A Provençal Mystery (3 page)

Sure that Agatha knew more about the diary than she was admitting, I couldn’t wait to discuss it further with her. But first I had to go home to my apartment and liberate Foxy.

Chapter 3

As always, I felt as if I was entering an older world as I  turned the corner off the Rue des Lices (yes, lice) into a narrow, cobble-stoned, medieval street, the Rue des Teinturiers, or Street of the Dyers, where I had rented an apartment for the few months I expected to be in Avignon. Here, cars—and, unfortunately, there were cars—seemed alien. It felt natural to be on foot, and it didn't take much for me to imagine myself back into another earlier time. On one side of the street was a moat-like canal, where cloth had once been dyed to make calico. At its far end, a huge wooden mill wheel revolved slowly, propelled by a sluggish stream of murky water from the Sorgue River. In the nineteenth century it had turned the machinery in a textile factory. But the street had existed long before that.

I turned into an ancient stone apartment building and trudged up creaking stairs to my third-floor apartment, a studio with a tiny kitchen. Foxy started barking before I reached the top of the stairs. When I opened the door, he jumped up to greet me, a habit I had never been able to break him of, probably because I always opened my arms to him. Foxy was a middle-sized, rust-colored mixed-breed with enormous upstanding ears, a luxuriant tail, and pale yellow eyes inherited from a Weimaraner ancestor. He and I had been together for eleven years. I had brought him to France with me because I couldn't bear to leave him behind.

“Hello, hello, hello, my boy,” I said, patting his head and trying to shove him down to the ground before he gashed my arm with his claws in his enthusiasm. He ran to the door and looked back at me expectantly. “Wait. We'll go in just a minute.”

After putting down my briefcase, I flopped into the second-hand wing chair by the door to rest for a minute and look around the apartment to see if I needed to do anything before we went out. I loved the place, though it had its disadvantages. The landlord had furnished it partly with what appeared to be antiques and then added cheap furniture from the local Auchan, one of those giant stores that the French call
hypermarchés.
Though there was a bidet—it stood out in the open, next to the kitchen—the bathroom proper was on the fourth floor. An inconvenience. But the apartment had a fireplace, the sound of church bells to measure out the hours, and a view of the medieval street. It looked neat enough, neater than usual. Only a few papers scattered around. A plastic bone belonging to Foxy. Some bread crumbs from my morning baguette on the tiny kitchen counter.

Foxy put a paw on my knee. I rose and walked over to the counter to pick up a couple of neatly folded used plastic bags that Agatha had given me to use to clean up after Foxy. That was a signal to Foxy, who began to dance around. “Are you ready to go out? Just you and me?” I asked, just to see him dance even more enthusiastically. “Okay, okay,” I finally said, put him on his leash, and led him out of the apartment. His nails clicked busily on the stair steps to the street floor, and as we emerged into the open air, he wagged his tail with pleasure.

The mistral was still blowing, though it had abated somewhat. The branches of the sycamores edging the canal swayed in the wind, their surfaces flickering with light. Foxy stopped to sniff at the doggy messages left on their trunks, then pulled me along to an arched opening in the high stone ramparts. The ramparts surrounded most of the city, reminder of Avignon’s medieval past as a shelter and a fortification closed to the world. Now with just a few openings to the outside, they merely created a traffic bottleneck and a tourist attraction. On the other side of the arch, along a grassy strip, the glittering Rhone ran wide, bending around the womb-shaped city.

The main drag, the Rue de la Republique, took Foxy and me to the Place d’Horloge, not far from the Papal Palace. A mean, cold little breeze blew across its broad expanse. The antique carousel that kids loved to ride stood motionless for the winter. In the City Hall clock tower, a tiny figurine hammered a bell at 12:30 to sound the half hour. I looked up at the tower only briefly; I had seen its toy-like mechanisms in operation often enough that they no longer intrigued me. The Place de l’Horloge itself
did
interest me. It had a long history: once a Roman forum and open-air meat market, it had been a place of execution during the French Revolution—a guillotine had chopped off heads here during the Terror. Blood had run here, animal and human. I imagined the blood flowing in the gutter, dark-red rivers lapping against the worn stone wall with thick, soupy, sad sounds.

