Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (5 page)

She is faithful, regular, and consistent, but I cannot keep up. So, I have started picking and choosing now, selecting the more telling entries and leaving out the more mundane. I have begun to give her life shape.

Do you think it wrong of me? Unscholarly. Unscientific, perhaps? Like the hovering M. Richaud, you must suspect me of some ulterior motive and read a guilty tension in my white-gloved hand or a less-than-innocent angle to my pencil. I confess that I have started to look for a pattern here. May not a translator aspire to storytelling? Or do you detect an act of hubris? A fledgling literary translator, already testing the limits of her little wings, eyes the far-off treetops where the editors and novelists nest, and stupidly thinks that with a bit of flapping she might join them. Max used to say I was a better listener than speaker, always putting
the pieces in the wrong order or neglecting the context needed to understand a tale, like a child so anxious to relay a joke, she babbles out the punchline with none of the necessary wind-up. He suspected it was the fault of bilingualism: a precocious talent for languages may clutter as much as it clarifies. Not that Max proved much of a teller in the end. But this is not his story nor mine. Let me prove my fluency with someone else’s words.

I wrote Marcel a much longer letter than usual yesterday and sent it to Jean’s attention, so that he will make sure it is on the table when Marcel arises tomorrow morning. That way the boy is sure to be greeted with birthday wishes from his dear mother at breakfast. How silly that we are not together today, but he will be here with me at the seaside before the month is out.

And sometimes it is easier to tell a son how much one loves him in a letter. I have recalled for him July 10, 1871. The instability of those times seems so far away now, the Republic so solid. To think Adrien was almost hit by a bullet in the middle of a Paris street, it just seems unimaginable today! I do not forget the worry though. I think I have carried that with me ever since Marcel’s birth, although that is not how I put it in my letter. Besides, that is a mother’s privilege: to watch over a child every day.

Marcel has sent me the most beautiful letter responding to my birthday wishes, which I have just finished reading and to which I immediately replied. That boy is so sensitive, he always sees right to the heart of any emotional question. He started by thanking me for the little history lesson—how ridiculous of me, of course, it is not as though the student of political science does not know all about the Commune and the Germans attacking Paris, and the siege, but, as Marcel goes on to say, one likes to tell children the same family stories again and again. It is a way of reassuring oneself that the bonds are still strongly tied, I suppose.

How many times I must have said to him, “Marcel, when your little mother was carrying you in her belly, all Paris was hungry but I had you to keep me full…” His father had to send me to Auteuil for safety, and when I did deliver him, he was so sickly the doctor who attended me did not think he would live. I do not imagine I mentioned that part to him when he was little, nor the stray bullet that almost killed his father—it does not do to frighten children with tales of sickness and death, after all.

In his letter, Marcel describes my face to me, and tells me how dear it is, and quotes Loti: “I would like to greet her with special words, words made specially for her.” He admits that he feels so sad sometimes because he knows he causes me pain, what with his ill health and his lack of willpower. I hurried to write him back to reassure him on that score, that I rejoice to see
him apply himself in his studies, that he has never caused me pain that it was not a mother’s privilege to suffer. In closing, I turned to Mme de Sévigné’s letters to her daughter: “How well you justify that excessive love that everyone knows I feel for you.”

Things have not begun auspiciously in this our autumn of academic seriousness. Marcel has effected a rapprochement with Mme Straus.

Indeed, M. Straus himself dropped by last week to tell Marcel that all is forgiven and he may return to the lady’s salon every week as before. It is tacitly understood there are to be no more inappropriate bouquets or extravagant compliments, which I suspect were more annoying to Monsieur than to Madame, but the young man’s presence is eagerly awaited.

Marcel is overjoyed, and burst out with the news the moment M. Straus had left (after the gentleman had very kindly paid his compliments to me on his way out). Well, they are charming people, the Straus. Jewish, of course, but very cultivated, and Madame’s salon is, I am sure, full of the most erudite and literary people. Yet really, the child does not need social distractions, he needs to study. I warned him not to go yelling this news to his father, or there will be trouble.

