The Last Life (39 page)

I nodded, trying to decipher the message I felt must be encoded in this anecdote.

My grandfather spoke again: "It was Serge, though—it was what he said, what happened to him, I realize, in retrospect, that first made me think, made me recognize that we might have to leave. Made me look to metropolitan France, in spite of myself. Because it was like a cancer, he was right in that, a cancer that metastasized through the most beautiful and precious of bodies, that glorious country. And it's still suffering, all these years later."

"But it was their land first, wasn't it?"

My grandfather rolled his eyes impatiently. "You concentrate on your schoolwork, my little one, and don't rattle on about things you know nothing about."

Clearly, I reflected later, I knew nothing about it, not least because I could not locate, in my grandfather's story, the source of his lambent smile, however faint, however many years later. The story only raised questions. My grandfather had behaved as he had seen fit, as blood and faith had dictated, and this in spite of himself—because all he had wanted, upon encountering this lumbering remnant of his humble origins, was to be rid of him. Serge was not a part of the LaBasse story, tailored as it had been for the glory of our own, ever smaller, circle; just as Estelle, the flighty prodigal sister, could not truly fit the narrative. Little bits of them had been chipped, like grindings, from the larger stones of their selves, and pressed into the mosaic of my grandparents' path: it was a way simultaneously to remember and to forget those who fell by the wayside, who were lost on the road to the Bellevue and success.

And if the story said nothing about Serge—as the story of Estelle revealed, ultimately, so little about her—then I was thrown again, as always, back to the teller, in this case to my grandfather himself, and to my own need to make of him something he might not be. His story was in no way shameful; he had done, so far as one knew, a good turn; and yet I felt that in some way, in his telling, my grandfather had fallen short. I couldn't have said, then, what I would have wanted of him; I merely resigned myself to irritability and remained silent for the remainder of the evening.

But in retrospect—a light in which we may not see more clearly, but at least have the illusion of doing so, as the event has been filtered, by faulty memory, into a shape that is now useful to us, just as my grandfather's encounter with Serge had been, so that whatever he left out I could never retrieve, so that the story was inflexibly his own—I consider that I wanted my grandfather to have been a hero, to have redeemed Serge's broken life and taken the poor man's family to his more prosperous bosom. I wanted, at the least, my grandfather to doubt his achievement, to see that exchange not as a triumph but as a shortcoming, so that I might look on the story and cull an immediate meaning, an immediate consoling promise: that although my grandfather had failed to save Serge, he would not similarly fail me, fail us; that he would set no limit upon what could be done to re-cement his crumbling dynasty; that he would, in his wisdom, give without counting the cost.

"Concentrate on your schoolwork," I was told, and I did, working even though I was on vacation, because it was the only thing I could think of to do that seemed like doing; but I was aware that I studied not because it was important but rather as if it were important, because any benefits my efforts might later confer upon me could not—or certainly not in time—save the life of the LaBasse family. I feared change, and the absence of change. I concentrated on my books and the boils on my back, as if I were in a dream, a nightmare whose end must come, as if, with my eyes sufficiently tightly screwed, I might get by.

When I was a little girl, I had believed that if you looked long and hard enough at a picture you might enter into it, leave behind the faded furniture of everyday and walk in oil-bright fragrant glades among eighteenth-century picnickers, or join windblown fishermen along some ageless rocky shore. I didn't muse on how one might get back from within the frame, just stood and willed and waited for another story, another life, to begin around me. When, after failing on numerous occasions to make the leap, I asked my mother whether my belief was misguided, she did not want to disillusion me.

"Perhaps," she said, "perhaps it's possible, if you look very, very hard."

At fifteen, I knew which picture I would have chosen: it would have been the watercolor of the Bay of Algiers, that sun-filled, gleaming wonder, painted at a time when everything still seemed possible, when the city might just have become—the impossible future of that pluperfect past—in time, Augustine's City of God or Camus's City of Man. I would have willed myself into that picture, and made that world different with the knowledge I brought—of the loss and hate to be averted. I would have altered the course of history. I would have willed Camus's dream of a paradise on earth, of a Mediterranean culture democratic and polyphonous. I would have sheltered from the sun alongside Moorish fountains and ambled in the casbah greeting Sami's forebears in fluent Arabic; I would have dreamed in the shade of jujube trees in an air drenched by flowering almonds.

