I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (36 page)

Mina was neither happy nor unhappy. It was certainly better than living at home. For several years, her life found a rhythm. Eugène did not ask much of her. She continued to work as a secretary. He provided her with clothes and paid for her vacations. She loved to travel and often traveled alone. I had seen photos of her punching a boxing bag on a ship, on a boardwalk where her hair blew in the wind. I did not know who had taken them.

Then Mina fell in love with a young man her own age. He was the scion of an aristocratic family, poised to inherit a castle and a title. He loved her just as much as she loved him, but his family was violently opposed to their union. They threatened to disinherit him. He vowed to elope with her anyway.

When Mina announced her departure to Eugène, he raped her. She became pregnant with Josée. I'd questioned my mother about the logistics of this. How could Eugène have made her
pregnant only this one time and not all the others? My mother replied only that this was what Mina had told her.

Mina was twenty-six years old. She would not leave for another twelve years, when she threw the suitcases out the window, broke down the door, and rushed into Beppo's arms.

—

T
HAT WAS THE
whole story, as Mina had told it to my mother and my mother had told it to me. But that rainy afternoon in Ischia, my mother did not tell it all to Josée. She stopped with the syphilitic husband, and Eugène's offer Mina couldn't refuse.

“Ah so!” Josée said, getting up and out of the bed. “My father saved my mother.”

“I'm not sure Mina—” my mother said.

“That was very brave of him,” Josée said, “to go threaten that man. I didn't know he had it in him. My mother must have loved him for that.” And with that she took off her dressing gown and began to pull on her bathing suit. The rain had stopped, she pointed out, and it would be a waste to stay inside talking all day.

—

T
HAT EVENING
, we had drinks by the sea as the sun was setting. Josée was complaining, as she often did that vacation, of the injustices that Paul had visited upon her. She was retelling the story of how her custody of Andrée had been revoked.

My mother interjected to say that during the divorce proceedings she had been asked to testify before a judge about which of her parents would be a better guardian for her younger sister.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“I found it shameful that anyone would ask such a question of a child. And I asked who would be taking custody of me. I was told no one had ever asked for it.”

“That's normal,” Josée said. “You were
majeure.”

“Mais non, Maman!”
my mother said, incredulous.

“You were eighteen,” Josée said.

“I wasn't!” Françoise said.

“But by then you lived with Jean-Michel!” Josée said.

“
Non!
” my mother said, elongating the word into one long wail.

“When I left with Andrée, all my other children had left home,” Josée said with certitude. “She was the last one left.”

“Where did you want me to go?” my mother said. “I had no other home.”

“In the summer of 1972, you and Jean-Michel went to Afghanistan.”

“It was a trip! I wasn't going to spend the rest of my life there! When I came back in the fall, you were gone.”

“Yes,” Josée said. “I left the first of July. Just as I had told him I would on the first of February. He was raping me one last time in my room. I was looking at an aquarelle we had above the safe—a sunset, black on a gold background. I said to him, very calmly, ‘It's the last time.' He was hammering away, in full swing, and I said to him, ‘Never again will you touch me. I'm leaving on the first of July.' And I did. On the first of July, I took Andrée, the turtledoves, and the cat—”

“Are those the turtledoves that you told me about?” I interrupted. My mother had told me that her turtledoves often flew free in her bedroom. They'd hatched eggs together. One day, the male escaped through the open window. The female took up a
relationship with her only surviving fledgling, another male. After that, my mother did not like the turtledoves anymore. She always made a face of exaggerated comical disgust when she told this story.

“Yes,” my mother said, “my turtledoves.”

“You had left them behind,” Josée said.

“I went on a
trip
to
Afghanistan,
” my mother repeated.

“And when you got home, were the turtledoves still there?” Josée lifted a finger in the air, as if she had finally backed the witness into a corner. My mother was silent a moment.

