Overhead in a Balloon (26 page)

I
t was shortly before her removal to the hospital that Magdalena learned about Juliette’s death. One of her doddering friends may have seen the notice in a newspaper. She at once resumed her place as my only spouse and widow-to-be. In fact, she had never relinquished it, but now the way back to me shone clear. The divorce, that wall of pagan darkness, had been torn down and dispersed with the concubine’s ashes. She saw me delivered from an adulterous and heretical alliance. It takes a convert to think “heretical” with a straight face. She could have seen Juliette burned at the stake without losing any sleep. It is another fact about converts that they make casual executioners.

She imagined that I would come to her at once, but I went nowhere. Juliette had asked to be cremated, thinking of the purification of the flame, but the rite was accomplished by
clanking, hidden, high-powered machinery that kept starting and stopping, on cycle. At its loudest, it covered the voice of the clergyman, who affirmed that Juliette was eying us with great good will from above, and it prevailed over Juliette’s favourite recordings of Mozart and Bach. Her ashes were placed in a numbered niche that I never saw, for at some point in the funeral service I lost consciousness and had to be carried out. This nightmare was dreamed in the crematorium chapel of Père Lachaise cemetery. I have not been back. It is far from where I live, and I think Juliette is not there, or anywhere. From the moment when her heart stopped, there has been nothing but silence.

L
ast winter, I had bronchitis and seldom went out. I managed to send Magdalena a clock, a radio, an azalea, and enough stamps and stationery to furnish a nineteenth-century literary correspondence. Nevertheless, the letters that reached my sickbed from hers were scrawled in the margins of newspapers, torn off crookedly. Sometimes she said her roommate had lent her the money for a stamp. The message was always the same: I must not allow my wife to die in a public institution. Her pink-nosed woman friends wrote me, too, signing their alien names, announcing their titles – there was a princess.

It was no good replying that everybody dies in hospital now. The very idea made them sick, of a sickness beyond any wasting last-ditch illusion. Then came from Magdalena “On Saturday at nine o’clock, I shall be dressed and packed, and waiting for you to come and take me away.”

Away from the hospital bed? It took weeks of wangling and soft-soaping and even some mild bribery to obtain it. Public
funds, to which she is not entitled, and a voluntary contribution from me keep her in it. She has not once asked where the money comes from. When she was young, she decided never to worry, and she has kept the habit.

I let several Saturdays go by, until the folly had quit her mind. Late in April I turned up carrying a bottle of Krug I had kept on ice until the last minute and some glasses in a paper bag. The woman who shares her room gave a great groan when she saw me, and showed the whites of her eyes. I took this to mean that Magdalena had died. The other bed was clean and empty. The clock and the radio on the table had the look of objects left behind. I felt shock, guilt, remorse, and relief, and I wondered what to do with the wine. I turned, and there in the doorway stood Magdalena, in dressing gown and slippers, with short white hair. She shuffled past me and lay on the bed with her mouth open, struggling for breath.

“Shouldn’t I ring for a nurse?” I said, unwrapping the bottle.

“No one will come. Open the champagne.”

“I’d better fetch a nurse.” Instead, I made room on the table for the glasses. I’d brought three, because of the roommate.

Magdalena gasped, “Today is my birthday.” She sat up, apparently recovered, and got her spectacles out from under the pillow. Leaning towards me, she said, “What’s that red speck on your lapel? It looks like the Legion of Honour.”

“I imagine that’s what it is.”

“Why?” she said. “Was there a reason?”

“They probably had a lot to give away. Somebody did say something about ‘cultural enrichment of the media.’ ”

“I am glad about the enrichment,” she said. “I am also very happy for you. Will you wear it all the time, change it from suit to suit?”

“It’s new,” I said. “There was a ceremony this morning.” I sat down on the shaky chair kept for visitors, and with a steadiness that silenced us both I poured the wine. “What about your neighbour?” I said, the bottle poised.

“Let her sleep. This is a good birthday surprise.”

I felt as if warm ashes were banked round my heart, like a residue of good intentions. I remembered that when Magdalena came back to Paris after the war, she found her apartment looted, laid waste. One of the first letters to arrive in the mail was from me, to say that I was in love with a much younger woman. “If it means anything at all to you,” I said, the coals glowing brighter, “if it can help you to understand me in any way – well, no one ever fascinated me as much as you.” This after only one glass.

“But, perhaps, you never loved me,” she said.

“Probably not,” I said. “Although I must have.”

“You mean, in a way?” she said.

“I suppose so.”

The room became so quiet that I could hear the afternoon movie on television in the next room. I recognized the voice of the actor who dubs Robert Redford.

Magdalena said, “Even a few months ago this would have been my death sentence. Now I am simply thankful I have so little time left to wander between ‘perhaps’ and ‘probably not’ and ‘in a way.’ A crazy old woman, wringing my hands.”

I remembered Juliette’s face when she learned that her menopause was irreversible. I remember her shock, her fright, her gradual understanding, her storm of grief. She had hoped for children, then finally a child, a son she would have called “Thomas.” “Your death sentence,” I said. “Your death sentence. What about Juliette’s life sentence? She never had
children. By the time I was able to marry her, it was too late.”

“She could have had fifteen children without being married,” said Magdalena.

I wanted to roar at her, but my voice went high and thin. “Women like Juliette, people like Juliette, don’t do that sort of thing. It was a wonder she consented to live with me for all those years. What about her son, her Thomas? I couldn’t even have claimed him – not legally, as long as I was married to you. Imagine him, think of him, applying for a passport, finding out he had no father. Nothing on his birth certificate. Only a mother.”

“You could have adopted Thomas,” said Magdalena. “That way, he’d have been called by your name.”

