A Provençal Mystery (10 page)

Michel finally came by the table with the bottle of wine— and a little dish of steak leavings for Foxy. He opened the bottle, poured a taste for Jack, waited. Jack nodded, and Michel filled glasses, up to the brim, for the two of us.

Then the Jack I knew was back. Seeing that he had my attention, he went into a monologue—he sounded as if he were reading from an academic paper—about the Vaudois massacre of 1545: “After all, at least three thousand people were killed in three days, and close to a thousand more sent off to the galleys. Villages burned. The question I’m asking is: is it because they were heretics, or was there another motive? A political one that has been whitewashed? It’s my sense that it was just an over-zealous annihilation of so-called heretics, an inexcusable genocide. The Church was capable of great excess in the name of God. The Vaudois under Valdo were only seeking a return to real Christian virtues, like poverty, the ones the Church was conveniently forgetting.” Throughout his peroration his voice kept rising in outrage. And he had dropped his obsequious attitude.

“It’s good to see a graduate student so passionately involved in his work,” I said, knowing that historians choose topics that have personal meaning, even though they don’t say so, and then wondering if Jack’s passion would cause him to murder a representative of the Church. He had gulped down most of his glass while I had taken only a sip of mine. “Isn’t it almost impossible to separate politics from religion in the sixteenth century?”

“Of course, yes, almost
impossible
, but I think it is
possible
,” he replied, looking nervous.

I knew he didn’t want to explain how he was going to deal with the question, so again I took pity on him. “You seem to carry a real grudge against the Church,” I said.

“The Church. The Church. The Church,” he replied, flipping his right hand sideways in a half-drunken gesture as if to shoo the Church away like a fly. Under the table Foxy moved closer to me.

“It’s just an institution,” I said, looking into the depths of my wine.

“‘Just’ an institution? I would think not. It still has the power of life and death.”

I looked up. He sighed, his face screwed up in a frown that seemed close to tears.

“How do you mean?” I asked.

He stared across the table at me, then extinguished his cigarette, taking his time about it. I wondered what was going on in his head. He must have noticed my surprise at his vehemence and decided to retreat. “Oh, nothing. Never mind. Never mind,” he said I cursed my face that showed every emotion. His eyes were dull and bloodshot, his skin looked unnaturally dry. Then he must have changed his mind because he added, with no embellishment, “The Church killed my mother.”

Chapter 10

“What?” I had not expected this. “How could that be?”

“She became pregnant when she was forty-four. My father wanted her to abort the fetus—she had heart problems. The doctor told them that she very likely wouldn’t survive the birth. She said that she put her faith in God. That it was a sin to abort. She died. So did the child.” As he spoke, I imagined his stricken father standing at the side of the hospital bed where his wife’s wracked body lay. And I wondered where Jack been during his mother’s labor.

“How old were you?” I asked, not wanting to ask the more terrible questions that entered my mind.

“Twelve.”

“Oh.” And I added, “Did it happen here?”

“Yes, in France. Aix. Later I found out that she had people working on her.” His face had the look that people’s faces get after a tragedy—vacant, drawn, withdrawn.

“People? Working on her?” I asked.

“Catholics. Militants fighting against abortion. My father told me about it.”

“I’m sorry, Jack,” I said. And I wondered if Agatha had known Jack’s mother and if she had been one of the ones “working on” her. I thought about how long-simmering anger and sorrow could lead to murder.

“Professor Ryan?” Jack asked.

“Thinking about a dowry problem that’s come up in my research,” I said. We lapsed into an uneasy silence, and shortly after, I went home with Foxy and then to bed.

It was dead dark when the ringing of the phone startled me awake. I knew who it was.

“Have the authorities closed the archive?” Magnuson’s voice, ordinarily so lush with confidence, had an anxious edge. Didn’t he, as chair of my department, have more to do than call France in the middle of the night?

“What?” I asked, as I pushed the button on my Timex so the little light would go on “It’s three o’clock in the morning here.”

Did he know what time it was in France? Either he hadn’t bothered to check or he didn’t care. On the other hand, I knew that in California it was six p.m., and I imagined him holding his evening cocktail before dinner and thinking it was a good time to harass Dory Ryan.

“Because of the murder. Are the archives closed?” he asked.

“You know about the murder. How?” Foxy jumped down off the bed. “It was awful.”

“I have a close colleague at Rutgers who knows Martin Fitzroy. Fitzroy told him about it. Then he told me.” The academic world was, I thought, so very small. And the Old Boys’ Club within it even smaller. “You must ask yourself how this will affect your work,” he added.

