THE PHONY MOTHER by Abigail DeWitt
I am old enough that people congratulate me on the simple fact of being alive, although until I was this old I always thought, please God not me. Please let me die before I’ve lost my senses and no one wants to listen to me anymore. But so near death, I don’t know. I always loved heights, could hardly keep myself from jumping just for the thrill of it, but now it’s as if I stand on the far edge of the world, hesitating. There are still things I’d like to say.
No doubt I’ve already said them.
* * *
I was seventeen in 1939 when Mathilde Antonna and her son, Jacques, came to us, and I believed her claim, circulated throughout the village, that she was a widow. Even a divorced woman wouldn’t invent a dead husband. I knew that, because my own mother was divorced and bore her shame bravely.
But the women in the village whispered among themselves that Mathilde Antonna was a girlmother. That much was obvious, they said; the only question was why she had come to us: Why not go to the seaside? It’s a hard life in the mountains, with snow half the year and so little room to grow anything.
The women took their gossip with them, trailing it from store to store, and I trailed along behind. Mathilde, they insisted, was too pretty. She couldn’t be much past – what? Thirty? And the boy was surely eighteen.
The expression itself – girlmother – made no sense to me. I didn’t know it was possible to conceive a child outside of marriage. Despite all I’d seen of cows and dogs and cats and goats, I didn’t realize humans went about things in the same way. I heard girlmother and pictured a child playing house. But I knew that wasn’t right; it was clear the village women meant something monstrous and, because Mathilde’s sin was connected to her beauty, I felt vindicated for my ugliness. Of course I wasn’t truly ugly – the young are beautiful, no matter what – but I was poor, tall as a boy, and bony.
Mathilde and Jacques arrived in the fall, when the leaves here turn so fast a fire seems to rage throughout the valley, though the wind is damp and raw. I remember that I heard about them on a Sunday. On Sundays, I went to the boulangerie and the butcher’s so that my mother would be spared the embarrassment of coming from a different direction than everyone else. The embarrassment of not making her way down the steps of the church with the rest of the village and crossing the square with two or three other women to the stores on the other side. I didn’t go to church either, but I hadn’t been excommunicated. I avoided church out of loyalty to my mother and also because, though I believed in God, the idea of a father orchestrating his son’s crucifixion struck me as the stuff of nightmares.
A Sunday, then, and I was doing the shopping. From the store side of the square, you can see Mont Blanc, rising up behind the church. It has nothing to do with my story, but how to speak of my village without naming the mountains all around? Mont Blanc, the Aiguilles, the Grandes Jorasses, Mont Maudit, Mont Blanc du Talcul. The sky was the deep, rich, icy blue you only see in the Alps, and the racks and bins at the boulangerie were still full of bread, the smell of yeast so tantalizing it seemed almost visible, as if it hung suspended in the clear noon light.
Nearly blind and hunched almost in half, the Widow Charles announced to the store at large that Mathilde’s gait said it all, and the others murmured in agreement, a gentle, fascist chorus. Nicole Lagrange, hair perfectly braided and coiled on her head and exuding an air of nobility because her husband was the mayor, leaned towards the Widow Charles, shaping the air with her slender fingers. She seemed to cup the words – girl mother – in her hands, as if she meant to fling them outside onto the cobblestones.
Ever since my mother had found a decorated hairpin in the pocket of my father’s coat and demanded that he leave, she and I had been the lowest of the low; in those days, a wife was supposed to tolerate a bit of infidelity. I was eight when my mother sent my father away and I didn’t know why she was angry. I thought it might be because my father forgot to empty his pockets in the evening – my mother was a meticulous woman – but in the years since, waiting in line for my mother’s and my groceries, I’d overheard enough to piece together the truth – my father was living with a woman in Annecy; my mother, the village women said, had done nothing to make herself appealing – so I was only mildly curious about Mathilde and Jacques. What fascinated me was this new connection between salvation and homeliness. I gazed down happily at my big, chapped hands, my worn boots, and stopped trying to make sense of what a girlmother was or how a person could be a round bread, which was the only meaning I knew for bastard.
But the very next day Jacques appeared on the train to school, and however beautiful his mother might be, he reminded me of a giraffe, with his long neck and thin, freckled, knobby forehead.
