Indelible by Adelia Saunders
{MAGDALENA}
Vilnius, 1991
In the old days when a child was born, Luck would stand outside the house and whisper at the window. He will be rich. He will be tall. He will have his share. After the baby was washed and wrapped the midwife would sit by the window and listen. He will live only as long as the little fire burns, Luck might say. And the midwife, if she were clever, would tell the family that they must never let the fire in the stove go out. The mother would spend her days feeding twigs into the flames and the son would grow up with the kitchen always warm until—this is how it happened in the stories—he married a rich girl who didn’t care about the old ways, who probably wasn’t very good in the kitchen and had no use for her mother-in-law’s advice, and he would fall stone-dead the moment she let the stove get cold.
That was a story Magdalena’s mother used to tell her, until one day, when Magdalena was just beginning to learn to read but before she knew that anything was wrong, she asked her mother why the midwife hadn’t stopped Luck from coming through the window with her pen.
“What pen?” her mother said.
“To write her name.”
“What name?”
“On the baby.”
“What are you talking about?” her mother said.
“Like here.” Magdalena ran her fingers over the words that were written across her mother’s neck and down her arms, looking for Luck, which in Lithuanian was a word that also meant Happiness, and sometimes meant something that was not exactly either. Almost everyone had it on them somewhere, and she found it at the bend inside her mother’s wrist, where the soft skin folded the letters. “Here,” she said. The letters moved a little with the beat of her mother’s pulse. Magdalena traced her fingers over the word, wondering how Luck had learned to write her name so neatly, considering she was nothing but a fairy and had never gone to school.
But her mother pulled her hand away. “You’re making jokes,” she said, not laughing. She felt Magdalena’s forehead for a fever and made her go to bed, and after that she didn’t tell the story of Luck outside the window anymore.
2008
{RICHARD}
Paris, June
Inga Beart lost so many things in Paris that her biographers hardly get around to mentioning the shoes. At the time, several newspapers reported that she was barefoot when she boarded the ship back to New York, refusing the arm of the ship’s doctor and feeling along the deck with her toes. Yet to the best of my knowledge no one has ever tried to explain what exactly happened to her shoes. They were red, with a high delicate heel, and historians say that throughout her career she was rarely seen in public without them. By the time she left France in 1954 those shoes would have been as familiar to a generation of readers as the pale eyes and ink-stained lips in her dust jacket photograph, or the way she had of bullying something fine and lyrical out of a plain phrase.
I don’t blame the biographers for giving so little attention to the subject of her feet. In the wake of the most violent episode of Inga Beart’s quick life, the fact that her shoes were gone must seem like a minor detail, and scholars have focused instead on the last lines she wrote on the ship back to America—a confession, though no one believed it, scratched into the paint on the side of her berth with the stub of a pencil she had kept hidden under her tongue. Because by then, of course, they’d taken everything else away.
But of all the questions that remain about Inga Beart’s final months, it’s the disappearance of her red shoes that matters most to me. I’d thought for years about going to Paris to see if I couldn’t find out for myself what happened to them, though of course I knew it was next to impossible that any evidence of their fate still existed some fifty years on. I’d asked a few of the historians about them, but they only gave me a shrug or raised an eyebrow at an old man’s interest in a pair of ladies’ high heels long since gone to dust. They must have gotten left behind in Paris, they told me. Those shoes wouldn’t have been any use to her by the time the nurses packed her things and sent her home.
And they may be right. I really don’t know much more about Inga Beart than anyone else does. I only saw my mother once, and I never got any help dating her visit; Aunt Cat and the rest of the family flatly denied that it ever happened. All I know is that I couldn’t have been more than three at the time, because by my fourth birthday she was already in Paris, and of course they never would have let a child see her in the state she was in when she returned.
The details of the day she came to visit have gotten so mixed up with scenes from old movies and bits I must have taken out of her biographies that it’s hard to be sure what actually took place that day and what my imagination filled in later. The memory is too detailed for someone so young, I’ll be the first to admit it, but I’ve read that at that age a child’s retention of a single piece of seemingly random information is sometimes remarkably accurate. And though it’s rare, that must have been the case with me, because I remember my mother’s shoes so clearly that I can see them even now if I close my eyes.
The memory is framed by a bit of what looks like lace but what must have been the corner of Aunt Cat’s vinyl tablecloth, leading me to imagine that I spent my mother’s visit hiding under the kitchen table. The rest of the memory—a blue door, a teacup smashing—doesn’t quite belong to Aunt Cat’s kitchen; it may have been spliced in later. But the image of those shoes is mine alone. In the hours or minutes I spent there under the table, while she and Aunt Cat must have been talking, I came to possess a bit of Inga Beart that the publishers and academics and fans and reporters and even Aunt Cat and the doctors missed. Nowhere in all the literature, in all the minute details of her life that have been written down, is there a record of her shoes in the vivid detail I remember. I tried to tell a couple of the biographers that I got an up-close look at them, but they didn’t seem too interested and wrote in their books the same thing Aunt Cat said, that Inga Beart never came to see me.
But one can only really be certain of a few things in one’s life, and I’ll bet those biographers and university professors have used up their share of certainties on other things. I saw her once, I know that, and through the years as I lay awake at night I learned the memory of my mother’s feet by heart. I saw the way the bones in her ankle twitched like there were little birds caught under the skin. I knew the soft leather and the exact shade of red of those shoes and I saw the places where they were scuffed and mended. To me the homophone was never a coincidence: I saw that her sole was broken before anyone else did—it was the left one, split across the ball of her foot as if she’d been standing on tiptoe for a long, long time.