It takes eight minutes for sunlight to reach the Earth, my Uncle Walt once told me. Just eight minutes for the light to travel all that way, and when the sun goes out, for eight minutes no one down on Earth will know a thing about it.
Uncle Walt must have read that fact in one of his astronomy magazines, and it must have come into his mind on one of the summer dusks we spent digging our shovels into mud, trying to block the irrigation water in the far corner of the field for long enough that the hard ground would be persuaded to let a little in. I remember looking up at the sky bleached by a sunset without any clouds and imagining the sun blinking out and darkness sweeping down through outer space, while for eight strange minutes the trees were still growing and people were still walking around, opening their newspapers and watering their cows in a doomed light, not knowing that the sun was already gone.
That thought has stuck with me all my life. It is less a fear of darkness than it is of those last few minutes of sunlight, of the world still going on normally when in fact the great irreversible event has already taken place, the end has already come and disaster is hurtling down.
One evening a year or two before he died when Walt and I were sitting in the old truck looking out at the half-drained pond, I asked him if he remembered telling me the fact about the eight minutes. He didn’t, but I suppose adults and children live in different worlds where words mean different things, and a remark a grown-up person doesn’t even remember making can bore right to the core of a child and stay there for the rest of his life.
Well, it’s those eight minutes of sunlight that come to mind as I think back over my first few days in Paris, when certain sights or sounds kept tugging on memories the way the shadows might begin to come in at different angles as darkness rounded Venus and rushed toward Earth on the heels of that final sunlight. Which is not to say my world went dark. As I made my way to the archives of the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris I felt no subtle warning run down along my spine, no sense at all of what I would find there. And that is probably for the best. I am no Inga Beart, to put out my eyes at the sight of knowledge, however difficult that knowledge may be to bear.
During Uncle Walt’s last year I had Diana come out to the ranch every couple of weeks to clean. Walt and I didn’t do much picking up after ourselves; still, most of the dust and the clutter in that house was from years past. Diana would fuss over Walt, getting him another pillow and that kind of thing, and I think he liked it. I liked having her there too, and it wasn’t only because I knew she needed the money that I started asking her to come every week instead of every two. She washed the windows and cleaned out the back kitchen, where we found an electric mixer the size of a sink still in its crate, unused for all those years.
When she’d finished with that I had her go through Aunt Cat’s boxes, though I knew Pearl would be mad if she ever found out. The will hadn’t been entirely clear about who they belonged to, saying just “For Ricky, the boxes in the back closet. There’s something of your mother’s you might as well have.” Both the lawyer and I interpreted that as meaning all the boxes in that closet, even though the only thing that had been my mother’s was a little doll trunk with Inga stenciled on it. Pearl didn’t agree, but though she’d gotten worked up about it right after Aunt Cat passed away, she hadn’t so much as set foot in the old bedroom in the years since, let alone looked in the closet, where Aunt Cat’s clothes were still on their hangers. So I figured it was as good a job as any for Diana. I set aside the doll trunk and I looked through a few of the other boxes—candlesticks and tablecloths and such from old Grandma Beart. I took what I could find of the silverware, thinking that Pearl’s daughter, Carly, might like to have it someday. It made me sad to think of getting rid of the things my Aunt Cat must have thought I’d be the only one with any patience for, but I knew Diana appreciated the work and I was running out of things to ask her to do. I told her to set aside any papers or photo albums, keep what she liked of the rest, and take everything else to Goodwill.
On Tuesdays I’d go to Pueblo to pick her up, and sometimes as I drove her down to the ranch we’d get to talking—me doing most of the listening—about our kids and Uncle Walt’s health and those sorts of things. She was not an uncomplicated woman, I could see that, but she had a way of taking a subject that would otherwise fill me with apprehension—Uncle Walt’s trouble moving his legs, for example, or the problems a friend was having back home—and she would lift those things up into the daylight and show them for what they were: life’s simple, practical calamities, best considered head-on. I’d spend most of each week looking forward to her being there, planning conversations we might have. Then when Tuesday came, I’d find I didn’t have a thing to say to her—and be contented in her presence all the same.
