The Last Life (44 page)

"I've been talking to your Aunt Eleanor today," my mother ventured, passing a bloodless hand through her hair, and seeming to shiver.

"Oh yes?"

"She—it was her idea, really, but it's not without merit, I think. I wonder—she wondered—whether a change might not be the best thing for you."

"For us?"

"Well—you see, my life—Etienne—no, for you."

"I don't want to go live with Aunt Eleanor and Uncle Ron. Maman, don't be silly. I want to be with you."

"That's what you think, first off, but I want you to give the idea some thought—"

"I know that I couldn't—"

"Besides which, it's not a question of you living with them."

"Then what?"

"I thought—well, the idea was of boarding school."

"Boarding school? Where?" In my world, such exile was only for the stupid, although I was faintly aware of boarding schools for the children of gentry, little tided snobs who said "
vous
" to their parents.

"Oh, not here, sweetheart. Not in France. You're half American, remember. My half." She laughed, mirthlessly, and spoke in English. "The half you have left."

"It must be incredibly expensive."

"That's not for you to worry about."

"And Grand-père and Grand'-mère—what do they think?"

"I haven't asked them. I'm asking you. They believe in turning over a new leaf, or they did, for themselves..."

"But Grand'-mère said, and she's right—we've got to stick together."

"Is she? Right? I don't know. Think about it. Think about the future."

In subsequent days, I did; and realized that, in spite of everything, I never truly had before. The accordion of my life (so long and so short both, a life) had never been a question. I had not thought of myself as a person who could choose. Freedom was a terrible prospect, exhilarating and terrible. I was on the cusp of sixteen: adulthood was no further in front of me than the summer of Thibaud, my grandfather, and America was behind me; and my mother was leaving it to me to decide.

It was a family story told of me (my own, and almost my earliest, bead) that when I was a child of four, one November afternoon, I was taken by my parents, with the infant Etienne in his carriage, for a walk in an unfamiliar park. I was bundled in a fur-trimmed camel coat with leather buttons, a matching fur-trimmed toque upon my tightly braided hair. I wore woolly black tights, the crotch doubtless drooping near my knees, and patent leather shoes with straps. I skipped ahead of my parents, arms out, crying out to the park at large that I was a princess, turning back on occasion for adult approval of my antics. At the center of the green we came on a fountain, in the middle of which squatted Neptune with his trident aloft and, at his ankles, a clutch of openmouthed fish, from whose orifices, in summertime, water gushed abundantly. It was then winter, however, and the fishes merely gaped, their goggle eyes on me, while beneath them the silty pool lay quiet, a wistful leaf or two adrift upon its stagnant water. I hopped up onto the fountain's marble border and proceeded to trot round and round, insisting to these figures that I was indeed royalty, my arms outstretched, my eyes intermittently catching the approaching, colorful blur of my parents; when suddenly, to their consternation, I appeared to pause, and then jumped, tights and coat and toque and all, into the water up to my waist. Hauled, bedraggled and chattering, from the murk by my bellowing father (his arms still, then, the safest refuge), I was asked why I had done it. I announced—and it was true; I remember precisely the instant of teetering—that, aware I was going to fall willy-nilly, I had assumed my fate by making it my intention. What I actually said was simpler, of course: "I was falling, so I jumped."

Already at four, from somewhere, I had faith in intention—as if the fact that it had been willed altered the quality of my wetness, and the cold that ensued (three days in bed with soup and stuffed toys). And that, always, was the lesson of my family's stories, of my great-aunt Estelle, of Tata Christine, of my grandparents, of my mother. My father's youthful experience merely reinforced the belief: departure was offered to him, not chosen, and then thrust upon him, with perilous, some might say fatal, consequences. The implication was clear. Severance, departure, once mooted, must be seen as inevitable: that has always been my unquestioned belief. If choice is illusory, the aim must be to keep the illusion intact. With this corollary: there is no returning. We need the might-have-been because we know it will not ever be; the imaginary is our sustenance, but the real is where we live, a reality of fragments. We move the pieces when movement is possible, because possibility and necessity, on some plane, are one; because what is fated and what will be are inescapably the same, and the illusion our only choice, choice our illusion.