The line hummed as I tried to edit my answer but failed, “I knew Sister Agatha. She was a friend. The last thing on my mind is how this will affect my work.”

“You mustn’t let sentimentality deter you from researching the paper,” he replied briskly. “No matter what your relationship with this woman who was killed.” He pronounced “relationship” with a tinge of salacious distaste.

“The killer has not been caught.”

“That is too bad.” I heard the question in his voice: what has this to do with our conversation? I imagined him frowning at my attitude—those two lines deepening across his forehead as he wound the phone cord between his long, nervous fingers.

“The killer is probably one of the readers at the archives,” I said. “I’m working every day with a killer. I find it very difficult to concentrate.”

“Don’t use your emotions as an excuse to stop working.” He sounded like the stereotypical harsh parent. I translated the remark: too bad women have entered this cerebral profession; they are irrational and emotional, so they muddy the clear, bright analysis that we live by. Agatha came into my mind, and it was as if I could imagine her saying, “Follow your heart. Forget that
mec
,” with an ironic glint in her eye.

Finally I said, “Emotions are part of history. And I intend to uncover them. To do that, I have to recognize my own emotions. Right now, that’s what I plan to do.”

I hung the phone back on the hook and waited. When it rang again, a deep imperious double ringing, I didn’t answer it. Then it was still.

Why was Magnuson so anxious that I finish the paper draft on schedule? I could only imagine that it was because he wanted time to rip it apart, That would provide evidence for the school to use in refusing me tenure. That way of thinking went against my grain to the point of pain.

Sleep eluded me. And my brain would not let go of speculation. How had I ended up here, in this place, at this time? I certainly had not seemed meant to be. My family is working class, though neither of my parents would identify themselves that way, but instead think of themselves as middle class and proud of it. My father works as a plumber—for himself, not with one of those plumbing companies that advertise themselves with two-page ads in the yellow pages. My mother is a teacher’s aide.

My father’s family prides itself on its past, and though my father himself never talks about it, my Aunt Lenore, his sister, did. According to her, the Ryans were gentry who had owned huge cattle ranches up through the 1920s and lost everything in the Depression. My mother’s family, on the other hand, were new arrivals to America, poor Scottish immigrants, who, my Aunt Lenore said, were so poor that they couldn’t afford “a pot to piss in, or a window to throw it out of.”

Though I didn’t think of it then in words like “social snobbery,” I hated the attitude of Aunt Lenore and some of the other Ryans toward my mother, who was the one who read to me and taught me the names of trees and spoke perfect English.

After high school, I floundered for eight years. The only solid things in my life were surfing and playing flute in a jazz band whose leader liked the idea of experimenting with non-traditional instruments. I had some talent—not enough to pursue a musical career any further—but I learned stage presence and how to wear flashy clothes and a lot of make-up. Otherwise I made a bare living working in a surf store near the beach.

Then my Aunt Lenore died and left me a small inheritance. I used it to go to college—I was beginning to realize that I could not live my whole life as a surfer and not-so-great musician.

In my freshman year, at age twenty-six, in a required course in American history, one of the assignments was to interview relatives and write a family history. When I talked to my father, I realized that, unlike Aunt Lenore, he didn’t like to think back about about his family’s past, and when he did, his stories were vague. This drove me to the Mormon library with its huge collection of genealogical records. In those records lay some facts about the Ryans no one had ever told me—the great-uncle who joined the Gold Rush, the supposed ranch owner who turned out to be a hired hand.

I was fascinated, and when I brought the facts to my father, he laughed and told me about the bigamist great-great uncle, the embezzler cousin, and the great-aunt incarcerated in the insane asylum (as it was called then) after being found wandering the streets of Montreal not knowing who she was. Before that, history to me was a set of lifeless names, phrases, and dates: Dred-Scott decision, 1929, John Adams, the Enlightenment. Now I realized it was also about stories, and I wanted to know more. That freshman class drove me to take more history classes. When the subject was Immigration, I thought of my mother’s mother arriving in America with an address on a slip of paper and almost no money. When it was World War II, my mother’s cousin who flew fighter planes and could have any girl he wanted (according to her).

In my senior year, I met Josh Weinstein, a math major. We debated—about Marxism (too doctrinaire for me, but not for him), about nuclear power (what I found scary he explained away with statistics), feminism (he thought it was nonsense; I didn’t). The year after we graduated, we married. After less than a year we divorced—a life based only on fierce intellectual arguments leads to a very depressing future.

