40; Ce n'est pas important

For a time, I was surprised that some of the women who attended my mother’s funeral, did. As far as I knew, my mother never saw or heard from Mrs. Littington again once she moved. But that’s not the reason for my consternation at seeing her again. We all knew she’d live on the block only for a while, just as she had in every other place to which her husband’d taken her from Toulon. He plucked her, or so he wanted us to think, from the rubble the Nazis, Fascists and the ones who tried to “liberate” the old quais and cathedral from them, left behind. Ce n’est pas important, she’d say whenever anyone asked her about the war, her family or the town. Or any of the other places, people or experiences of her life.

Toulon, Oran, Aden, Asuncion, Tahiti, this block—those are just the places I remember her mentioning. And oh yes—Montreal. The one place name that aparked herface from the impassiveness that was too expressionless to be called serenity. Apres Paris, il y a Montreal. Montreal, she said, was from le temps perdu, like Paris, la belle cite, which she saw once when she was just a young girl. The sun rose in her chestnut-flecked eyes when she described la claire, l’elegance of the women promenading under belle epoque skies just starting to turn gray, the clouds enfolding from the east rather than the north or west.

Verite and elegance, she told my mother, are all that matter. My mother, who did not use the idioms and syntax of her immigrant grandmother, and knew no language save for what she learned on this block, understood. No one talked about liberte or egalite at Mrs. Littington’s sort-of-bohemian aunt’s house on the Rue de Rennes, near the old Montparnasse station; only verite et elegance.

Mrs. Littington’s aunt had never married, and every day “Madame St. Just,” the tallest woman she’d ever met, came to visit. Madame St. Just, Mrs. Littington said, also had the deepest, throatiest voice she’s ever heard on a woman, aussi des hommes. Her high cheekbones, her thin neck and arms, were fin but not raffine; her bones neither those of a paysane nor of une Parisienne vraie.

But Madame St. Just was full of l’elegance and la verite, Mrs. Littington said. Even in her strangest, crudest gestures—She belched louder and more gratingly than any woman or man in her country!—seemed as inevitable and beautiful as tiles from a mosaic of the gods that were retreating from the darkening post-belle epoque horizon creeping along the curves of the Seine.

Nothing impressed the girl who would become Mrs. Littington nerly as much as Madame St. Just’s mouth, which softened and curled whenever she said la vie or told stories she’d probably told hundreds of times before but filled young Francoise, the future Mrs. Littington, like wines discovered behind doors left unlocked, then uncorked, poured and palated between furtive glances.

Somehow she knew enough not to repeat anything she heard from Madame St. Just, not to her mother or her father, and certainly not to any man—or anyone else—in Toulon. As far as I know, no man on this block has ever heard such stories. All about je/te, she’d tell my mother, not je suis ici, vous etes la or worse, sous moi.\

I wish I could remember more of those stories now. But I could just as well try to recall a lecture on quantum mechanics (I have no idea of what it is) or a religious revival my mother brought me to, had she been the sort of woman to attend such things. Wait—I’m remembering now that Mrs. Littington said that her aunt and Madame St. Just didn’t talk about l’amour or make promises about anything, not even about meeting for lunch or coffee in the garden behind the cathedral.

Actually, I recall now that my mother and Mrs. Littington didn’t really talk that much—at least not when I was present. And mother was never reluctant to talk, especially with women she knew. For that matter, I don’t remember her spending as much time with Mrs. Littington as with some of the other women. And, as I’ve said before, once she left, mother never spoke about her again.

But there she was at my mother’s funeral, older but not the wan or matronly presence someone expects from someone her age. Her unwrinkled yet creaseless black pants and jacket fit her as perfectly; she stood like one of those buildings that, in spite of its cracks and peels, doesn’t age much, any more than if someone had painted it a different color.

She’d left the je/tu—as if she and one of her friends had simply been conjugations of the same verb—always unchanged, something she didn’t have to, but could, return to. When one’s stories become je suis ici, vous etes la narratives, returning—remebering—becomes both necessary and impossible.

I don’t think I could’ve understood this if I hadn’t left this block and lived among men, in their world of capricious, pointless deaths—which it to say, their lives. Mrs. Littington never saw Paris again, or any place else in France but Toulon. My mother never saw much of anything but this block, but she seemed to understand, even if Mrs. Littington could never exactly translate into my mother’s idioms.

I don’t know where she came from to see my mother—or at least those other women—one last time. Certainly I didn’t know whether her husband was still alive, whether they’d stayed together, or what became of their children. And of course mother could never know: She remembered only the ce n’est pas important which someone misinterpreted before it reached her ears. So she didn’t stay in touch; in time Mrs. Littington surely forgot much about my mother’s life. That is why she did a double-take, then looked away from me, in the funeral parlor. Sometimes people aren’t sure, after absences of decades, whether the person they’ve come to see had a son, daughter, cat , dog, all of the above or none of the above. Not that it was important—to me, anyway—whether she remembered me, or how. She won’t return to this block, and neither, I hope, will I. We couldn’t, even if someone allowed it.

