Doctor's Wife (17 page)

    “You ran into Peg?”

    “Yes, alas.”

    “What did she say? Was it about us?”

    “Mn, hm. Did the phone ring?”

    “No.”

    “Good.” She went into the kitchen and put the
croissants on a plate. “Let’s have our breakfast, then go out and
look at pictures.”

    “I’ve got a better idea,” he said. “Let’s do
something useful. Why don’t we go and get your photographs taken
and then go to the embassy and get you a tourist visa?”

    “No, let’s have fun.”

    “Can we really have fun?”

    “Why not?”

    “How can you have fun when you’re sitting here
scared that the phone will ring? Or that he’ll take it into his
head to come over here and raise hell?”

    “He won’t. If he hasn’t phoned this morning, it
means he’s calmed down.”

    “Okay. But what
about
the visa? I mean, my
charter flight is about two weeks from today. We don’t have all
that much time.”

    “No!” She got up from the table as though she would
strike him. “I haven’t decided anything. I’m not going to decide
anything until this damn period starts. I can’t.”

    “I’m sorry. Please, I’m sorry.”

    She came to him, standing over him, holding him,
pressing his head against her thigh. He felt her tremble. “Oh,
Tom,” she said. “Come on, let’s go to the Jeu de Paume and look at
Impressionists. Let’s not talk about anything until tomorrow, all
right?”

    “All right.”

    •

    Next morning, from a dream in which he and his
sister ran along Coast Guard beach in Amagansett, pursued by two
men with knives who wanted to kill them, he woke alarmed to stare
at a strange ceiling, his mind slowly restoring him to Paris, to
Peg’s big bed, and to Sheila beside him. But when he turned his
head she was not there. For a while he listened, wondering if she
were up and moving about in the flat. The only sound was the
ticking of Peg’s alarm clock. He pulled on his jeans and went out
into the corridor, thinking she might have gone downstairs for the
breakfast croissants. But two croissants were already on a plate in
the kitchen. Beside them he found a note.

                Got up early and
had breakfast. These

                are yours, and
there’s coffee on the

                stove. Have gone
for a walk. Will be

                back about ten.
Love, S.

    He fingered the note. Alarm, the same unreasonable
alarm he had felt earlier in his dream, came back as he stood
staring out of the kitchen window at the shadows of the courtyard
below. It was raining. Until this morning she had never wanted to
be separated from him. Even yesterday, after their visit to the Jeu
de Paume, when she decided to do her hair and he to go for a walk
while she did it, she ran out after him, calling, “No, no, come
back, come back, I want to be with you, I want to be with you,”
chanting the words as though they were a mantra of her content. Yet
today he was alone. He poured coffee and sat down, disconsolate,
staring at the rain on the windowpane.

    •

    The Chapelle d’Accueil was in a side altar just off
the nave on the river side of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. There
was a confession box in there and, in front of the altar, a table
with a lamp, lit while the priest was in attendance. On the wall,
to the left, was a placard:

                CONFESSIONS

                Anglais—English

                8-10 12-15
Horaires

                M. Le Père
Michel Brault

    On the table in front of the priest were a large
ledger and a manila folder which contained sheets of ruled
notepaper. Mrs. Redden did not know the purpose of the ledger, or
what was written in the folder. She came out of the shadows, going
toward this chapel, which sat like a small lighted stage off from
the gloom of the nave. The priest, the principal actor, looked up
as she made her entrance, gesturing her to sit on the chair facing
him across the table.

    “Do you want me to hear your confession,
Madame
?” he asked, in heavily accented English.

    “No, I’d just like to talk to someone.”

    “Please,” he said. He did not look like a priest. He
wore a gray cotton summer jacket, much like Protestant ministers
wore at home. His stock was also gray, frayed at the place where it
was attached to his white celluloid collar. She remembered her
father, years ago, talking about his first visit to France, saying
the French priests looked so poor it was a disgrace. But it was
this poverty which had attracted her when, entering the cathedral,
moving among the throngs of tourists who milled, unprayerful, in
the nave, she saw this fat, weary old priest sitting at his table
in a side altar, his cheap spectacles askew on his nose, his worn
gray jacket, his baggy trousers. A priest should be poor. Irish
priests were not.