One day when I picked Diana up she was complaining of a toothache, and by the time we got to the ranch it was clear the tooth was really troubling her. I got her some aspirin and some ice, and I could see her cheek was puffing up. When Aunt Cat went back to school to be a dental hygienist she learned to assist in root canals. I remember her saying that a bad tooth will only get worse, and so I told Diana that I’d drive her into town to see the dentist. She didn’t have any kind of insurance, but I told her not to worry about the cost. As it turned out, they sent her to the emergency dental clinic in Pueblo. There was quite a wait, and though I kept bothering the nurse to get her in as quickly as possible we spent most of the day together in the emergency room waiting area. It might sound like I was unconcerned by the discomfort she was in, but that’s not what I mean when I say that I appreciated each moment of that afternoon. The two of us, side by side in our plastic chairs. I felt—for no good reason—that there wasn’t a thing more that I wanted from the world.
To help her pass the time I told her about getting scarlet fever as a boy, which was complicated by an allergy to antibiotics and turned into double pneumonia, and how my cousins were always jealous that I got to go away to a big city hospital. I told her about the round windows in the walls that, in my delirium, spun and spun, and how the nurses put on a puppet show for me, with one of their old-fashioned white starched caps as a ship, how even now I can’t stand boats because they bring back the rocking feeling of that fever.
I told her about the day my son was born, and how that was the happiest day of my life, and, though she was trying to open her mouth as little as possible, she told me about how her daughter came out more quickly than expected in a big Soviet hospital without enough doctors, where, if it hadn’t been for one of the other expectant mothers catching her in time, the baby would have slipped right off the delivery table and onto the floor.
These were the thoughts that were going through my head as I walked to the medical archives, and it’s odd to say that as I was approaching what I imagine is as close as I’ll ever get to knowing my mother’s secrets, I wasn’t thinking about her at all. I didn’t know where Diana was at just that moment, but I made a plan to find out, and though the story of her daughter being born in that Soviet hospital was awful, in its way, telling it had made her laugh through her toothache—and me too, imagining the whale of a woman in the next bed lunging to catch a slick tiny person as she slid off the edge of the delivery table and into the world.
The medical archives had a slightly antiseptic smell, though that might have been my imagination. The building had been an elementary school once; there was a water fountain sized for six-year-olds in between the bookshelves and over it a display of old-time photographs of nurses and midwives posing gravely with unnerving implements.
A lady at a desk said something to me, then seeing I didn’t understand, she asked me in English what I was looking for.
“I’d like to see a hospitalization record from the Hôtel-Dieu hospital,” I said.
“What is the name?” she said, and I spelled it for her. She typed some commands into the computer, and I waited, wondering if she had read translations of Inga Beart’s books in school, if she would ask me what it was like to be her son, and what I would tell her if she did.
“Ah, yes, okay,” she said. She began writing down a file number, then stopped. “Ah, but this is 1954.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“After 1939 these documents can go only to the patient.”
“Well, but she was my mother,” I said. “Look, it says right here,” and I showed her my birth certificate, glad I’d brought it with me for just this kind of thing. I gave her my passport too, so she’d know I was who I said I was.
“Okay,” she said. “But these documents can go only to the patient.”
“But she’s dead,” I said. “She died in 1954.”
“You have a paper showing this?”
“No,” I said. I hadn’t thought to get a copy of the death certificate. “She died when I was very young, see, and I didn’t know till later—”
“Yes, but we must have this document. Maybe she is still living, so we cannot give her file.”
“She is not still living,” I said. “My mother was Inga Beart, the writer. She was very famous and she died just a few months after the record was made, in November 1954.”
“Okay,” she said. “But I will have to see the document of her death.”
“It was in all the newspapers,” I said. “Everyone knows about it.”
“Please, you must be quieter. People are reading.”
“Everyone knows,” I said, quieter.
The woman typed something else into the computer. “I am looking, and we have no document of death for her. You can see only your own file, you do not have the right to look at what is hers.”
