Landfalls (45 page)

Peering into the dressing table mirror, I try drawing what hair I have back over my forehead, and suddenly remember, with a stab of envy, Jean-Fran
ç
ois's wife,
É
l
é
onore. His
widow
, I should say, though she never called herself that, even after she'd given up hoping for his return. His
late
widow, actually. She died—it must be nine or ten years ago, in Paris, where she'd moved to be closer to news of Jean-Fran
ç
ois. News that never arrived, of course. A genteel woman, despite the disadvantages of her birth. She used to wear her hair pulled back. It was so thick it added a handbreadth to her height. When she powdered it, people told her she looked like the queen. That was before the queen lost her own head, of course. When
É
l
é
onore herself was still young, before she'd stopped waiting for Jean-Fran
ç
ois, when she still hoped to have children of her own one day.

I lean toward the glass and try again to arrange my hair the way she once did. But on me, the effect is ghoulish. I blow out the candle to erase the image, then grope my way in the darkness toward bed and forgetting, not even bothering to say my prayers.

*   *   *

“Good morning, Madame Dalmas de Lap
é
rouse,” Antoine says with a grin when I come down the next day. I can't tell if he's trying to restore harmony between us by addressing me this way—or making sure he fires the first salvo in an ongoing clash. Another symptom of long marriage: every statement may be taken kindly or unkindly.

“I wish to go to the civil records office this morning,” I announce. It's worth saying just to see my husband's smile vanish.

“What for, my dear?”

I sit down. A servant brings me coffee. I blow lightly over the surface and take a sip. “Too much chicory,” I call to the retreating servant, then look across at Antoine. “I wish to see for myself how the name is written.”

He sets down his own coffee with a show of exaggerated patience. “I can't take you today,” he says. “I have too much to do. Remember we're leaving for La Bessi
è
re tomorrow.”

So we are. That's why the children are here, to accompany us to the country estate of my husband's family. A long day's coach ride to the southeast, La Bessi
è
re is a dull, restful place, perfect for cows, sheep, and children. Ordinarily I welcome the temporary respite from the narrow streets, petty town gossip, and love-starved penitents of Villefranche-de-Rouergue. I also look forward to the company of Jacques, our Bordeaux mastiff, a large, tranquil animal quite devoted to me. But we're likely to be at La Bessi
è
re till the end of May. I can't wait that long.

“I'll go to the office myself,” I say.

“I need the carriage.”

“I'll walk.”

“
Jacquette.
You can scarcely make it to the end of the street.”

I look away, not wishing to give him the satisfaction of knowing he's hurt me. Nor do I wish to be accused of manipulating him with womanly emotions. A hasty, scorching gulp of coffee brings more excusable tears to my eyes. “I'm going
today
,” I say, waving my hand before my scalded mouth.

*   *   *

The reception room to which we're conveyed appears designed to make the perusal of government records as difficult and unpleasant as possible. The room manages to be both airless and cold, the light dim, the long oak table too high, the chairs hard and too low, the registry book a dense, cube-like tome, hard to open, and the handwriting in it crabbed and spidery. I end up standing and leaning over the table to get the proper distance from the page. My right hip aches with the effort.

“Are you the one who wrote this?” I demand of the pimply young man who brought us the registry and stands fidgeting while we examine it.

“I'm not sure, madame,” he says. “There are several clerks here.” He nervously pinches a bit of skin at his throat.

I point to the entry. “This judgment was entered
yesterday.
The ink is barely dry. Don't you recognize your own hand?”

He peers down at the book, then clears his throat, pulling harder at his throat, as if that might help. “Yes, I—I believe that was me.”

“Do you realize that you've written our name three times in three different ways?”

“Madame?”

“Look,” I command. He bends over the page. “Here, it's ‘Lapeyrouse' with a
y
. And here, ‘Lapeirouse' with an
i
. And finally, here”—I jab the page—“it's ‘La Peyrouse,' two words. As it happens, not one of these is correct.”

“I'm—I'm sorry,” he stammers. “I'm always very careful, and—”

“And?”

“And I very much need this position, madame.”

“What did the official decree from the king say?”

“It says exactly what this says.”

“The
king's decree
also wrote the name three different ways?”

“No, madame—I'm sure it did not.”

“I would like to see it.”

“Pardon me?”

“If you show us the decree, I will not complain to the head clerk about your orthographic inconstancy.”

The young man, whose neck now sports an angry red welt, excuses himself from the room.

Antoine, seated at the table, sighs. “Is this really necessary?”

I ignore him, watching instead a cloud of motes swirling in a weak shaft of light coming through a high window. Does the light make visible the dust already present in the air, I wonder, or is the dust attracted to the light? As a child I used to ask such questions all the time. It drove my poor mother to distraction. But Jean-Fran
ç
ois would gamely try to satisfy my curiosity. “It's too bad you're not a boy, Jacquette,” he told me once. “You could become a great savant and make speeches before the Academy of Sciences.” The old questions still intrigue me, but I've stopped asking them aloud, much less expecting any answers.

The young man returns with a superior, an entirely bald individual carrying a thin document case. Though obviously older than the first clerk, his age is impossible to guess: he might be an old man with an unlined face or a still-young man who's lost his hair early.

“Do you know who we are?” I ask him. Antoine stirs discontentedly beside me but says nothing.

“Yes,” the bald man says. “Madame Dalmas. Your brother was the great navigator Lap
é
rouse who was tragically lost at sea.”

“Exactly. We've waited many years for permission to use his name.”

“Yes, madame.” He coughs. “Now, how is it you believe the name
ought
to be written?”

I spell it out for him:
L-A-P-
É
-R-O-U-S-E.
“That is how we spelled it when my brother was alive.”