We only took the train to school if the weather was too bad for bikes or skis – if it was sleeting, or the wind was especially strong, or the fog too heavy. All of us from the surrounding villages would take over a single coach, though once we reached Chamonix, of course, the boys went one way and the girls went another. While the others laughed and told stories, I read fitfully, distracted by the rain and the wind, and the sensation I love so much of being suspended above the gorges. Because of the bad weather, I couldn’t see how precipitously the earth fell away, first on one side, then another, as the train wound along its tracks, but I felt it. I imagined the railcars tumbling out into nothingness and the thought of so much space thrilled me.
The older students – the ones in my grade – sat on one side of the railcar and the little ones sat on the other, but I took a bench by myself, near the door. Jacques stood not far from me, holding onto a strap and swaying with the train’s movement. I could tell he wasn’t used to the mountains, the way he lost his balance every time the train went around a curve – he wasn’t used to the winding, or the sheets of rain, or the black cliffs appearing suddenly in the windows and I wondered if he was glancing at me as I glanced at him. I blushed, embarrassed, and suddenly I understood that we belonged together, with our lonely mothers and our clumsy bodies. Ugliness wasn’t, after all, a virtue. I could see my own big, raw knees swimming in my peripheral vision, and his boots and the bottoms of his trousers. The fabric was too thin; those trousers wouldn’t do him any good once winter came, and his boots, though adequate, looked as if they’d never been worn before. I gazed up the length of his leg, forgetting my embarrassment; I tended to swing between imagining that everyone was talking about me and imagining that I didn’t exist, and in my non-existent moments, I’d developed a bad habit of staring. Since I stayed away from my peers and wore thick glasses, people rarely noticed, but Jacques stood maybe a meter from where I sat.
When I reached his crotch – which, after all, was right at eye level; I could have been staring past him out the window – the blood seemed to drain out of me. If I had failed to understand that humans procreate the way animals do, it’s because it had never occurred to me that our genitals were so like theirs. I’d never given any thought to the workings of a boy’s body, but now, with Jacques so close, I pictured all those bulls and dogs and cats and goats I’d seen, and I understood that being hairless and walking on two feet changed nothing.
It’s hard to believe I’d been so obtuse until that moment, but when I consider my life, it’s all one long story of obtuseness. In any case, gazing straight at Jacques’ crotch clarified a great deal for me, what a girlmother was, a bastard, even the full extent of my father’s offense. And though at first I felt sick, as if the ground had opened up beneath me, I was also thrilled: the ground had opened up beneath me.
My mother never spoke of the way she was treated, but she never spoke much at all. When she confronted my father with the hairpin, she set it on the kitchen table instead of the bowl of soup he was expecting, and returned to the stove to ladle out my dinner. More discussion would have struck her as ridiculous as the hairpin itself. She was so averse to waste of any kind – of words, time, money – that even the slenderness of her bones seemed a measure of her thrift.
I could have told anyone how sad she was. I felt her grief so acutely that she might have been murmuring to me all day long, even when I was at school. When Nicole Lagrange and the other women looked away from me or her, or made it clear that they were talking about us – even if my mother was safely at home, bent over the fine-stitch sewing that earned our keep – I felt the tightness in my mother’s ribs, her echoing loneliness, and I wanted to fly away.
She expected me to do well in school and become a schoolteacher, and, while I studied, she took in sewing and did the housework. The other children in the village milked and herded cows, cleaned stalls, cut hay, split wood, and shoveled snow, but I sat and read while my mother scrubbed our floors and windows, washed our laundry, fed our fire, made our supper; while she sewed baptismal and communion and wedding gowns that were famous in six villages for the precision of their stitching, their fine and elaborate pleats and smocking and tucks and gathers. Her stitches, our house, her soul – everything she tended to was flawless.
Except for me. I overspilled my bounds, wanting the world. I didn’t want to be a girlmother, but I wanted Jacques for my own. Once I understood the possibilities, I couldn’t think of anything else. It could have been anyone, but Jacques was the only option I could see – what did I care that he was a bastard?
That evening, while my mother said her prayers – despite everything, she still believed in Jesus and Mary and all the rest – I tried to picture Jacques without his clothes, and, as Jesus was the only notion I had of a naked man, that’s how I saw him, wounds and all, a cloth across his lap, his arms wide open.
