Various Miracles (5 page)

This was true. It was a fact that only two girls in her level had ever been to Paris, which was just five hours away by train, and a surprising number of them had never been even as far as Rennes. Also impressive to these girls was the fact that Hélène’s mother was a poet, a real poet, who had published three books.
Trois livres? Vraiment?
Their eyes had opened wide at this and they weren’t giggling any longer. (“That’s one thing about the French,” Hélène’s mother told her, “they respect writers.”) The girls at l’école Jeanne d’Arc were forever asking Hélène how her mother was getting on with her poetry.
“Ta mère, elle travaille bien?”
Their own mothers were the wives of fishermen or shopkeepers. Hélène had been presented to some of these mothers in the village streets; thick-ankled, round-faced women wearing old woolen coats and carrying groceries in bags made of plastic net.

Hélène and her mother had never intended to spend the whole of the year in St. Quay. They had planned to travel, to drift like migrants along the edges of the country.
(La France
has the shape of a hexagon, Hélène has been taught in the village school; this fact is repeated often, as though it carries mystical significance.) Instead of traveling, they had attached themselves like barnacles—this was how Hélène’s mother put it—to this quiet spot on the channel coast, and Hélène had enrolled in the local school. There was a very good reason
for this, her mother surprised her by saying. “The only way to get the feel of the country is to become a part of it.” Of course, as Hélène now knew, and as her mother would soon discover, it was not possible at all for them to become part of the community. Everywhere they went, to the boulangerie, to the post office, everywhere, there was a rustle and a whisper that went before them, announcing, just behind the weak smiles of welcome, “Ah, les Canadiennes!” It made Hélène feel weak; she always was having to compose herself, to imagine how she must look from the outside.

In St. Quay there were a number of old churches, though the largest, a church dating from the thirteenth century, had been torn down ten years earlier. It had been replaced with a brown brick building which was square and ugly like a factory, and distressingly empty, distressing, that is, to the local priest, a Father Dominic. He was an old man with creased yellow skin and a stiff manner, but he was the only friend Hélène’s mother had so far found in St. Quay.

“Alas,” said Father Dominic, rubbing his long chin, “Brittany was once the most religious corner of France, and now it has become, overnight”—he made a zigzag in the air to signify lightning—
“secularized.”
He said this in his loud, lonely voice, speaking as though there could be no reversal.

“The church,” he said, “has lost out to television and motorbikes and modernism in general, and it has all happened in a flash.”

Well, this was not quite the truth, Hélène’s mother explained later. The truth was that during the French Revolution Brittany had been filled with ranting anticlerical mobs who tore the statues out of church niches and removed stone chunks (heads chiefly or the fingers of upraised hands) from the roadside cavalries that dotted the Côte du Nord.
Quel
dommage
, Hélène’s mother said in sly imitation of Father Dominic, her only friend.

The particular church where Hélène found herself imprisoned on a Thursday afternoon was one of these small, desecrated churches, statueless and plain, its heavy doors shorn clean of carving and its windows replaced by dull opalescent glass. The church was officially closed. She knew that; it had been closed for many years.

Father Dominic had explained to them that it was no longer served by a priest. Nowadays there was but a single mass celebrated here each year—it was he who had the privilege of serving—and that was on a certain spring day set aside by tradition to honor sailors who had been lost at sea. On that particular Sunday in early April, the doors would be thrown open and people would enter carrying armloads of spring flowers; after that, a procession would wind over the rocks and down the beach itself.

When Hélène’s mother heard Father Dominic talking about this festival, her eyes had softened with feeling and she had nodded as though she, too, had had occasion to pay tribute to lost seamen—which, of course, coming from Winnipeg, she had not.

“That will be something to see,” she said to Hélène, and wrote the name of the festival in her notebook. At that moment, seeing her mother writing down the details of the fête and imagining the blond sunniness of this festive day, Hélène truly understood that they would be staying here the entire year, that their drifting, which she had loved, all ten days of it, was not to be resumed.

The old church stood just outside the village on the rue des Chiens, the same street where they had found a house to rent. “We’ve installed ourselves in a cheap stone house on Dog
Street.” Hélène’s mother had written this in a cheerful letter to a friend back home, as though having an inelegant address gave them an unconquerable ascendancy over the difficulties the little stone house presented. There it stood, surrounded by drenched shrubbery, a dragging lace of rain falling from the corners of the steep roof. The landlord, a scowling, silent widower with three teeth in his head, lived in the basement, and his presence cast a spell of restraint over them so that they tiptoed about the house,
his
house, in bedroom slippers and spoke to each other in hushed formal voices, more like a pair of elderly sisters than a mother and daughter. The bathroom stank despite the minty blue deodorizer Hélène had bought and attached to the wall, and the kitchen was damp and without cupboards. The two armchairs in the living room were covered with ancient, oily tapestry cloth, badly frayed. In the morning her mother made coffee, carried it to one of these repellent chairs, and sat down with her notebooks. There she spent her time, scarcely getting up and looking out at the sea all day. Hélène knew without asking that the poems were not coming easily.

By good fortune the Canadian government had seen fit to award her mother a sum of money so that she could come to France for a year in order to write poetry. She had long desired—and this was explained at great length in the application—to touch the soil where her ancestral roots lay. (But these roots, she now admitted to Hélène in one of their long whispered talks, were more deeply buried than she had thought. Her forebears had gone to Canada a long time ago, first to Quebec, then making their way to Manitoba.) And she was not entirely certain which region of France they had come from, though it was generally believed to have been either Brittany or Normandy. Now she was here,
breathing French air, eating French bread, drinking bitter black coffee and taking weekend walks on the wild wetted path that went along the coast, but what really was the use of this? What had she expected? For the so-called roots to rise up and embrace her?

