The Last Life (30 page)

There had been time, but never opportunity. My mother's parents—whom I know only from photographs: my grandfather Merlin, a rangy, bespectacled bank manager with hair pasted across his scalp as shiny as paint, a man who loved to work with his hands, who built tile coffee tables on weekends and staked his vegetable garden in ordered rows, felled not by his cancer but by the first, toxic dose of chemotherapy; and his sharp-eyed wife Vi, plump as a loaf and, I have always imagined, yeast-smelling, with rippling arms like pastry dough and an assortment of stiff hats for Sunday church, who outlived her husband by only a year and died of a broken neck after falling down her basement stairs, according to Aunt Eleanor too frugal to turn on the light when venturing to retrieve ajar of her famed tomato pickle as recompense for a neighbor's help in Merlin's weed-filled zucchini patch—were ambitious for both their daughters, having lost their firstborn and only son to meningitis when he was only three. But their ambitions stretched only as far as Boston, a couple of hours' drive away. Their world was small. (How curious, and typical, that their antagonistic Eleanor should have chosen the life they wanted for her, while Carol, the spit of her mother in youth, was to drift out of their ken into a country they could hardly imagine.)

When Carol returned from France, for the summer and her senior year of college, Vi trembled in her corsetry at the child's announcement—love, an engagement, a Frenchman—and pressed affable Merlin to give the girl a talking-to.

"It's puppy love, Vi," her husband assured her. "I fancied a girl I met in Florida, when I was about Carol's age. But she loved that swampy heat, while it made me break out in hives. Could never have worked. I came home, my mind settled, and I met you. The one for me."

"Merlin, this is France we're talking about, not Florida."

"Shush, Bubbles"—this was his nickname for her, although neither my mother nor Eleanor recalls her as particularly effervescent. Carol's home now. She's got a year of college to go. It's a long time. It'll pass."

"Look at Eleanor and her craziness, Merlin. Has that passed?"

"It will, sweetie. It's all God's will."

God did not see eye to eye with Merlin and Vi on Carol's future, nor did my mother. They had not known that her reserve overlay such stubbornness, and Vi, unfamiliar with pop psychology, never imagined that her own solid intransigence served only to sharpen her daughter's will.

By September, Merlin, at his wife's request, had written to Jacques LaBasse (in English, his only language) to ask where Alexandre's family stood on the union. Jacques wrote back (in English also, a stilted letter, written with a dictionary to hand), explaining the family circumstances, the Bellevue and Alexandre's fine prospects. He commented that fate was unpredictable and youth headstrong—a flight of bombast for which Merlin rather liked him, but which reduced Vi to tears of fury.

"
He's
no help. My God, is there nothing we can do?"

"Looks that way," said Merlin. "
As
long as she's happy. We've raised her right."

Not right enough, it seemed. At Thanksgiving, Carol set off for a weeklong visit to France and her fiancé, with a shell-pink shantung suit in her luggage and every intention of marrying. The plans had been under way all fall. The reception, small but elegant, took place in the hotel restaurant, spilling out onto the terrace because the weather was unseasonably warm. Carol told Jacques and Monique that her parents could not afford to come but sent their blessing; and told her parents of the deed only when it was done. She came home, as planned, but only to collect her things; and to try, in a few weeks, to console her distraught mother ("They're Catholic, Mom. It's so beautiful there. You'll come and see").

Merlin was grateful, at least, that Carol had withdrawn in time to save him the cost of spring tuition. "As long as you're happy," he told her; and to his wife, remarked, "She's got a glow on her she never had before. It must be right. Wouldn't want her to end up a mousy thing, stuck at home."

"You'll regret it," was Vi's final word. "It's not your world. Life isn't make-believe, you know. You'll come home crying before it's all over."

"Different strokes, eh?" said Eleanor, home for the weekend. "How are they on women's lib? Lousy, I bet, like all Catholics."

Merlin and Vi never made it to France. Merlin's cancer was diagnosed in the late spring, and he was dead by June. Vi had no desire to travel on her own. "Who'd look after the cats?" was her persistent excuse, to which Carol had no suitable answer.