The first time I saw Mathilde, I was near enough to touch her, and I almost did. It was another Sunday, and I had stepped into the boulangerie for a baguette. Before the fog of my glasses evaporated, I was startled by the silence – no one was talking at all, as if some awful thing had just happened – and then my glasses cleared, and I saw her, saw the little space around her the others had left while they carried out their wordless transactions. The boulanger knew what each woman wanted, so it wasn’t as if the usual banter had ever been necessary, but Mathilde didn’t understand the we spoke amongst ourselves, so their silence was just as unnecessary. She was last in line, and I took my place behind her, my heart beating so fast I imagined she could feel its vibration against her back. By now I had seen Jacques several times, and though we had never looked at each other directly, I was more and more sure of our bond. Here was his mother – and by extension, I felt, mine, as if we were already in‑laws. Her face was turned a little, studying the prepared dishes, so that I could see her profile, but it wasn’t her white-blonde hair or her green eyes that struck me first, the way they had everyone else; it was her posture as she waited, so obviously an object of disapproval. Her back was straight, her slender neck bowed, a tendril of hair hung loose from her bun. She stood like a girl who had been well brought up: polite, dutiful, her neck tilted, the posture of a novitiate. I stared at the faint down on the curve of her neck, her modest white collar, and the gold cross at her throat – she had clearly been to Mass with the others – and I knew she was innocent of all the accusations made against her. She was no more capable of sin than my own mother.
I wanted to go up to each woman in line and tell her how wrong she’d been: Nicole Lagrange, the Widow Charles, fat old Madame Battendier, and jolly Madame Désailloux with her two jolly married daughters. I would have liked to grab them by the hair and slap them for all the times they’d whispered about my mother, stared at her, glanced at the two of us with their false smiles. I may have been a quiet girl, but I had a good imagination. I saw myself knocking their heads together, pair by pair, and then I just wanted to take Mathilde’s hand and run away with her. I’d take her down to the stream I liked to go to when the weather was nice and we’d sit on the flat rock beneath the poplars, the water parting around us. I’d brush her hair.
She kept gazing at the prepared dishes – the greasy rillêttes and the smooth pâté, the speckled quiche and the golden flan – like a girl at the altar; then, suddenly, she was speaking, placing her order, her voice breaking into the silence not like the soprano flute I expected from such delicate features, but like a cello, deep and almost painful. One baguette and two pieces of flan, please.
After she had paid, when she turned to leave, I smiled at her – I who never smiled at anyone. She smiled back, her teeth as small and even as a child’s, and hesitated for a moment, as if we should speak, but of course we didn’t. Still, there was that pause, that sudden, startled smile, and after that I smiled whenever I saw her and she always smiled back, a smile so open and warm, it was as if we knew each other’s secrets. I thought she knew how lonely I’d been and that I didn’t judge her, and I believed she loved me.
Winter came, and there was talk of the boys going to the front, but none of them had yet, and the war still seemed far away. Or maybe it’s only now, knowing what came later, that the early days of the war seem so harmless. What I remember is how the world felt new to me, the snow itself like a thing I’d never witnessed: the flakes melting on my tongue, and the deepening drifts, the ache of the wind – an ache inseparable from my own desire, but whether that desire was for Mathilde or Jacques, I hardly knew, could hardly tell them apart, the one so small and good, the other so gangly and rude. I wanted Jacques to touch me and I wanted Mathilde to ask after me.
On Sundays, when they walked past our châlet to Mass, he towered over her, his head bent towards hers as if he were confiding in her, but it was just bad posture. He barely spoke to his mother any more than he spoke to anyone else.
The only real similarity between them was how pale they were and I came to see their complexion – his especially, with all its freckles – as a sign of vulnerability, the flush of his cheeks evidence of his perpetual mortification. He must know what people said about him and his mother, how they discounted the existence of his father. What could he do but look away?
Mathilde wouldn’t know. Surely she wouldn’t be able to imagine what everyone else was imagining, and that was why she was so much lovelier than Jacques. She was no more capable of gossip than she was of sin.
But Jacques! The more he wanted to express – even of love, of kindness – the more withdrawn he grew. This was how I explained the fact that he had not once glanced in my direction. Of course, he looked at no one, but I was sure he avoided me most of all.
