The Summer of Katya (17 page)

The road followed the Gave de Salies that wended, now close beside our wheels and sparkling in the sunlight, now a field away and calm, now hidden in a curve of trees; and it was when we had rounded a turning that revealed two graceful bows of the river beyond and below us that Katya decided we had arrived at the perfect picnic site.

Monsieur Treville assumed his responsibilities as paterfamilias and supervised the unloading and setting out of our meal, giving instructions and assignments always a moment after the task had been already undertaken, and making suggestions that were light-heartedly ignored. When satisfied that everything had been done as he had directed, he rubbed his hands together and announced that he was famished and that those who were unwilling to dig in with conviction and a certain sense of territorial aggression would doubtless go hungry.

As it happened, he ate quite lightly, often drifting off into his private thoughts as he sat rather uncomfortably on the sheet that was our ground cloth and stared, unseeing, out over the vista. In organizing everything with such superfluous energy, he, too, had been playing his part in confecting a tone of fun and animation.

To our general amusement, Paul pursued his role of the comic complainer, grousing about everything bitterly and assuring us that the basic raison d’tre for landscape painting was to offer mankind the beauties of nature without requiring one to come into actual physical contact with its obscene reality. Furthermore, and more to the point, Katya had forgotten the salt!

The sheet was littered with the flotsam of the picnic and we had passed a quarter of an hour in relative silence, Katya leaning back on her elbows, her eyes closed, allowing the sunlight and breeze to touch her uplifted face, Monsieur Treville off somewhere in the maze of his thoughts, Paul flat on his back, his hat over his face as protection against the one fly that had attended the repast and had, of course, selected him as its host, and me lost in rehearsal of what I wanted to say to Paul. Katya rose and suggested we go down to the riverbank to collect wildflowers. Paul muttered sleepily that he would rather be struck by lightning, and I claimed to be too contented and lazy; so it was Monsieur Treville who grunted to his feet and trudged along after Katya, explaining to her that many wildflowers—golden-seal, henbane, foxglove, mayflower, among others—that are considered poisonous today, were used medicinally in the Middle Ages. Indeed, there was some reason to believe that….

And they departed, Katya moving gracefully through the tall grasses, the wind billowing her white dress; and her father following along behind, continuing his unheeded monologue. I watched them until they were lost among the trees bordering the Gave.

“She loves nature so,” I said quietly to Paul. “I admire—perhaps I envy—the way she embraces life and draws pleasure from simple things.”

“Hm-m-m,” he grunted noncommittally from beneath his hat.

“It seems a great pity, when happiness for her is compounded of such simple things as freedom and love, that she should be denied it… surrounded by such darkness and fear.”

He pointedly kept silent.

“May I discuss something with you, Paul?”

“If you must,” he muttered.

In the most succinct way possible, I told him what I had learned about the tragic event in Paris that had precipitated their flight to Salies. Then I made my case for their not running away from the evil tongues of rumormongers, as gossip would pursue them wherever they went, and they would lose years of their lives in futile efforts to elude the ineluctable.

He heard me out and was silent for a time. As he had not removed his straw boater from his face, I could read nothing of his expression. He drew a long sigh. “Montjean… what a nuisance you have been, rooting about in our past and lumbering me with your unwanted and worthless advice.”

“I have not been rooting about in your affairs. And I don’t consider my advice to be worthless… not for Katya, at any event.”

He lifted the hat from his face and opened his eyes to look at me with an expression of fatigue and condescending pity. “You are making judgments from the dangerous position of one who knows a little… but not enough. I intend to flesh out your knowledge, because learning the facts is not going to be a pleasant experience for you, and I believe you have earned a little unpleasantness. First tell me what you presume happened in Paris.”

“What happened? Well… I assume the events were as your father presented them—an accidental shooting of a young man whom he took to be a burglar.”

Paul settled his eyes on me, his expression flat. “And what if the shooting were not accidental?”

“Not accidental?”

“What if Father had known perfectly well that the young man was not a burglar?”

“I… I don’t understand?”

“Oh really? I thought you understood everything.” He closed his eyes but continued to speak lazily, through slack lips. “Let me tell you a little tale. One night, about two years ago, I returned to our house in Paris after a bout of carousing. The house had an enclosed garden behind it, and in order to avoid disturbing anyone, to say nothing of announcing my profligate tardiness, I entered through the garden gate. As I navigated the path, a bit the worse for drink, I stumbled over the fallen body of a young man who had for some months been paying court to Katya. He had been shot, Montjean. And he was quite dead. A clean shot through the heart. Are you seeing the picture?”

