Amandine (8 page)

I say the words over and over again all the way back to our rooms, and Amandine giggles, thinks it’s a new song I sing to her. I put her down in the cradle, sit at the desk, and write the words as best as I can remember them, as best as I can spell them. When I go to the village, I will stop by the
bibliothèque communale,
riffle through the medical encyclopedias. How often have I done this? I always swear it will be the last time, since I manage to increase only my fear and not my understanding. Better to look in Jean-Baptiste’s eyes than to stare at the menacing script in the books. Better still, to look in Amandine’s eyes. Yes, into your eyes, my love. Happy birthday, sweet child. Happy first birthday, Amandine
.

I like it that most of the sisters spend their evening recreation time in what has come to be known as Philippe’s parlor. Even in summer, he keeps a fire. After vespers and supper, after the convent girls and the teaching sisters have returned to their dormitory, there seems almost a rush among the rest of us—like a family whose company has finally gone home—to get to the next part part of the evening. Some go to take a book, others their work bags, then settle down in the candlelit place. Philippe is already established in his black velvet, high-back chair when I carry in Amandine. Holding out her arms to him or flailing her hands as though fanning a flame, so anxious is she to go to him, she holds her breath until she’s in his arms. Paul, too, draws up to the fire. Not in the spirit of the gathering family come to soothe the hurts of the day, she comes to assure that our happiness be flawed. Less and less does she triumph as Philippe makes you laugh aloud and you flail your feet and arms when he hoists you, tummy down, a squirming lamb upon his shoulder. He dances you about. Cheek to cheek then, he nuzzles you—your soft to his rough—and you, loving that caress, push your face into his and stay quiet, eyes closed, as though you would fix him with your stillness. He pulls cherries from the pocket of his soutane, dips one into the tiny glass of Armagnac that waits for him on the table near his chair and, by its stem, holds the dripping cherry to your lips. You lick your lips where the cherry touches them, smart, lick your lips again. Philippe tells you your mouth is “just like a tiny cherry.” You flail your arms again as if to beg another drop of the lush amber stuff, and he repeats the gesture. The sisters giggle, goad you on to another lick of the cherry, ignoring Paul’s harrumphing, a foiled effort to check the game.

And when Philippe places you down upon the small blue rug beside his chair, then sits, opens his book, you are content to lie on your tummy and look up at him, the thin wings of your back arching through the white batiste of your nightdress. He reads, and you stay becalmed upon your tiny blue sea, hushed save some intermittent gurgle or chuckle or the sound of your sucking to soothe your aching gums upon the cool metal of the crucifix that falls from his belt.

I was right about you, Amandine. On that first day when I held you in my arms, I told Paul that you would hardly ever cry. You are almost never cross or contrary. It makes me fearful, though, this restraint. Even when you topple in the garden or when Baptiste pricks your forearm to draw blood each month, you hold your sobs within. Squeezing shut your eyes, the tears streaming, your mouth opened in a scream, you make no sound. Cry, Amandine, screech, I howl at you, let it out, let it go. I shake you up and down in my arms as though the rough movement will dislodge the choked sound, but it does not. It terrifies me, this voiceless cry. Your distress is not that of a child who waits for rescue but that of one who understands she is alone. You are not alone. Do you hear me, child? You are not alone. I’m here with you, I’ll always be here with you
.

In the hours when Solange and Amandine keep to their rooms, they are serene together, a young mother with her growing daughter. Solange sings to Amandine as she bathes her, fixes little suppers for her over their fire, supplement to the good custards and cereals and paps that the kitchen sisters prepare. She tempts the child with a paper-thin slice of pink ham set to sizzle in a small black iron pan with an egg. Sometimes with figs roasted soft and warm over the embers then dusted in dark sugar and bathed in cream, and often apples stewed in a copper salver with a nugget of white butter. She sets a tablet of thick milk chocolate near the hearth to soften, feeds it to Amandine with a tiny silver spoon. When Solange sits with Amandine in her arms to read to her, the child closes the book, places her hand near Solange’s mouth, signals that she prefers the stories Solange invents.

On her second birthday, Philippe gifts Amandine a miniature rosary made of seed pearls. The string of beads in her baby hands, she squats or tries to kneel with Solange of an evening, earnestly watching, imitating Solange’s fingering, and making her own repetitive devotional sounds.

Though she walks daintily and with perfect balance, Amandine prefers to mimic Philippe’s lurching gait and accompanies the motion
with sounds alarmingly like his breathlessness. So clever is she in this guise that Solange, when she first saw it, called for Baptiste.

Amandine calls the sisters by name, addresses Paul as Mater and Philippe as Père just as she has heard the others do and, though her stutter and lisp seem normal infant noises to the rest, Paul pronounces them marks of the devil. Philippe tells her, “The household has understood that the child’s presence is your burden, Paul. Now will you have the child herself understand it as well? Who, indeed, does the devil inhabit in this place?”

