The Vexations

TODAY THE BOY IS ORDINARY. NOT YET EXTRAORDINARY IN ANY way, not someone you might one day care to read about. The accomplishment he is most proud of is winning a neighborhood farting competition back in Paris, and he was the favorite in an upcoming belching contest. He is missing it right now, he realizes, as he calculates the hours eaten by the train carrying his newly diminished family north. There have been so many sadnesses it seemed there was not room for more. But now they all squeeze together in Eric’s heart to admit another: this lost chance at glory. He confides in his sister about the contest, a plea for sympathy.

“Mother would be ashamed of you,” Louise hisses.

Eric is a boy magnificently without shame, but Louise’s statement at least makes him think. Their mother wouldn’t exactly be pleased, he decides, but she would not be ashamed. He would still be her little monkey, and he hears his name the way she said it, the R at the top of her mouth, the sounds of her language soft like raindrops on a muddy yard. He sticks his hand in his armpit, directs farting noises at his sister. Louise rolls her eyes, asks their father to tell him to stop. Conrad ignores them both, pulling his hat on and off his head with single-minded determination. He is nearly four years younger than Eric, his hair still toddler-fine and sparse, floating in a staticky corona around his face. Louise is the middle child, but her gestures are a disapproving old woman’s, all wagging fingers and pursed lips. Eric loves her anyway. When she bossed the neighborhood children, he would always persuade them to take her back, let her play again. The neighborhood parents liked Louise because she could always be trusted to tattle when something risky was afoot. Little Mother, the woman in the next apartment called her, and Eric cringes when he thinks of this, as if the word has been said aloud, as if their father could hear him hearing it.

Their father, Alfred, is a lightning-struck tree. It is November of 1872. In September, the family contained a fourth child, Eric’s infant sister, and now it doesn’t. In October, the family had a mother, and now it doesn’t. Alfred slumps in a corner of the train compartment, staring out the window at the black-and-white cows in the endless yellowing fields. “I grew up here,” he says, his palm against the glass, and the children glare. They were supposed to grow up in Paris. They feel kidnapped, not by fate or by their mother’s death, but by the only person present enough to blame. “Do you remember your grandmother?” their father asks them. He licks his fingers and tries to smooth down Conrad’s hair. Conrad twists away, removes his left shoe and puts it on his hand. Louise shakes her head.

Eric announces he’s hungry and Alfred sighs and takes a red apple from his satchel. Eric has already bitten into it when Conrad squeals in protest, and their father orders the children to share, opening up his pocketknife and holding out the handle. Eric doesn’t move. He’s never sliced an apple before, and if his father wants it done on a moving train, surely he can do it himself.

“That’s all right,” Louise says. “I’m not hungry.”

For once Eric wants her to go back to her bossing ways, to explain to their father that children shouldn’t be cutting fruit on their own laps.

“Take it,” Alfred says sharply, his fingers pinched around the flat of the blade. Eric does, gingerly, and Alfred settles back into his seat. “You mustn’t act this way at your grandmother’s house,” he says. “She won’t have it.”

Eric follows his father’s gaze as it returns to the window. Nothing but bare fields, bled of color in early November, stolid cows, stark stone houses and barns. The train curves and water appears below an indentation in the fields.

“The Seine,” his father says. “All the way out here.”

Louise slips the knife from Eric’s hand, folds the blade away, and tucks it in her skirt. Eric imagines wrenching the window open and flinging the apple into the river, flinging himself alongside it, and bobbing all the winding way home. He imagines a note in a corked bottle: Please help. Kidnapped to Normandy. Cows everywhere. He stands and moves close to the window.

His father puts a hand on his shoulder, leans into his ear. “It’s flowing westward,” he says gently, almost a whisper. “To Honfleur, then out to sea.”

“Oh,” Eric says. Has his father guessed his plan? Eric looks down at his tooth marks in the apple, whose white flesh is already browning, and gives the rest to Conrad, who takes the apple with both hands, presses his face to it, and gnaws. Eric thinks of his imaginary note moving helplessly into the great nothing of the Atlantic: Please help. Cows.

In Honfleur, his grandmother Agnès assigns Eric and Conrad a single lumpy horsehair mattress in the attic. The garret windows rattle in the sea wind, salty air eating at their wooden frames. Everything about this town feels wrong, blown raw and new each morning. There is no warm smell of sewage on the river, no coal dust collecting over the sills and doorstep. Even the milk is grotesquely fresh, with a grassy, fleshy sort of taste. The butter is of a color and sweetness like fruit. It makes Eric gag.

“Too fresh?” his grandmother says scathingly. “How about that. And the wind? You’re half Scottish, you know, so you should be all right with the cold.”

