When I’d finished with the microfilm, satisfied that the French newspapers hadn’t covered Inga Beart’s loss of her eyes in any greater detail than the papers had back home, I left the library and walked back along the river. It would be evening soon and all up and down the banks of the Seine young people were sitting in groups, tearing off pieces of bread, and passing bottles of wine because no one had thought of bringing paper cups. I might have felt disappointed at what I hadn’t found except that I’d never seen a crowd so lovely, clinging like that to the edges of the river, dangling their bare feet out over the water and stretching their toes toward the night.
I imagined my son in with all those young people, leaning on the shoulder of a girl with a ring in her lip or tossing a bit of bread to the ducks. He has the kind of courage I never had, going off to school half a world away. When I was his age there were unspoken boundaries; people didn’t think to do those sorts of things. But the rules that were unspoken by my generation went unheard by his, and it turns out that a boy from our little town can go off to college anywhere he likes and learn the things that would make him fit right in among the city kids toasting the sunset in London or New York or Hong Kong or Paris.
I could see my church tower wrapped in scaffolding on the other side of the river and I walked toward it, knowing my hotel was just behind and to the right. According to my map, there was Notre Dame in front of me, and I thought I might go in and have a look, but music drew me back along behind it. I listened to an accordion player, and when the song was done I gave him some money and walked on. At one end of the bridge a man was making a puppet dance while he played the harmonica without any hands, and at the other end a little group had gathered around a young fellow singing “Bye Bye Miss American Pie.” When he didn’t know the words he filled them in with “wa wa wa-wa wa wa wa-wa whiskey and rye . . .” and the crowd just loved it.
As a little boy Neil and his cousins used to like to jump off the haystack in the barn down at the ranch. Pearl’s kids would hurl themselves off, so certain that I’d catch them. And I’d brace myself, calling out, “Ready! Set!” with more confidence than I really had, watching their little bodies fly over the edge and praying to God I would. Neil always faltered for a moment. He would start to jump, my heart would tumble, then he’d stop and start all over. But he always jumped, hollering all the way down, then he’d race Carly and the twins up the ladder to do it again. I ought to give his mother a call, I thought, find out where I can reach him now that his classes are finished for the summer. I don’t like to be a bother, but I was remembering Neil as a child, a tiny missile hurtling off the haystack and into my arms back when things were no more complicated than that. I imagined how surprised he’d be to hear from me. “You’re in Paris??” he would say, not believing. “Sure,” I’d say. “Beautiful city.” I would have done it too—they sell prepaid calling cards in the tourist shops—but I remembered our last conversation. I figured I’d wait until I had something to show for my being there.
My landmark disappeared as I went down one street, then reappeared not exactly in the direction I’d expected. The sunset lit up the windows of the buildings around me with such an orange that each one looked like it was burning on the inside.
I was nearly back to my hotel when I found myself on the same narrow street I’d taken my first morning in Paris. I went along until I came to the shoe repair shop again, and I half-expected to see the girl with the suitcase still standing out in front. But this time the street was empty.
I stopped for a moment to take a closer look at the miniatures in the window. The owner was clearly a religious man: There were little saints and scenes from Scripture along with the crusading knights I’d noticed earlier, all of it made out of scraps of shoe leather and bits of old tools. Sharp tacks found use in a crucifixion scene, and beside the workbench I recognized the guests at the Last Supper, carved out of blocks of saddle soap. The fellow was quite a craftsman; he’d managed delicate expressions with a few twists of an awl in soft wax. Good hands, my Aunt Cat would have said. She had them too, fingers that understood pressure and give and suited their strength to the task. She could wring the neck of an old chicken with a quick snap of her wrist or splice the tiny wires of a toy locomotive, and a pinch on the ear hurt just exactly as much as she meant it to.
I got my share of spankings from those hands, but I have my fond memories too, and these came back to me with unusual clarity as I stood in front of the cobbler’s window. I remembered how my Aunt Cat used to scoop finger-fulls of something called Chap-Chap Balm for Irritated Udders out of a giant jar she’d brought from the old Beart family dairy, its label gone translucent with grease. Each night before bed she’d coat her hands with it, wrap them up in dishcloths, and sleep like that, and for all they did, my Aunt Cat’s hands stayed smooth. I remembered when that case of scarlet fever landed me in a big city hospital, how all through the days or weeks of quarantine in a tiny room that seemed to list from side to side, its round little windows looking at me like animal eyes, the only points of solidness as the whole world tilted and lurched were my Aunt Cat’s cool hands cupping my cheeks.
