The Black Tower (10 page)

H
ERE’S A WONDER
. At dinner, Nankeen breathes not a word of our recent encounter. Whenever I catch his eye,
he’s
the one looking away, and as soon as dinner’s over, he excuses himself and retires upstairs to his studies.

He’s ashamed, is that it? Or else, in those few moments when Vidocq held him by the shirtfront, he caught scent of a different world—where civilization and nankeen trousers availeth a man not. Or maybe I’m only saying that because it’s the way I feel.

At any rate, the disappointed Rosbif and Lapin retire without bloodying any of their fellow eaters; Charlotte takes away the dishes; and the only ones left in the dining room are Mother and me. Not that she notices. This being Friday night, she is polishing her silver.

The silver was part of her bridal trousseau, and to the best of my knowledge, it has never actually been used. (All the lodgers of Maison Carpentier make do with pewter.) In no way does this discourage her weekly ablutions. She wraps one of Charlotte’s aprons round her black tulle dress, sheathes her sleeves in muslin, and bears
down,
with a surgeon’s fixity. Before five minutes have passed, her arms are coated in a viscous, pearly lather, as though she had plunged them into a whale.

“Mother.”

She doesn’t look up or greet me or do anything that would loosen her mind’s grip. She says only:

“The newel post is still loose.”

“I know.”

“You said you’d get to it.”

“I will.”

“You said that yesterday. The day before, too, if I—”

“Mother, please. I need to ask you about something.”

My temples are pulsing, and as I pass my hand over my face, a slick of sweat comes free.

“Not something,” I correct myself. “Some
one
.”

“Who?”

“Father.”

And here she does, in fact, pause in her labors. For one second.

“What could I possibly tell you,” she says, taking up her chamois once more, “that you don’t already know? You grew up in this house, you saw him every day of your life. That
was
you living here all those years, wasn’t it?”

“That was me.”

“Well, what a relief. I thought perhaps you were…a changeling or…something like that….”

For the next half minute, the only sound is the friction of cloth against teaspoon.

“Of course,” I say, “just because you live with someone doesn’t mean you won’t have questions about them.”

The cloth halts for a fraction of a second, then hurries on.

“People are what they are, Hector. There’s no point in…there it is.”

“He was a doctor once.”

“Who?”

“Father.”

Her eyes now are flat and gray, and orbiting, as though she’s mislaid something.

“That was many years ago, Hector.”

“Why did he stop?”

“Ohh.”

She wipes her forehead with her sleeve. The gray froth clusters over her eyes like a third brow.

“He had his reasons,” she says. “I’m sure he did.”

“What were they?”

“Oh, how ridiculous you sound, Hector!
What were they?
As though I could even—when it was so long ago.” She shakes out the cloth. “Over and done with. Not worth another thought.”

There you are: a perfect specimen of Restoration thinking. My mother does exactly what her nation asks of her. For many years, she hung a tricolor from her window; now it’s a white flag with three golden fleurs-de-lis at the center. The eagles and bees that once graced her porcelain cups have given way to the royal arms. The only thing she has that even hints of the past is a bud vase with a single gilt
N
. She keeps it in a secret niche in the drawing room and never puts flowers in it.

“When Father was a physician,” I say, keeping my voice light, “what sorts of people did he treat?”

“Oh, all sorts, I expect.”

“He wouldn’t have—I was only wondering if he might have had occasion to—to treat an aristocrat. Someone like that.”

The silence bears down.

“Perhaps even a member of the royal family,” I suggest.

She snatches up a butter knife. “Hector,” she says, “I can’t say I like your line of questions. Whoever your father knew or didn’t know—a quarter of a century ago—can be of no concern of yours.”

“It
is
a concern.”

A statement of fact, that’s all I intend, but something startles her eyes back toward mine. The scrubbing subsides, and in a dark brown tone, she says:

“That horrible convict.”

“No.”