Enough. Sighing, I sat down on a bench to read the fax Griset had put into my reluctant hands. Sighing, too, Foxy lay down beside me.

Dr. Ryan,

We have not yet received any further word from you about your paper and hope that all is well with you. Please contact us immediately. It is necessary that you keep us up to date on your progress. May I remind you that an outline of the article must be completed and in my hands and the hands of the editors of Journal of Religious History by February 15? May I also remind you that it must have the unanimous approval of the tenure committee for us to go ahead with your second-year review?

Your last letter was disappointing. The lack of detail made it impossible for us to assess your progress. As you know, the tenure committee has been ambivalent about your project from the beginning. Professor Cushing suggests that you need to include statistics from monasteries as well as nunneries in order to provide a balanced view. While I agree with you that doing original research on monasteries would make it impossible for you to meet the deadline at this point, I think you might find it profitable to include information from secondary sources to aid in such a comparison.

We must know what you are doing so that we can send you the appropriate suggestions.

Sincerely,

Albert Magnuson, Chair

As always, I read between the lines. The letter said: we took you on as faculty only because we were pushed to hire a woman by some feminist donors to the university, you don’t fit into our old boys’ club, we won't allow you many chances to make the grade. And we hope this fax makes you so nervous that it hampers your work and you fail; then we can refuse you tenure.

What could I do? I didn’t really know Magnuson, would never know him. It was as if he were from a different species; there was nothing in him I could latch on to. I couldn’t play the daughter role. Or the flirt role. Or the serious student role. I  would never be able to raise a smile on that thin, ascetic, fanatic face, which in another time could have been the face of a Grand Inquisitor gone amuck.

I had thought that my half-year sabbatical, which had come about only because those feminist donors gave me a grant, would give me some relief from my struggle to retain my identity in a place as alien as Carlsbad West, but the giant hand of Magnuson was reaching across land and sea to smack down on my brain and squash me.

As I shifted on the bench, Foxy stood, expectant. “Not yet, boy, let me think,” I said, and Foxy lay down again.

The diary was already distracting me from my close-to-impossible task of finishing my article on deadline. Magnuson would be—or pretend to be—embarrassed and angry if I didn’t meet it. After all, he was the department chair, and he was on the board of the
Journal of Religious History
, which had accepted my proposal. It once seemed so simple: to churn out thirty or so pages of manuscript on the recruitment of nuns into seventeenth century French convents. But some pages—even sentences—came about only as the result of days of research. Example: “Of all the nuns of the choir, 28% were of noble birth.” Not a particularly distinguished sentence. Not a scintillating sentence. Plain. But to write it, I had taken notes on and analyzed the records of more than a thousand nuns in the convents of Our Lady of Mercy throughout France. I needed to write hundreds of such sentences in the historian’s precise and bloodless style. The final deadline only a few months away—and I hadn't come close to finishing my research.

In such a paper, there was no place for a nun's diary.

I was trapped.

Why, I thought rebelliously, did I even care about all this, but even as the words came into my mind, I knew the answer: it was not just the seven years in graduate school, with a student loan of thirty thousand dollars to pay off. It was far more.

Dissertation done and PhD in hand, I had been on the job market for months before Carlsbad West College made me an offer. The college, founded as a Catholic college, clung to its conservative origins. The old men in the history department hadn’t wanted to hire a woman in the first place, but several rich widows among the contributing alumni insisted on it, and my dissertation subject—French nuns—fit the Catholic goals of the school. Within a week of the opening of the first semester, the old men discovered that I was uppity. I had an attitude, and they hated it. And my speech wasn't professorial enough.

