Then they all went home. But it was an anxious and sleepless night for everyone. They had telephoned the doctor before going home, and he had promised to come back the next day.
“It’s flu, isn’t it?” Albert had asked.
“Yes … but it’s gone to her lungs. I could hear a rattle through my stethoscope. Well, we’ll have to see how things are tomorrow.”
Tomorrow … As they lay in bed, each of them closed their eyes, listened to the clock chiming, and gently stretched their legs between the icy sheets. It was a cold night. Occasionally Augustin would wake up with a start, muttering, “Wasn’t that the telephone?”
“No, go back to sleep. Don’t worry so much!”
At dawn he looked at his wife in the dim light coming through the shutters. She was sleeping peacefully, her wonderful dark hair spread over the pillow. “In spite of everything,” he thought, “I’m on my own. Claire sympathizes; she doesn’t suffer. But why should she suffer? She’s looked after Mother well. She’s always made a point of saying, ‘Your mother’s not easy to look after.’ But now she’s sound asleep.”
He felt almost afraid, as he thought how far away from him she seemed, how unfamiliar. It was probably because of his dreams—a jumble of daydreams and nightmares that had sent him back to the years not so long ago when she had not been there. What was that idiot Albert doing? And Alain? He thought about them with irritation and scorn, yet he wanted to see them.
The second day went by very slowly. One by one they went into the room where the old woman was lying. She didn’t move. They said, “She’s sleeping,” and tiptoed away. But it seemed to them she was better. She woke up during the day and ate a little food; they all breathed more easily, although the women did not allow themselves to be distracted or deceived by hope.
The women! How useful, rational, and practical they were! They spoke quietly, saying, “Poor Mama.” They telephoned the doctor. They grieved as you would over the death of someone you are fond of but who is unimportant to you. When, at four o’clock, her temperature rose again, they were the first to say, “We must have a second opinion.”
The two doctors took a long time to arrive and, growing colder by the minute, the family waited in a mood of solemn impatience. It was late. None of them had had dinner. The sons were incredulous. “Mama, dying? Oh, come now.” They needed time to take in the idea of her death. But how quickly the women resigned themselves to it! They adopted a mourning attitude; they were intent on dispelling any hope, sighing, “She never looked after herself properly.” “At her age, it’s serious if you ignore a cold.” “When my own mother died …”
They were troubled and upset, although they stayed very calm. What could be more natural, more to be expected, than the death of an old woman who was ill?
At last the consultant arrived. He listened to the patient’s chest, questioned the nurse, then announced, “Bronchitis … not too serious.”
He nodded at Albert and they left the room together. He said, “Look, it’s a bit worrying. I fear there may be complications with her heart. She’s getting pain and distress in the cardiac region. It’s worrying!”
“It’s not serious, is it?” asked Albert, bending his large, anxious face toward the doctor.
“If we manage to avoid complications in that area, I hope it won’t be serious, but … well, we’ll just have to wait, see how things are in the morning. I hope she may feel better in the morning.”
Albert listened and—gradually, slowly—the thought took shape in his mind, “She’s going to die … my mother’s going to die.”
[ II ]
THE EVENING DRAGGED ON SLOWLY. THE THREE women sat knitting by the fire in the parlor; through the half-open door they could see the patient dozing; her cheeks were red and blotchy and her nose looked pale and pinched. The women watched her, shaking their heads. “Poor woman. She wasn’t so bad. A bit … bad-tempered, a bit spiteful … but at her age …”
They got up occasionally to go to the door and speak to the nurse.
“No change.”
“The doctor’s worried about her heart, isn’t he?”
“Yes. If it’s that, there’s nothing to be done.”
“How old is she? I wouldn’t want to live that long.”
Eventually they began to discuss other matters. With a sigh, one of them said, “Have you seen Adrienne? You know that blue dress? I don’t know whether to order it now.”
A pause, then: “Black is always so much more practical.”