“
He’s
put you up to this.”

“Mother.”

“Badgering you about your poor father.”

“It’s
me
asking, Mother. No one else.”

She turns away from me now. As far as she can manage without actually leaving.

“Shame on you, then, Hector.”

“Shame,” I repeat in a low voice. “Why
shame
? If Father led such a quiet, such an
unimpeachable
life, what shame could there be in knowing more about him?”

A long silence before she coils herself back round.

“Your father was a good man. That’s all you need to know.”

She’s holding my eye now—the better to gauge her missile. On it comes, low and deadly.

“He certainly never squandered his family’s assets on a common whore.”

The strange part? Instead of cowing me, it frees me. Something in my head turns lambent and still, and I draw out a chair, and I sit in it, and I look at her, and because all the niceties have been burned away, I can
stay
looking at her, I can stare her out of all countenance.

And when I speak, how gently my voice ripples.

“It’s true what you said before, Mother. I’ve lived here all my life. And I’ve never really known the first thing about Father. Or you. Of course, I never worried so much about
him
because no one else seemed to know him either. You least of all. I guess I just assumed he didn’t
want
to be known.”

With great deliberation, she strips the muslin sheaths from her arms.

“And now? Now I think I was wrong, Mother. I think there was something in him that didn’t want to be known. Something
happened
to him. A long time ago. And he couldn’t square it away, and he couldn’t forget it. Of course, I don’t have any proof. But I think
you
might, Mother. I think you know exactly what happened.”

There is a kind of woman who will throw tears in your way when you draw too near. Eulalie was one of those; Mother, to her credit, has never been. To intruders, she has only one answer: rage.

And this is its truest expression. A raucous, fast-descending cry, like a crow rustled from a tree.

“I have nothing more to say to you on this subject!”

And as I walk out the door, she sends a last cry after me, and this one carries, to my ear, a note of ragged hope—as if it could erase an entire conversation.

“Your father was a good man!”

T
EN MINUTES LATER
, I’m standing in the foyer. In my coat and hat, my hand resting on the doorknob. Ready for my evening walk, you see—and
not
ready. Beneath those counterpulses, the knob actually trembles.

And then I hear a cough.
Cough
doesn’t quite cover it. A barking, heaving, chest-splitting sound.

It’s Father Time. Leaning against our grandfather clock.

The coughing at least gives me leisure to study him, more closely than I ever have before. That patriarchal beard—that’s the beard Moses came down from the mountain with, isn’t it? That tall, tottering frame: a Doric column ever on the verge of toppling. Whatever was straight in him is now bent. He’s all
angles,
like an attic.

“Are you all right, Monsieur?”

He puts out a hand to allay my concern. With the other, he pounds his chest until the air begins once more to stream.

“Nothing to…” One last cough. “Nothing to
worry
about, just a bit of—salivation, I think, going down the—the wrong
aqueduct
.”

“Can I help you with anything?”

“Me? Oh, no no no. You see, I couldn’t help but—
hear
you. You and your mother, I mean….”

He does something
startling
then. He touches me. A scaly,
salty
hand, pressed against my shoulder.

“See here, my boy, you really ought to look kindly on her. It’s been a hard road, hasn’t it? Ah, but if it’s your
father
you’re wanting to hear about, there are plenty of
other
people to ask.”

This look he’s giving me…it’s the same look he gave me the other night over the dining table. That helpless complicity, oddly soothing when it first came my way. Here, after all, was Father Time. Old friend of my
father’s
.

Attendant at my father’s funeral.

“Of course,” I hear myself say. “Of
course
.” I peer into the slow-opening crypt of his face. “You mean I could just—ask you questions about my father? His
past,
I mean?”

“Oh my, yes,” he says, smiling. “It’s one thing we’re good for, old vanes like me. You can always get us to point
back,
eh? The further back the better. Why, if you asked me what we had for dinner tonight, I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you. Whiting, perhaps.”

