The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender(2)

Their father, Beauregard Roux, was a well-known phrenologist whose greatest contributions to his field were said to be the curls of goldenrod hair atop his head and on the backs of his hands — and the manner in which his French was laced with just a hint of a Breton accent. Thick and large, Beauregard Roux could easily carry all four of his children dangling from one arm, with the family goat tucked under the other.

My great-grandmother was quite the opposite of her husband. While Beauregard was large, grandiose, mountainous even, his wife was small, indistinct, and walked with the blades of her shoulders in a permanent hunch. Her complexion was olive where his was rosy, her hair dark where his was light, and while every head turned when Beauregard Roux stepped into a room, his wife was best known for her capacity to take up no capacity at all.

On nights they made love, their neighbors were kept awake by the growls Beauregard made upon climax — his wife, however, hardly made any noise at all. She rarely did. In fact, the doctor in the small village of Trouville-sur-Mer who delivered their first child, my grandmother, spent the length of the delivery looking up from his duties just to be sure the mother had not perished during the act. The silence in the room was so disturbing that when it came time for the birth of their next child — my great-uncle René — the doctor refused at the last minute, leaving Beauregard to run the seventeen kilometers in his stocking feet to the town of Honfleur in a rush to find the nearest midwife.

There remains no known history of my great-grandmother before her marriage to Beauregard Roux. Her only proof of existence lay in the faces of her two oldest daughters, Emilienne and Margaux, each with her dark hair, olive complexion, and pale-green eyes. René, the only boy, resembled his father. Pierette, the youngest, had Beauregard’s rich yellow curls. Not one of the children ever knew their mother’s first name, each believing it was Maman until it was too late for them to even consider it could be anything else.

Whether or not it had anything to do with his large size, by the dawn of 1912 the small French village had proven much too petit for Beauregard Roux. He dreamed of places full of automobiles and buildings so tall they blocked the sun; all Trouville-sur-Mer had to offer was a fish market and Beauregard’s own phrenology practice, kept afloat by his female neighbors. His fingers ached for skulls whose bumps he hadn’t read time and time again! So, on the first of March of that year — which was eldest daughter Emilienne’s eighth birthday, son René’s seventh, Margaux’s sixth, and Pierette’s fifth — Beauregard began to talk of a place he called Manhatine.

“In Manhatine,” he’d say to his neighbors while pumping water from the well outside his home, “whenever you need to take a bath or wash your face, you just turn the faucet, and there it is — not just water, mes camarades, but hot water. Can you imagine? Like being greeted by a little miracle every morning right there in your own bathtub.” And then he’d laugh gaily, making them suspect that Beauregard Roux was perhaps a little more unstable than they might have wished for someone so large.

It was to the dismay of the women in Trouville-sur-Mer — and the men, for there was no other character they liked better to discuss — that Beauregard sold his phrenology practice only one month later. He secured six third-class tickets aboard the maiden voyage of the SS France — one for each of his family members, with the exception of the family goat, of course. He taught his children the English words for the numbers one through ten and, in his enthusiasm, once told them that the streets in America were unlike anything they’d ever seen before — not covered in dirt like the ones in Trouville-sur-Mer, but paved in cobblestones of bronze.

“Gold,” my young grandmother, Emilienne, interrupted. If America was really the impressive place her father thought it was, then certainly the streets would be made of something better than bronze.

“Don’t be foolish,” Beauregard chided gently. “Even the Americans know better than to pave their streets in gold.”

The SS France, as I’ve come to learn in my research, was a marvel of French engineering. Over twice the size of any ship in the French merchant fleet, she would set a new precedent for speed, luxury, service, and cuisine for the French Line. Her maiden voyage departed from the bustling port of Le Havre, forty-two kilometers from Trouville-sur-Mer.

Le Havre of 1912 was a place clearly marked by the distinctions of class. Surrounded on the east by the villages of Montivilliers, Harfleur, and Gonfreville-l’Orcher, the Seine River separated the city from Honfleur. In the late eighteen hundreds, when the neighboring villages of Sanvic and Bléville were incorporated into Le Havre, an upper city developed above the ancient lower city with two parts linked by a complex network of eighty-nine stairs and a funicular. The hillside mansions of rich merchants and ship owners, all of whom had made their fortunes from Le Havre’s expansive port in the early nineteenth century, occupied the upper part. In the city’s center were the town hall, the Sous-Préfecture, the courthouse, the Le Havre Athletic Club, and the Turkish baths. There were museums and casinos and a number of lavish and expensive hotels. It was this Le Havre that gave birth to the impressionist movement; it was where Claude Monet was inspired to paint Impression, soleil levant.

Meanwhile, the suburbs and old districts of Le Havre, where the working-class families lived, and the flat quarters near the port, where the sailors, dockworkers, and laborers worked, were neglected. Here dwelt the effects of grueling and unreliable employment, poor sewer systems, and unsanitary living conditions. Here the cemeteries were overwhelmed with the dead from the cholera outbreak of 1832. It was where consumption found its victims. Here were the bohemians, the red-light district, the cabaret with the effeminate master of ceremonies where a man could pay for a drink and a little entertainment without having to take off his hat. And while the rich Havrais in the upper part of the city raised a toast to many more blissful and successful years, those living in the slums rotted away in a toxic smelly mess of insalubrity, shit, promiscuity, and infant mortality.