    He looked at her. He was waiting for her to
begin.

    “It’s about a friend of mine,” she said. She had
decided to say this. “A friend who tried to kill herself.”

    He nodded. He had the swollen, pitted nose of a
drinker. His hand, placed flat on the folder as though he were
swearing an oath, was large and white, unused to any toil. I
shouldn’t have started this, she thought, it’s a mistake. “Father,
do you know whether people who kill themselves think much about it
before they do it?”

    “Usually, yes.”

    “But sometimes not?”

    He felt his large nose with forefinger and thumb,
pulling on it, preoccupied. “Possibly. Do you know of such a
case?”

    “Well, this woman had never thought about it. But
last night she woke up and I think she wanted to kill herself.”

    “She told you this?”

    Mrs. Redden nodded.

    “
Madame
, have you, yourself, ever thought
about suicide?”

    She looked at him sharply. “No,” she said.
“Why?”

    “Because intelligent people often do think about it.
After all, as Camus has pointed out, it is perhaps the only serious
personal question.”

    An Irish priest would never say that. Suddenly she
was able to tell him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t tell you the truth. I am
talking about myself. There isn’t
a
friend.”

    He nodded, waiting for her to continue.

    “Last night,” she said, “I woke up. I hadn’t had a
nightmare or anything. The moment I woke up I felt drawn to go out
on the balcony of the apartment I’m staying in. I felt I must climb
up on the balcony railing and push myself out and jump. It was as
though something were leading me on, making me do it.”

    “But you did not do it?”

    “Obviously not.”

    He smiled apologetically. “Yes, of course. But did
you try?”

    “Do you mean, did I climb up on the rail? Yes, I
did. But after a while I got hold of myself and went inside
again.”

    Beyond, in the gloom of the cathedral, the organist
struck a sudden practice chord, the sound immense and powerful like
the roar of a God. The organist sounded a deep note, then a high,
shrill one, then began to play the opening of a Bach fugue.

    “Do you, perhaps, wish to punish someone?” the
priest asked.

    The organ, swelling, thundered to a stop, leaving
behind a stillness in the vaulted roofs of stone.

    “No.”

    “Sometimes people think of their own death as a
punishment,” the priest said. “A punishment of oneself. Or a
punishment of others.”

    “Yes. But I don’t want to punish anyone. Not even
myself.”

    The priest rotated his head slowly, as though he
suffered from a crick in his neck. “Sometimes such wishes are
unconscious.”

    “Yes, I suppose. Perhaps I do wish to punish myself
for what I’ve done. But I don’t think so. I feel enormously happy,
most of the time.”

    “Happy people do not wish to commit suicide,
Madame
.”

    “But I am happy. Happier than I have ever been. I do
have a difficult decision ahead of me. But I will make it.”

    “And after you have made it,” the priest said, “will
you still be happy?”

    She turned away and looked at the wall to her right.
On it hung a huge oil painting. The inscription read:

                SAINT-PIERRE
GUÉRISSANT

                LES MALADES DE
SON OMBRE

                Laurent de La
Hyre

                Offert le
premier Mai 1635 par

                La Corporation
des Orfèvres

    “I don’t know,” she said. “Whatever I decide, my
former life is over.”

    “
Madame
, are you a Catholic?”

    “I was. I don’t think I am any more.”

    “When you came into the cathedral this morning, did
you take Holy Water on your fingers and make the Sign of the
Cross?”

    “Yes.”

    “And did you think, ‘God is here’?”

    “No, Father, I did it from habit. And from respect
for other people who might be believers. I didn’t come in to pray.
I was walking along the Seine thinking of what happened to me last
night. I felt I should talk to someone about it, a doctor, perhaps.
And when I saw the cathedral I thought, Perhaps a priest has
experience, people tell him things like this. So I came in. And
then I saw you.”

