GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (41 page)

In the doorway stands a little girl of seven
or eight with thin graceful bare arms and a school satchel on her
back and now wide-eyed and stepping back as he approaches and casts
himself on his knees before her, having recognized his darling and
he understands the missing photograph of her in white Confirmation
veils four impossible years later, and the missing later oil
paintings and the rejuvenation of the wall paper.

Not the early fifties but the mid-thirties,
another trick on both of us. O Marie-Claude, don’t be frightened,
it’s me, it will be me, Seymour, in fifteen years, I’ll never leave
you then.

He reaches out for her.

Her scream and “Momma! Momma!” is cut off,
the room is cut off. Seymour’s personal screen goes glaring blank
again.

Louis steps into the street, her street, no
doubt about it. There, at one end, the church with stone demons
pitchforking naked stone sinners above the entrance. At the other
end, the square with the green bronze general with raised sword.
Her flower shop, he knows, stands between a toyshop and a corset
shop. Approaching, he recognizes them too, but not what stands
between them.

He wants to step away but can’t help
approaching the not flower shop with the ornate legend
POMPES
FUNEBRES
which he
doesn’t understand but does slowly understand what he sees in the
window: crosses of all sizes, marble angels, porcelain flowers,
bronze wreathes, black marble plaques with names and birth and
death dates and short phrases he doesn’t comprehend except for
recurrent topsy-turvy “
regrets éternels
.”

Bewildered, he turns to the flanking shops, wanting
to ask what has happened to the flower shop. In the toyshop rows of
porcelain dolls lie in their open boxes with staring eyes and he
can’t enter. In the other shop, stands a massacre of headless,
armless, hourglass-shaped corseted dummies and he can’t enter.

He returns to the other, wrong, shop. He
wants to enter and ask, but he sees in the window, somehow fixed in
the stone, sample photographs of the beloved departed, the old man
with drooping mustaches, the solemn child, and there, that third
photo, with the date 1881-1901: that smiling face, that name graven
in the speckled granite for all time.

Again she tries to cry in French.
“I’m
Hélène
, not
Helen. You have the wrong room.” Again her cry is an inaudible
squeak. The footsteps in the corridor resume for a second and then
she hears a knock on the neighboring door, the door opening, a
young woman’s cry of joy, the young man’s exclamation
“
Hélène
!” the
door closing and soon her shameless love-whimpers that clamped ears
can’t keep out.

Finally, to put an end to it, Helen
(laying no claim to the name
Hélène
)
starts crawling over to the fourth-story window wide open on white
fog, crawls nearer and nearer.

An hour of street after wrong street,
aching ankles, aching heart, and then the idea occurs to Margaret:
a map of Paris to find the right street. She finally locates a
bookshop on the other side of the
Avenue Mozart
. She waits, alongside a well-dressed
white-bearded old man, at the pedestrian crossing. When the traffic
light changes, she steps off the curb.

The light is green but suddenly a big
low-slung black car hurtles toward the red light, impossible at
that speed to brake to a stop.

Margaret tries to run. Her left high-heel
twists. She catapults forward. Her bleeding palms, outflung, catch
the old man in the small of the back, propelling him out of the
path of the swerving car. Sprawling, she replaces him in the fatal
spot. It could easily be taken for a gesture of supreme
self-sacrifice, instead of the consequence of a defective heel.

The black car is upon her.

Louis can see his warped reflection in the
window of the unbearable shop, hunched and trembling for the first
time in his two lives. That too is unbearable. Scenes of past valor
come to him. It’s as if he hears a distant bugle commanding his
body to stop trembling. He admonishes that disgraced image of
himself:

“This ain’t her street. That ain’t her. That
ain’t me. That old man was the devil. Her street can’t be up this
high. It’s down by the river. Can’t fool me.”