But at fifteen, I was no longer a child, and I knew it to be impossible.

The summer burst, in full cicada-song, upon us, the roads jammed with cars whose plates spoke of glamor—75 and 92 for Paris, but others, too, from Milan or London or Munich—and the beaches overflowed again with their human cargo. The hotel filled, although not with the families of Cécile, or Laure, or Thibaud, and ultimately less than in other years. The Iraqis invaded Kuwait, to American outrage, and the adults, at summer cocktails on patios or in villa drawing rooms—parties which my parents and even my grandparents attended as though the months before had never been; but how else could they have behaved?—discussed the role of Europe, and more particularly of France, in battles that were sure to come over Kuwait and its resources. They noted with dismay the halted construction projects along our coast, the soaring unemployment rate. They lamented the oblivious grandiosity of the nations leader ("He thinks he's an emperor, that's the trouble," scoffed my grandfather, once again, of Mitterrand, an observation that I thought would only originate in a like mind). There was talk of the further tightening of European ties, the collapsing of internal borders and the cordoning of Europe as a whole, a move of which my father and grandfather approved, as a means of closing out definitively the other worlds, the second and third. "What is the second world, Maman?" I asked, but she merely shrugged and stroked my arm.

From our enclave, all the world appeared to be in motion, in the face of which the LaBasse family—never in tune with the times—planted itself, and resisted: there would be no divorces, or selling out (although my grandfather harried my father about his plans to upgrade, to reach for the fourth Board of Tourism star, insisting that this recession was a time for consolidation; and my father, or so he told my mother, replied in American fashion, "You have to spend money to make money, Papa," prompting only a disgusted sneer), no accommodation to the superficial, temporary aberrations which they took, well, everything, on every plane, to be.

I lived, with Etienne, largely within the parameters of house and garden, willing to expose my riddled skin only to his undiscerning eye: I donned my flowered bikini and read, belly down, on a chaise longue on the patio, my books the replacement for my former hours of boredom shared with friends, while my brother ogled me from the shade. I hoped the sun would dry my spots, and it did, somewhat, but not enough for me to venture cheerfully to the beach, to be a leper among the unblemished on its shores. Still sleeping poorly at night, I dozed by day, felt myself to be a peculiar nocturnal creature, without moorings. I hoarded glimpses—like pictures—of lives that had once touched mine: Thibaud sent cards from his Nordic travels, cheerful scribblings about the churches and beer gardens, with no mention of his lady. I spotted Marie-Jo, at a distance, in a speeding convertible with a man's arm around her shoulder, and again, laughing, with Thierry, at the poolside, while I cowered in my grandmother's dining room in a long-sleeved, high-collared blouse, and endured Madame Darty's discourse on Virginia Woolf ("
très
Breeteesh"), whom she thought I should read, as my mother shot me sympathetic smiles from the far end of the table. (Madame Darty, thrilled to have been admitted to my grandfather's circle, provoked in him, as I had noted that first evening, a frustrating vagueness: she so readily held forth—an occupation, at his table, which had always been his own—that he lapsed into silence and total concentration upon his food, feigning so perfectly an old man's deafness that Madame suggested, to my grandmother, an ear doctor whose instruments might remedy the problem. "Today a hearing aid," she advised, "can be no bigger than the pit of an apricot!")

Lahou and Sami had faded entirely from view, but from Frédéric, who telephoned on the eve of his departure for a month in London and Edinburgh, I heard that Sami had withdrawn from school and would not resurface in the autumn, or only as the skulking menace outside the gates come to deposit and retrieve his beloved.