This quickly becomes the retort for everything. Eric can’t complain about the draft in his room because of his mother’s Scottish blood. He can’t complain about the scratchiness of the linens, or Conrad’s sharp, jabbing toenails, because Scots wear rough tartans. He can’t complain about the food, because Scots eat oats and sheep stomachs. Since Normans are supposedly of hardy Viking stock themselves, the children are effectively never allowed to complain about anything.

Eric cuts triangles of newspaper, rolls them into horns, and pins them to Conrad’s knit sleeping cap. “Conrad the Pillager,” he announces, but Conrad just cries. The boy asks, incessantly, for his mother, and the sound pierces them all, a knife in apples. “I’ll smother you,” Eric says. “I will.”

For the first few days Alfred seems to be pretending they’re on holiday. He gives them tours, pointing out where Champlain set sail for the New World, but also the home where Jane, their mother, was visiting when they met; the ship brokerage where Alfred was employed; the hotel where Jane’s parents stayed to meet him before the wedding; the Anglican church where Eric was baptized, whereupon the devoutly Catholic Agnès shrieked that neither she nor God would forgive Jane for this. Agnès never did, and while God’s opinion could not be known for certain, no doubt Agnès considered Jane’s death a kind of proof.

The church Agnès would have preferred was St. Catherine’s. As the largest wooden church in France, it is also on the tour. The old stone one burned many centuries ago, in the Hundred Years’ War, their father explains, praising the local shipbuilders who, rather than wait for the war to be over, for the Church to allocate funds and masons and craftsmen for a new one, built with what they knew. It was all ax work, he says, the beams and the thousands of wooden shingles covering the roof and walls. Towering straight oaks, trees of a sort that can no longer be found in Normandy, were used for the nave, the oldest part of the church. There is an obvious lesson here, says Alfred, about resourcefulness, about initiative. “They didn’t wait for someone else to help,” he insists. “They made the best of things.”

“Well,” Eric says dismissively, “a hundred years is a long time to wait.”

“They didn’t know it would be a hundred years. And the war wasn’t really like that. It kept stopping and starting.” Eric senses his father’s impatience, as if Alfred knows he is not getting through. “They might have thought the war would be over in days, and they’d have all the stonemasons they wanted. No one knows these things when they’re living inside them. Wars only have their names put to them later.”

Eric can make no sense of a war lasting a century, of how long that might be. He can make no sense of a war fought with England, a place the family vacationed once, at the seaside in Brighton. A voice whispers in his head that his mother will be dead for a century, and a century after that, and all the centuries after.

That Eric’s own name will last a century after his death, a century at least, does not enter his mind. He does not feel born to fame, nor entitled to it. Greatness sounds like a lot of work, frankly, and he is not given to study, or to practicing his piano. But however long Eric’s name lasts, it will be longer than his mother’s, longer than his sister’s or his grandmother’s or his father’s. Conrad will one day publish a chemistry manual, so that his name will molder, if not in people’s consciousnesses, then indefinitely in the catalogs of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. But none of this has happened yet. Lives, like wars, carry names assigned to them only once they’re over.

St. Catherine’s sits on a slope overlooking the harbor, separated from its bell tower by a stone courtyard. The height of the tower invites lightning, and the largest wooden church in France is also the most vulnerable to fire. The family climbs the steps of the tower up to the small belfry. The roof shingling is green with moss, and there is a moist, rotting smell. Alfred lifts the children so they can see through the wooden window slats: the harbor, the town, the city of Le Havre across the narrow channel, all divided into dim narrow slices. In an effort to share a joke, their father tells Eric that the townspeople here call Le Havre “the city on the other coast.” But to Eric the distance looks vast enough for the name to be entirely appropriate. On the way back to his grandmother’s house, he whispers words of his mother’s English: “House, house, house,” he says, and does not think to say “home.” He traces the letters on his leg, his finger moving through the fabric of his pocket, an anxious charm against forgetting.

Their uncle, Alfred’s younger brother, insists on being called Osprey, in English, by everybody: the children, his parents, friends and business associates, and the passersby who wave at him in the Old Basin. He owns a boat there that never leaves its mooring, although he pays a sailor to look after it, keep the sails mended, ropes coiled, railings freshly varnished. On weekends and evenings, after he leaves his stationer’s shop, Osprey sits on the boat smoking his pipe. Alfred and the children occasionally join him, and Osprey teaches Eric how to tie knots while Louise and Conrad pretend to fish over the side with sticks and string. Osprey has a wife and three children of his own, but his wife bitterly resents the expense of the boat and rarely brings her children to see their cousins. Agnès and Alfred grouse about Osprey’s finances over dinner, their disapproval couched as concern for his family. This is the only thing that seems to console Agnès about her influx of Parisian grandchildren; there are now new people to whom she can complain.

