all at once.”

  But that was the way everyone became a mother, I thought, and still think now.

  “When I married Alfred—a husband and two boys, like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I suspect Eric and I both handled it rather badly. I think I did better by Conrad, but then Conrad’s so agreeable. One feels he could have been raised by gypsies and come out all right.”

  “I’m sure you did better than gypsies.”

  She smiled, but only at the corners of her lips. A thank-you note rather than an actual expression.

  “I like hearing you play,” I said, trying for kindness, comfort. “The piano. At home, Fortin reads aloud to us in the evenings, but there’s no music unless I make it.”

  “I didn’t realize you played.”

  This struck me as odd, since I’d written about my lessons in all my letters. I would have had little enough news to report otherwise. Although I addressed the letters to my father, I intended them for the whole family. Love to Eric, I always wrote, and to Conrad, and also to Eugénie, whom I hope someday to meet.

  “I need to feel good at something,” Eugénie continued. “I always feel competent when I play those pieces. I’ve got them all by memory. I always know just where I am and I can feel what’s ahead. Not like nursing. Or mothering. Do you understand?”

  I did.

  “I play them and daydream I’m a concert pianist. Breathless audience, furious applause, the whole bit. It’s so silly.”

  It wasn’t.

  “I was going to be great, you know. By the time I stopped playing seriously, I knew it wouldn’t happen. But as a little girl, I was sure I was going to be so extraordinary.”

  I didn’t know if this was a moment when a kinder person would tell her that she truly was extraordinary, or that she might yet prove so. But I didn’t see how, and moreover I understood that she was confiding in me because she didn’t think I was extraordinary either. Both of us ordinary, I would understand how it felt to play and pretend to be otherwise.

  The next day Eugénie asked me to help wash Eric, who was too addled to protest. We left his drawers on, but there was still so much skin, the waxy white of cheddar, bony legs and arms shrunken by sickness, his middle still soft. I knew little enough of men’s bodies, but I knew this was not the body of a soldier, and never would be. Only his hands seemed strong, with their sprawling, square-ended fingers, and I was jealous of them, jealous of the intervals and chords they must be capable of.

  “I’m never ill,” I said out loud.

  “That’s lucky,” Eugénie said.

  “Almost never. Never like this.”

  She wrung a washcloth out into a bowl, the sound of the water her only response.

  This is the one you wanted? I raged silently. Sick and pale and too dumb even to know he’s dying?

  I stood and left, not so much with anger but with shame, worried that Eric could somehow hear my thoughts. I stood on the balcony to breathe, although even in spring the air in Paris was no relief from the sickroom. The smells wafting up from the street to the third floor were of cracked leather, coal dust, and dung. Nothing had ever made me miss Le Havre so much, though all I was really missing was the wind that came over the water, on its way to and from someplace else.

  A sound heart is the life of the flesh: but envy the rottenness of the bones, I imagined Uncle Fortin quoting to me. Proverbs 14:30. I bought a notebook that afternoon and copied the verse out for two full pages. Conrad saw and teased me. At first I thought it was for the repeated lines, a sort of schoolchild’s rosary, but it turned out he meant religion in general. Maybe boys who have been loved each day of their lives have no need of it. Maybe children with mothers need less of God.

  Later he apologized and offered to accompany me to Mass on Sunday, since both my father and Eugénie preferred to spend the morning reading the newspaper in their dressing gowns. After Mass we wandered. The weather was fine, the sun strong enough to warm my hair beneath my hat. It was April in Paris. April in Le Havre, too—April everywhere—but spring had come to a firmer decision about itself here than it had in the north. The trees were flaring green, the pushcarts laden with flowers. We bought daffodils for Eric.

  Once Conrad and I acknowledged the impossibility of shading in the last decade of our lives, our conversations were freed for his many enthusiasms. Beneath his adolescent self-consciousness was a little boy’s volubility. He taught me about fireworks, about enormous lizard bones being excavated from the sea cliffs in England, about the orbits of passing comets.

