Alphonsine finished the week’s accounting in her father’s office and slapped the ledger closed. Normally she was content doing this task as she’d done in the hat shop in Paris, but today she thought, I have more appealing things to do—preparation for the painting-that-is-to-be.
She would not be just the hostess of the restaurant, as usual, but hostess to the birth of a painting. A midwife. She wanted everything perfect—the weather, the light on the water, the fruit on the table, the dessert. If she picked pears today, by Sunday they would be golden streaked with bronze, with a pleasant tang. Auguste might want to paint them. She had river errands to do. She went to the oar shed for her paddle, basket, and collecting can, and lowered them into a périssoire at the dock.
She pushed off. It happened to be her favorite périssoire, not because of anything about the boat. All their périssoires were nearly the same—long, wooden, needle-nosed boats with open hulls for one person using a doubled-bladed paddle. Their narrowness made them precarious for first-timers, but she had navigated the river in them for twenty years. It was her favorite because of its name. Aurore. Dawn. Full of promise.
The painting-that-is-to-be was full of promise too. All the models to get to know. A chance to make real friends, not just day-trippers out for an afternoon affair in the country with any grenouille, any of the easy country girls of La Grenouillère who lifted their skirts and spread their knees like a frog to attract hungry young men eager to lie on the bank with them.
She paddled out beyond Restaurant Lemaire on the northern point of the narrow island. Here commercial traffic wasn’t separated from pleasure boating. If she kept paddling up the big north loop, rounded it, and turned south along the Bois de Boulogne, then rounded the south loop, she’d eventually be in Paris, but she doubted if anyone had done that in a périssoire.
Once, when she was a little girl, her brother had lifted a stone and pointed to a worm curved into three loops. “Look, it’s the Seine,” Alphonse had said.
“No, imbécile. It’s a worm,” she’d insisted.
“It’s the river. The river’s a worm.”
That a worm could be a worm and a river, or that a single word could signify a worm as well as a river, was devious trickery. Her eyes told her it was only a worm, and she’d stubbornly held to that, stamping her feet, until he made their father show them a map. It was as Alphonse had said. For calling him names, Papa had given her the task of memorizing the river towns from the two that their island straddled, Chatou on the west bank and Rueil on the east bank, all the way to Paris. But knowing their names was less momentous than realizing that a person could look at one thing and see another or call it another. That was something truly thrilling. From then on, she’d felt justified in thinking of boats as wooden shoes, lily pads as frogs’ beds, and white fungi on trees as nature’s meringues.
Now she conjured an image of the river as a blue-green ribbon tying the Maison Fournaise to Paris, not in a direct line as the train would go from Rueil-Malmaison, but meandering through loops of memory beginning with childhood here, school in Paris, and Louis, then through the time of peril to the eventual and permanent locking of the shop door behind her.
Or the river was a cord plaited of many strands, as when slivers of islands like theirs divide the water for a time to reunite with its remembered self downstream, as friends separated for many years finally reuniting, flowing calmly, evaporating into fog, clouds, rain that would make puddles, rivulets, brooks, streams, the Marne, the Aube, the Oise, all joining the mighty Seine, until Le Havre and the sea, where the water evaporated again into fog, clouds, rain. Rain that could fall in other streams going to other rivers, the Loire, the Rhône, the Rhine. The Rhine, the river of the land of the Prussian. She trailed her hand in the water that might go anywhere, like a thought.
She stayed close to the bank where there was hardly any current moving against her and the midsummer foliage overhead gave her shade and turned the water green. Under the sycamore boughs, she looked for marsh peppermint to make a wreath for Auguste’s luncheon on Sunday. When it was dry, it had a piquant, minty fragrance that might mask the occasional smell from the sewage plant upriver in Asnières. She wanted their day to be lovely in all ways so their pleasure would show on their faces for him to paint.