Upon arrival at the Bellevue, installed in a small flat on the ground floor of the residence block, my mother initially was entranced—by the varying colors of the sea, of the sky, by the aura of history and the glamor of the Parisian guests in the restaurant. She did not care that she had not graduated from college, and hardly noticed that, as Eleanor had pointed out, she had merely traded one patriarch's roof for another's. She found Jacques aloof, apparently indifferent to her, too preoccupied with his little empire to do more than smile occasionally at the top of her head, or ask her practical questions in the simplified, formal French he used with the Portuguese laborers. Monique was more demanding: she sat my mother down at her polished dining table for long afternoons of tutoring, not only in the language but also in the mores of her new home. "We do not put our hands in our laps during meals. We keep them in clear sight. It is far more respectable. We do not tip our soup bowls away—how curious it looks when you do, as though you were fishing! Far better to spill soup on one's own clothes than on the hostess's tablecloth. Consider that she may have embroidered it herself! It may have been part of her trousseau!"

My young mother attempted improvements upon her three-room apartment, only to fall afoul of Monique's—or rather, Madame LaBasse's: Carol was not, then or ever, invited to call her in-laws by their given names, and was grateful, after my birth, to be able to resort to "
Grand'-mère,
" along with me. "
Maman
" simply could not form itself in her mouth—notions of tradition, which extended even within the newlyweds' four walls: "You can't put carpet in a bathroom, dear girl—whatever are you thinking? It's positively unsanitary. And I thought you might prefer this bedspread, really, to the florals that you've been looking at. So much more tasteful. It's a gift, you must accept it."

How Carol tried. She wanted, very much, to belong to this new, old world. She had her hair cut by my grandmother's coiffeur, and piled her bathroom shelves with the creams the older woman recommended. She learned to cook my father's favorite meals at his mother's elbow, drenching vegetables in unaccustomed salt and trying to appreciate the virtues of bloody meat. She was taught to choose the skinniest and most withered beans in the market, rather than the crisp, robust stalks that appealed to the eye; it was impressed upon her that Alexandre preferred his tomatoes almost still green, his grapes peeled. She could never develop a taste for the grass-flavored milk, and so stopped drinking it. LaBasse women, my mother was told, did not wear earrings; it was vulgar. They wore no rings other than their engagement diamonds. Carol learned to read quietly during the siesta time, or else to slip out for a walk; but she could not bring herself to sleep in the heat of the day.

She could not tell whether she loved or despised her mother-in-law, the imperial creature, and, having no one to discuss it with—Lili, Sally and Coco having long since vanished, their foreign memories packed away with their textbooks and souvenir Provençal tablecloths—did not dwell on the matter: she depended on the older woman, her only hope of becoming French. Not till too late did she realize that the recipes and expressions she had so studiously mimicked, until they inseparably constituted her French self, were the antiquated trivia of an Algerian life no longer extant, or rather, existing only in such households as her own, and as a result of virtuosic mimicry all round.

Sometimes, even in the early days, she marvelled at what she had so rashly decided, craved the chattering twang of her native language and the slack afternoons she had long ago spent with Eleanor, bare legs dangling, flipping through
Mademoiselle
on the porch of her parents' house, or racing down the asphalt to wade in the weedy creek at the end of their road. She longed for television, as she had known it, and hummed outdated advertising jingles to herself, or sang the words, alone in her living room. She missed the easiness, above all, but told herself there was merit in difficult pleasures, and when, salty with sweat, she tumbled delightedly in the wedding sheets with my father, she reassured herself that the sacrifices were worth it. Besides, she could still hear her mother's squeaky voice, prophesying doom ("You'll come home crying"), and resolved to try the harder to prove small-minded Vi wrong.

When Vi died, the quality of my mother's nostalgia shifted: the clapboard house, and with it the creakings of her youth, was sold (by efficient Eleanor) along with most of its contents, and there was nothing to go back to. That was when Carol began to be unhappy, when she started to rail against her father-in-law, her mother-in-law, France—tentatively at first. The apartment, its bathroom floor chilly in winter and its faucets spitting, seemed to close in upon her. Alexandre's parents resided three floors up, on the other side of the building, but when she heard footsteps overhead she imagined that they were theirs. She noticed that the Bellevue gate was locked at midnight, and compared their lives to those of animals in the zoo. She tried, as a mark of initiative, to befriend the hotel guests—young women, like herself, some still travelling with their parents; a middle-aged English couple who came to paint watercolors side by side on the pano; a trio of Italian youths who flattered her and excited her husband's ire—but they only stayed awhile, and left again, for lives that seemed much more real than her own.

