8 AN AIR OF PRAYER
8
A N A IR OF P RAYER
During the winter, family visits to the Viviani Retirement Home were restricted to the hours of 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Barbara was used to being the first to arrive during those hours. On Tuesdays and Fridays, she woke early and, so long as she didn’t have a meeting with an editor on the other side of the world, would go to visit her grandmother. Sometimes she wondered to herself how—at forty-one years old and after everything the two of them had been through—she still felt that same yearning to see and hug and hear her grandmother as she had when she was eight. It was hope sustained.
Prior to arriving at the retirement home, which was located on the edge of the Latin Quarter just fifty steps from the Seine, Barbara stopped at a long-standing pastry shop two blocks away from Square René Viviani to buy her grandmother a treat. If it wasn’t a Saint Honoré cake, it was milk-chocolate cat tongues. Despite her age, her grandmother continued to indulge in her sweet tooth to the point of indigestion. She hadn’t lost that wartime weakness for sweets. In times of hunger, sugar was a reward, a gift you could savor on your palate and make last.
Mamie Margaux had more of an apartment than a room. The only thing missing from the living quarters that would make her feel like she was still in a tiny apartment, albeit with medical assistance and hotel services, was having a kitchen with a stovetop. What she had instead was a microwave and an electric kettle sitting on a white laminate shelf. She had also negotiated for a mini fridge to be placed underneath. Some days, to avoid going down for lunch with the fellow residents, who she thought were in worse shape than she was, Margaux went out to buy ready-made food, heated it up, and ate it at the table she’d set up against the poet’s window in her room. She was convinced she was the only resident who could come and go during visiting hours as she pleased. A week before checking into the private residence, she’d made the facility agree to sign a permission slip—a special kind of authorization that opened doors for her, quite literally. Margaux Dutronc told them that she was eighty-three years old, her head was clear, and, aside from the pain in her knees, her legs allowed her to walk a bit each day pain-free. She wasn’t there, like the other grannies, to wait for the signal to take off from the runway. She left home to save herself the trouble of going up and down five flights of stairs, and it was precisely because she’d spent too much time shut in that she didn’t want to miss out on an ounce of freedom. She was there in the interest of comfort, of adapting to her body and giving in to the whims of a timeline that sometimes felt like it stopped, then sometimes flew by. Margaux couldn’t stand how so many of her fellow residents thought of themselves as locked up in the home, as if they were suffering a punishment for becoming a burden. Even the phrase made her shiver. Locked up. It wasn’t a prison or asylum. She moved there out of her own volition, and she didn’t want to become infected with resentment, which spread like a virus, permeating the dining room and the courtyard with the magnolia tree.
At ten on the dot, Barbara entered her grandmother’s room and found her reading the newspaper, posture straightened, hair white, glasses clean, and pose dignified. She was leafing through the pages near the table that looked out toward the square. “At the poet’s window.” That’s what her grandmother would call a large window with beautiful views.
“You still alive, Mamie?” Barbara made the same joke each morning she visited.
“Still am, my love,” her grandma joked back in the same tone. “Good morning.”
“Good morning.”
Without taking off her jacket, a champagne-colored fake sheepskin, Barbara gave her grandmother two kisses.
“Your cheeks are freezing, sweetie.”
“It’s cold and dry today ... It’s Paris-Paris.”
“And they say it’ll get worse.”
“Who says that?”
“The newspaper. But I don’t know if these weather guys ever guess right.”
Mamie closed the Libération . She folded it, set it on the table, and eyed her granddaughter from head to toe as she slipped off her coat.
“I brought you something new today. Let’s see how it tastes.” Barbara placed a small package on the table. “A Sacher torte.”
Her grandmother’s bony fingers struggled to undo the little pastry-shop bow.
“Sacher torte is the one from Vienna, right?”
“Yes. It’s chocolate and peach marmalade.”
“Put it in the fridge. Thank you, sweetie. I’ll save it for dinner. That way I don’t have to go down and eat with those cockatoos.”
Barbara sat at the edge of the bed. “There’s no need to—”
“You know Anine? The one whose room is next door, the one who’s not all there? Today, she suddenly got it in her head to ask me in the middle of conversation, ‘So what do you want to be when you grow up?’”
“Don’t pay any attention to her.”
“But the thing is she isn’t just asking me, she asks all of us. She could be talking about anything at all, since she drones on and repeats herself a lot, and then, out of nowhere, she asks the question ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’”
“And how do you respond?”
“I change the subject. What am I supposed to tell her? That I’m already grown up, dammit? That I’m beginning to forget things too? What does Anine expect us to say? Nobody knows. Why does she ask us four, five times in a row? Nobody knows that either. She doesn’t know, I’m sure; she’s on the brink of—”
“She’s older than you, right?”