“I couldn’t – not without your consent.
You
were my wife. Besides, why should I have to adopt my own son?” I think this was a shout; that is how it comes back to me. “And the inheritance laws, as they were in those days. Have you ever thought about that? I couldn’t even make a will in his favour.”

Cheek on hand, blue eyes shadowed, my poor, mad, true, and only wife said, “Ah, Édouard, you shouldn’t have worried. You know I’d have left him all that I had.”

I
t wasn’t the last time I saw Magdalena, but after that day she sent no more urgent messages, made no more awkward demands. Twice since then, she has died and come round. Each time, just when the doctor said, “I think that’s it,” she has squeezed the nurse’s hand. She loves rituals, and she probably wants the last Sacraments, but hospitals hate that. Word that there is a priest in the place gets about, and it frightens the other patients. There are afternoons when she can’t speak and
lies with her eyes shut, the lids quivering. I hold her hand, and feel the wedding ring. Like the staunch little widows, I call her “Lena,” and she turns her head and opens her eyes.

I glance away then, anywhere – at the clock, out the window. I have put up with everything, but I intend to refuse her last imposition, the encounter with her blue, enduring look of pure love.

M
. Alexandre Caisse, civil servant, employed at the Ministry of Agriculture, bachelor, thanked the seven persons sitting in his living room for having responded to his mimeographed invitation. Actually, he had set chairs out for fifteen.

General Portoret, ret., widower, said half the tenants of the building had already left for their summer holiday.

Mme. Berthe Fourneau, widow, no profession, said Parisians spent more time on vacation than at work. She could remember when two weeks in Brittany seemed quite enough.

M. Louis Labarrière, author and historian, wife taking the cure at Vichy, said that during the Middle Ages Paris had celebrated 230 religious holidays a year.

M. Alberto Minazzoli, industrialist, wife thought to be living in Rome with an actor, said that in his factories strikes had replaced religious feasts. (All smiled.)

Dr. Edmond Volle, dental surgeon, married, said he had not taken a day off in seven years.

Mme. Volle said she believed a wife should never forsake her husband. As a result, she never had a holiday either.

Mlle. de Renard’s aunt said it depended on the husband. Some could be left alone for months on end. Others could not. (No one knew Mlle. de Renard’s aunt’s name.)

M. Alexandre Caisse said they had all been sorry to hear Mlle. de Renard was not feeling well enough to join them.

Mlle. de Renard’s aunt said her niece was at this moment under sedation, in a shuttered room, with cotton stuffed in her ears. The slightest sound made her jump and scream with fright.

General Portoret said he was sure a brave woman like Mlle. de Renard would soon be on her feet again.

Mme. Berthe Fourneau said it was probably not easy to forget after one had been intimately molested by a stranger.

Mlle. de Renard’s aunt said her niece had been molested, but not raped. There was an unpleasant story going around.

M. Labarrière had heard screaming, but had supposed it was someone’s radio.

M. Minazzoli had heard the man running down five flights of stairs. He thought it was a child playing tag.

Mme. Volle had been the first to arrive on the scene; she had found Mlle. de Renard, collapsed, on the fifth-floor landing, her purse lying beside her. The man had not been after money. The stranger, described by his victim as French, fair, and blue-eyed,
had obviously crept in from the street and waited for Mlle. de Renard to come home from vesper service.

General Portoret wondered why Mlle. de Renard had not run away the minute she saw him.

Mlle. de Renard’s aunt said her niece had been taken by surprise. The man looked respectable. His expression was sympathetic. She thought he had come to the wrong floor.

Mme. Berthe Fourneau said the man must have known his victim’s habits.

Dr. Volle said it was simply the cunning of the insane.

M. Labarrière reminded them that the assault of Mlle. de Renard had been the third in a series: there had been the pots of ivy pilfered from the courtyard, the tramp found asleep in the basement behind the hot-water boiler, and now this.

Mme. Berthe Fourneau said no one was safe.

Mme. Volle had a chain-bolt on her door. She kept a can of insect spray conveniently placed for counteraggression.

M. Alexandre Caisse had a bronze reproduction of “The Dying Gaul” on a table behind the door. He never answered the door without first getting a good grip around the statue’s waist.

Mlle. de Renard’s aunt said her niece had been too trusting, even as a child.

M. Minazzoli said his door was fully armoured. However, the time had come to do something about the door at the entrance to the building. He hoped they would decide, now, once and for all, about putting in an electronic code-lock system.

M. Alexandre Caisse said they were here to discuss, not to decide. The law of July 10, 1965, regulating the administration of cooperatively owned multiple dwellings, was especially strict on the subject of meetings. This was an assembly.

M. Minazzoli said one could arrive at a decision at an assembly as well as at a meeting.

M. Alexandre Caisse said anyone could get the full text of the law from the building manager, now enjoying a photo safari in Kenya. (Having said this, M. Caisse closed his eyes.)

Mlle. de Renard’s aunt said she wanted one matter cleared up, and only one: her niece had been molested. She had not been raped.

Mme. Berthe Fourneau wondered how much Mlle. de Renard could actually recall.

Mlle. de Renard’s aunt said her niece had given a coherent account from the beginning, an account from which she had never wavered. The man had thrown her against the wall and perpetrated something she called “an embrace.” Her handbag had fallen during the struggle. He had run away without stopping to pick it up.

Dr. Volle said it proved the building was open to madmen.

M
. Alexandre Caisse asked if anyone would like refreshments. He could offer the ladies a choice of tonic water or bottled lemon soda. The gentlemen might like something stronger. (All thanked him, but refused.)

M. Minazzoli supposed everyone knew how the electronic code system worked and what it would cost.

Mme. Berthe Fourneau asked if it would keep peddlers out. The place was infested with them. Some offered exotic soaps, others ivory trinkets. The peddlers had one thing in common – curly black hair.