The Body In the Vestibule (6 page)

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Authors: Katherine Hall Page

BOOK: The Body In the Vestibule
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She got out of bed and walked slowly to the window overlooking Place St. Nizier. She could hear Tom and Benjamin
in the kitchen. As she got closer to the window, she suddenly realized she had been hearing something else, too. Music. Loud.
It was the
clochard.
Same place. Same pets. Same
casquette.
Faith ran to the kitchen.
“Tom, come to the window! The
clochard
is back!”
Tom came to the doorway and gathered his wife in his arms.
“I know, darling, he was there when I got up.”
“But I know what I saw! I'm not going crazy! He was dead!”
Tom clearly didn't know what to say, but Ben did.
“Who is dead, Mommy? Can Ben see?” He pulled vigorously on her nightgown. They'd explained that she was growing a brother or sister for him and he was hopeful the whole idea had been scrapped by a providential grim reaper.
“No one is dead, lovey. No one you know. Mommy was just saying something to Daddy.”
Faith and Tom exchanged looks that spoke whole encyclopedias. It was difficult at times to remember that Ben understood everything they said these days. And there'd be two of them eventually. Until Ben had been born, Faith had never fully realized that when you had a child, the child was there for good. God evened things up to some extent by arranging for children—small ones, anyway—to go to sleep earlier.
“Why don't we all go to the market together and after lunch we can take the funicular up to the top of Fourvière?” The last thing Faith felt like doing was going out. Every cell in her body was sensibly advising her to get back into bed and sleep for a very long time. Unfortunately, neither husband nor son heard them.
“Great idea, honey. It's a beautiful day. Let's see how fast you can get dressed, Ben.”
“Superfast. I'm Super Ben. Watch how fast,” and he sped down the hall to the closet where they kept their clothes. By the time Faith caught up with him, he was pulling garments off the shelves and there was a pile on the floor.
“Ben!” she shouted angrily. He stopped, startled, then started to cry.
“I'm losing it, Tom,” Faith said. “You get him dressed and let's get out of here.”
 
The stairwell of the apartment was always dim and it seemed to Faith as they descended half an hour later that it was dimmer than usual. The garbage she had spilled had been cleaned up, but the odor of fish remained. She stopped and looked at the two
poubelles.
Tom took her arm and pulled her toward the door. The sun was streaming in from outside.
“You don't believe me, do you?” It was said, what had continued to nag at her since the police had departed.
“I believe you saw him, but how can I believe he was dead when he's sitting over there collecting a fortune in
monnaie
and blasting us all with his horrible music? And you must admit he seems an unusual choice for the miracle of Resurrection, even though the Lord does work in mysterious ways.”
Faith sighed. At the moment, she wasn't sure she believed herself. She remembered Ben's pregnancy as often a kind of out-of-body experience—not merely trouble concentrating but a real sense of floating away in all directions. She hadn't felt like that with this one. Maybe it was hitting her all at once. It was the only logical explanation. She sighed again.
The man had been dead. There had been no pulse.
 