It seemed to Hélène that her mother had childish notions about the magic of places. A field of oats was a field of oats. The blackberries they’d found along the coast path had the same beaded precision as those at home. Her mother had a way of making too much of things, always seeing secondary meanings, things that weren’t really there, and her eyes watered embarrassingly when she spoke of these deeper meanings. It was infantile, the way she went on and on about the
fond
of human experience. What was the
fond
but carrying home the groceries, trying to keep warm in the drafty stone house, walking down the dark road in the morning to school where the other girls waited for her, admiring her warm wool sweaters and asking her how her mother, the poet, was doing.

Recently Hélène’s mother, as if to make up for the lack of poems, had latched with fevered intensity on to particles of local lore, prising them out of Michelin guides and storing them up in notebooks—not the same notebooks the poems went into, but pale green spiral-bound books with squared-off pages, notebooks (meant for young school children) that she bought in the village at the Maison de la Presse. In one of these notebooks, she had recorded:

Her mother asked Hélène one day which version she preferred, but before Hélène could decide, she herself had said, “I think the second version must be true.” Then she qualified. “Not true, of course, not in a real sense, but containing the elements, the
fond
of truth.”

“Why?” Hélène had asked. She saw the shine on her mother’s face and felt an obligation to keep it there. “Why not the first version?”

“It’s a matter of perspective,” her mother said. “It’s just where I am now. In my life, I mean. I can believe certain things but not others.”

Because of the way she had said this, and the way she had squeezed her eyes shut, Hélène knew her mother was thinking about Roger, the man in Winnipeg she was in love with.
She had been in love before, several times. Love, or something like it, was always happening to her.

But now something had happened to Hélène; she was locked inside a church, chosen somehow, the way characters in stories are chosen. The thought gave her a wavelet of happiness. And a flash of guilty heat. She should not have entered the door; it should not have been unlocked and she should not be standing here—but she was. And what could she do about it—nothing. The feeling of powerlessness made her calm and almost sleepy. She looked about in the darkness for a place to sit down. There was nothing, no pews, no chairs, only the stone floor.

She tried the door again. The handle was heavy and made of some dull metal that filled her hand. She set her school bag on the floor and tried turning the handle and pushing on the door at the same time, leaning her shoulder into the wood. Then she pulled the door toward her, rattled it sharply and pushed it out again.

“Open,” she said out loud, and heard a partial echo float to the roof. It contained, surprisingly, the half-bright tone of triumph.

“I’m fourteen years old and locked in a French church.” These words slid out like a text she had been asked to read aloud. Calm sound surrounded by their own well of calm; this was a fact. It was no more and no less than what had happened.

Perhaps there was another door. She began to look around. The windows, high up along the length of the church, let in soft arches of webbed light, but the light was fading fast. It was almost five o’clock and would be dark she knew, in half an hour. Her mother would be waiting at home, the kitchen light on already, something started for supper.

High overhead was a dense, gray collision of dark beams and stone arches, and the arches were joined in such a way that curving shadows were formed, each of them like the quarter slice out of a circle. Hélène had made such curves with her pencil and compass under the direction of Sister Ste. Adolphe at the village school, and had been rewarded with a dainty-toothed smile and a low murmur,
“Très, très bon”
Sister Ste. Adolphe gave her extra pencils, showed her every favor, favors that, instead of exciting envy among the girls, stirred their approval. Hélène was a foreigner and deserved privileges. It was unjust.

It occurred to Hélène that there must be a reason for the church to be open. Perhaps there was a workman about or perhaps Father Dominic himself had come to see that the church was safe and undisturbed during its long sleep between festivals.

“Hello,” she called out.
“Bonjour
. Is there anyone here?” She stood still, pulling her coat more closely around her and waiting for an answer.

While she waited, she imagined two versions of her death. She would be discovered in the spring when the doors were flung open for the festival. The crowds, rushing in with armloads of flowers, would discover what was left of her, a small skeleton, odorless, as neat on the floor as a heap of stacked kindling, and the school bag nearby with its books and pencils and notebooks would provide the necessary identification.

Or some miracle of transcendence might occur. This was a church, after all, and close by was the sea. She might be lifted aloft and found with long strands of seaweed in her hair; her skin would be bleached and preserved so that it gleamed with the lustre of certain kinds of shells, and her lips, caked with salt, would be parted to suggest a simple attitude of
prayerfulness. (She and her mother, in their ten days of wandering, had visited the grave of an imbecile, a poor witless man who had lived as a hermit in the fourteenth century. It was said, a short time after his death and burial, that a villager had noticed a golden lily growing from the hermit’s grave, and when the body was exhumed it was discovered that the bulb of the plant was located in his throat, a testimonial to his true worth and a rebuke to those who had ignored him in his life.)

It occurred to Hélène that her mother would blame herself and not France. Lately, she was always saying, “One thing about France, the coffee has real flavor.” Or, “At least the French aren’t sentimental about animals,” or “You can say one thing for France, things are expensive but quality is high.” It seemed her mother was compelled to justify this place where she had deliberately settled down to being lonely and uncomfortable and unhappy.

It had all been a mistake, and now her mother, though she didn’t say it, longed for home and for Roger. “A man friend” is what she called Roger, saying this phrase with special emphasis as though it was an old joke with a low wattage of energy left in it. Roger loved her and wanted to marry her. They had known each other for two years. His first wife left him. “He’s very bitter,” Hélène’s mother said, “and for someone like Roger, this can be a terrible blow, a great humiliation.”