A case of curiosities (11 page)

The Morel

SPRING IN TOURNAY coincided with Carnival, that raucous time between St. Blaise and Mardi Gras, a period of excess if not license, of feasts and masquerades, hunts and entertainments. Up became down, mice preyed on cats, poverty and wealth exchanged places in the folly of uncontrolled inversion.

Festivity forced work at the mansion house to stop. Even the accountant could not prohibit that. Claude, happily relieved of his responsibilities, crunched his way home through the spring snow. (Whenever he did so, he thought of squeezed cornstarch because of the S-roll homophony.) During the topsy-turvy time of Carnival, he envisioned himself in the role of mansion-house lord served by an ineffectual Abbe. Master became slave and slave master, at least in Claude's ambulatory thoughts.

He tried to ignore the pagan and Christian celebration. Though taunted by revelers at the massive outdoor cross one of the Go-lays had decorated with mountain flowers, Claude did not stop. He reached his cottage just before the sun lowered over the taller trees and the sky turned a blue unknown to the enameler's palette. Cold grabbed his joints and cramped his ghost finger as he unlatched the door. He found the cottage unexpectedly quiet. His sisters were huddled together in the box bed, entangled like dormant lovers. From the vinous smell, he could tell they had been drinking. He was upset to find that his mother was not at home. He had wanted to talk. With the snows melting and the spring growth emerging, he suspected that she was out in search of roots. Two facts confirmed his suspicion: the shelf on which the root basket and clippers normally rested was empty, and the moon was waxing. That meant roots would be tender. (By contrast, Madame Page conducted her aboveground harvests four days after a full moon, when leaves were less oily and dried more potently.) Claude could find out nothing from his sisters.

There were too many locations to check: the oak forest near the Tournay River, the field behind the Golay farm, the pasturage, the quarry where the local boys and girls, and the Abbe, dug for shark's teeth, snake stones, and other fossilized life.

Claude inquired at the Red Dog. A group of revelers performing a sword dance—one of the aforementioned pagan rites— blocked the tavern door. Three wine-ripened men beat Swiss drums and jingled bells on their feet like medieval fools. They slapped at each other with wooden swords, while another cluster of men performed a violent flailing dance. The swordsmen avoided the flailers, and the flailers avoided the swordsmen, and Claude avoided both.

He entered the tavern. At the sour portals, Gaston had posted an announcement that wine was being sold at the price of licorice water, and licorice water at the price of wine. Strasbourg goose livers and larded hare were offered for the cost of salted peas. The Red Dog quickly exhausted the supply of luxury items, leaving nothing but the overpriced peas and licorice water and the festival bread baked by Jean Rochat — the same Rochat, incidentally, who squeezed cornstarch and whose ear had been removed by the self-righteous surgeon.

Gaston had robed himself in bearskin in homage to St. Blaise. As master of ceremonies, he provided vulgar commentaries which he punctuated with malodorous declarations of dehibernation. He questioned Claude, as much as drunkenness would allow, about the goings-on at the mansion house, but the apprentice kept the Abbe's secrets secret. After listening to some tired jokes and bear farts, Claude learned that his mother had hiked to a clearing above the quarry. He left the Red Dog under a hail of talk about Madame Page and her witches' brews and the Abbe's illicit trade.

The moonlit sky made the torch Claude carried unnecessary. He came upon his mother on the south rim of the quarry. She was huddled over some unexpected cat's-paw, a plant she used in the treatment of mild stomach disorders. Mother and child embraced.

"How long will you stay?" she asked.

"Just this night and tomorrow. I must get back to the work on the enamels."

"And how is the work?" Madame Page returned to her rooting, gesturing for Claude to assist. He bent down and, with a motion learned long before, pulled and snapped the cat's-paw without damaging the delicate tendrils.

"The Abbe says I am very good at what I do." Claude gave over the foot-long root. "He says I have 'tamed the vehemence of fire.'

"Have you?"

Claude pondered, and then frowned. "I have not even tamed myself. I told you this before. I take no pleasure in the work."

"Does the work give pleasure to others?"

Claude ignored his mother's question. "They are not even so good as the attic sketches."

