I wasn’t the only one who’d forgotten that the French National Archives opened late on Saturdays. I waited outside the gate with one or two others until a guard came and unlocked it for us, then I went upstairs to the office of the woman I’d spoken to the day before. She seemed slightly put out to see me there and reminded me that the staff were available for consultation from Monday to Friday only, and that such meetings had to be scheduled in advance.
“Well?” she said when she’d finished. “What is it you want to know?”
I told her I was interested in seeing my mother’s medical files. “No, we have nothing like this here,” she said. The records from Inga Beart’s stay at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, if they existed, would be located some blocks away, where the archives of the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris were kept.
She wrote down the address. “It isn’t far. You know the Place des Vosges? The street is just beyond. But I think you will have to wait. I don’t think you will find anyone there to help you on a Saturday.”
“Thank you very much,” I said, and wished her a good weekend. I still had the rest of the comtesse’s twenty-three cartons of playbills and memoirs to look through, and so I went back to the documents counter and asked for carton number seven.
I settled down at one of the long reading tables and spent the morning and most of the afternoon on cartons seven, eight, and nine: receipts from various dressmakers, old rail tickets, the sorts of things most people have the sense to throw away. I checked all the files that had dates from the early fifties, but none of them connected the comtesse to my mother.
The funny thing is, I might never have discovered anything at all if the man from the art gallery hadn’t offered me a cup of tea the night before. I only opened the folder labeled “Hirondelle” thinking that maybe the comtesse had financed one of those murals he’d talked about—and I only knew that Hirondelle was spelled the way it was because it had been traced in gold script across the rim of my saucer.
The folder contained just two sheets, printed out on heavy paper with the name of a transatlantic steamship company at the top. They were in French and I thought that it was too bad the gallery owner wasn’t there to see them, because it seemed that the comtesse herself had taken a trip onboard the SS Hirondelle sometime during the 1950s. I’d scanned most of the first paper without thinking much about what I was doing when it occurred to me that in fact the voyage had been made in 1954, which might give the lie to Carter Bristol’s claim that the comtesse was present when Inga Beart did what she did. But I double-checked the dates: Inga Beart was taken to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital on August 10, and the Hirondelle arrived at Le Havre, France, on August 8, 1954, which would have given the comtesse just enough time, I suppose, to be back in Paris in time to witness Inga Beart’s disaster.
That is when I realized something odd. The paper I was looking at was an embarkation schedule for a round-trip ticket with New Orleans as the city of origin rather than Le Havre. After arriving from the United States on August 8, the comtesse was set to leave France again on August 20. And it seemed she wasn’t traveling alone. The price was given in francs for two tickets, tourist class, which the comtesse had apparently paid for in June of the same year.
The second piece of paper was a receipt from the steamship company. In just the way one hears one’s name above the din of a crowded room, the one familiar word on the page jumped out at me. My hands were shaking as I got out my notebook and copied down “deux billets pour passager Beart et gardienne, classe touriste . . .”
I’d never quite imagined that Carter Bristol might have been right, although, as I told myself without really believing it, this was among the least important of details. So what if my mother had had an affair with the comtesse? It hardly proved Bristol’s theory as to why she put her eyes out, and certainly the trip was never made, since it’s well established that Inga Beart was in Paris the whole time. The Hirondelle left New Orleans on July 28, 1954; Inga Beart sat at the tabac on August 1, and after her injury on August 10 she did not leave France until October 1954, when they transferred her to a psychiatric hospital back in New York. I looked up the word gardienne in my dictionary, and found it meant guardian or caretaker, just as I’d thought. So it seemed clear the comtesse understood that Inga Beart was in a bad way, even when she bought those tickets in June 1954.
After that, as you can imagine, I set out to look at every bit of paper in every one of the sixteen remaining cartons. In carton number fourteen I found what I’d come for: a file nearly an inch thick, labeled “Inky”—a nickname my mother must have picked up sometime after she left home, because I never heard Aunt Cat or any of the cousins refer to her that way. They say she had the habit of biting down on the tip of her pen while she was thinking, leaving a bit of blue on her lips.
There was no doubt it was the file Carter Bristol had seen. I really can’t be sure of all of what was inside, but there were letters from the comtesse to various doctors and psychiatrists on my mother’s behalf, and handwritten drafts of what could only be love letters from the comtesse to my mother. There were letters from my mother too, written in French, specifying dates and times to meet. There did seem to be a great deal of secrecy surrounding their relationship. I did as best I could translating word for word with my pocket dictionary, and though much of what I came up with made no sense at all, I did learn that they chose to meet in “unknown places with enough darkness,” and that the comtesse had called my mother “chérie.”