They were on their own. Their husbands were in the dining room; they could see them sitting at the table, smoking in silence. Mariette was with them.
Claire beckoned to them to come and join their wives; Augustin got up and gently closed the door.
Every now and then the patient would moan, complaining that she couldn’t breathe. She begged them to open the windows, but they said, “Later, later … tomorrow, if the sun shines.” They did not know that, for the sick, time does not move at the same pace as it does for those around them. There were so many long, drawn-out hours until the next day … You had to fight for breath and struggle toward nightfall as you would climb up a mountain.
She pushed away the hands that reached toward her—the cold arms felt icy; she shivered. “You can see she’s cold.” They pulled the blankets up higher, suffocating her; they closed the shutters and the curtains. The room was oppressive now, hot and stifling. All she could hear was the whistling noise coming from her chest. She closed her eyes. The hours passed slowly. First one, then another of her children came in quietly to sit by her bed. She did not need to look at them. She recognized Augustin’s slow movements, Alain’s lighter footsteps, and Albert’s sighs. As if carrying a heavy burden on his shoulders, Albert sighed mournfully from time to time.
Each in turn slowly leaned over her, then left, walking through the parlor without answering the wives’ questions, and went back to his brothers.
It was a relief to be together that night. They did not need to speak. Albert was the only one who talked, although nobody listened to him. “Just like the old days,” thought Alain. Albert had always been treated with condescension by his brothers, but tonight this did not appear either to hurt or surprise him. In the early days, before he was old, rich, and important, he was just “fatty Albert” or “good old Albert” to his brothers, leaving the good looks and the talent to them and to Mariette.
From time to time Augustin stood up and went over to the window. As he opened the curtains to look out at the rain he felt his old spirit returning, that lighthearted impatience and inner fire that the years had extinguished. Mariette was smoking, her face hidden in the shadows. Some of the indefinable grace her brothers had loved so much could be glimpsed in her face.
In the little parlor next door the women could not hear what they said. Sometimes they pricked their ears, but no … they remained silent, waiting. Claire softly called out, “Come in here … you’d be more comfortable.”
No one replied.
In a strained voice Alix murmured, “Whatever can they be talking about?”
Her sister gave her a surreptitious, pitying glance: she looked so worried and tense, haggard with jealous, unforgiving love. She listened, and said as she shrugged her shoulders: “I don’t know. Something about Aunt Andrée or cousin Henriette, people who’ve been dead twenty years. As if they have nothing better to do.”
She stood up, folded her knitting, and went into her mother-in-law’s room, where the night nurse was helping her to sit up and drink. She asked, “Do you need anything, Mama dearest?”
The old woman did not reply. No, she did not need anything. Yet she felt worse; she was finding it more difficult to breathe. But she could hear the children’s footsteps and their quiet, muffled voices. She knew they were there. She was sure, now, that she would not die alone one night, as she had so often feared, looked after by plump Josephine, waiting on her deathbed for her sons, who would be woken, summoned, but would get there to
o late. She had so often imagined that she would die alone in the summer in the empty flat, surrounded by shrouded furniture. The children had never understood why she was so miserable as the holiday season approached. Children didn’t understand anything … But now she knew they were there, that they would leave her only when she was out of danger or, on the other hand, when death came to take her from them.
The night nurse complained to Claire, “She shouldn’t slump like this. Her lungs are clogged up, but she won’t sit up against her pillows. I keep trying to lift her, but every time she sinks back. If you could help me …”
Claire took the old woman by the shoulders and, with some difficulty, gently pulled her up, but as soon as they let go of her, her large body sank down into the bed, and her head fell heavily onto the pillow.
Claire went into the dining room. They were all sitting with their heads bowed under the lamp, talking in low voices. With a peculiar feeling of distaste she looked at Mariette’s blonde hair, shining in the light, disheveled and as pale and delicate as wisps of smoke. It was … shocking, that beautiful blonde hair framing the worn-out face.
