dowry
from the curve in the road, the children can already see their mother, doubled over and heaving, exiting from the doorway backside first. She moves with the narrow, shuffling steps of a person towing a much larger and more lifeless body. Why hasn’t she called Father for help? And all at once they turn pale, for having arrived unannounced they have done it at last: caught Mother in the midst of her private activities. It’s not Madeleine? Lucie asks, in a quavering voice. No, says Jean-Luc, who is taller and proportionately less dramatic: It is only Mother’s chest. Only! The girls rise up on their toes, straining to see for themselves. The chest is forbidden to them, never opened, frequently polished, smelling faindy of candles when they press their furtive noses against its seams. Inside, they are told, they will one day find their mother’s most beautiful things. And so Beatrice imagines a spill of silk underclothes, light as froth, and Mimi, who believes her mother’s tastes to be in perfect accord with her own, pictures the glistening brown eyes of the tame monkey she longs for, while Lucie imagines a mirror, brimming at the edge of the chest like a pooclass="underline" when the lid is finally raised, she will gaze down at its clear surface, seeing her own face, and those of her sisters. No one imagines a veil. A veil! Beatrice gasps, as Mother lifts it from the open chest, its sheer white length floating out from her fingers. A thousand tiny stitches hang aloft in the morning air. They have heard of this veil; how many times has their mother described the putting on of it, the splendid wearing of it, the lifting of it to disclose her husbands gentle, nervous face, peering down at her? How lightly it must have rested upon her hair! Up, up it rises, curling like smoke, until at last it dissolves into a great cloud of goosedown, peculiar goosedown, which, rather than slowly tumbling to the ground, darts off merrily in all directions, the thousand stitches revealing themselves as moths.
unveiled
OH NO, murmurs Beatrice, who has watched her mother greet the bad news of ripped sheets, a sick cow, burnt bread, curdled milk, with an alarming degree of outrage. And now this, a true tragedy — perhaps they had better turn around and come home tomorrow. But Mimi, the youngest and most foolhardy, has already leapt down from the cart and begun running towards the house. As her feet fly beneath her, as her breathing quickens and the long grasses wave her on from the side of the road, she thinks, with each shuddering burst of her heart, That is my mother. There she is. Maman! she cries, coming closer, and the familiar figure turning towards her, arms spread. Maman! she shouts, for she is running to meet her mother, with her thick waist and her deep skirts and her dark, intoxicating smell. So pretty! is what she sobs before sinking far into her mother’s folds. Then, surfacing only long enough to say it, her face swollen, her eyes swimming with love: You must have looked so pretty. For this is a revelation to Mimi, that Mother for her wedding wore moths in her hair, a revelation that casts her in an entirely new light.
reel
Madeleine is carried home in the company of bees. Before sunrise, she walks away from the hospital at Maryville, until in the darkness she comes upon a wagon, lit by a dying lantern and driven by a drowsing boy, whose head lists far to one side as he is pulled helplessly back into sleep. It is with hardly any effort at all that she breaks into a litde run and scrambles up among the beehives on their way to Saturday market, the boy not even turning around or murmuring in protest. She leans against the hives and dangles her feet over the edge of the dray, watching the road unfurl in her wake. To move backwards in this way through the landscape that she left long ago — it makes her feel like a kite being reeled in from the sky. Passing beneath her are dusky fields, linden trees, a scattering of stony houses. The sleeping boy pulls her forever back, past the cupola atop the mayor’s new house, past the slate roofs and the barely smoking chimneys, past the sprigged curtains hanging in upper windows, the painted doorways, the homely fences with their latched gates, past the pigsties and the henhouses, past the litde low bench where her mother sometimes liked to catch her breath. And though Madeleine knows that her long spell of weighdessness has finally come to its end — the tug of the string, the smell of damp earth — she feels, contrary to all expectations, her heart begin to lift.
log
MME. cochon touches down upon the chemist’s shop. Here, with a light wind blowing and the sun still caught behind the church, she pulls her diary from between her breasts. She presses the tip of a pencil to her tongue. In the left-hand column, she notes: At dawn, ate a plum. Bitter. Spit it out. Saw wagon on road to Saint Nicholas. Beehives in back. Madeleine slid out. Pangs of indigestion. Watched her walk into woods. Dress needing a good scrub. For now, the right-hand column remains empty. Mme. Cochon is not her regular self today. On the left, she continues: Mid-morning took some tea. Appetite returning. Clouds dispersed. Wanting jar of pear jam. No chance to ask. Children arrived with cart. Beauty in back. It is the sight of this stranger, sitting in the pony cart, that prompts Mme. Cochon to write her first full sentence of the day. She must drink vinegar to keep herself so slim.
visitor
Beatrice does not risk making the introduction immediately as Mother hails her triumphant children parading through they the moth-eaten veil all but forgotten, the chest abandoned by the doorstep, but of her own accord the stray woman dismounts from the cart and inches towards the gate, where she waits to be noticed invited in. Mother straightens, plucking Mimi s arms from about her waist Who is that? There are gypsies wandering about, and thieves, and she has also heard many chilling accounts of kidnappers. As for this woman, is that a trick of the light, that makes the shape of her head seem familiar? It is unnerving, the way she gazes so wistfully at the house, the yard, the swarm of clamoring children. Yes, she is well-dressed, but her hand crawls up and down the length of her pale neck like a spider. The sight of this stranger prompts Mother to ask: Where is M. Jouy? Oh Mother, Beatrice exclaims, what a story we have to tell you! And as if on cue the other children stop where they are and drop down onto their bottoms, elbows on knees, chins in hands, | rapt faces turned towards their sister. Mother, her suspicions aroused, her eyebrows raised, remains standing. It is difficult to tell whom she regards with greater misgiving: her gesticulating daughter, grown so tall now, or the vagrant woman hovering outside her gate.
beatrice says
on the road we pound a woman, covered in blood. As she walked, she left behind her a trail of red drops, falling from her hair and her sleeves and the tip of her chin. But she was so beautiful, so much more beautiful than we could ever imagine, we stopped the horse and asked her to come with us. We wanted to know, Why are you covered in blood? She told us, It is the blood of my husband. I returned to him because I had grown lonely for the sight of my face, and for the sound of my voice. We asked her, How lonely? And she told us, So lonely that I heard it in the branches of trees, in cart wheels and doorknobs, in the moans of a flatulent man, in all kinds of wind. And though I scraped on my body and ordered it to speak, the sounds I made were strange to me. And so I went home to my husband, and as soon as I stepped into his gardens, I heard him playing. I heard the sound of my own voice, carrying to me from an upstairs window. But when I entered his house, the viol fell silent, and all that I found, sitting down to his supper, was my enormous husband— And then she killed him! Claude cries as he slices an invisible sword through the dr.