He straightens up, walks away from the
street and goes down an avenue toward the river. Four times, in
different
arrondissements
,
he encounters the street with the toyshop and the corset shop and
between them that other shop. He walks past the street each time,
never once breaking into a run. Finally he reaches the right river,
the Seine. He walks with dignity to the middle of the bridge and
starts scanning upstream for a spire. It’s then that he’s pulled
into darkness.

Seymour returns from blankness fleeing down
the staircase and behind him a thunder of pursuing feet with voices
clamoring his infamy. “The child! Little Marie-Claude! Monster!
Stop him!” At the foot of the stairs, blocking the way out is the
butcher with a cleaver. Seymour trips and sprawls. They are upon
him.

His screen goes glaring blank and then
starts darkening.

Darkening, darkening.

Seymour Stein makes no effort to resist
extinction.

Chapter 41

Back Again

Of the four who had gone outside, two
return, emerging vaguely, side by side on their medical wheeled
couch in the white room with the granite-faced old nurse and the
dripping faucet. It’s not for long. They have a confused awareness,
as in a dream, of resisting the foaming bitter liquid the nurse
forces on them. They’re sure it’s a prelude to a third,
inconceivably worse, trial run and now, as they start fading, they
think of the other meanings of “trial”: judgment and suffering.

They awaken, still side by side, in the
men’s room of the Living Quarters, in a state of advanced
dilapidation: themselves, of course, but also the room. The
electric wiring has miraculously survived and the naked bulb sheds
weak light on the rubble-littered floor, the fissured walls, the
bulging ruins of the ceiling shored up by stout props. Five cots
have been shoved together in a cleared corner. The rumble of
wheelbarrows and hammer blows come from the women’s room on the
other side of the partition.

Not Gentille but the silent bitter-mouthed
female functionary brings them their meals, at irregular intervals,
some days not at all. Perfectly indifferent to that as to
everything else, they stare up at the ruined ceiling and try to
maintain their minds in a neutral area of blankness. But when they
sleep they find themselves out there again.

Over and over they hear Max, laughing or
crying or both, and asking them where they’d been all this time,
trees green when they’d left, bare now. Unless it was a dream. Kept
the light burning all the time, scared of the dark like a kid. Had
to change the bulb twice so maybe it was a year alone here. Unless
it was a dream. Where’d they been all this time if it hadn’t been a
dream?

They don’t answer, can’t. Words are like
huge boulders they can’t budge. They catch scraps of Max’s confused
story of how it had been for him here, something about Dummy and
the key, how he tried to take it from her but something funny
happened to him when he did and then Sadie and the cops and Turnkey
showed up and took her away and so the key too and he has to find
her to get the key to the tunnel out of here and they have to help
him do it instead of laying there on their backs.

They keep on lying on their backs, ignoring
his pleas. They’d been outside twice already.

Max is gone most of the time. When he
returns he says nothing or actually says it: “Nothing.” Often, in
his sleep Max cries out “Bess, honey, I don’t want no flowers, wait
up for me,” and “The key, goddam you, the key!”

They don’t wonder about the two others
who’d been sent out and who haven’t returned although Max asks
about them all the time. They ignore everything, even each other
except when Louis cries out repeatedly in his sleep “That ain’t her
in the granite!” and “The river!” and “Where’s the spire?” At the
hundredth repetition, Helen reaches over and shakes him awake,
which is what Louis does to Helen at the hundredth repetition of
“Don’t come in, I’m
Hélène
” and
“Come in, I’m Helen.”

Max tries to pull them out of it. With the three of
them exploring the corridors chances were three times better that
he’d be able to locate Dummy and the key. So he carts the books in
from the women’s room, a whole armful, spine-loose and dribbling
plaster dust. He places them alongside Helen’s static face. He goes
to Louis’ armory and gets the crossbow with a boot-quiver of bolts
and lays it on Louis’ bed near his static face. Neither of them
budges.

