From what I pieced together over the next few days from the comtesse’s papers and the information in the file, it seems that a number of specialists had agreed that a new psychotherapeutic technique that translates to something like “emotional shock therapy” was just the thing to rid Inga Beart of her most persistent demons. The plan was to jolt her back to health not by electric current, as was the fashion, but by the sight of her living, breathing—and, by that point, flushed and dizzy—child. And so the comtesse, who spared no expense, agreed to pay my passage, and Aunt Cat’s too, all the way to Paris.
I wonder if, as she half-carried me up those stairs to her sister’s apartment, Aunt Cat hoped that the comtesse and the specialists were right, that my unnaturally pink cheeks, along with a new sailor suit and the pacifying effect of the fever, would help make Inga Beart love me, or keep me. If Aunt Cat stood waiting for the blue door to open, hoping that she’d be boarding the ship back to the States alone, back to a husband and two small kids who were already plenty enough to handle.
Exactly what happened next will probably never be known. Even after I got Inga Beart’s estate manager to send me a copy of her death certificate by express mail and had the notes in my mother’s own medical file translated by a professional service the archivist referred me to, there are still gaps in the story that may never be filled. Now that Inga Beart, Aunt Cat, and the Comtesse Labat-Poussin are all dead, I’m the only one left who witnessed it, and I don’t remember a thing about that afternoon except for the blue door, the falling cup, my mother’s shoes, and—was it?—a drop of blood on her ankle.
I don’t know if my mother tried to shield her eyes or run into another room, or if the comtesse forced her hands down to her sides or blocked the door to keep her there, though I’m sure it’s not fair to credit cruelty like that to a woman who, it seems, had only Inga Beart’s best interests at heart. All it says in my mother’s file is that Inga Beart begged them not to make her look at the child. There was an argument between her and the comtesse—all of this according to “the sister,” who told the story to the receiving doctor. At one point Inga Beart apparently appealed to Aunt Cat, expressing what the doctor called “acute distress” and saying that “she did not want to see what was going to happen”—an indication, perhaps, that she recognized she was on the brink of a dangerous loss of self-control. Then, somehow, she was made to uncover her eyes and turn her face to me.
I assume that Aunt Cat pushed me under the table when Inga Beart went for the knife, probably thinking that she meant to use it on me. According to the medical file, it was a small kitchen knife with a curved blade, the kind used for peeling fruit. Maybe it had been left on the table that morning after my mother had her breakfast; maybe, when the doorbell rang, she was taking the skin off a peach. I know that sometime soon afterward the comtesse fainted, and it was Aunt Cat who clamped a dish towel over her sister’s face and, possibly with help from a neighbor, called for an ambulance to take them—and me—to the H?tel-Dieu hospital, where it didn’t take long for someone to notice that my coloring couldn’t be due to shock alone. I had a fever of 41.7 degrees Celsius, according to the records, 107 degrees Fahrenheit by my calculation and extremely serious for a child of five. They packed me in ice; no doubt they lectured Aunt Cat about dragging a child brimming with microbes all over the country, and, according to the records, they forbade her from entering my room. But, a nurse noted, she did anyway, and stayed to watch me turn from red to white to blue as the fever eased and they unpacked me from the ice, and then from blue to white to red as it flared back up again.
“Don’t you think it’s your fault now, Ricky, don’t you think like that,” Aunt Cat had said, standing at the fence with the jagged end of the chicken wire caught on her sleeve the day I came home from college mad as anything, having learned that my mother’s death had been precipitated by an act of self-destruction I’d never known a thing about. I remember her saying that, because later on as I turned the conversation over in my mind I reasoned to myself that Aunt Cat must have been talking about why my mother left me as a baby, all those years ago.
Aunt Cat also said another funny thing that day, that, I confess, I never thought too much about until I stood in the medical archives looking at my own name on a hospital form all in French. I’d said, “Didn’t you think I’d find out someday?”—meaning that sooner or later I was sure to learn the cause of my mother’s fatal infection of the sinuses. Aunt Cat, who must have misunderstood the question, said something like, “But you were delirious. You had a fever so bad they told me you wouldn’t remember a thing.” She put her hands on my shoulders and took a breath, but I pulled away from her.
“I’m not delirious,” I’d said, misunderstanding in my turn.
And then, perhaps realizing that I didn’t know as much as she’d assumed at first, that no fever-locked memory had burst its dam, Aunt Cat let that long breath go and said, “Well, you just don’t tell that sort of thing to a child.” She set her jaw and went back to the chicken wire, and that may have been the last and longest conversation we ever had about my mother.
Of course, what I learned at the medical archives set me to thinking about a lot of things, reinterpreting conversations of thirty and forty years ago, and with the final days of my stay in Paris spent rushing around trying to get documents translated and copies made, it’s only now, on the plane back home, that I’ve thought back to what my Uncle Walt said just before he died.
It might not have come to mind at all, except that I’ve got the window seat next to a nice young couple from the suburbs of Paris. They told me, in very good English, that this is their first overseas holiday together. They’re going to New York to see Rockefeller Center and Niagara Falls. I leaned back in my seat so they could get a better view of their hometown from the air as we circled Paris and banked to the left. Of all the people in the world this young couple might make me think of, the ones that come to mind are Cat and Walt, who were once that age, fingers intertwined without even thinking about it.
By now they’ve fallen asleep with the armrest uncomfortably between them. The girl’s head is on the young man’s shoulder, his cheek against her forehead, and it occurs to me that of course it must have been Aunt Cat and not my mother that Uncle Walt was talking to as he slipped away. In those last moments, when the nurse turned down the ping of the monitor and a veil on the hereafter lifted, Cat is the one Walt would have seen.
“Don’t you be mad at her,” he’d said to me, and I see now how he might have looked to where Aunt Cat was waiting for him just beyond this life and figured there would never be a better time to patch things up between us.
And to her he said, “You didn’t want to take him off to Paris.” It wasn’t abandonment my Uncle Walt was talking about, it was something more like love: Aunt Cat didn’t want to give me to my mother. For all the trouble I was to her, my Aunt Cat would just as soon have kept me. And before he left this earth it was the one thing Walt thought I ought to know.