You Are My Heart and Other Stories (14 page)

“Oh yes. Lots of time. Being a professor, as Saul Bellow used to say, is a racket.”

“Thinking about Mort upset you. I'm sorry. I forgot how close you two were.”

“Did you?” Paul asked. He waited, but Margaret stared at him without expression. “He was twenty-nine when he died, and, unlike his brother, without a bitter bone in his body.” He forced a smile. “Sorry I got so edgy, but being with you again, well—the memories do find their way home.”

“That's a good thing, Paul.”

“Why?”

“Because—remember what you taught me, from Cather—Willa Cather—that sometimes memories are—how did it go?—that sometimes memories are better than anything that can ever happen to us again?” She shook her head sideways. “Amazing that she thought that way—and she wasn't even Irish.”

“After you and I split, my mother started an organization to help children with muscular dystrophy—take them to ballgames, movies, museums, parks—I drove the van during the summers, and we'd have raffles and Bingo nights to raise money for the outings, and to help families with—”

“—their ADL's?”

“—with their ADL's,” he said. “Yes. Thank you. But the organization died when she did.”

Margaret started to giggle, covered her mouth. “I got the answer right, didn't I?” she said.

“The answer?”

“To my question.”

“I don't understand,” Paul said. “You're being too obscure—or too clever—for me, but what I was thinking—what I was about to say—was that I used to want to kill Mort, did I ever tell you that?”

“Yes,” she said quietly.

“All the parents—the mothers especially—always saying how
wonderful
their children were, how much they
loved
them, how
blessed
they were, when these kids made their lives into living hells. In our hearts, we were all murderers. You ever have to clean up a two hundred fifty pound sack of a disabled man with a bad case of diarrhea?”

“Not yet.”

“Not
yet
? But—” He shook his head sideways, as if to clear it of extraneous matter. “But tell me this,” he said. “Besides the work you do with the law firm, and keeping tabs on old flames—what, as people put it these days, what are some of the—awful phrase—
fun things
you do?”

“Ah,” she said. “I was hoping you'd ask.”

“I'm sorry,” he said, and raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Really. I'm surprised talking about Mort got to me the way it did.”

“I'm not,” she said, “but here's the deal, since you ask. I've been on several of their cruises—the ones the alumni association sponsors. I've been to the Galapagos Islands, and on a trip that went from Patagonia to South Africa.”

“I get the brochures,” he said.

“Have you ever considered going on one?”

“Not yet.”

“I tried some of the more exclusive dating services first, and some online sites, and discovered what most women of a certain age discover,” she said. “And then a friend of mine from Weston, also a widow, met a man on a cruise—she said she figured
out that on a cruise you had a better than average shot at meeting a man of a certain age who was well-educated, had money
and
a curious mind, and, if alone on a cruise, would be in search of a companion.”

“So why,” he asked, “are you telling me all this?”

“You're teasing again, right?”

“What I think,” he said, “is that you were right before—that some things are better now because, as you put it, young people have—dread word—more
options
. But what we had in our years, I've always thought, was something they don't have now—the sense that anything was possible, whether in matters political
or
personal.”

She folded her napkin, placed it on the table. “Did you really
always
think that?” she asked.

“Now look—”

“I had this idea for a cartoon a while back, where you see people hustling toward two lines in which men and women are seated at tables across from one another, and above one set of tables there's a sign that says, ‘Speed Dating,' and above the other set it says, ‘Speed Eating.' ”

“That's funny,” Paul said. “That's actually very funny.”

“I waited seven months after your wife's passing, but it seems that you are, to put a kind spin on things, going to be sitting
shiva
for a very long time.”

“Excuse me?”

“You have no intention of ever calling me or seeing me again, do you?”

“I don't understand why you have to—”

“Can you answer the question, please?”

Paul shrugged, but said nothing.

“You knew that when you responded to my note and agreed to meet with me, didn't you?” Margaret stood, steadied herself against the back of her chair with one hand. “I believe our accounts are even. Still, I've decided to let you pay the check today.”

She moved to his side of the table, bent down, and, holding to his tie with a firm downward grip, whispered in his ear: “Isn't it amazing what the imagination can do to us? Given your line of work, you should be the expert on that, but really—don't you think it's amazing to realize, after all these years, that I'm not the woman you imagined I was once upon a time, or, for sure, the woman you imagine I am now?”

She kissed him on the cheek, then bit down on his ear lobe. “I had a swell time,” she said, and before he could respond, and while he touched his ear with his napkin, hoping, he realized, he might find pinpricks of blood on it, she turned and walked from the restaurant.

A
llan Blum and his wife Esther, vacationing in the South of France for the month of December with their friend Sam Gewirtz—in Spéracèdes, Aa village near Grasse, in the Maritime Alps—stood on the road that led from the church to the cemetery, waiting for the funeral cortege. Two helicopters hovered in the air above them. Behind metal barricades, crowds three and four deep lined both sides of the road, and policemen, in pairs and on horseback, were stationed along the route. Church bells had been ringing steadily.

The sky was dark, without sun or the imminence of sun. The temperature was near freezing—the radio had predicted thunderstorms—and on terraces that rose toward Cabris, a
village perché
a mile or so above Spéracèdes, the undersides of leaves on olive trees appeared in the light breeze to have been brushed with silver.

Late afternoon the day before, on their way back from Nice, where they had had a leisurely lunch and toured the old Russian and Jewish parts of the city, they had been stopped at four separate police check points. They were asked to get out of their car, had their passports and driver's licenses examined, and had been questioned rigorously: What was their purpose in being in France? Why had they rented a house in Spéracèdes, and how long did they intend to stay there? Were they acquainted with the Algerian woman who was accused of murdering the village doctor's
wife and child, or with other Algerians who lived or worked in Spéracèdes? Did they employ any Algerians to do housekeeping or gardening… ?