“You must help me lift your mother,” Claire said. “It’s bad for her breathing and for her heart to be lying like that, but she won’t make the effort to sit up. I don’t understand it. She’s not fighting. You have to fight.”
Augustin stood up and went to try to help pull the patient up onto her pillows, but she slipped out of his hands, as she had done with the others, moaning as she sank down again. He looked at her silently and gestured to Claire to leave her alone.
“But it’s not doing her any good, as I told you …”
He left the bedroom without answering.
“One shouldn’t let oneself go like that,” Claire said again.
“Ah!” said Alain softly. “They’re all the same, those little Hasselin girls.”
Augustin smiled, remembering a time when Claire and Alix were just the little “Hasselin girls,” distant strangers whom they greeted coldly, with a wary reserve.
Alain murmured, “All the same. They’re always right there. They wave their arms around. They talk. They think they can change the course of destiny … they’re very—energetic.”
Augustin shrugged slowly.
“Yes, energetic, passionate and loyal.”
They fought against illness, and even death itself, while the Demestres’ instinct was to wait, to let things take their course. Augustin thought perhaps that was what was keeping them together that night, a need to be with one another, with family. They all felt the same weariness confronted with what seemed to them a futile commotion. They had tried to suppress their anxiety with useless words and pointless activity. But this had neither helped nor comforted them. Finally they resigned themselves to silence and to waiting.
Yes, it seemed to them that they should wait, stay out of the way, not say anything, shut their eyes. While the women … they had neither detachment, nor a man’s superior wisdom.
“It’s all so useless,” murmured Alain, as a pained look flickered across his face. His brother guessed that he was thinking about Alix, who, after all these years, still had not given up trying to make him love her. And who knows? If she had not been so desperate to make him love her as much as she loved him, there could have been some tolerance and affection between them, whereas …
That was indeed what Alain was thinking. And his brothers could read his mind. They had stopped seeing one another simply as ghostly shadows, the way we see people whose behavior doesn’t affect us and who bring us neither grief nor happiness. Perhaps their fear and worry that night made them more than usually sensitive to one another’s thoughts. “Yet we haven’t changed,” thought Augustin in confusion. Their attitudes hadn’t shifted enough to make them love one another. He, Augustin, still thought Albert was a fool and Alain withdrawn and selfish, just as they undoubtedly continued to judge him as harshly and intolerantly as only brothers could. In spite of this, they understood one another.
One of them asked suddenly, “How old was Grandfather when he died?”
In the parlor they could hear Claire’s voice: “I’m telling you that the light is tiring Mama.”
They did not reply. How old was Grandfather when he died?
For Claire, his was a name that aroused no echo in her heart. For the brothers, he was the man from whom they might have inherited the illness that would kill them one day.
Meanwhile, Claire and Alix were quietly talking together. Alix was complaining about Alain, about her children, about her life.
“Bernadette sometimes stands up to him; she’s his favorite. Martine adores him, as I did, crawling to him. But he doesn’t love them. He doesn’t love his house, and he doesn’t love me. I know there isn’t another woman, which makes it worse. You can try to reach a man who has stopped loving you, but him … Oh, how I loathe the Demestre spirit; it’s so elusive! They’re all the same; that’s why we fell for them. When I was young, before I was in love with Alain, I think I was in love with the whole Demestre tribe. I loved that ‘family look’ they shared: their mannerisms, their peculiarities, their gentle voices, their beautiful hands … I loved Alain before I knew him, when he was just a name spoken by you and your husband and when I was still a child. Those Demestres! Do you remember, Claire?”
