13 rue Therese: A Novel Page 2

  The train pulls into the station with a great squeal. It has five cars: four green ones, and a red one in the middle. His daughter looks up at him and asks: “Papa, why is the first-class car in the middle?”

  He has never wondered this before. Children ask the strangest questions. He spontaneously answers: “Well, if the train stalls and gets hit by another train from the back, or if it hits a stalled train from the front, the middle car is the safest. It’s to keep society’s more valuable members from getting damaged, you see.”

  This just occurs to him as he says it, and it immediately strikes him as true.

  “Papa, that’s terrible!” His son looks at him with large outraged eyes, his sense of justice deeply shaken.

  He shrugs. “Dear boy, this is the world. This is just the way the world works.”

  HE TURNS OUT THE first young woman he has hired to tend his children. Though she feels so good, he is afraid he will get her pregnant. Then he would have to marry her. This offends his sense of propriety.

  IT’S A CLOUDLESS DAY in the spring of 1896 when his wife gives birth to his second child, a daughter, and dies of complications from the delivery. He names the child Louise. He looks at her tiny flailing limbs and feels utterly lost. He thinks this must be the worst day of his entire life. He is still young.

  HE SETS AN OVAL SAPPHIRE into a gold ring. The stone’s pure blue color mesmerizes him. The filigree work he has wrought around it is beautiful. His supervisor has spent a great deal of time showing him how to do it. He thinks maybe he is being groomed to take over after his supervisor is gone.

  The stone glints darkly at him. He has never been so happy. He will give this ring to his wife to celebrate the birth of their son. It’s the first piece of jewelry he’s made that he gets to take home instead of selling. He is proud of his labor. He is glad that his wife will wear his work on her body.

  HE IS FRIGHTENED the day he gets married. He’s pretty sure he loves the girl, but he isn’t sure about till death do us part. That’s a long way away. How is a man to know how much he will love a woman decades from now, after she has grown old and withered, and perhaps mean and bitter?

  Today she looks lovely in her white lace. Her oval face has a high flush, and her dark eyes will not meet his. She is a virgin. This makes him nervous. Being with a virgin makes him fumble and flutter also, as if this were his first time. At first, the business of clothing removal is very serious—they don’t smile. Then, he somehow manages to get tangled up in his own suspenders. He makes himself laugh with his contortions. His mirth means she is allowed to laugh also, and she does.

  “Here, I will help you with these,” she says, and she does.

  They are naked and free and at the cusp of the rest of their lives: it’s like he’s starting over, as if he were being born.

  THIS MAN THERE, HE is barely more than a boy. He has not even left his father’s household. This is his first serious picture, taken alone without his family. His father laughs and says: “The next picture you’ll have taken, you’ll already have your wife and your children. Enjoy your bachelor life!”

  He is excited. He looks forward to the future. Look at his forthright gaze. He has just gotten an apprenticeship making jewelry. His father is disappointed that the boy will not pursue his studies in law but understands that the boy is good with his hands and wants to do something with them. The boy has always been gifted with tiny work.

  His protruding ears are endearing. He is too young to even know that a portrait from a profile or three-quarters perspective would be immensely more flattering. The ears would not stick out so. Eventually, he will figure this out.

  If you were a romantic, and you hadn’t just been pulled back here through what is to come, you would say: He has his whole life ahead of him—how lucky he is.

  A Photograph Undated

  (likely taken in the last decade of the nineteenth century)

  Un souvenir de ma villégiature

  THIS IS A POSTCARD that Louise receives from her father in the last month of the Great War:

  *

  Who are these men? You do not recognize any of them. The father is not pictured here. At least, none of these faces looks to you like the face of the man pictured on January 26, 1943, or the same man pictured in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

  Still, you gaze at this photo because you cannot help seeing the following:

  The black dog in the foreground. You know nothing of dogs, but this animal looks to you something like a golden retriever, except dark. Is it an especially courageous breed that is well suited to life in the trenches? You cannot know. Perhaps he is just a mutt—perhaps he is even a she. The dog is indeed a female. The men have called her “Eclat d’obus,” but just Eclat for short. An éclat d’obus means “shrapnel,” literally “shard of shell”; there isn’t a single word that means shrapnel in French. The men call the dog this because their time at war has given them a perverse sense of humor: Eclat is the daughter of another dog they had before, this one named Obus—thus Shell begat Shrapnel.

  Obus is dead now; she was blown up on the front lines: both her hind legs exploded clean off, with a great splatter of canine gore. The dog’s howls of agony were so terrible that the man nearest her took his revolver out of his holster and immediately shot the animal in the head. He wept then, silently, covering both eyes with his hand. He will never forget the heat of his own forehead cupped in his palm that day. He had not cried for some of his best friends—friends who died right in front of him—friends he did not have the courage to shoot in the face to end their suffering though they begged for it, as they knew the ambulance would not come in time for them.

  Some of the men are smiling for this picture, just a little. How are they doing that? They are so strong.