I wasn’t the only one who noticed those hands. I recognized them the first time I came across the character of Verna in Inga Beart’s last novel. A dairyman’s daughter with braids down her back and fine-work hands; she takes a cactus spine out of the barn cat’s paw and wins a yellow ribbon for her needlework. She appears later in the novel, briefly, as the mother of a boy and girl, a hardworking rancher’s wife who takes care of her hands, as if she’s saving them for something.
The biographers say Inga Beart never came back to see her sister or anyone else after she left home at the age of seventeen. But the portrait of Verna, fingers still quick and supple as she grows into a woman of steely middle age, so resembles my Aunt Cat that even if I didn’t have my own memory of that day under the table I’d still be certain Inga Beart visited her sister later in life. And in any case, there is a needlework ribbon—yellow for grand champion, going yellower with age—hanging above the telephone back home, in the frame it’s been in since my Aunt Cat won it at the county fair in 1939, three years after Inga Beart left her parents’ home for good and ran off with her Hungarian.
Next to the apostles in the window a little Madonna held the baby Jesus wrapped in moleskin in her arms. After all the walking I’d done that day I could feel the heat of a blister-to-be on my foot. A square of moleskin was exactly what I needed. But by then it was getting late and the shop was dark. I leaned in to see if anyone was still inside, and when I cupped my hands against the window to block the glare my palm stuck to the glass. Someone had left their chewing gum. The gum had gone stringy in the heat of the afternoon and when I pulled my hand away a sticky thread stretched between my palm and the shop window, then broke and reattached itself to the glass. Having taught the middle grades for so many years I’ve found plenty of chewing gum in unwanted places. I got out my handkerchief and cleaned it off as best I could.
It took some doing, and I may have only made things worse. A man had come out of a shop across the street and was standing in the doorway, watching me while he filled his pipe. In another moment he started toward me.
“The proprietor is away,” he said, nodding to the shoe repair shop. I shouldn’t have been surprised that he spoke to me in English; I must have looked like Yankee Doodle in my old sun hat and the gym shoes I’d brought for walking in.
“I see,” I said.
The man didn’t seem concerned by the smudges on the window, because he said, “If you have left something to be repaired, I have the possibility to go into the shop and take it for you. I keep a key.”
“Oh, well thank you,” I said. “I was only going to ask about something for a blister.”
“Ah, then perhaps they will help you at the pharmacy. The owner, it will be some weeks until he returns.”
“Is he a friend of yours?” I asked.
“Well, we are here day by day, the same street, which is not so full of people, as you see, and so we talk to one another. I watch his shop while he takes his lunch, and sometimes he watches mine.” And then, as if he had just noticed that my handkerchief was stuck to my fingers and there was still a gob of gum on the glass, he said, “Ah, this again. I find it happens on my windows too. The children, they pass just here on their way to school.”
“A bit of some kind of oil would do the trick,” I said. “I used to teach school, and I always kept a bottle of oil soap in my desk. It takes chewing gum right off.”
“Mm, yes, I may have something,” the man said. “One moment.” He crossed the street and went into a small art gallery I hadn’t noticed before. After a minute he came back out, carrying a box filled with tubes of paint.
“You’re an artist?” I asked.
“No, no,” he said. He shrugged in the direction of the gallery and gave a little laugh. “I hope you will say nothing to my clients, but these days it is very difficult to find at once an artist and a master of technique. And so I keep a few things—” He dug around in the box until he found a can of painter’s oil and handed it to me. “This I use for fattening the paints. One never knows when one will be required to adjust the perspective, to add a spot of color that must be there.”
My handkerchief was ruined anyway, so I used it to daub some oil on the window. I let it sit for a moment. The man gave me a palette knife and I scraped the glass as gently as I could. The oil did the trick, the gum came off. I did my best to wipe the window clean.
