Ladivine (30 page)

Not because they involved Clarisse Rivière, her mother, but because they involved Freddy Moliger, whose mere hand repulsed her, his big, cagey, shiftless hand.

She’d given up the search for Clarisse Rivière’s present and, resetting her sights, she began looking for something for herself, so this trip to Bordeaux wouldn’t be for nothing.

It was then that she came onto the yellow gingham dress. She held the hanger up to her chin and clasped the dress to her chest.

Very nice, she read in Clarisse Rivière’s admiring eyes.

And indeed, were she invited to a wedding at this time of year, that was exactly the dress she would choose.

There was nothing she’d more likely wear than her yellow gingham dress, despite the abhorrence it caused her ever since Clarisse Rivière’s death.

Far from Langon, far from Berlin, in this land where her mother had never been, where nothing evoked her memory, she would certainly have found the courage to put on the yellow dress.

Who had done it for her? What woman, like her in every way, had worn that dress to the wedding?

Not the woman they’d seen at the market, who, even in that very dress, looked nothing like Ladivine. She must have got hold of it after the wedding, legally or otherwise.

Who, then, had boldly appeared in the yellow gingham dress from the Bordeaux Galeries Lafayette, bought by Ladivine out of anger and spite because Clarisse Rivière wouldn’t accept a gift offered with implacable bad blood, just as she silently refused to chase off the invisible but palpable presence of her lover, that Freddy Moliger she’d been seeing for several months, to whom she herself gave presents that were never spurned, whom she’d brought into her home, into her lonely, respectable house, where no blood had yet been spilled?

Ladivine could have worn that dress to a wedding, but even here, would she have found the courage?

And should she feel offended or grateful that someone had shown a daring that was perhaps beyond her, and that a stranger whose face people confused with her own had gone to that glamorous wedding to dazzle an admiring crowd with a yellow gingham dress that Ladivine had never put on, no more than Clarisse Rivière, to whom Ladivine had given not that dress but a beige cardigan later bought at Karstadt, after the anger and spite had subsided, but not the worry, nor the profound sense of disgrace?

Should she feel rescued or deceived? Should she feel humiliated or chosen?

Oh, she didn’t know, and perhaps never would.

She climbed the broad staircase to the rooms the Cagnac woman had shown them before lunch.

The soles of her new sandals were neither slippery nor stiff; she thought she’d never worn any so comfortable.

Her legs felt slenderer, sprightlier, and her feet seemed to spring off each tread as if the young bride had also given her a little of her vitality, her high hopes.

On the second floor, in two rooms separated by a sliding door, Marko and the children were asleep, each in a generous, white-sheeted bed.

What was there to do after such a meal but sleep? she thought, apprehensive.

She took off her sandals and gently lay down beside Marko.

She closed her eyes, knowing she wouldn’t sleep, and when Wellington’s voice resounded in the hallway she first thought she was dreaming, having drifted off without knowing it.

But then she heard it again, a young voice, slightly sneering, speaking, in his peculiar English, words that Ladivine couldn’t make out from the bedroom.

Another boy answered, and they both began to laugh.

Lying hushed and stiff, Ladivine concentrated so hard on that voice that her head spun.

“Wellington, Wellington,” she murmured, sweat suddenly pouring down her face.

A still-doubting joy, a still-hesitant hope, kept her pinned to the bed, perhaps waiting for some unambiguous sign, perhaps afraid that rushing into the hallway might shatter any chance that it really was Wellington.

At last she carefully got out of bed, opened the door, and there, at the top of the stairs, leaning on the banister, Wellington and another boy were chatting—one of the boys, she mechanically observed, who’d served them at lunch.

She saw Wellington in profile, speaking in his languid voice, head tilted back, ever ready to laugh at his own jokes.

He was resting his weight on one leg, and his very young man’s bony hips showed under the light fabric of his Bermuda shorts.

She silently closed the door and hurried to Marko, so excited that she stumbled on the polished wooden floor, suddenly unsure how to put one foot in front of the other.

“Wellington, Wellington,” she murmured, her breast swelling with overpowering rapture.