I had become so interested in genealogy and the trouble it could cause that I decided to become a historian, applied to graduate school, and was accepted. While my professors thought my working-class background was terrific (they wished
they
were working class—it had such panache), they weren’t happy with my overt enthusiasm (all their emotions were understated, my makeup (I then penciled on my eyebrows), and my clothes. I knew that how I talked and dressed bugged them, but I was defiant at first. Within a year—I’m a fast learner—I’d figured out it was best to act at least somewhat like them around the university. I stopped wearing make-up, except for a little lipstick, and rustled up my large vocabulary and started using it in conversation.

Not even sure it was worth it, I persisted in my course work, stung by the memory of Josh’s disdainful remark: “You’re a lightweight, Dory. You’ll never take anything to the
nth
power. You’ll quit as an all-but-dissertation, an ABD.” I knew in my heart of hearts—and where was that, my heart of hearts?—that he was half right, that I would, if I wasn’t careful, float on a surface forever if I quit. Yet I was still considering quitting when I reluctantly went to France to do my research and found my home, the archives, a place of voices—stories—dried in old ink. I was hooked. I littered my dissertation with the stories, but was careful to include enough analysis and theory, even though it often slowed down the narrative, so that I looked smart.

Every morning in the two weeks following Agatha’s death, we readers underwent the scrutiny of the security guard. Schmidt came often and irregularly to ask questions, sometimes the same questions he had asked before. We all dealt with the uncertain pressure in our own way: Fitzroy tried to stay above it all by riding on his own eminence, striding into the room, camelhair coat over his arm; Madeleine, who came rarely, sat fearful and watchful as far away from the others as she could; Rachel worked in a desultory fashion on the few documents she had managed to get, while contending with Chateaublanc, who had dug himself into his bunker of obstructionism even more; I watched and fantasized dramatic endings from outside—bombings, floods of rain rising, lightning bolts. When Agatha’s short obituary appeared in the local newspaper, I read it, cut it out, and put it away as if by doing so I was keeping her, if not alive, at least remembered.

Strangely Griset and all of us regular readers, except for Madeleine, began to meet for lunch at the café every day, even though we were all too aware that among us might be a killer. Sometimes I wondered why. Perhaps it was because we wanted to keep an eye on each other.

Eleven days after the murder, I was late arriving at the café with Foxy, Jack close behind me. “Bonjour, Madame Red,” Griset said to me in greeting. He merely nodded at Jack, who tended to ask for too many documents at once, in too peremptory a voice.

“Where is Rachel?” Fitzroy asked, with a concern that seemed out of character.

“Probably home doing a translation,” I replied. “She’s not having a lot of luck getting documents.”

Michel came to take orders. Griset, Aubanas, and I ordered the special, which was veal, and a bottle of white wine to split among us; Fitzroy a steak with
fries
and mineral water; Jack a
croque monsieur
.

At first the conversation, in French for the sake of Griset, centered on Agatha’s death. We had gone over it many times, telling ourselves the story again and again. I thought we were doing this to convince ourselves that it had really happened or to dull its bright horror with repetition.

“I’ve always thought of the archive as a safe place,” I said, “but not any more.”

“No place is safe,” said Roger, “especially these days.”

I regarded him as he turned away from me to talk with the two other men. His expression under his cliff-like brow was amused, his talk easy. But as I sat there watching him—dressed this day in his “Keep on Truckin’” t-shirt—I thought that his apparent openness and ease could perhaps be a facade. When Jack asked him about his work, he responded laconically. It was boring, he said. Then he leaned back in his chair, made smoothing gestures with his hand as if all the world were a nervous animal to calm, then lit a cigarette, a Marlboro.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” I said.

“Only rarely,” he replied, looking at me through the smoke.

We chatted as we ate. Griset and I quickly forked the juicy bits up. Roger had a delicate touch with his knife and fork, which belied his bear-like appearance, and he was a watcher, who waited before venturing an opinion. I thought that he had a long history of France in his bones, in spite of his hip t-shirts—it gave him a confidence that I envied.

“What a good appetite you have,” Griset said to me. He sighed and lit an after-lunch Gauloise.

“It’s called greed. And it’s why I have this extra weight,” I replied, “though the extra pounds seem less in kilos.” I looked down into my lunch with regret—it was half gone already. Michel had deglazed the pan and sauced the veal with some unc-t-uous mixture of juices, olive oil, and wine.

“It suits you,” said Griset.

“You Americans worry too much about things like that,” said Roger.

“And French women don’t? I’ve seen diets in
Marie Claire,
” I replied.

“You might try jogging, Dory,” said Fitzroy in his mellifluous voice, which held a hint of Boston. “Take Foxy with you. Run along the Rhone.”

“What for?”

“
To lose the weight.” He stared at me blandly, reasonably. “But I agree with Griset—you are a fine figure of a woman.”