I prayed for bad weather so that we could ride the train, so that I could watch him as he leaned skillfully now into the curves, could see his Adam’s apple jump as the space below us came into view – as I myself swallowed, imagining the rush of air. No one else on the train even seemed to notice the drop.
I pictured going to church with him and Mathilde, sitting beside him and feeling the fabric of his trousers against my knee. I would have gone – I would have feigned belief in anything to sit beside them – but I didn’t want to hurt my mother.
I can’t explain what it was like to be young in those days, how heady it all was, with the war spreading across Europe, and desire all tangled up with death. I was thrilled that cold April morning in 1940, when our boys went off to fight. The sky was crystal blue, fog rose from the valley, and Mont Blanc floated like God Himself in the distance. Across from the snow-covered massif, the Aiguilles glistened blackly.
Jacques slumped against the station wall in an overcoat whose sleeves were too short, staring at the ground. I stood a little ways from him, behind a post, daring myself to go up to him, to throw my arms around his neck and kiss his cheeks. Everyone was crying and kissing – who would even notice my display? I imagined Jacques blushing, stammering maybe. He’d have to look at me. My father, whose eyes I inherited, sometimes said how pretty mine were when he still lived with us. Jacques would gaze into them and put his arms around me. I touched my mouth: He’d press his red, chapped lips against mine.
Mathilde wept, like all the mothers, but she wasn’t clinging to her son the way they were, and she seemed more out of place than she’d ever seemed at the boulangerie or in the square. She’d come down to the station without a coat – all she wore with her dress was a sweater and boots – and her arms hung helplessly at her sides. She looked even younger than the village women claimed, and it seemed she barely knew Jacques. It seemed as if she wept for no reason.
My heart was racing. They don’t know what to do with themselves, I thought, how to be a family. If I went up to Jacques, if I touched him, Mathilde would smile through her tears, so grateful for my presence in their lives. I held onto the post, giddy and shivering. We would only have a few minutes together before the train came, but it would be enough, a promise. Afterwards, Mathilde and I would leave the station together, arm in arm. We would send him letters in the same envelope, and his letters to us would arrive in a single packet, too.
Just as I stepped forward to go to Jacques, Mathilde put her hand on his wrist. Like any mother. As if every evening she kissed him goodnight, brushed his hair out of his eyes, rubbed his feet. She stroked his skin, a gesture so familiar, so effortless, that I could hardly breathe.
Their lives were with each other, and when he did fall in love, it would be with a girl as beautiful as Mathilde. My eyes stung, and I pulled my coat closed against the cold air, a coat that fit me the way Jacques’ fit him. I would have left the station, run out past the edge of the village and up into the high mountains, where the snow was still waist-high – but I couldn’t tear my eyes from them.
Jacques looked down at Mathilde and when she caught his gaze, she mouthed, Please, chèri. Don’t go.
I wanted to knock her hand away.
There was no need: Jacques shrugged her off so brusquely that she stumbled into the dirt beside the platform. I gasped, as mortified as if I’d pushed her off myself, and when her face reddened, my own skin burned. I wanted to run to Mathilde and apologize – for Jacques, for myself, for everyone who had ever been unkind to her – and then, disgusted with myself, I remembered all the ways I’d betrayed my own mother.
I thought of her back at our châlet, unwelcome even now, when the village was sending off its boys. I should have stayed with her. I would have, if I hadn’t been so infatuated with Jacques and Mathilde. If I hadn’t spent all my time wishing I could have Jacques and look like Mathilde. Wishing, as often as not, that Mathilde were my mother. When I was small, I’d sit beside my mother in the evenings and make sure her spools of thread were neatly ordered in her sewing basket, lining them up so that they matched the color wheel at school. I used to race through my homework so that I could practice my stitches with her, trying to copy not just the fine motions of her hands, but the shallow rhythm of her breathing.
I would still be that girl, I thought, if it weren’t for Mathilde, and with the great moral flexibility of the young, I shifted all my blame to her. Mathilde barely had time to catch herself and step back up onto the platform, as if she’d been no more than accidentally jostled, when I was cataloguing her faults: she was a girlmother, I decided, not because I doubted her purity, but because she had failed to assume the mantle of authority that all real mothers have. I stared at her, standing in the midst of the sober, graying fathers and the fat, hysterical mothers, the proud sons, and thought, The Widow Charles was almost right. The trouble was her posture, not her gait: that slender, bowed neck, as pink as a girl’s in the cold. She wasn’t a true grown‑up, and that was why her son behaved so terribly.
