HIS MOTHER WAS WAITING up for Moissac, her head swathed in a nightcap which made him think of a bonnetted infant, its face puckered up to cry. She turned off the radio.
Moissac did not want to talk. “Leave it on, maman. I haven’t heard the news all day.”
“Lies,” she said. “One thing one day, another the next.” She switched on the radio again and took his coat from him.
He went to the sink and while he turned up his cuffs and drew a basin of water, he watched her reflection in the window. She was straightening the coat on the hanger when she discovered the bulge in the pocket, the string of glass beads he had torn from Madame Fontaine’s doorway. She put her hand in the pocket and pulled them out, the loose beads scattering over the floor.
“Put them in a dish, maman. I’ll have to take them back to Madame Fontaine.”
He could not hear what she was saying until he turned off the radio. “Now, what did you say?”
“I said, what else was she wearing?”
Moissac described the curtain of beads in the pension vestibule and how he had caught the strand in the button of his sleeve. He showed her where the button was now missing. It was ridiculous, but the more he explained, the guiltier he felt. “Believe me, maman, if she had been wearing them, I would not have come home with them in my pocket.”
“Did that woman sing again tonight?”
“Everybody sang. I will tell you about it in the morning.”
“I wouldn’t think of asking,” she said. She got the clock from the window-sill and wound it. “Maman, was René here tonight?”
She paused, her hand on the door to her bedroom. She was deciding whether or not to lie to him, Moissac thought. But why would she lie? “No,” she said.
Moissac dried his hands and wiped his face on the towel. “What do you talk about, the two of you?”
She shrugged. “The Michelet gossip.”
“You’d think he would have told you then about Madame Lebel’s daughter marrying old Divenet.”
“I may have forgotten. Don’t try to trick me, Théophile. I am not one of your refugees or black-marketeers.”
“Do you talk about the refugees?”
“We talk about you,” she said impatiently. “You forget that I like to talk about you and the way you’ve come up from the days in Michelet.”
“I came up, maman, because my predecessor was recalled to military service and then preferred de Gaulle’s exile to the prefecture of St. Hilaire. René knows that and so do you.”
“What are you trying to say, Théophile?”
“I am saying that if René pretends to admire me it is only because he wants information about the police.”
“What could I tell him? We are never that serious anyway. He flirts with me. You saw it last night.”
“Yes, I did.”
“I see,” she said. “Why would a man flirt with an old thing like me? Is that it?”
That was it, but even in his present mood he could not say so. “I do not like to be spied upon and I feel that’s what René is doing.”
“I shall tell him not to come any more,” she said and went into the bedroom.
A few minutes later, in bathrobe and pajamas, Moissac took his rosary and went into her room. She was buried deep under the quilt with only her face and the brown, twisted fingers showing. The bed seemed larger even than it had seemed to him as a child when she would take him into it and warm his cold backside against her. “It is ridiculous for us to quarrel about René, maman.”
“That’s not what’s ridiculous,” she said. “It’s the way you always bring him up when there is something else that you don’t want to talk about.”
He got her rosary from the bedside table and handed it to her. He made one more effort to placate her. “I will tell you about the harvest feast in the morning. The monsignor sent you his blessing, by the way.”
“The monsignor sent me his blessing,” she repeated, weighing the words. “Did I raise you to be so crooked, so sly, my son? Or is it because you’re a policeman?”
“You’re criticizing me for your own faults, maman.”
“Am I? Maybe I am. It is better than criticizing you for your father’s. It is strange to see a son grow older than his father. He would have looked just like you, Théophile.” She gave a dry little laugh. “It’s no wonder I get my generations mixed up.”
“Goodnight, maman.”
“We haven’t said our prayers yet.”
“I think I’ll say mine in bed tonight.”
She held her arms up to him. He bent and kissed her cheek. He could smell the age of her through the lavender. She touched his nose with her finger. “Just like his,” she said.