“Anine? Not even. I’m two years older—but, poor girl, she doesn’t function anymore. Her mind ...”
“Not like you. You’re a queen.”
“I’m the best in this home. That’s for sure.” She showed off her best laugh. “All the doctors tell me so.”
“I thought you were gonna say that all the grandpas in the residence talk about it. I’ve seen one wearing pajamas in the hallway who’s handsome.”
“Don’t joke around, because there is one here who ... would make you cross yourself.”
“What?”
“No, no ...”
“Say it, come on.”
“‘The Great Masturbator’ is what the nurses call him.”
“Oh, Mamie, I don’t even want to know. Don’t tell me.”
Barbara was visiting with the intention of sharing Jasper’s well-wishes. She’d run into him in the stairwell of the apartment building, and he’d vehemently insisted that she do so. At the time, she’d suspected that through some trick of the mind, he’d unfortunately guessed at her intentions: she’d pass the greetings along when she saw her grandmother if she remembered. But she let it go.
“How’s my cactus?”
“Impeccable. Just the way you left it. Watching through the window all day.”
“You’re taking care of it?”
“It’s in the same place, Mamie. It’s perfect. Don’t worry. It gets light, I water it only when the dirt is dry. I put in the clay that you left me, and I talk to it every day. I do everything you told me to do.”
“It’s heavier than a corpse, that cactus. The porter from the greenhouse who brought it up five flights must still be on leave. You should’ve seen how much the poor guy was sweating.”
“Between the pot, the plant, and the dirt, that doesn’t surprise me.”
“I tried giving him a tip, and he said, ‘I’d rather you let me sit for a bit.’ And you bet he sat on the red couch, and I gave him a glass of water and let him rest until he recovered.”
Mamie Margaux took out her hand cream from the nightstand and offered some to Barbara. It was a gesture both of them liked sharing. They did it unconsciously, having done it for Barbara’s whole life.
“This one smells good.” Barbara looked at the label on the tube. “Ah, L’Occitane.”
“I think Jasper gave it to me.”
“Oh, Jasper ... I ran into him in the stairwell. I told him I was coming, and he sent his greetings.”
Her grandmother didn’t say anything. Both of them continued to rub their hands thoroughly. Mamie had not finished going through the apartment inventory by the time the cream had absorbed into their hands.
“And that guy? Does he still have the room?”
“Marcel? Yes. No problem.”
“A lawyer, right?”
“Yes, yes. Discreet and ...”
“He pays every month?”
“He pays rent on time every month. You don’t have to worry about that.”
She thought twice about whether she should get into the details. “In fact, he’s just left for a couple of weeks, and he’s sent his brother to use the room. Fine, but ...”
“But ...” Mamie knew how to detect any anger from her granddaughter, no matter how much she wanted to hide it.
“His brother is more of a loudmouth. Nothing serious, but the first few days he acted like it was his apartment. I had to stop him in his tracks, and you know, I don’t like these things. It makes me uncomfortable having to say, ‘It stops here, boy. This is not your house.’”
“I’m guessing he’s young.”
“Hardly. He said he’s thirty-three. One time, I mentioned to him he’s ‘the age of Christ.’ And can you believe he didn’t know Jesus’s age when he was crucified?”
“It’s enough if the youth know who Jesus is at all.”
“He’s no dummy. He’s plenty clever. He says he’s a photographer. Or at the very least, he goes out all day with his camera and backpack.”
“What kind of photographer?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t asked.”
“Don’t trust him if he’s a photographer. Believe me.”
Barbara stood up from the bed and approached the window, looking out onto the street.
“Is that the tree you were talking about, Mamie?”
“It’s the oldest tree in Paris. Believe it or not, but there’s a plaque out there that says it.”
“Se non è vero, è ben trovato ...”
“I’ll tell you what it says. ‘Robinia acacia, something, something, however many trees planted here next to the church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre in 1601,’ I think.”
“Let’s go look at it, come on. Let’s go out for a walk.”
“Are you trying to kill me?”
“What do you mean?”
“From the cold, I mean.”
“Let’s go, come on. Look ... the sun’s shining out there, Mamie.”
Convinced, Mamie Margaux and her granddaughter passed through the two tiled hallways that stretched between the rooms and the exit to the street. The Viviani was a home founded sometime around when man landed on the moon. It could have ended up a filthy and dilapidated center, but the new owners, the heirs of the founders, were careful about hygiene and had an obsession with maintenance. Every two years, they painted the building white from top to bottom. Every three years, they reupholstered the chairs. Every four years, they redid the lighting so it didn’t look like a morgue waiting room. Inside, no one was forced to feel like they had to confront the ultimate question.
