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“You see, Mamie,” explained Yannick winningly. “The beauty of it is that we’re not even expecting you to do anything. Just to be yourself. To be natural.”
“I could run a column in the magazine,” added Laure. “”Mamie Framboise Advises,“ something like that. Of course, you wouldn’t need to write it. I’d do all that.”
She beamed at me, as if I were some child who needed reassurance.
They’d brought Cassis with them again, and he too was beaming, though he looked confused, as if this was all a little too much for him.
“But I told you.” I kept my voice level, hard, to keep it from trembling. “I told you before. I don’t want any of this. I don’t want to be a part of it.”
Cassis looked at me, bewildered.
“But it’s such a good chance for my son,” he pleaded. “Think what the publicity might do for him.”
Yannick coughed.
“What my father means,” he amended hastily, “is that we could all benefit from the situation. The possibilities are endless if the thing catches on. We could market Mamie Framboise jams, Mamie Framboise biscuits… Of course, Mamie, you’d have a substantial percentage…”
I shook my head.
“You’re not listening,” I said in a louder voice. “I don’t want publicity. I don’t want a percentage. I’m not interested.”
Yannick and Laure exchanged glances.
“And if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking,” I said sharply, “that you might just as easily do it without my consent-after all, a name and a photograph’s all you really need-then listen to this. If I hear of one more so-called Mamie Framboise recipe appearing in that magazine-in any magazine-then I’ll be on the phone to the editor of that magazine that very day. I’ll sell him the rights to every recipe I’ve got. Hell, I’ll give them to him for free.”
I was out of breath, my heart hammering with rage and fear. But no one railroads Mirabelle Dartigen’s daughter. They knew I meant what I said too. I could see it in their faces.
Helplessly, they protested:
“Mamie-”
“And stop calling me Mamie!”
“Let me talk to her.” That was Cassis, rising with difficulty from his chair.
I noticed that age had shrunk him; had softly sunk him into himself, like a failed soufflе. Even that small effort caused him to wheeze painfully.
“In the garden.”
Sitting on a fallen tree trunk beside the disused well I felt an odd sense of doubling, as if the old Cassis might pull aside the fat-man’s mask from his face and reappear as before, intense, reckless and wild.
“Why are you doing this, Boise?” he demanded. “Is it because of me?
I shook my head slowly.
“This has nothing to do with you,” I told him. “Or Yannick.” I jerked my head at the farmhouse. “You notice I managed to get the old farm fixed up.”
He shrugged.
“Never saw why you’d want to, myself,” he said. “I wouldn’t touch the place. Gives me the shivers just to think of you living here.” Then he gave me a strange look, knowing, almost sharp. “But it’s very like you to do it.” He smiled. “You always were her favorite, Boise. You even look like her nowadays.”
I shrugged.
“You won’t talk me round,” I said flatly.
“Now you’re beginning to sound like her too.” His voice, complex with love, guilt, hate. “ Boise…”
I looked at him.
“Someone had to remember her,” I told him. “And I knew it wasn’t going to be you.”
He made a helpless gesture.
“But here, in Les Laveuses…”
“No one knows who I am,” I said. “No one makes the connection.” I grinned suddenly. “You know, Cassis, to most people, all old ladies look pretty much the same.”
He nodded.
“And you think Mamie Framboise would change that.”
“I know it would.”
A silence.
“You always were a good liar,” he observed casually. “That’s another thing you got from her. The capacity to hide. Me, I’m wide open.”
He flung his arms wide to illustrate.
“Good for you,” I said indifferently. He even believed it himself.
“You’re a good cook, I’ll give you that.” He stared over my shoulder at the orchard, the trees heavy with ripening fruit. “She’d have liked that. To know you’d kept things going. You’re so like her…” he repeated slowly, not a compliment but a statement of fact, some distaste, some awe.
“She left me her book,” I told him. “The one with the recipes in it. The album.”
His eyes widened.
“She did? Well, you were her favorite.”
“I don’t know why you keep saying that,” I said impatiently. “If ever Mother had a favorite it was Reinette, not me. You remember-”
“She told me herself,” he explained. “Said that of the three of us you were the only one with any sense or any guts. There’s more of me in that sly little bitch than the pair of you ten times over. That’s what she said.”
It sounded like her. Her voice in his, clear and sharp as glass. She must have been angry with him, in one of her rages. It was rare that she struck any of us, but God!.. her tongue.
Cassis grimaced.
“It was the way she said it too,” he told me softly. “So cold and dry. With that curious look in her eyes, as if it was a kind of test. As if she was waiting to see what I’d do next.”
“And what did you do?”
He shrugged.