  One afternoon he asked me if I was planning to stay with the family in Paris after Eric was better, and I told him I didn’t know.

  “I’d think it’s more exciting here,” he said, “but I suppose it’s noisy and dirty and all that. That’s what people say. And I’m sure you’ve got friends in Le Havre.” He thought I was trying to decide, I realized—weighing a life in Paris against a life in Le Havre. He didn’t know I hadn’t been asked to stay. “I suppose it’s nice to live by the sea,” he added, after I was silent too long.

  “I would miss the sea,” I said, truthfully. “Besides, where would you sleep?”

  Eugénie had put me in Conrad’s bedroom, Conrad on a sofa in the living room, where more and more of his clothes had been accumulating, since he was so afraid he might discover me in a state of undress in his room that he couldn’t even bring himself to knock on the door to get into his dresser.

  I could have Eric’s room, Conrad said, after Eric recovered and left again for the army. Or I could stay where I was and he would take Eric’s room. It was my choice, he said, gallantly.

  “The army will want him back?”

  “He’s not discharged. It’s only a medical leave. Unless the doctor says he’s unfit. But he’ll be fine,” Conrad added, after a pause.

  “Of course he will be. But I imagine he’d probably sneak away from his regiment so often he’d still need his room.”

  “Eugénie would turn him in straightaway. She and Eric don’t get on.” Conrad said this quietly, as if confiding a secret rather than a state of affairs I’d thought was evident to all. “If he deserts,” Conrad continued, “he’ll have to hide elsewhere.” I could tell he didn’t like the word “desert,” even as a joke. Some duties, he thought, should not be taken lightly.

  “I suppose we’ll see,” I said, and both of us let that hang there like it was an answer to all our problems.

  “I’m indestructible,” Eric announced. He’d woken me with his coughing: a sloshing, choking cough full of all the fluids that Eugénie’s pots of water hadn’t been able to dissolve. “Couldn’t even drown,” he said. “Winter in the harbor and it didn’t get me. Or maybe it was lying in wait. Maybe that’s what this is, years on. It’s been living in my lungs like a worm.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “That time I tried to rescue you. I was going to sail to you, on Uncle Osprey’s boat.”

  “Really? You never told me this.”

  “Really. I fell into the harbor instead. Osprey fished me out.”

  I took his hand in mine, not trusting my mouth to know what to say.

  “But it’s just as well. You’re lucky, you know.”

  Oh, Eric. O! as they’d say in an opera. O Eric! Why did you have to ruin it? We were having such a good conversation. “Name me how,” I said. “Name me one way I’ve been lucky.”

  “You’ve had a family, all the way through. You weren’t sent off to school. You haven’t had a wicked stepmother fussing at you since you were shipped back to Paris like a parcel.”

  “She’s not wicked. She means well.”

  “You’ve just met her, and you’re on her side?”

  “That’s right, I’ve just met her. They�
�ve been married for years, and I’ve just met her. So tell me again how I’ve been lucky.”

  “She sent in the conscription papers herself, you know. Fished them out of the rubbish bin and filled them in! I’m not a coward. If the Prussians come back, I’ll fight. But nothing was happening in Calais. It was all so boring. I was going to be old and boring by the time I finished.”

  “You would have been twenty-five,” I said, and Eric gave me a look as if I clearly did not understand how very decrepit twenty-five was.

  “I didn’t fancy shooting off my toes, so I soaked my uniform and stood outside the first good snow we got.”

  “You did this on purpose?”

  “It didn’t work the first time, so I did it again without a shirt on. I lay down and made snow angels.”

  No doubt a proper nurse, unwilling to dishearten a fragile patient with bad news, would have withheld the next thing I said. But on hearing this admission—that he’d done it on purpose!—I was too angry to lie. “You’re not discharged,” I told him. “You’re only on medical leave. You’ll be sent back when you’re better. That’s how it works.”

  It took a moment for this assertion to penetrate, but then Eric shook himself, his whole body jerking, and I worried at first that he was having some kind of fit. But he was just flinging off the words, like a dog shaking itself dry. “I won’t go. I just won’t.”