One day Advocate picks his way between
mounds of rubble to their cots. Glancing up at quick intervals at
the bulging ceiling, he upbraids them for their persistence in
yielding to desire during the trial runs, opening the door on
terrible things. Had he not warned them that hidden fears and
unavowable desires might well shape the events of trial run? They
had been the authors of their own woe, he says. Thanks again to
Sub-Prefect Marchini, they had been retrieved
in extremis
, the narrowest of escapes, not the case,
though, for
Monsieur
Stein
and, alas, alas,
Mademoiselle
Williams, perhaps already exited, a disaster, pure
disaster. How can the accelerating chaos be staved off
without
Mademoiselle Williams
? He wrings his hands.

They don’t react to his words. They close their
eyes. When they open them Advocate is gone.

The following day or week, two husky
functionaries drag Seymour Stein into the men’s room, their
rubber-gloved hands hooked under his armpits, their frozen faces
carefully averted from his head which lolls on his chest with each
of their steps. His useless feet make trails in the plaster rubble.
His head is swathed in bandages. Both eyes are badly blackened and
his nose and lips are swollen. He looks like a suspect returned
from a torture session with a stop-off for patching up in view of
later sessions.

The functionaries drop Seymour like a sack
of potatoes on a cot. He curls up facing the wall and says nothing
except when he sleeps and then cries it over and over, “I never did
that. I couldn’t have done that,” until Louis reaches over and
shakes him out of it.

Finally Max gives up the search for the key
and sinks into the same apathy as the others. Nobody moves in the
rubble-strewn room. Nobody speaks outside of the terrible
dreams.

The hammering on the other side of the
partition finally ends and the wheelbarrows rumble away. When the
bitter-mouthed functionary who has replaced Gentille comes in with
the food she wordlessly stabs her sharp chin at Helen and then at
the partition, indicating that Number Two should reintegrate the
Women’s Room. But Helen remains with the others to awaken them out
of their nightmares and to be awakened by them out of hers.

The Common Room window, which they ignore,
is glorious with May when, suddenly, they behold Margaret, utterly
transformed, standing on the threshold of their ruined room. She
illuminates it. She brings to them, somehow, the blue sky and the
remembered scent of lilacs of earlier Mays. Her visage and her
speech are those of a prophetess.

“Our sufferings will soon be over,” she
proclaims. “This has been revealed to me.”

She kneels alongside each of them and places
her hand on their foreheads but not on Seymour Stein’s for he turns
to the wall at the approach of her hand. That potent loving hand
seems to draw the suffering out of the others.

“Tell me,” she says, over and over and
finally they tell her; about the cruel honeymoon room, about the
photo screwed to mortuary granite, about the search for the missing
key to the tunnel to outside and dreams of Bess with flowers not
for him but for the lovers she receives on his mound. As Margaret
draws out the festering experience tears well and spread over their
faces. Louis and Helen who have never wept before in this half-life
and seldom in their first, real life, weep now and Margaret takes
their sufferings upon her, weeping with and for them, having
suffered herself, cruelly but no more. Her tears fall on their
faces, mingling with theirs, and they are cleansed of it all,
quickened back to life, vast peace.

“Louise is not dead,” she says to Louis,
kissing his wet cheek. “I know that soon you will be reunited with
her, young again, your trials over. The promise has been made. Try
to remember me sometimes, Louis.”

To Helen she says: “I know that you will
soon be reunited with Richard and young again, your trials over. I
know this because the word has been given, the sacred promise
made.”

To Max she says: “I know that you will soon
be reunited with Bess, young again, and that you will give her the
dachshund pup and also, this too I asked for, and the promise made,
that you will also give her and she give you a beautiful girl baby:
name her Margaret, for me.”

She carries over to them the moldy food and
chlorinated water they have refused for days and says “Eat and
drink” and they eat and drink the delicate fare and cool
thirst-quenching liquid and, delivered, fall back into dreams but
now of green trees and blue sky and fragrant flowers, a peace
beyond the poor power of words.