Allan and Sam, both in their late sixties, lived near each other on Manhattan's Upper West Side, had grown up in the same Brooklyn neighborhood, and had gone through elementary school, high school, and college together. Five months earlier, Sam had lost his wife Pauline to breast cancer, and when six weeks after this, at the time of the Jewish New Year, Allan suggested Sam join him and Esther for their vacation in France, Sam had agreed at once.

Sam pointed to the far side of the road—to the Hotel Soleillade, where police sharpshooters, in flak jackets, were positioned on the roof and in some of the upper-story windows. “When I lived in Paris for a while, and this was a long, long time ago, before Pauline and I were married,” he said, “I remember looking out my window—I had a second-floor apartment on the Boulevard Raspail—and seeing a funeral come by—a large black hearse, and mourners in top hats, and a brass band playing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.”

The church bells had stopped ringing, and police on motorcycles now cruised by slowly, along with journalists, photographers, and television crews. They were followed by four policemen on horseback, then by a phalanx of several dozen police marching in lock-step. Behind them came two teams of horses, one following the other, each team pulling a coffin—a large coffin first, a smaller one second—each coffin covered with a garland of braided red and white flowers.

“The French are really good at this,” Sam whispered. “They're terrible at many things, but when it comes to ceremony, they're terrific.”

Behind the police, at a distance of some fifteen to twenty yards, a crowd of mourners now appeared. From newspaper and television images, Allan recognized the man in the middle
of the front line, a tri-colored sash across his chest, as Doctor Henri Bertrand. Hatless, and wearing a gray three-piece suit—Allan gauged him to be in his early- to mid-forties—the doctor was strikingly handsome in the manner of an Italian movie star, with wavy, graying hair, deep set eyes, and a square chin. His arms were linked with the arms of two elderly women, one to each side of him, and the elderly woman to his right had her arm linked in the arm of a much older woman who walked with difficulty, dragging her left leg slightly. Doctor Bertrand stared straight ahead, and from the proud way he carried himself, he might, Allan thought, have been a hero returning to his hometown in order to witness a statue being unveiled in his honor.

A boy, perhaps five or six years old, in suit and tie identical to Doctor Bertrand's—his surviving child, Allan assumed—walked several feet to his left, hand in hand with a middle-aged woman. A priest, in long black robe, walked to Doctor Bertrand's right, and in the line of people immediately behind Doctor Bertrand walked four other priests, along with three women in brown and white habits, this group followed by a group of two to three dozen others, the women in dresses and topcoats, the men in suits, some of the women pushing baby carriages. Despite the chill in the air, Allan noticed, none of the men wore coats.

On television, the evening before, they had learned the news: that Doctor Bertrand's wife and three-month-old daughter had been found dead in their home, and that the police had taken the family's Algerian housekeeper into custody and would be charging her with the murders.

“Summer afternoon,” Esther said.

“
Summer ?
” Allan said. “But it's December. I don't understand—”

“Summer afternoon,” Esther repeated. “Henry James thought those were the two most beautiful words in the English language.”

Stepping out from behind the barricades, people now moved
onto the road to join the funeral procession. Allan turned to Esther and opened his mouth to speak—to ask how she could, in such a moment, be thinking such a thought—but as he did, something caught in his chest and he found himself doubled over, gasping for breath. He could hear Esther, a retired New York City high school English teacher, talking to Sam about Henry James, saying that there was not, as far as she could recall, a funeral anywhere in James's novels or stories. The same was true of Jane Austen. Nor were there any references she could remember in either writer's work to war. And yet, she was saying,
everything
was there—everything that mattered.

“I'm sorry,” Allan said. “I didn't want…”

He sat on a bench, Esther on one side of him, Sam on the other, Sam telling him that the same thing had happened to him once, at the funeral of an old girlfriend. Allan's heart began to slow down, to beat more regularly, and he told himself that in a week or so he would visit Doctor Bertrand in his office and have him listen to his heart, and perhaps the doctor's laying on of hands would provide the pretext for conversation. Although the doctor would hardly be a stranger to death, he might now be experiencing a more acute sense of loss than any he had previously imagined possible. The doctor might not want to burden friends and family with his situation, and it might, Allan thought, give the doctor's heart some ease to be able to talk with a stranger—with someone he
didn't
know…

 

The speaker, on a platform in front of the village's school, was talking about the National Front's
mission civilatrice
, and how the two great dangers facing France were unemployment and immigration. Three million unemployed Frenchmen, he declared, were three million immigrants too many. What had happened in Spéracèdes would soon be happening not only in Paris, Marseilles, or Lyon, but in every village where good and honest Frenchmen and Frenchwomen lived. North Africans and others
from that continent were draining France of its resources, and undermining the integrity of French national identity.

The French nation grieved with Doctor Bertrand and his family. Of course. In such a dark time, however, there
was
hope and there
was
light, for the National Front had solutions to France's problems: repatriate these immigrants, restrict their access to French citizenship, create and deploy a special National Guard to prevent civic unrest and subversion…

Allan saw that some of the people applauding most enthusiastically were villagers with whom he exchanged friendly greetings when he walked to and from town. The speaker—not Le Pen, who had sent his regrets and who, since Sarkozy's ascendancy, was limiting his public appearances—was listing items on the National Front's agenda: reintroducing the death penalty, criminalizing abortion, blocking France from further integration with Europe, encouraging French women—their patriotic duty—to have more children. Allan pointed to one of the placards:
Pour le SIDA—SIDAtoriums
.