“Bravo,” the man said. “I will try this myself the next time. You say you are a schoolteacher?”
“Retired,” I said. I didn’t want to discuss it, so I said, “I was admiring these little figures in the window.”
“Ah yes. Well, the owner, he is a funny sort. Every year he makes a pèlerinage, a trip for the purposes of religious devotion, to visit the bones of, I believe, this one here—” The man pointed inside to one of the little figures. “He has to walk to the very end of land, as they call it, which is in the north of Spain.”
“My goodness,” I said.
“Yes, he does this every year in June, and every year I would say it takes some weeks. And when he comes back he has got sore feet and he has missed the customers like yourself. But he has been going now for many years. He tells me there was a time when all the men of his profession were quite devoted to this saint, who made such business for the shoemakers. People would walk great distances to make a visit to his tomb, and when they did, they must have boots. For many centuries the travelers to this site, they have left from just there—” he pointed over the rooftops to the same tower I’d been using as a landmark. “It is the tower of Saint Jacques. Saint James, I believe you say in English.”
“I can see why they chose that tower,” I said. “I noticed it the first morning I was here. It’s been keeping me from getting lost, my hotel is just on the other side.”
“Yes, but they are making improvements now, it is covered over. I think you must return when they have finished, they say it will look very nice.”
“I’d sure like to see it,” I said.
“Yes, and this is important, I think, for it was in a bad state since years and years. Pieces of it would come crashing onto the street, and there were several deaths among the people below. In fact, I have a very personal link to this reconstruction, because my own mother was hit by a stone that fell from this tower, and it is a true miracle that she was not killed instantly on the place where she stood.”
“When was that?” I asked.
“Long ago. It is already quite some years since they began to cover it to protect the pedestrians.”
I’m afraid I was smiling. It hardly suited the story I was being told, but I couldn’t help it. In a flash I saw myself rapping on the door of Carter Bristol’s window office at the university where he teaches, saying, “Well, Carter, you got it wrong.” I imagined myself personally supervising the sewing of the addendum he would have to write into the spine of each of my mother’s biographies. But I was getting ahead of myself.
“Do you remember what year it happened in?” I asked.
“I think it was ’99, though perhaps before, when they put a sort of net around it. But if you are interested the city has put a sign saying the length of these renovations.”
“I mean your mother’s accident,” I said.
“Ah,” he said. “Well, it would have had to be many years earlier. Yes, I was just a child. My father was always agitating for the mairie to do something about this tower.”
“As early as 1953 or ’54?” I said.
“It is possible,” he said. “I’m afraid I cannot ask her. My mother passed away not long ago.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m very sorry to hear that.”
“Yes, well, it had been expected. And still it is not the same. When your parents are gone—and my father died some years before—when both of them are gone, then you feel differently. Who is left to remember the first time I clapped my hands or stood tout seul? One begins to think about such things.”
“Yes,” I said, but I was thinking of the bricks falling from the tower of Saint Jacques.
“But we are of that age,” he said.
“Yes,” I said again, and thanked him for his help.
With the exception of a few short stories and a little bit of poetry, once Inga Beart got to Paris all she wrote were letters, mostly to a few close friends back in New York. Several of those letters are available in archival collections, and it’s clear from reading them that in the months leading up to August 1954 Inga Beart was losing her grip on reality. She spent whole pages listing mundane events in the lives of unnamed characters, as if the letters served as a reservoir for an excess of words she no longer had the strength to organize into novels.
But when Carter Bristol was writing his biography of my mother, he apparently discovered in the files of that Parisian comtesse several letters that scholars hadn’t seen before. In one, Inga Beart seems to be sketching the outline for a character based on her neighborhood druggist. According to Bristol’s book, the letter went like this: “Have been studying the apothecary’s assistant, seems he’ll be crushed by rocks falling out of the sky. So you see? The French is coming along. Must admit I had to take him home with me for a glass of pernod . . .”
The letter is dated July 18, 1954, placing it among the last things she ever wrote. The tone is rushed, as if she’d dashed it off without stopping to think, and none of it makes much sense.