For once, the market failed to entrance her, and she quickly bought smoked sausages and
choucroute
sold by one of the
butchers with a market truck.
Fait à la maison
, homemade, he swore. Melons were beginning to come from Spain. They'd have that first-Tom's with a little port poured in the middle. She still had salad and cheese from the party, so all they needed was bread. Ben and Tom walked along behind her, munching what Ben called “air cookies,” small sponge cakes sold from a patisserie truck by a lady Faith had never seen without a smile. She couldn't decide whether the smell of the
choucroute
was making her hungry or nauseated.
“Let's get a coffee,” she proposed. There was a café she liked near the market. Early in the morning, the market vendors and farmers stopped there for a
petit mâchon,
first breakfast with coffee—or a glass of
vin rouge
—before opening their stalls. Tom had christened it “Café Sport du Commerce de France,” paying homage to its brethren throughout the country. An old-fashioned café, no glitz, no phony Belle Epoque repros. At this time of day, it was crowded with shoppers. They found a place and Faith sat down thankfully. Her ankles hurt. She was facing the wall, which was covered with large mirrors reflecting the pedestrians outside. Her face looked the same as it had the night before, maybe a little pale and wan, but she was still Faith. The waiter set down large steaming cups of
café crème
in front of Tom and Faith, and an Orangina for a delighted Ben, who immediately began repeating “Orangina, tina, nina” over and over until they stopped him.
The coffee smelled wonderful. In what Faith was beginning to appreciate as typical French directness, the term for decaffeinated coffee was
café faux
. She took a large sip from her cup. It was real, all right. The café was warm and the noise level increased as more customers pushed their way in. The mirror began to get a bit fogged from the heat of the coffee and the swirling smoke from all the cigarettes. Faith took another appreciative sip from her cup and started to look forward to lunch. As she put the cup down,
she saw Marilyn strolling with her dog in the clear part of the mirror. As she passed by the window, Marilyn looked in and their eyes met for an instant. Faith started to turn around to wave a greeting but was astonished instead to see a look of intense fear cross Marilyn's face before she ran across the street and walked swiftly in the other direction.
She started to tell Tom about it. One more odd thing in a sea of oddities. Maybe another time. Besides, Ben was there, now vigorously searching out the last drops of soda with his straw.
“Anybody hungry?” she asked in what she hoped was a bright, untroubled voice.
The sidewalks were emptying and stores closing, as was usual at lunchtime. They paused at one end of the market so Ben could watch the commotion as the stalls were dismantled, trucks packed up, and the street cleaners took over with their hoses and brooms, still made of twigs, only plastic ones now.
As they approached Place St. Nizier, Faith looked for Marilyn and the other two, but they were not at their corner. Ghislaine Leblanc, acting as a member of what Faith was beginning to term the Leblanc-Lyon Fundamental Information Service, had told her that Saturdays and Sundays were big days for the
filles de joie.
Days of leisure for their clients, they meant busy times for the girls. Faith had been a bit surprised at the openness of the trade, but Ghislaine had told her that it had always been this way, and besides, it prevented rape and helped to keep peace in the house, “
paix des ménages.
” The one time the police had cracked down on the trade in the mid-seventies, the prostitutes had sought sanctuary in the Eglise St. Nizier, to the slight embarrassment of the priests, who nonetheless allowed them to remain for a week or two in protest—restriction of free trade. After all, they paid their taxes like any other citizens! They had been more or less left alone after that; and their dramatic leader, a Germanic prostitute named Ulla, later
made a sharp turn and became involved in trying to get women
out
of prostitution, and for some,
into
a drug-rehabilitation program.
Faith had a sudden flash, picturing the ladies from Boston's Combat Zone seeking refuge in Aleford's First Parish, with some sort of Valkyrie at the fore, and wondered what the community would do. Probably try to adopt as many as they could. Whenever they were downtown, her friend and neighbor Pix Miller repeatedly averred to Faith as they walked by, “That one could be saved, I'm sure.” It was spoken in her usual audible voice, trained since childhood to speak up and speak clearly.
The
clochard