  “You’ll do what instead? Keep making yourself sick until you kill yourself?”

  “Something will come up. It will all work itself out. It always does.”

  “Does it?”

  “Yes,” he said, and I thought that for him, perhaps it always had. Perhaps it always would. Who was I to say otherwise? If God really did go around closing doors and opening windows, then each life was a giant house full of blowing curtains and broken locks, all of us wandering from room to room to room. “There’s so much still,” Eric said. “I haven’t even started.”

  “You’re an idiot” is what I said aloud. But under the surface of the remark something else heaved and spun. Fear and anger, yes, but also love. Don’t ever lose this, I thought. Please. Even if you’re wrong. Somebody has to be extraordinary. Why not you?

  Then: Why not me? The thought quiet as a puff of steam from a boiling pot. But I put a lid over it, because that was something else Uncle Fortin had taught me—how not to be foolish.

  “What kind of husband do you want?” Eugénie asked me. “Tell me one thing you’re looking for.”

  “Do you have somebody in mind?”

  “No, no, just making conversation.”

  Eric was back in his room after a final kitchen steam bath. His breathing sounded nearly normal, his lungs clear and hungry. In celebration, Eugénie put a little lemon in the last of the boiling water, poured two cups, and set them on a tray. With Conrad on an overnight school excursion, we moved to the parlor and sat side by side on the lumpy sofa that had been serving as his bed. The only light came from the windows, gray starlight trickling across the floor. Alfred was in bed already.

  I thought about what Eugénie might be expecting to hear. The truest things—that he be kind, and honest, and hardworking—seemed dull. I wondered if she wanted us to be women who would speak freely, even scandalously, to each other, if she wanted to be a confidante to whom I should say I admired a certain build or breadth. “One who lets me have a handbag,” I finally said. Uncle Fortin forbade it—he thought carrying a bag was a manly thing to do, like a hunter with a pouch of powder, or a lawyer with a leather folio of papers. It suggested I had some destination or trade that required me to equip myself; perhaps Uncle Fortin thought it would look like he hadn’t taken sufficient care of me. Estelle carried things the old-fashioned way, in fabric pockets that hung from a string tied round her waist, accessible through slits in her skirts. If I was sent out on an errand, I carried the money in my fist.

  If Eugénie thought my criterion strange, she did not inquire about my reasons for it. She simply took the comment in stride. “Alfred doesn’t mind a handbag,” she said. “Sometimes when I walk to the music shop I’m juggling so many things I might as well carry a suitcase.”

  “But does he really even notice—what sort of bag you leave the house with?”

  “Probably not,” she conceded.

  “Then it doesn’t count.”

  “Of course it counts.”

  “Not caring isn’t letting.”

  “Not caring is exactly like letting.” She paused. “In a marriage, anyway.”

  “Then Alfred was a lucky find.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t call him that. He’s your father.” Eugénie sighed and clinked her cup back down onto the tray. “If you’re missing your lessons, you’re certainly welcome to play the piano here,” she said, her dress rustling as she gestured into the dark at the instrument. “If there’s anything in particular you’re working on, I might have the music somewhere. Or Alfred could find it in the shop.”

  I thanked her and meant it sincerely.

  “I suppose you won’t be here much longer,” she said, “if Eric keeps improving. Still, you probably don’t want to return to your teacher entirely out of practice.” So here was the answer to Conrad’s question. There was no hint of disinvitation in her voice, no sign I had displeased her. It was simply that I had my place, and that place was not here. “I could even listen to you,” she said. “Give some corrections. We could have a little lesson.”

  “I’m not sure you have anything to teach me,” I told her, and ruined whatever might have lived between us. I stepped on it like a glass and listened to it break.

  “Did you share them?” I asked my father several days later. “My letters?”