I copied everything down, going carefully page by page and putting in all the accents. Toward the end of the file I came to a thick waxed-paper envelope. It was marked “juin 1954.” Just as Carter Bristol had said, inside were a half dozen photographs printed on small squares of paper with scalloped edges. In one picture Inga Beart stands in front of a dressing room mirror, her face mostly in shadow; in another her bare shoulders are reflected in that same mirror. I looked through them slowly, hoping as I turned over each one that it would show her feet. But the angles of the photographs were intimate; the person who took them had been standing close. Only one included anything of my mother below the waist. She and several others are seated on a sofa with an ornate mantle behind them. Two light-haired women smile up at the photographer, a man in evening dress raises a glass, but my mother has turned away. Her legs are crossed in the parallel slant that women seemed to favor then and her feet are hidden, as if by design, by an elaborate tea service placed on a low table in front of her.
If there’s one thing I’ve found in the time I’ve spent doing this kind of research, it’s that every so often one gets slammed up flat against the limits of our modern ability to get our hands on information. Here I was, having traveled halfway across the world to look at a photograph that a complex bureaucracy had managed to preserve behind cardboard and string. And what a fantastic achievement, what a scientific wonder the invention of the snapshot was, because there in front of me I had an image of my mother just as she’d looked in an unguarded moment half a century ago. But even with all that luck and preservation, all it took to keep me from knowing what she’d been wearing on her feet was a china teapot that I would never in a thousand years of technological advancement have the power to move five inches to the left.
I made notes on all of it in as much detail as I could, and I hardly noticed how much time had passed until the archivist, the same one I’d spoken to that morning, tapped me on the shoulder to say that they were closing for the day. And sure enough, everyone else in the big reading room had put away their things and was standing in a long line to have their bags checked before they went out the door. I packed the carton up in a hurry, though as carefully as I could because I could feel the archivist watching me with arms crossed a few feet back, making sure I didn’t fold over any corners.
I ought to have felt as hungry and dispirited as I had the day before. The lunch I’d brought had sat all day forgotten in the locker and the information I’d found seemed only to reinforce Carter Bristol’s version of events. But just the fact that I had found anything at all made the details seem unimportant. I forgot my resolution not to pass the art gallery again and I hurried in that direction, hoping that the owner would be standing outside. And when I turned down the little street, sure enough, he was.
Now, I didn’t want to be a nuisance, and I wasn’t sure he’d feel like translating the pages of notes I’d copied down. But he seemed glad enough to see me, and I had the Hirondelle to tell him about. I started off with that, saying that during my research I had, by chance, stumbled on the very subject we had been discussing the day before.
“Ah-ha, she was having money difficulties, this comtesse,” he said when I showed him the notes from the Hirondelle file.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think she was quite wealthy.”
“Classe touriste, this is the second class,” he said. “On the Hirondelle in the second class they had a swimming pool and there are some fine pieces left from the dining room, but for the wealthy it must be classe cabine I think.”
“But the ticket wasn’t for her,” I said. “The ticket was for my mother, she was a friend of hers,” and I showed him what I’d copied down from the steamship company’s receipt. “Here—it says ‘Passenger Beart and a guardian’—I’m assuming a caretaker, maybe a nurse,” I said. “She wasn’t well.”
He took the notebook from me and looked at it a moment, as if he couldn’t quite read my handwriting.
“Gardienne, yes, this is one who would be responsible for her,” he said. “And here, passager Beart, this is your mother? So I think it must be the feminine, a small mistake of the e. And also here, there will be an accent.” He took out a pen and fixed the spelling to passagère.
“Sorry about that,” I said. “I was writing quickly.”
I showed him the other notes I had, from letters back and forth between the comtesse and Inga Beart, and the comtesse’s letters to the doctors. I didn’t want to come right out and tell him my mother had been having a romantic relationship with this woman, but he seemed to figure it out, because he laughed a little to himself and said, “Well!”
“Can you make anything out?” I asked.
“This Lucette, your mother’s friend, she is saying she knows what will be best for your mother, your mother must trust her and on like this, but also that the husband—or perhaps it is another woman?—must not find out. And then, if you’ll excuse me, there are some details which are more—”
“Oh, well yes,” I said, remembering certain parts of Bristol’s book. “I think I’ve already heard those. Just, if you can, what does it say there, where it talks about a voyage?”
