The Marriage of Opposites

  “You should have called for me sooner.” My son threw off his coat and went to stand at the foot of the bed. He called to his father, but Frédéric seemed very far away and he would not respond.

  “Is this the end, then?” Camille asked me. I could see how shaken he was. “Is there no hope?”

  “There is always hope,” Adelle had told me so long ago, when I was so unhappy with my life, after I married the first time. Much to my surprise, it had turned out to be true. Now it was a lie, but I could not tell my son otherwise.

  Frédéric slept in the grip of his fever, his breathing labored. The sound of him straining for air reminded me of the sound of the wind that came across the sea from Africa before the rains began. I hadn’t changed my clothes in days, or washed, or had a meal, or left the room. Perhaps Camille noticed my distress, for his expression changed. He pulled over a chair and sat next to me.

  “Did you know that Father and I once went to a waterfall and threw off our clothes and dove in together? He told me if I held out my hands little fish would come to me, and they did. It was near this same place I once found a skeleton, nearly hidden by the tall grass.”

  “I know that place.” I was glad to envision it, the pool I had passed on the way to the herb man, whose death my son had foreseen when he was just an infant who refused to sleep.

  “We went swimming the day we chased off Madame Halevy’s daughter.”

  I looked at Camille, surprised to hear this. I hadn’t known my husband had been a party to that. It made me love him even more.

  “I’ve kept Madame’s ring to remind me of that day. I’ve kept her story secret for her, but there’s no real cause to do so anymore.”

  I nodded. “She was a great one for secrets.”

  “She told me that your cousin Aaron was her grandson. Her daughter abandoned him because the father was African.”

  “I think you’re wrong,” I told him, yet I remembered Madame Halevy at the door, late one night, when I thought she was a witch standing in our courtyard.

  “Your mother had lost a son, and so the two made a pact. Your mother would raise the child in our faith and no one would ever know the truth about Madame Halevy’s daughter. When he fell in love with Jestine, they told him he mustn’t marry her; such a marriage would only bring his origins into question. These two ladies were the ones who thought it best for Lydia to be raised in France, where she would be considered a member of our faith. They were the ones who arranged for her to be taken. They thought they were doing the right thing for all concerned, but they were not.”

  My son tugged off Madame Halevy’s ring. He’d worn it for so long it had left an indentation in his flesh. When he took my hand in his, his palm was as rough as any workingman’s. He seemed older than his years because of his long beard. He painted in the fresh, cold air, and his complexion was weather-beaten. I thought of how I’d carried him through the woods when he couldn’t sleep. How he was the only one of my babies I had told my stories to. I’d loved him too much even then. I saw Frédéric in him, his lanky, dignified posture, his resolve to do the right thing, his strong features.

  “I had pity for Madame Halevy,” he told me. “That was the world she lived in, but it isn’t ours. Give the ring to Jestine. Tell her Aaron Rodrigues wanted her to have it. He just never had the chance to give it to her.”

  My son sat with me through the night. When morning came the bright streaks of daylight were haint blue, but in this country that color couldn’t keep ghosts away. My husband died that day at noon. It might as well have been midnight, for the heavy damask drapes were drawn and the room was pitch. I did not want to look out and see Paris, the city of my beloved’s death. The world was silenced by snow, but in the dark I could imagine vines of cloudy pink bougainvillea and bees rumbling through the blossoms and the young man blinking back sunlight as he stared into my window.

  His last words to me were I am no longer with you.

  I did my best to tear down the curtain between death and the living world, to ensure that light and breath would enter into my husband once more. I breathed into his mouth and pounded on his chest. I called to him, but he didn’t return. He was gone from me.

  There was a small service at the cemetery. Camille was there with my kitchen maid and their little boy. When it came time to move the coffin into the ground, I would not allow it. There were wood doves nesting nearby, and they all took flight when I began to scream. We had hired a Rabbi, an old man who wore a broad, black-brimmed hat and said the mourning prayers for a fee. When I could not be held away from the casket, he retreated as if I were Lilith herself, the witch who came for unnamed babies and never let them go. She had talons at the ends of her fingers and a thousand golden rings, all sacrifices from women who had tried to bribe her. But no payment would do. I held on to the coffin and banged on it. I heard an echo and thought my husband had been brought back to life by a miracle. I was not one to give up easily, no matter who my enemy might be, even death. I heard my son’s voice then as his strong arms pulled me back. He is gone and all we have is this world, here and now.

