The Last Life (33 page)

One windy March night, late, several months after the incident with Lahou and the boys, when I had slid back into believing that my family, in all its awfulness, was the only certainty I had—an evening in which my father had been absent from the dinner table, and had not surfaced by the time I went to bed—I was wakened by my mother shrieking. It sounded so little like her that at first I thought it must be Etienne, suffering some dreadful attack. I leaped from beneath the covers and into the hall; but Etienne snored in his bed. The sounds that so distressed me wafted up, thready, from the living room below. My next thought was that my mother had been assaulted, as she read, by an intruder—maybe Sami had gathered a gang to rob my parents' house?—and I faltered at the top of the stairs, debating whether to sneak along to my parents' room and summon the police. Then I heard my father's voice, a sonorous rumble: I could picture it, he trying to embrace her, to quiet her outrage, in his arms, to stifled sobs; she, flailing and resisting, like a desperate moth. He sounded imperturbable, but I knew otherwise. His pattern was exactly that of a summer thunderstorm: the slow gathering, the darkening of the sky, the spooky calm, the greening of the landscape and the ominous rustling; and then the explosion, anticipated but still always a surprise, in its steady wrath. And after a time, its passage, an intermittent booming, and then calm again, with no indication that the event had ever taken place.

I sat, after a moment's hesitation, on the top step, and listened, chin forward, sucking the ends of my hair, my nightgown tugged tight over my knees and tucked under my icy toes, again in my confessor's pose of childhood, of nights when they had fought about my grandfather's tyranny or my grandmother's meddling, about my father's indifference and my mother's frustration, about the care of Etienne or how I should spend my holidays—or sometimes about vile dinner parties my father had arranged, or about money for household repairs, or about the inefficacy of the gardener—anything, really, and always something, feints, baiting matches, hedging the fact of their fundamental incompatibility, my mother's terrible loneliness, my father's weakness.

This argument, though, sounded different. My mother's high-pitched laments did not stop, and my father's clap of thunder did not break. My father was not winning; he was not even trying to win. I deciphered peculiar words in my mother's torrent: "humiliation" and "lies"; "the dignity of a jackrabbit." I was shivering. I listened, as my mother's voice dropped an octave, swelled again, did not abate. I considered pattering down the stairs, forcing tears onto my cheeks as I had when I was little: it had always made them pause, and turn to me, the small, frail creature they had created, and put their differences aside. My father would carry me back up to bed, or my mother would lead me by the hand, and one or other would tuck me in and stroke my hair until I fell asleep, secretly proud of my achievement. I did not think they would welcome me now; I was too old, and too knowing. They might have turned their fury on me, and that, too, would have been preferable to this; but equally, they might just have drawn breath, ordered me away, and resumed quarrelling. I hesitated, warming my toes in my kneading fingers, breathing down the neckline of my nightie to soothe my chilly nipples, then tiptoed back to my cold sheets.

The next morning, my father had left the house before I got up. My mother, impressively sullen, squinted at her children from between puffy lids, and barked orders at Etienne's new nurse, an innocuous, stout young woman with cat's-eye glasses and a prominent beak.

"Everything okay, Maman?"

"Just eat your breakfast," she answered, in English.

"We'll talk about it when I get home, okay?" I didn't know what "it" was, but sounded as though I did, and my mother winced.

"We'll see," she said. "We'll see."

I don't know whether she did wrong to tell me. I'm sure she didn't want to; but she thought that I had divined the truth, and besides, she had no one else with whom to discuss the matter. Her mother-in-law's allegiances could be surmised; and the older woman had worries enough already. And although my mother had friends, ladies of comparable standing in the town, she didn't want to hear that they already knew, nor risk their indiscretion: "We've had enough dirty laundry for a lifetime," she said.

