“Ah, yes, you wrote some months ago,” the archivist said as we sat down in her office at the appointed time. “Your mother was a friend of the Comtesse Lucette Labat-Poussin?”
“Well, no, not a friend,” I said. I wondered how much the archivist knew about the comtesse. “An acquaintance, if that. She and my mother may have known each other socially.”
The archivist looked at the page I’d marked in Bristol’s book and typed something into her computer. “I see,” she said, and if one of her eyebrows lifted higher than the other, it was very slight.
Lucette Labat-Poussin, heir to a copper fortune and comtesse by marriage, was something of a personality in her day. She was a generous patron and unpredictable lover, usually to the same people, and she openly preferred members of her own sex long before such things were done. Her attentions and her money went to dancers and actresses mostly, and though she took an interest in writers too, no one aside from Carter Bristol has ever suggested that one of them was Inga Beart.
I suppose Bristol is only taking his theory of my mother’s psychosis to its logical conclusion when he claims that Inga Beart’s final act of self-destruction was in fact aimed at destroying someone else. He’s done quite a job of gumming up history to make the comtesse play the part, claiming that what Inga Beart did to herself was meant to hurt the comtesse most of all. In my view, there is little evidence to support the idea that Lucette Labat-Poussin and Inga Beart even knew each other very well, let alone that they had the kind of passionate clandestine affair Bristol describes. In all my research I’ve found their names mentioned together just a handful of times, usually as guests at the same party, and Inga Beart didn’t seem to benefit from the kind of financial support that generally accompanied the comtesse’s affections. No other biography of Inga Beart contains more than a passing reference to Labat-Poussin, but this hardly troubled Bristol. According to him, if their relationship was more successfully kept secret than the comtesse’s other exploits, it was only because she was at that time entangled with at least two other younger women and took some pains not to offend a sense of propriety among her society friends.
The archivist handed Bristol’s book back to me and wrote out a card with the call number for the comtesse’s papers. Before I’d had a chance to ask about the medical records from the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, she was motioning for me to follow her out of her office. Clearly our meeting was over.
The archivist pointed me to the main reading room, where I gave my form to the man at the requests counter, then waited until he called my number. The comtesse’s papers were in a cardboard box tied up with strings; almost certainly Carter Bristol had been the last to knot them in a little bow. Inside there was a pile of typewritten papers, some handwritten letters of odd sizes, and a stack of photographs. Naturally I looked at the photographs first. Many were of the Comtesse Labat-Poussin as a young woman.
In his book Bristol explains the supposed relationship between them as one of nostalgia on the part of the comtesse, who saw in Inga Beart a measure of the loveliness she herself had nearly attained in her youth. I had to agree with Bristol that in some of the pictures Lucette Labat-Poussin kept of her young self she does look a bit like my mother, though the resemblance is mostly superficial, in the hairline and the shape of the face. Her light eyes, though similar, are flat and direct, nothing like my mother’s, which from her earliest school pictures appear as twin wells reflecting a colorless sky at their depths.
The comtesse apparently told someone that they had been mistaken for sisters, and it was because of this physical resemblance, Bristol says, that Lucette took an interest in Inga Beart when she arrived in Paris. As a sort of vanity project she tried to stem the psychological as well as physical damage Inga Beart seemed intent on doing to herself with a combination of morphine, barbiturates, and bacchanalian soirées. But, according to Bristol, by the summer of 1954 Inga Beart’s mania had progressed to the paranoiac stage. She was afraid that the comtesse was getting too close, and so she ended the affair in the most effective way she could. By blinding herself she destroyed the very likeness the older woman was trying to preserve.
Of course these are only Bristol’s conjectures. Nowhere in all of Inga Beart’s correspondence, in gossip columns, or in the memoirs of their contemporaries is there a single mention of the two of them being seen together outside of social settings. Even on August 10, 1954, no one ever swore to anything. In essence, Bristol has based his entire claim on a bystander’s account that a dark-haired woman who matched the comtesse’s general description was seen bringing Inga Beart to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital the day she lost her eyes.