There was talk, in July, of Becky coming to visit in August, a prospect that sent me into thrilled confusion. (I was not sure whether we were friends, nor whether she would want to spend her afternoons at the Bellevue and would force me to accompany her there. It struck me that she might recoil at my newly developed physical deformities, or at my brother's, and deem me a virgin for life.) But the flurry of possibility was short-lived. The plan, it seemed, had been Eleanor's (as had my own trip, I recalled), devised to retrieve her wayward daughter from the clutches of an unsuitable young man; and Becky, when informed of it, had wailed and stomped with such distressing conviction—had refused her food, in fact—that Ron had intervened, and soothed his women, and found the girl an internship in the English department of his little college instead, Xeroxing and collating under a secretary's watchful eye, in the comfort of an air-conditioned office. Becky was to enter her final year of high school—not, as had been threatened, in public school—and was, while I lay sombrely sunning, touring the East Coast from Virginia to Maine to view her options. She would eventually, and perfectly appropriately, plump for Sarah Lawrence, a college overflowing with privileged rebels such as herself, whose primary aim was successfully to limn the margins of respectability, to engage in satisfying black-clad bohemianism without straying beyond the pale.

Upon hearing that Becky's arguments with Eleanor now involved a man (whose unsuitability had doubtless been paramount in her choice of him), I concluded that her defloration had been accomplished at last. It meant that she, too, had slipped further away, into the realm of adulthood; and that now, in my virginal set, I could number only myself and Etienne. (Rachel was not mentioned in my mother's conversation, by which I deduced that she still had not become a problem; for problem is what we all become to our parents, as we cease to be children.)

As for my parents, in their continuing: my grandfather, although he resumed no formal role in the running of the Bellevue, was nonetheless, as I have said, proprietary of his creation. He damped and overrode my father's enthusiasms, frowned upon his son's decisions, drummed his fingers with impatience at Alexandre's plans—"Castles in Spain," scoffed my grandfather—until he came to the point of Madame Darty-like deafness with regard to his successor, and heeded about the hotel delivering unsolicited and contrary indications to the senior employees my father sought to manage.

Stymied, my father shrank, his energy sapped. He clung to his tide and its privileges, while his own father needled him and whittled away beneath him. My father would slowly loosen his grip, give in to the biblical commandment that he honor his parent, and heed the stronger man's wishes: no expansion, no renovation, no fourth star that year, or the year after. But the capitulation came at a cost—in time, we would see, the ultimate cost—and he rose less early, stayed out less late, clapped fewer backs and threw out fewer—far fewer—belly laughs. He turned to my mother (although not to my mother alone) for succor, and he kept eating.

She, ambivalent, railed now against both men, father and son, but never in the one breath. She alternately defended and denounced her husband, and in this dialectic found a way to go on. She wished him dead, his father dead, she wished the Bellevue under the sea. She was not careful in what she wished for, but her wishing (and her praying, which she conducted privately; I do not know what she prayed for), for all its stridency, made continuing possible. Her wishing, far more than anything else, I took as the sign that the family would survive: her wishing for difference was something I had always heard, a tune familiar in its hollowness, and in its very insistence it staved off change. The dark day would come, I assured myself, when my mother would cease her wishing; as long as she wished, we were safe.

If, in previous years, I had wondered whether September brought an ending or a beginning, in 19901 had no doubt. The days had slogged, a behemoth each, unsparing, through the summer. I had not known a time so slow (although as I remember it, I have to tell myself it felt that way, those long afternoons in the garden now telescoped into a single dreary day), so very near to stopping altogether, and yet slow not in fullness, as my American summer days had been, but with a weight of emptiness unaccountable. Such interruptions as there had been revolved entirely around my family (a weekend visit, coincident with Bastille Day, from Tante Marie and her two younger sons—the ever-working husband and his nearest offshoot having remained behind in the estival emptiness of Geneva—marked the nadir among these), and so had not served to reshape the passage of hours, as pleasure so readily does.

The one unexpected and confounding delight that marked that summer came, unheralded, from my father, against whom I remained joined with my mother in tacit resistance. He, for all his dismay at his own father's tentacular and undermining reach through the Bellevue's inner workings, was not unaware of my own doldrums, even as he recognized that to my adolescent eye he was the enemy. In a stand I now see as courageous (then, my side already chosen, I was unsure what to make of it, and would have, were it not for my mother's chilly admonition that he was stall, and above all, my father, spurned his advance), he suggested—one tedious night at the dinner table when, in response to his query about my day, I had raised a sullen eyebrow and stretched my mouth into a thin, grim line, without speaking—that he and I, father and daughter alone, should have an evening on the town.