But Carter Bristol claims that this letter and others like it exhibit the same emotional detachment one finds in the writing samples of the criminally insane. He tells us that Inga Beart had come to believe she had the ability to actually shape the lives—and deaths—of the people she used for her characters. It was a grandiose delusion typical of the sociopathic personality: She thought she could make the sky itself fall in on the unfortunate druggist, just by power of suggestion.
In fact, Inga Beart’s entire body of work was coercive, Bristol says. He has a whole chapter on a divorcée named Mary Hamlin whom Inga Beart met in New York. She is said to have been the model for the character of Anna-Lee: a woman who once worked at her father’s roadside diner and who, years after the book was published, actually did end up swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills, just like Anna-Lee. What most people see as a tragic coincidence, Bristol takes as proof of my mother’s power over her subjects: After reading her own life’s story all the way through and watching Bette Davis play her in the movie version, the poor woman went ahead and lived it, just as Inga Beart had written.
Of course, I never knew most of the people who appeared as characters in my mother’s books; the similarity between my Aunt Cat and Verna, the rancher’s wife, is the only example I can speak to personally. But that one relatively minor character is enough to convince me that Bristol has got it all wrong. Inga Beart didn’t prescribe events; she took her cues from what was already there. While I hid under the table absorbing the image of my mother’s shoes, my mother would have had the chance to catalog a whole range of spot-on details about the life of the woman her older sister had become.
When I try to imagine things as they must have appeared to her as she sat in Aunt Cat’s kitchen in 1951 or ’52, I can see how my mother might have come up with a life for Verna that ended up being similar, in some ways, to Aunt Cat’s. She would only have had to look out the window at the sloping pastures that were always hard to irrigate, the weeds just waiting for an opportunity along the edges of the field, to figure that, with the price of beef falling as the big cattle operations got bigger, the ranch wasn’t going to be able to support the five of us for long—the natural conclusion being that Aunt Cat, like her neighbors, like Verna, would have to get a job in town. In my mother’s book there’s a mention of Verna having found work at a dental surgery; my Aunt Cat began cleaning teeth for Dr. Braun in Walsenburg around the time I was finishing junior high. But there’s nothing too odd about that; dental assistant was one of the few professions open to women of that era. When you take into account their shared manual dexterity, it seems logical enough that both the fictional Verna and my Aunt Cat wound up with their steady fingers effectively, if not always gently, scraping and polishing away the residue of so many Sunday candied hams, black coffee, chewing tobacco, and other enemies of rural tooth enamel. In any event, it’s ridiculous to think of my Aunt Cat even subconsciously mimicking the life choices of a character in an Inga Beart novel; as far as I know, she never read a single published word her sister wrote.
But Bristol brushes these sorts of particulars aside and spends the rest of his book analyzing my mother’s interviews, her relationships with men, even the things her teachers wrote about her in grade school, to come up with the idea that she had a near-complete inability to feel emotions of empathy, which run from pity all the way to love. She was unable to imagine the emotional lives of her characters, and so she borrowed—some say stole—the most intimate experiences of the people around her. It never troubled her that those details had been given in confidence; even the act of betrayal left her numb. And Carter Bristol knows all this because he has a Ph.D. in literature and another in abnormal psychology, because in her wedding pictures Inga Beart’s eyes are looking just beyond each husband’s head, because none of those husbands could even speak English very well, which, Bristol says, helped her put off a little longer their discovery that she could not feel, just like some people have no ear for music and others can’t tell the difference between red and green.
He also dissects in a very scientific way Inga Beart’s supposed lesbianism, and at the same time her penchant for men from far off places. He makes various guesses at my own paternity, and goes into all the other nasty details that keep a book like his on the bestseller list. He’s even done some interviews on the morning television talk shows, and he always gives the same rueful chuckle, as if he wished it were not his duty to inform the public of the most shocking aspects of my mother’s private life, then launches into the kind of head-shrink mumbo jumbo that puts one off one’s breakfast.
Unfortunately, people watch those shows, and Bristol’s book really has changed the way the world sees Inga Beart. I suppose I shouldn’t mind so much, because her book sales have actually increased since his biography was published, and I get a one-eighth share. It comes to quite a sum now that it seems everybody wants to reread her novels, looking for signs of a sociopathic personality.
