Le Divorce (31 page)

Inside the station, men appeared to be waiting for her.

“Madame de Persand?” said a higher official (she supposed
from his more numerous buttons). They went into his office. She was sat upon a chair. Somewhere behind her she heard whispering, as the higher official settled himself into his chair, behind his desk, offices alike the world around, desk, metal bookcase, little flag on a stand, seals on the wall, wastebasket—“Madame de Persand?” Yes, Anne-Chantal was still with her, standing protectively against the wall just inside the door.

“Crime passionnel,”
said a whisper behind her. “
L’américaine.
A gun was used. They all have guns.
Bien sûr, il s’agissait d’un coup de fusil. Elle est américaine.
”

“Your name, madame,
prénom
,
nom de jeune fille
?”

Roxy barely heard herself answer these questions, easy questions about her name, her life, her marriage. The higher official, she was thinking, looked something like her own father, same high bridge of the nose, same rusty hair. Was that not strange? Was it not strange that Charles-Henri should be dead? Later she would cry, she promised herself. She would feel, deeply feel to her heart, the pain, the poignancy, the loss of her handsome young husband. The horror of it would overcome her, she promised herself. It just had not struck her yet.

“Would you mind, madame, we will do a certain test concerning your hands,” said the higher official. Anne-Chantal appeared to be smiling at her, making a little thumbs-up sign. Courage, she seemed to be saying. Good for you, she seemed to be saying. But good for you for what?

Roxy in the police station also felt a need to pee. Alert to any change within her, she asked herself was it the baby coming, but no, it was just pressure on her bladder as she got up to follow where they told her, into another room, to put her hands into soft wax or whatever it was, just routine they said again and again, they had to do it. They did not let Anne-Chantal come with her, but Anne-Chantal was hovering there supportively in the hallway, chatting with the policewoman who had welcomed them. The reality of things began to weigh more heavily on Roxy now, Charles-Henri dead, policemen asking serious questions, though she knew she was herself in no danger, she gave no thought to herself, concentrated all her power on feeling the
horror, and indeed the mystery, for how did he happen to be dead? They had not said how.

She thought of her fatherless children. She thought of poor Suzanne, and the rest of the family, of how they all had loved this blithe, talented person, so lighthearted, so winsome. She thought of how the baby would never know him, Gennie not remember him, just a stupefying tragedy that had not yet burned into her own breast the way it would soon, she knew it would, but was beginning to sink in all the same.

“You may return home,” they were saying, “but do not leave the area. We will escort you.”

“I will stay with her, she must not be alone, we will call her mother,” cried Anne-Chantal. “We must call the Persands. Have you notified the Persands?” Roxy’s head spun with a sort of exhaustion in advance, thinking of all the notifying, all the pain in store. It was strange that a policeman was coming with her and Anne-Chantal.

He said he would stay downstairs, in the foyer of her building. The utility room was sealed with yellow tape.

It was only noon. Was that possible? She thought she should call Roger. She thought she should lie down, and Anne-Chantal agreed. Anne-Chantal took Roxy’s telephone book and sat in the salon to make the calls.

Through the long afternoon, into the early twilight, Roxy keeps asking Anne-Chantal if Suzanne is back from Disneyland, and Anne-Chantal keeps calling the number and shaking her head. Eventually she reaches Antoine. Antoine arrives at the rue Maître Albert. He spends a long time in the corridor with the police and then comes up to Roxy’s, face pinched, tearful and grim. He embraces Roxy and drinks a cognac. Then he calls Frédéric and Charlotte. Roxy can hear Charlotte’s screams through the telephone. Antoine’s voice is husky but controlled, in charge.

“Roxeanne is under arrest, I think,” says Antoine to Charlotte. “Her status is unclear.”

“Trudi is in the country, she’s coming,” he says to Roxeanne. His staunch, loyal demeanor makes it clear that he does not for a moment believe that poor Roxy had anything to do
with this shocking tragedy. The Persands are coming to her side. All agree it is strange that Isabel and her mother and Suzanne and the children are not yet back from EuroDisney. There is such pain at the prospect of having to tell Suzanne the horrible news about her son. It is beyond horrible to think of her blithely unaware, yet, with it so likely they will return soon,
inutile
to go searching. It occurs to Roxy again to wonder how he died, and by whose hand? Could it have been by his own? They never said.

Anne-Chantal, hearing her moan of distress, rushes in to feel her forehead.