Still, I’d assumed that Bristol was telling the truth when he wrote in his book that he’d found pictures of my mother among the Labat-Poussin papers, and I was honestly surprised when I got to the end of the comtesse’s stack of photographs without so much as a glimpse of Inga Beart. Most of the rest of the carton was taken up with drafts of the same type-written document—all in French—which seemed to be the comtesse’s memoirs. I looked through it all carefully, scanning each page for my mother’s name, but I never found it. There were no love letters, no mention of the druggist, the falling bricks, or the glass of Pernod. Dispirited, but madder than ever at Bristol for having so clearly fabricated a relationship between the two of them, I packed the carton up again and returned it to the counter, where a man in a heavy apron took it and scanned my card. I thanked him and turned to go, but he said something to me and, seeing that I didn’t understand, he motioned for me to wait. So I waited and he came back with another carton.
“That’s not for me,” I said. “I only had the one.” But the man didn’t understand. He pushed the carton toward me and pointed to the card the archivist had given me.
“Vingt-trois,” he said.
I shook my head. “No, I think you already gave me the right box,” I said.
“Vingt-trois,” he said again. He pointed to the carton I’d just returned. “Un,” he said. He pointed to the new carton on the counter. “Deux.” He pointed to the shelf behind the desk where more cartons were waiting. “Trois, quatre, cinq, six, sept, da, da, da, vingt-deux, vingt-trois,” he said, and showed me a list of numbers on the card.
So I took the next carton of the Comtesse Labat-Poussin’s papers. It was similar to the first; I couldn’t find my mother anywhere. The third and fourth were just the same.
It was clear that the comtesse had been a much more prolific patron of the arts and letters than I had gathered from Bristol’s book or from the research I’d been able to do on my own back home. There were dozens of folders labeled with the name of this or that project, and with the help of my little dictionary I got the sense that the comtesse had dabbled in all manner of things, from financing operettas to the rehabilitation of historic sites that had been destroyed during the war. She seemed to have saved everything—train tickets, programs from amateur theaters, letters written in smudged ink on hotel stationary, all of them in little packets bundled together and labeled in the same tilting script. Of course I couldn’t understand most of it. I looked closely at all the photographs and the to and from lines on the letters, but there was no sign of Inga Beart.
I’d promised myself I would make it through carton number ten before I stopped for the day, but by the time I got to the sixth my eyes were having a hard time focusing. I still wanted to see the medical records, but the archivist I’d talked to that morning seemed to have gone home. It was just as well, I thought. I was tired and though I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast what should have been hunger was replaced by a kind of spinning feeling, the same mild vertigo I’ve experienced from time to time ever since that childhood case of scarlet fever locked me in a rocking delirium that the doctors said I was lucky to survive.
On my walk back to my hotel I turned again down the street with the shoe repair shop on it. The shop was still closed, but the man who had helped me clean the chewing gum was standing in front of his gallery, wiping his hands on a rag. I was hardly in the mood to talk, but I couldn’t just walk by without saying hello. I remembered that I’d made a note to find out more about his mother’s injury; I wondered if there might be old newspaper reports about people being hit by bricks falling from the tower. It was hardly a subject to begin a conversation with, but he seemed to be in a talkative mood, asking me about my trip and what I thought of Paris, and it was easy enough to bring the subject around to family history, since after all that was the reason for my visit.
He seemed politely interested in my project, but before I could find out about the newspaper clippings he was telling me that he too made a hobby of historical research. He had collected a number of pieces of memorabilia from the SS Hirondelle, which, I soon learned, was a luxury ocean liner built in 1914, with a mural by Marc Chagall painted on the ceiling of the dining room and a resident ballet.