Meanwhile, the season is starting up again at Mme Baignères’s and at Mme Arman de Caillavet’s, where Marcel is hoping to pursue his friendship with the great M. France himself, no doubt to further his own literary ambitions. Yesterday, I finally insisted that Marcel draw
up a timetable, with a set number of hours for reading each week, and pointed out that if he insists on coming home in the small hours of the morning, nine o’clock study periods were not very realistic.

With the weather still so warm, Mme Faure and I slipped out for a walk yesterday before seasonal preparations make such things impossible. What a round of dinners and balls she must attend next month—the lot of a political wife. I felt I was actually doing her great benefit, just providing a little tête-à-tête with a good woman friend for a change. We talked long of conjugal duty, and asked each other to what extent one should close one’s eyes. I had not realized M. Faure is quite so active outside the home. Poor thing, these matters are such a trial, as I have reason to know.

Marcel is very excited because he met the Princesse Mathilde at Mme Straus’s. I had heard that she styles herself as a simple woman, and does not hesitate to mention the Bonapartes’ humble origins. When Marcel took her hand and made to kiss it, she abruptly turned it over and shook his instead. Adrien was quite impressed, and said, “Imagine the grandson of Louis Proust shaking hands with Napoleon’s niece!” I had to gently remind the doctor that he professes to be a republican.

We are recovering from the Neuburger-Bergson wedding. Marcel and Dick looked very smart standing
beside the bride and groom under the canopy. (So kind of them to honour them so—I was a little surprised since they did not feel Maman was a close enough relation that the proximity of the anniversary of her death needed to be avoided when they were setting the date.) That new suit from Eppler is very well cut in the end, with a nice line across the shoulders. Perhaps I should tell Dick to get the shirts he wanted done up there instead of next door.

Marcel is very taken with his new cousin. They had a long discussion of M. Bergson’s work at one of the receptions before the new year, and Marcel was trying to explain his theories to me. It is about the way we experience our memories of the past, but I was not sure I was grasping it at all. Louise looked lovely, her dress had the most exquisite beading.

M. Blanche is really pressing Marcel on this issue of the portrait. He is a youngish man, yet already he has something of a reputation as a painter, so I urged Marcel to go ahead and agree to sittings. It is a distraction from his studies, this is true, but it would be regrettable to pass up such an opportunity. M. Blanche would undertake the portrait of his own volition—apparently, he likes Marcel’s Italian eyes, so a mother must surely feel he is a man of discernment—but I suggested to Adrien that if the portrait is a success, we might even buy it. This summer, my little wolf will be twenty-one, and what a present it would make!

We had a great family debate about the merits of the
telephone at dinner last night. Dick is all for it, and says one day every house will have one. He was even trying to convince Adrien it would be very useful for his practice, pointing out that in America doctors are now all on the line. Marcel is skeptical and was arguing strongly for the pneumatic, saying there was nothing a telephone could do that a
petit bleu
could not achieve just as fast. Dick replied that if you were sending an invitation, and the other person could reply just as soon as the question is put to him, it could actually speed things up. Marcel cleverly pointed out that often you do not want to reply right away, but want to delay a few days and consider your social schedule and the other invitations you have received. I have never much taken to sending messages by the pneumatic, always preferring a letter, but perhaps it really will be as Dick says and we will get used to the telephone.

Now that he’s chez Straus so often, Marcel is very much back in with Jacques Bizet and Daniel Halévy. The old Lycée Condorcet set apparently wants to launch a literary journal, and Marcel is now busy at inaugural meetings and the like. He also wants to have a dinner for his friends this season and now I have only to convince the doctor that he should be allowed it. After all, he is young, it is natural to want to go into society when one is young, and one cannot be always visiting without ever opening one’s own doors.