It occurred to me that she was right. What claim do I have over the personal information of a woman I never knew? All my life in one way or another, people have been telling me the same thing. I stood there looking at the woman for a moment, and I believe I had every intention of turning to leave. But I saw the blue door framed by the edge of the tablecloth, I watched the cup fall and smash into four pieces, petals of a china flower blooming as it hit the floor. I saw the red shoes, and how a piece of the cup must have flown up and nicked a spot just below her anklebone, where a drop of red blood beaded but didn’t run.
“But I’m her son,” I said.
I saw the stitches that anchored the strap in place, the scuff across the heel. I saw the way the slim bones adjusted themselves under the skin when she stood up and how veins covered the arch of each foot with bluish lace.
“Look,” I said. “I have the paper here. She was my mother.” I showed her my birth certificate again.
“Yes, if you want only your file, it’s okay,” she said.
“I want my mother’s file,” I said.
“You cannot have this file. Beart, Inga was in hospital in 1954. Files after 1939 can be released only to the patient.”
“Yes, I know,” I said.
“So you would like to see your documents?”
“What documents?”
“For Beart, Richard.”
“No,” I said. “You don’t understand. I’m an American, I don’t have documents here. Only my mother has documents because she lived in Paris for a while, and I—at the time I wasn’t with her.”
“They must be yours,” she said, looking at my birth certificate, then at the screen. “Documents for Beart, Richard at the hospital Hôtel-Dieu. You will have to fill out this form here, with the number of the fonds first, like this, okay? I can help you.”
“No, no,” I said.
“You want the documents or you don’t want?”
“They’re not mine,” I said. “Richard Beart, it’s a common name.”
The archivist paused a moment and looked back at my birth certificate. “Ah, okay,” she said. “Yes, it’s a mistake if you say you have not been there, but I see that the day of birth is the same.”
“I’ve never been in France before.”
She typed something more into the computer. “And also the day of inscription to hospital is the same.”
“What day?” I asked.
“It was 10 August 1954 for Beart, Inga also, yes?”
“Yes.”
“And it is the same for Beart, Richard. Ah, maybe there was an accident and they went together?”
“No, no accident,” I said.
“Oh, yes, you are right.”
“How do you know? What does it say there?” I asked. “Would you just read me what it says right there on the screen?”
“It says ‘quarantine,’ this is all. Quarantine paediatrique.”
“Why was she in quarantine?”
“No, this is for Beart, Richard. For Beart, Inga it says nothing more here. But for the quarantine they have a different system for the records, I can see that the file for Beart, Richard comes from a separate collection. In fact, for a time the children’s quarantine had its separate administration—”
“What was he quarantined for?” I asked.
“Well, that I cannot say,” she said.
I remembered the hospital rocking, Aunt Cat’s cool hands on my cheeks and those round little windows like animal eyes—like the portals of a ship—their frames fastened with rivets to the wall. “Let me see the file,” I said.
“Well, no, if it is not yours you must not see it.”
And when the rocking stopped, the nurses with their starched white caps, a crack in the plaster ceiling, my head thick with fever, not able to understand what they said.
“But I had scarlet fever,” I said.
“Yes, but these are records from the hospital Hôtel-Dieu in Paris, and you say you have never been a patient in this place.”
“But I had scarlet fever in 1954.”
The archivist looked at me a moment, then back at my birth certificate, and then at the computer. She tapped her pen against her lips. “Okay,” she said, and she wrote some numbers on the forms she had given me. “Wait here.”
She came back a few minutes later with a thin blue file and led me to a private room to look at it. “Please do not photograph the documents,” she said. “There are official photocopies only and for this there is a fee.”
“Thank you,” I said. She went out and shut the door.
The file was labeled in the blocky, almost imperceptibly uneven printing of an old typewriter, the last name all in capitals the way they do in France. For a moment or two I just looked at it, thinking about how one’s own name always seems so odd and unfamiliar if one sits right down and stares at it. I’d come a long way, and this was not the person I’d expected to find.
