The Last Life (10 page)

He did not guess that her eager eye on the future measured the difficulty of her past, or that the nervousness he attributed to his presence was born of the effort, the constant effort, simply to be what she had become. He did not picture her in any place other than room 426 at the Ritz on the Place Vendome, a beautiful, gilded creature buffed and cossetted, beaded and bejewelled: he pictured her always dancing her graceful waltz. For years hers was the only English song he knew, and he reserved it for moments of greatest happiness: "I'm sitting on top of the world, just rolling along..."

"And, in truth," said my grandmother, "for months afterwards, I believe it was not me but Estelle who walked with him hand in hand in his dreams of Algiers, whose wide eyes gazed at him in amused adoration, whose voice whispered 'forever' in his sleeping ear. He would think of me and hear Estelle, feel her cool fingers on his wrist, leading him to the places of utmost contentment.

"He did not ever see his sister again," my grandmother concluded. "She went to America, and she disappeared. His long-lost. So when your mother came into our lives, he was not as taken aback as I was. To him, it seemed like justice. He is a patient man, your grandfather, in spite of what you may think, and a man with a long memory. He has held the memory of that evening his whole life, like a jewel in his hand."

The story seemed to me the stuff of films, and I pictured my vanished great-aunt as Greta Garbo, my grandfather stepping up to the Ritz and entering, from grainy black and white to a world of technicolor, and then slipping back again, when the fantastic evening was over.

I entered my own brightly tinted afternoon full of these images, intrigued at the prospect of unknown American cousins (I was then only moderately familiar with the known ones, my mother's sister's children), but reluctant to share their possible existence with my friends. My grandfather could never be conjured young and handsome to Marie-José or Cécile: they would only have scoffed.

So I waited, and told my mother, expecting her delight to mirror mine: more Americans among us, more of us among the Americans—something like that. A past branching like a rabbit warren along unexplored corridors, which might yield anything.

My mother listened, but she was not entranced. When I finished, she took her hand from Etienne's wrist and laid it idly in her lap. We were on the patio, in the early evening shade, and the cicadas were screaming over the whirr of distant traffic.

"That's where she ended it? That's all she told you?" My mother's voice was neh with scorn. "Believe it if you like. Told that way, it makes a lovely story."

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing." She stood to fuss with Etienne's straps and, from behind, tickled him under the arms. He chortled, his mouth wide with glee, his arms reaching out in lazy spasms. She brushed a fly from his face. "This young man will need his dinner soon," she said, flicking with her foot at the chair's brakes in an expert, unconscious maneuver.

I extracted my mother's version only through badgering and pleas. Negotiations were interrupted by my father's return, and by supper: only as we tidied up afterwards, while the dishwasher pursued its drugged rhythms and my father sprawled in his armchair in the living room listening to
Aida
at thunderous volume, did my mother capitulate.

"If you must know," she said at last—as if her contempt for my starlet great-aunt had not made not knowing impossible.

According to my mother, who knew it, she claimed, from my father, my grandfather had seen Estelle one more time, much later, in the 1950s, when she was dead. The American who took her to New York had abandoned her. No longer sitting on top of the world, her beauty fading and her visa on the verge of expiry, while the war in Europe heaved towards its beginning, Estelle cast around in desperation for someone to marry. She found him in a modest widower, a clerk or insurance salesman from the gloomier reaches of New Jersey. After a hasty and unfestive ceremony, she moved into his clapboard house in a suburban town and tended the handkerchief lawn, and dressed and fed his three children who, as they grew older, made it clear that they liked her as little as she liked them. She didn't even care for the widower, although he may not have been a bad man, and she didn't care for the calluses and chillblains that marked her delicate hands and feet. Eventually, said my mother, when the war had stormed and ebbed in Europe, Estelle scraped together what little money she could, and fled. Not to Paris—which was,
après guerre,
famously bleak—and not to Blida, or even to Algiers, where her sister Paulette, still (and ever) unmarried, manager, by then, of an elegant shoe store downtown, urged her to come. She skirted that city because her unforgiving mother presided there, over the LaBasse family, and it was too late to make amends—and set her sights instead on Tangier.