40-A, Her

Still wonder about that lady, the one whose name I never knew, the one whose voice I heard only once before the funeral. Did she recognize me? Now I’m remembering something else. The day before the funeral, when I walked through the graveyards that separate this block, this neighborhood, from every other place I’ve seen since living on it, the wind—at least I thought it was the wind—flickered across my face and the back of my hands, which I shaved every day at that point in my life. I felt my blood fluttering under my skin and another current of wind rushing over my pores. But—no tingles, no goosebumps—I realized the air was still and the sun, behind translucent clouds and the chill of headstones against my fingertips seemed still, almost neutral.

When I walked under the bronze cross at the top of the gate, she glanced from across the street, a few yards to my left. I hadn’t remembered, at that moment, that she was our old neighbor, but I exhaled fully, wholly, when the step I thought she took in my direction cut to her left and toward a house on the corner.

Didn’t occur to me that it was her—or that she was looking at me—until long after the funeral, after I ‘d left the block for the last time. She’s probably still there, for all I know.

39. Identity

It’s still strange sometimes to be free of obligations. The person to whom I was married has no idea of where I am or what I’m doing. The phone calls to friends and workplaces stopped a long time ago. I’ve not only liberated myself from marriage—It’s easier when you don’t have children or property, as I didn’t—but that somewhere, actually at various points along the way, I’ve shed most of the bonds I had with other people. It wasn’t a conscious choice, but I don’t regret it now.

Now I understand why people stop visiting the gravestones of family members and friends. It’s not just because survivors move away, at least geographically, from the dead. After a while, it’s not possible to mourn, or even to recall or forget. The person you knew no longer exists and can’t come back. In fact, they can’t be replaced: Someone or something merely substitutes for something. I guess we’re all substitutes for something or someone.

There was the girl my mother once was; there were the people she’d been before she met the one who fathered me; there is what she might’ve been if she hadn’t known him or given birth to me or anyone else. I’d heard stories that she’d had a boy or a girl: someone who’d been taken for her or whom she gave up. I found photographs once of a curly-haired (wo)man/child, wrapped in something that looked like a butcher’s apron with a picture of a tree—I don’t know what kind—painted on it. I guess that rules out the abortion story, which I’d never believed anyway.

She walked in. What were you doing in there? You left them on your dressser, I claimed. What were you doing, looking there? Couldn’t help it: the door opened that faded wood dresser top, I explained. Normally, she didn’t leave anything there, so of course those photos caught my attention. Whose pictures are those? I wondered aloud.

Mine.

Couldn’t’ve been: the face was too round, even for such a young child. Eye sockets too flat. And I didn’t think my grandmother—or just about any other mother—would’ve dressed her kid that way, not even if her husband or boyfriend or whomever chopped meat by day and silk-screened T-shirts by night.

What followed was the one moment of true hatred I ever felt toward her. It’s one thing to finesse one’s way around something a kid might not understand or be ready to hear—or something one simply isn’t ready to explain. But she never did that before, or after, so I knew she was lying. Why?, I still ask myself. Not many things could’ve changed what I felt for her, not even finding out she’d given a child away or killed it. I would never’ve told anyone else about something like that.

I didn’t tell when she thought she had a malignant tumor. Or when she said she’d sung or performed other jobs—That’s all they were, she said—or hinted at whom my father might’ve been. I also never told what I heard of her conversations with any of the women who would attend her funeral. She knew this, and some time in my teen years she stopped gesturing me away when I chanced upon one of her encounters.

I also never mentioned the things she said about a certain man whom I can only assume was my father. They met in school, in a dance hall, or on some long-since-closed ride in a seaside amusement park: The stories varied. Or maybe they just met one evening in some nameless stretch of sidewalk, or another evening somewhere else.

I’d seen him—I’m sure of it. Everything about my face, except for my knobby chin, I got from mother. Her hair was straight and fine, his splayed with an ever-so-short arc from the top of his head down to his ears. So I know I didn’t get my coiffure from the haircutter my mother used to take me to. His dark brown hair differed from hers only when he didn’t shave for a day or two and the nearly orange fields in his stubble reflected the rusty undertone of his hair.

When I was a child, my hair glowed nearly as russet as his flecks. As I grew older, they darkened like tree trunks after sunset. And when he lost the locks from the top of his head, the fringe around the crown just above his ears glowed brighter and curled at his ears.

Mother didn’t have to chase me, even though I always wanted at least a glimpse of him, the way most people choose to view tigers in a forest or sharks on the continental shelf: close enough to know what they are, but at enough of a distance for a head start.