The Last Life (48 page)

My mother was girlish in her glee. On the way home, she turned at every red light and gasped again at how I'd changed, how well I looked, how much I had been missed. Stunned by the flight, the hours in Paris, my lack of sleep, I nonetheless tried to answer her zealous questions as lightly, as fully as I could: about the campus, the roommate, the teachers, the food. But what I wanted to do was peer quietly, from my window, at the crystalline winter light, at the red "Tabac" signs and green pharmacy crosses, the branching lanes and occasional ambling peasants, at the red-tiled roofs and knobbly vineyards, at the barren blue rise of the mountains.

"The cars look so small, so white!" I exclaimed. She laughed, and Etienne with her. And when, on the highway, I rifled for change at the tollbooth, we both smiled at my fistful of useless quarters and dimes.

Of her own news, my mother was circumspect. "When we get home, sweetie. There'll be plenty of time to talk about everything when we get home."

I sighed at the palm-lined boulevard, and noted the fresh paint on the Bellevue's gates as we passed. I marvelled at the new traffic light on the brow of the hill. I felt my lungs fill to bursting as we turned into our familiar street.

"It's home, Etienne! We're really here!"

And he, by way of calm acknowledgment, mumbled, "Graw."

"He's so pleased. He missed you, too. And he's had such an autumn—a lung infection, you know, quite bad. He's only just got over it."

"You never told me."

"Sweetie, what would've been the point? He wasn't in any danger. And you would just have worried, all that way away, over nothing."

"What else don't I know?"

"Don't be silly. You're here now. There will be plenty of time for everything."

"Two weeks isn't plenty of time."

"Don't be like that." My mother closed her hand over my wrist, and the heavy gold bracelet she wore lay cold on my skin.

"New?" I asked, fingering it.

"That's another story, dear. All in good time."

I had never before remarked how meanly the tires of Etienne's chair squeaked on the front hall's marble floor; nor had I remembered the hollowness of my own step in the entryway. The house felt different, chilled and quiet, as though we three were intruders upon a long-enclosed emptiness.

"It feels like you don't even live here," I said. "It's strange. My voice almost echoes."

"What nonsense," my mother chided. "You've just forgotten. Your memory must be pretty short. Now, leave your bags—we'll get them later. Fadéla has left us some lunch, I think, and we can eat right away. Then you can sleep, which is what you most need. I thought we'd put off your grandparents till tomorrow, give you a chance to catch up. And then—" as she was speaking she wheeled Etienne, pale and scrawny, through the
salon
to the dining room, where the table was set for three, with a large jug of water and a baguette in a cloth-lined basket. My place, however, was set at my father's seat; and while my mother chattered, I set about moving it, place mat and cutlery, glass and napkin, back to its rightful position.

"You can't pretend he'll come back, dear," my mother said. "You might as well sit in the armchair."

"I don't want to."

"As you like, then. But it's not healthy. Now, as I was saying—"

Over shrimp and avocado salad and chablis, while Etienne contemplated an empty plate and me, with a gaze in which I discerned, or believed I did, relief and devotion, my mother unfolded the facts of their months without me. Etienne's illness—initially a rumbling cough, which had deteriorated to spouts of greenish phlegm that had threatened to choke him—had necessitated his hospitalization for a fortnight. I marvelled, and was furious, at the smooth conversations my mother had directed over the long-distance lines, at the careful ease of her lying. Again, she maintained that she had done right to keep the news from me.

"But what if it had got worse? What if he'd been dying?"

"You're being melodramatic, sweetie. He wasn't in danger. And if he had been, of course I would have told you, and you would've come straight home."

"How do I know? How can I trust you?"

"You'll just have to. I'm your mother. You're making such a fuss about a little infection—"

"Two weeks in hospital, Maman!"

"You had enough to contend with, a new environment far from home, not to mention the burden of everything else, of your father. And I was taking care of your brother. And all the doctors, and Iris too. You're not responsible for him; I am. You have a life to lead."

"He's my brother."

