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  For Nick

  CONTENTS

  MAGDALENA Vilnius, 1991

  2008

  RICHARD Paris, June

  NEIL London, May

  MAGDALENA Swindon, May

  RICHARD Paris, June

  MAGDALENA Swindon, May

  NEIL Paris, June

  MAGDALENA Paris, June

  RICHARD Paris, June

  NEIL Paris, June

  RICHARD Paris, June

  NEIL Paris, June

  MAGDALENA Between Orléans and Meung-sur-Loire, June

  NEIL Vilnius, June

  RICHARD Paris, June

  NEIL Vilnius, June

  RICHARD Paris, June

  MAGDALENA Santiago de Compostela, July

  A Note on the Author

  {MAGDALENA}

  Vilnius, 1991

  In the old days when a child was born, Luck would stand outside the house and whisper at the window. He will be rich. He will be tall. He will have his share. After the baby was washed and wrapped the midwife would sit by the window and listen. He will live only as long as the little fire burns, Luck might say. And the midwife, if she were clever, would tell the family that they must never let the fire in the stove go out. The mother would spend her days feeding twigs into the flames and the son would grow up with the kitchen always warm until—this is how it happened in the stories—he married a rich girl who didn’t care about the old ways, who probably wasn’t very good in the kitchen and had no use for her mother-in-law’s advice, and he would fall stone-dead the moment she let the stove get cold.

  That was a story Magdalena’s mother used to tell her, until one day, when Magdalena was just beginning to learn to read but before she knew that anything was wrong, she asked her mother why the midwife hadn’t stopped Luck from coming through the window with her pen.

  “What pen?” her mother said.

  “To write her name.”

  “What name?”

  “On the baby.”

  “What are you talking about?” her mother said.

  “Like here.” Magdalena ran her fingers over the words that were written across her mother’s neck and down her arms, looking for Luck, which in Lithuanian was a word that also meant Happiness, and sometimes meant something that was not exactly either. Almost everyone had it on them somewhere, and she found it at the bend inside her mother’s wrist, where the soft skin folded the letters. “Here,” she said. The letters moved a little with the beat of her mother’s pulse. Magdalena traced her fingers over the word, wondering how Luck had learned to write her name so neatly, considering she was nothing but a fairy and had never gone to school.

  But her mother pulled her hand away. “You’re making jokes,” she said, not laughing. She felt Magdalena’s forehead for a fever and made her go to bed, and after that she didn’t tell the story of Luck outside the window anymore.

  2008

  {RICHARD}

  Paris, June

  Inga Beart lost so many things in Paris that her biographers hardly get around to mentioning the shoes. At the time, several newspapers reported that she was barefoot when she boarded the ship back to New York, refusing the arm of the ship’s doctor and feeling along the deck with her toes. Yet to the best of my knowledge no one has ever tried to explain what exactly happened to her shoes. They were red, with a high delicate heel, and historians say that throughout her career she was rarely seen in public without them. By the time she left France in 1954 those shoes would have been as familiar to a generation of readers as the pale eyes and ink-stained lips in her dust jacket photograph, or the way she had of bullying something fine and lyrical out of a plain phrase.

  I don’t blame the biographers for giving so little attention to the subject of her feet. In the wake of the most violent episode of Inga Beart’s quick life, the fact that her shoes were gone must seem like a minor detail, and scholars have focused instead on the last lines she wrote on the ship back to America—a confession, though no one believed it, scratched into the paint on the side of her berth with the stub of a pencil she had kept hidden under her tongue. Because by then, of course, they’d taken everything else away.

  But of all the questions that remain about Inga Beart’s final months, it’s the disappearance of her red shoes that matters most to me. I’d thought for years about going to Paris to see if I couldn’t find out for myself what happened to them, though of course I knew it was next to impossible that any evidence of their fate still existed some fifty years on. I’d asked a few of the historians about them, but they only gave me a shrug or raised an eyebrow at an old man’s interest in a pair of ladies’ high heels long since gone to dust. They must have gotten left behind in Paris, they told me. Those shoes wouldn’t have been any use to her by the time the nurses packed her things and sent her home.

  And they may be right. I really don’t know much more about Inga Beart than anyone else does. I only saw my mother once, and I never got any help dating her visit; Aunt Cat and the rest of the family flatly denied that it ever happened. All I know is that I couldn’t have been more than three at the time, because by my fourth birthday she was already in Paris, and of course they never would have let a child see her in the state she was in when she returned.

  The details of the day she came to visit have gotten so mixed up with scenes from old movies and bits I must have taken out of her biographies that it’s hard to be sure what actually took place that day and what my imagination filled in later. The memory is too detailed for someone so young, I’ll be the first to admit it, but I’ve read that at that age a child’s retention of a single piece of seemingly random information is sometimes remarkably accurate. And though it’s rare, that must have been the case with me, because I remember my mother’s shoes so clearly that I can see them even now if I close my eyes.

