I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (30 page)

She put in my hands his date book from 1930. On the day of her birth, in pencil, he had made the small notation “J.E.”

“He couldn't even bring himself to write my name,” she said.

—

M
INA WAS RELEASED
from prison the following Christmas, after eight months in jail. Difficult as that time had been, the only real hardship Josée alluded to was her mother's return. Mina immediately reclaimed her control of the family's affairs. Josée, used to her independence and new responsibilities, did not take it well.

Josée spent a month in Italy by herself, then returned to Paris and finished her final year of high school through correspondence classes. She took a quick course to become certified as a secretary. The family's finances were severely reduced, but Mina was adamant that they stay on in the home she and Beppo had rented. Both Mina and Josée found positions as secretaries. Josée took phone calls and dictation for a lawyer. The pay wasn't much, but she was proud to be making any money at all.

The morning after she'd received her first paycheck, Josée went to the florist by her office and spent a quarter of the money on an azalea plant in full bloom. It was a gift for her mother. Her boss saw her come into work—I imagine her staggering, her face hidden behind an explosion of pink flowers—and offered to drive her home. Josée accepted. It would be far easier than carrying the plant home on the city bus, and this way her boss would see her impressive front doors. She climbed into his fancy American car.

Mina was out front gardening when they drove up. She stood very still as Josée got out with the flowers.

“Don't you have any shame?” Mina said as Josée reached her, her voice trembling with anger. Josée was confused. She came forward with the flowers, and Mina slapped her.

“How dare you drive up here in that man's car,” Mina said.

“But . . . he's my boss,” Josée said. “I bought these flowers for you. He offered to drive me home so I wouldn't have to carry them.”

“Of course,” Mina said. “That's what they all say.” She went back inside, leaving her daughter on the doorstep sobbing into the azaleas.

Josée's eyes filled with tears as she told me the story. “You see? It affects me even now,” she said.

“Did she ever apologize?” I asked.

“Oh, no. Mothers never apologize to their children. I don't think she ever apologized for anything,” Josée said. She quickly launched into another topic.

“Oh! It hurts, that story!” I said, interrupting her with a pained laugh, my hand over my heart.

“Well, you know, when you're that age, you take everything so seriously. Your first salary, your first gift to your mother. But now I see . . . she was only trying to protect me from the mistakes she herself had made.” The subject was closed and she refused to say anything more.

—

I
HAD ALWAYS
ASSUMED
that Josée and Paul had met on an airplane. It seemed befitting of the grand scale of their turbulent romance, and Josée's stories of her days as an airline stewardess loomed large in her telling of her past. I'd imagined her in her
sharp blue uniform and matching cap, wings pinned on her chest, catching Paul's eye as she walked down the aisle demonstrating safety procedures. I'd imagined my grandfather as I'd always known him: a cigar in hand, expensive shirt buttons straining slightly over his stomach and broad hairy chest, a lascivious twinkle in his eyes. But the truth was they met at a dinner party in a small apartment when Josée was a secretary and Paul a medical intern. Josée had been invited by her boyfriend's sister. There didn't seem to be much more to tell to their meeting, other than that the boyfriend had been quite annoyed with his sister, Josée said laughing. But, she said, when Paul wanted something he went after it, and he went after her. And she'd liked him, loved him even. He was charismatic, at ease being the center of attention, and he was sturdy and masculine and handsome. He made her laugh, bantered easily, made declarations of love in grandiloquent French.

“You must be the only person,” my mother told me with awe when I recounted this, “to whom Josée has ever admitted that she once loved my father.”

Paul was twenty-eight when Josée met him, and she was nineteen. She spent her twentieth birthday in tears.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because nothing was happening,” Josée told me. She'd waited her whole life to turn twenty. It was to be the beginning of her glorious emancipation. But instead she lived at home, with Mina, Mélanie, and her brother, and she sobbed as she blew out her candles.

“I was also crying because of the dog,” she added.

Paul was studying bone grafts, and he did trials on abandoned dogs. He'd left the most recent one with her. Josée knew she wasn't
supposed to become attached. She helped Paul with the trials. She held the dogs as they whimpered during the operations, and she knew what any attachment would later cost her. But this dog was sweet and vulnerable and feeble. It limped around in its plaster cast. The dog died on the morning of her twentieth birthday. Her father, who had come by to wish her a happy birthday, had thoughtfully taken its body to burn in the large industrial ovens of his business. Which only made Josée more distraught—she realized too late that Paul would be furious, that examining the corpse had been the whole point.

When Josée told me this story I felt my temples vibrate and expand, a feeling I had always associated as a child with being in the presence of magic. I pictured time bending as the image of my mother crying over her dog's corpse folded to overlap with that of Josée. I had never seen either of these women, so formidable in the incarnations I knew, cry such unself-conscious tears as one would shed over an animal. And maybe there are dead dogs in every story. Certainly there were parallels between their lives more striking than this one. But this image made my whole body buzz. In some place outside of time, both young women mourned all they had failed to accomplish, not knowing, as I did, all that they would.

—

J
OSÉE HAD SEVERAL
ABORTIONS
in the first few years she and Paul were together, she told me. It was the only solution to premarital sex. Only soldiers had condoms, and she had never seen one.

“No one used contraception?” I asked, shocked. “But what did your friends do?” In America, condom use was so widespread that, by 1950, vending machines had been installed.

Some of her friends went to backstreet concierges,
faiseuses
d'anges,
angel-makers. Some of her friends went to England. Perhaps some of her friends had boyfriends who had the kindness to, as Josée said, “repaint the ceiling.” But Josée had the good fortune of dating a young doctor.

Whenever Josée's period was late by two or three weeks, Paul would perform a dilation and curettage.