"What?"

"The enamels."

"Surely you exaggerate," his mother said.

That was the wrong response. It only intensified her son's vexatious mood. "Take a look," Claude said. He reached for a drawstring purse and loosened it. He pulled out an enamel case. His mother inspected it by the moonlight. A crudely painted monkey in a frock and wig stared stiffly at the viewer. "Do you see now?"

She did not. She saw only a discontented boy whose discontent she failed to understand. All she could do was let him talk, which he did for the rest of the night. Anger and impatience burst out as he described the general dissipation in the mansion house.

"Has the situation not improved?"

"It has not," Claude said.

The mother consoled her son with a smile, and when the smile was hidden by a cloud that had scudded over the quarry, she stroked his head. At dawn, as the valley turned misty and the moist air coated his cheeks, Claude was still talking. A wind unrelated to the Vengeful Widow whispered quietly, and a number of valley birds Claude had registered in his S-roll — larks and robins, mostly—emerged in search of food. Both Claude and his mother were tired. Even the nocturnal need sleep. Walking back to the cottage, Madame Page stopped in the oak grove to address the problems her son had raised. She hoped to give comfort to a tired and dejected child. Slapping her hand against the trunk of a mighty tree, she said, "This valley will always have its oaks, Claude. Plants that are proud and stationary, solid, rooted, never swaying much, never changing quickly, taking great comfort in isolation even though all around stand a hundred other oaks.

"Then there are the mushrooms, morels in particular, delicate little nothings that burst forth around the base of these mighty trees. I have filled my basket with them right here. Morels sprout up in the most unlikely places. They are prone to movement. One year a cluster here, the next year a cluster there. An oak can't be a morel, and a morel can't be an oak. Your father was a morel. What's the Abbe? He wishes movement and permanence. He cannot have both. No one can."

Claude's mother had rarely made so much sense. Her extended parable clarified a problem he needed to convey to himself and to the Abbe. Claude wanted to go directly to the mansion house, but his mother insisted he return, however briefly, to the cottage. She wanted him to have something. He waited outside, knowing that reunion with his sisters would provoke routine recriminations and jealousies he considered petty when judged against his current discontent. His mother emerged from the cottage to say, "Here. I think it's important you carry the spirit of the morel, the spirit of movement." She handed Claude the watch sent from Constantinople. "This was all that was returned. It was your father's. Now it is yours."

Claude looked at the broken watch. As a child, he had always imagined his father had carried it, brandished it, over the sands and mountains of many lands. Its heavy stillness now saddened him. He took hold of it as one might take hold of a fragile €gg. He wrapped it in a piece of calico and slipped it into the drawstring purse that contained the enamel monkey. He left the cottage and began to tramp back to the mansion house. As he walked, he considered his mother's reflections and their link to the man he loved so greatly and so grudgingly. He took a shortcut back over the quarry rim, past a gravel pit and limestone bluff. He found himself in an area rich with fossilized animal life. He stopped to chip off a spiral shell with his clasp knife.

The Abbe would inspect the fossil, he knew, and query viva voce: "Let us see, Claude. Is the shell wrinkled, whirled, or bellied? Check for flutings and grooves. Taste it. Is it salty or sweet? What can we conclude? Did the creature come from a lake, or the sea?" (The Abbe, in regular correspondence with the precocious geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner, was a committed Neptunist.) Then he would call for "the Tenth" and check the shell against the Systema Naturae. If it were a boring find, say a Helix ramondi, he would toss it on a shelf next to the piles of petrified oysters so often uncovered near Lausanne. He would end the lesson with advice linked to his favorite specimen: "Behold the spiraled shell of the nautilus — nature's tribute to enclosure, to protection, to helical perfection. Its method of protection is a mystery. We know only that it is a creatute that recoils in moments of terror and delight."

But Claude no longer looked forward to the anticipated exchange. He no longer cherished the Abbe's grandiloquence— elegant phrases skeined around a repertoire of skills. Profound dissatisfaction overshadowed any attraction the Abbe's pedagogic demeanor might once have had. Claude did not care for the fossil world, just as he did not care for enamels. Even research on sound failed to hold his interest. He stopped at the far edge of the bluff and looked down at the village. He saw the Calvary that marked the hopes for a miracle that would not come. Once again, he contemplated the inversive nature of Carnival and saw himself as Lord. His anger rose. He launched the fossil, followed by the enamel monkey.