Instead of letting me go, which would have brought the widows down on their heads, they had given me a task to prove myself—the journal article, a poisonous gift from Magnuson. It would have to appear cutting-edge but not destroy any icons. A neat trick. And they hadn't expected that I would get the grant.

I wanted to win at the game. Winning meant getting tenure, which would make me untouchable, and I would be able to do the kind of history I wanted to do—writing about obscure people from the past who were more than numbers. But first I had to pass their test and write their kind of article. And face even more tests after that.

Foxy sighed and put his paw on my foot, a gentle reminder that we were on our way somewhere. Foxy knew that “somewhere” was probably the Café Minette. There Michel, the owner and chef, whom he adored, would pour him a bowl of water and put some tasty bits on on plate for him. “Okay, Foxy,” I said, as I put the fax in my pocket, came back to the world of the Place de l’Horloge, and started off to the restaurant.

The café, identified with blue-painted lettering on the window, was sandwiched between a bakery and a tabac on a small square near the old Jewish quarter. When Foxy and I turned the corner from the winding side street into the square, I could see Agatha and Madeleine standing in front of the café. They were arguing, but I was too far away to hear what they were saying. Agatha’s arms were flailing; Madeleine was standing stiff and implacable. Tail wagging furiously, Foxy barked at the sight of Agatha, from whose hand tidbits tended to drop at lunch. Madeleine said something that made Agatha stop dead. They stood, silent, waiting, as Foxy and I approached.

“It’s Michel’s day to make lamb ragout,” Sister Agatha said in French, nodding her head at the outside sign on which Michel announced the special of the day. She loved food as much as I did, and her enthusiasm for it was far less complicated.

“Too many calories,” I replied also in French. I considered ordering from the menu, which was always the same. Perhaps a
salade composée
, dressing on the side.

“You look fine,” Agatha said.

“I have ten pounds too many—or maybe more,” I said.

She regarded me for a moment, then said, “And why do you care? Do you want to attract a man? Many men love women with
embonpoint
.”

My stomach growled, I thought of the ragout, and I said goodbye to my briefly entertained vow to to count calories. “You’ve convinced me,” I said. “Maybe, like you, I’ll start wearing the robe of my profession. The dons at Oxford do. The robe will fly out behind me as I stride to class or the archives. Very dramatic, and it’ll hide the
embonpoint
. But it would brand me too much as a academic, I suppose.”

“As my habit brands me as a nun?” Agatha said.

“In a way. Though you are much more than a nun, Agatha.” I could hear affection in my voice.

“I know I can be more than a nun, but the habit gives me credibility with the kids,” Sister Agatha said. “
Les gosses
. They make fun of it but they respect it.”

Madeleine turned her face away and adjusted the brim of her fine felt hat to shade herself from the sun or perhaps to better frame her face; its tangerine-and-red striped ribbon lay artfully against her long neck. “Are you having lunch with us, Madeleine?” I asked.

“I have errands, but I will join you in a half hour or so,” Madeleine replied and went off down the street, sure-footed, striking the cobblestones with her high heels.

Rachel Marchand was sitting at a table in the back of the café. I had seen her there before, almost every day. When she came in after I arrived, I often watched her take her needlepoint from a canvas bag, cross her feet in their black boots in a demure way, and start stitching. Waiting for her food to arrive, back curved in concentration, she stabbed the needle fiercely in and out of the cloth as if she was trying to kill it. Then, the thread used up, she knotted it off, cut it with a tiny scissors, and threaded a new needle. “Inexorable” was the word that came to my mind as I watched her in her fierce concentration. I had often wondered what picture she was making with the needlepoint. It was hard to imagine a field of flowers or other sentimental subject.

Now I nodded at Rachel; she responded with a tiny, reluctant smile. Don’t step on a toad, sister, I thought—how useful Rose’s proverb could prove to be! Agatha and I took a table with a pink tablecloth by the window. Michel, a thin but jovial man in his forties, came over to take our order and reached down to pet Foxy, a regular. Foxy’s tail thumped in greeting.