But I do mind. For all she wasn’t, Inga Beart was my mother. I might be able to dismiss Carter Bristol’s interpretation of her life as just another fad the professor types have to make up to keep themselves relevant, if he hadn’t been so smug and short with me the time we spoke. Bristol never once tried to contact me himself, which is surprising, considering that his book mentions me more than any of the other biographies. But unlike the other recent biographers, who called me up for at least a cursory spell check of Aunt Cat’s married name and so on, I didn’t even know Bristol was writing the book until I saw it on the New Arrivals shelf at our local library. And by then of course it was too late.
It wasn’t the scandalous bits I objected to. For what it’s worth, I think Bristol may be right when he says it’s time to do away with the cult that sprang up around Inga Beart after she ended the way she did. And while most of us would prefer that the more intimate details of our mothers’ private lives not be splashed around like that, I can understand and even appreciate the public’s curiosity. After all, Inga Beart wasn’t always considered a hallowed figure by the literary world. During her lifetime she was just another public personality, whose exploits were more often than not discussed in the tabloids in unflattering terms. No matter how I feel about it personally, I can accept that it is time to make her human once again.
What I cannot accept is inaccuracies, particularly where I am concerned. I played only a small role in Inga Beart’s life, and no one, least of all me, is trying to deny that. But I was there. Why else would she have come back to see me, however briefly, before she went to France? Whatever was on her mind when she walked out of that Santa Fe hospital where I was born, she did not intend to leave me altogether, and this is crucial to disproving Bristol’s theory that my mother lacked the normal spectrum of emotion, that she felt none of the shades of love, regret, and loneliness so familiar to her characters.
But when I called Bristol up to tell him the short list of what his book got wrong, he wouldn’t even talk to me. I tried to be reasonable. I told him, “You know best about the New York years, and you know best about Paris. I’m no psychologist,” I said, “but I thought you’d like to know that she did visit me once, so it’s not like you said.”
I wanted to tell him about the shoes, how I remember them, but he cut me off with something like, “Well, you’re on your own on that one.” And then, as if he were trying to spare my feelings, he said, “She never went back to Colorado, alright? She never set foot there again. It’s a fact.”
“You’re a shrink,” I said. “What do you know about facts?”
“I know this is hard for you,” he said.
“What about Verna and the needlework ribbon?” I said. “My aunt, Catherine Hurley, really won one of those, did you know that?—Huerfano County Fair Grand Champion, 1939—and my mother left home in ’36. She must have seen it when she visited—how else could she have known?” I would have told him about the smoothness of my Aunt Cat’s hands, how her fingers were delicate and cool, like Verna’s.
“I’m not interested in arguing with you,” Bristol said. “I think I’ve made it clear that there are some unanswered questions. No denying that. But Inga never went back to see the family—your aunt said so herself in her interview with the PEN Foundation. I believe you’ll find the exact citation in my book.”
I tried again to tell him. “Her red shoes,” I said. “I saw them, I promise you, when I was just a kid. She came to visit, it must have been in ’51 or ’52, before she went to Paris. I was under the table, I saw them right up close. They had a double strap that fastened at the ankle, a second crease on the strap at the third hole.” The call was costing me a fortune, he’s off in England after all, but I hardly cared. “How could I remember those shoes if she hadn’t come to see me?”
“Look, I really don’t have time for this,” he said. “If you have concerns about the book, you can address them to my publisher, and otherwise I’ll thank you not to call my office again.”
I didn’t stand a chance with the publisher and he knew it. A high school language arts teacher on early retirement, against Dr. Carter Bristol, professor of literary psychology at one of those schools where they wear the hoods. But. That was before I knew that Inga Beart’s letter about the druggist was not necessarily the product of a depraved imagination that Bristol made it out to be; that Parisians in the 1950s sometimes did get hit by falling rocks. Just that little hole in Bristol’s theory made me feel that I was onto something. I pictured my Aunt Cat, holding up a hand-knit mitten, looking for the place where one of us kids had snagged it on barbed wire. In my mind she was wetting the frayed ends of the yarn between her lips, knotting them together again, reminding me or Pearl or Eddie that the whole thing’s just one thread and a little tear unravels everything.