The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (23 page)

“You needn't stay laced for us,” I said. “Relax and enjoy your poison.” But she was used to it now, she said. Liked her wormwood bitter.

“She's not
père inconnu,
” said Mathilde.

I had taken the certificate and folded it, not without a glance at the facts and dates. “Mathilde!” I said. My hands shook as I took Berthe from her arms. I'd always have a vinegar bath, after my working evenings, but tonight it would have to wait. Damn these gossiping midwives.

“Nothing suits her today. Usually she's such a quiet one, isn't she?” said Mathilde.

Odette handed me a glass and was staring at me with something like concern. A weak, murky fatigue shadowed me, and the nausea. So much so that I had even wondered if I was sick or (worse) pregnant again, and douched out with Jeannel's. On better days the fear ebbed back; on bad ones it seemed to represent something else, deeper, formless, shadowy, as though I was standing behind my own body, pushing it into the abyss.

“What's this about the father's name?” said Odette.

“It's right on the line, on the birth certificate—de—
what?
”

. . . Pursued by my relentless roiling guts, keeping the roof over our heads, cosseting the neighbors, and appeasing the Brigade boys who patrolled the block. Mathilde came in the evening to look after Berthe, until I returned at the Regulation-dictated eleven o'clock. It was true, the night before in a mood of defiant rage, I seized a sputtering pen, filled its unreliable gutta-percha reservoir with ink—really, I needed to go back to the dip pen and inkwell, or just a goose quill, which had been good enough in the Gers. I had inscribed my own name,
Eugénie Louise Rigault.
And wrote his name on the line for the father:
Stephan de Chaveignes.
Bold as you please, managing to stave off a blot, and thrust it toward Mathilde to file.

“Well, a toast to your daughter, a citizen of Paris,” said Odette smoothly. We clinked glasses. I didn't like to drink much before I nursed, but the bitter trickle of emerald offered a dose of respite. The little flat was a fortress of domesticity—mended furniture tied together with silk scarves, mismatched cutlery, and jars as wineglasses. Clio an orange coil on the divan.

I glanced down at the bloody package. “If I'd known you were coming, I'd have gotten something better.”

“We can order in from that little brasserie around the corner. What's it called? Chevet's. Mathilde, will you go and fetch it? And join us as well; you look like you could use something. Roast chicken and salad and a bit of cheese. And coconut meringue. We can't do without that. Here, give me a pen, I'll write it down.”

When Mathilde was out the door, Odette said, “What are you doing to yourself, child? Planning an early grave?”

I tipped back my glass. “I'm all right. It was nice of you to come.”

“Well, that night I saw how things were.”

“Yes.” I remembered our conversation.

“Eugénie, did you really—name the father? You wrote it on the birth certificate?”

“I did.”

“The Code Civil prohibits it; it's
recherche de la paternité.
”

“It's the truth. What can they do about it?” I muttered.

“Whatever they please, I suppose. But you should be more careful. Your situation is precarious enough.” Odette sighed and kicked off her shoes, resettled herself on the divan.

I changed the subject. “We were interrupted, weren't we? The other night when you'd started to tell me about how you met Jolie.”

“Yes, on the rue des Vertus—I first saw her at a little café, the only decent place down there. Holding court.”

“Yes, she took me to that place.”

“You know, I'd had my old man, who took care of me after my parents died. For six years—from when I'd just turned thirteen—life was perfect. Oh, he's not the beast that you think, that people think—he didn't touch me until I was sixteen, and I loved him by then . . . No one ever knew why that filly reared up and threw him. He was a cautious rider.” Odette took a tiny sip and continued.

“I was very young, and took up with a friend of his, much younger—handsome—a beautiful man, a wonderful lover. Four months of bliss, then catastrophe. He was the one who broke my heart. The father of Beatrice—if she'd lived.”

“Ah.”

“One day he just—disappeared. Didn't come when we were supposed to meet, never turned up again.”

“Just like that? But why—” Futile question, my own question. All the same, it was my constant companion and slipped into the room like a restless child.
Why, why, why?