“Hello there,” I said to little BEART, Richard—though when I opened the file it was my Aunt Cat I recognized first, in the handwriting on the hospital admittance form. She’d been in a rush, and the curving, graceful script that always seemed more feminine than the rest of her had a panicked slant, the end of one word trailing into the first letter of the next as if she couldn’t spare the time to lift the pen. But the curl to the R in my first name, the looping numbers of my birth date were unmistakably hers. The questions on the form were all in French; she’d left most of them blank and scrawled across the top FEVER CHILLS RASH TONGUE IS WHITE and with a double underline ALLERGIC TO AMOXICILLIN!! I turned the page.
I’m very grateful to the woman at the medical archives, and I made myself a note to send her a box of chocolates and a card as soon as I get home. I’ll be sure not to be too specific in the card—I wouldn’t want one of her superiors to get ahold of it and find out she bent the rules. She told me in no uncertain terms when I came back to the desk to ask for her help—because of course the rest of the file was all in French—that the archivists absolutely did not do translations. But maybe I was just insistent enough or else there was something in my face that told her that my world and everything I’d believed up until that point hung ready to pivot on what that file said. She sighed, put a sign out on her desk, and followed me into the little reading room.
When I think of my Aunt Cat a certain memory often comes to mind. It’s a story I would have liked to have told at her funeral, except that folks who hardly knew her wouldn’t have found it appropriate. One day when we were kids, someone—one of the men who worked around the farm, I think—came in at suppertime to say that there was a hurt dog out on the highway and someone’d better shoot it. It went unspoken in our house that it was Aunt Cat who handled that kind of thing. She put her boots on and gave Eddie a little pat on the shoulder—he’d gone all white thinking it was probably Goodboy, who was always chasing tires. She got Uncle Walt’s gun out of the closet and she and the farm hand went out. Eddie started crying all over his supper, but I knew that, things being as they were, the dog had a bit of luck to have Aunt Cat be the one to do it. It may not be much, but it’s the thing I’d like to have gotten up and said the day we buried her: Aunt Cat’s hands wouldn’t shake and she’d get it right on the first try.
It’s the steadiness of my Aunt Cat’s hands I think of now when I imagine her leading me up to the blue door, and the door opening into a room with a table covered in lace. My hand would have felt hot in hers. She had been checking my temperature, the file said, and told the doctors that I’d been a bit flushed since a few days before we landed at Le Havre—though it seems she thought it was just seasickness that had kept me in bed through most of the voyage. She’d been planning to take me to a doctor as soon as we landed but—I suspect—the comtesse insisted that I be brought straightaway to Paris, where, Aunt Cat told the doctors, I had vomited during a visit to a Parisian department store. The medical file doesn’t mention why I was taken shopping, though I imagine the comtesse had something to do with it, perhaps buying me a new outfit in which to meet my mother. It must have been there that I stood under a marquee with a grid of light bulbs stuck up against the sky and, dizzy with the crowd and the fever, looked up and saw my Universe.
From what I pieced together over the next few days from the comtesse’s papers and the information in the file, it seems that a number of specialists had agreed that a new psychotherapeutic technique that translates to something like “emotional shock therapy” was just the thing to rid Inga Beart of her most persistent demons. The plan was to jolt her back to health not by electric current, as was the fashion, but by the sight of her living, breathing—and, by that point, flushed and dizzy—child. And so the comtesse, who spared no expense, agreed to pay my passage, and Aunt Cat’s too, all the way to Paris.
I wonder if, as she half-carried me up those stairs to her sister’s apartment, Aunt Cat hoped that the comtesse and the specialists were right, that my unnaturally pink cheeks, along with a new sailor suit and the pacifying effect of the fever, would help make Inga Beart love me, or keep me. If Aunt Cat stood waiting for the blue door to open, hoping that she’d be boarding the ship back to the States alone, back to a husband and two small kids who were already plenty enough to handle.
Exactly what happened next will probably never be known. Even after I got Inga Beart’s estate manager to send me a copy of her death certificate by express mail and had the notes in my mother’s own medical file translated by a professional service the archivist referred me to, there are still gaps in the story that may never be filled. Now that Inga Beart, Aunt Cat, and the Comtesse Labat-Poussin are all dead, I’m the only one left who witnessed it, and I don’t remember a thing about that afternoon except for the blue door, the falling cup, my mother’s shoes, and—was it?—a drop of blood on her ankle.