“No!” Josée answered for her, triumphant. “Because I see myself very clearly, leaving with their cage.” I stifled a smile and both women looked at me sharply.

“I couldn't carry the cat,” Josée continued. “And so your father, who had gone crazy with rage, grabbed it by the scruff of its neck and threw it in my face. Can you imagine? Claws out, straight in my face. It was your cat in fact, Françoise.”

“I didn't have a cat,” my mother said. “We didn't have a cat.”

“Fine,” Josée said easily, conciliatory. “Not your cat, but a cat.”

“Anyway,” Josée continued, “that's how Andrée and I found ourselves living on a houseboat with two turtledoves, a cat, a hamster, a dog, and a turtle.” Her voice warmed, became full and lyrical. My mother sat back in her chair, mouth drawn tight, and stared at her hands. But soon she leaned forward again, soon she laughed. Josée was a wonderful storyteller, and my mother could not help but be pulled back in.

—

T
HE SUMMER AFTER
OUR
TRIP
to Ischia, my mother discovered a secret recording. It was among the digitized files of home movies she'd had converted from reel-to-reel and VHS, but this
one was only audio. It was labeled “
Printemps
72.” My mother had no memory of ever hearing it before.

Through the static, she made out Josée's voice, though not as it was now, low and gravelly with age. This was Josée's voice shrill with anger, the one my mother had forgotten she remembered, and then remembered, on hearing it, so clearly.

Several times on the tape, Josée asked Paul to speak louder, claiming she was going deaf. She screamed to Andrée to turn down the television in the other room. This, my mother realized, must be one of several secret recordings Josée had made around the time of her divorce. Intentionally or not, she'd given it to Françoise one year in Paris, and Françoise had put it in her suitcase and brought it back to New York. There it had sat, unplayed, for decades.

My mother did not wish to listen to it all the way through on her own. But that summer, she played the tape for me. We paused often so that she could help me decipher what was being said.

“Ah, Paul,” Josée says, moments after the recording begins, “I was just telling Françoise that you're refusing a legal separation and want a divorce as quickly as possible. I'm leaving in June with Andrée, and so logically you will claim custody of Françoise.”

“I claim nothing at all,” Paul says with the careful locution of an educated man, each syllable perfectly rounded. “We were going to talk about this tonight, with Sylvie present.”

“Yes, well, she's not here and we still have to talk about it,” Josée says.

“
D'accord,
I decide that I'm keeping Sylvie,” Paul says.

“So you're taking custody of Françoise and Sylvie,” Josée says.

“If Françoise would like to stay with me, yes,” Paul says in a hushed voice, pronouncing her name with tenderness.

“Françoise, I told you, her life is Jean-Michel,” Josée says, and in
her mouth her daughter's name is like the nasal quacking of a duck. After some further back and forth, Josée addresses Françoise. It becomes clear then that my mother has been in the room all along.

“Okay, so that's all settled,” Josée says. “I'm taking Andrée and you'll be in your father's custody. Which won't mean you never come to see me.”

“Yes,” Françoise says softly, in a voice I don't recognize at all. There is a faint don't-hit-me tremor. She sounds
meek,
a word I would never use to describe her now.

“Because even if you had come under my responsibility,” Josée goes on, “I'm sure you would not come live with me. It's not important for you. Your life is practically made already. You're portioned off to Jean-Michel.”

It soon becomes clear that Josée is pushing for Françoise to marry Jean-Michel in the fall, after their return from Afghanistan. She presents this arrangement as an inevitability. Françoise appears worried that Jean-Michel may not agree to this, but of her own desires she says nothing. She is only a small voice, buffeted by her parents.

“I cannot say that I'll oppose their union,” Paul says, “but neither can I say that this corresponds to what I envision for my daughter.” He speaks with the finesse of a character in an old play. It is not a quality I remember about him.