What she did to earn a living in Morocco, in the short years still allotted her, my mother wasn't sure. But that she ended her days mired in poverty, unvisited by her family, unloved and alone—of that my mother was certain. It was a cancer that killed her, but presumably her spirit—the fey dancing spirit that twirled the floors of grand hotels and restaurants in the thirties—was long dead.

"Your grandfather knew, from 1948 onwards," my mother told me, "exactly where she was, and in exactly what a sorry state she was. And did he do a single thing? Did he lift a finger?"

I waited.

"Hah. You know he didn't. They were too afraid—such good Christians—that this pathetic, divorced, fallen woman might corrupt the morals of their precious children."

"Of Papa?"

"Precisely. You would've thought the poor woman had leprosy, the berth they gave her."

"But Grand-père saw her again, you said."

"For the funeral. The funeral! She was dead. The LaBasse funds may or may not have run to a tombstone, I don't know. You'd have to ask your father. They may not even have bought her plot in perpetuity, for heaven's sake. Not that it matters now, but there she is, or her bones are, all alone in the cemetery in Tangier. Or dug up and thrown in the sea to make room for someone else. Nobody ever went to put so much as a flower on her grave."

"I get the point."

"It's not—it's not that. Not in the end. It's that they did nothing when she was alive. They pretended she didn't exist."

"How do you know?"

"Your father told me. The first he heard of her was the funeral—he must have been a little younger than you are, maybe nine or so, and his father hops off to Morocco. 'I never realized travel was so efficient,' he said when he came back. 'It's not far at all. We should go on holiday.' Or something like that. He said something like that."

We had long finished cleaning and were talking by the stove, she with her back pressed to the fridge. We heard my father's footsteps cross the hall, the dining room.

"You won't speak about it, will you, to him? It only upsets him. Maybe when you're older, or when—I don't know."

"What are you two up to?" asked my father from the doorway. "Listen,
chérie,
I think I'd better run back to the hotel—just a few papers to look over—you don't mind, do you?"

"Of course. Whatever. Of course." But my mother's features were set anew in a glazed panic, and her fingers fluttered over the pristine countertop in pursuit of imaginary crumbs. I kissed them both and, as my father didn't offer a ride, set off on foot to join my friends.

I could not decide whether my grandfather was sentimental or heartless. I could not determine whose version was true. I could picture the romantic young Jacques in Paris, and Jacques the righteous Catholic and father protecting his family, and I could even see the little boy, careless, frolicking in the streets of Blida: but I could not connect these images into a single person, into my grandfather. And by the same token, a short month later, I couldn't tell what I felt in the days following the shooting. Must I hate him—his was a vicious crime of rage and indifference, the surest sign of a cold heart—or must I love and pity him, a broken and sick man whose soul had been momentarily gripped by self-destructive madness? I was washed, alternately, by these extreme opinions; that both might be simultaneously possible I never considered. It was a matter of choosing a side and of taking it.

My family and my friends made the decision for me. In the initial aftermath of the "Bellevue incident," as the local paper termed it (with a blurred, ten-year-old snapshot of my grandfather on the front page, in late-seventies gear, his lapels stretching to the edges of the frame and his striped tie fat as a fish), I found my routines ruptured. The Bellevue did too, which was perhaps more serious.

Released from hospital within twenty-four hours, her back an intricate map of stitches and plasters, still pocked in places by splinters that the medics had not had the patience to remove, Cécile was gathered up by her irate parents and returned to Paris; but not before they paused at the
préfecture
to press charges, thus ensuring their return, and a trial. The bullet, lodged in the wooden balustrade at the poolside, was prised out by expert policemen, an exercise that interrupted swimming for a day and, because of the fluttering plastic tape demarcating the scene, made of my usual playground a pilgrimage for inquisitive locals. Laure, too, departed unceremoniously, her father paying the bill only after delivering an enraged lecture to the front-desk clerk. Thierry's father—torn, it seemed, between horror at his employer's act and amusement that his odious offspring, shaken but essentially unhurt, should have been disciplined into silence for the first time in years—teetered on the brink of resigning, until my own father sat him down with a bottle of scotch and some blunt talk about the changes in store, and possibly with an open checkbook too. Thierry's father, and Thierry too, stayed put.