When Osprey comes to Sunday dinner, Alfred rattles off old grievances, how Osprey used to short-sheet their bed, how he planted dead mice under the coverlet. And there was the time he placed under the covers a baked potato so hot that Alfred burned the bottom of his foot and limped for a week. Eric supposes he should feel loyal to his father, but mostly he feels embarrassed at his father’s feebleness at pranks. Alfred complains about misplacing his pocketknife, eyeing Osprey as if he might be somehow responsible for that, too. The main course is a briny lamb, raised on salt marshes near the coast, a local specialty Agnès prizes and the children loathe, and before it’s even finished Osprey retreats to the garden to smoke. Agnès soldiers on with dessert, an apple tart drenched in eggy custard. Eric tries extracting the apple slices, but his father makes him eat the entire quivering yellow square.

When Agnès finally excuses Eric from the table he finds Osprey sitting on a wooden bench in the back garden, tapping his pipe out and rubbing ash into the gravel with his shoe. “You’re still here,” the boy says, surprised.

Osprey asks him if he gets along with his brother and sister.

“Mostly.”

“Well, good for you.”

Eric feels that he’s disappointed his uncle. Both stare at their shoes. Osprey’s feet, Eric notices, are exceptionally large.

“Have you found the mermaid?” Osprey finally asks.

Eric shakes his head.

“Come for a walk.”

They leave by the back gate and circle around the block, passing the front of his grandmother’s house and turning left up a pedestrian stairway, one of many shortcuts that mount the steep slope rising from the harbor. The sides of the staircase are the ivy-covered walls of private gardens.

Halfway up Osprey pauses, looks around as if to mark his bearings, then pulls at the ivy, searching for something. “Here it is,” he finally says, and holds the vines aside.

Inlaid in the brickwork is a large brass plaque without words, just the relief of a mermaid, her tail curled into a J and her hair streaming down around it. She is topless, with rounded breasts and tiny nubs of nipples. The plaque is a weathered, greenish color, except for the golden breasts.

“Boys used to rub her for luck,” Osprey says. “They would pass her every day on the way to school, and there were little spells people would say, for extra luck, or to conjure the mermaid in real life.”

Eric isn’t sure if he’s allowed to rub the breasts. Is his uncle inviting him to carry on the game, or to mock the gullibility of the village boys?

“Go ahead,” Osprey says. “Make a wish.”

Eric thinks at the mermaid, harder and harder, until his brain feels the way his eyes do when he pushes on the lids. He strokes the mermaid’s hair, dabs the tip of his finger to the two fins at the end of her tail.

“Now you know the secret of the mermaid,” Osprey says. “You must be a good steward.”

That night Eric worries over what it means to be the steward of the secret of the mermaid. Should he share it with Conrad, or Louise? There are those bright scandalous breasts. There’s the risk that Louise might tell Agnès, and that Agnès will find some way to ruin it for everybody. Eric decides that he can wish hard enough for everyone. He’ll keep the secret to himself. Is that all right? he thinks into the air, imagining the darkness of a sea at night, the moonlight catching on the silver streaks of fish, a pale woman with a finned tail. He presses his hands to his eyes until she flickers into movement. Of course, she says. That’s fine.

The next morning their father is gone. “On the first train,” Agnès tells them at the breakfast table. “He’s…traveling.”

Eric sets aside a part of himself to be especially angry that his grandmother has rehearsed no better explanation than this. He does not really expect adults to be truthful with him, but surely they could take their lies more seriously.

“It’s impossible,” Agnès says. “A man trying to mother three children. That’s why I told him to bring you here.”

That afternoon she walks Eric to the shops in the town center. From a crisp envelope she unfolds a list of everything the school will require him to have: one mirror, two combs, a brush, a shoehorn, a prayer book, a glass and set of silverware, bed linens, twelve handkerchiefs, eight shirts, twelve cloth napkins, twelve small towels, six pairs of summer stockings and six winter. Three pairs of plain leather shoes. At the shoemaker Agnès orders three different sizes, the largest so big Eric needs two pairs of stockings and crumpled paper in the toe to keep his feet in them.

“So they won’t get outgrown before they get outworn,” she says.

For the shirts and towels and sheets, she buys yards of fabric. She does not buy the finest of anything, nor does she buy the cheapest. This, Eric thinks, is as much love as she has shown him.

“You can take flatware from the house,” she says. “And a glass.”

“Take it where?” Eric says.

She ignores him, but at the cabinetmaker she reads off precise dimensions for a box, absolutely no more than a quarter meter high. “I don’t know why,” his grandmother says, “but those are the instructions.”

“So they fit under the beds,” the cabinetmaker says. “Dormitory size. I’m sure we’ve got one ready-made. Do you want it delivered to the house or the school?”