"He's my son. I would do the same again." She was quiet for a moment, playing with the breadcrumbs around her plate. "But it was, you know, it was killing, all on my own. You can't imagine ... And it's made me think—"

"What?"

"I've been talking about it—with friends, with a friend—"

"With whom? What?"

"Don't get all upset. I've been wondering if it isn't too much to ask, of all of us, for Etienne's well-being—I mean it, above all, for him—"

"What are you getting at?"

"There are places—you know this—equipped, better equipped than even this house can ever be—"

"You aren't!"

"I've just been talking to people, that's all. You know your brother—" we both looked at him, and he grinned. "He loves people, and attention. He loves being made a fuss of. And now—"

My mother went on to explain that her resources were not unlimited, that there was to be no life insurance payment because of my father's means of death, that she was, in short, looking for a job. "And if I'm out all day, and back only after Etienne's bedtime, that leaves him all the time with Iris. And she's wonderful to him, to be sure, but that would double her hours, and the expense—you have to understand, it's unrealistic not to consider, for his welfare—"

"Grand-père will pay for it, you know he will."

"That's another thing we need to talk about. I don't—I'm not—relations between your grandparents and me are not—they're not easy. I don't want to upset you, it's just the way it is. Your father never crossed them, you know. They've been coddled—that's the word: coddled. So that now, when we disagree, they can't seem to—and they're under strain, and—"

"Is the hotel doing badly?"

"It's not a good time for the business, that's part of it, and your grandfather has had to work very hard, and for a man of his age, coming out of retirement—but it's not only that. I think they can't—I think your father's passing has been extremely hard for them."

"And not for us?"

"It's been hard on our relationship, then. Theirs and mine. Your grandmother thinks it very wrong that you're away, and now—"

"But they'd want to help, for Etienne. To stick together. Have you even asked?"

"I don't want to ask, Sagesse. That's the bottom line."

It was not, of course, the bottom line. The gold bracelet, clunky and ostentatious, speckled with rubies and sapphires, was the bottom line: my mother had a boyfriend. It took her days—almost half my holiday—to work up to the news. Information about Titine's death in October, about Iris's eldest son's engagement, about the new priest in the parish, a young man with, she said, "bedroom eyes"—all were more pressing revelations than the arrival on the scene, scant months after my fathers death, of a suitor, a divorced businessman in his early fifties whom she had known socially for years and never mentioned, but to whose ardent attentions she had swiftly, even eagerly, fallen prey.

"He's wonderful with Etienne," she assured me, her cheeks bright and her eyes aglow, as I stared stonily out the window. "He's a kind, gentle, patient man. But strong. Not like—"

"Not like my father."

"He's very stable."

"I'm sure."

"And independent."

"No doubt."

There was a silence.

"How could you?" I asked.

"I'm grieving too, Sagesse. Paul is respectful of that. But you, of all people, ought to understand."

"I?"

"We've talked—at least, we did, when your father was alive. I have a life, too. I'm entitled to one. We have to change. Things change. Can you give me that much?"

I shrugged.

"His children are grown up. He's free. He's in love with me."

"And you?"

"It's too early for me to know."

But I prised from her the truth that the "friend" who advocated Etienne's removal to an institution was none other than Paul, who also advised my mother to sell the house and move into his villa in Nice; that he slept in my father's bed; that he was offering her a position in his firm. "He wants me to be independent. Not like your father's family. He sees that it was the problem with his first marriage, that he and his wife grew apart. He's very liberated."

"Marriage?"

"He said marriage, not I. He's patient. You'll like him, I promise."

"Is this why you sent me to boarding school?"

"Don't be obscene."

"Who's being obscene? I ask you."