She shook Marko’s shoulder.

He opened his eyes, immediately breaking into a smile, and reached out for her.

“Marko, Wellington’s here, I just saw him. He’s alive! He’s out in the hallway…Oh, darling, what a relief…”

He frowned, perplexed, lost, and his arms fell back to the mattress.

“What Wellington? Who are you talking about?”

“You know! The boy you…who went over the railing…”

She broke off, realizing Marko was only asking in hopes of a moment to choke back his fear.

For, beyond confusion, it was a blend of terror and deep disillusionment she saw pouring from Marko’s eyes, his suddenly ashen face, his trembling lips.

Rather than sit up on the bed, he burrowed under the covers.

She felt as if her body were slowly deflating.

“What’s the matter, Marko? Aren’t you happy? Aren’t you relieved, at least?” she whispered slowly.

“I was so happy he was dead, you can’t imagine how happy! I don’t want to see him, I don’t want to hear about him!”

He was almost shouting. Tears of rage burst from his eyes.

Then the anger faded, and there was only bewilderment, disappointment, helplessness, very like the helplessness, thought Ladivine, that had gripped Marko’s face and made her afraid for him when they first landed here.

He turned his head to one side on the pillow. His cheeks were quivering like an old man’s.

“We’ve got to go back to the Plaza, I don’t want him alive here in front of me,” he whispered. “This damn vacation, it’s like it’s never going to end!”

To Ladivine, too, their stay seemed to be stretching out endlessly before them, like their very existence to come, but she was shocked to find Marko so anguished when she herself felt only joy at the thought of it.

When Ladivine once again stepped out onto the graveled terrace, her feet so cozily and perfectly adapted to the new sandals that she could feel them throbbing with an eagerness to walk, an SUV pulled to a stop just in front of her, the young bride at the wheel.

It was gigantic, with a belligerent snout and dazzling silver trim.

She lowered the window and shouted to Ladivine to climb in beside her.

In the backseat, Cagnac and the groom were talking like a couple of new friends, animated and effusive.

Ladivine hoisted herself onto the seat of buttery, enveloping leather.

“What do you think, lady? I’m leaning toward this one, myself,” said the young woman, with a wink.

“But it’s the most expensive one,” said the husband, feigning torment.

Cagnac chortled, merry and obsequious.

“Isn’t it comfortable!” murmured Ladivine, reclining her seat.

The young woman turned toward the forest.

But, rather than follow one of the many lanes vanishing into the massive trees, she gently veered away and began skirting the forest’s edge, as Ladivine had seen her do before.

Then a strange, aching regret wrung her heart.

To erase it, she turned halfway around and asked Cagnac:

“That boy who works for you, Wellington…Has he been here long?”

“Wellington, Wellington,” said Cagnac, searching his memory. “Oh yes, that young one. We have him out now and then, when we need him, two or three weeks at a time, and then he goes back. Fine boy,” he added dreamily.

“And when did he come this time?”

“Oh, I’m not sure…Maybe last night.”

Cagnac sat up straighter and, avoiding Ladivine’s eye, adopted the impatient, somewhat pinched air of one who finds this subject unsuitable in the fragile, momentous midst of a test drive, of a deal in the making.

He turned to the husband and threw out a few flattering words on the young woman’s skill at avoiding the branches that sometimes blocked their way, fallen from the trees of the forest.

The husband smiled contentedly.

“So,” the young woman asked Ladivine, “what do you think?”

“Of the car? Very nice, very comfortable,” said Ladivine eagerly, guessing that her new friend, or her old friend, perhaps her lifelong friend, had her heart set on it.

She didn’t say that the bright, beckoning voices of the forest were calling her, and that beneath them she also heard a throaty, muted summons that scorned those happy little cries, a summons Ladivine would not escape.

You can listen to that happiness, the summoner said, if it helps you, but you won’t get away.

What was Clarisse Rivière doing in the forest?

Clarisse Rivière had never commanded anyone to do anything—or had she?

