Amandine (6 page)

I placed the tray on the big oak dresser, keeping my back to them. “Shall I pour the tea, Grand-mère?”

“Yes, child.”

“Will Madame take sugar?” I asked, still not turning around
.

“No, thank you. No sugar. A drop of milk, please.”

Her voice small like a girl’s, her French perfect. Trying not to look yet wanting to see her, I handed the tea and, as she took it from me, held it in one hand, she tore off her kerchief with the other. “Thank you, Solange. Let me look at you, dear. I’ve heard such lovely things about you.”

She held out her free hand, palm up, to me, and when I took it, she closed her fingers about mine, then half let go of them before regretting it, I thought, and holding them longer. “I am happy to meet you.”

Stunned by her face, such an astonishingly beautiful face, eyes like a deer, black and full of tears, I said nothing, nodded my head. It was I who let go first. I who let her hand fall from mine. I went to pour Grand-mère’s tea, and when I turned to take it to her, I saw that the lady was gone. A small package, roughly wrapped, tied in butcher’s twine, lay upon the arm of the chair where she’d sat
.

“Where did she go? Who was she?”

“A friend of the family, child.”

I picked up the package, ran to the door, flung it wide. “Madame, Madame, your—”

Halfway to the top of the road, she never turned back. A droning wind shimmied the chestnut leaves, thrashed the door against the stones. She would never turn back, the lady with the eyes like a deer
.

“Why did she come here, Grand-mère?”

“She came because she needs help. Our help. Yours and mine.”

“Mine? Yours and mine?”

“She has proposed a certain position for you, child. She has asked that you take on the responsibility, the caretaking of an infant. An infant girl, barely a month old, an orphan. She has proposed that—”

That this baby come to live with us?

“No. Not that. She would like you to care for the baby in another place. In a convent. She would like you to live, as an extern sister, in a Carmelite convent in the south, near Montpellier. You and the baby would live together among this Carmelite community.”

“For how long? When? I don’t understand why.”

“Solange, there will be many things that you will not understand should you take on this work, this next part of your life. I can’t say for how long it would be. I will tell you what I know. Almost all of what I know. You will consider the offer, and you will either accept or decline it. Come here, sit with me.”

I knelt before her chair, took her hands in mine, kissed her fingers
,
reached up to turn her face to look down at mine. The blue of a dragonfly’s wing, Grand-mère’s eyes, blue melting into green, green hemmed in black, Grand-mère’s eyes. Janka’s eyes. She bent my head to the sun-smelling fiandre of her apron, rested her chin in my hair, touched it again and again with her lips. Her way of talking to me. We stayed like that for a long time. Already saying good-bye
.

“The woman who was here is—let us say—connected to the Church in another country. She has a particular interest in this orphan child, and she wishes to be assured that it will be cared for devotedly. Why she has chosen to place it in the convent in the south she did not reveal. About why she has chosen you to be the child’s guardian and nurse she said only that she had been told of you through the auspices of an extended member of this family.”

“Someone in Poland?”

“Yes.”

“Who was it?”

With her eyes, Grand-mère said she couldn’t tell me. She continued
.

“She knew of your time in the convent at Beaune. She knew that you’d only recently returned home. I believe it was instinct more than reason that convinced her of your worthiness, instinct being the more faithful device, the more courageous device, I think, when things matter most. We trust reason always less as we grow older, Solange, you’ll learn that. You shall have occasion to feel how feckless reason can be. In any case, she traveled here to speak with me about you. To see you, if only for a moment. I think that moment was sufficient for her. She left this package as a kind of trust. A first step. It’s for you to keep, to give to the child when she is older. When she’s thirteen, I think she said. Yes, when she’s thirteen.”

“Thirteen? And she’s just, did you say that she’s a month old now? Are you saying that the child will be, that she is to remain under my care? Always?”

“Yes. I think that, as long as the child lives, until she is grown, she will be your charge.”

“I’ll be like a mother to her.”

“Like a mother.”

“But why in a convent? Why can’t I take care of her here with you and Maman and Chloe and Blanchette? It would be better that way. I have only just left a convent, Grand-mère, and I know that sort of life is not—”

“It’s not a nun’s life you’ll live. Certainly not a sequestered one. You and the child will be under the protection of the convent. Your work will be to care for the child, to raise it in the atmosphere of a religious house, but the freedoms of a lay sister shall be yours.”

“I’ve never heard of such an arrangement and I—”

“I know. I, too, have never heard of such an arrangement. A most particular situation. In addition to the lodgings, the table provided by the convent, you will be given a stipend to further maintain yourself and the child. Every detail has been considered, Solange, but not every detail can be explained, most especially to your martinet’s satisfaction. Now it is you who must employ instinct rather than reason. It’s your turn. No matter what you do, you’re bound to suffer. It’s the way of things. But now, right now, you are straddling two lives, and I fear you will live neither of them. You say the convent is not for you—and yet I sense, nor is the world. This … shall we call it a rare chance? Yes. This rare chance of being called to Montpellier as lay sister, as nurse to this child, it may serve to reconcile discord if not to stave off sufferance. You may be able to combine the two lives rather than choose between them. You might appease your guilt, however contained, at having left the convent while affording yourself some measure of adventure. Once again, however contained. You would live the portions of the religious life that so appeal to you but without surrendering your liberty. That was it, I know. The suffocation of final vows, the inextinguishable promise. That was what you couldn’t make. So much for a woman-child to consider, was it not?

