I knew that at the end of their lives many people went backwards, searching for the moment when they first glimpsed the light of our world. I got into bed beside Frédéric. The doctor had been and gone. My husband was too weak to lift his head. Still, I trusted the soothing tea that Dr. Gachet and Dr. Hady recommended, to fortify his spirit and his strength.
Still he grew weaker. One night he didn’t know me. He called me Mademoiselle and said he was lost. I called for Dr. Hady in the middle of the night, and he came right away, even though the weather was dreadful. The doctor clapped the snow from his coat in the hallway. I greeted him and took his scarf and gloves. “Terrible night,” he said.
He then asked me to boil water.
“For what?” I asked, concerned. I could not imagine Frédéric would have the strength for any sort of surgery if that was what was being proposed.
“For tea,” he told me. He handed me a packet that looked familiar, reddish peels of tree bark and some spices and herbs. I thought it might be the cure the herb man had given me years ago when Jestine and I saved Frédéric’s life.
I had forgotten my shoes, and the kitchen floor was freezing. None of the servants were there, for it was a holiday weekend. I fixed the tea and brought it down the corridor. Everything was silent. My footsteps, the snow sifting down, the empty streets. There was a clock in the parlor, and I could hear it as if it were a beating heart. When I neared the bedchamber I heard Dr. Hady’s voice. “Does your chest ache when you breathe?”
“There are birds outside the window,” Frédéric said.
Dr. Hady went to pull back the curtains. Flakes of snow hit against the glass and stuck in patterns that looked like clouds. Snow was wedged to the branches of the plane trees that lined our street. “There are no birds,” he said.
But from where I stood I saw the three blackbirds.
I went to the window and opened it, even though the wind came through and snow dotted the floor. I shouted at the birds and gestured with my arms, until Dr. Hady pulled me back and closed the window. I sat in a chair shivering while he drew the curtains.
I took the tea to Frédéric, but he waved it away.
“Darling,” he said. He recognized me. “You see them out there, don’t you?”
“Perhaps the malaria he had after arriving in St. Thomas damaged his liver and spleen,” Dr. Hady told me when we went into the hall. The doctor said he’d given my husband quinine, made from the bark of a tree from South America, which had not been freely available when Frédéric was a young man. For this medicine to be effective, however, it needed to be given immediately after the illness became present, not years later. And then there was the growth in his abdomen, perhaps a cancer of the stomach. It was too late to remove any tissue for study, for Frédéric was too weak for anything so invasive. The doctor told me to keep my husband cool when the fever came and have him drink the tea every hour. He refused to accept a fee. “You are family to us,” he said. “I am here whenever you need me.”
I SOON REALIZED THAT the doctor’s tea was a narcotic of some sort, not meant to cure but to ease the process of dying. My husband’s lean, strong body and his fluid energy had disappeared. He faltered more every hour. Still there was a gleam of response when I got into bed beside him. We twined around each other, and I breathed into his mouth so that my soul might strengthen his, but it did no good. I wept for the young man in my kitchen, his fine features, his eyes elusive, as if he feared to look at me. But he did look, and now he opened his eyes. He still knew me. No one else had known me as he had.
It took three days. Jestine or one of her daughters came to sit with me. The fevers grew worse, and the chills were so terrible nothing I did seemed to warm him. On the third day, I sent for Camille. He came immediately, smelling of snow and paint. He was thinner than before, his beard longer, his clothes fitting for a peasant. I made no mention of any of this and allowed him to kiss me three times. He had brought a handful of hyacinth, the same flower I’d had with me when I knew my husband would die. They were deep purple and smelled of both spring and snow.
“You should have called for me sooner.” My son threw off his coat and went to stand at the foot of the bed. He called to his father, but Frédéric seemed very far away and he would not respond.
“Is this the end, then?” Camille asked me. I could see how shaken he was. “Is there no hope?”
“There is always hope,” Adelle had told me so long ago, when I was so unhappy with my life, after I married the first time. Much to my surprise, it had turned out to be true. Now it was a lie, but I could not tell my son otherwise.