The World Below (26 page)

He laughed. “A dam, my dear. They dammed up the river and submerged the whole damned thing.”

I looked down again. It came and went under the moving water, the sense of what was there. There were long moments when I couldn’t quite get it, when it seemed I must have imagined it. But then there it was again, sad and mysterious. Grand, somehow. Grand because it was gone forever but still visible, still imaginable, below us.

“How could they do that, though?” I asked him. “What about the people who lived there?”

“I don’t suppose there were many left by then. And when the dam went in, the ones who
were
left had to leave.”

“But that’s so terrible, to see your town down there. All the places that were yours, that meant something to you.”

“I imagine it would have been,” he said.

“It’s so … weird.” I leaned over and watched the shifting images. “But it’s kind of magical, really, isn’t it? And sad.”

“Well, of course you’re right. It is. Sad, and beautiful too. As many sad things are.”

I looked for a long time. Behind me I could hear the occasional slow ticking of my grandfather’s reel as he gently pulled the line this way or that. “Think of it, Grandpa,” I said. “Think about the fishes swimming through the places where people used to live.”

“Yes.”

It made me think of my mother somehow—the lostness of the world down there, the otherness of it. It was like being able to look at memory itself. I felt a kind of yearning for everything past, everything already gone in my life.

Behind me my grandfather said, “What would you think about going away on a kind of adventure this summer, Cath?”

I turned and sat up. “An adventure? What do you mean?” I was so absorbed in what I’d been looking at that his words seemed
connected with the shimmering buildings, the sense of what was lost. For a moment it was as though he were offering me the equivalent of entering that underwater world, of going somewhere it was almost impossible to go.

He cleared his throat “Well, what I mean is France, actually. I’ve written to your aunt Rue to ask about it. It turns out she has friends who would like an English-speaking sitter for the summer.” He had laid his fishing rod across his lap. “You wouldn’t be an au pair,” he said (at the time I had no idea what this meant, what he was speaking of). “You’d live with Rue. But you’d baby-sit for this friend’s children, and get paid, for about twenty hours a week.”

France. A way out. A new life. I almost couldn’t answer, I was so grateful. After a moment, I said, “I’d love it. I’d absolutely love it. I’d love to go.”

I looked at my grandfather. His eyes were steady on me, and what I felt was that he saw me. Saw me as I was, as a person, even at that confused, unformed age. Saw my life and how I didn’t know what to do with it; saw that I was special. That France, or the equivalent of France, was the only answer for a person like me.

On the way home, I peppered him with questions about France. When I would go, how long I’d stay, whether anyone would speak English, what Paris looked like. He told me a little of his memory of France from the First World War; he’d been billeted with a family in the village where the base hospital was, but he got to Paris once, after the armistice.

“I stayed in an old hotel—well, damn it, every hotel was old. But it was cheap, and I had to get up in the middle of the night and sit in a chair: bedbugs!”

“Ugh!” I said.

“Still, I thought it was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen.” And then, as though it were connected, not a change of subject at all, he said, “Did you know I’d been your grandmother’s doctor before I was her husband?”

“No,” I answered.

“I was. When she had TB. And before that I was her mother’s doctor, too. So you see what an old, old man I am.”

I laughed. I was very happy.
France!
I thought.

“It gave me, I think, too much power in her life.”

I looked over at him then. He seemed tiny to me all of a sudden, hunched over and shrunken. His trembling hands were lying uselessly curled up on his thighs. What was he talking about? The notion of his having power, power of any kind, seemed absurd to me. It made me uncomfortable to hear this. I didn’t know what to say. I turned away quickly, back to the road.

He must have sensed my feelings. I felt him stir and straighten up.

After a moment he said, “What do you think, Cath?”

“About what?”

“Why, about the power one person has over another. Should we resist it?”

I looked at him for a moment, mouth open.

“Should I mind my own business, for instance, and let
you
decide what to do with your summer? Because it may be, for all we know, that this trip to France will change your life for good or ill. One day perhaps you’ll think, Oh, that damned old man, why couldn’t he just have let me
be
?’ ”

“Oh, no!” I said. “I’ll
never
think that.”

“No?” He sounded amused. I looked over. He
was
smiling.

“No. I
want
my life to change.”

“Yes,” he said, it seemed to me sadly. “Yes, I know you do.”

The rest of the way into town, we rode silently. I think my grandfather fell asleep.

Eleven

I
suppose the truth was that I was sent away. Perhaps my father had indicated that he couldn’t take me for as long that summer as he had the summer before. Perhaps my grandparents felt they needed a rest, some privacy. But certainly, and naturally, they did want to separate me from Sonny. I had as much as asked them to send me away from that situation.

Sent away
was not how I felt, though. I felt liberated. I felt deeply and permanently
set free
, mostly from myself.

Rue lived in a deep, narrow apartment on the Right Bank. If you leaned carefully out the opened windows at the front you could see the Eiffel Tower on the other side of the Seine. These words,
Eiffel Tower, Seine
, had the power to stir me profoundly, maybe even more than the reality of the places themselves did.

My bedroom was at the back of the apartment, overlooking the inner courtyard, which had once, perhaps, been elegant but was now always full of parked cars and the noise of the concierge’s television set, turned on all day and into the night to what sounded like game shows: you could hear the emcee’s frantic high-pitched voice, the joyless mechanical hysterics of what must have been a studio audience. I had two windows that opened out over this space, and I
spent a lot of time, particularly in the evenings, sitting at them and watching the life unself-consciously being acted out in layers in the apartments across the way.