“It was not the biggest of the great ships, or the fastest, but for style, it was something incredible,” he said. “There are stories—during the First World War it was made into a hospital ship. The dining room itself was used for this, and you can imagine the soldiers looking up from their cots to the chandelier—the Chagall, of course, was put in later, but the original chandelier was made with some six thousand pieces of crystal brought from Vienna. And these young men—from Provence, from the Massif Central—who would have seen nothing like it before or after, opened their eyes to this sight and believed they had passed over, you see, to heaven.”
“Goodness,” I said.
“Oh yes. The nurses had some trouble to convince them otherwise.”
We were standing outside the gallery. “Come in, come in,” he said. “Perhaps you would like some tea?”
“Thank you,” I said.
He took me through to a little room at the back of the shop, where he quickly arranged a bit of plastic sheeting to cover a canvas in the corner, then cleared a small table for us. “Sit, sit,” he said. He put water on to boil in an electric kettle and served me on an original Hirondelle tea service.
“Yes, a terrific vessel,” he said. “A reinforced hull quite advanced for its time—it survived several U-boat attacks and was taken for use by the British navy during the Second World War. And then, after all this, one day in 1959 while the sun is shining and the sea is calm, it sank not far from the port of Southampton. The reasons are not entirely understood, even to this day. Sugar?” he said, offering me a spoon shaped like the forked tail of a songbird. “Hirondelle,” he said. “I have forgotten this word in English. A delicate bird, she makes her nests in the eaves with bits of earth.”
“Might be a swallow,” I said. “I have them in my barn back home.”
“Yes, yes,” he said. “She has the weight of a handkerchief but she flies each autumn some ten thousand kilometers and returns with the spring. Lemon?” he asked. “I’m afraid I have no cream.”
“I’m fine, thank you,” I said.
There was paint underneath his fingernails and the room smelled faintly of turpentine. “I hope I’m not interrupting your work,” I said.
The man gave a little laugh in the direction of the canvas in the corner. “No, no, this is nothing. Some small adjustments to the current exposition.” He touched the corner of the plastic sheeting. “I try to be discreet.”
“Of course,” I said.
“A matter of perfecting the balance. The fellow I’m showing now, he has got such a very nice way with the light. But the subject, it slips from the eye.” He nodded to the canvas. “This one here has been hanging for months. Such potential, and yet I watch the customers—they look to the frame, then to the ticket with the price, then to their watches. Then they are gone.”
“So you’re repainting it?” I asked.
“Repainting, no, never this. I allow to be seen what was there before. Minimal rearrangements, nothing beyond the small correction of a line.” When I didn’t say anything he said, “You will understand, I’m sure. In our professions—you say you are a schoolteacher? What material do you teach?”
“English,” I said. “The middle grades.”
“Yes, yes, of course. So you will understand exactly. When one sees such possibility, hasn’t one a duty?”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” I said.
“To develop the potential. Of a painting, a student. One must give what one has.”
I had to smile at that. “I’m not sure my former employers would agree,” I said.
“Oh?”
“I’m retired,” I said. “The circumstances were, well, they were not what I’d expected. It was that,” I said, nodding toward the plastic sheeting. “Developing potential. But the school board didn’t see it that way.”
“Oh?” he said again.
I shrugged, wishing I hadn’t said anything at all. “That sort of thing can be misunderstood.”
He nodded. “Well, yes, for a schoolteacher there are always difficulties, I’m sure. An underappreciated profession. And the children now, one hears they can be quite difficult to manage.”
“Oh, no, not really,” I said. “I enjoyed teaching. Kids that age, like you say—there’s so much potential. There was one student in particular, I took an interest. We got to be quite close.”
The man took a sip of tea. “Ah,” he said, and he looked at me closely. “A young lady?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Well, certainly, these things can happen. And between a teacher and a student, quite common I’m sure.”
“No, no,” I said. “It was nothing like that.”
“No, of course,” the man said.