I don’t know if my mother tried to shield her eyes or run into another room, or if the comtesse forced her hands down to her sides or blocked the door to keep her there, though I’m sure it’s not fair to credit cruelty like that to a woman who, it seems, had only Inga Beart’s best interests at heart. All it says in my mother’s file is that Inga Beart begged them not to make her look at the child. There was an argument between her and the comtesse—all of this according to “the sister,” who told the story to the receiving doctor. At one point Inga Beart apparently appealed to Aunt Cat, expressing what the doctor called “acute distress” and saying that “she did not want to see what was going to happen”—an indication, perhaps, that she recognized she was on the brink of a dangerous loss of self-control. Then, somehow, she was made to uncover her eyes and turn her face to me.
I assume that Aunt Cat pushed me under the table when Inga Beart went for the knife, probably thinking that she meant to use it on me. According to the medical file, it was a small kitchen knife with a curved blade, the kind used for peeling fruit. Maybe it had been left on the table that morning after my mother had her breakfast; maybe, when the doorbell rang, she was taking the skin off a peach. I know that sometime soon afterward the comtesse fainted, and it was Aunt Cat who clamped a dish towel over her sister’s face and, possibly with help from a neighbor, called for an ambulance to take them—and me—to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, where it didn’t take long for someone to notice that my coloring couldn’t be due to shock alone. I had a fever of 41.7 degrees Celsius, according to the records, 107 degrees Fahrenheit by my calculation and extremely serious for a child of five. They packed me in ice; no doubt they lectured Aunt Cat about dragging a child brimming with microbes all over the country, and, according to the records, they forbade her from entering my room. But, a nurse noted, she did anyway, and stayed to watch me turn from red to white to blue as the fever eased and they unpacked me from the ice, and then from blue to white to red as it flared back up again.
“Don’t you think it’s your fault now, Ricky, don’t you think like that,” Aunt Cat had said, standing at the fence with the jagged end of the chicken wire caught on her sleeve the day I came home from college mad as anything, having learned that my mother’s death had been precipitated by an act of self-destruction I’d never known a thing about. I remember her saying that, because later on as I turned the conversation over in my mind I reasoned to myself that Aunt Cat must have been talking about why my mother left me as a baby, all those years ago.
Aunt Cat also said another funny thing that day, that, I confess, I never thought too much about until I stood in the medical archives looking at my own name on a hospital form all in French. I’d said, “Didn’t you think I’d find out someday?”—meaning that sooner or later I was sure to learn the cause of my mother’s fatal infection of the sinuses. Aunt Cat, who must have misunderstood the question, said something like, “But you were delirious. You had a fever so bad they told me you wouldn’t remember a thing.” She put her hands on my shoulders and took a breath, but I pulled away from her.
“I’m not delirious,” I’d said, misunderstanding in my turn.
And then, perhaps realizing that I didn’t know as much as she’d assumed at first, that no fever-locked memory had burst its dam, Aunt Cat let that long breath go and said, “Well, you just don’t tell that sort of thing to a child.” She set her jaw and went back to the chicken wire, and that may have been the last and longest conversation we ever had about my mother.
Of course, what I learned at the medical archives set me to thinking about a lot of things, reinterpreting conversations of thirty and forty years ago, and with the final days of my stay in Paris spent rushing around trying to get documents translated and copies made, it’s only now, on the plane back home, that I’ve thought back to what my Uncle Walt said just before he died.
It might not have come to mind at all, except that I’ve got the window seat next to a nice young couple from the suburbs of Paris. They told me, in very good English, that this is their first overseas holiday together. They’re going to New York to see Rockefeller Center and Niagara Falls. I leaned back in my seat so they could get a better view of their hometown from the air as we circled Paris and banked to the left. Of all the people in the world this young couple might make me think of, the ones that come to mind are Cat and Walt, who were once that age, fingers intertwined without even thinking about it.