Well, then, I thought (forgetting my mother and her spools of thread as quickly as I’d thought of them) if Mathilde was just a girl, there was no reason we couldn’t actually be friends. And Jacques? Maybe he did love me. Who could say? A boy who shoved his mother was not a boy who would reveal the tenderness of his heart, but when he came home from the war, when he tore my well-stitched clothing from my body, I’d tame him. I’d teach him to be kind.
Until then, Mathilde could be like an older sister to me, the kind who, though gentler and more innocent than her younger sibling, can still be a guide.
The train pulled into the station – the same small, red train we took to school, already full of soldiers – and I noticed then that all the fog had burned off the valley. The boys would be able to look out the windows and see the chasms below: the rocky cliffs and the stunted, snow-bowed trees, the white, raging river at the bottom.
For the first few days after the boys left, the village was quiet. The mothers and fathers went solemnly about their business, and the very old grew vague, wandering the streets as if they had nowhere to go. But the young girls, dreaming of soldiers – we all walked a little taller, as if the world belonged to us.
On the fourth or fifth evening, as my mother and I sat in front of the fire, I spoke to her: “Maman,” I said, though we rarely called each other by name, since we were mostly alone and didn’t waste words.
She didn’t look up from her sewing. Her hair in the firelight was beautiful – still brown and glossy as horse chestnuts, though she was past fifty – and if she’d not pulled it back so tightly, if she’d smiled more easily, she might have been pretty.
“Maman,” I repeated. “I’d like to go to church.”
She didn’t pause in her sewing, the needle diving in and out, in and out, her thimble glinting. When she was done, she tied a knot, snipped the thread, and put the garment down; then she rose and went into her room. I thought she’d gone to bed. When she disapproved of me, she let me know by her deepening silence, but after a few minutes she came back, carrying the veil I’d worn to Mass the year before her divorce. She held it up, inspecting it with her small fingers, and then she pulled a white spool from her basket and mended its frayed edge. It was so contrary to the way she’d acted my whole life – to what I thought of as her pride and stubbornness – that I realize now I didn’t know her at all.
But I wasn’t thinking about her then. I was just thinking about Sunday.
Mathilde was already in church when I arrived. I slipped into the pew behind hers and, during the whole hour of kneeling and standing and sitting and kneeling, during all those cries of Domine non sum dignus, I copied her motions, imagining that we were the same person, with the same fine hair and slender arms. I slammed my fist against my heart in time with her. If anyone stared at me, surprised by my return to the fold, I didn’t notice.
After Mass, I fell into step beside Mathilde and crossed the square with her. I waited in line with her at the boulangerie and, as soon as we’d made our purchases and were alone, I asked if she’d heard from Jacques. She gave a small, pained smile and shook her head. It didn’t occur to me that she was afraid for his life. I thought she was dismayed because he was such a terrible son, and I wanted to console her, to let her know that, through me, she would always have him. It’s just a mercy that I lacked the words.
Every Sunday of that sad, quick war, she smiled at me, asked after my mother, and when she saw something that amused her – little Georgette Mathias trying to skip, a small dog yapping at a big one – she touched my forearm the way she’d touched Jacques’. Look, Marie Claire, she said, chuckling. I tried to laugh the way she did, quietly, from the bottom of my throat.
In May, the heavy snows came back, the way they often do at the beginning of spring. Mathilde and I paused for a moment outside the boulangerie and she shouted over the wind: “It’s like being inside the mind of an insane person. All this whiteness, and not a point of rest.”
Her complaint was so literary that I hoped she’d been like me – first-in‑class, friendless, even homely – and as I wrapped my scarf around my head, I wondered where she was from, what sunny place that made a spell of bad weather so alarming. It seemed indiscreet to ask, and anyway, June brought days of blinding sunshine, and Mathilde forgot her horror of the snow. Just before we left the square one Sunday and went our separate ways, she stopped and nodded towards Mont Blanc. “I love it here,” she said. “This cold, fresh air. And soon – July? August? When is it when all the wildflowers come out? I love that burst of color beneath the snowy peaks. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
“You’re what’s beautiful!” I burst out, and she laughed, touching my arm.