My aunt—the Duchess, was like an older, more elegant, and certainly more stable version of my mother. By the time I saw Rue each morning, she was, as my grandmother always was, carefully dressed—in Rue’s case, though, wearing Chanel knockoffs and thick ropes of gold and pearls around her neck and wrists. We had breakfast together in the dining room, served by the Moroccan maid, Claude, who alone among us seemed at ease; she wore bedroom slippers and shapeless clothes to work in and sang as she moved around the apartment.

Each morning, over our coffee and bread and fruit, Rue told me what her day was to be and what time she would come back to get me for whatever cultural excursion we were to undertake that afternoon.

My days were orderly too. In the mornings I took care of the three American Pierce children. I had lunch with them and settled them down for their rest. I came home immediately to a French lesson with Mme. Georges. Then I was free until the agreed-upon hour with Rue. Several times a week I went back to the Pierces’ in the evening to baby-sit, but I was paid extra for this and was allowed to refuse if Rue and I had something planned.

I didn’t like Rue, but I admired her. Her escape itself, to France, to Paris, to her apartment. Her way of dressing. Her way of seeing the world. All this seemed exotic and remarkable to me, given the little town in Vermont she’d come from, given that she was my mother’s sister. Of course, it had arrived in her life step by step. She’d been a nurse, and she came to Europe in the Second World War. She’d met her husband in France just after it ended. He was a businessman, from a stuffy bourgeois family, and she gave me to understand that marrying her represented his rebellion, his defiance of them. This seemed unlikely to me at the time, for wasn’t her life, in its way, as stuffy and bourgeois as anything imaginable? She
was full of strictures—how to sit, how to eat, how to wear one’s hair, how, differentially, to address the people we encountered daily. Rules, endless rules, most of which I’d never heard of before. She meant to make a difference in my life—she had
taken me on
, that was clear—and she did. Mostly in the ways she intended, but in other ways too.

She announced her intentions, not to me but, in my presence, to her friends. In French. But over the course of the summer, even though my own speech in French was always laboriously composed in my mind before I uttered it, I came to understand bigger and bigger chunks of her conversations. And so I knew what she thought of my life: “So extremely narrow, you wouldn’t believe it.” She spoke of my mother: “Completely deranged, but also capable of a kind of small controlled daily life.” Of my father, foolish and pathetic, though loyal, one had to give him that. And of my grandparents, trying their best, of course, but at their age, how could one expect them to have the energy necessary for the job? And my grandmother! Well, one noted she’d already raised a child of her own so disturbed she ended by taking her own life. What more need one say, after all?

And where, in all of this, she would ask dramatically, raising her glass, or her cup, or her cigarette, was there the smallest chance for this poor little one (me) to experience life, culture, art, as one was meant to? I was a pathetic creature. Culturally I might as well be completely orphaned.

Once, when one of her friends protested her speaking of me this way within my hearing—and of my parents and family—she said,
“Fffft
. If you speak at all rapidly, she understands nothing.” It was the first whole sentence that I was aware of taking in without the internal process of translation.

I had been lost in myself before this—a defense, I suppose, against my mother’s illness and death as well as, to some degree, an intensified version of that particular stage of adolescence. Now
I began to see myself, my
story
, through Rue’s eyes. I saw, in fact, that I had a story. But not only that. I saw myself, the embodiment of that story, through French eyes too, I saw myself as I was seen, physically moving around in Paris. Rue gave me this: self-consciousness. Before her, I had been invisibly at the center of my world. But the world grew larger for me now, and I became visible in it. To myself, most of all. Even the Pierce children helped me gain a distance on myself. Nathalie, the oldest, announced to me one day that I was their
second
favorite sitter. I was not, she said, as funny as Lene, the Danish au pair who took care of them in the winter, but I was sweeter, kinder, and at certain times prettier.

Instantly I understood that I was too somber, not witty enough; and I swore to myself I would change.

This became the meaning to me of my stay in France: I would change. I could change. I would come back a different person, ready for a different life. I traipsed after Rue and took in her comments on architecture, on art, on clothes, on manners and food—things I’d never conceived that you thought about, I’d never understood that there could be good or bad versions of. I watched the way French people sat in restaurants and cafés, the elaborate facial expressions and gestures they made as they spoke or listened. So much energy! So much concern! Just about words, ideas. I studied and copied the way the French girls dressed and moved and talked, the light rhythm of their speech. I had my hair cut like theirs. I lost weight. With the money I earned at the Pierces’, I bought new shoes, new clothes. I felt pretty, glamorous, unfright-ened for the first time in my life. In my room, with the lights out and the windows open, I smoked cigarettes I’d stolen from Rue, tilting my head back glamorously, watching the languor of my arms in the mirror.

But there was another aspect to my stay, another change in perspective being offered me. For Rue had her own vision, too, of my grandparents’ lives together. It emerged, it bubbled up in all her
talk about them: a clear disdain for my grandmother, a sense of her as untrustworthy, and a deep, jealous adoring of my grandfather. It was the kind of thing, I think now, that my mother, if she’d been like other mothers, if she’d been able to talk to us normally about her family, might have easily explained. She might have said, “Oh, Rue. She was half in love with Daddy. No wonder she always found fault with Mother.”

To my own credit—and because of my love for my grandmother—I understood some of it that way anyway, though I couldn’t have been so easily dismissive or so amused as this theoretical mother of mine. But I sensed there was something off in Rue’s notion of things. I may have concluded this in part because of the way Rue saw my mother’s illness: as something my grandmother had caused. This was, of course, the way the world understood it then, the educated world in particular. And Rue had had medical training. She knew her Freud—or at least the distortion of Freud that held parents, mothers in particular, accountable for all pathology in their children.