None of the staff, in fact, quit: it was too late in the season to scout for other work, and my father, visited by an authoritative demeanor none had known he could possess, gathered them together the very morning after and reassured them, speaking of his own father with respectful regret, as if the old man had been the wounded party, a brave general forced into retirement by an unforeseeable and tragic injury. My mother, contrary to my expectations, did not gloat, but cleaved instead to her adopted parents and spent long hours sequestered in our living room with my dry-eyed grandmother and Tante Marie, who flew in from Geneva, discussing strategy, how best to stanch the flow of malicious gossip and redeem the family name. Even Etienne seemed to sense the heightened tension in the air, although it elicited from him not sober grimaces but gales of spooky laughter at peculiar moments—when he was being bathed, or when the sun set and my mother, smoking furiously, paced the hallways of the house they had built for him.

The Bellevue, though, had sprung a leak. At this, the busiest of seasons, the guests trickled away. Not all, but enough to furrow brows and lighten the load of the chambermaids. My father, against his own father's wishes, battled cancellations by accepting, for the first time in the hotel's history, a German package tour, a crowd of identical, rowdy couples in their forties and early fifties, whose wan and unfriendly offspring would take over the grounds, and above all the pool, for their Teutonic games, hurling gutturals at one another and making—as I suppose we always had too—a general nuisance of themselves. They didn't swim at night, though: my father ordered that the bulbs be removed from the underwater lamps, and he posted an unsightly plaque at every entrance to the deck limiting the pool hours from dawn to 8 p.m.

Not that all these changes mattered much to me. From my first awakening after the deed, I developed a phobia about the scene of the crime. I could not bring myself to follow my father up to the hotel; and when, after my grandfather had been formally arrested and released on bail and had come to "rest," for an indefinite time, in one of the spare bedrooms down the hall from mine (it was feared that his presence at the Bellevue, like that of a ghost, would be bad for business), I found myself all the more weighted with guilt.

On the first day, I waited—naively, I would later feel—for Marie-José to call or to come by. She was my best friend. She did not know that I had lain beneath her feet and listened to the drama unfolding overhead; she would, I reasoned, want to be the first to tell me how it really was, what they had all thought and felt. She would laugh about it. We would laugh—appalled, greedy laughter. She would want to bring me over to her side, the swimmers' side, Cécile's side, where I belonged.

She did not call.

That night as I failed to sleep, it came to me that Marie-Jo was not sure of me; that precisely because she didn't know that I had been there, and thought that I might therefore believe the LaBasse version of events, she must be waiting for me to call. I sprang from bed early the next morning eager to clarify, to make amends. I dialed—not without trepidation—no later than eight thirty, imagining my beautiful friend stretching, catlike, among her sheets and reaching for the pink phone by her bed. But it rang only once, and Marie-Jo's mother's voice came on the line.

"Oh Sagesse. Of course. She's out, I'm afraid."

"Out?"

"An early tennis match with her father. Yes, out. I'll tell her you called."

I knew it at once for a lie. And when I called at dusk, the hour at which our gang always dispersed for home, the same tinny grown-up's tone informed me, with no effort at conviction, "I don't know where she is. Sorry."

I waited, again, a day and a half—during which time I succumbed, my need for the sea like a drug, and took the bus to the public beach. I swam there alone among the noisy groups of kids and hid when I thought I saw people from school, then trailed home feeling worse—and tried, once more, near noon. Marie-Jo herself picked up.

"Oh, it's you."

"I've called—maybe your mom didn't tell you—several times."

"I know."

"Are you okay?"