“Oh, Marie Claire. You have no idea. All you have to do is stand up straighter.” I turned bright red, and she continued: “And when you feel bashful, smile.”
I looked away, still blushing, but the following Sunday, she sat down on the edge of the fountain and motioned for me to sit beside her. “You mustn’t worry about your looks,” she said. “A girl only needs a few tricks. Shall I teach you?” She went on without waiting for an answer: “At night, before you go to bed, rub salad oil onto your skin and scalp to make them soft. And here – ” she took a lock of my hair and twisted it into a tight rope. “See how the damaged ends stand out? Twist your hair this way when you’re at home and singe the flyaway ends with a match. Then brush your hair a hundred times. It will fall across your back like silk.” She laughed then, and squeezed my hand, and I laughed too, as if we’d shared a great joke.
It’s thanks to her that five years later, when Pierre Mason would come home from a POW camp, he’d propose to me. Pierre wouldn’t care how well made my clothes were or that I’d excelled at school, but he’d love to watch me brush my hair.
Jacques was the first of our boys to die. I can’t remember how I learned the news; it seemed that all of a sudden and all at once, the village knew, as if a flash had lit up the darkness and we had seen for an instant the whole geography of grief that lay around us – not only the boys from our village who would die, but our defeat, the long years of humiliation and fear, the revelations when the war was over. Everything garishly lit up, and then gone: we couldn’t be sure anymore what we’d seen.
I stood in the corner of my bedroom, thinking, Jacques is dead. He was alive and now he’s not, as if I were trying to solve an equation. I don’t know why I was standing there, just that I kept going over and over the same basic facts, getting nowhere. I was shocked, of course, and I cried, but I wasn’t heartbroken, and though I was ashamed not to be grieving, I was mostly baffled. He was alive, and now he’s not.
I should have rushed over to Mathilde’s châlet, brought her something to eat, sat with her while she grieved – I should have done what any ordinary friend would do – but I didn’t. The longer I didn’t, the more impossible it seemed. It embarrassed me to think of her being inconsolable.
No one else went to her, either. Suddenly, I thought of myself as just another villager, and what did we really know about her? I told myself that if the Queen Anne’s lace were blooming, I’d bring her some, but the Queen Anne’s lace was still a month away. By the end of the week, Mathilde had left us.
No one knew where she’d gone, though Gerard Antoine saw her on the road to Vaudagne and offered her a lift. She had her suitcase, but he didn’t ask where she was headed or for how long. When we went to the châlet she’d been renting from la Mère Lagrange – I tagged along behind Nicole Lagrange and a few other women – we saw that she had closed the shutters and put everything away in chests so that the mice wouldn’t eat them. The blankets and sheets and pillows and soap, a box of sugar and coffee and a few jars of jam (which we would come back to, of course, before the war was over) were all packed away and the mattresses tilted on their sides. She had weeded her garden, but even the tidy rows of turnips and radishes and carrots and potatoes, the heads of lettuce she’d left behind, did not suggest occupancy.
I thought of her, righting herself after Jacques shrugged her off, and I knew that wherever she went, she would tidy up the evidence of every injury that was ever done to her. She would hold no one accountable. I felt as if I would be sick, but Nicole glared at me: I had no reason to look so gloomy, she said. Mathilde had just been passing through.
Jean-Luc Coiffier died a few days later, and then Claude Mason and one of the Manets from Vaudagne. We lost the war in six weeks, and Churchill called our loss the Phony War. La Drôle de Guerre, we said ourselves, ashamed: A funny kind of war.
But if boys die by the thousands, isn’t that war enough?
Afterwards, all we were left with was a metallic taste in our mouths, like dirt. We didn’t starve the way they did in the cities, but we had lost our appetite.
And yet the leaves filled out on the trees, deepened, and the forest rustled all summer long with its watery shade, its shifting light; the meadows filled with blueberries, and at dusk, while the valley exhaled the warm scent of hay and lupine, the snow on the mountains turned pink.