Will we never be free of this demon asthma? It was not a bad attack, just wheezing and gasping and it passed
quickly enough, but the anxiety it causes my poor little Marcel is almost unbearable for me to watch. It will be monstrously unfair if he is still held back by his health even as he grows up.

Ever since that day in the Bois, we have lived under this cloud. I realize it must be exactly eleven years ago now, for we were spending the Easter holidays at Uncle Louis’s when it happened and he was nine at the time. There we all were, a perfectly lovely spring day in the Bois de Boulogne, and suddenly he was gasping and choking and writhing about on the ground, clutching at his chest. The image will always remain with me, the way a perfectly innocent, sunny day can suddenly, in one moment, become a nightmare. You look up expecting somehow the weather will have changed to account for such sorrow, and now the blue sky mocks you and the clarity of the air seems almost evil.

I suppose it is the trees—they are just coming into full leaf this week, late after that hard winter. I was set to return to Paris at the end of the week, but told Uncle Louis I will return right away, in the hopes Marcel will be more comfortable if he stays indoors in the apartment. How funny that we think of the country air at Auteuil as being healthy, yet for him it is the cause of disease.

I went to the Louvre alone yesterday afternoon and spent most of it lost in contemplation of Caravaggio’s
Fortune Teller
. I must have seen the canvas often enough before, but perhaps the keepers have moved it to
a new location or cleaned it and that is why it caught my eye in particular today. The fortune teller is a common peasant woman with a ruddy round face, but her client, who extends his hand and eyes her a little warily, is clearly a nobleman, with fancy clothes and fine features.

I had never noticed before how much he looks like Marcel. The nose is long and straight, with the slightest bump or arching just below the bridge. The eyes are deeply set, with a pronounced line across the middle of the lid that separates the flesh of the lid proper from the flesh of the brow, as though the skin itself was carved from stone. The cheeks are flushed and the lips full and red. Well, people often remark that Marcel’s look is Italian. His darkness is actually Semitic—he inherits it from his grandfather Weil—but to be sure, there is something of the young and noble Florentine about him. Apart from the hair—the fortune teller’s client has the most lovely curly locks—and the skin—Marcel’s is less olive in shade—they are very close. Oh, but he is beautiful.

I will not bore Marcel with a mother’s indulgent comparisons. He is already all puffed up with his hostesses fawning over him.

I
SAW MAX IN THE
library today. He was behind the reserve desk, where the clerks load returned manuscripts onto their carts and wheel them back into the stacks. He had his back to me and was pushing a cart in the opposite direction, towards the glass door that leads to the unseen vaults, but surely it was him. I recognized the way his curls cling
to the back of his head, and his gait, light, springy, and tentative somehow, as though he did not entirely belong to this earth. Only the cart seemed to anchor him to the floor. The library overalls, a one-piece affair in faded blue, looked too large on his small frame, and I can imagine he complains that they don’t fit properly and make him look shrunken or insignificant.

He was always a bit vain. In the old days, walking along St. Catherine Street together, I would sometimes catch him spying on his own reflection in the shop windows, checking that he was really as beautiful as he wanted to be. This morning, I want to rise from my desk to follow him, to catch up with him and see his face, but a certain lightness in my stomach gives me pause.

Fear and desire have begun a swift little ballet in my gut. Five years since he left Montreal, left for good, and his image still unsettles me, the idea of being in his presence, even a great room’s length away, fills me with fluttering hopes, all false, I know, and impossible little dreams. Can one call it love, this attenuated longing stretched over months and months until they become years? I both yearn for him and dread him, wondering sometimes if it is not simply the habit of heartache that has ensnared me. In moments of reason, I see that I am miles away from the real Max and wonder if I could actually love whoever it is he is now. And yet here he stands, all too familiar and infinitely desirable. I see him clearly, if at a distance, hovering at the end of the room. I am unable to rise and go to greet him; I am too certain this apparition will prove to be only a chimera.