Of course, I hadn’t come all the way to Paris just to go through a file Carter Bristol had already seen. When I wrote to the archivist that I was also interested in seeing some old medical records, she told me that only a person’s own family could access that kind of thing. I wanted to ask her about finding the forms from Inga Beart’s admittance to the H?tel-Dieu hospital on August 10, 1954, so before I left my hotel I gathered up all the documents I might need. I made sure I had the important pages marked in Bristol’s book and put my birth certificate inside to save it from getting bent, then I packed my notes into my briefcase and left my key at the front desk.
But as it turned out, I didn’t even get the chance to start my research. I followed my map up rue des Archives, but when I got there and told the woman at the reception desk who I needed to see, she shook her head.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
The woman called a young man over, who explained that the archivist I’d corresponded with was unavailable until later that week.
“But I have an appointment for today,” I told him. “We set the date months ago. She has some things to show me. I need to speak with her—I’m only here until next Sunday.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “There is a formation on the preservation of old texts, and she has been required to attend. It is quite important—in our collections are documents more than one thousand years old, and quite vulnerable to humidity. But, if you will please come back Friday in the morning? She will see you then at half past nine.”
I didn’t know what to do with myself for the rest of the day, so I made my way back toward my hotel. I’d heard that Inga Beart’s books are making something of a comeback in Europe, and as I went I kept seeing them in bookshop windows: It seemed a new translation of the first novel had just come out. I was surprised to see that Carter Bristol’s biography has already been translated into French; one store I passed had her book and his displayed together. They’d used a different picture for the cover of the French edition of Bristol’s book: a grainy newspaper photograph of a bandaged woman leaning against the railing of a ship. It’s a well-known image, taken from the dock in Le Havre by a photographer for the Herald Tribune: an American novelist returning home from France with her head wrapped in white gauze. The photograph has been cropped to fit the cover of Bristol’s book, but if you have the ability to enlarge the original by two or three hundred percent, and if you can look beyond the dark stains on the dressings wrapped around her face, you will see that her feet, which are nearly hidden in the shadow of a steamer trunk, are bare.
Inside the bookshop a half dozen copies of Bristol’s biography had been set out on a display table. Inga Beart’s own work was apparently of secondary interest. When I asked about the book of hers I’d seen in the window, the saleswoman pointed me to the Littérature étrangère section at the back of the shop, where only the first novel and a short story collection were kept in stock. I thumbed through them, wondering how they fared in translation.
It wasn’t until I was in high school that I first read my mother’s books. By that time Inga Beart had been dead for nearly a decade. Her novels were popular again and a new generation of scholars and critics were busy rehabilitating her image. I wasn’t aware of any of that at the time. I knew, dimly, that my mother was famous, and that mentioning her would set my aunt’s jaw tight. If I saw something about her in the paper—having once been a local girl, news items like her candidacy for a postage stamp were covered in-depth—I knew better than to bring it up at supper. But I had never actually seen one of my mother’s books, and I remember the quiet chill I felt as I went along the fiction shelf of the school library; Ba’s gave way to Be’s, Baldwin, Barnes, and then Beart, Beart, Beart, a whole half-shelf of books, their stiff library dust-jacket covers smudged a little bit, corners blunted enough to show that I was not the first student at Walsenburg Senior High to discover them. I was too shy to check them out; I was afraid the librarian would give me a knowing smile or intrude in some other way on that first meeting between my mother and me. I don’t remember which I started with; I may have gone from left to right across the shelf or I may have chosen one because I liked the cover. What I do remember is the afternoons that followed. I’d sit in the stacks, too tall at fifteen for my knees to fold comfortably against me, sneaking bites of my sandwich and reading my mother’s books. The sandwich was against the library rules, and the books broke an unspoken covenant of my life in Aunt Cat’s house, but I read and chewed with a criminal thrill all through my high school lunch periods.
I imagine that at first I didn’t absorb much of the stories. I was more interested in the feel of the pages against my fingers, the weight of the books, paper and spine and thick cardboard covers, the first pieces of my mother I could hold in my hands. But as I made my way across that half-shelf and back again, I found myself drawn into the bounded, bittersweet worlds of my mother’s characters. They say she created a new American realism; characters that are by every definition ordinary come alight and blaze briefly—none of her books were long. The critics back then made a scene when it came out that each character was based almost entirely on an actual human being, and it’s commonly assumed that Inga Beart’s crisis began when she lost her publisher, having been accused of writing true life stories—a genre that didn’t sell as well then as it does today. Now, of course, she’s seen as a pioneer, one of the first to turn the facts of unembellished lives into literature. But even before I knew any of it, I read my mother’s books with the sense that I was eavesdropping, the feeling that I ought to turn the pages quietly so the people inside wouldn’t know I was there.