“A
MANDINE, DOUCEMENT, DOUCEMENT
.
HOLD MY HAND NOW, DON’T
run. You musn’t run. Amandine, stop now and look at me. You know you must not run. And I can’t pick you up right now, don’t you see all that I’m carrying in my other arm? Hold my hand, walk slowly. Père will wait for you. All right, now you may go alone.”

Philippe holds his arms out straight as the two-year-old—willful against the rules—runs to him at startling speed, shrieking his name. Bending to catch her, he holds her to him, stands and swings her about then in his awkward fashion. Dear Philippe. His great Gallic nose, rutilant badge of the good Languedocian abbé, his soutane fluttering, the long black muffler wound about his neck, even in summer, a tail of it flopping against the hunch of his back, how vehement he seems in his ceremonial meandering about the gardens, among the vines, head down, prowling in the sunstruck southern light as though bent on crucial enterprise. How late his muse came. Lisping, wan, adoring.

Through high parched grasses, the three walk down to the creek bank, to a soft, earthy rise under a walnut tree. Solange makes a pallet with a quilt for Amandine, takes out a pillow for Philippe. Dismissing the quilt, Amandine climbs into her place in Philippe’s arms. Solange opens three paper-wrapped parcels—thick slices of black bread laid with butter and applesauce. As he does each afternoon, Philippe falls asleep during his telling of a story to Amandine while she continues to quietly champ at the last of her bread. She closes her eyes then and forces out a sound like Philippe’s snore. The grasses sway like the swishing of a full brown skirt, and the two are prone beside them. Solange spreads the quilt over the sleeping pair and walks back to the convent. She will come to wake them before vespers.

By the time she is three, the sisters’ shared care of Amandine with Solange has taken on its own rites and rituals. There is a place arranged for the child in every part of the convent, so that, for instance, when she is in the care of the cooking sisters, she is propped on a cushioned stool near the worktable. Given her own dose of bread dough or pastry, she works along with the others, rolling, shaping, chattering. An old parlor chair placed in the washhouse is where she naps in the late mornings while Marie-Albert runs yellow-striped dish towels or heavy cotton petticoats through a wringer, flings them into a basket. The sounds comfort Amandine and, should Marie-Albert interrupt her work for a moment, the child sits up, urges her to get on with things, then settles back down. On Mondays and Tuesdays, when Marie-Albert washes the sheets from the narrow beds in the sisters’ cells and hangs them, taut and even, with wooden pins onto pulley lines strung in the shape of a quadrangle, Amandine likes to sit and sing inside the roofless, wet, white house with the flapping, bleach-smelling walls. Marie-Albert, conforming to the house rule which dictates that all underclothing be hung out of the sight of any possible passersby, pins the sisters’ off-white linen brassieres and pantalets to another line strung inside the house made of sheets. And since it so happens that many of the younger sisters seem to have their
menses at, more or less, the same time, each month there is a long line of pantalets swaying dreamily on the line. Amandine asks Marie-Albert why her own pantalets are not hung there and so, rather than wash and dry the child’s things in their rooms, Solange begins to bring Amandine’s clothes to the washhouse. When Paul first sees the sisters’ pantalets, along with her own and the longer, larger woolen ones of Philippe, waving beside Amandine’s tiny, ruffled ones, she reaches for her handkerchief, pats her upper lip.

Amandine delights in the outdoors. She wanders about, touching, smelling, inspecting, Solange or one of the other sisters close by but not too much so. She scrutinizes a swallow’s nest, windblown and landed in the herb beds, and often she gossips with the birds, standing under some branch where they perch, nodding, chirping. She answers them. They her. In the furrows beneath the vines, violets grow and, one by one, she gathers them—only the darkest blue ones will do. Lining up the gossamer stems in her trembling palm, she takes them to Solange to tie up with a blade of meadow grass. Wind it round and round, a one-loop bow, and there it is. Her nose yellowed from dipping it into wildflowers, leaves tangled in her sweaty curls, cheeks red from the labors of her forage, she is pleased.
Pour Mater
, she tells Solange.

On Saturday mornings Solange pushes the child in the upright pram down the steep chalk white road to the village, to the shops, to the park, to the library. Everywhere they go, they are greeted with affectionate curiosity. The orphan delivered to St.-Hilaire years ago in a limousine, her infant self preceded by a royal court’s worth of possessions, her tiny soul baptized by the bishop himself. Yes, this Amandine, such a bright, sanguine little girl, she along with this handsome young
Champenoise
who tends to her so lovingly, they cause a quiet stir among the villagers.

“Ah, Mademoiselle Solange, let us have a look at darling Amandine. A pistachio macaroon for your
goûter
? Here, yes, you may take it, it’s for you. Such wonderful eyes, this little girl. Yes, a meter of the
rose-colored wool will do nicely for a spring jacket with a little cape. White cotton stockings, three pair. A box of soaps shaped like stars from Marseille, a bottle of almond oil. Your first pair of boots, can you button them? That’s right, just like that. And you, Mademoiselle Solange, how well our sweet southern air agrees with you
. Au revoir. Au revoir.”