“I see.” He pulls a sheet from the document holder. “Now, as you'll see from this copy of the royal decree, that is not the spelling authorized by His Majesty.”

I hold it at arm's length and read while Antoine looks over my shoulder:

Louis, by the grace of God, King of France and Navarre, ordains the following: That the honorable Pierre-Jean-Antoine Dalmas, Philippe-François Dalmas, François-Marie-Léon Dalmas, Pierre-Antoine-Victor Dalmas, and Jean-François-Charles-Salvy de Barthès, be permitted to add to their names that of La Peyrouse.

Paris, Tuileries Chateau, signed, Louis

Well, there it is: La Peyrouse with a
y
, two words. And appended to—not in place of—our current family name. Did the spelling change every time a new person encountered it—or, in the case of our pimply clerk, every time it was encountered? Oh, how many men worked in mindless concert over a quarter century to mistake my lost brother's name?

But that isn't all. I actually find myself preoccupied less with the name itself than with the list of people authorized to use it. It shouldn't surprise me, of course—there they are, my husband, our three sons, and Victoire's son, Charles. I know how the world works; I was just explaining it to Pierre yesterday. Names belong to men, while women belong to names. Yet I
am
surprised—and dismayed—to find myself and Victoire entirely absent from the judgment. Isn't it by virtue of their connection to
us
, Jean-Fran
ç
ois's sisters, that the men in our lives are permitted to take on his name? I can't stifle a sigh as I hand the document back to the bald clerk.

“Madame,” he says, “if I may make so bold, it is my belief that this spelling, with the
y
, is more in keeping with the family's Languedocian roots.”

I stare hard at him until he blushes right to the top of his smooth pate.

“Of course, the family may submit a petition asking that the spelling be altered,” he quickly adds. “But that may take some time.”

*   *   *

Sometimes a husband knows when to remain silent: an occasional gift of long marriage. Antoine says nothing as we drive, nothing when we stop before our house on the rue Basse Saint-Jean, nothing as he helps me down from the carriage and to our front door, only squeezing my hand by way of farewell before setting off on his errands.

In the drawing room, the three older grandchildren look up with entirely-too-innocent faces from what looks like a hastily arranged game of piquet. “Grandmother!” Martiane calls out much too brightly. “Will you play with us?”

“Where's nurse?” I ask.

“She still has a headache,” Delphine says.

Still? She's altogether too prone to headaches, this nurse.

“And Pierre?” I ask.

All three children shrug and won't meet my eyes.

“What happened?” I demand.

“Nothing—” Delphine begins, but I put up my hand to silence her and point to
É
mile. At ten, he's less practiced at dissembling than his older sister and cousin. Right now he's visibly wriggling behind the hand he's been dealt.

“I don't know,” the boy mumbles, fanning and unfanning his cards. “He's just crying.”

“And the three of you had nothing to do with that, I suppose.”

Another collective shrug.

I find Pierre sniffling in a far corner of the library, where he's pulled several volumes of Diderot's
Encyclopedia
from the shelves and is bent over an illustration showing two men fencing. “Are you going to challenge your cousins to a duel?” I ask.

“Grandmother!” he cries. “Where were you?”

I lower myself into a tufted settee. “City hall.”

He sets the books aside and climbs up next to me. “They chased me and called me ‘Levain P
ê
che-louche.'”

“What for?”

He slaps a fist against the cushion in frustration. “They're making fun of me because I can't be a Lap
é
rouse.”

“I see.” Pierre Louvain-Pescheloche.
Levain P
ê
che-louche.
Suspicious sourdough fishing? “It's not a very imaginative insult,” I say.

He folds his arms and pouts beside me. I can't remember my siblings and me—or our cousins—teasing one another as much as my grandchildren do. Perhaps we were too busy trying not to die to indulge in such play. We had our nicknames, of course. As a small child, I'd been unable to pronounce “Jean-Fran
ç
ois.” “Sois, Sois, Sois,” I used to call him, following him around our house in Albi, commanding him to be. He in turn took to calling me by the last syllable of
my
name—“Quette,” or sometimes “Quette-quette.” Even when we were older, both married, he would call me that if we chanced to be alone.

“Next time they make fun of you,” I say to Pierre, “tell them their name is wrong.”

He looks up at me. “Wrong?”

“It's misspelled.”

“Is that why you went to city hall?”

“It is.”

“And did you fix it?”

His big round eyes are still watery but no longer sad. I never cease to be amazed by the rapidity with which children's feelings change. Was I like this as a child—morose one moment and hopeful the next? “We have to ask the king to fix it,” I explain.

“So why don't you?”

“We can, Pierre. But it may take a very long time.” Indeed, it exhausts me just thinking of it. Our original petition was sent to King Louis XVI. Then resubmitted to the National Assembly. Then Emperor Napoleon. And finally, after the Restoration, to the current king, Louis XVIII. “It took twenty-five years to get permission to use the name in the first place,” I muse aloud. “How many years will it take to fix the spelling?”

“I don't know,” Pierre says. “How many?”

I shrug, conscious of imitating the other grandchildren.

“Another twenty-five years?” he says.

“Could be.”

“How old will I be then?”

“You tell me, Pierre.”

He doesn't have to think long. He may be tiresome, but at least he's not stupid. “Thirty-two!”

“You'll be a grown man.”

“And how old will
you
be?”

“Me?” I laugh. “I'll be long dead.”

Pierre falls silent for a moment, then tugs at my sleeve. I expect him to say something sentimental and childish—perhaps expressing the hope that I will never die. Or making an outrageous guess at my age:
“Two hundred?”
But instead he says, “Grandmother, did you find out if you could give me the name too?”

“Oh, child,” I say, my heart pulled between impatience and sympathy. “It's not mine to give. The king didn't grant me or Aunt Victoire permission to use the name. That went only to our husbands and sons.”