By now they’ve fallen asleep with the armrest uncomfortably between them. The girl’s head is on the young man’s shoulder, his cheek against her forehead, and it occurs to me that of course it must have been Aunt Cat and not my mother that Uncle Walt was talking to as he slipped away. In those last moments, when the nurse turned down the ping of the monitor and a veil on the hereafter lifted, Cat is the one Walt would have seen.
“Don’t you be mad at her,” he’d said to me, and I see now how he might have looked to where Aunt Cat was waiting for him just beyond this life and figured there would never be a better time to patch things up between us.
And to her he said, “You didn’t want to take him off to Paris.” It wasn’t abandonment my Uncle Walt was talking about, it was something more like love: Aunt Cat didn’t want to give me to my mother. For all the trouble I was to her, my Aunt Cat would just as soon have kept me. And before he left this earth it was the one thing Walt thought I ought to know.
And if I’m right about that, then things begin to fit. My memory of my mother’s shoes is clearer than it ought to be because I saw them when Inga Beart was already in Paris; I was five, not three. It wasn’t Aunt Cat’s kitchen table I remember hiding under, of course it wasn’t: The tablecloth was made of lace. And what Bristol and all the others say is true. My mother never came to see me.
Well, I might be feeling the influence of an especially long dawn as we fly with the sun from east to west, more time than I’ve ever had before to watch the beginning of a day, or it might be my unfamiliar vantage point above the clouds. It isn’t often that one sees the world from way up here. But it seems as good a place as any to let an old idea go.
Instead, I imagine a long-distance telephone call from Paris, the comtesse arguing with Aunt Cat, telling her a boy ought to be with his mother. My Aunt Cat agreeing, in the end, to make the long trip with me to Paris. And when it was all over and we boarded the ship back to America together, I’d like to think that maybe Aunt Cat forgot for a moment that I was one more mouth to feed and felt half-glad that the comtesse’s plan had gone so wrong and she hadn’t gotten rid of me.
As for the red shoes, I guess I’ll never know. It’s likely that they were taken off sometime before my mother reached the hospital. Along with the catalog of ocular lacerations that, even without knowing French, I can’t manage to read without feeling a little ill, the doctor’s notes show that Inga Beart was also treated for an oblique fracture to the fifth metatarsal: a broken little toe. That kind of break most commonly occurs when a toe meets with axial force, for example, when it is stubbed against the corner of a step or a curb. And because it implies that the toe has been wrenched from the foot, it almost always happens barefoot. It’s possible that Inga Beart’s shoes were removed during the ambulance ride, but it’s more likely, to my mind, that Aunt Cat took them off of her before she went about getting her sister down the stairs, and left them there on the floor of the apartment.
Without a bit of evidence to back it up, I imagine the comtesse waking from her faint a few moments later, perhaps with the sound of sirens on the street below. Finding herself alone on the scene of what the police and reporters were sure to recognize was the final act of a bizarre and gruesome drama, I imagine her slipping quietly away. But the comtesse was a woman who saved the drafts of her love letters; she had an eye for posterity. So maybe on her way out she picked up those red shoes from where they lay in a jumble on the floor and kept them—for her records. And yet even as I imagine this—the comtesse hurrying through the courtyard with my mother’s shoes clutched in her handbag—I can hardly fault her. I hung on to those shoes as my single memory of Inga Beart, why shouldn’t the comtesse have felt she had a right to do the same? Aunt Cat, with her practical tastes and the way she felt about her sister, wouldn’t have cared a thing about them, and the gawkers and scavengers who were sure to arrive hardly deserved them. But for the comtesse, and for me too, it was different. We’d come as close as we ever would to something bright and rare. I suppose we both wanted a souvenir.
I haven’t made up my mind just yet about what do with the information in those medical files. I could make quite a splash with an article in the American Literary Review or one of the other journals, a brand-new chapter in the life of Inga Beart. The knowledge of her sister’s visit, the comtesse’s plan, and, of course, who it was she was so desperate not to see would add a new layer to the debate over why she blinded herself. It would certainly prove Carter Bristol’s theory wrong; with a scene like the one that must have taken place in Inga Beart’s Paris apartment brought to light, Bristol would hardly be able to go on claiming that Inga Beart’s child meant nothing to her, that she was pathologically short on emotion.