    The priest smiled, showing a large gap between’ his
upper front teeth. “
Eh bien
, I hope I will be able to
help. Could you, perhaps, tell me what sort of decision it is that
you must make?”

    In the silence of the nave, there came a distant
murmur of tourists, a shuffling of many feet, as a conducted tour
group passed by the side altar, some looking in with curiosity at
Mrs. Redden and the priest. The priest ignored the interruption.
When the tourists had gone, Mrs. Redden looked at him and shook her
head.

    “Would it help you, perhaps, if you could talk about
it?”

    Mrs. Redden slid her chair back abruptly and stood
up. “Thank you, Father. It’s already helped me to talk to you.”

    “You should talk to
someone,” the
priest
said. “Are you living alone?”

    “No.”

    “Good. You should not be alone. Talk to a friend.
Will you do that?”

    She lowered her head.

    “Or come and see me again. I am here every day
except Sunday.”

    “Thank you, Father.”

    “God bless you, my child.”

    The organ gonged in clear tones as the organist
again played the opening of the fugue. In the nave a group of
Japanese tourists clustered in a circle, as though waiting to
perform some complicated stage maneuver. Some stared around,
robot-fashion, their ears plugged to plastic cords attached to
boxes containing recorded lectures. Others held cameras aloft.
Flashbulbs struck in ellipses in the gloom. Mrs. Redden came down
from the side altar, going along the left center aisle, passing a
field of empty chairs. She looked up at the great cruciform shape
of the roof above her head and, hearing the deep organ tones again,
she thought of the question asked by the priest: “Did you think,
‘God is here’?” No, God is not here. Notre-Dame is a museum, its
pieties are in the past. Once these aisles were filled with the
power of faith, with prayer and pilgrimage, all heads bowed in
reverence at the elevation of the Host. Once people knelt here, in
God’s house, offering the future conduct of their lives against a
promise of heaven. But now we no longer believe in promises. What
was it that priest said? Camus, suicide, the only serious personal
question. She looked at the side altar and saw the priest open the
large ledger in front of him and turn to a blank page. She watched
him pick up an old-fashioned straight-nibbed pen and write
something on the page. Is he enter- . ing my visit in that book? A
small transaction of God’s business. Debit or credit? I wonder
which.

    Outside a cold wind swept in an invisible puffball
along the walls of the archbishop’s garden, scattering a cluster of
pigeons as though dispersing a street demonstration. Mrs. Redden
caught her blue sun hat, holding it on her head. The clock on the
Pont au Double said it was almost eleven. She began to hurry. Rain
fell.

    •

    “Worried?” he said. “Of course I was. I thought for
a while you might have gone back to Ireland.”

    “Without my suitcase?” She laughed. “You don’t know
me.”

    “Well, where
did
you go?”

    “Oh, just for a walk. I’m sorry. You must be tired
of sitting in all morning, waiting.”

    “I am,” he said. “Let’s go out now. Okay?”

    “Of course.”

    As they went downstairs, she ran ahead of him,
beginning to take the steps two at a time. He ran after her,
turning the descent into a mock race, thinking that her mood was
much better today. Perhaps he could bring it up at lunch.

    “Which way will we go?” he asked.

    “Depends on where you want to have lunch.”

    “Is Restaurant des Arts, okay?”

    “Perfect.”

    Outside, the rain seemed to have stopped, but the
sky was still gray, filled with shifting clouds. The winds whipped
their bodies as they walked up the rue Danton.

    “So, tell about this walk.”

    “Oh, I went along the Seine as far as the Pont
d’Austerlitz. And on my way back, I wound up in Notre-Dame.”

    “What did you do, go to Mass or something?”

    “I talked to a priest.”

    Suddenly he felt uneasy. In Villefranche she had
said she was no longer a practicing Catholic. But he had lived long
enough in Ireland to be wary of such protestations of freedom. A
priest sounded like bad news. “And how did that go?” he asked.