“Can you make anything out?” I asked.
“This Lucette, your mother’s friend, she is saying she knows what will be best for your mother, your mother must trust her and on like this, but also that the husband—or perhaps it is another woman?—must not find out. And then, if you’ll excuse me, there are some details which are more—”
“Oh, well yes,” I said, remembering certain parts of Bristol’s book. “I think I’ve already heard those. Just, if you can, what does it say there, where it talks about a voyage?”
“Ah, here this Lucette is referring to something that must have been said before. She is asking this person, which will be your mother, not to leave Paris, that in fact there will be something important to happen for her here. Important for her benefit. It seems your mother has been talking of some trip, yes, about leaving for some time. Lucette is writing, ‘You are always running looking for peace’ and—is this an r that you have written here?—yes, ‘you are always running looking for peace, but I will make you happy here,’ and so on. Something like this.”
“Thank you, really, thanks so much,” I said.
“But it is strange that you found this in the files of this comtesse,” he said. “Perhaps the letter was never sent.”
“Either that or she kept a draft, it was hard to tell exactly.”
He turned to the next page of my notebook. “Ah, and this too is interesting,” he said. “This you found in the same place?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think it’s a letter from a doctor.”
“Mm, it must be. He is telling madame that her friend is suffering with a certain alienation—there is a void, he says, in her relations. He is recommending that this friend must put her face to certain unhappy realities, and so on.”
“Unhappy realities?” I asked.
“Something like this. She must look to certain facts which can be difficult to bear. This doctor is telling madame that she may help her friend to do this if she wishes.” He studied the page a moment more. “Ah, but come in,” he said. We were still standing on the sidewalk in front of his shop. “Perhaps you would like another cup of tea?”
Throughout her life Inga Beart seemed to have a need to defy the domesticity expected of women in those days—leaving a rural childhood behind for the glitter of first Los Angeles and then New York and Paris, marrying exotic men and leaving them, never able to stay long in one place. The comtesse was not the first to suggest that she had something to outrun. It gave her an air of tragic adventure that the critics appreciated and the artistic set couldn’t get enough of. Something in her suggested an exhilarating proximity to the edge of an abyss, and people—certain kinds of people—were drawn to her because of it, as if by getting close to her they would be able to see what lay beyond.
But according to the biographers, a change took place around 1949, which, coincidentally or not, was the year of my birth. Though she continued to produce novels at the rate of about one a year until 1952, by the end of the forties most scholars agree that Inga Beart’s best work was behind her. She developed a well-known appetite for opiates and became a frequent guest at gin-soaked dinner parties where her drinking took on a kind of savagery that friends and acquaintances hadn’t seen before. Whether this in fact had anything to do with me, or whether it was the inevitable disintegration of a psyche held together somewhat tenuously in the first place, is a matter of debate.
In any case, the Comtesse Labat-Poussin wasn’t the first to try to cure Inga Beart. Before my mother left for France she’d spent time in several high-priced sanatoriums and spas, probably similar to the luxury rehab centers one hears about for celebrities today. She underwent electric shock treatments at Bellevue Hospital in New York and, at the urging of her publishers, who were concerned with the decline in the quality of her work, she saw several well-respected analysts. I’ve often wondered if it was one of them who convinced her to come back home, if it was at the behest of a New York doctor that my mother sat down at Aunt Cat’s kitchen table, hands with a bit of a tremor, perhaps, one foot tapping against the table leg. In my memory of her feet I can see a tension there; the delicate muscles from ankle to toe are stretched tight. Perhaps I hid from her on purpose, crawling under the table because I was afraid of this strange woman. She would still have looked the part of the glamorous lady novelist, “a woman of quick wit and exquisite eyebrows” as Vogue described her once. But in my child’s way I might have sensed that she was tensed to run.
The gallery owner and I sat down in the back room and he poured our tea into a different set of Hirondelle cups. Breakfast dishes from the upper dining room, he told me, recently purchased at an excellent price from a dealer in Marseille.
“What do you think, it is possible?” he asked, holding his teacup up to the light. “Perhaps your mother on her voyage drank from this very cup. On the Hirondelle fine Arabic coffee was served all day on the upper decks—they say it was better than anything you could find in Paris.”
I started to explain about the dates and my mother’s injury and how it wasn’t possible she’d actually used the ticket, but I stopped, letting myself believe for a moment that Inga Beart’s life had gone a different way. I pictured her on board the Hirondelle, steaming back across the ocean toward a little boy, a sunburned child whose days were spent thigh-high in alfalfa, who fell asleep each night to the memory of his mother’s shoes. I imagined her looking out over the ocean, raising a cup to her lips, leaving a mark on the china from the lipstick she painted on thick to cover stray stains of ink.
“My goodness,” I said, and I held my cup up too. “Now wouldn’t that be something?”
{NEIL}
Vilnius, June
Dijana Bikauskien? lived in a big block apartment building in the suburbs of Vilnius, and it took Neil longer to get there than he’d expected. He got lost and had to show the address to several people before an old man, looking at him suspiciously, pointed toward the third in a row of identical buildings. In between them lines of laundry had been hung out to dry, and though it was after eight o’clock the summer sun wasn’t close to setting. White sheets and baby clothes, a little girl’s dress, men’s undershirts, the blouse and skirt of an airline stewardess, some hipster jeans, large cotton underpants, and a checkered tablecloth waved in the breeze. Neil tried to remember what Magdalena had been wearing at the train station in Paris, but he didn’t see anything that looked her size.