“Chicken.”

“Ah, you see? Gone. Utterly. Now ask me how I dined the day Mirabeau died, I can tell you. Down to the last drop of cassis, yes.”

His eyes go rheumy with memory. His hand clenches and unclenches.

“I know it’s getting late,” I say. “But would you mind terribly if we…?”

“Mind?” His features swarm with confusion. “Ah, you’d like to—you mean
now,
is that it? Well, I suppose that might work. Yes, we could—we could even retire up
stairs
to my quarters if you…do you know, I might have some cocoa first. Things flow better, don’t they, with a little chocolate?”

“Monsieur,” I say, raising a hand. “Before we say another word, I must beg you to tell me. Did my father ever have cause to meet a prince?”

“Why, yes,” he answers. “Yes, of course.
Everyone
was a prince in those days.”

“Y
OU MUST EXCUSE
the…so seldom get
visitors
up here…not much in the way of a
chair
…”

Father Time, my new friend, sputters his apologies as he prods open the balky door.

And it’s true, when a man ceases to pay his rent, no one comes any longer to sweep his floors. The dust that adheres as a matter of course to Father Time’s belongings has become, over the past few months, a damp, brownish rime that leaves translucent slicks on the floorboards and on the patches of plaster that show wherever the flower-speckled wallpaper has pulled away.

The curtains are gone. There’s an old rosewood dresser with twisted-copper drawer handles. An old washstand with a wooden top. No trace of a fire in the fireplace—how he must have shivered—and scant trace of the room this used to be. For when I was a child, it was my father’s workshop, and every bit as forbiddingly private as he was.

Standing now amid the old detritus, I’m stabbed by the memory of him: stooped over his lathe, grinding out lenses for spectacles, telescopes, microscopes. I remember the smell of the turpentine and the melted pitch and the copper nitrate. I remember stepping on the old cartridge shells he used for cutting glass—they lay in the hallway like sprung traps.

My mother used to reprove him for the mess he left behind—the mounts, the brass tubes and spindles, centrifugally whirled in every direction. Beneath all her complaints lay the suggestion that a physician might have found a more suitable second career. To which he had but one reply:

“It was good enough for Spinoza.”

All of that’s gone now, even the smell. All except for Father’s desk, still squeezed into the same lightless corner. One of the legs has gone missing, and the current tenant has taken the unorthodox step of replacing it with a molasses barrel, which turns out to have a door, carved rather artfully along the barrel’s own grains, releasing with a single pulse.

“Here we are,” murmurs Father Time.

Not even pausing for a candle, he plunges his hands into that dark cavity. And draws out…

We will call them history’s tendons.

A Chinese fan, that’s the first item in the inventory. It unfurls to reveal Liberty’s rouged face. Then comes a tricolor snuffbox. Inkwells made from the rubble of
barrières
. Tickets (unused) to a Beaumarchais farce. A pewter mug of the Bastille, straddled by an enormous rooster.

Father Time is rich, it turns out, in precisely the sorts of relics that France no longer has use for. Ceramic renderings of the Tennis Court Oath. Saucers of patriotic children declaring their allegiance to the Convention. Sheet music for…

“Ça Ira!”
cries Father Time. “That was quite the rouser, wasn’t it? ‘All the aristocrats will
hang
la-la….’”

Even the wrappings prove to be relics: old issues of
Annales Patriotiques
,
Feuille Villageoise
,
L’Orateur du Peuple
….

“
Le Courrier Universel!
Why, do you know I used to
write
for them? Very—very
febrile
essays under the pseudonym of Junius. And here’s, oh my, Lequinio’s Patriotic Prayer, wasn’t
that
on everyone’s lips for a…for a…now
here.
…” He drags out a mass of icicle blue yarn. “I am pleased to tell you this is an old mitten of Rousseau’s. He left it behind on a hike. Usual great-man reverie, I expect. Hand must have been quite
chapped
by day’s end.”