“I think it's premature,” he continues. “And, as Françoise knows, this is very egotistical, but her union with Jean-Michel turns her away from our shared medical vocation, a mutual passion that gave me infinite pleasure. It was one of the great joys of my life. Everyone who worked with me shared the same sentiments and thought I was a blessed man to have a daughter who was young, pretty, and
intelligent . . . No, but it's the truth, Françoise. You're very very very pretty. A very very beautiful girl.”

My mother paused the tape. She gave a short sharp laugh of pain. “But it is premature! There's no reason for us to get married at seventeen, no reason except to leave my father completely alone, with his daughter married off to the son of his wife's lover.” She shook her head, pressed play again.

And then, Jean-Michel arrives. The invisible room fills with ghostly voices, taking on the surreal quality of an ensemble piece in a theatrical production. There are the sounds of glasses clinking, a chair being pulled across the floor to accommodate the guest. I knew I was supposed to feel that this was the objective past, truer than all the rest, yet it felt like a radio play.

“Ah, Jean-Michel,” Josée says. “We were just discussing Françoise's custody. I asked for custody of all three children, but Paul said I couldn't take Françoise and Sylvie even if they agreed. Because Françoise no longer exists as our daughter, Françoise is your wife. It's certain that she's no longer at the stage where someone needs to take custody of her.”

The tape ended abruptly, in the middle of one of Paul's monologues. My mother rested her arms on her knees.

“Oh,” she said, hand on her forehead. “Her
voice.
”

I said, “I'm so impressed you survived all that.” But I was surprised by how empty-handed the recording had left me. I had expected it to contain a miraculous and impartial Truth. Yet while it corrected certain facts—Josée had said she'd leave in June, and not in July—the narrative that strung these facts together remained as complex as ever.

My mother had been correct in saying she'd still lived at home
that fall. Josée's relationship with Louis Guérin was uncovered before the date for the wedding could be set, and the plan was derailed. But Josée had also been truthful when she'd said she believed Françoise was already gone. She was not reinventing the past. She had willfully tried to make Françoise leave home, creating that reality, even then. In a sense, Françoise had been both out of the house and not. She was in that liminal space, where so much of our shared history lay.

I kept stroking my mother's back (“Her
voice,
” she repeated), and somewhere deep in my stomach, unfair yet uncontrollable, I was jealous of her. I was jealous that on the rest of the hard drive there was only video after video of my brother and me tearing open mountains of presents, playing dress-up, blowing kisses to the camera. Inside myself, I had retained the vivid emotions of my adolescence. But there was no external record of those dark difficult moments with my mother, the ones that I was now becoming less and less certain I remembered.

—

I
N
I
SCHIA
, the evening after Josée and Françoise had argued about the events of that summer, the three of us dined at one of the island's many oceanfront restaurants. A waiter brought us a plate piled high with small fish fried whole, my favorite dish. Grease stained my notebook. A question arose: When, exactly, had Josée begun seeing Jean-Michel's father? Was it the summer just before the two girls were sent to boarding school—when Josée appeared eager that Sylvie pursue her
petite aventure
? Or was it the summer after, the one during which my mother became pregnant? Josée refused to be pinned down on a date. The tone of the conversation became more and more strained. My mother
asked point-blank if Josée and Louis Guérin were already sleeping together when he accompanied Jean-Michel to their home to arrange for her marriage.

“I don't even know what we're talking about anymore,” Josée snapped. “You're ruining my birthday with all of these questions.”

My mother let the topic drop. She knocked my hand and signaled for me to put my pen away. A false calm covered the rest of our meal.

But when we returned to the hotel room, my mother leaned against the closed door. She looked dazed. She asked for my notebook and began making a timeline, using the clues Josée had given us. “It's just as I thought,” she said, putting the pen down with a gesture that had all the drama of a scene from a movie. “Her relationship with Louis started before I began dating Jean-Michel. If only she could have acknowledged the role she played. I don't want an apology, but just, oh just an
acknowledgment.
”