He took another sip of tea. I took one too and burned my mouth. More than anything I wanted to stand up and walk out of his shop, hurry back to my hotel room and close the blinds, put my mind on my files and documents and a cold glass of milk, maybe a ham sandwich too. But the gallery owner was refilling my cup, edging a bowl of sugar cubes politely in my direction. His interest was familiar—I got plenty of that sort of thing during the school board hearing: the curiosity of people who’ve already made up their minds. I set my tea cup down hard on its saucer, then remembered that I was his guest, that he’d been awfully nice to invite me in. “I’m sorry,” I said. I ran my finger around the underside of the cup, afraid I’d chipped it.
The man waved his hand. “Very high quality ceramic, made to endure the storms at sea.”
“It’s just that everyone thought the same thing. About the girl.”
The man set his own cup down. “I apologize. These things, it isn’t necessary to discuss.”
“No, it’s all right,” I said. “To be honest, no one even asks about it anymore.”
The man and I sat without saying anything. He looked down at his cup, and I remembered the ugliest stretch of that conversation with Pearl and Eddie out behind the post office. “You’re an embarrassment to us,” Pearl had said. “Eddie’s lost business because of you, did you know that?”
“Jesus, Pearl,” Eddie said.
“Jerry Deitch got someone else to do his deck, you told me that,” Pearl said. When Eddie didn’t say anything she turned to me. “His daughters were in your class. He said if he’d known he would have pulled them out of school.”
It’s not what you think, I might have said. There’s been a mistake. But it was all still so fresh—it wasn’t even clear, at the time of that conversation, that I wouldn’t be teaching again the next fall, and I had my reasons for keeping quiet. The gallery owner put more water on to boil, and I thought about how many times in the years since then I’ve told the whole thing through to a sympathetic audience all in my own head—the flesh-and-blood people who might have been interested having long ago stopped asking.
“It was five or six years ago now,” I told the man. “At the end of the semester I used to have my classes do a bit of fiction writing. And that year I had a very bright student. She’d shown some interest in my mother’s work. My mother, like I said, was a writer. And so I assigned one of her short stories to the class—it wasn’t what I usually did. What my mother wrote was always based on real people and actual events, and I told my students that I wanted them to do the same, write about something they knew, something they really understood, but give it the guise of fiction. Let those lines blur, I said, for the sake of a good story. In any case, when this particular student turned in her assignment, well, there were problems at home and she turned in a story about a girl who was being mistreated. You know. By a very close relative.”
“I see,” the man said.
“It was clear she wasn’t making it up. It had to be taken seriously. I told her to come see me after class. It was the father, a very bad situation. I should have sensed it before. Maybe I did, but not to the extent.”
“Mm, yes,” the man said. “What does one do?”
“Well, I was in a difficult position,” I said. “I handled it poorly.”
I would have liked to have left it at that, but the man poured the rest of the tea into my cup and asked me to go on. So I did my best to explain. I told him I should have known that what this student needed most just then was someone she could trust to keep a secret. But after all those years of working with young people, I was still naive. “There are rules,” I said to her. “I can’t let this go.”
I thought she was just upset when she threatened to bring me into it. “How come you like me so much, anyway?” she said. “You could get in trouble for that.” I should have taken her seriously when she reminded me of how I’d patted her hand, given her a ride home once or twice, written something friendly in an old copy of Mrs. Dalloway I’d given her. “You’re not supposed to do things like that,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. But that is not what we’re talking about. I need you to see someone about what’s been happening to you.”
In the end she agreed to go to the school nurse. There were bruises on her arms. “And other places too,” she said, and she showed me one on the inside of her leg. I knew the nurse would recognize right off what was happening. In return I promised that her family would never see what she’d written—a promise I have kept, despite it all.
A little bell sounded at the front of the gallery and the door chimed open and closed. “One moment,” the gallery owner said. He went into the front room, saying something in French. “Tourists,” he said when he sat down again. “They will not buy. Go on. The nurse.”