  FOR SEVERAL WEEKS AFTERWARD I did not leave my room. I took the laudanum that was prescribed to me, ten drops at a time and then twenty. When that was not enough I had the coachman bring me more, from where I did not ask. I slept all day and night for good reason. In my dreams I could go back in time. That was what I wanted. The place I’d always hated, I longed for desperately now. Every night I dreamed of sitting in the kitchen while Adelle fixed our lunch. I was out in the yard where the chickens came to me when I clucked at them. There were green moths at my window and red flowers in a vase. I was wearing a white slip made of cotton and the sunlight was blinding. I could not open my eyes because of it. There were parrots in the trees, a sign of luck, the luck I had given away. A man was walking through the door and my heart was so loud I couldn’t hear anything else.

  Jestine came and insisted upon opening the drapes. A dim light fell in bands across the room, but I protested even that. I did not wish to see the world, or step into it, or know it without Frédéric. We were one person, or so it had been, and now without him, I was nothing. A girl who was waiting for her life to change. An old woman who cared about nothing but what she had lost.

  Camille came to see me, but I kept my back to him. He found my blue notebook in my bureau and began to read to me during his visits. He told me about a donkey with the name of a Frenchman whom I loved so well I gave him bread mixed with milk for breakfast, and of an apple tree that never grew any bigger, and a bird that flew around the world searching for love. He added stories of his own, of an old lady who rescued a baby from drowning in the rain, of people who were in love, but kept apart. He brought colored pencils and illustrated my stories, and sometimes when he left, I would study them. I cried when I saw how beautiful our world had been as seen through my son’s eyes, and my tears brought me back to life.

  Jestine made me fongee and insisted I eat. She then brought out my black mourning dress, the one I’d packed in St. Thomas and had worn to every funeral except my husband’s. On that day I’d refused to wear anything more than a white slip under his long black coat. Jestine pressed the mourning dress with lavender water, then she combed my hair. Nothing had turned out as we thought it would. I gave Jestine the gold ring that should have been her wedding band. “From Aaron,” I said. “Since you were the one he loved.”

  We had grown up in a world rimmed with hurt, where a lie was easier to tell than the truth. Later that day, I heard Jestine crying in the garden. It was cold and there were no birds, only the sound of her immense sorrow. What we had lost, we could never regain. I sat in the parlor and when Jestine came inside she no longer had the ring. She had buried it under a rosebush, using her bare hands to dig deeply enough. Every day as the weather grew warmer we sat on wicker chairs and watched the leaves greening. In April the war in the states was over, and there was a great celebration in our city, but then the news came that Lincoln had bee
n shot on April 14. Black banners and buntings were hung on houses and shops. By the end of the month, the buds that appeared on the rosebushes were white. They were Alba roses, but we called them roses de neige. Snow roses. We told each other that when they bloomed our hearts would be mended. But on the first of May, when the roses opened, they were red, and we still carried our pain. We then understood we would carry it forever. We had planned to cut the roses when they bloomed, and keep them in vases, but we left them. They reminded us of the gardens in St. Thomas. Just as I suspected, a thousand bees appeared one day and drank their fill.

  LATER THAT MONTH I received a card from my son announcing that he and Julie had had another child, a daughter born on May 13, whom they had named Jeanne-Rachel. Jeanne for Julie’s mother. Rachel after me. I had done many things that I regretted, and I had all but lost my son, just as Jestine had predicted. So I took his naming of the baby to be a message to me. I thought about the first Madame Petit, who had refused to die until her baby was named. What you are called marks you and makes you who you are. Despite my disagreements with the parents, I put aside my bitterness. This baby was mine.