Odette sighed. “Oh, they get in over their head. Think they can afford to keep a mistress like the rich ones do, or their fathers did. He'd known my old man, gone to the races with him—he was there on the day of the accident and I ran into his arms, a sobbing girl. He promised to take care of me, but he couldn't afford where I was living then and put me up in a rat hole on Vertus. I didn't care; I was grateful and fell in love with him immediately. Not like my old man—but in that mad, jealous way, always worried he would go off with someone else. He did care for me, I think—but he outpaced himself. He'd inherited some money and didn't prefer to spend his time making more of it . . . But then, when he left—I was hard up. I saw how the women were living, but I wasn't like them. I'd loved these men—I wasn't selling my body, wouldn't dream of it. But in the eyes of society it was the same. I was ruined goods. Of course.”

Odette tipped back her glass, rearranged her skirts. In my arms Berthe had quieted enough to let me listen, and I unlaced my stays to try her at my breast.

“So, what did you do?”

“You mean, after I visited La Cacheuse and sent Beatrice back to the angels? I looked up my lover's friends, met up with them if they'd speak to me. Most of them didn't. When I could, I went to the old places—Vachette, Café Anglais—but Paris was a fishbowl. I kept seeing people who'd known my old man or my lover, and Vertus was a terrible place, filthy, and I couldn't bear it, except for Jolie. She came and went, but she always circled back to see how I was doing. Her brother, Henri, was still around then, and he took care of some things for us even though he was barely more than a boy himself. He and his band kept us out of the hands of the worst of the brutes lurking around there—I'll always be grateful to him for that. Then one night on the rue de la Grande Truanderie—I was eating
tripes à la mode de Caen
with probably the last upright citizen in Paris who'd be seen with me. He'd known my old man and I suppose he thought I needed comforting. After dinner he introduced me to the captain of a sailing ship,
The Pharamond
—named after the first king of France, and his favorite dining spot when he was in town. I liked him well enough; he seemed kind and knew the ways of the world. We kept drinking Calvados and it was the best night I'd had in a while. He told stories and I saw that nothing could shake him; he made his own rules for how to live. He asked me to sail with him, and my old man's friend as much as told me to go, get out of Paris, and have an adventure. The first place we sailed to was Barbados, on a sugar run. That opened my eyes, I can tell you.

“But enough storytelling. I just stopped by to see how you were. And now I do see.” I shifted Berthe on my arm—she was already heavier, growing, moving in new ways. Tonight she was not sucking well, though. Her tiny lips fell off my breast as though she couldn't remember what it was, as she had done when she was first born.

“Listen, Eugénie—you're no good at this end of the game. You need someone to take care of you.” Odette shook her head. “You're naming
de-whatever,
but going out fast and cheap; doing this blind and dressed like a servant—it's a death sentence. You're either above or below yourself, I can't tell which.”

I had no answer to this, because she was right.

“And you must stop walking around as though you deserve to be whipped, like you've done something wrong.”

“If I hadn't, surely things would not have turned out this way!”

Odette tossed her head. “You didn't organize the world or the Préfecture of Paris. Why, I'm sure if it had been up to you, you'd have done things quite differently, and so would I.”

Mathilde came back up the stairs with the bag from Chevet's. On squares of brown paper we served roast chicken, steaming and delicious, with crackling, fragrant skin. Odette cut the wedge of Camembert and said, “Mathilde, how do we find Eugénie an
abéqueuse?
An honest one, I mean—not up to the usual tricks.”

Mathilde said she could find some names, but when she announced what it would cost, even Odette looked startled.

“So many of them nurse for the rich women,” said Mathilde. “Or the hospice.” She glanced at me. A brief silence fell.

Then I said that I couldn't imagine entrusting Berthe to a wet nurse . . . My milk was all I had; I needed to give her that much.

But the next day Berthe wailed inconsolably, making a wild sound that would challenge anyone's reason, and she hardly took any nourishment. Her little head was hot and seemed only to get hotter, even with cool cloths applied to it. When she at last cried herself to sleep, I slipped out to the baker's; but by that time no day-old bread was left. He took a few sous off today's loaf, but with a tired look that told me not to ask again soon.

