1842
Just before my twelfth birthday my father called me to him. He gave me an envelope. The paper was a fair sky blue. When I opened the envelope I found a ticket for passage on a schooner. I thought I was dreaming. I pinched my own leg and it smarted. My mother was standing in the doorway. There was her green-tinged shadow. It was likely she knew I wasn’t going to my lessons. Certainly, she knew I was not interested in the family business. Now I was being sent to relatives in Paris, and to a school there to study with a Monsieur Savary. My parents were not pleased with my schoolwork, and they thought my world should be broadened. Clearly, they feared for my future or they would not have taken such a radical step. I would miss Hannah’s wedding, I would miss my own birthday and celebrate it not at home with my family but in a land I’d only seen in drawings, living with people I’d never met before.
I didn’t know how to feel. St. Thomas was all I knew, and I wondered if going away might change me in ways that made me into someone else; if I might become more like the boys my age from the congregation who abided by their parents’ laws and rules. I was defiant, and I supposed I was being punished for that. In the days that followed I went wandering and didn’t come home till morning. Sometimes I saw the slim deer that were brought here for the sole purpose of being hunted more than a hundred years earlier, creatures that had become so shy of human contact they were rarely seen. I stood outside a ring in the countryside where there was cockfighting. Men were drinking hard and betting on their roosters, and there was the scent of blood. My blood raced as well, and I drank a fair amount when I could manage to get hold of a bottle. My friends, the two brothers, were wary of me now. Perhaps our differences were too much for our friendship in this time and place. My mother would have disapproved of my being there at the ring, she would think the men barbaric. And yet Jestine had told me my own mother seemed to enjoy dispatching chickens when she was a girl. So there it was: my mother was a hypocrite and a stranger. She did one thing, but insisted I do the other. I realized that I hated her. This was not what I was supposed to feel and so I hated myself as well.
I found myself at the harbor one day when the sky was still dark. I walked around taking in the scents and sounds, then I went to sit on Jestine’s steps. I wished that she had been my mother, for she understood me in a way my own never would. There were still the last few stars in the sky, their dim light reflecting in the water. Jestine emerged from the cottage with mugs of coffee mixed with sugar. Her hands were dyed indigo blue from the dresses she had tinted that day.
“You can’t sleep,” she said. “Neither can I.”
“I know what happened,” I said. “I’m going to Paris. When I get there I’ll look for your daughter.”
“Looking never did anyone any good.”
I amended my words. “I’ll find her.”
Jestine nodded and patted my back. I felt that she had faith in me, even though I was a boy. She went inside, and I drank my coffee. She came back with a letter in a sealed envelope. “I wrote this the day they took her.”
I folded the letter into my jacket. The paper felt soft, like silk, as if it had been touched ten thousand times. I folded it the way Madame Halevy had folded up her own story.
I arrived home when dawn was breaking, walking through clouds of mosquitoes. The light was a pale pink. I thought I would sneak into the house, past Rosalie’s open door, but as it turned out my mother couldn’t sleep either. She was waiting for me outside, sitting on the metal chair that had been left there ever since Madame Halevy had come for me in one of the last weeks of her life.
“Let me guess. You were at Jestine’s.” My mother sounded hurt.
“To say good-bye,” I told her, for there was nothing wrong in that.
My mother led me upstairs without a word. She didn’t berate me or punish me for being out all night. We were quiet on the staircase so we wouldn’t wake my brothers and sisters. Outside the birds were waking, and there was a haze of mist as the heat of the day settled onto the streets. My father had already been to the garden to say his prayers and left for the synagogue to offer his help to those in need. My mother hadn’t told him I was missing. She didn’t like to worry my father; she was tender with him in a way she wasn’t with anyone else. Now she opened the door to the chamber she shared with him, a room we children were never invited into. To my great surprise there was my painting of Jestine, the one that had been taken from the storeroom. It had been hung upon the wall. My mother had tears in her eyes, something I had never seen before. I was confused. She had told me my paintings were nothing like the real world, and yet she’d kept this one. Because my mother was a stranger to me, I had always thought I was a stranger to her as well. Now I wasn’t so certain.