Paris by the Book(50)

Ellie put on her let’s-do-this face, and stood. “That’s probably why they think we’re crazy,” she said.



* * *



—

Declan offered to accompany us, but the women who’d come to usher us in frowned, and the twins needed watching anyway. So off Daphne, Ellie, and I went, to an office that looked like a hospital ward. The therapist that Robert and I had seen in Milwaukee had had a beautiful riverfront loft downtown, clean and uncluttered, simple lines. It always made me think of a day spa, tranquility, balance, burbling peace. Robert said he always thought of Ikea, all those opaque directions.

But this room made me and the girls think of Madeline. Specifically, the 1950s-era hospital where Madeline has her appendix out. A half-dozen cots ran along one wall beneath fourteen-foot ceilings and a row of massive, openable windows. It looked ancient and unused—but also clean and quiet and calm. There was a bud vase with a single rose, yellow, real, on a desk just inside the door.

Even the flaking paint—also yellow, a pale lemon, the color of the tart the girls were later offered as a snack—was beautiful. And Ellie was able to identify yet another parallel to Madeline—wherein the young heroine, recovering from that appendectomy, discerns the outline of a rabbit in the ceiling cracks of her hospital room—which made our own ceiling cracks that much more quaint. For me, anyway. For the psychologist, a bespectacled older man who insisted on speaking to us in English (with a disorienting Scottish accent), it only reinforced his belief that our collective mental health needed attending to.

Once again, Daphne cited the tour, the bookstore, Madeline, Bemelmans.

Bemelmans? No, the man said. He is not known.

Ellie began to explain about the books, the bridge, how Bemelmans himself had once been suicidal, although there was no evidence he’d ever gone off a bridge or wanted to—

Mademoiselle, he interrupted.

C’est vrai, Daphne chimed in.

The man looked at his clipboard and then at me.

“Girls,” I said.

Ellie ignored me and continued. The initial inspiration for the whole series, in fact, had occurred in a hospital, when Bemelmans, recovering from minor surgery in a ward much like this one, struck up a friendship with a little girl who was visited each day by a kindly nun, a nurse, in that swoopy white thing, like a hat? Ellie looked at me. “Wimple?” I said.

Ellie looked at Daphne. “Comment dire ‘wimple’ en fran?ais?” Daphne shook her head. The psychologist looked at me. Ellie continued.

Bemelmans and the girl passed the hours deriving stories from shapes made by cracks in the ceiling.

Daphne broke in to point out that there were no smartphones back then. Life was more boring. She said this in French.

Do you use the portables? the man asked me in English. There are many dangers on the portable phones. I know of America this is different, but this is not America.

Ellie asked if he would like to hear more of the story. I said no. The man said yes.

The hospital that Bemelmans and the girl—a girl close to Daphne’s age—had been in was not in Paris, but another part of France. Did he know it? The ?le d’Yeu in the Bay of Biscay, just south of the mouth of the Loire.

The psychologist pursed his lips and then fell into muttering French. “We will go now to the separate rooms?” he said. “Different rooms, different questions, the mother, the girls, this sort of thing.”



* * *



—

Does your mother hit you? This had been his opening gambit, Daphne reported once we were home and the twins asleep. She and Ellie said they said non.

And did he ask anything else?

She and Ellie conferred with their eyes. Non.

But during my individual interrogation, the psychologist said differently. He did mention he’d asked them about being struck—he said that, in his experience, Americans professed to not believe in corporal punishment, but many of them practiced it as soon as they left the United States . . .

But he also said he’d asked them about their father, and that the conversation had gone like this.

Where is your father, girls?

Il est parti. He is gone, the girls said. He asked how long; they told him. He asked them where, and they told him—or rather, they told him they weren’t sure. He had pressed them on this point and “the younger one” had finally said, some people say he is dead.

Madame, the psychologist said down his nose to me, she say this with no tears. This is not normal.

Would it suffice, I wondered, if I cried for them? Their lack of tears was not evidence of resilience, which I’d let myself think for months, but delusion. It was indeed not normal, not for their father to have disappeared, not for them to be so certain he was coming back—or, to judge from what had just happened, to judge from Daphne’s account over coffee weeks before, that Robert had come back. For many nights after Robert left, I cursed him for not considering how his disappearance would mess up our kids—but now I worried how I was messing them up. After our rocky early days in France, I’d fallen into the fiction that coming to Paris had been good for them. Because what young girl doesn’t want to come to Paris? I always had. And now I was here, just like I’d always dreamed, in a police station talking to a mental health professional.

He continued: And then the big one say, “but we do not believe he is dead.” He looked at his notes. And then I ask them, “why do you not believe he is dead?” I ask because this is important to understand. Death is not small, we must be very clear when we speak on it. And so the small girl looks at the big girl and the big girl looks at the small girl and the big girl speaks.