I wondered how it could never have occurred to me that such a thing might happen. Never, in all the wishing before my father's death, never, in the cloud of guilt and sorrow afterwards, never had I imagined—although, with detachment, I could see the logic of it—that my mother's transformation, our transformation, could involve leaving behind all of it, all of us, the Bellevue and my grandparents, and, above all, me and Etienne. My brother, in his intransigence, the one who would not change, was still, to the last, to have held us, to have remained at our core. Our house had been built for him, our lives patterned around his needs. And if I had been horrified at the ease with which my father had closeted my brother, that long-ago afternoon, in the elevator, and at the ease with which I had left him there, then what was I to feel at my mother's readiness to shunt him, to shuck him off, to hollow him from our lives like the pit from a peach, and wheel him off to an institution more truly imprisoning than the LaBasse family had ever been?

The afternoon of this exchange, a brittle, grey day just before Christmas, I went, on foot and of my own accord, to visit my grandmother. We had all had supper together the night after my arrival, a polite and formal affair at their apartment, but neither she nor my grandfather had stopped by the house in the intervening days. She greeted me at the door (Zohra had already left), and her hand on my shoulder was so cold that I could feel it through my sweater. My grandmother looked older to me, the pattern of her cheeks crazed, like old porcelain, with new lines and furrows. Her eyes burned in their sockets, and although she smiled at me, I felt no warmth from her gaze. I felt like a traitor.

We sat opposite one another at the dining room table, the site of so many stiff meals and, for me, of such quiet dread. Outside, a haze enveloped the horizon and the sea churned in its steely broth. The pool below us lay sprinkled with dead leaves, abandoned for the season, its turquoise water stagnant and forlorn. The room, like my grandmother, was cold: a draft seeped around the window frames and scuttled along the floor, in eddies around my ankles.

"So your mother has told you about her paramour?" My grandmother's nose trembled with disdain, and her Parkinson's sent erratic shivers through her.

"I suppose she has."

"And how do you feel about it?"

"I don't know. I haven't met him."

"Is that all you can say?"

"How do you and Grand-père feel?"

"It would seem it is none of our business. I feel—I am horrified, for your poor father. At the error of his choice of wife, which is only now clear. Now, perhaps, I understand why he did what he did."

"That's a horrible thing to say."

"Your mother has succeeded, in a matter of months, in dismanding a family. A family that had stayed together in spite of terrible trials, for a long time. She is a wicked woman."

"I don't know that—"

"I feel sorry, above all, for you and for your brother. Although you don't seem to mind, off gallivanting in America. Etienne's happiness is apparently of no importance to you. But at least you are a child."

"I'm not really, anymore."

"Your mother is the person responsible. I don't blame you. You're my granddaughter, and I'll always love you, and you'll always have a home here. But that woman—"

"She is my mother."

"If you feel that way..." My grandmother made an exasperated swoop of the head.

"Is this guy so awful?"

"I don't know him. I don't care to. He's a Gaullist, for one thing."

"Yes, but—"

"And I can't condemn him for trying his luck, albeit with unseemly haste. But your mother seems to have welcomed him into her bedroom without batting an eye—"

"It's hard, being alone."

"What would you know about it? And she was never alone. You didn't have to leave—she sent you. And your grandfather and I, what are we? Nothing? And Etienne?"

"But she doesn't belong. She's never belonged."

"Then that's been her decision."

"But you've never liked her."

"Have I ever said such a thing? Has your grandfather?"

"What about me, then?"

"You'll always belong here, with us, if you choose. That's up to you."

The apartment's silence weighed, the moribund rooms with their trinkets and doilies pressed upon us, the cold air so thick it felt like matter between us. There was a faint smell of hying, left over from lunch, and of the soap with which Zohra scrubbed the floors.

"Thank you," I said. "I'm grateful." But the choice—is it not always?—had already been made.

My mother was out when I got home. Iris sat in the living room, in the rose velvet love seat which illuminated her dark skin, knitting, while Etienne, covered in his plaid rug, dozed near the window.

"He likes to look out and see the day," she said. "Even when it's not a particularly nice one. I know it's colder over there, but it makes him happiest, so I bundle him up warm and let him have what he wants."

"Has he been for a walk?"

"Too brisk, today. With his lungs, now, we want to be extra careful. A recurrence would be an awful thing."