All the Dead Yale Men (31 page)

People passed by the window in the dining room, and I saw the men in their dark clothes, the women in their stylish coats, their gaits so proud, so elegant, as though they had practiced all their life to walk past the window of a thirty-eight-year-old woman who was pregnant by a man not her husband. It was here, when the clink of the silver against the plate was so loud as to sound like a small automobile accident, I went through the details of how I had come to be living on rue Buci with that silent woman who seemed to be a cloud of smoke from a sooty fire.

The eating alone, like this, seemed like part of the punishment. I ate slowly, as a matter of defiance, sometimes putting my hand on the swelling stomach, and while I waited, which I knew was coming, for the first kick, I kept brooding.

Still, what I know about love, or a large part of love between men and women, comes from the time I had to consider the matter as I ate the rack of lamb with spinach, the salmon with morels, the steak tartare with fried potatoes. It
was a variety of liturgy, I suppose, and something I did to keep myself company. After all, when you are most lonely you think of when you were most joined to someone else, to the point of feeling that you were not one person, but two combined. This matter of codifying what I knew about McGill, about my feelings, left me knowing that the sensation of this variety of love (of which, of course, we have many) was one that left me not only whole, but warm, and somehow correct, not in the right and wrong sense, but in the sense that I fit with the stars, or that because of what was happening between me and another human being, the night sky didn't seem so mysterious, or its mystery was at that time reassuring. It made me feel as though the scale of what I felt was honored by the worlds, the distance of the stars that I saw with my own eyes. With that intensity, with that certainty, this experience, this sensation, which we all love, is as nearly as I can tell one of the most demanding, exquisite, and dangerous (not a sufficient word, really) of all the items that human beings go through.

This is what I missed, at those meals set for one and with those elegant women going by in the street: the warm certainty, the conviction that I could communicate by a touch, the warmth of a hand, just that. And so, I was left with a constant longing, a tug for something gone. That was the bitter lesson: even though it was all illusion, all hope and bizarre behavior, I still felt the tug of what had happened. On some occasions I stopped the fork, my hand on my stomach, and remembered a touch or a look, a kiss, a throb in some intimate place, all hitting me with that mixture of regret and desire. This condition, this suspended, protracted longing, which could never be forgotten, is right at the heart of what I taught myself at that dinner for one. That longing, that unbreakable isolation, which couldn't be soothed by the lover (who had
proven to be untrustworthy), is at the center of the regret when human love goes wrong. And the amazing quality, the item that left me woolgathering in that apartment in Paris, or when I went for a walk by those restaurants that put off the most wonderful aroma of roasts, of potatoes with garlic and rosemary, of tartes framboise in the oven, is that this desire for what would never have worked doesn't make humans less, or diminished, but more, or larger, and that somehow the pain of this makes us wiser.

Of course, the loyalty from Pop was so unexpected. He reached to me from the depths, from all humiliation, all sense of self-loathing, all sense of betrayal simply pushed aside. He had something to do, and he was going to do it. I had a bank account. The maid. A doctor. The doctor had made arrangements for the hospital and a nurse. The baby kicked.

The telegrams came on Monday and Friday: Catherine stop report weight and health stop any needs stop love Pop.

Love? It left me shaking and added to my sense of what I know about this substance, which is so necessary, so hard to obtain, more difficult to keep, so easy to lose, and which leaves such a violent, vicious wake, sometimes, when it goes.

A telegram said: Practical considerations stop letter to follow stop Pop.

I should have known that the lawyer in Pop would take over at a certain point, since, after all, if you are a pilot, after twenty-five years, you think like a pilot, and if you are a lawyer, after twenty-five years, you think like a lawyer.

The letter was in the little box in the hall, and I put what is called a skeleton key into the lock on the door and took it out and read it at that plate for one. At least it was some company. Pop, in his letter, explained that he could not, in thinking about it, accept the child as his son, since that meant that the
will he had made, the trust he had set up, and all the other benefits to his offspring would flow to this child, too. And while Pop could do this for himself, he could not, in all honesty, cheat his sons out of what was theirs because of, as he put it to be polite, “what had happened.” What ideas did I have?

We had one solution, which I sent to Pop: we would say to the boys, when I came home, that this was the child of a relative of mine who had lived in Europe and who had died in childbirth. Pop and I would take this “cousin” in. We would bring him up in our house, but he would not have the benefits of a son, in terms of inheritance and other advantages, since he would already have the generosity of our taking him in.

He wrote again to say that he would have the French birth certificate translated and that he had contacted the doctor in Paris to enter the name of the mother as not being Catherine Mackinnon but my sister Celeste Muriro. He would work out the details of citizenship. Everything could be arranged.

I was at the outdoor market, very heavy, reaching for a banana, when the man there, François, of course, said, “
Madame, il a commencé. Voici de l'eau
.” Or “Madame, it has begun. Here is the water.”

So, I stood with the bananas, which François had put in the string bag I used to go shopping, as though this, the gift of the bananas, would help. Then he went across the street to use the telephone. I felt the cold air and knew that I should walk to my apartment and get the bag I had prepared and go to the hospital, just as the doctor had told me to do, just as he had told me to have the hospital call him, but for a minute, maybe two, I wanted to feel the cold breeze on my wet stockings, if only to be reminded of just how alone I was and how, if there was ever a time when I should take pleasure or at least strength from the solitude I had learned to live with, this was it.

The shadow, the whiff of black smoke, stood at the door, the small bag in her hand, which she gave to me as though she knew what it had taken for me to pack it alone, the thing open on the bed, and then I went to the bureau to take out clothes that would fit after the birth, the touch of them enough to blister my fingers, or, worse, that caused me to stop, as though frozen, to think of those moments when McGill and I had been alone or when he had come into the house with the scent of pine sap and sweat. I took the bag and thanked her.