Not that the Seine in Paris didn’t have its own pleasures. For six years, she and Louis had enjoyed them when they lived there as a young married couple ambling along the quays watching sunlight dance on water, or cooling themselves in the shade of the towers of Notre Dame stretching to the opposite bank in the afternoons. She loved the flower sellers on the Île de la Cité, the Sunday bird market with hundreds of beaks twittering at once, the floating bathhouses, the café-concert barges sending intoxicating music across the water, the roasted chestnut sellers standing over their braziers in front of Notre Dame in winter, the bouquinistes tending their green metal display boxes attached to the quay walls where she had bought used books—Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Guy de Maupassant, George Sand. Life was full then, with theater, opera, the Universal Exposition, the annual painting Salon, the Salon des Refusés of new painters, scores of journals and fashion magazines, and Louis.
One day along the Quai du Louvre, she had pinched off a three-pointed leaf from a plane tree. “It’s an amphibian’s foot,” she had said, and walked it up Louis’s arm. On Pont Neuf, she had leaned over a rounded parapet and dropped it. She darted across to the other wall of the bridge to watch it appear and float downstream.
“How long do you think it will take to float the loops and crawl up on the bank at Maison Fournaise?” she had asked.
Louis had laughed at her notion, and drew her tight against him, and said, prophetically, it seemed to her now, “There’s no guarantee, Alphonsine. One can never be sure of arriving home again.”
She’d kept her fantasies to herself the rest of the afternoon. They were the stuff of books, not to be shared. Darkness came over her as it came over the city and the river. The light of the gas lamps quivered double, once on their street posts on the Quai des Tuileries, and again in the water, more violently, flame-colored strips of silk blazing the river. Or giant golden fish angrily lashing their long tails, she’d thought, but didn’t say.
She had arrived home again, to the island of Chatou, after the Prussian Siege of Paris, after the Commune, after she had sold the shop. She’d had enough of looking across the dinner table at an empty chair. On the bank in front of the Maison Fournaise, she had put her hands in the river, hands that had sewn flesh, washing them.
And the day before yesterday, she had washed Auguste’s raw flesh. A woman couldn’t do that for a man without feeling an intimacy. His was the same inside, oozing red, and when she daubed it, for a second that fish-white raw skin was clean, and then the pinpricks of red came again, and spread until they joined. Auguste had a touch of that same helplessness too, the same endearing surrender. She had felt the possibility of being close to him then, close and needed, just as she had felt during the Siege before she knew him. She would do all she could to feel that again.
Now, alongside the périssoire, she spotted a spread of peppermint with pale lilac flowers just out of reach. She took off her canvas boating shoes and tied up her skirt. As she stepped onto the cool mud, a tug pulling a coal barge tooted. The sound vibrated through her chest, startling her. She slipped on the gooey mud and righted herself with a splash that dirtied her skirt. “Idiot! Now look what you’ve done!” she yelled. She could see the pilot laughing. He’d done it on purpose, just to let her know he was watching her.
She picked her way to the peppermint clumps and yanked. Two small green frogs jumped away. Several plants came out, roots and all. Plenty for a wreath.
On the far bank beyond a sawmill, asparagus fields alternated with chalk quarries cut into the hillside in yellow squares like a patchwork quilt. And there, just what she was hoping for, the orchardist’s little boy was playing by the landing. She paddled diagonally across the river and got out.
“Bonjour, Benoît. What are you doing this morning?”
He knelt alongside a gurgling rill, his small hands and pant legs muddy. He stood back and pointed. “I’m making a dam and a lock.”
“Aha. You are an engineer! And when you finish, what will you make?”
He pointed to a cleared patch near the rill. “The locksman’s house.”
“Then you are an architect. What will it be made of?”
He gave her a look as though he couldn’t imagine that anyone could be so dumb. “Mud.” He packed some into a square to show her.
Here was a child who could surely look at a leaf and see the foot of a frog. “And then what will you make?”
“A factory.”
“Ah, you are a man of the modern age.”
He scratched the side of his face in perplexity, leaving a muddy smear.
She showed him three twenty-centime pieces. “May I pick some pears? Will you give these to your papa? Here, let me put them in your pocket.”