“Is it the baby?” she asks. “Oh, how beautiful if the baby would come soon, to lift our hearts with a new life.”

“I must go see him,” she cries. “Is he—still down there?”

“No, no, definitely not, you must not look. Later, at the interment.”

A
T
E
URO
D
ISNEY
, I knew nothing of any of this, for no one revealed it. I wanted to try to understand the strange day by myself, and so I decided, with Tellman’s complimentary pass, to try the food at the Disneyland Hotel. In the somewhat heavy-handed charm of the Victorian dining room, I ordered dinner and thought about things. It was a wide-ranging reverie about making love to Edgar in Zagreb, getting rich from Saint Ursula, and wondering what would happen if Magda Tellman died. If she died, I supposed Charles-Henri would come back to Roxy, and that would set me free.

Looking back, this seems rather callous, but I just wasn’t ready to go home to the others yet. Thus, eating
blanquette de veau
and drinking a half bottle of Côtes du Rhône at Disneyland, I missed the distressing scene when Suzanne and Margeeve brought Gennie back to the rue Maître Albert and learned from Anne-Chantal the news about Charles-Henri, only hearing it myself about ten when I came home. The police at EuroDisney had not known about the death at 12 rue Maître Albert.

When I got to the rue Maître Albert, Roxy’s lights were
dark. I climbed the stairs to the garret without stopping. There was a note on my door to say they had all gone to the Avenue Wagram. This was puzzling, but not necessarily ominous. Perhaps, I thought, Suzanne had proposed dinner for her heroic band of erstwhile hostages. I went down to Roxy’s and called my parents’ hotel, though, to make sure they weren’t there, and they were not. Then I decided to telephone Edgar—it was he I wanted to talk to anyway, so I went back down to Roxy’s apartment and sat in the dark living room.

“Ah, Isabel, how are you?” he said.

“I’m okay. Has anyone told you about today?”

“Which part of the day? The Serbs have resumed shelling Sarajevo. My sister was held hostage for seven hours by a crazed American in the Disneyland theme park, then there is the small matter of the murder of my nephew.”

“Who?” I cried with sudden horror, seeing that it would be Charles-Henri, of course.

“Charles-Henri. Shot three times in the chest and left to die in the
poubelles
at Maître Albert.”

I don’t know what I said. It was clear enough. Tellman had killed Charles-Henri, and tried to kill Magda.

“At first, naturally,” continued Edgar, in the same dry, almost angry tone, “the police suspected Roxeanne. I spoke to the Commissaire. But the injured Magda had crawled from her cottage to the Spectorama warehouse by the motorway and found help. She told her story. Her husband had shot her.”

“My God,” I said, thinking, poor Roxy, poor Charles-Henri, how stupid. Tellman a murderer, he might have killed the children after all. I even thought, poor Magda, maybe Charles-Henri was the love of her life, does anyone care about poor Magda? Does anyone believe in love? I felt like crying, but it was all too strange for tears.

“Mon Dieu,”
Edgar said. “What a world!” he cried in the bitterest tone. “The red and the black—who would have thought the black would so quickly supplant the red?”

I think he may have been talking about Bosnia. “May I come over?” For I wanted to be in his arms.

“
Non
,
chérie
, I am just going to the Avenue Wagram. Suzanne is very distraught. Your parents are there, I think.”

“I’ll see you there, then, I guess.”

I heard a noise and turned around in the dark living room, startled to find Roxy had been standing in the doorway of her bedroom.

“They’re over at Suzanne’s,” she said.

“Roxy, how horrible, I didn’t hear, I didn’t realize you were here. I just got here, I . . .” I began. “I’ll stay with you.”

“I made them go. I wanted to be alone,” she said. “They took Gennie over there. I’ve taken some sleeping stuff. Supposedly not harmful to fetuses. I’m going to sleep.”

“Roxy, my God,” I tried to say again, but of course there was nothing to say: sorrow, pity, shock. The way life can turn around in a minute, you never know. “It was the husband, that guy Tellman. . . .”

“I know, I heard. I think they thought it was me,” she said. Her voice was drugged, bemused and sad.

“You can’t be alone! I’ll stay here.”

“I’ll go to sleep in a minute. I couldn’t go with them. I made them go. Iz, there’s something—I feel as though I killed Charles-Henri. But I can’t ever tell them.” From her face, I saw that she did think that. Her eyes were the strange sleepless eyes of Lady Macbeth.