“Monsieur, please.” I give him a propitiatory smile. “You were going to tell me about my father.”

“Yes…” He peers into the barrel’s vault as though his old friend’s face might come blazing forth from the darkness. “So I was….”

“Maybe you could tell me how you met him.”

“Ah!” His face brightens instantly. “The Collège d’
Arcourt,
that’s where. I was a professor, of course; he was a student. Not one of
my
students, no. I was all about
botany
in those days. I was very busy refuting Reynier’s findings on the—the amputation of sexual organs in hollyhocks. Work which was
quite
favorably mentioned, I don’t mind saying, in—in Jussieu’s
Genera Plantarum.
…”

“What was he like?” I ask, more loudly. “My
father
.”

“Well, he was—he was
quiet,
yes. Not so quiet as he became later, but he had—I would call it a natural
gravity
. A way of being
still,
I mean. He was unfailingly polite, he was—very
dogged,
as if he mistrusted his own gifts. I used to give him advice about, oh, courses to take, professors to avoid, that sort of thing.
Unsolicited
advice, goes without—he rarely
took
it, but I think he appreciated someone giving it. He’d never had much of that.

“Well, one thing and another, we began meeting for coffee. Thursday mornings at the Wise Athenian. I
paid,
of course, at the beginning, he didn’t have the means. And do you know, for years, we never missed a single one of those coffees? Not even when he was in the worst throes of medical school. Not even when the world was falling apart. We used to—we used to
joke
about it. Because we were much more regular about the Athenian than mass.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Oh,
girls,
of course,” says Father Time, raking his beard. “Your father was always—ha!—more
marriage
-minded than I. I remember the day he told me about your mother. Yes, he was—he was blushing almost as much as you are right now.”

Something unexpectedly cunning in his eye. If I weren’t blushing before, I am now.

“And, of course, we talked politics. That’s what people
did
then.”

“Was Father a true republican? A believer?”

“Weellll…depends on how you define
believer
. He wasn’t your sans-culotte type. Didn’t wear the clogs, didn’t carry the
pike
—kept his hair powdered—but he believed, yes, in his own way. What I mean is there was always, how to put this, a
core
of skepticism behind everything he affirmed. If I was the Rousseau man, he was
Voltaire
through and through. And of course, he never aligned himself with the Girondins or the Montagnards. Never had to. He was too busy—ha!—patching them up. Doctors had more work than they could handle in those days.”

I jam my hands in my pockets. I flex the toe of my boots.

“So…my father had a practice?”

“He was a
surgeon,
my child. At the Hôpital d’Humanité. But his skills made him quite coveted among a—among a certain
set
. Oh, yes, rumor had it even—even
Marat,
who was a doctor himself, even
he
asked for your father. Ha! Might’ve saved the old sod’s life—second opinion, eh?
Out of that grimy water, you dishrag!
”

“Did he ever…?”

That’s as far as I get until I am stopped by…my father himself.

T
HE MEMORY OF HIM
, I mean.

Alone, as usual. Coveted by no one. Having his late-afternoon tea. (An English custom, who knows how he came by it?) The tea he always drank quickly, down to its last leaves, and then he set to buttering his toast, with every bit as much fixity as he brought to lens grinding. It took him a good minute, usually, to drag that butter across every last square of blackened bread—to scrape it down until nothing of the original solid remained.
Diligent,
yes, and at the same time, furtive, like an anchorite prying an old piece of chocolate from a crevice.

The idea that this man—
this man
—could be the coveted Dr. Carpentier…

“N
EVER MIND
,” I say.

“Oh, but you were going to ask me something.”

“It’s nothing. I was just—I was going to ask if my father ever met Louis the Seventeenth.”

And as soon as it’s out, I’m trying to call it back in.

“I don’t really have any
reason
to—”

“But of
course
he met Louis the Seventeenth. He was the boy’s doctor.”