“Light, so much light, because we’ll be in the dark soon,” a nursing assistant had once told Margaux as she changed the sheets.
Barbara and Mamie went out onto the street, arm-in-arm. Each had their wool scarves wrapped up so high you could only see their eyes. Slowly, they approached the tree. The trunk was dark, wrinkled by the fissures of centuries.
“It’s hard to believe it’s the oldest in the city. I would’ve guessed I’d seen bigger or older ones, but I don’t know how to calculate that.” Barbara circled the tree. “It has a nice trunk. You can’t deny that.”
“A bit distorted, wouldn’t you say?”
“A little skewed ... but a mighty trunk. It has personality.”
“At four hundred years old, who wouldn’t?”
“It’s pretty out here.”
“Very. Dogs happily lift their legs here. Then they bow because they know it’s a tree with history.”
Barbara always laughed at every one of her mamie’s fanciful ideas, as if they still were together that summer in Sainte-Maxime. They sat down on the only bench in the sun. Their bottoms freezing, they contemplated the tree that had outlived the Sun King, the Napoleons, Marie Antoinette, the Revolution, Hitler, and Sarkozy. With time, they’d had to prop up the heaviest branches so it wouldn’t topple to the ground.
“History carries weight,” the grandmother murmured with the ulterior motives of someone who hears the bell tolling every quarter hour.
A bicyclist, outfitted like he’d just escaped the final stages of the Tour de France, passed by the tree without even looking at it.
“Once the weather gets nicer, you know what you can do? You can come out here with the oboe and play in the square.”
“Oh, honey, what are you even saying?”
“I’m not saying you should do it now. At the end of spring, in June, when it’s nice ...”
“What do you want? For people to throw money into my hat? We sure would make people laugh.”
“I don’t see why not.”
“They’d throw tomatoes at me.”
“You can do it on the 30th of May, an homage to my mother. She would have turned ... sixty-three, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Sixty-three on the 30th of May, yes.”
“Yes, she died at ...” Barbara counted on her fingers.
“Fifty-five. She’d just turned fifty-five.”
Mamie Margaux knew it all perfectly. If you have to bury your daughter, the last thing you forget is her age when your world ended. You could’ve survived a war, you could’ve suffered never seeing your love again, you could’ve experienced many close deaths—deaths that are the laws of life and those that challenge any natural law—but if you have experienced the worst thing in the world, you remember it every day. Her age: fifty-five. The date: July 25, 2000.
“I think,” said Barbara, looking for words that wouldn’t hurt, “that you and I hardly speak about my mother.”
“About édith?”
“About both of my parents. About édith and Clément. It’s been eight years already. Almost.”
“It’ll be eight years in July.”
“I don’t know. It’s a feeling. I’m not saying it’s good or bad, Mamie, but maybe we’ve spoken too little about ... I miss them so much. If they hadn’t died at the same time ... Do you know what I mean? Sometimes you don’t know what’s worse. At least they didn’t have to miss each other. They went together, on a trip that my father dreamed about and ... goodbye. But at the same time, throughout the years, I think about it, and I think that when people go through an illness, the family can say goodbye. On the other hand, a heart attack, an accident ... Maybe it’s crueler for the living. Suddenly, it’s good night. Everything is over, and everything is left hanging. There’s no option that gives us closure. That much is clear. No matter how you look at it, it’s a shit show, right?”
The grandmother had been staring at the oldest tree in Paris, bare from the winter, while listening to Barbara. She let a couple pushing a stroller pass by in front of them before saying her part.
“We hardly speak about it because we think about it a lot.”
The subsequent silence, dense as the morning fog, had an air of prayer to it. Barbara laid her head on her grandmother’s shoulder.
“You’re right. We hardly talk about it because we think about it a lot.”
Mamie Margaux slowly found her voice of serenity again.
“We’re like a tree leaf. Every single one of us, a leaf. Beautiful, fragile, proud ... imperfect too.”
“Colorful.”
“Yes, colorful. Or shriveled. Delicate ... The tree is humanity. We each are one of the leaves. And we dance in the wind and need the other trees to live, and we hold on for the calm. édith was one leaf, your father another. And Damien. And you. And I, holding on here. The game of life is designed so they fall one by one.”
“What you’re saying is beautiful, Mamie.”
“It’s a catastrophe,” she said carefully, “when too many leaves fall all at once. The wars, the flu of ’68, the crash of the Concorde. Your father’s dream, you said it yourself. The trip he and édith prepared for so long. The 25th of July, 2000. The dates. We’ll start forgetting things, like that damn Anine, but we’ll remember the damned dates. The dates and knowing what we want to be when we grow up.”
“Mamie ...”
“What?”
“Do you have a handkerchief?”