On the other hand, I’m not sure I want to be in the business of telling my mother’s secrets to the world. Bristol and the others will conclude that, whatever my mother felt for me, it was a far cry from maternal affection. A woman who couldn’t stand the sight of her own child, that’s how Bristol will put it. He’ll say she tore her eyes out in a rage after she was forced to look at me. I may just let those documents continue their slow progression into dust in the archives of the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris, and keep my mouth shut.
But there is one person I will tell. This was a family affair, after all, and as Inga Beart’s grandson, it’s Neil’s story as much as mine. I’ll call him up when I get home and let him know what I’ve found. He’s got a head for this kind of thing, and I’d like to hear what he makes of it. But knowing me, I’ll mix up the important points, I’ll forget to say how it was that I happened to open that Hirondelle file, or that I thought of him as I watched the young kids sitting along the Seine. I’ve loved words all my life, but when it’s mattered most, I’ve never been too good with them. I’ll mess it up when I try to tell him that I hope he never has to piece together old documents and scraps of memory to figure out what he meant to his father.
The captain says we’ve hit a bumpy patch just over Nova Scotia, and my tomato juice is rippling in its plastic cup. I’ll take these notes and type them up when I get home, to give to Neil when I see him next. I’ve gone on longer than I meant to and let all sorts of extra bits creep in, and when it comes to Inga Beart and what exactly happened that day in August a good half-century ago, he’ll have to draw his own conclusions.
But as for me, I believe my mother blinded herself before she ever saw me, because starting in the Santa Fe hospital when she turned her head away as I took my first breath, and ending in that Paris apartment, it seems that was the way she wanted it. And if this is true, and Inga Beart managed to put out her eyes in time to spare herself the sight of me, then I suppose there will come a day in the not so distant future when I will choose to believe she had her own good reasons. Maybe I’ll be sitting out in the old truck watching the pond, thinking it over. How my Aunt Cat pushed me, five years old and flushed with fever, under the table when she saw what was about to happen; and my child’s mind fixed not on the screams or the blood but on my mother’s shoes and a china teacup falling to the floor. Other people will assume that it was shame transformed into a kind of crazed resentment that made Inga Beart blind herself rather than look her child in the eye, or see a face that had her nose or—I’ve been told—something of her smile. And yet. As I look out at the cattails or walk down to the water’s edge, maybe I too will find myself able to choose what not to see.
They say that once her eyes were gone, for her last few months Inga Beart was happy. The experts may someday take a second look at what she said before she died, starting with the interview she gave to a reporter after they’d transferred her to a hospital for the blind in another part of Paris. She was tired of reading, she told him. They may find the account the ship’s doctor gave of the voyage back to New York a month or so later, in October 1954, and think again about what he said: Inga Beart had contracted an infection on the boat, and as she lay on fever-soaked sheets, her face still in bandages, she covered the wall beside her with words. According to the doctor, who told a reporter about it later on, she recorded a kind of hallucination. He said it was hard to read exactly—something about bodies marked with ink and how blindness shut out what she’d rather not see. When they got her to New York they realized the infection had gone to her brain and none of it was taken seriously. But it might be time for a young Ph.D. student somewhere to argue that, for Inga Beart, who said once that she’d been trapped into a life as a writer, blindness was an escape.
But there will be other articles to write, and the scholars might never get around to it. I may decide that, as the only witness left to wonder, maybe the puzzle is mine to solve. When I get home I’ll walk down to the pond to see how much water has been lost in the time I’ve been away, and I’ll sit a while, turning it over in my head: My mother chose darkness rather than be made to look at me. I’ll measure the space at the edge of the pond where the water has receded and the mud is cracked and dry, and a thought will strike me, a perfect explanation. I don’t know just yet what it will be, but I have time. The rain will come, the pond will fill on up again, and one of these days I’ll find a way to see it as an act of love, the kind no one will believe.