And so, because I had to, I chose to go. Aline and Ariane were at once impressed and horrified at the prospect ("America? But people there are so shallow, no? And everybody drives cars everywhere. Will you go to New York?"). My grandmother, tight-lipped, could hardly restrain her contempt, while my grandfather seemed barely to absorb the information, so preoccupied was he with the columns of red ink that laced the Bellevue's monthly accounts. (My mother did not explain how the school would be paid for, but I gathered, eavesdropping, that she had hoarded her share of her parents' small legacy and husbanded it well, and that the funds were to be drawn from a hitherto undisclosed American source.) I asked Etienne, repeatedly, what he would think of my leaving, and he merely giggled and rolled his eyes, stretching a hand, or a foot, as much as to say "I am here. I will always be here. Here are my limbs." Foolishly, I believed him.

The choice of school—it seemed at a cursory glance that New England was thronged with such institutions—was limited by the tardiness of my application (it was June by the time the decision to proceed was formally taken), and consequently centered upon places where Aunt Eleanor could tweak a connection. In this way, and to my chagrin, I was presented with only three options, two of them single-sex schools—one to which girls were invited to bring their own horses—and the third a formerly all-male establishment on the outskirts of a small town in New Hampshire. The brochure portrayed ruddy youths trudging along snowy paths, their backpacks sagging and their teeth agleam; and again, similar groups sprawled with notebooks in the spring, beneath flowering trees, while behind them a white spire glinted in the unblemished azure sky.

The catalogues for all three schools, on glossy stock, bore lists of student-to-teacher ratios, of ethnic minority and international attendance, of colleges chosen by graduates in recent years. Smiling alumni peered out from the pages, alongside ebullient quotations about their experiences. Teachers were shown in concerned attitudes, monitoring students over Bunsen burners, or writing on blackboards; or, whistle in hand, at the edges of autumn fields, upon which blond girls with strong thighs and flying tunics wielded hockey sticks with fierce determination.

"Is this what school was like for you?" I asked my mother, bewildered at the sleekness and enthusiasm of it all.

"I went to the local Catholic high school, dear," she said. "So, no. But college was, a little. A little like this."

"It doesn't look like school at all."

"It'll be fun."

"That's my point." I pointed at a photo of a school play, elaborately staged and costumed. "What's that got to do with school?"

"It's a different approach, that's all. You don't have to go, you know."

But faced with these seductive plates of golden youth (not a parent, not a family in sight), I could not fail to succumb. "I want to. I can be—anyone—there, can't I?"

"I suppose you can, if you put it like that."

"Who I am, it doesn't travel, does it?"

"What do you mean?"

"Nobody will know, except what I tell them?"

"No. Nobody will know."

I selected the coed boarding school, in spite of its remote location ("Show me New Hampshire on a map," I entreated my mother), largely because I saw a face in their catalogue that resembled Thibaud's, while all the girls at the two other schools looked confidently alien, like escaped guests from the Spongs' cocktail party on Cape Cod.

The selection made, I bragged to Aline and Ariane about it, conjuring for them my Boston summer, as they sat, rapt, cross-legged, in their spoiled back garden. They turned the catalogue pages again and again, till they were grimed with fingerprints, and marvelled at the banks of computers, the microscopes, the quaint chapel.

"So you won't sit the
bac,
then?" asked Aline, wrinkling her pale brow.

"I don't suppose so. Not there. I can always come back after a year and—"

"So you'll become American?"

"Don't be silly."

"But I mean—for university—you'll go to university there?" She seemed appalled.

"I don't know. Maybe. It depends—"

"But you'll have to, won't you?"

"I don't have to do anything."

She shrugged. "Well, otherwise it doesn't make sense, does it? Because if you just have to come back and prepare the exams here, then why go?"

"Because I can. Because I want to."

Her sister sighed. "It's beautiful, Sagesse, but it just seems so—remote, you know. I guess it's hard for us to understand. I mean, you're American, so—"

"I'm not American."

She blinked. "Well, half American, then. You're not French, anyway, not the way, say, we are..."

"What's that supposed to mean? Of course I'm French."

"Sort of."

"Not sort of..."

"I think," Aline interrupted, "all Ariane is trying to say is that we would never belong there, so it seems strange to us."