By September of 1940, murmurings of resistance were loud enough that even my mother heard them. The newspapers warned of Alpine terrorism and, though we’d always used the news for toilet paper, there was a special pleasure in it now. We would redeem France ourselves. The boys who had survived the Phony War – Pierre Mason, Bernard Coiffier, Henri Forestier – along with a couple of the older men, intended to use every advantage of altitude and crevasse and blinding fog against the Germans and Italians. They might know their own mountains, but they didn’t know Le Tour du Midi, or La Vallée Blanche.
Of course I was proud of the boys, but it wasn’t until I was older and discovered how the British and the Americans saw us – worse than we had seen ourselves – that I became so fierce in my pride. At the time, what I mostly felt was an electrified awareness of the world – fear isn’t the right word – and a dull ache of longing for my friendship with Mathilde.
Still, the way I’d wanted Jacques, the way I’d tagged after Mathilde, came to seem like the stuff of childhood. They were such simple infatuations – to see the pair of them walk by my window, with their heads nearly touching, had excited me in a plain, straightforward way. When our boys burned down a chalet with three policemen inside it, what I felt was a darker thrill.
Of course, I was still a coward. The kind our allies thought we all were. I kept my head down, followed orders, spoke politely to the police. I wouldn’t let on that I’d only attended church on Mathilde’s behalf, so I kept going. I wanted to tell my mother the truth, that it was a sham, but an admission like that would only have hurt her. She had given her life to me and in my desperation to be like Mathilde, I had spurned her. I tried to make it up to her around the house, fixing her a tisane in the evening before she thought to ask, correcting her stitches without telling her, awakening before her to feed the fire so the house would be warm when she awoke, and she was grateful, but it was the gratitude you would show a stranger. I was part of the church now, and the church had cast her out.
In the spring of ’43, around the same time that Pierre Mason and the others were taken prisoner for the châlet fire, my mother began sewing a communion dress for Georgette Mathias. When it came time to do the smocking, she pricked herself – a thing she’d never done before – and then she put down her sewing, went to bed, and never got up again. Within a month, she had died.
I barely remember the days that followed. Old timers – those of my classmates who are still alive – say that I went running into the road, crying; that when Nicole Lagrange wondered aloud if my mother had made her peace with God before she died, I told her to go to the devil; that I refused all offers of food. I’m sure it’s true, but I can’t remember. What I do remember is my scalp stinging because I couldn’t stop pulling my hair. To this day, if my comb snags, tears spring to my eyes and I remember my mother, her small, delicate hands brushing my hair when I was little, showing me how to do French braids for church, in the days when we still went together.
I left Les Houches as Mathilde had. I had never been farther than Chamonix and now I went to Paris. I have no idea what I was thinking. The Allies were bombing the trains, and no one traveled who didn’t have to. Later, I told people I went to Paris to prepare for l’Aggrégation so that I could be a schoolteacher – and that’s what I did – but I can’t remember what drove me there in the first place. For awhile after my mother died, the world lost all its vividness for me. Of course, I was in Paris – I’ve never understood the beauty of a city – but, still, it was war time, with its undertow of fear and the sound of German in the streets. You’d think that would have kept my senses alive, but it didn’t.
I took a small room in a pension near Sèvres, and though there was a flush toilet at the end of the hall – a luxury I’d never known – I was colder than I’d ever been at home, where it was always possible to build a fire.
Only one memory from my year in Paris stands out clearly: Mathilde. I’d kept an eye out for her, hoping that she might have moved to Paris after Jacques’ death. It was unlikely I’d run into her in such a big place, but I looked for her anyway. I wanted to run to her and tell her that my mother had died. I thought that would make us equals! I imagined her taking me under her wing again, but I no longer wanted her to teach me to be beautiful. Now I imagined us both pale and plain, dressed in old clothes, as if, if Mathilde and I could walk together, arm in arm, past a group of German soldiers in our poor Alpine boots, my mother would be vindicated. Everything in me was confused, the way it is in dreams, scraps of one part of life adhering nonsensically to another, as if my mother’s willful poverty had been an act of patriotic resistance.
Mathilde wasn’t in any of the places I looked for her – she wasn’t resting in the Luxembourg or the Tuileries or the Bois de Boulogne, where I often went to escape the press of the city. She wasn’t hurrying down a side street, or waiting in a long line for some poor cut of meat. She was, predictably perhaps, in a dance hall which I, just as predictably, wandered into by accident, looking for a toilet.