“But the pain must have been excruciating,” I said, crossing my legs as if to ward it off. We'd finished our meal and a bottle of red wine. I got up and opened a second one.

“It hurt a lot,” Josée said, perfectly matter-of-fact, as I refilled our glasses. “But when you know what to expect, things hurt much less.”

“
Quand même!
” I said, an uncomfortable giggle rising in my throat.

“Yes, well, it's no pleasure cruise,” Josée said.

When I researched it later, I would find that contraception was indeed hard to find in France in the postwar years, and abortion was indeed common. Still, the procedure must have been dangerous as well as physically and emotionally painful.

“You didn't think of them . . . as children?” I asked.

“Not at all,” Josée said. “Not at all. We called it being delivered . . . delivered of a problem. We did it when we were late by a few weeks—we never waited as long as three months,” Josée said.

“It's hard for me to understand,” I said. “The way I've heard abortions talked about . . .” I was thinking of my mother, of my friends, of all the women I'd known who were permanently affected by the sense of their lives splintering into possibilities not lived.

“It's stories, all of that. Women who have a crisis of the blues
because they lost a fetus.” Josée let out a small huff. “It's really all people who have never known war. Those ladies with nothing in their skulls. There are more interesting things to worry about in life. You have to know that a child chooses to come incarnate himself on Earth, and if it doesn't work out, he'll just go back up and re-create himself in the stomach of someone else. It's . . . you haven't
killed
anybody. I think we really feel very sorry for ourselves for so little. People need war or something to shake them up a bit, so that they don't fall into an abyss of doubts.”

Josée did worry that the procedures would leave her unable to have children. She did in fact have a miscarriage in her first year of marriage, before Sylvie. The pain, again, had been excruciating, but Paul hadn't intervened. As Josée told it, it was a friend who helped her onto the examining table, another friend who held her hand. The child had been male, the son Josée and Paul had always wanted. But this too was no great tragedy, she said.

After the miscarriage, she went to see a gynecologist for the first time in her life. She discovered that the miscarriage had been due to her retroverted uterus. During her subsequent pregnancies, she would spend the third month lying in bed on her stomach.

“Be careful,” she said, “you might have one also. One of my daughters does, I forget which. It's hereditary.” I felt a small thrill at her acknowledgment that we were related.

“A doctor told me once that I do,” I said. The doctor had also told me that it was common and had no impact on fertility, but I didn't mention that.

“Yes, well, you can know right away,” Josée said, “if in coitus you're better on your stomach. If it hurts when he's on top of you, but not when he takes you from behind, then it's retroverted.”

I laughed. A February wind blew at the kitchen windows and the clock ticked off the hours of the night. The red wine was very good and it made my arms feel warm and heavy.

“It's all very logical,” Josée said. “It either hits up against your cervix or it doesn't. And then, well, the G-spot—but that isn't of my era.”

“They didn't really think about female pleasure, in your era?” I asked. Josée took a long unsteady inhale as she considered her answer. She let it out in a whoosh.

“No,” she said.

“You hesitate,” I teased. Like my mother, Josée was not easy to tease.

“Well, because your grandfather fucked well. He liked it. I don't know if he did it well, but he really enjoyed it. No. It isn't like today, women with their sex toys.
Pfff,
you've all gone and made things so complicated.”

“But female pleasure isn't so complicated,” I said.

“
Effectivement
. But . . . when they say women now have ten orgasms in a row! It just seems exhausting to me.”

“Ten times seems exhausting to me, too,” I said. “But that women have orgasms at all seems to me important.”

“I don't think in my day men gave themselves a whole lot of trouble trying to find a woman's clitoris. I don't remember your grandfather ever asking me if I'd had a good time.”

“But didn't that leave you feeling frustrated?” I asked.

“No, I mean, we knew that we
could.
If it came on its own, that was good. But we weren't going to go out searching for pleasure, saying, ‘Me too, I'm going to . . . it's my right!'”

“But the same way men talk about how . . . if you excite them
and don't follow through, they wind up in pain? I've had the same thing happen to me—I go a bit crazy, I get angry, I cry.”

“Really?” Josée asked. “You?”

I flushed and stumbled. “Yes,” I said. “There's just . . . a lot of emotion.”

“Something is missing,” Josée said slowly, trying to understand. “Something hasn't been released?”

“Maybe,” I said, my cheeks burning hot. I strung several words together that did not form a sentence. I was fascinated but nervous. There was electricity in the air, like at a slumber party when someone suggests Truth or Dare.

“I don't know,” Josée said. “Maybe I'm a bit of a prude. You know, it's been more than twenty years since I had sex.”

She laughed and I joined in.

“I don't know what I'm talking about,” Josée said, shaking her head and looking down.

“And did you ever . . . caress yourself?” I asked, trying to slip back into interviewer mode.

“Mélanie used to tell me not to touch my flower,” Josée said. “I didn't understand what she meant.”

“But it's something that all girls discover at some point, no?” I asked.

“No. For me it was a man who made me notice that I could . . . orgasm. I'd had no idea. It was a boyfriend, when I was seventeen. He told me that, when I was alone, I had to take a warm bath, light a candle, listen to some gentle music, caress myself. And then, supposedly, I would find myself
aux anges
. But I don't have any memory of a life-changing experience in a bathtub. Perhaps I'd put the candle in the wrong place.”

“It's something that I've always taken so for granted,” I said. “If a friend told me that she had never had an orgasm, or that her boyfriend paid no attention to her pleasure, it would shock me now,” I said.

“Here we are in the twenty-first century,” Josée said, waving a demonstrative hand across her kitchen table. “It wasn't of our day, all this. And I didn't talk about it with my friends. We had other cats to whip, trips to go on, dinners to plan.” It occurred to me that it was unlikely Josée had ever spoken this frankly about sex with anybody.