“In my family we just have girls,” said Mimi.
“Another thing Raymond did,” said Marie. “He stole his father’s gold watch. Then he lost it. Just took it and lost it.”
“Raymond never lost that watch,” said Mimi. “He probably sold it to two or three different people. Raymond will always be Raymond. I’m having a baby. Did he tell you that?”
“He didn’t have to,” said Marie. “I guessed it when we were in the car. Don’t cry anymore. They can hear. The baby can hear you.”
“He’s already heard plenty from Raymond.”
Marie’s English died. “Look,” she said, struggling. “This baby has a grandmother. He’s got Berthe. You’ve got Berthe. Never mind Raymond.”
“He’ll need a father image,” said Mimi. “Not just a lot of women.”
“Raymond had one,” said Marie. “He still joined the Marines.”
“He or she,” said Mimi. “I don’t want to know. I want the surprise. I hope he likes me. She. It feels like a girl.”
“It would be good to know in advance,” said Marie. “Just for the shopping — to know what to buy. Do you want to save the rest of the shrimp or throw it out?”
“Save it,” said Mimi. “Raymond hardly ate anything. He’ll be hungry later on.”
“That bad boy,” said Marie. “I don’t care if he never eats again. He’ll find out what it’s like, alone in the world. Without his mother. Without his aunt. Without his wife. Without his baby.”
“I don’t want him to be alone,” said Mimi, showing Marie her streaked face, the sad little curls stuck to her wet cheeks. “He hasn’t actually gone anywhere. I just said I thought he was thinking about it.”
Marie tried to remember some of the English Berthe used. When she was talking to people from her office, Berthe would say, “All in good time,” and “No way he can do that,” and “Count on me,” and “Not to worry.”
“He won’t leave you,” said Marie. “No way I’ll let him do that. Count on me.” Her elbow brushed against the handle of the refrigerator door; she felt a silvery spark through the chiffon sleeve. This was the first time such a thing had happened in Florida; it was like an approving message from Berthe. Mimi wiped her hands on a paper towel and turned to Marie.
“Be careful,” said Marie, enfolding Raymond’s wife and Raymond’s baby. “Be careful the baby doesn’t get a shock. Everything around here is electric. I’m electric. We’ll have to be careful from now on. We’ve got to make sure we’re grounded.” She had gone into French, but it didn’t matter. The baby could hear, and knew what she meant.
ÉDOUARD, JULIETTE, LENA
A RECOLLECTION
I married Magdalena here, in Paris, more than forty years ago. It was at the time when anti-Jewish thoughts and feelings had suddenly hardened into laws, and she had to be protected. She was a devout, lighthearted, probably wayward Catholic convert, of the sort Dominicans like to have tea with, but she was also Jewish and foreign — to be precise, born in Budapest, in 1904. A Frenchman who had grown rich manufacturing and exporting fine china brought her to Paris — oh, a long time ago, even before the Popular Front. He gave her up for the daughter of a count, and for his new career in right-wing politics, preaching moral austerity and the restoration of Christian values. Whenever Magdalena opened Te Temp and saw his name, she would burst out laughing. (I never noticed Magdalena actually reading a newspaper. She subscribed to a great many, but I think it was just to see what her friends and former friends were up to.) He let her keep the apartment on Quai Voltaire and the van Dongen portraits he’d bought because they looked like her — the same pert face and slender throat.
I never lived with Magdalena. After our wedding we spent part of a week together (to calm my parents down, I went home to sleep) and a night sitting up in a train. I never imagined sharing an address, my name over the doorbell, friends calling me at Magdalena’s number, myself any more than a guest in the black-red-and-white-lacquered apartment on Quai Voltaire. The whole place smelled of gardenias. Along the hall hung stills from films she had worked in, in Vienna, Berlin — silent, minor, forgotten pictures, probably all destroyed. (The apartment was looted during the Occupation. When Magdalena came back, she had to sleep on the floor.) Her two pug dogs yapped and wore little chimes. The constant jangling drove them crazy. She washed them with scented soap and fed them at table, sitting on her lap. They had rashes all over their bodies, and were always throwing up.
I was twenty-two, still a student. My parents, both teachers in the lower grades, had made great sacrifices so that I could sit reading books into early manhood. The only home I could have offered Magdalena was a corner of their flat, in the Rue des Solitaires, up in the Nineteenth Arrondissement. Arabs and Africans live there now. In those days, it was the kind of district Jean Renoir and René Clair liked to use for those films that show chimney pots, and people walking around with loaves of bread, and gentle young couples that find and lose a winning lottery ticket. Until she met me, Magdalena had never heard of the Rue des Solitaires, or of my Métro stop, Place des Fêtes. The names sounded so charming that she thought I’d made them up. I begged her to believe that I never invented anything.
She was fair and slight, like all the women in Paris. In my view of the past, the streets are filled with blond-haired women, wearing absurd little hats, walking miniature dogs. (Wait, my memory tells me; not all women — not my mother.) Why had she given up acting? “Because I wasn’t much good,” she told me once. “And I was so lazy. I could work, really work, for a man in love with me — to do him a favor. That was all.” From her sitting room, everything in it white, you saw across the Seine to the Place du Carrousel and part of the Tuileries. Between five and eight, men used to drop in, stand about with their backs to the view, lean down to scratch the ears of the pugs. Raymonde, the maid, knew everyone by name. They treated me kindly, though nobody ever went so far as to scratch my ears.
My parents were anticlerical and republican. In their conversation, Church and Republic locked horns like a couple of battling rams. I was never baptized. It broke their hearts that my marriage to Magdalena had to be blessed, at her insistence. The blessing was given in the church of Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin, in deep shadow, somewhere behind the altar. I had never been in a church before, except to admire windows or paintings; art belonged to the people, whatever the Vatican claimed. The ceremony was quick, almost furtive, but not because of Magdalena: I was the outsider, the pagan, unbaptized, unsaved.
My father and mother stayed home that day, eating the most solid lunch they could scrape together, to steady their nerves. They would have saved Magdalena, if only someone had asked — gladly, bravely, and without ruining my life. (That was how they saw it.) I suppose they could have locked her up in the broom closet. She could have stood in the dark, for years and years — as many as she needed. They could only hope, since they never prayed, that there would be no children.
I had already signed our children over to Rome a few days before the wedding, one afternoon just after lunch. Bargaining for their souls, uncreated, most certainly unwished for (I did not separate soul from body, since the first did not exist), went on in the white sitting room. Magdalena, as ever blithe and lighthearted, repeated whatever she’d been told to tell me, and I said yes, and signed. I can still hear the sound of her voice, though not the words she used; it was lower in pitch than a Frenchwoman’s, alien to the ear because of its rhythm. It was a voice that sang a foreign song. Did she really expect to have children? She must have been thirty-six, and we were about to be separated for as long as the war might last. My signature was part of an elaborate ritual, in which she seemed to take immense delight. She had never been married before.