  That mincing fellow in the middle. You can tell just by the jaunty tilt of his cap and the limp wrist on his right leg, crossed tightly over the left—just from looking at this, you can tell the man is queer. If you look at the rocky ground at his feet, you can imagine how hard it is. You can see the dust and the scuff marks on his shoes. If you let your gaze travel up his body, immediately you see the bindings around his skinny shins. You have to look up what those are called: “puttees,” you think is the word.

  Can you imagine? The soldiers wear them every day. They cannot be comfortable: certainly, they must be tight. Do they not hinder the blood flow down to the feet? Can the men not feel the pulsing muscles in their legs strain against this constriction when they have to run like hell from something?

  In the trenches, they sleep in these. They never take them off, never unwind the bindings. They get used to them because they have to. Did you know—each roll of this bandage around the shin is an incantation, truly a binding ritual, meant to keep the meat on the bone. Each roll around the confined flesh is a prayer: don’t fall apart

  don’t fall apart

  no no don’t fall apart

  please.

  You see, all the men in the photograph wear puttees. All the men in the picture are bound, trying to keep themselves together. That is how considerate they are, for the love of God and country and women and the other men—for the love of all that is good and true—they keep themselves together because they have to. They are afraid but they are not cowards.

  Also, look at how bulky their coats are, and how every single button is fastened, up to the very last one around the neck; they must have several layers of clothes under there. They must be trying to keep the heat in. These men always suffer from the cold. Every day they suffer from the cold, but still they find time to gather at a pile of rocks. They find time to arrange themselves artfully and stay still for a moment—the moment of picture-taking. It is a moment of companionship; they have brought some of their beloved accoutrements: the dog, and the fellow next to the queer one has his pipe in his hand, and the fellow next to that fellow holds what looks like a roll of papers (maybe he likes to write?). It is a moment of companionship; a loose fist rest
s on a friend’s shoulder; an arm wraps around a friend’s knee.

  Huddled together, but strong

  still for a scrap of time

  for this picture

  look at it

  they want you to.

  Still, this picture is a postcard that Louise receives from her father—so why don’t you flip it over and look at the message?

  It reads:

  Col d’Oderon—Alsatian Frontier. On 12-10-18.

  To my beloved little Louisette

  A souvenir of my holiday here.

  Your father who embraces you:

  [Illegible initial] Victor

  His signature is very difficult to read. Louise’s father apparently likes muddled flourishes. You are not even sure what his first initial is. Is it an L? You will have to pay attention to some of the other documentation to see if you can figure this out.

  You are caught by his word villégiature. You had to look it up in your desk reference because you’d never run across it before. You thought it meant something like a military campaign, but the clear black type in your book states “holiday, vacation.”

  Holiday?

  Vacation?

  It occurs to you: perhaps Louise’s father has a strange sense of humor also. He has been to war, too. Why should he be different from all the other men?

  THERE WAS A DAY, about two months after this postcard arrived, when the father and daughter almost—

  But wait, first let us gaze upon another object, relevant to the forthcoming episode—another souvenir that Louise has left behind in the record. It is an object she was given in childhood to pray with, and she always remembered very well the last time she used it to say Our Father over and over again. That day she tried to muster up all the scraps of faith she might have in her unbelieving heart, her fingers clutching the beads, attempting so earnestly and so hard to believe that it would be all right, that another boy would not be lost. The war had just ended and another boy would not be lost: it was not necessary.

  *

  It was a day in December 1918. A weary France had just signed the Armistice. Louise was back at home with her father and her brother. Her father was well and her brother was not. Her brother was in bed delirious with fever, and Louise sat at his side with her wood and mother-of-pearl rosary dangling from her hands, praying for his recovery—oh, if this worked—if he got better, she might perhaps believe a little in a benevolent God, if only for a flicker of time.

  Her brother turned slowly on his side. She looked up from her rosary at the soft sound of his body sliding against the clean white sheets. He was facing her, his eyes wide and limpid in his pallid face. His skin always shone now with feverish secretions—he sweated so much that his nightgown was often drenched, stuck to him. At this moment, he looked lucid.

  “Do you need anything?” Louise asked.

  “Do you see him?” her brother whispered back.

  “What?”

  “The fellow in the corner of the room—do you see him?”

  He did not seem frightened; instead he looked almost conspiratorial, as if they had come upon some unexpected animal in the forest and he was deciding whether he wanted to spook the animal for fun, or merely stay still and watch it.

  Louise looked and saw only an empty wooden chair, bathed by the dimming light of late afternoon.

  “He is sitting in the chair,” he explained.

  It pained her that her brother had clearly gone mad with his illness. She tried to believe that this was not a bad sign. “There is no one in the chair,” she said softly.

  “Yes, yes—be still and look carefully. There is a man sitting in that chair with his legs crossed and a pad of paper resting on them. He is wearing dark slacks and a white cotton shirt and a blue tie. He is quiet and he is taking notes and he is looking at me.”

  “Oh, darling, there is no one there—please, come back,” Louise said, her eyes filling with tears.

  “It’s all right. He’s not hurting me. He’s taking notes on my dying. He is a scholar and such things interest him, you see. He has your rosary in his left hand.”

  “What?”

  “Your rosary, the one you’re holding. He has it in his left hand, and when he is not looking at me, he is looking at it.”

