“Yes, but they are making improvements now, it is covered over. I think you must return when they have finished, they say it will look very nice.”
“I’d sure like to see it,” I said.
“Yes, and this is important, I think, for it was in a bad state since years and years. Pieces of it would come crashing onto the street, and there were several deaths among the people below. In fact, I have a very personal link to this reconstruction, because my own mother was hit by a stone that fell from this tower, and it is a true miracle that she was not killed instantly on the place where she stood.”
“When was that?” I asked.
“Long ago. It is already quite some years since they began to cover it to protect the pedestrians.”
I’m afraid I was smiling. It hardly suited the story I was being told, but I couldn’t help it. In a flash I saw myself rapping on the door of Carter Bristol’s window office at the university where he teaches, saying, “Well, Carter, you got it wrong.” I imagined myself personally supervising the sewing of the addendum he would have to write into the spine of each of my mother’s biographies. But I was getting ahead of myself.
“Do you remember what year it happened in?” I asked.
“I think it was ’99, though perhaps before, when they put a sort of net around it. But if you are interested the city has put a sign saying the length of these renovations.”
“I mean your mother’s accident,” I said.
“Ah,” he said. “Well, it would have had to be many years earlier. Yes, I was just a child. My father was always agitating for the mairie to do something about this tower.”
“As early as 1953 or ’54?” I said.
“It is possible,” he said. “I’m afraid I cannot ask her. My mother passed away not long ago.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m very sorry to hear that.”
“Yes, well, it had been expected. And still it is not the same. When your parents are gone—and my father died some years before—when both of them are gone, then you feel differently. Who is left to remember the first time I clapped my hands or stood tout seul? One begins to think about such things.”
“Yes,” I said, but I was thinking of the bricks falling from the tower of Saint Jacques.
“But we are of that age,” he said.
“Yes,” I said again, and thanked him for his help.
With the exception of a few short stories and a little bit of poetry, once Inga Beart got to Paris all she wrote were letters, mostly to a few close friends back in New York. Several of those letters are available in archival collections, and it’s clear from reading them that in the months leading up to August 1954 Inga Beart was losing her grip on reality. She spent whole pages listing mundane events in the lives of unnamed characters, as if the letters served as a reservoir for an excess of words she no longer had the strength to organize into novels.
But when Carter Bristol was writing his biography of my mother, he apparently discovered in the files of that Parisian comtesse several letters that scholars hadn’t seen before. In one, Inga Beart seems to be sketching the outline for a character based on her neighborhood druggist. According to Bristol’s book, the letter went like this: “Have been studying the apothecary’s assistant, seems he’ll be crushed by rocks falling out of the sky. So you see? The French is coming along. Must admit I had to take him home with me for a glass of pernod . . .”
The letter is dated July 18, 1954, placing it among the last things she ever wrote. The tone is rushed, as if she’d dashed it off without stopping to think, and none of it makes much sense.
But Carter Bristol claims that this letter and others like it exhibit the same emotional detachment one finds in the writing samples of the criminally insane. He tells us that Inga Beart had come to believe she had the ability to actually shape the lives—and deaths—of the people she used for her characters. It was a grandiose delusion typical of the sociopathic personality: She thought she could make the sky itself fall in on the unfortunate druggist, just by power of suggestion.
In fact, Inga Beart’s entire body of work was coercive, Bristol says. He has a whole chapter on a divorcée named Mary Hamlin whom Inga Beart met in New York. She is said to have been the model for the character of Anna-Lee: a woman who once worked at her father’s roadside diner and who, years after the book was published, actually did end up swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills, just like Anna-Lee. What most people see as a tragic coincidence, Bristol takes as proof of my mother’s power over her subjects: After reading her own life’s story all the way through and watching Bette Davis play her in the movie version, the poor woman went ahead and lived it, just as Inga Beart had written.
Of course, I never knew most of the people who appeared as characters in my mother’s books; the similarity between my Aunt Cat and Verna, the rancher’s wife, is the only example I can speak to personally. But that one relatively minor character is enough to convince me that Bristol has got it all wrong. Inga Beart didn’t prescribe events; she took her cues from what was already there. While I hid under the table absorbing the image of my mother’s shoes, my mother would have had the chance to catalog a whole range of spot-on details about the life of the woman her older sister had become.