I read the poem printed on the sheet.
“Again, please, Daniel, so I can know how to sing it in English. Read it slowly, doucement.”
I read it once more, slowly this time, looking up at her when I could. She was looking at me as I read, or rather, at my mouth.
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
The last lines, she said, they are different.
Different?
From the original, from the conclusion of the original poem. She recited the French version, its cadences stately and mournful. I could follow only with difficulty the courtly, antiquated French but understood that the final lines said something about picking “the roses of life” before those roses fade.
“So what are these mountains?” she asked, pointing at the poem on the table. “There are no mountains in the French. And what is this crowd of stars?”
I had no answer for her, and she merely asked me to read it a third time, and once again, as I read it, she watched my mouth as I spoke the words.
“Peelgreem?” she repeated when I had finished. “Pilgreem is how you say it?”
“Pilgrim.”
“And eed? Do I say it right?”
“Hid,” I said.
“It is impossible!” she said, exasperated, smiling. “Heed.”
“Hid.”
“Hid.” She winced slightly as she repeated it, as though the h-sound hurt her to make. “So you see,” she said, “you cannot leave. Without you I am hopeless.” At some point she had folded the paper and put it back in her bag. It had been on the table for no more than fifteen minutes, but those words had burned themselves into me with the hiss of a brand.
Not that I remembered them, not literally, not that I remembered anything from that stilted, sunstruck meeting beyond the fixity of her gaze on my mouth, when I looked up from the words on the page, while her lips moved almost imperceptibly, in complete silence.
I tell you I never thought of the poem again. But when I saw the diagonal shadow of an envelope in box 5504, Jessica Burke’s post office box, and when, back at my desk, the envelope disclosed a single sheet, folded so often that the paper had begun to soften along the folds, to wear away where the folds crossed, the sheet marked with a ring where the aggrieved waiter had set a sweating carafe down on it—the same sheet Miriam had unfolded before me nineteen years ago in Paris—that sheet appeared as familiar to me as if I had unfolded and read it in faithful observance every day since that day we met on the rue de Vaugirard.
…how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
“So you were each other’s language teachers,” Clementine said when she was old enough to say such things.
I supposed we had been.
“Will you teach me French, like Mommy taught you?” she asked.
But I was never any good at it, not as good as I should have been after a year in Paris, never good enough to feel as though I weren’t speaking through a veil of static.
For Clem, however, it was different. As soon as she could make her choice known, Clementine elected to attend the Lycée Français de New York, and it was not long before she, with an amused exasperation not unlike Miriam’s, was correcting my pronunciation and syntax, pointing out “la différence évidente, non, mais vraiment évidente,” between “dessus” and “dessous,” the difference—really, the obvious difference—between “over” and “under.”
TEN
Clementine’s questions became harder the older she grew. There was no more wondering whether mommies die after having babies the way bees die after they sting you. Now she was on the hunt, her curiosity piqued by each scrap she found. Even when she was a toddler her look could unnerve me, so level I could believe Miriam had bestowed it on her, to track and haunt me. When Clementine’s questions beset her, however, her gaze shifted, now sidelong, now scavenging.
Did you and Mom speak to each other in French?
Do they speak French in heaven?
Do I have cousins and uncles in France?
Did you bury her, or was she cremated?
Did you take me to her funeral?
Yes, darling.
No, darling.
No, my darling; it didn’t happen like that.
Perhaps so, my love. Now go to sleep.
We can talk about it later, Clem. Go back to sleep.
Her questions—weren’t they what I lay awake for, alone in my watchtower? When they arrived, I told myself, I would be prepared. She would take what she needed, learn what she wanted to know. I couldn’t give her her mother, but I could give her her story. That was, as I understood it, my job. At times, sometimes for weeks at a stretch, her questions would subside, but then her curiosity would flare again like a fever I could not cure.
Did you say goodbye?
Did she know me?
Did you give me my name or did she?
Where are my grandparents?
Why don’t we see them?
Eventually, the urgency abated, or so I thought. Clementine seemed, if not content, willing at least to let it rest, perhaps to let me rest. Perhaps (I began to think) she had her story now. My mother died when I was born, I heard her say in the playground, in the coffee shop, on the telephone. Did I detect an emerging inflection, fleeting, a hint—could it be—of pleasure in her proclamation? My mother died in childbirth.
One day—she must have been twelve or thirteen—she delivered the news to an inquisitive