  When Jestine suggested we go to see my namesake, having figured out how I might avoid the mother, I quickly agreed. My friend had persuaded Lydia and Henri Cohen to invite my son and Julie to lunch, to discuss financial matters, for I had placed Henri in charge of my finances. I still supported my son’s family, so he agreed to this appointment. On that same day, Jestine and I took the train from Paris to the railway crossing at Les Pâtis, near Pontoise. Then we walked, for my son and his family lived in a farmhouse outside of town. We took a beautiful old looping road bordered by purple blooms scattered through the tall grass. I realized it was lavender, which I took to be a good sign. I was wearing black boots with buttons that made for good walking shoes and my black mourning dress and also Frédéric’s black woolen coat, even though the day was unseasonably warm. I did not imagine I would ever wear another color. As we approached the farmhouse I fell silent. Jestine understood that I was nervous. The sky was dull and the clouds were low. We held hands so we wouldn’t stumble on the muddy road.

  As we neared the house we noticed there were chickens running free in the yard.

  Jestine laughed. “Don’t kill anything,” she warned me.

  “I’m too old,” I informed her.

  “Don’t be silly. Old women are the fiercest ones of all.”

  We chuckled as we traipsed along, our skirts dragging. Madame Halevy had told me I wouldn’t begin to understand the world until I was her age. Witches are made, not born. That was what she’d whispered to me on the night my son brought us to her house for dinner. Remember that, she’d said before I left. Remember me.

  We knocked on the back door as if we were expected guests, and ignored the protests of the kitchen maid, who was startled to find two old ladies calling and did her best to put us off. We said we were too tired to be turned away, and demanded tea before the poor woman could question us about our intentions. When steaming mugs of tea and small lemon tarts had been offered and accepted, the maid explained that her employers and their little boy had gone to Paris for the day. She didn’t have the authority to entertain guests and might find herself in trouble if her mistress discovered she’d allowed strangers into the house. I threw Jestine a knowing look. The original kitchen maid was now an employer with a long list of dos and don’ts. We assured the maid we were well meaning, there to see the new member of the family, and that we had traveled too far to turn heel and leave.

  Now that we were inside, I took the opportunity to evaluate my son’s situation. The house was rough hewn, but not without charm. A good thing, since I was paying for it. My son the anarchist had no trouble letting the money from our family business pay his bills. When the maid had been convinced we were harmless, we were brought into the parlor, where lovely lace curtains had been hung over the windows There was the baby in the cradle.

  “Do they call her Rachel or Jeanne?” I asked the maid. I hoped it wasn’t Jeanne, the name of her other grandmother, the one who tended orchards near Dijon and likely plucked chickens each evening for a stew.

  “They call her Minette.”

  I was pleased to hear this. It was a pet name for a little cat. They could call her whatever they wanted as long as they didn’t call her Jeanne. As far as I was concerned, her name was Rachel.

  I wished either Jestine or I could have remembered the words Adelle recited to protect a child from harm, but neither of us could recall her prayer. I wished Frédéric had been beside me. I still talked to him inside my head, and so I told him now how happy this visit had made me. My namesake was a beautiful child, with dark eyes. I believe she recognized me when I stood over her cradle. I told her about the butterflies who created a second moon of light, and of blue birds as tall as people, and of a woman who swam away from the cruelties of humankind. I’d brought a gift for her, my mother’s diamond earrings. I left them on a tray beside my son’s easel with a brief note—de Rachel à Rachel, From Rachel to Rachel. Most likely he would think the jewels wasteful, silly extravagant things, and would sell them in order to pay his bills. Perhaps that was what they had been meant for all along when my mother sewed them into the hem of her dress.

  I’d brought a gift for the household as well, a basket of apples. But as we left the house I noticed there was an orchard just beside the house. We picked apples to eat on the train ride home. The light was deep and gray and the fields were purple, exactly as my son painted them.

  NOT LONG AFTERWARD I moved to smaller lodgings, in the Ninth Arrondissement. Our apartment had always been too large, and I had found myself going from room to room as if searching for my husband. My new lodging happened to be close to my son’s studio and an apartment he rented for the nights he spent in Paris, while the mother of his children cared for their home. The children came to me on Thursdays. I marked that day of the week on my calendar with a star. Camille carried the baby and held the little boy by the hand. He reminded me so much of Frédéric, for he had the same sort of tenderness with his children.

  “They’re not too much for you?” Camille asked. He called the darling little boy Marmotte, sleepyhead, the same name I had used for him. “They won’t tire you?”

  “Do you think I’m ancient?” I said.