That afternoon she took me with her to the supermarket—the very one where the bomber girl had once worked—and piled the cart with Findus frozen meals and cans of soup (not, in our house, accustomed fare, but chosen, she informed me, so that my father could fix himself something on his own when he came in late) and afterwards directed us to a nearby
salon de thé,
decorated with fake gas lamps and potted fig trees, where she forced a mille-feuille upon me and ordered only a chamomile tea for herself, peering bleakly at the urinous liquid and sipping with exaggerated daintiness. She must have cried more during the day, as her eyes were still waterlogged—in the market she had kept her sunglasses on—and seemed to seep, involuntarily, at the corners.

"Your father has been entertaining mistresses," she divulged, eventually, her locution antique so as to buffer the fact. "Regularly."

I swallowed. "You mean, he has a mistress?"

"Not exactly. No. Then it would be easier to sort out."

"Then, what?" I was trying to seem adult, to play the role of confidante. Not wanting to gape, I turned my attention to my pastry, prying it, with my fork, into its thousand layers. An image of Marie-José in bed with her recruit sprang unbidden to my mind.

"His attention span is short. There are a number of them."

"Since when?"

She blinked. "We haven't got into that. Since forever, maybe."

"How do you know?"

"How do I know? What does it matter? Who they are doesn't matter either. I don't want a full accounting. It's just—especially now—when all eyes are on us, what with your grandfather—I don't know—it's so selfish."

"What are you going to do?"

She looked at me and brushed a dribble from her lashes. She didn't answer.

"Well, are you going to leave him, or what?"

Her face opened, all its features separating in surprise. I could tell that the notion had not crossed her mind.

"Leave him? For what? And you, your brother—I don't think so."

"But if you can't—will he stop?"

"He denies nothing, he promises nothing. 'I am what I am,' he says. 'It's up to you.' Up to me—as if anything in this life were my choice. As if his family hadn't dictated everything from day one. It's nonsense."

"Do you love him?" Part of me wanted to laugh, speaking of my father in this way, at the unreality of our exchange, as false as the decor around us.

"What does that even mean? And what does it matter?"

"Does he love you?"

"So he says. Can't live without me. As always."

"Maman, listen. If nothing matters or means anything, what difference does it make? You have to decide what you think is right." My pastry lay dismembered on my plate, streaked with yellow custard, inedible.

"There's nothing to decide, sweetheart."

"Then why tell me?"

"Because I have to tell someone. So I don't wake up wondering if I imagined the whole thing. And I thought you already knew."

"Because of that afternoon?"

"What afternoon?"

Then I recounted, because it was too late to go back, the events of the January afternoon at the house, which now, suddenly, made sense (I wondered how could it not have dawned on me before). And she, to whom it had apparently not occurred that her husband might be "entertaining mistresses" in her home, dissolved. The tears that had been lurking inside their bloated sacks gushed forth. She put her sunglasses back on, propped upon the slick of her bony cheeks, but they could not hide the shudder of her shoulders as she cried. I recalled Becky, in Ron and Eleanor's sunlit yard, blithely announcing that if life did not get better she would kill herself; and I was cramped by the sudden fear that were I in my mother's place, after so many long years of trying, I might consider it the only solution.

"You won't do anything silly, will you?" I asked, in the car, on the way home.

She kept her fuzzy eyes on the road. "You know me, dear. Of course I won't."

Thereafter I dreaded my father's return in the evenings, and was sickened by the civilized facade my parents maintained, whether for my benefit or Etienne's it was never clear. They did not touch—but this was not new. They were unfailingly polite; they bounced the conversation along like an india rubber ball, as insubstantial. In subsequent days, my grandfather's morale, his activities in prison, became a favorite topic of discussion, cheerfully neutral. And at night I waited, always, for their distant bursts of anger. Sometimes I took to my perch on the stairs, willing it. But it seemed they had nothing to say to one another, and all that I heard was the faint tinkle of the stereo, its aggravating sonatas and placid chamber music trickling through the quiet house.

In doubt, my father consulted his mother. She, in turn, came to placate my mother, to reassure her that she was not alone. She strove to convince her that this belated knowledge was as much a part of the LaBasse tradition as
aubergines au gratin
and uncarpeted bathrooms.