  “That’s impossible: I am holding my rosary,” she insisted, as if his acknowledgment of this fact would immediately make him well again.

  He shrugged. “I know it’s impossible, but it is so. He is holding your rosary and oh—now he is looking at you.”

  Louise flinched as a start of electricity snapped in the pit of her chest when she heard these words, and as the tremor zinged from her solar plexus and down her arms and into her startled hands, she saw a flash of something white above the chair—like the crisp white cotton of the shirt on the man who clearly was not there. She thought she heard a pen scratch a few words on paper. She thought she felt a quizzical gaze run up her body and she opened her mouth to say something, but before any words came out, the feeling of the nonexistent eyes went away and she was sane again.

  “He is looking at me again,” announced the thin voice from the sickbed. “He looks a little sad. I think he knows I am going to die soon.”

  “Oh, no—please, don’t say that. You’re going to get well. I am going to get you another cold compress. Would you like another cold compress?”

  Louise’s brother smiled weakly and nodded yes, then sank back into his pillow and closed his eyes. It was the strangest episode of his delirium: so quiet and so gentle, not like his other terrified ravings full of shell impacts and screaming exploded soldiers. There was a terrible night where he wheezed and coughed and twisted on the mattress in an agony unbearable to behold, convinced that he was being gassed again.

  This day with the peaceful academic taking notes on their unwinding lives in a corner of the room—Louise never forgot it. Her brother died the next day of the Spanish influenza.

  Petit calendrier memento pour 1928

  *

  AS YOU CAN SEE, the notebook is tiny—approximately two by three inches—but its paper is good and thick. Behind the flowered cover, the front flap announces: “This Calendar contains THE CHARTS of Luck-Bearing Precious Stones.” The first page advertises the business of a jeweler named Cleper, whose shop is on the boulevard de Strasbourg. The diary is clearly a small favor given to customers or potential customers as a form of advertisement. Louise has it because Cleper worked in her father’s shop with her husband, before Cleper split off and opened his own shop. The three men are still friends.

  Cleper was very proud of his little diary idea, and gave one to his friend Brunet, who then gave the thing to his wife, as he had no use for something too small to contain his business appointments. The quaint superstition of the copy inside the booklet tickles housewives, which Cleper means to do. Witness the second page:

  THE ANCIENTS attributed

  Virtues and a Power

  of protection to Precious stones

  To ward off ill fortune,

  one must wear the

  SPECIAL STONE

  from the month of one’s birth

  To preserve one’s health, one must

  wear each month a

  DIFFERENT STONE

  CONSULT

  The Charts of

  LUCK-BEARING

  PRECIOUS STONES

  CLEPER

  JEWELER

  PARIS, LA BOURBOULE

  The middle spread of the booklet contains a chart of birthstones and what they symbolize, and helpfully points out that such stones can be mounted on rings, barrettes, pendants in platinum, gold, silver. The back page lists which stones must be worn each month to preserve one’s health. That Cleper is a clever fellow. His first name is Pierre; clearly, he was born to work with stones, was he not?

  The record has not yet yielded a photograph of Pierre Cleper, but this is known: he is a decent-looking man of medium height—not what you would call dashing, but his looks
do not explain the fact that he is not married. The fact is that he does not want to marry, ever. He does quite well on his own, thank you very much. He can have a woman when he needs one.

  He was in the Great War too, as was every man. Once, the force of the blast from a nearby shell knocked him clean down. Somehow he was uninjured—unsliced by shrapnel, unburned by flame. It was strange. The only thing that happened was that the sound of the explosion made him deaf in his left ear. The other ear works just fine.

  Louise has not written much in Pierre Cleper’s little diary. It floats around on the bottom of her purse, and she digs it out when she needs to scrawl down an address or a telephone number. The only marks she has made on the pages where the months of the year are charted are in June and in July: on the nineteenth day of both these months, she has put a small x, in pencil. To the outside observer, this means nothing.

  Did you know, the year of this little memento calendar, 1928?—this is our year. Halfway between the Great War and the Greater War: this is the year of our story. In its waning months, yes—an unusually warm November is when everything begins (Cleper’s birthstone chart proclaims November as the month for topaz, the gem of ardent love, nobility). A new family moves into Louise’s building, and new things start to happen.

  Madame Henri Brunet

  THIS IS THE CALLING card for a happy married couple:

  It lists their address—a narrow edifice in the center of Paris, too small to allow for the installation of one of those thrilling creaky elevators that are cropping up in the larger buildings. This is all right by Louise: elevators unnerve her. She does not like the metal grids they are nearly always imprisoned in: an afterthought to the building’s design—a violation of the staircase, formerly open. She does not like the jarring clang the grid makes when it shuts after her, when she gets into the small rising box. She is none too fond of the rising box either, encased in its metal shaft: the heave as it pulls her up is a foreign queasy thing, and the closeness makes her nervous, especially if she is in there with another person. It amuses her that they often put a mirror in the elevator, so she can watch the slight shudder of her body as the thing stops abruptly when it reaches the requested floor. Perhaps she can catch the slight widening of her eyes in the reflection, at this moment of vertigo.