  “I do,” the little boy said. “A hundred years old. You’re a very old goat.”

  I laughed despite myself. I liked a boy who broke the rules. “Did you teach him to be so polite?” I asked my son. “Or maybe your mother told you I was a goat,” I said to my grandson, who laughed and hid behind his father, peeping out every now and then with a grin on his face.

  “Be nice to your grandmother.” Camille leaned down to kiss the little boy on his head. “They adore coming here,” he told me.

  “Why shouldn’t they?” I said.

  Camille laughed and kissed me three times, as we used to do on St. Thomas. “Don’t let them tire you out.”

  My son left the children early in the morning, and returned after his day of work at his studio. I assume their mother appreciated a day to see to her bustling household without the children underfoot. She didn’t mind the old goat when it came to caring for them. So much the better. I liked to sit with them in the parlor in the afternoons and tell them stories. I took out my blue notebooks, which I had stored away for so long. My darling granddaughter was only a baby, but my grandson listened to every word I told him, eyes wide. I told him about the werewolves who couldn’t count to a hundred, about fish who could become horses on dry land, about a donkey named Jean-François who could speak.

  “No he couldn’t,” my grandson responded with certainty. “Donkeys don’t talk. We have one. My mother says feed a donkey hay and he’ll be happy.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe that’s true in France. In St. Thomas, donkeys talk.”

  “In English?” he asked. I saw that I had won him over, despite what his mother had told him. That gave me hope for th
e future.

  “In French,” I informed him.

  My grandson nodded, pleased. This made sense to him. He was a charming, practical boy. He took his nap very well, my Marmotte, and lay down on my settee so I could cover him with a green silk blanket. “I’m in the ocean,” he said to me.

  “Swim into your dreams,” I said, as I dimmed the light.

  When my pretty little namesake fussed, I lay down on the bed beside her. She was not a good sleeper, but she was a good listener, with lovely dark eyes and a mouth like a rose. I told her the story about the woman who lived with the turtles, the one who had followed me across the sea, just under the ship. All across the ocean she had slept with her long, pale arms wrapped around the anchor, she ate fish and clams, she avoided sunlight, and swam just below the surface of the waves. She came near when she heard music on board from a string quartet that was traveling to Paris. She came even closer when the captain displayed his art collection of watercolors in shades of apricot and rose and yellow, all human colors that she could never find at sea. One day a passenger’s dress was missing, and that evening I spied a skirt floating in the water, a silky thing that rose and fell with the tides. The woman who lived with turtles could not make the choice between our worlds, and at night I saw a hundred of her companions floating farther out in the ocean, their green shells like stepping-stones.

  The baby was often asleep on my bed when her father came for the children at the close of the day. He said it was a wonder how well his daughter slumbered when she was in my care. I told him that babies needed to sleep in order to dream. I believe my namesake dreamed of a thousand small miracles and that she dreamed of the turtle-woman from our homeland. When he arrived for the children, my son smelled of turpentine; he couldn’t wash it away. He was considered to be famous now, although still a radical, and the other radicals who admired him wished to have his paintings for free. Every month I wrote him a check, just as I’d always done. Not that he was a spendthrift. Far from it. He wore old clothes that hung on his thin frame and favored boots with restitched soles. He’d rather eat an apple than have an expensive meal in a café. More than anything he was a family man. He was a good father and a good husband. He was intent on marrying my kitchen maid, but he still wanted my blessings. I understood. I’d wanted the same thing myself. Perhaps that was why he allowed me to spend so much time with the children, or perhaps it was simply because he could see my deep love for them. For now, I would let them wait for my approval, but eventually I would have to give in for the sake of these darling children. I gave them fongee porridge for dinner every Thursday. I had hired a cook from St. Thomas named Annabeth, who remembered all the old recipes; she could even make a mixture that tasted like guava berry rum by using local strawberries. It was a comfort to have her around, plus she was an excellent baker. Every now and then she made a coconut cake that I brought to share with the Cohens. “Don’t you want something better than porridge for your family?” Annabeth often said to me on Thursdays, but no, I didn’t want anything more. When I told Jestine about the cook’s remarks, she laughed. She, too, made fongee for her grandchildren. It was good for the body and the spirit, as it had been long ago.