"I won't belong there either, you know."

"Then why go?"

"Because I don't belong here."

"Precisely," said Ariane. "You're different."

When I reported this conversation to my mother and grandmother, my grandmother rumbled with disgust.

"That's the French for you," she said. "Small-minded."

"But Grand'-mère, you're French."

"I am, it's true, in a way. But I've always disliked the mentality of metropolitan France. In Algeria, we weren't like that. When I think of our ancestors, struggling so hard for the glory of France—for this, only to be told that we don't belong—"

"But you wanted to come here—"

"We wanted to because we had to. And they treated us like dirt. And the
harkis
—betrayed by this country, both here and in Algeria—they treated us all like dirt."

"Then surely it's good for me to go to America?"

"America? As if there were anything for you there!" My grandmother blotched and quivered. "The LaBasse family survives by sticking together. We always have. This is where we belong: together. And your mother knows it. Or you ought to, Carol. By now." She turned, fierce, upon her daughter-in-law. "You plan to send this child off into the wilderness—no family, no structure, no context. And for what? To a cesspool of violence and McDonald's, the Styrofoam culture, the land of packaging—"

"What exactly," asked my mother tightly, "would you have us do? In favor of what do you stand? Not of France, apparently. So I've offered my daughter a chance to start again. You'd have me send her off to Algiers, I suppose, in honor of some vague nostalgia?"

"Oh honestly!"

"No, I mean it," my mother persisted. "What is she supposed to believe in? If Alexandre had believed in something, then—"

"Then what?"

"Never mind."

"I want to believe in the future," I said, in a joking tone, trying to avert the friction. "That seems like a good thing to believe in."

"The future doesn't exist," retorted my grandmother sourly.

"Maybe the past doesn't either. Maybe nothing does," I waffled. "Maybe only Etienne knows what really exists, because that's what he does, that's what he focuses all his energy on—existing. But he's not giving away any secrets."

"Nor is he heading off to some overpriced summer camp that some marketing manager calls a school. He's staying right here. And so should you."

My mother took a breath. "And when Alexandre wanted to stay, in Algiers, and you were leaving—"

"That was different. And, as we know now, a bad mistake."

"It was his choice."

"Was it?"

"Come on," I tried to intervene. "What does it matter now? We can't do anything about it."

Both women glared at me.

"We can, we ought to do something about what's happening now," my grandmother said.

"But I want to go, Grand'-mère. Maman isn't forcing me."

"As if you knew what was good for you! You're just a child!

"Maman doesn't think so. She trusts me. Don't you?"

My mother nodded, wearily.

"So that's that."

"Let me tell you something." My grandmother shivered in her seat, as if a painful ripple ran through her spine. She composed herself; then spoke. Her hands, veiny, spotted, were crossed in her lap. She reminded me of an iguana: ancient, somehow primitive.

"When your grandfather first flew over here to look at land, he didn't tell me what he was doing. He just said it was a business trip. I thought he'd been sent by the St. Joseph. I had no idea. And when he came back, and sat me down, and your father and your aunt beside me, in a row in the living room, and marched up and down in front of us waving his hands, rattling the china, and told us that he had signed the papers on this patch of scrub in some unknown little burg in France, I cried. I simply dissolved. Your father, all of fourteen, younger than you are now, stood up and stormed out. He turned white, the purple vein at his temple throbbed, ready to burst. Just a boy. He didn't take a jacket. In his shirtsleeves, he slammed the door.

"The row he precipitated was unending, terrible. Always between them. There was no meal where it didn't hover over us like a swarm, where it didn't bubble through the conversation, through the simplest words, like lava. Eventually, Alexandre more or less ran away from home. He spent more and more time at his grandmother's house—and how could we condemn that?—and less and less with his family. He'd come home in the afternoons, and leave again before supper, like a visitor. Sneaking home to bed like a thief. Believe me, I cried about it. By myself, in private, when my husband was at work and my daughter at school. Within the year, he asked my mother if he could live with her altogether, and she was delighted. She even came to me to plead his case—a vulnerable stage, she said. My own mother. Important not to disrupt his education. Fine. He and your grandfather had been at loggerheads for months by then. Although in truth it had been, perhaps, since forever. It had always been difficult between them.