I could not answer.

“As you might imagine, I sobered up with a jolt. I knew instantly that Father had killed him. I can’t explain why, but I was absolutely sure. He had several times given voice to his dislike of the young man—a trivial mind; not worthy of Katya… that sort of thing.”

“But… I cannot believe that your father could… He’s a gentle and kind man. A little befuddled, but not…”

Paul opened his eyes and rose up onto one elbow to address me more directly. “My father, Montjean, is insane.”

The matter-of-fact way he said this chilled my spine.

“It’s in our blood. My great grandfather died in an asylum. One of my great uncles lived out his life incarcerated within his own home, attended in secret by two daughters who never married. A cousin of ours killed himself by stepping in front of a train. It seems that the disease passes along the male line of our family. That is why I must never marry, must never have children. My own father was always a bit of a recluse, preferring to live in past centuries rather than deal with life as it is. When he met my mother he fell in love so totally, so desperately, that friends of hers warned her against the marriage, considering Father’s devotion to be almost unhealthy in its intensity. But she accepted his proposal, and for a little less than a year they were caught up in the swirl of a grand passion. She became pregnant almost immediately, and she died in childbirth. The shock to my father was staggering. It goes without saying that he never loved again… never even looked at another woman. He withdrew into himself and devoted all his emotional life to his studies and to us… to Katya and me.

“I believe I told you at one time that Katya and I resemble our mother to an uncanny degree. I’ve seen photographs, and the similarity is quite shocking. Unsettling, indeed. I don’t claim to understand the psychological mechanisms—that’s more your bailiwick than mine—but I believe that what happened was this: Father wandered into the garden, his mind all tangled in his studies, and he saw Katya in the arms of a young man. All innocent enough, of course. Young people trying to discover the perimeters of their feelings, the boundaries of their love… that sort of thing. But what Father saw was… his wife in the arms of another man. He returned to his study—stunned and bewildered. Katya bade the young man good-night and retired to her room. The fellow lingered in the garden, all aglow with dreams of a most saccharine sort, we may presume. Again Father comes into the garden. This time he has a gun—one of my target pistols. And…” Paul tugged down the corners of his mouth and shrugged.

He lay back on the ground cloth and closed his eyes. After a time, he continued. “I cannot know if that is exactly what happened, of course, but I fancy it’s close enough. At all events, when I arrived home that night, I came upon the poor fellow. At that time, I had not yet perfected the distant sangfroid that has become so attractive an element of my character. I was frightened, confused, shocked—indeed, I experienced the whole medley of emotions appropriate to the circumstance. Unable to think clearly, I woke Katya and told her what had happened. You can imagine her state. We talked for hours… late into the night. What were we to do? It was unthinkable that we could allow Papa to go to prison or, worse yet, to an asylum. For much of the time Katya was teetering on the edge of shock. She gripped my hand until the fingernails broke my skin, and she shuddered convulsively. But she did not cry. She has never cried since, in fact.

“Not knowing what to do, we agreed to do nothing. Not until morning, at any rate. I sent Katya to bed—certainly not back to sleep—and I dragged the body into the shrubbery to conceal it until I had decided upon a plan of action.”

I sat there unmoving, unable to comprehend all that I was hearing. I remember that the sun was hot on the back of my neck, but I felt a chill of horror beneath the warm skin. The breeze turned a corner of the sheet and covered my outstretched legs. To this day, for some reason I do not understand, the image of my legs covered with the white sheet epitomizes that moment for me. Finally I was able to say, “But what options did you have? Surely your father insisted on facing up to his actions and not allowing his children to become implicated.”

“Fate delights in its little ironic twists, Montjean. Father did in fact confess, but that is not to say that he faced up to his actions. That next morning, Father remembered nothing of the matter. Nothing. It was gone from his memory. Obliterated. The man with whom I took breakfast, the man who babbled on about some minor point of medieval lore, was totally innocent, had never harmed another human being in his life, was in fact incapable of harming anyone. He remembered not a trace. Indeed, ever since that night, Father’s memory has been weak and perforated to the point of burlesque comedy, as even you must have noticed. Surely you don’t imagine that a vague and distracted mind such as he now possesses could have made him one of France’s most respected amateur scholars. Before the… accident… his mind and memory were like honed Swedish steel.”