“I cried, of course. I was only nine.”
Of course he would, I told myself. That was always his way. Too sensitive beneath his wildness. He used to run away from home regularly, sleeping out in the woods or in the tree house, knowing that Mother would not whip him. Secretly she encouraged his misbehavior, because it looked like defiance. It looked like strength. Me, I’d have spat in her face.
“Tell me, Cassis”-the idea came to me in a rush and I was suddenly almost out of breath with excitement-“Did Mother-do you ever remember if she spoke Italian? Or Portuguese? Some foreign language…”
Cassis looked puzzled, shook his head.
“Are you sure? In her album-”
I explained about the pages of foreign writing, the secret pages I had never learned to decipher.
“Let me see.”
We looked over it together, Cassis fingering the stiff yellow leaves with reluctant fascination. I noticed he avoided touching the writing, though he often fingered the other things, the photographs, the pressed flowers, butterflies’ wings, pieces of cloth stuck to the pages.
“My God,” he said in a low voice. “I never had any idea she’d made something like this.” He looked up at me. “And you say you weren’t her favorite.”
At first he seemed more interested in the recipes than anything else. Flicking through the album, his fingers seemed to have retained some of their old deftness.
“Tarte mirabelle aux amandes,” he whispered. “Tourteau fromage Clafoutis aux cerises rouges. I remember these!” His enthusiasm was suddenly very young, very like the old Cassis. “Everything’s here,” he said softly. “Everything.”
I pointed at one of the foreign passages.
Cassis studied it for a moment or two, and then began to laugh.
“That’s not Italian,” he told me. “Don’t you remember what this is?” He seemed to find the whole thing very funny, rocking and wheezing. Even his ears shook, big old-man’s ears like blue-cap mushrooms. “This is the language Dad invented. ”Bilini-enverlini,“ he used to call it. Don’t you remember? He used to speak it all the time…”
I tried to recall. I was seven when he died. There must be something left, I told myself. But there was so little. Everything swallowed up into a great hungry throat of darkness. I can remember my father, but only in snatches. A smell of moths and tobacco from his big old coat. The Jerusalem artichokes he alone liked, and which we all had to eat once a week. How I’d once accidentally sunk a fishhook through the webby part of my hand between finger and thumb, and his arms around me, his voice telling me to be brave… I remember his face through photographs, all in sepia. And at the back of my mind, something-a remote something-disgorged by the darkness. Father jabbering to us in nonsense talk, grinning, Cassis laughing, myself laughing without really understanding the joke and Mother, for once, far away, safely out of earshot, one of her headaches perhaps, an unexpected holiday…
“I remember something,” I said at last.
He explained then, patiently. A language of inverted syllables, reversed words, nonsense prefixes and suffixes. Ini tnawini inoti plainexini. I want to explain. Minini toni nierus niohwni inoti. I’m not sure who to.
Strangely enough Cassis seemed uninterested by my mother’s secret writings. His gaze lingered over the recipes. The rest was dead. The recipes were something he could understand, touch, taste. I could feel his discomfort at standing too close to me, as if my similarity to her might infect him too.
“If my son could only see all these recipes-” he said in a low voice.
“Don’t tell him,” I said sharply.
I was beginning to know Yannick. The less he learned about us, the better.
Cassis shrugged.
“Of course not. I promise.”
And I believed him. It goes to show that I’m not as like my mother as he thought. I trusted him, God help me, and for a while it seemed as if he’d kept his promise. Yannick and Laure kept their distance, Mamie Framboise vanished from view and summer rolled into autumn, dragging a soft train of dead leaves.
6
Yannick says he saw Old Mother today.
He came running back from the river half wild with excitement and babbling. He’d forgotten his fish on the verge in his haste, amp; I snapped at him for wasting time. He looked at me with that sad helplessness in his eyes, amp; I thought he was going to say something, but he didn’t. I suppose he feels ashamed. I feel hard inside, frozen. I want to say something, but I’m not sure what it is. Bad luck to see Old Mother, everyone says, but we’ve had enough of that already. Perhaps that’s why I am what I am.
I took my time over Mother’s album. Part of it was fear. Of what I might find out, perhaps. Of what I might be forced to remember. Part of it was that the narrative was confused, the order of events deliberately and expertly shuffled, like a clever card trick. I barely remembered the day of which she had spoken, though I dreamed of it later. The handwriting, though neat, was obsessively small, giving me terrible headaches if I studied it for too long. In this too I am like her. I remember her headaches quite clearly, so often preceded by what Cassis used to refer to as her “turns.” They had worsened when I was born, he told me. He was the only one of us old enough to remember her before.