He returned to the mansion house carrying nothing but sadness and a watch that had long since stopped ticking.

The following day, Claude was back at work on the Hours, putting the final touches on a harness, part of a commission fot a wealthy silk merchant from Lyon: "One case, in gold, Equestrian Frolic with Whip"

The design was uninspired. It made Claude inattentive, and that led him to overcook the colors. The thighs of the rider melted over the flanks of the horse, and the face of the silk merchant's mistress dissolved into hellish caricature. She became a gruesome satyr with breasts. Claude needed to escape. After walking disconsolately around the mansion house, scraping his clogs against the stones, he took out the watch his mothet had given him. He held it in his hand and stared. He prized it open and inspected the gears. He then prowled the alcoves in search of the Abbe, whose knowledge of the mechanical arts could be used to restore Claude's only heirloom. He found him at the entrance of the locked chapel.

"Can this be fixed?" Claude asked, displaying the watch. "Surely, your skills could manage such repair."

The Abbe was generally easy prey for such tactics, but this time the request was not well received. "It would require tools from beyond this door, and, as you know, entrance to the chapel is prohibited."

"Please."

With much reluctance the Abbe said, "Wait here." He disappeared down a corridor that led to the library and returned with a few basic tools. "Why not give it a try yourself?" he suggested. "A proper cleaning and adjustment of the spring are all that is needed. Just be careful." He pointed out the areas of potential difficulty.

Claude worked on the mechanism. His hands took the watch apart as if they had been made to do nothing else. Then, with a patience rarely in evidence at the mansion house, he put it back together. He derived tremendous pleasure from giving life to a thing that had been immobile so long, and when he showed the watch to the Abbe a few weeks later, he was rightfully proud. For the first time in months, he was excited by his handiwork.

The Abbe was surprised, and pleased as well. Pointing to the swing of the balance he said, "It is why the innards of a watch are called the movement."

Perhaps because of his mother's comments on movement of another kind, Claude granted the word enlarged importance. "I should like to work more on such movements if I could," he said.

The Abbe shook his head. "If you were to work on the mechanical aspects of the Hours, schedules would be disrupted. Such work will come later, I promise. The accountant at present is intolerant of any deviation from the commission plan. Besides, I cannot allow you to disturb the chapel. Not yet." They both instinctively looked to the bolted doors that marked off the boundary of Claude's privilege. "No, I am sorry," the Abbe sighed, "I really am, but you must content yourself with the cases."

Claude sensed a certain regtet in the Abbe's decision and took that regret as a silent appreciation of his disttess. He convinced himself that if he completed what was necessary at the pace expected, free time could be spent studying the principles of watchmaking.

This was not easy. Claude read, almost at tandom, a half-dozen books on horology, taking notes in a mannet that mimicked the Abbe's system of cross-reference, except that his little scraps tended to rise like flags of surrender. They indicated passages Claude could not understand, and of these thete were many hundred. His trouble was compounded because many of the most helpful works, to say nothing of the bettet tools, were locked away in the one room ftom which he was banned. It was clear he had to gain access to the chapel if his skills in mechanics were to advance. This meant he had to plan a new assault on the Abbe's weak-willed and generous nature. Claude became part tinker, part thinker—and the thinking was ditected at changing the Abbe's mind.

"Why does he prohibit entrance to the chapel?" Claude asked the household staff gathered around the kitchen table. They had assembled to shell a dauntingly high mountain of beans.

Kleinhoff said, "He tefuses everyone entry. Is that not all we need to know?"

"Not everyone," Catherine shot back.

"Who?" Claude asked.

"She is allowed in."

Claude queried, with feigned ignorance, "She?"

The scullion ladled out more gossip about the woman none of them had met, the woman the Abbe had once mentioned inadvertently by name. "Madame Dubois is why," Catherine said. "I saw them myself last month. They were at it."