“But, I don’t understand. If the incident was gone from his memory, how could he have confessed?”

“My dear fellow, I am nothing if not clever to the point of deviousness. I availed myself of half-truths and of all the forces of my imagination to trick him into admitting to the authorities that he had shot the young man, without subjecting him to the horror of knowing that he had killed a human being in cold blood… without making him face the fact that he was insane. First, I told him outright that the lad was dead, shot in your garden. Then I made up the tale that he had tried to force his attentions on Katya, and that, in her panic, she had shot him.”

“What?”

“Reserve your astonishment, old fellow. It gets more baroque as it goes along. I convinced Father that, in her state of shock, Katya did not have the slightest memory of killing the man. He agreed with me that it would be cruel—and possibly dangerous to her mind—to allow her to learn the terrible truth. Between us, Father and I concocted the story that he shot the young man by accident, mistaking him for an intruder. So, you see, Father confessed to killing the boy without ever knowing he had actually done it. The police accepted our story after minimal investigation.”

“Minimal?”

“We are, after all, a family of some importance. Justice may be blind, but she is not without a sense of social propriety. The poor are grilled and cross-questioned; the rich have their statements taken down, with close attention to accurate spelling.”

Paul had recounted the events with his eyes closed, lying on his back, his delivery slow and monotonic, almost bored. I wondered if this cold insouciance was a product of his unemotional character, or if it was a defense he had developed.

“And Katya?” I asked after a silence. “How did all this affect her?”

“As you would imagine. She was fond of the young man… perhaps even loved him. The fact of his death was shocking; the method of it—by her own father’s hand—was shattering. If she had also known that the shooting was no accident, that her father (or rather the madness hiding within her father’s flesh) had cold-bloodedly shot him down, I daren’t consider what effect it might have had on her. Fortunately, she never knew. So you see, to this day my family survives in a fragile web of interwoven misapprehensions. Katya believes Father shot the young man by error, and that his mental state was precariously shocked by the event. Father believes that Katya shot the fellow in panic after his attempt to violate her. And both of them are willing to do whatever is necessary—to pull up roots and go to the ends of the earth if necessary—each for the purpose of protecting the other. I hope you can appreciate how dangerous it would be for both of them if your probing were to expose them to the truth. Your blundering about in our affairs could easily tear the delicate web of lies that prevents my father and my sister from discovering the horrible and destructive truth.”

“And you sit at the center of the web. A spider-god controlling their fates.”

Paul vented a long, shuddering sigh, as though infinitely weary of me. He was silent for a time before continuing in his flat, almost indolent tone. “It would not have been a matter of the guillotine for Papa. It would have been an asylum. Have you ever experienced an asylum for the criminally insane, Montjean? Do you have any idea what they’re like?”

“As a matter of fact, I have. I did a year of internship at the Passy institution before coming to Salies.” I did not confide to Paul that my experiences at Passy had turned me away from all thoughts of pursuing my interest in the new science of psycho-analysis. I had found the treatment of the mentally ill, even at such an advanced facility as Passy, to be brutal, degrading, horrid. The nurses and attendants seemed to have been dredged up from the lowest orders of society. The case which, in my mind, italicized the horrors of institutionalization was that of a young woman I shall call Mlle M. She was young and very pretty, beneath her slovenly, indeed disgusting, faade. The event that had driven her beyond the boundaries of reality had to do with incest. No purpose would be served in detailing it further. Mlle M. used to wander the grounds of Passy, her expression bland and distant, her soft eyes empty. The most salient manifestation of her condition was her practice of soiling herself and refusing to allow anyone to clean her up. Despite my natural disgust, I felt particular compassion for her, and after many months of gently, slowly bringing her to have confidence in me, I learned something that shocked me and filled me with rage. During her first weeks at Passy, the gentle and withdrawn Mlle M. had been subjected to frequent and rather bizarre sexual assaults on the part of guards and attendants who, as I later discovered, considered such opportunities to be one of the privileges associated with their unpopular occupations. Mlle M. confided in me with expressions of sly pride that it was to protect herself from these assaults that she had devised the practice of soiling herself and making herself too disgusting to be desirable.