The second piece of paper was a receipt from the steamship company. In just the way one hears one’s name above the din of a crowded room, the one familiar word on the page jumped out at me. My hands were shaking as I got out my notebook and copied down “deux billets pour passager Beart et gardienne, classe touriste . . .”
I’d never quite imagined that Carter Bristol might have been right, although, as I told myself without really believing it, this was among the least important of details. So what if my mother had had an affair with the comtesse? It hardly proved Bristol’s theory as to why she put her eyes out, and certainly the trip was never made, since it’s well established that Inga Beart was in Paris the whole time. The Hirondelle left New Orleans on July 28, 1954; Inga Beart sat at the tabac on August 1, and after her injury on August 10 she did not leave France until October 1954, when they transferred her to a psychiatric hospital back in New York. I looked up the word gardienne in my dictionary, and found it meant guardian or caretaker, just as I’d thought. So it seemed clear the comtesse understood that Inga Beart was in a bad way, even when she bought those tickets in June 1954.
After that, as you can imagine, I set out to look at every bit of paper in every one of the sixteen remaining cartons. In carton number fourteen I found what I’d come for: a file nearly an inch thick, labeled “Inky”—a nickname my mother must have picked up sometime after she left home, because I never heard Aunt Cat or any of the cousins refer to her that way. They say she had the habit of biting down on the tip of her pen while she was thinking, leaving a bit of blue on her lips.
There was no doubt it was the file Carter Bristol had seen. I really can’t be sure of all of what was inside, but there were letters from the comtesse to various doctors and psychiatrists on my mother’s behalf, and handwritten drafts of what could only be love letters from the comtesse to my mother. There were letters from my mother too, written in French, specifying dates and times to meet. There did seem to be a great deal of secrecy surrounding their relationship. I did as best I could translating word for word with my pocket dictionary, and though much of what I came up with made no sense at all, I did learn that they chose to meet in “unknown places with enough darkness,” and that the comtesse had called my mother “chérie.”
I copied everything down, going carefully page by page and putting in all the accents. Toward the end of the file I came to a thick waxed-paper envelope. It was marked “juin 1954.” Just as Carter Bristol had said, inside were a half dozen photographs printed on small squares of paper with scalloped edges. In one picture Inga Beart stands in front of a dressing room mirror, her face mostly in shadow; in another her bare shoulders are reflected in that same mirror. I looked through them slowly, hoping as I turned over each one that it would show her feet. But the angles of the photographs were intimate; the person who took them had been standing close. Only one included anything of my mother below the waist. She and several others are seated on a sofa with an ornate mantle behind them. Two light-haired women smile up at the photographer, a man in evening dress raises a glass, but my mother has turned away. Her legs are crossed in the parallel slant that women seemed to favor then and her feet are hidden, as if by design, by an elaborate tea service placed on a low table in front of her.
If there’s one thing I’ve found in the time I’ve spent doing this kind of research, it’s that every so often one gets slammed up flat against the limits of our modern ability to get our hands on information. Here I was, having traveled halfway across the world to look at a photograph that a complex bureaucracy had managed to preserve behind cardboard and string. And what a fantastic achievement, what a scientific wonder the invention of the snapshot was, because there in front of me I had an image of my mother just as she’d looked in an unguarded moment half a century ago. But even with all that luck and preservation, all it took to keep me from knowing what she’d been wearing on her feet was a china teapot that I would never in a thousand years of technological advancement have the power to move five inches to the left.
I made notes on all of it in as much detail as I could, and I hardly noticed how much time had passed until the archivist, the same one I’d spoken to that morning, tapped me on the shoulder to say that they were closing for the day. And sure enough, everyone else in the big reading room had put away their things and was standing in a long line to have their bags checked before they went out the door. I packed the carton up in a hurry, though as carefully as I could because I could feel the archivist watching me with arms crossed a few feet back, making sure I didn’t fold over any corners.
I ought to have felt as hungry and dispirited as I had the day before. The lunch I’d brought had sat all day forgotten in the locker and the information I’d found seemed only to reinforce Carter Bristol’s version of events. But just the fact that I had found anything at all made the details seem unimportant. I forgot my resolution not to pass the art gallery again and I hurried in that direction, hoping that the owner would be standing outside. And when I turned down the little street, sure enough, he was.
Now, I didn’t want to be a nuisance, and I wasn’t sure he’d feel like translating the pages of notes I’d copied down. But he seemed glad enough to see me, and I had the Hirondelle to tell him about. I started off with that, saying that during my research I had, by chance, stumbled on the very subject we had been discussing the day before.
“Ah-ha, she was having money difficulties, this comtesse,” he said when I showed him the notes from the Hirondelle file.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think she was quite wealthy.”
“Classe touriste, this is the second class,” he said. “On the Hirondelle in the second class they had a swimming pool and there are some fine pieces left from the dining room, but for the wealthy it must be classe cabine I think.”
“But the ticket wasn’t for her,” I said. “The ticket was for my mother, she was a friend of hers,” and I showed him what I’d copied down from the steamship company’s receipt. “Here—it says ‘Passenger Beart and a guardian’—I’m assuming a caretaker, maybe a nurse,” I said. “She wasn’t well.”
He took the notebook from me and looked at it a moment, as if he couldn’t quite read my handwriting.
“Gardienne, yes, this is one who would be responsible for her,” he said. “And here, passager Beart, this is your mother? So I think it must be the feminine, a small mistake of the e. And also here, there will be an accent.” He took out a pen and fixed the spelling to passagère.
“Sorry about that,” I said. “I was writing quickly.”
I showed him the other notes I had, from letters back and forth between the comtesse and Inga Beart, and the comtesse’s letters to the doctors. I didn’t want to come right out and tell him my mother had been having a romantic relationship with this woman, but he seemed to figure it out, because he laughed a little to himself and said, “Well!”