"Men have needs," she informed her stricken daughter-in-law, "that have nothing to do with love. Alexandre worships you, depends utterly on the happiness of you and the children. He takes good care of you. He will always come home to you. And beyond that, there are compromises. We all make compromises."

Seeing my mother still stony-faced, my grandmother grew more expansive. "I know exactly how you feel. More exactly than you know. It's a phase, I promise you. Jacques, before we came here, before he had the hotel—a brilliant young man, he was undervalued, insufficiently challenged. In such situations, men seek—what?—consolation, you could call it. Proof of their worth. They're like children, really; insatiable. You should be grateful; it keeps him from pestering you too much, leaves you time for your own pursuits."

And further: "My dear girl, it's hardly new. I always assumed you were aware, that you understood how things worked. The power, don't you see, is all yours, just as it has always been? What is different from a year ago, really, except a tiny, irrelevant piece of knowledge which you would do best to forget?"

"Everything is different from a year ago," my mother replied.

My grandmother tried again: "It is our job, as wives and mothers, to keep families together. You know that. It's why you've kept Etienne with you, although it hasn't always been easy. What if I told you that I'd been through much worse? And we've survived. And more than survived."

My mother raised a skeptical eyebrow—pondering my grandmother's idea of survival, when her husband was in jail for assault with a deadly weapon; and wondering, too, what my grandmother could deem worse than my mother's sorry trials. My grandmother sighed, sinking back in the sofa's cushions, and closed her eyes (to see with her mind's eye? to avoid seeing at all?) and told her.

In the period immediately after the Second World War, my grandfather was a restless young man. He had drifted into the hotel business not out of any love of service, but rather because, during the last years, '44 and '45, when North Africa had been liberated and France had not, a fellow veteran—his commanding officer, in fact—proved to be, de-mobbed, the son of the manager of the glamorous Hotel St. Joseph, a Moorish fantasy on the clifftop that had long been host to Algiers' most illustrious visitors. Jacques was ambitious, clever; but the disruptions of the wider world had intervened upon his life, distracted him from the strategic career planning he had imagined he would undertake. Besides, any plans for greatness that he might have made would have involved the powers of metropolitan France, and those powers, during his twenties, were otherwise engaged. The hotel job, when it was offered, recalled his glamorous sister Estelle, his prewar dreams of glory.

In 1948, at thirty-one, he was, then, in junior management on the staff of the St. Joseph, something of a dandy, physically slight but greying impressively at the temples. His dark hair was receding manfully from his large-featured face, lending his appearance a gravitas it had theretofore lacked. Famously efficient, he was known around the hotel's hushed halls for irascibility at the slightest incompetence: the grubby collar, the undusted side table, the wilting rose in the lobby's vast bouquet—any of these was sufficient to incite a tirade. But he was careful, and thorough: he hunted down the culprit, and chastised only that subaltern. He praised where praise was due, albeit gruffly, and with his superiors he affected an almost painfully respectful demeanor, as if to say "I am ready to be chastised in my turn, should I deserve it." Still, promotion was slow in coming. The ranks of the staff were bloated, he complained to his wife, by codgers in tenure, men with fat bottoms in easy chairs, idly smoking pipes, men who thought nothing of sucking the hotel dry, as if they were themselves guests, and would continue to do so until they retired. He chafed; at home, he ranted; he prayed that his talents might be recognized, that he might be used to his fullest capacities.

And he worried about money: his salary was small, the needs of his young family great. He looked at his son, a sturdy child with dimpled limbs and a surfeit of energy. He surveyed with distaste the mess this boy made—colored blocks lay strewn around the apartment; at mealtimes, the lad in his high chair spilled his milk daily, as if on purpose, puddling the carpets. He resented the child, born too soon, and the obstacle this greedy toddler represented. He resented, too, the swelling beneath Monique's smock that would be Marie, another mouth to feed, another bundle caterwauling in the night, that already, not yet breathing, deprived him of his wife's attentions and of the privileges of his marital bed.

"Can you imagine," said my grandmother to my mother, "such frustration? A man of such promise, with such force of character, hemmed in on all sides?"