I should have waited until I got back to my pension or squatted in the shadow of a building. It was almost curfew and hardly worth getting in trouble for a toilet. But I went in, squinting into the darkness, the smell of alcohol. A few glittering, ropy-looking women were holding their dance partners against their breasts. If they let go, it seemed, the men would simply fall. There were no Germans, just the slow, sad couples, the sticky floor, the smoke, and, at the front, on a dais, Mathilde, singing in her deep, lovely voice. I opened my mouth – Mathilde! – but I couldn’t make a sound.
She held a microphone with one hand and stroked her breasts with the other, not the way a singer runs her hands along the side of her body, offering herself to her audience – none of the customers were looking at Mathilde, anyway – but as if she were soaping herself, lathering her body through the red fabric of her poorly made dress.
She was more beautiful than ever, with her hair cut into a bob, and her lips painted red, and she looked ten years younger than she had in our village, dressed in those high-necked dresses with the little white collars, and her hair in a chignon. The other people in the bar may have been dissolute, but she was radiant, singing her song about the consolations of a kiss: Le chagrin est vite appaisi, et se console d’un baiser.
I wasn’t shocked that she was dressed like a prostitute or touching herself in such an odd way – it cost me nothing, after all, to give up my fantasy of her innocence – I was shocked that she was still so beautiful, so much in life. I might not have grieved Jacques’ death, but a mother who had lost her son should be a kind of phantom, I thought, biding her time until her death. Mathilde swayed to her own voice and a smile played around her lips, as if she knew that when she was done a man would come and claim her. I imagined that her smile would open as warmly as it once had when she saw me, and for a moment, thinking of those distant Sundays, I wanted to run up onto the dais and pull her out onto the street, take her to my pension and beg her forgiveness. I should have been with her when she received her telegram.
Le chagrin est vite appaisi, she repeated, her hand on her heart: sorrow is quickly soothed. I slipped back out into the evening, as sickened as I’d been after the Phony War. What could she mean by that refrain? I wondered, as if she’d written the lyrics herself. She was no kind of mother at all.
But I wanted to talk to her, tell her everything that had happened since she’d left. Maybe, I thought, if I told her how sorry I was that Jacques had died, she’d remember her grief and be a mother again. And even if she didn’t, we could still visit for awhile. She could tell me how she styled her hair. I stood on the pavement, equivocating in the mild, spring air, and it wasn’t until I heard the sound of German at the end of the street that I remembered the time and jumped on my bike. I owed it to my mother, after all, to avoid women like Mathilde.
There’s always a reason – a thousand reasons, if you want them, and afterwards, a thousand regrets.
By the time Paris was liberated, I’d come down with tuberculosis and had been sent back to the mountains, to a sanitarium. That was where I met Pierre again, when I had nearly recovered and he was still bone-thin, his head shaven and his lungs racked. Once he was well enough to leave, we were married in the town hall in our village. Five months later, when I gave birth to our first child, I thought I understood Mathilde at last: It wasn’t radiance I’d seen in her, but an explosion of grief. Mathilde had gone back to the person she was before Jacques, as if Jacques had never been. If he never was, she hadn’t lost anything: in the gloom, she was a teenager again, the world around her whole and smooth and featureless.
Now, I don’t know. We never know how other people suffer, what accommodations they make, what sacrifices.
Perhaps my mother, far from being heartbroken when the villagers turned away from us, felt the dross of her life falling away, imagined herself getting lighter and lighter until, at some longed-for point in the future, she would be as light and invisible as God. Maybe Mathilde just liked singing, liked touching her own breasts.
I know only that motherhood, like war, is all failed plans and improvising. Every generation builds its own Maginot Line and hopes for the best; the worst, until it comes, is unimaginable.
I imagine myself now, slipping off the far edge of the world, all my mistakes coming loose from me and swirling up around my body like dust, a funnel of my own sins. Inside that funnel there’s still the girl I was, before I’d turned away from anyone.
Abigail DeWitt is the author of the novels Dogs (Lorimer Press, 2010) and Lili (W. W. Norton, 2002). Her stories have appeared in Drafthorse, The Carolina Quarterly, and Salamander.