He thrust out his little chest. She picked according to beauty as well as ripeness, filling her basket.
“Don’t forget to give your papa the money.”
“I have to finish the dam first.”
“Don’t go too close to the river. It goes faster than it looks.”
“Only on the top, my papa said.”
She paddled on past the laundry barge at Bezons toward Argenteuil, where the sailing regattas were held. A dark blue sailboat with a red horizontal stripe cut through the water at a tremendous speed. Le Capitaine, she read on the stern. She didn’t recognize it, but the marina at Argenteuil had two hundred boats. This one would be a tough rival for Gustave. She kept a sharp lookout for his boats, the Iris and the Inès. It would be a stroke of luck if she saw him.
The clanking and screeching of the tall steam dredge disturbed her. It was an ugly machine, looking like an enormous, relentless praying mantis. The chain crawled up the framework, hauling up rectangular buckets of sand and depositing them onto heaps on the bank in order to deepen the channel. She looked away from what that mechanical monster might be dredging up.
She passed the rubber factory that looked like her school in Paris if it weren’t for the smokestack, and the Joly iron foundry that made parts of railroad bridges and their own decorative half arches that held up the terrace of Maison Fournaise. Alexander, the Russian engineer, had asked her to go with him and her father to see the first one being made here. His excited eyes had looked at her for approval as much as at her father. And now Auguste was going to paint on that terrace. Strange how a dead man was part of the painting.
Up ahead, the Iris was sailing her way. She raised her paddle above her head with both hands to hail him. Gustave saw her and let the sails luff.
“Did you see that dark blue sailboat with a red stripe? Le Capitaine?”
“Yes, I saw it,” he said.
“Will you be able to beat it in the regatta?”
“Depends.”
His boat was passing her. She turned. “On what?”
“On whom you’ll be cheering for.”
“You, of course!”
Gustave grinned. “Then that settles it.”
He sheeted in, his sail filled, and he was gone. Surely he’d be in the painting.
Her arms were tired now so she tied the boat to a tree and walked, looking for the weeping willow that marked the way to the secret place where there would still be raspberries to pick. They grew over the ruins of the convent where Héloïse was taken by her secret lover, Peter Abelard, seven centuries ago.
She had bought an old book of Héloïse’s letters at a bouquiniste along the Seine. Héloïse addressed him as my only love. What an inconceivable promise was contained in that. Fifteen years without a word from him and she still affirmed her devotion, her need for his affection, and even for sexual intimacy despite the vows she’d taken at this very convent. To him who is specially hers, from she who is singularly his, Héloïse had written. When she was younger, she had thought Héloïse’s fidelity honorable, but was fidelity to a memory as important for a widow now as it used to be? This was la vie moderne.
There was the willow with its reverse image in the water. Behind the green veil of its trailing branches, mallards quacked at the intrusion, a loud hoarse quack, followed by softer sounds diminishing into a muttered “qua,” as if grudgingly resigned to her presence. She walked up the incline. Hidden behind a thicket of hedge nettles, the ruin wasn’t known by Sunday crowds. The raspberry vines had threaded themselves like a net over the remains of a stone wall she imagined to be the wall of the refectory where Héloïse and Peter had stolen away between the offices of compline and vigils for their mad, happy feast of love.
She plucked a raspberry. Sweet juice, sweet pleasure. Within that tangle of tendrils, inside a blossom, a tiny bead was kissed and blessed by the sun, from which it took in light and warmth and heaven’s rain imbued with the richness of the soil of France. All of the elements of the river world helped that bead to expand and multiply into sheer casings for sweet pulp, wedged together in a knobby globe until it released its juice in her mouth.
The urge to gorge herself flooded her. She plucked and ate until her fingers were red from juice and the backs of her hands were scratched with a web of red threads. Plenty for two feuilletés aux framboises, one pie for each table on Sunday. When the models would eat them, they would be blessed with all of the elements of earth and sky and water, all the goodness of this river world. The sweet, sharp taste would kiss their tongues, and that would be Héloïse’s blessing on them, but it would be her own blessing on the painting.