“No one is dead, lovey. No one you know. Mommy was just saying something to Daddy.”
Faith and Tom exchanged looks that spoke whole encyclopedias. It was difficult at times to remember that Ben understood everything they said these days. And there'd be two of them eventually. Until Ben had been born, Faith had never fully realized that when you had a child, the child was there for good. God evened things up to some extent by arranging for children—small ones, anyway—to go to sleep earlier.
“Why don't we all go to the market together and after lunch we can take the funicular up to the top of Fourviere?" The last thing Faith felt like doing was going out. Every cell in her body was sensibly advising her to get back into bed and sleep for a very long time. Unfortunately, neither husband nor son heard them.
“Great idea, honey. It's a beautiful day. Let's see how fast you can get dressed, Ben."
“Superfast. I'm Super Ben. Watch how fast," and he sped down the hall to the closet where they kept their clothes. By the time Faith caught up with him, he was pulling garments off the shelves and there was a pile on the floor.
“Ben!" she shouted angrily. He stopped, startled, then started to cry.
“I'm losing it, Tom," Faith said. "You get him dressed and let's get out of here.”
The stairwell of the apartment was always dim and it seemed to Faith as they descended half an hour later that it was dimmer than usual. The garbage she had spilled had been cleaned up, but the odor offish remained. She stopped and looked at the two poubelles. Tom took her arm and pulled her toward the door. The sun was streaming in from outside.
“You don't believe me, do you?" It was said, what had continued to nag at her since the police had departed.
“I believe you saw him, but how can I believe he was dead when he's sitting over there collecting a fortune in monnaie and blasting us all with his horrible music? And you must admit he seems an unusual choice for the miracle of Resurrection, even though the Lord does work in mysterious ways.”
Faith sighed. At the moment, she wasn't sure she believed herself. She remembered Ben's pregnancy as often a kind of out-of-body experience—not merely trouble concentrating but a real sense of floating away in all directions. She hadn't felt like that with this one. Maybe it was hitting her all at once. It was the only logical explanation. She sighed again.
The man had been dead. There had been no pulse.
For once, the market failed to entrance her, and she quickly bought smoked sausages and choucroute sold by one of the butchers with a market truck. Fait & la maison, homemade, he swore. Melons were beginning to come from Spain. They'd have that first—Tom's with a little port poured in the middle. She still had salad and cheese from the party, so all they needed was bread. Ben and Tom walked along behind her, munching what Ben called "air cookies," small sponge cakes sold from a patisserie truck by a lady Faith had never seen without a smile. She couldn't decide whether the smell of the choucroute was making her hungry or nauseated.
“Let's get a coffee," she proposed. There was a cafe she liked near the market. Early in the morning, the market vendors and farmers stopped there for a petit machon, first breakfast with coffee—or a glass of vin rouge—before opening their stalls. Tom had christened it "Cafe Sport du Commerce de France," paying homage to its brethren throughout the country. An old-fashioned cafe, no glitz, no phony Belle Epoque repros. At this time of day, it was crowded with shoppers. They found a place and Faith sat down thankfully. Her ankles hurt. She was facing the wall, which was covered with large mirrors reflecting the pedestrians outside. Her face looked the same as it had the night before, maybe a little pale and wan, but she was still Faith. The waiter set down large steaming cups of cafe creme in front of Tom and Faith, and an Orangina for a delighted Ben, who immediately began repeating "Orangina, tina, nina" over and over until they stopped him.
The coffee smelled wonderful. In what Faith was beginning to appreciate as typical French directness, the term for decaffeinated coffee was cafe faux. She took a large sip from her cup. It was real, all right. The cafe was warm and the noise level increased as more customers pushed their way in. The mirror began to get a bit fogged from the heat of the coffee and the swirling smoke from all the cigarettes. Faith took another appreciative sip from her cup and started to look forward to lunch. As she put the cup down, she saw Marilyn strolling with her dog in the clear part of the mirror. As she passed by the window, Marilyn looked in and their eyes met for an instant. Faith started to turn around to wave a greeting but was astonished instead to see a look of intense fear cross Marilyn's face before she ran across the street and walked swiftly in the other direction.
She started to tell Tom about it. One more odd thing in a sea of oddities. Maybe another time. Besides, Ben was there, now vigorously searching out the last drops of soda with his straw.
“Anybody hungry?" she asked in what she hoped was a bright, untroubled voice.
The sidewalks were emptying and stores closing, as was usual at lunchtime. They paused at one end of the market so Ben could watch the commotion as the stalls were dismantled, trucks packed up, and the street cleaners took over with their hoses and brooms, still made of twigs, only plastic ones now.
As they approached Place St. Nizier, Faith looked for Marilyn and the other two, but they were not at their corner. Ghislaine Leblanc, acting as a member of what Faith was beginning to term the Leblanc-Lyon Fundamental Information Service, had told her that Saturdays and Sundays were big days for the filles de joie. Days of leisure for their clients, they meant busy times for the girls. Faith had been a bit surprised at the openness of the trade, but Ghislaine had told her that it had always been this way, and besides, it prevented rape and helped to keep peace in the house, "paix des menages." The one time the police had cracked down on the trade in the mid-seventies, the prostitutes had sought sanctuary in the Eglise St. Nizier, to the slight embarrassment of the priests, who nonetheless allowed them to remain for a week or two in protest—restriction of free trade. After all, they paid their taxes like any other citizens! They had been more or less left alone after that; and their dramatic leader, a Germanic prostitute named Ulla, later made a sharp turn and became involved in trying to get women out of prostitution, and for some, into a drug-rehabilitation program.
Faith had a sudden flash, picturing the ladies from Boston's Combat Zone seeking refuge in Aleford's First Parish, with some sort of Valkyrie at the fore, and wondered what the community would do. Probably try to adopt as many as they could. Whenever they were downtown, her friend and neighbor Pix Miller repeatedly averred to Faith as they walked by, "That one could be saved, I'm sure." It was spoken in her usual audible voice, trained since childhood to speak up and speak clearly.
The clochard was still at his post and she tried to think of a reason she could tell Tom for going over and looking more closely at what she still thought of as her corpse— perhaps a sudden need for prayer—but Tom was already hustling her in through the front door. They picked up the mail. Two epistles from home. One was a postcard of the White House from Hope and Quentin, on which they had written that they were spending a delightful weekend with old business school cronies. Faith debated whether the choice of card carried any implications other than being the nearest to hand on the rack. It could well be that Quentin had political aspirations, yet somehow he struck her as a behind-the-scenes man. But you never knew with Hope. Last summer, she had said pointedly to Faith, "When everyone is always saying what a great president the president's spouse would make—Betty, Barbara—don't you think voters are ready for a woman?" Faith didn't. However, if anyone could convince first the Republican party and then the nation, it was her sister.