“Well, I assumed things were being handled,” I told him. “And then—it was strange. People started to stop talking when I walked into the room. At school, in the teachers’ lounge. I didn’t understand. But what she’d told the nurse—somehow the facts got rearranged. It was me, she said, I had done it. Of course at that point the school board got involved. I told them what she’d said to me, but by then it was too late. They said, ‘Why didn’t you report it immediately?’ and I tried to explain, but the girl denied everything. And no wonder—they had a hearing, and the rules said the parents had to be present when she gave her side.”
The man leaned back in his chair and puffed out a breath in an understanding kind of way, so I went on. I told him how the committee figured out pretty quickly that there were problems with her story, but by the time the family issues fully came to light, the school board had it in for me. There was talk of sexual improprieties and accusations of the kind of clumsy innuendo that, as a teacher of the language arts, especially offended me. They didn’t like that I’d met with her outside of class or that we’d had a relationship based, I’d thought, on real affinity. I explained that I’d tried to be a friend, that I thought she needed one in a system that didn’t know how to nurture a kid like her, but they couldn’t understand that. All they cared about was whether I’d sat too close or touched her hair, imposing the school system’s code of conduct like a grid over a simple human relationship. I was tired of having the things I’d thought were real and good turned rotten in the eyes of other people, and I told them so. And when I’d finished they looked at me coolly, and said, “You seem very upset.” So I stopped trying to explain. “I didn’t put a hand on her,” I said, and for their purposes it was true enough. I finished out the semester and then I left without a fuss.
Through it all, I did my best to make sure no one outside of the old battle-axes on the school board found out that the girl had confessed to me, unbidden, the afternoon it all began. I’ve wondered since if it was the right decision, but at the time I had genuine concerns about her safety if the truth came out. Once our local paper got hold of the story I could have done myself some good if I’d shown a reporter a copy of what she’d written in her homework assignment. And it would have been easier for me to get a teaching job in another district if the gossip they printed up like it was news wasn’t always followed by “Richard Beart declined to be interviewed for this article.” But there’s nothing like the combined effect of a school board investigatory committee and a small-town newspaper to make a person feel like he’s shouting at the wind. Whatever it cost me, keeping my end of our bargain seemed the least I could do to help protect that child from all that she was up against. And it was too bad. I’d taken an interest in her in the first place because I truly believed she had a gift. “You could be a great writer someday,” I’d said to her, never guessing that her first successful work of fiction would be at my expense.
The gallery owner was quiet, and I sat for a moment, knowing my face was red and that I’d been talking too long. I remembered the ladies on the school board, listening with lips closed tight, sure that if they kept me talking long enough they’d catch me in a lie. And perhaps they had. I’ve learned by now that the truth is full of angles and refractions—and though everything I’d just told the man was true, it was also true that the school board hearing had left me with a kind of shame that was harder to bear than the public humiliation because it was entirely my own. I’d known from the beginning that the girl was troubled and I’d done nothing about it; I’d thought those troubles would be useful to her later on. I told her what they used to say about my mother, that she wrote to ease a sadness she could never quite explain.
The man drained his teacup and stood up. I wasn’t sure from his expression what he thought of it all, and I half-expected him to tell me to get out of his shop. So I was surprised when he took a bottle down from the shelf and asked if I’d like a glass. I shook my head. “I really should be going,” I said.
“Yes of course,” the man said. He took my cup and saucer and nodded to my notebook, which I’d set on the table. “Best of luck with your research,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said. “And thank you for the tea.”
“Not at all. I hope you will stop by again while you are here in Paris.” He nodded toward the canvas in the corner. “Perhaps when the paint has dried. You can tell me what you think.”
I thanked him again, saying I’d be sure to do that. I knew I ought to ask him to tell me more about his mother’s accident, but I hardly wanted to prolong our conversation. As I left the shop I told myself I’d just have to live without the knowledge, because I was not going to make the mistake of going down that street again. I’d told the man more than I’ve ever told anyone back home. I wondered if every traveler had the same experience—if there was something about being a stranger to a place that made things better left inside one’s own head want to heave themselves, uninvited, into the light.