Claire did remember. My God, how glamorous they had seemed to her. She thought back to the summer when the house next door to theirs had been rented for the first time by the Demestre family, happy and well-off in those days. They, the little Hasselin girls, daughters of a lowly insurance clerk, spent their summer holidays in one of those awful little houses built, as prewar villas often were, to look like a Swiss chalet, with a pointed roof, a wooden balcony, and the name written above the door in shells and pebbles. And there was the house next door, so beautiful, simple, and imposing, its garden merging into the damp pine forest. The night the Demestres gave a ball to celebrate Mariette’s engagement, the little Hasselin girls stayed up all night, leaning out of their bedroom window, trying to make out the dancing shadows behind the dazzling lights. It was September, and already cold. They were frozen to the bone. Every now and then couples came out onto the balcony, and they would glimpse light, gauzy dresses and bare arms. Claire was then fifteen, and Alix barely ten. And now here was the legend of the Demestres, the Demestre world, regrouping itself slowly and quietly next to them.
“What are they talking about?”
They were talking about the house, the rooms they had as children, their mother’s dresses … Alain listened. Casually, they said, “You won’t remember any of that, you were too young, it was before you were born.”
And Alain, usually so scornful of everything and everybody, was listening openmouthed, somehow becoming once again the “baby” of the family. His face took on the round-eyed, astonished expression of the youngest child allowed, as a special treat, to listen to the grown-ups. “You won’t remember that, Alain.” He thought he did remember but did not say anything, not wanting to contradict his elders. He realized that, deep down, the reverence and fear they inspired in him was still intact.
Augustin and Mariette were talking quietly, cracking nuts in their hands with identical gestures. Mariette sighed. Her face was lit up with that youthful, lighthearted beauty and grace they had never been able to forget. Perhaps they had never forgiven her for allowing age and life to spoil the reflection of their own youth in her face … Now, in the dark, they could see only her still-beautiful eyes and hear her gentle, slightly rasping voice. They forgave her for growing old, and loved her once more.
“Oh, do you remember? Do you remember?”
Remember what? Nothing. Sounds, shadows, such an ordinary past, but one the others did not know about, did not understand. The wives did not understand, that was all … They were not part of the family.
Albert listened, saying diffidently yet cheerfully, “Yes, you’re right, Augustin, you’re right.”
Now they were discus
sing people whom neither Alix nor Claire nor Sabine had ever known. The women heard an indistinct murmuring, then suddenly a Christian name none of them had heard mentioned before. Georges? Henriette? Friends? Relations? They moved closer together. They knew, in their heart of hearts, that they did not really care about their mother-in-law’s illness and her possible death. Although they passionately wanted to be involved in their husbands’ grief, they were being gently rejected, with an obstinacy typical of the Demestres, rather like a dog discreetly slipping its head out of an uncomfortable collar. With the ruthless greed borne of love they wanted the men they loved to belong only to them. They wanted to console and to caress them, but above all make them realize that all they had in the world were their wives, their children, and their homes. That should be all they needed; it should replace everything else, be enough for them till the end of their days.
Sabine came and stood in the doorway.
“The light really is too bright. It’s tiring for Mama. Come in here; come into the parlor.”
They shook their heads, wanting to be rid of her.
Mariette turned out the lamps, leaving one burning by the fireplace. It reminded them of the nights when they used to be awake together while their mother slept, when they would look at the moonlit sky with a sweet, heartfelt longing. It was not their childhood that had scarred them so deeply, but their early youth and first, carefree love, before they took on the hateful burdens and responsibilities of forty-year-olds.
“You were so pretty!” said Alain artlessly.
Mariette sighed sadly. “I was, wasn’t I?” she said.
“You really ruined your life, you poor old thing,” said Augustin, with a curious bitterness, a strange anger, as if he were talking less to his sister than to himself.
Each of them was thinking, “We’ve all ruined our lives. But in any case, life is ruined just by living it.” They said nothing. Whereas friends or a wife exhaustingly insist on talking, there comes a moment in which silence or a sigh or a brief look is enough among brothers and sisters. Each of them thought, “Poor old thing,” and then went back to thinking about themselves; yet through some miracle of kinship, thinking about themselves did not distance them from the others.