Below a recipe for mulled cider, she writes:
I can remember what it was like. To be in the light. To be whole. It was like that for a time, before C. was born. I try to remember how it was to be so young. If only we’d stayed away, I tell myself. Never come back to Les Laveuses. Y. tries to help. But there’s no love in it any more. He’s afraid of me now, afraid of what I might do. To him. To the children. There’s no sweetness in suffering, whatever people might think It eats away everything in the end Y. stays for the sake of the children. I should be grateful. He could leave, amp; no one would think the worse of him for it. After all, he was born here.
Never one to give in to her complaints, she bore the pain for as long as she could before retiring to her darkened room while we padded silently, like wary cats, outside. Every six months or so she would suffer a really serious attack, which would leave her prostrate for days. Once, when I was very young, she collapsed on the way back from the well, crumpling forward over her bucket, a wash of liquid staining the dry path in front of her, her straw hat slipping sideways to show her open mouth, her staring eyes. I was in the kitchen garden gathering herbs, alone. My first thought was that she was dead. Her silence, the black hole of her mouth against the taut yellow skin of her face, her eyes like ball bearings. I put down my basket very slowly and walked toward her.
The path seemed oddly warped beneath my feet, as if I was wearing someone else’s glasses, and I stumbled a little. My mother was lying on her side. One leg was splayed out, the dark skirt hiked up a little to show boot and stocking. Her mouth gaped hungrily. I felt very calm.
She’s dead, I told myself. The rush of feeling that came in the wake of the thought was so intense that for a moment I was unable to identify it. A bright comet’s tail of sensation, prickling at my armpits and flipping my stomach like a pancake. Terror, grief, confusion… I looked for them inside myself and found no trace of them. Instead, a burst of poison fireworks that filled my head with light. I looked flatly at my mother’s corpse and felt relief, hope and an ugly, primitive joy.
This sweetness…
I feel hard inside, frozen.
I know, I know. I can’t expect you to understand how I felt. It sounds grotesque to me too, remembering how it was, wondering whether this is not another false memory… Of course, it might have been shock. People experience strange things under the effects of shock. Even children. Especially children, the prim, secret savages we were. Locked in our mad world between the Lookout Post and the river, with the Standing Stones keeping watch over our covert rituals… But it was joy I felt all the same.
I stood beside her. The dead eyes stared at me, unblinking. I wondered whether I ought to close them. There was something disturbing about their round, fishy gaze that reminded me of Old Mother, the day I finally nailed her up. A thread of drool glistened at her lips. I moved a little closer…
Her hand shot out and grabbed me by the ankle. Not dead, no; but waiting, her eyes bright with mean intelligence. Her mouth worked painfully, enunciating every word with glassy precision. I closed my eyes to stop myself from screaming.
“Listen. Get my stick.” Her voice was grating, metallic. “Get it. Kitchen. Quickly.”
I stared at her, her hand still clutching my bare ankle.
“Felt it coming this morning,” she said tonelessly. “Knew it was going to be a big one. Only saw half the clock. Smelt oranges. Get the stick. Help me.”
“I thought you were going to die.” My voice sounded eerily like hers, clear and hard. “I thought you were dead.”
One side of her mouth hitched, and she made a low yarking sound, which I eventually recognized as laughter. I ran to the kitchen with that sound in my ears, found the stick, a heavy piece of twisted hawthorn that she used to reach the higher branches of the fruit trees, and brought it to her. She was already on her knees, pushing against the ground with her hands. From time to time she shook her head with a sharp, impatient gesture, as if plagued by wasps.
“Good.” Her voice was thick, like a mouthful of mud. “Now leave me. Tell your father. I’m going… to… my room.” Then, jerking herself savagely to her feet with the stick, swaying, keeping upright with a simple effort of will: “I said, go away!”
And she struck at me clumsily with one clawing hand, almost losing balance, stubbing at the path with her stick. I ran then, turning back only when I was well out of her range, ducking down behind a stand of red currants to watch her staggering toward the house, dragging her feet in great loops in the dirt behind her.
It was the first time I became truly aware of my mother’s affliction. My father explained it to us later, the business with the clock and the oranges, while she lay in darkness. We understood little of what he told us. Our mother had bad spells, he said patiently, headaches that were so terrible that sometimes she didn’t even know what she was doing. Had we ever had sunstroke? Felt that woozy, unreal feeling, imagined that objects were closer than they were, sounds louder? We looked at him, uncomprehending. Only Cassis, nine then to my four, seemed to understand.
“She does things,” said my father. “Things she doesn’t really remember afterward. Because of the bad spells.”
We stared at him solemnly. Bad spells.