  He was smoking on the balcony. It was a warm evening, late sun blazing in the windows across the street. Birds darted past, taunting cats in the windows on either side of us. Eric was well enough that Eugénie had tried to resume hosting afternoon lessons. At the first set of scales, Eric yelled from his bedroom, threatening a relapse if the racket continued. Eugénie was giddy that his lungs had the strength to yell.

  “Your letters?”

  “My letters to the family.”

  “You were always so good about writing to me. Did you send others to the family?”

  “Those were to the family. They were written to everybody.”

  “Were they?”

  It was hard to be angry with the dying, and useless to be angry at the dead. My father had been gone, in his own way, as long as my mother had. He’d floated out of his own life years ago, and never quite floated back in.

  “I’d tell the boys you were well,” my father said, as if to reassure me. “You always seemed to be doing very well.”

  “You think Uncle Fortin would have posted the letters for me if I’d said I wasn’t? I wasn’t supposed to worry you.”

  “Should I have been? Worried?”

  I’d been fed and clothed. Warm enough, safe enough. Uncle Fortin had brought me up with God, whom I could tell now I wouldn’t have known here in any shape, Catholic or otherwise, and whom I would have missed. Uncle Fortin had made it easy to understand what he wanted me to be, which was a good and ordinary girl. And he’d given me a good and ordinary life.

  “I suppose not,” I said. I explained that he needed to have the doctor write a letter to the army, saying Eric’s lungs were too weak to return to active service. It was probably true.

  “Probably?”

  “There’s no point in it, for him. Eric a soldier? Unless you want France falling to Prussia.”

  “We thought he might learn some discipline.”

  “He won’t. Not in the army. He’ll refuse to learn anything.”

  “You think so?”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  My father looked pensively into nothing, or maybe at the balconies across the street, the other men smoking and pretending they were alone. “It’s useful to have your opinion,” he said. “A sort of outside perspective. Eugénie seems to think
like you, but I haven’t been sure what to want for him.”

  An outside perspective? Oh, Alfred. O Alfred! Uncle Fortin had been right, all those years ago—I was an orphan after all. “Let’s keep our fingers crossed,” I said. “Let’s hope he’s as special as he thinks he is.”

  “I’m grateful I don’t have to worry about you,” he said. “You’ll make some man a very good wife, you know. You’ll make a wonderful mother.”

  I thought about the unspoken qualities he’d think a good wife and mother should have—kindness, devotion, resourcefulness—and basked in the compliments he’d more or less given me, words you could fold up and place in a handbag (should you be allowed to have one), carrying them with you wherever you went. Should I have wanted something more from him? You’ll make a wonderful concert pianist! Or a painter? Or a scientist? But I wouldn’t. That wasn’t the way my life was ever going to turn out, and as little as my father knew me, we both knew that.

  The following week my father and Eugénie went out for the evening. They hadn’t offered many details, but I gleaned that it was a meeting related to financing for the publishing concern, that they needed it to go well, and that it was not expected to go well. They’d left us with a supper of cold fish and potatoes. Eric harassed Conrad and me into buying a bottle of white wine. Eugénie hadn’t allowed him any alcohol since he’d become ill. We made a toast to Eric’s health, to my safe travels back to Le Havre. I’d bought the ticket myself, written to Uncle Fortin with my travel plans: “I promise not to kick off my shoes this time. You won’t have to carry me.”

  We even toasted the conscription office, which had received that afternoon a doctor’s letter describing Eric as permanently unfit for service. Conrad didn’t think the ruination of our brother’s lungs was an appropriate thing to be toasting, but Eric waved off his concern.

  We hadn’t told Conrad—scholarly, rule-abiding Conrad—that I myself had been the one to persuade the doctor to write the letter. On his last visit, the doctor had been dangerously optimistic. “With a little more recuperation time,” he began, and I elbowed my father to make his case. Men squirmed out of service all the time—it wouldn’t be unacceptable to hint, maybe even to ask outright. But my father hemmed and hawed so badly the doctor couldn’t understand what he was getting at. Finally I burst into tears, wailing at how close I’d come to losing my brother, how he still coughed all the night long, how after losing our mother I couldn’t bear this, too.