My father, in these early times, was not oblivious to his young wife's confusion, but he had been raised to believe that a woman would bend, easily, gratefully, to her husband's life, and that this was love; and he observed, and tasted, and admired all that Carol was learning from Monique ("the
gratin
was delicious—just like
Mamans,
" he would say, in highest praise), considering it his part of the contract. He made love to her, ardently, often. He figured she would settle, in time.

It was a relief, then, for Carol to be pregnant with me. It was, unquestionably, the right thing for her to do, and it made her belong, for a while without reservations, and in any event, forever, in a way that she had not before. My grandfather took notice: he held out chairs and opened doors for her, declared her radiant, reserved for her the smiles that illuminated his otherwise mournful face, his brows almost airborne in their quivering abundance. My grandmother's tone softened, from crinque to advice, and her "my dear," for a time, meant precisely that. Alexandre was tender, and overjoyed. He stroked her belly and massaged the small of her back, brought her treats from the hotel kitchens at noontime, like a diligent sparrow. He threw himself into his work, wanting his pleasure to spill over the Bellevue grounds: he ordered a vast bed of lavender planted in my honor, eager to hear the bees swarming over it, and a pair of orange trees to mark his fruitful union with his wife. The gardens so flourished under his oversight that my grandfather granted him care of the hotel's catering as well: Alexandre planned other people's weddings as enthusiastically as if they were his own, and undertook, of his own accord, the promotion of the hotel in the region and, in time, in the nation at large. The time of lectures and suppers and committees was begun. He wanted everyone to share in his surfeit of beneficence, to know that the future would be glorious. It was an early, short-lived expression of the exuberance manifested, much later, much longer, at my grandfathers incarceration, the first—or my mother's first experience—in the cycle of zeal and inanition that marked out my father's life, the great sine curves of his soul.

Which is why she should have known then, or thought to ask. But Carol, too, was absorbed in her pregnancy, in the new scents and sensations, in her fear about the delivery (not least because it would be conducted in French) and in the preparations for my impending life. The bedding and the tiny garments ribbed in blue or yellow seemed to her infinitely dear, so French, and she scoured books and magazines for elegant French names, exclaiming over obscure saints and pursuing their histories, only, too often, to find their martyrdoms sinister and bloody. (Marie, which is my first name, taken from my aunt and from the Madonna herself, was not hard to find; but Sagesse, a fantasy, they came to on their own, finding it euphonious and thinking, perhaps, and wrongly, that I was the child of their wisdom.) She took my father's enthusiasm to be her due, the reward for her suffering. She asked no questions, even when she woke before dawn to find him pacing the flat, naked as a bear; or standing over her, smiling softly in the gloom. Once he sat all night at the speckled Formica table in the kitchen, scribbling plans for their future—for our future—which he would not divulge. She came to him, bleary with sleep, her stomach a giant, gleaming marble beneath her filmy gown.

"What in God's name are you doing?" she asked. He looked up only for a moment, and reached out a hand to caress me: "Saving our lives, my dear. I'm saving our lives." And he winked. "Back to bed, to sleep. You need it." She did, and she went, and in the morning, finding him ruddy and fresh, she imagined it had all been a dream.

And then there was me—after whom, what could there have been to ask? Carol's days—and nights—were full to overflowing, as her swollen breasts were with milk, and my every tooth, my every step, my every mumble was committed to record. Their needs retreated in the face of mine. I had become the protagonist. Then again, not so very long after, there was Etienne: he, gasping, raised a multitude of questions, but the course of my father's late adolescence was not among them. The future, for both my parents, slipped away as stealthily as a smuggler's skiff from the cove below their window, and my father's torpor before his little boy seemed only a mirror of my mother's own. Now, truly, they were stuck. But in time Alexandre raised his head from his chest, and with Jacques's permission and his money began to build the villa, which was to be a monument to Etienne's imperfect (more than perfect) future, forever entwined with theirs (this little boy would not grow up and move away—ever) and our family home.