“And then there’s destiny, Solange. Sooner than later, make friends with the Fates and be less alone. What little more I know than you do now, what very little more that I know, I shall not tell you. If your curiosity is stronger than your compassion, the position is not meant for you. If you must know more than that this child is to be entrusted to you, refuse, Solange, send your regrets and get back to pruning vines
and stirring soup. And outwitting the occasional lechery of your father. Not a bad life here after all, is it, child?”

At ease with the vague ways of her mother yet trusting her implicitly, Maman said little about it all. If Janka proposed my going to Montpellier, then it was for the good. That’s what Maman told me as we bent to gather vine trimmings, sat tying faggots of them round with hemp weed
.

“But Maman, I’ve just come home. Were not two years of my being away enough for you? Were they not penance enough to suit you?”

She didn’t answer. She looked at me as if she would speak but then touched her hand to her mouth—as though to close it?—went about her work. All this silence. The convent, the farm, barely a difference save the bells. Everyone sealed shut, even if they speak, especially when they speak. No one can ever know another. I watched Maman then, sat back on my heels and watched her wrapping the hemp round and round the twigs, tying a loop knot, slicing the hemp with a rusted chestnut knife, piling the faggots into her apron
.

“Let’s get to the kitchen, Solange
. La joute
for this evening. From the cellar we’ll need a cabbage, some potatoes, a string of sausages, two thick trenchers of ham. The chickens are dripping in the barn sink. Here, take a basket.”

Maman, slow down, Maman, look at me, I wanted to tell her, but I didn’t. Rather, I took the basket without even looking at her. She knew what Grand-mère knew. About suffering, I mean. Could it have been that she, too, would have liked to save me from it, and so, in her powerlessness, she was awkward? Ashamed? She turned away from me so I would love her less. Was that it? Was she warning me?

“Don’t love me so much, Solange. I’m hardly worth it, I can hardly bear it, this blind devotion of yours. Worse now than before you went away. I’m only a woman, perhaps not yet a woman. I have borne three daughters, and still I am trying to find my way. How can I help you when I know so little myself? Don’t love me so much.”

Was that what Maman told me with her diffidence? Did she steel herself so that, once again, she could part with me, and I with her? I forgave you, Maman, for sending me away. For choosing him. But I’d come home. It was all okay. He wouldn’t have come near me, Maman, and had he, I wouldn’t have been afraid of him. I wouldn’t have let him, Maman
.

Mothers and daughters. Jealousy, envy. How is it that a mother can feel jealousy and envy even of her daughter? Maman’s defense of me back then was quick, singular. That night when she followed Papa. Watched his back from behind my door. From the door opened only a chink, she watched him sit on a chair near my bed. Watched him kneel, then bend his head. His mouth. Watched him slide searching hands flat over my body. His hands under the thin blue quilt. She watched him, and I watched her. At last, she threw open the door, stood there, hands clutching her face, no words, no screeching. Stood there making sure of what she saw. By his hair, she dragged him away. I watched as she kicked him then, moved him down the narrow, dark hall with her feet. Never resisting her, she kicked him about the face, the loins, centimeter by centimeter across the stone floor. She left the heap of him outside their room. I could hear him weeping
.

But after that, it was “Solange, that dress is ready to pass down to Chloe. Solange, cover your hair at table. Solange, is that rouge you’re wearing?” Not he, it was I whom you watched. Not I, it was he whom you chose. You chose him. How you began to look at him, Maman, as though none of us were there. And when you both thought none of us
were
there, you would let him turn you about to face the wall, let him pull you to him from behind, bury his face in the nape of your neck, separate your buttocks, press himself up against them to make a cleft of your skirt with that part of him. When I saw that, I remembered his hands from another time. A time when I saw him pick a melon from the vine. He stood there in the dirt, pushing together the sides of it, softening it, twisting it, ripping it open, raking out the seeds with his fingers, sucking and chewing at its heart, the juices dripping from his mouth, his chin, heaving down what was left. Knowing I was watching him from where I crouched, weeding potatoes
,
he turned to grin at me. “I was thirsty,” he said. His performance had been just for me. I hated him, and I hated you more. I hated you almost as much as I loved you. I love you, Maman. I tried to stop loving you. Sometimes I feel as though I’m older than you. Like I’m the mother. The one who understands. I understand that you thought, that you hoped you could keep him if only I were away. Out of sight. Isn’t that how it was? “Solange, Papa and I have been talking. About your spiritual life, I mean. About your future.” And so I went. But I had come back. Did you really want me to go away again? Did you still choose him? And will you send Chloe away, too? And Blanchette? Is that how you’ll keep him, Maman? Don’t you understand that he’s already gone?

B
UTTRESSED, ARCHED, PILLARED—A MEDIEVAL CHURCH RE-DRESSED
for the Renaissance is the Carmelite convent of St.-Hilaire. Once a granary, then a fortress, it stood neglected for a century or two before its fragments were restructured into a grand villa. For these last forty years since its reformation into a religious house, it has seemed to the villagers a grotesque, a breach upon the peace. Twenty-seven brides of Jesus and their abbess pray, meditate, and work in the convent proper, while seven more cultivate the spiritual and secular educations of thirty-six girls, aged five through seventeen, in the convent school and dormitory. Retired from his offices in a nearby parish and residing alone in a remote wing of the convent, the Jesuit priest Philippe celebrates holy mass before his feminine congregation each morning at five, interprets and illumines doctrine for the teaching sisters, lectures morality to the upper classes, is father confessor, absolver of sins, and legendary estate
vigneron
.