  The memory is framed by a bit of what looks like lace but what must have been the corner of Aunt Cat’s vinyl tablecloth, leading me to imagine that I spent my mother’s visit hiding under the kitchen table. The rest of the memory—a blue door, a teacup smashing—doesn’t quite belong to Aunt Cat’s kitchen; it may have been spliced in later. But the image of those shoes is mine alone. In the hours or minutes I spent there under the table, while she and Aunt Cat must have been talking, I came to possess a bit of Inga Beart that the publishers and academics and fans and reporters and even Aunt Cat and the doctors missed. Nowhere in all the literature, in all the minute details of her life that have been written down, is there a record of her shoes in the vivid detail I remember. I tried to tell a couple of the biographers that I got an up-close look at them, but they didn’t seem too interested and wrote in their books the same thing Aunt Cat said, that Inga Beart never came to see me.

  But one can only really be certain of a few things in one’s life, and I’ll bet those biographers and university professors have used up their share of certainties on other things. I saw her once, I know that, and through the years as I lay awake at night I learned the memory of my mother’s feet by heart. I saw the way the bones in her ankle twitched like there were little birds caught under the skin. I knew the soft leather and the exact shade of red of those shoes and I saw the places where they were scuffed and mended. To me the homophone was never a coincidence: I saw that her sole was broken before anyone else did—it was the left one, split across the ball of her foot as if she’d been standing on tiptoe for a long, long time.

  I suppose it makes the most sense to begin this account with the morning I arrived in Paris. I’ve tried to think back over my first moments in the city: Was there a sound that brushed just right against a memory? Or a smell that was in some distant way familiar? But the fact is that after all those hours on the plane, everything felt so new and odd to me. When I fi
nally stepped off the airport shuttle bus and onto the boulevard de Sébastopol, the only thing I remember noticing was that it was very early in the morning.

  At that hour there was a hush that country people don’t expect of a city. The loose spokes of a bicycle’s wheel made a musical sound across a cobbled alleyway, and the sun was just beginning to light up the rows of buildings, all done in the same milk-washed stone. But I didn’t stop to appreciate the quiet. I was worried about my Aunt Cat’s old suitcase. The clasps had given way and I’d found the suitcase on the baggage carousel in its own plastic tub, wound in tape with a sticker explaining that my luggage had been damaged during the flight.

  I should have known that the suitcase wouldn’t stand the trip, I’d thought, but I didn’t dare undo the tape and open it there at the airport—I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get it closed again. In any case, all my notes and the important documents were safe in my carry-on; the suitcase only had my clothes and a few books in it, I told myself, and it wasn’t until I was already on the shuttle leaving the airport that I remembered that among those books was the latest biography of my mother, published just a few months ago. I needed to have it with me for my appointment at the French National Archives the next day, and I had no idea if I would be able to buy another copy in Paris.

  So, as soon as the shuttle driver handed me my luggage I got down on one knee on the sidewalk and started unwrapping the baggage handlers’ tape. I’d put the book in last, right at the top of my suitcase, not thinking about how old those clasps were or how a heavy book would be the first thing to fall out.

  I got the suitcase open. The undershirts I’d packed were rumpled, like they’d fallen out and been stuffed back inside, but the book was there. It had a smear of grease across the cover, and I took out my handkerchief to try to clean it. It wasn’t that I cared at all for the book itself: another sensationalized retelling of my mother’s life by a British professor named Carter Bristol. Bristol has written a number of revisionist biographies, and if he’s come to tasteless conclusions about several household names, it has only made him more successful. The cover of the book, with Bristol’s name superimposed over a photograph of my mother, particularly annoys me, but I wiped the grease off anyway. It’s a lovely picture, one of the few I’ve ever seen in which she is looking directly at the camera. Against the shadows her pale eyes have an eerie quality, and I was reminded of a description I once read in a magazine article: Inga Beart looked out at the world through a pair of blank spaces, it said. Her eyes were two small gaps in creation that had never been inked in.

  I got the book cleaned up as best I could and wrapped it in a shirt. After all, I owe Bristol a debt of sorts. It had taken me most of a lifetime to work up the nerve to come all the way to Paris, and it might have taken me the rest of one if it hadn’t been for him. Because even as Bristol twists the facts of my mother’s private life to fit his purposes, in his chapter on Inga Beart’s final years in Paris he does seem to have made a genuine discovery: a handful of letters and unpublished photographs that Bristol claims were taken of my mother during the summer of 1954. The footnote says, “Fonds Labat-Poussin, Archives nationales de France.” If it’s true, then this is the first new material anyone has found on her in years.

  My Aunt Cat’s suitcase was not the kind that rolled. It was heavy, and with the broken clasps I had to carry it carefully. I’d chosen a hotel near the National Archives, not realizing how hard it would be to find. First I turned down a narrow passage that ended in a high stone wall, then found myself on a number of little streets that weren’t included on my map, all of them ending at odd angles to where they’d begun.