I didn’t know what idea had gotten into her drugged brain. Of course she hadn’t killed him; Roxy could not be blamed for this. Think of her unwavering loyalty to Charles-Henri, her resistance to divorce, the little pledge of his love so soon to be born—not even the Persands could blame her. I made her go back to bed. I felt tender toward her, and full of pity.

When she was lying down, she grabbed my arm and hissed at me, “I wish I was a hard-hearted, cold person like you, Isabel. You always have everything the way you want it. Maybe someday you’ll suffer too, but I doubt it. But I don’t hate you. I used to, I think, but . . .” Whereupon her eyelids fluttered closed, and she had drifted off into some kind of stoned sleep.

I was shocked, but part of me was not surprised she thought
these things. I wondered if they were the bitter reflections of the sad moment or the secrets of her unconscious.

Of course I couldn’t leave her alone. I thought it was strange that the others had left her. I sat on the sofa in the dark, burning to go to Edgar.

It was only a few minutes before someone rang the doorbell.

“Ames,” he said, and I buzzed him in.

“How is she?” he asked, his usually smirky face transformed by love and concern. All at once I saw the nice side of Ames, like a mirror reflecting backward on a hundred other instants, things he had told me and guided me in. His excellent cooking and his responsible dog ownership and reputation for charity.

“I talked to her a half hour ago, and she told me she was alone. How could they have left her alone?”

“She probably made them. People don’t cross Roxy.”

“I’m staying with her. I came over to stay with her.”

“Could you, Ames?” I said. The limitations of my judgments about people became clearer all the time. “I’d like to go be with my mother and Suzanne. Did you hear about what happened to them?”

I had plenty of time on the metro to the Avenue Wagram (two changes) to wonder what Roxy had meant when she said she used to hate me, but I didn’t take it seriously and put it out of my mind. I was too stunned.

In Suzanne’s big Haussmannian apartment, Suzanne, her tear-stained face resolutely smiling, seated, surrounded by her eldest son, Frédéric, Antoine and Trudi, Charlotte and Bob, Chester and Margeeve, an unexplained man perhaps from the police, Roger and Jane, a doctor called Monsieur Quelquechose, Roxy’s lawyer Maître Bertram, and another man, talking to him, who could have been the Persands’ lawyer. And Edgar. I saw my father looking covertly at him as Edgar bent over Suzanne’s chair to talk to her. Altogether a scene of great animation. An atmosphere of resolution and courage, Gennie in bed already, a discussion with Jane of sleeping pills for Suzanne, Antoine trying to get Monsieur de Persand on the telephone somewhere in Poland, Paul-Louis and Marie-Odile huddled on cushions on the floor.
Edgar turned to look at me when I came in, it seemed with a more acknowledged familiarity, or maybe I was imagining that.

Later, when I went into the kitchen to make tea, he came in. His voice was low.

“I am leaving on Sunday. I’m sorry to leave my sister at such a time. I am sorry to leave you.”

“It wasn’t Roxy’s fault,” I said. “Roxy loved him.”

“A timely death, from Roxeanne’s point of view,” he said, watching me. “A widow’s halo instead of the scarlet compromises of the divorcée. Her children safely to inherit. A seamless bond with Suzanne, and so on. Suzanne. It is a hard thing to see your child die, the hardest thing, I imagine.”

They do believe it’s Roxy’s fault, I thought. They think if she had been a better wife, and used cube sugar and done her nails, he wouldn’t have taken up with Magda.

“I had not thought of the
crime passionnel
as a particularly American form. This Tellman. American violence you read is usually related to drugs or robbery.”

“Oh, what shall I do?” I cried. “Will you want me when you come back?”

But he had no opportunity to answer, as Antoine came in at that moment.

Of course I was as crushed and miserable as the others, and sat with them as the hours wore on, all the hours that had to be got through until things could be done, tomorrow, to ease the thinking about it. Was I surprised? Not entirely. From what we knew had happened to Magda, it seemed obvious that Tellman had killed Charles-Henri. I supposed it was obvious to everyone else. The man was in custody. I hadn’t minded about him shooting Magda, it was no more than fascinating, for I had never seen her. But I minded about Charles-Henri. It was my first death.

“Oh, oh, mon petit,”
moaned Suzanne, dry-eyed and tiny, sitting on the
canapé
.
“Je ne peux pas le croire.”