“It is nothing,” the maid said and shrugged.

I had been in labor before, but not like this, in that French room with the gray walls and the nuns in their starched habits, not one of them ever really looking at me, and this, of course, left me to my own devices as the contractions came closer and closer. And much to my amazement, I thought of those moments of McGill's when he said that he could see a blue storm coming, all blue as a bruise in the sky, and then he would go stiff. I often thought, and surely thought when I was in labor, that this was a price he paid for being in love, or at least not able to control himself with me, because he said that the sky got that blue when he had been excited or upset and when he was with me he had never been more excited and more upset, because, he had said, he had always wanted to be a decent man, but somehow it had come to this. I tried to remember how smooth his skin was, just as the scent of pine seemed to be in the room as the worst of the birth came, the transition, and then I saw that the nun mopped the hall with a bottle that said
L'odeur du pin
. And so I came up against the hard fact that it wasn't just love remembered or used as some defense against the birth, at which I finally screamed louder than I have ever screamed before. The scream came from the fact that I was alone, that
McGill had been insufficient, and from a paradoxical but profound love for what Pop had done. Stood by me. And not out of vanity, or because he wanted to avoid a scandal, but from his belief that it is what he should do and what he wanted to do. Stand by me.

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•
  
•

My grandmother and the baby went to the apartment on rue Buci, and my grandfather had arranged for a nurse. My grandmother walked endless miles, to the Luxembourg Gardens, to the Tuileries, since, as she wrote to Pop, “No matter what, I must never, under any circumstances, look as though I have given birth. I must look five years younger.”

And not only did she exercise, she went to those perfume shops and cosmetics shops on the right bank, and spent a small fortune, she said, like the French women who went there to soften their skin, to make it clear, and when she came home, pulling up to the house in a Buick driven by my grandfather's chauffeur, Wade, she had Jerry with her, in a small bassinet, and she looked more than five years younger. Jack and Chip looked at each other and then hugged her and said how wonderful she looked. I imagine she didn't look old, although she began to age almost instantly, if the photographs from this time are accurate.

So, the baby was brought into the house, and Jack and Chip didn't really pay him much mind, since he was twelve or fourteen years younger than them, and soon they went to Yale, and then the war started, and by the time they came back, Jerry was away at school himself, although it was a special school. And finally, after Chip had come home, gotten married, and started work as an academic and a spook, Jerry lived in a town along the Delaware, Lackawaxen, and worked odd jobs, getting by, odd,
having seizures, and finally when my father was in his thirties and moving up as an academic-spook, Jerry built that house out of spare parts and junk he picked up along the side of the road and at the scene of accidents. This, of course, was about the time I was born.

These extra books, the ones I had found under the lining of the trunk, had been tied with what I supposed to be French ribbons, pink, or maybe a just now faded red, and I tied the diaries shut with this ribbon, although my bows were not as neat and precise as I wanted, and so I did it again, as though by making it perfect, like something on a gown made in Paris, I could communicate with my grandmother.

Then the trunk lid closed like a bear trap. Bang. The dust rose in a cloud again.

The boxes, the trunks, the old lamps with shades that were covered with dust, so as to have the color of some old, intimate stain, the broken-down rockers and children's toys, all washed up here as though time was a force like the wind or tides or something that liked to push things around. Then the stairs creaked under my feet, and outside, on the front porch, the moonlight was brighter now. And then I went along the pond, where a fish stirred at an insect, or along the road to the stone house, where I stopped with only my breathing for company.

It was getting light, and the road had only a grayish luminescence in the dawn, but as I came to the stone house road and turned down it, that dark shape appeared as though it had been waiting.

The bear stood sideways, against the hillside. Its head seemed as heavy as a bowling ball, or, at least he seemed to have trouble holding it up, since as he stood there, against the gray stone that emerged from the hillside, like the remains of something that was no longer useful, he kept lifting his head, as though it took
effort. Dark fur against the hillside. The living evidence of how things that seemed so right could so easily go wrong.

We faced one another. His eyes were that same oil-colored hue, although even more opaque, or something darker than dark, a color that not only had no light but actually absorbed it, that vacuumed it up from the landscape in which we both stood.

The bear swayed from side to side, or at least its head moved back and forth. It was otherwise silent, although its claws made a scraping sound as it came uphill, toward me, as though it had been a guardian all along of those diaries and was now called upon to protect them as he had always wanted. Or perhaps under the circumstances, with the light changing, I thought such a thing. The bear stood on two feet and clawed at the air. Then it stepped toward me so that I could smell that rotten salmon odor, or something like a skunk smell that has almost worn off, and I stepped closer and said, “Get out of my way.”

The bear swayed from side to side. Yes, it seemed to say, we will settle this later.

It turned and walked into the brush, its blackness dissolving into the blackness of the undergrowth, which, for a moment, made everything look not like brush but a mass of bears, but then I shook my head and went down that road toward the house. The books were under my arm, and I seemed like an old schoolboy who was late for an exam.

The light was on. Pia sat with her hair in a mass at the table in the stone house, a cup of coffee in front of her. Robert sat in a pair of sweatpants and a fleece jacket that had a North Face logo. He held his coffee cup in both hands, but even through the window they were obviously shaking. Pia spoke and put her head down. At the window, where I stood like some phantom, their voices vibrated in the glass of the window, where I put the tips of
my fingers. Could I make sense from just the touch? As though by a variety of Braille?