After her last visit, when Clarisse Rivière introduced Freddy Moliger to her daughter, who immediately conceived the most unpleasant impression of that man, she could nonetheless only concede that Moliger seemed to hold no power over Clarisse Rivière, whereas Ladivine had thought it likely or even certain that he had her mother firmly under his thumb, unable to imagine any cause but coercion and contamination for the shocking new life Clarisse Rivière had chosen.

She had in fact almost exploded at her father on the phone, having called him two or three times solely to tell him what Clarisse Rivière was doing with her life, and express her concern, and hear, she hoped, Richard Rivière’s concern echoing back.

But instead, almost silent, uncomfortable, as if he thought it was no longer his place to know of such things, he simply said in a hesitant voice that Clarisse Rivière might finally have learned how to be happy, and those trite words threw Ladivine into the icy waters of barely repressed rage, which came back to her a few months later when he called to tell her of Clarisse Rivière’s death.

“You see, you see!” she cried. “If only you’d shown a little concern, too!”

“But, my little girl, what would that have changed?” he’d answered very quietly, distraught, tears in his voice.

Ladivine thought he was trying to dodge his responsibility, that this was hardly the real question.

No one, she thought, could in good faith deny that shared, unhidden concern might have a protective force, and that Clarisse Rivière might have lived her strange, thorny new life more carefully had she felt the shared concern of a daughter who loved her and an ex-husband who didn’t hate her and was worried about her.

Or would she have behaved more foolishly still?

Or would she have decided that at her age she had no reason to think her freedom in any way limited or complicated by the groundless anxieties of two people she loved who had, each in their own way, turned away from her?

In any case, when Ladivine met her mother’s lover, her mother twice asked a favor of Moliger, and to Ladivine’s almost outraged surprise he obeyed her at once.

“Go get us some beers, would you?” Clarisse Rivière asked in a firm, confident voice as she dropped onto the blue couch, not yet soaked with her gushing blood. And then, a few minutes later:

“Maybe a little something to nibble on with these beers?”

And Moliger hurried off for a bag of potato chips from the kitchen, docile, solicitous, but always with something both derisive and furious about him, as if he had to make up for his evident pleasure in obeying with a look that expressed just the opposite, concealing that pleasure from anyone who might find it laughable.

What was Clarisse Rivière doing deep in this foreign forest?

And why did it seem, oh yes why, wondered Ladivine, that Clarisse Rivière was calling to her in her true voice, her dark, solemn, trusting voice, that the naïve, sunny songs also winging their way from deep inside the forest were meant only to attract her to what would otherwise fill her with terror?

But nothing that involved Clarisse Rivière could ever frighten her, far from it.

She hadn’t heard her mother’s whimpers or screams as her blood drained away, as she weakened with each passing second, and any unspoken appeals Clarisse Rivière might have made after Ladivine’s father left she’d refused to hear, in self-defense and embarrassment.

And so, if Clarisse Rivière was now calling her in her true voice, her dark, solemn, trusting voice, she would come running with all the fervor of her uneasy conscience, her remorse-choked affection.

When Marko came down to dinner that evening, Ladivine’s first thought was that her husband had been handed a death sentence.

Neither Marko nor the children had left their rooms all afternoon, and Ladivine, feeling uncomfortable for the Cagnacs, had tried to keep their hosts company, though she saw she was disturbing them as they dealt with the SUV’s sale to the young couple, typing up papers, a purchase contract, flattering and fussing over them to make sure, Ladivine realized, that they didn’t get any ideas about backing out.

Doing her best to seem carefree, she drifted from room to room on the ground floor, where the Cagnacs had a large office decorated with automotive posters, and everywhere she went she furtively looked around, trying to see Wellington.

Should she come face-to-face with the boy, she told herself, she’d have to beg his forgiveness, however real or serious or otherwise the thing she and Marko had done to him.

Yes, she told herself, humbling herself before Wellington was no sacrifice at all, and no apology on her part could erase all the terrible things Marko had thought about the boy, and the appalling happiness he found in his certainty that he’d destroyed him.

Wouldn’t she simply be trying to show him her joy that he was alive?

Not that she could seriously hope to find Marko relieved, for the moment, to see Wellington on his feet and evidently unhurt.