“They’re not mine,” I said. “Richard Beart, it’s a common name.”
The archivist paused a moment and looked back at my birth certificate. “Ah, okay,” she said. “Yes, it’s a mistake if you say you have not been there, but I see that the day of birth is the same.”
“I’ve never been in France before.”
She typed something more into the computer. “And also the day of inscription to hospital is the same.”
“What day?” I asked.
“It was 10 August 1954 for Beart, Inga also, yes?”
“Yes.”
“And it is the same for Beart, Richard. Ah, maybe there was an accident and they went together?”
“No, no accident,” I said.
“Oh, yes, you are right.”
“How do you know? What does it say there?” I asked. “Would you just read me what it says right there on the screen?”
“It says ‘quarantine,’ this is all. Quarantine paediatrique.”
“Why was she in quarantine?”
“No, this is for Beart, Richard. For Beart, Inga it says nothing more here. But for the quarantine they have a different system for the records, I can see that the file for Beart, Richard comes from a separate collection. In fact, for a time the children’s quarantine had its separate administration—”
“What was he quarantined for?” I asked.
“Well, that I cannot say,” she said.
I remembered the hospital rocking, Aunt Cat’s cool hands on my cheeks and those round little windows like animal eyes—like the portals of a ship—their frames fastened with rivets to the wall. “Let me see the file,” I said.
“Well, no, if it is not yours you must not see it.”
And when the rocking stopped, the nurses with their starched white caps, a crack in the plaster ceiling, my head thick with fever, not able to understand what they said.
“But I had scarlet fever,” I said.
“Yes, but these are records from the hospital H?tel-Dieu in Paris, and you say you have never been a patient in this place.”
“But I had scarlet fever in 1954.”
The archivist looked at me a moment, then back at my birth certificate, and then at the computer. She tapped her pen against her lips. “Okay,” she said, and she wrote some numbers on the forms she had given me. “Wait here.”
She came back a few minutes later with a thin blue file and led me to a private room to look at it. “Please do not photograph the documents,” she said. “There are official photocopies only and for this there is a fee.”
“Thank you,” I said. She went out and shut the door.
The file was labeled in the blocky, almost imperceptibly uneven printing of an old typewriter, the last name all in capitals the way they do in France. For a moment or two I just looked at it, thinking about how one’s own name always seems so odd and unfamiliar if one sits right down and stares at it. I’d come a long way, and this was not the person I’d expected to find.
“Hello there,” I said to little BEART, Richard—though when I opened the file it was my Aunt Cat I recognized first, in the handwriting on the hospital admittance form. She’d been in a rush, and the curving, graceful script that always seemed more feminine than the rest of her had a panicked slant, the end of one word trailing into the first letter of the next as if she couldn’t spare the time to lift the pen. But the curl to the R in my first name, the looping numbers of my birth date were unmistakably hers. The questions on the form were all in French; she’d left most of them blank and scrawled across the top FEVER CHILLS RASH TONGUE IS WHITE and with a double underline ALLERGIC TO AMOXICILLIN!! I turned the page.
I’m very grateful to the woman at the medical archives, and I made myself a note to send her a box of chocolates and a card as soon as I get home. I’ll be sure not to be too specific in the card—I wouldn’t want one of her superiors to get ahold of it and find out she bent the rules. She told me in no uncertain terms when I came back to the desk to ask for her help—because of course the rest of the file was all in French—that the archivists absolutely did not do translations. But maybe I was just insistent enough or else there was something in my face that told her that my world and everything I’d believed up until that point hung ready to pivot on what that file said. She sighed, put a sign out on her desk, and followed me into the little reading room.
When I think of my Aunt Cat a certain memory often comes to mind. It’s a story I would have liked to have told at her funeral, except that folks who hardly knew her wouldn’t have found it appropriate. One day when we were kids, someone—one of the men who worked around the farm, I think—came in at suppertime to say that there was a hurt dog out on the highway and someone’d better shoot it. It went unspoken in our house that it was Aunt Cat who handled that kind of thing. She put her boots on and gave Eddie a little pat on the shoulder—he’d gone all white thinking it was probably Goodboy, who was always chasing tires. She got Uncle Walt’s gun out of the closet and she and the farm hand went out. Eddie started crying all over his supper, but I knew that, things being as they were, the dog had a bit of luck to have Aunt Cat be the one to do it. It may not be much, but it’s the thing I’d like to have gotten up and said the day we buried her: Aunt Cat’s hands wouldn’t shake and she’d get it right on the first try.
It’s the steadiness of my Aunt Cat’s hands I think of now when I imagine her leading me up to the blue door, and the door opening into a room with a table covered in lace. My hand would have felt hot in hers. She had been checking my temperature, the file said, and told the doctors that I’d been a bit flushed since a few days before we landed at Le Havre—though it seems she thought it was just seasickness that had kept me in bed through most of the voyage. She’d been planning to take me to a doctor as soon as we landed but—I suspect—the comtesse insisted that I be brought straightaway to Paris, where, Aunt Cat told the doctors, I had vomited during a visit to a Parisian department store. The medical file doesn’t mention why I was taken shopping, though I imagine the comtesse had something to do with it, perhaps buying me a new outfit in which to meet my mother. It must have been there that I stood under a marquee with a grid of light bulbs stuck up against the sky and, dizzy with the crowd and the fever, looked up and saw my Universe.