“Ah, here this Lucette is referring to something that must have been said before. She is asking this person, which will be your mother, not to leave Paris, that in fact there will be something important to happen for her here. Important for her benefit. It seems your mother has been talking of some trip, yes, about leaving for some time. Lucette is writing, ‘You are always running looking for peace’ and—is this an r that you have written here?—yes, ‘you are always running looking for peace, but I will make you happy here,’ and so on. Something like this.”
“Thank you, really, thanks so much,” I said.
“But it is strange that you found this in the files of this comtesse,” he said. “Perhaps the letter was never sent.”
“Either that or she kept a draft, it was hard to tell exactly.”
He turned to the next page of my notebook. “Ah, and this too is interesting,” he said. “This you found in the same place?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think it’s a letter from a doctor.”
“Mm, it must be. He is telling madame that her friend is suffering with a certain alienation—there is a void, he says, in her relations. He is recommending that this friend must put her face to certain unhappy realities, and so on.”
“Unhappy realities?” I asked.
“Something like this. She must look to certain facts which can be difficult to bear. This doctor is telling madame that she may help her friend to do this if she wishes.” He studied the page a moment more. “Ah, but come in,” he said. We were still standing on the sidewalk in front of his shop. “Perhaps you would like another cup of tea?”
Throughout her life Inga Beart seemed to have a need to defy the domesticity expected of women in those days—leaving a rural childhood behind for the glitter of first Los Angeles and then New York and Paris, marrying exotic men and leaving them, never able to stay long in one place. The comtesse was not the first to suggest that she had something to outrun. It gave her an air of tragic adventure that the critics appreciated and the artistic set couldn’t get enough of. Something in her suggested an exhilarating proximity to the edge of an abyss, and people—certain kinds of people—were drawn to her because of it, as if by getting close to her they would be able to see what lay beyond.
But according to the biographers, a change took place around 1949, which, coincidentally or not, was the year of my birth. Though she continued to produce novels at the rate of about one a year until 1952, by the end of the forties most scholars agree that Inga Beart’s best work was behind her. She developed a well-known appetite for opiates and became a frequent guest at gin-soaked dinner parties where her drinking took on a kind of savagery that friends and acquaintances hadn’t seen before. Whether this in fact had anything to do with me, or whether it was the inevitable disintegration of a psyche held together somewhat tenuously in the first place, is a matter of debate.
In any case, the Comtesse Labat-Poussin wasn’t the first to try to cure Inga Beart. Before my mother left for France she’d spent time in several high-priced sanatoriums and spas, probably similar to the luxury rehab centers one hears about for celebrities today. She underwent electric shock treatments at Bellevue Hospital in New York and, at the urging of her publishers, who were concerned with the decline in the quality of her work, she saw several well-respected analysts. I’ve often wondered if it was one of them who convinced her to come back home, if it was at the behest of a New York doctor that my mother sat down at Aunt Cat’s kitchen table, hands with a bit of a tremor, perhaps, one foot tapping against the table leg. In my memory of her feet I can see a tension there; the delicate muscles from ankle to toe are stretched tight. Perhaps I hid from her on purpose, crawling under the table because I was afraid of this strange woman. She would still have looked the part of the glamorous lady novelist, “a woman of quick wit and exquisite eyebrows” as Vogue described her once. But in my child’s way I might have sensed that she was tensed to run.
The gallery owner and I sat down in the back room and he poured our tea into a different set of Hirondelle cups. Breakfast dishes from the upper dining room, he told me, recently purchased at an excellent price from a dealer in Marseille.
“What do you think, it is possible?” he asked, holding his teacup up to the light. “Perhaps your mother on her voyage drank from this very cup. On the Hirondelle fine Arabic coffee was served all day on the upper decks—they say it was better than anything you could find in Paris.”
I started to explain about the dates and my mother’s injury and how it wasn’t possible she’d actually used the ticket, but I stopped, letting myself believe for a moment that Inga Beart’s life had gone a different way. I pictured her on board the Hirondelle, steaming back across the ocean toward a little boy, a sunburned child whose days were spent thigh-high in alfalfa, who fell asleep each night to the memory of his mother’s shoes. I imagined her looking out over the ocean, raising a cup to her lips, leaving a mark on the china from the lipstick she painted on thick to cover stray stains of ink.
“My goodness,” I said, and I held my cup up too. “Now wouldn’t that be something?”