***

So, it was a typical evening; neither a dull nor a busy night on the streets. Or perhaps not so typical. I'd been feverish and thin-skinned by noon; a bit of chicken liver turned my stomach; wine tasted bitter, water too thick. Mathilde was late. By the time I went out my breasts ached; Berthe had slept through another feeding time and now I was afraid she was sleeping too much. Mathilde had put her hand on my daughter's tiny furrowed brow and pursed her lips.

The man who stopped was large, not tall but solidly built, with a heavy beard. A suit neither good nor bad; he was self-contained, the kind who paid his way. Soon after I saw him I felt the pressure of his hand, his big fingers, with knobbed, swollen knuckles. Twitched my hands away; I didn't like to touch, to see too much.

Hôtel Picot, I told him. “La Ratière,” Jolie called the place; a
hôtel de passe
that let by the hour. The lobby was a pretense of respectable decoration, with a tatty carpet, skeleton chandeliers, chipped-paint filigrees; beyond it was a stair with a grim, sarcophagic smell; the odor of pickled, rotting things. The rooms were passably clean. No one asked questions.

An iron band pressed around my head, that familiar need to ward off—when he reached for me again, I pulled back as though my hand had entered a hive of bees. He stood, looming and uncertain, but I was no help to him. Through his trousers I sensed a quick swelling, heard the hard intake of breath.

I said, “Get me a
paff
if you don't mind. If you go down, the barman will get it.” When he left I met my own eyes in the glass, steadied myself against my own gaze. That much I'd learned to do.

 

His thumb hooked around two glasses and the neck of a bottle, and he knew his purpose well enough. I drank down the brandy, but it just churned in my guts. I lay down with my head turned and my skirt pulled up—this is why I did it on the cheap, so as not to be involved—my bodice buttoned to the neck. But this one grunted and jerked his thumb up to demand that I undo it—as he wanted the top of me as well as the bottom. When I hesitated, he moved quickly despite his bulk, swung me round and nimbly fingered my buttons, my front-lacing stays. I barely had time to gasp before he was on his knees, burying his face. My breasts were pendulous and aching with milk, their areolas a dark, mottled red, and wet with the thin fluid that escaped. A soft low growl rose from somewhere within him as he sucked them, then ground his face into the softness of my belly. I fought down bile, fury, wild despair.
Berthe, they belong to Berthe
.
 .
. Then I glanced down at the top of his head, his pale scalp where the hair parted.

I'd sensed the thing even before I saw it: a hard chancre, coin-shaped, swollen and angrily red on his scalp. I reached for my bag and pulled out a sheath, one of those tough, abhorred little membranes that the tobacconists stocked and the men hated.

“It's too late for that,” he said, breathing hard.

“I am a mother, monsieur—please.”

He felt my resistance, flared to it like a match to a gas jet. Without answering he pushed me back and turned me over, pulled up my hips; I pressed my fists against my eyes and braced myself to take the heat.

A sharp crack. What?

I am a mother
.
 .
.
What?

And then, I was
not there
—not on the bed, not anywhere. The mattress eddied out from under me, and I had a brief sense of vertigo, of falling.

 

Sometime later, I don't know how long, I was watching the scene as if from a corner of the room or the top of a long flight of stairs. Like the slow, round eye of the photographer's camera, I took in the tangle of sheets, a glass still standing, half-filled with amber, another tipped over. Crumpled dress in a pool on the floor; the corset's dangling strings; trousers in a heap. The last imprint on the air was our voices, shimmering, palpable . . .
It's too late for that .
.
 . No!
And then a liquid quiet, like a plunge below the water's surface.

The woman, then, face-down. Dark hair scattered on the pillow, a limp hand, fingers curled. Flailing over it, his shirttails, blue-white in the dimness. The consciousness that was myself, but not that body, saw it: detached, curious . . . When had it last been my own, that poor, numb knob of flesh? It moved a little, with the man's frantic jerks, a rag doll hunched under his bulk; or the ribs of a carcass hustled to and fro, the hunter's fist clamped to the back of its neck. A black shape, boot to the ribs—bloom of red blood against the white—