  Of course I started right off wondering if maybe Inga Beart had walked down one of those same streets some early morning a good half-century ago. If she might have left a party as the streetlamps blinked out, leaning for a moment against one of them to steady the same patch of lightening sky. I’ve seen photographs from those Paris soirées: Inga Beart is usually at the edge of the frame, drifting toward unconsciousness on somebody’s arm or turning away from the lens—which in any case was no longer focused on her, but on the new writers and artists and the day’s fresher beauties. They wouldn’t have noticed my mother as she slipped away, unsteady on her feet, stumbling, perhaps, as the heel of one shoe caught a gap in the stones and tore free.

  I happened to be passing a shoe repair shop just then, and I stopped for a moment to look in the window. I set my luggage down to give my arms a rest and peered in through the glass at the dusty back shelves. It wasn’t that I actually expected to see a pair of red high heels that might have been left for repairs some fifty years ago in among the galoshes and summer sandals that customers had forgotten to reclaim. But I looked for them anyway, just to be sure.

  I hadn’t noticed that I was taking up most of the narrow sidewalk, bending down to look in the window. A young woman with a suitcase of her own stepped into the street to go around me. Her suitcase bumped off the curb and rolled over. I turned to apologize and the girl stopped short, saying something I didn’t understand.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and when she looked confused, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak—”

  “Ah, no, okay. It’s okay,” the girl said in English. No point in asking her for directions, I thought. She spoke with an accent I was sure couldn’t be French.

  “Let me help you with that,” I said. I picked up her suitcase and set it back on the sidewalk. “I’m afraid you’ve lost a wheel.” I looked to see if it had gone down into the gutter.

  “It is missing from before,” she said.

  She must have mistaken me for someone else because she was looking at me intently, squinting her eyes a little as if she were trying to place a particular detail of my face. I looked away, and without meaning to I started counting to myself, one-one-thousand two. It was a habit I’d gotten into during my trouble with the school board, when for most of my last semester teaching I stopped meeting the eyes of the girls in my classes and looked instead at the parts of their hair, counting to myself, one-one-thousand two, then shifting my gaze, careful that no one would think a glance had lingered too long. The girl had a high, even hairline, plain brown at the roots. One-one-thousand two, I thought, and directed my eyes down at our two suitcases, one-one-thousand two, then at a rose in a cheap plastic cone that the girl was carrying. Along with the rose I noticed that she had a shoebox under her arm.

  “Let me get the door for you,” I said. When she looked at me blankly I nodded to the shoe repair shop. “Are you going in?” I asked.

  “No,” the girl said. Seeing that I was looking at the shoebox she was carrying, she said, “Ah, no, not this. It isn’t shoes.”

  “Oh,” I said, and to myself, one-one-thousand two.

  It was only then it occurred to me that there was something half-familiar about her too. I looked again, trying to place the curve of her chin or the tilt of her head.

  “Do you know what street is for the station Montparnasse?” the girl asked.

  “No idea,” I said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know Paris.”

  One-one-thousand two, I thought, and when I looked at the girl again I realized what it was I recognized. It wasn’t that I’d seen her face before—at least not exactly. But I’d just been looking at the cover of Bristol’s book, where the photograph of Inga Beart captures the uncommon lightness of her eyes. The girl with the suitcase didn’t look like my mother except that her eyes were also very pale, and they gave her face the same distant expression—she was looking at me, but her eyes might have been tracking dust motes, or they might have been focused on something very far away.

  The girl said something again in her own language. She was still looking at me; I could see the minuscule adjustments of her pupils, spreading like drops of ink in still water. I remembered too late to shift my attention to the girl’s forehead. Then, not knowing what else to do, I looked back in at the window of the shop.

  There’s something they say about
my mother: For all she saw in people, she never once looked at me. At the moment of my birth, according to the biographers, Inga Beart turned her head away. One of the biographies quotes a nurse who claimed she was present at my delivery, saying that she remembered it out of the thousands because even the girls who got their babies in the professional way would try to get a peek before the sisters carried them off. But Inga Beart shut her eyes, as the nurse remembered it, and wouldn’t open them again until I had been weighed and footprinted and bundled off into the care of the state, and they told her it was time to sign the papers.

  It took some time for the hospital staff to sort out where my relatives were, and a while more before Aunt Cat and Uncle Walt could arrange to come and get me. It was no easy thing for them, taking on another baby with Pearl still in diapers and Eddie barely six months old, and I spent my first weeks of life in an orphanage.

  Of course, when my own son was born I was determined that for him everything would be different. He lay in his hospital bassinet and gripped my finger with fierce newborn strength, too new to the world to do anything by half measures, and I told him that so long as I had anything to do with it, he was never going to feel alone. I was lucky enough not to know back then the thousand ways a promise like that would be impossible to keep, and I stayed all through the night at the window of the nursery. I wanted to be sure my son had his father there, a face to see through the glass when he opened his eyes.

  But if my mother ever worried that I was lonely or afraid, there’s no record of it. In fact, in all her novels and stories, her volumes of correspondence and the hours of interviews she gave over the years, my mother never once mentioned me. All the scholars have noted this, and even the more restrained of her biographers can’t help but put it rather painfully. As one of them said, “For Beart, who refused to believe in anybody until she had them written down, her own child simply did not exist.”