was still at his post and she tried to think of a reason she could tell Tom for going over and looking more closely at what she still thought of as her corpse—perhaps a sudden need for prayer—but Tom was already hustling her in through the front door. They picked up the mail. Two epistles from home. One was a postcard of the White House from Hope and Quentin, on which they had written that they were spending a delightful weekend with old business school cronies. Faith debated whether the choice of card carried any implications other than being the nearest to hand on the rack. It could well be that Quentin had political aspirations, yet somehow he struck her as a behind-the-scenes man. But you never knew with Hope. Last summer, she had said pointedly to Faith, “When everyone is always saying what a great president the president's spouse would make—Betty, Barbara—don't you think voters are ready for a woman?” Faith didn't. However, if anyone could convince first the Republican party and then the nation, it was her sister.
The other mail was a letter from her mother—a brief, succinct report of the weather in Manhattan and their activities of the last week, closing with the lines, “I do hope you are taking care of yourself, darling Faith, and getting plenty of rest. You know how you tend to overdo.” With that
understatement ringing in her ears, Faith started up the stairs.
After lunch, which was consumed down to the last crispy, artery-blocking bite of
grattons,
those delectable fried pieces of pork, duck, or goose skin not to be mentioned in the same breath as pork rinds, Faith's fatigue became apparent to both husband and son.
“Ben, why don't we let Mommy have a little nap and we'll go up the funicular by ourselves?”
Faith started to make a feeble protest. She loved the view from the top of Fourvière. It wasn't just the panoramic view of all of Lyon. On a clear day, you could see all the surrounding mountains, the Monts d'Or, such a lovely name, and occasionally as far as Mont Blanc to the east. But at least mountains stayed put and she could see them another day.
Faith stretched out on the bed. Ben had patted her brow. “Poor Mommy,” he said before running gleefully down the hall and out the door with Daddy. Was the glorious Oedipal phase over so soon, Faith wondered drowsily, wherein she had been loved so primitively, so totally?
Her eyes started to close and she fought sleep desperately. She had plans, but Ben and Tom had to be well away first. Her eyes were closed. She tried to open them, except the lids weighed more than the Arc de Triomphe and refused to budge. She slept.
A while later, she rolled over and blinked. Again it took a moment to orient herself. Perhaps it was the way the church seemed to occupy the whole room that startled her so often upon waking. She sat up slowly. She hadn't been inclined, or increasingly able, to make sudden movements these days. She looked at the clock on the façade of the church. She'd been asleep for almost an hour. Tom and Ben would be coming back soon. The afternoon shadows were beginning to lengthen. She'd have to be quick.
Since this morning, there had been one overriding
thought in her mind. She
had
to get a closer look at the
clochard.
Quickly, she slipped on her shoes and went to the window. The music had stopped and she had a dreadful thought.
It was true. He was gone. She was furious at herself.
“Great going, Faith,” she muttered aloud. “Sleep your life away.” She'd have to wait until tomorrow to see him. Why it was so important, she wasn't sure. She could see him perfectly well from the window, but she wanted to touch him to see if he was real or if her hand would pass through his body like some projected image. She tried to think how she could have done things differently last night. Stayed with the body and screamed her head off was the only alternative that seemed possible. After a while, someone would have responded. However, the idea that the body would disappear was one that quite naturally had not occurred to her, and she wasn't a screamer by nature.
She was still tired. She crept back into bed. They were going to the opening of a show at Valentina's gallery, then out to dinner with the Leblancs and some of their friends. It was the last thing she felt like doing.
“Hello, darling, did you have a good sleep?” Tom was kissing her awake. She wanted to snarl at him that she had slept all too well and would have to wait until the morning for further
clochard
investigation, but she didn't want him to know what she was planning. The Reverend Fairchild took a dim view of his wife's sleuthful proclivities.
She managed to wrest a smile from somewhere and realized she did feel better. Oh sleep that knits …
 
Two hours later, she was feeling even better, as who could not in the jovial atmosphere of Valentina's gallery. The exhibit was called “Lyon Aujourd'hui”—four artists' views of contemporary Lyon. Faith wandered contentedly through the brightly lighted rooms. The crowd spilled out onto the sidewalk, wineglasses in hand, catching up on the
news. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. The rapidity with which the French language is spoken increases in proportion to the number of people speaking it, and Faith was aware only of a word or two in the conversational swirl around her. Tom was in the thick of it and seemed to have picked up several new hand gestures since their arrival, as well as a distinctive shrugging of the shoulders and pursing of the lips. She'd get him a beret before they left, even though they were not so universally worn anymore. He'd look wonderful wearing it with his vestments.

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