“I suppose I am asking if you love her.”
“You are saying we should break off or get married.”
“I am saying only that she is happy here, happy now.”
“Is there anywhere else one can be happy?”
“Do you love her?”
“Yes, I believe I do, even if you—”
“You believe?”
“That. I believe that. I do not believe in.”
“My belief, Daniel—my belief is that love is indistinguishable from obligation.”
“What about the obligation to fact, to how things are?”
“Daniel, you are a psychologist, or psychiatrist—whatever you are, you cannot be entirely blind. Is it not a problem for you, does it not trouble you that you are the one she chose, you of all people?”
“I happened—”
“You did not happen. You did not just happen. That you, a shrink of all people, could believe, could choose to believe you were just anyone, passing through, some love affair—sweet borrowed time! You did not happen. You were already a psychologist, an analyst, call it what you like. That you could think—after what she has been through—that you could think for even a minute—”
“I do not follow.”
“Daniel, aren’t there rules, regulations, professional standards?”
“Miriam is not my patient—”
“Not yours, Daniel. Of course she was not yours. But after what happened you cannot think you are a neutral choice for her.”
“What do you mean—after what happened?” Her gaze fixed me again. “Béatrice, I don’t understand.”
As though in pain, she pinched the bridge of her nose and held a deep breath. “I thought—I assumed you knew. I would not have—I oughtn’t have mentioned it.”
“You are saying there is something I should have known. And that you cannot tell me what it is.”
“But now I have to, don’t I? Anyway it is not a secret.”
“Except, it seems, to me.”
“She never told you that she spent a year in hospital?”
“What kind of hospital? What for?” But in that moment, before Béatrice said a word, I already knew what kind. I already knew what for.
Béatrice said it had happened three years ago, before they had met. Miriam had returned home to Nevers for the winter holidays. Shortly before she would have returned to Paris to resume her studies, she had tried to kill herself. Or rather, she had killed herself, having taken every precaution to ensure she would not fail. She had even notified the police where to find her body, by calling a non-emergency line at night and leaving a recorded message at the station. After writing to her parents and posting the letter, she bicycled into the countryside, then down a logging road, abandoned and unmarked. At the end of the road she hid her bicycle and walked a distance into the woods. In a clearing Miriam had zipped herself into a sleeping bag and swallowed a quantity of Seconal, three or four times the fatal dose, carefully stirring the drug in a cup of yogurt until it dissolved, ingesting it all, then chasing it down with a half liter of vodka. The mixture would have been sufficient to drop a bull.
“There was no reason,” Béatrice said, “no reason at all why she should not have died. She ought to have. There was no reason.”
What had happened, Béatrice said, was either vanishingly improbable or frankly miraculous and remained, at least to her, unexplained. Miriam would have quickly lost consciousness. Barbiturates work fast and are capable of halting respiration within minutes. But then she threw up, which should not have happened, because Seconal suppresses the vomit reflex. Though she was still rapidly dying, vomiting would have mitigated the dosage somewhat and slowed its effect. She was saved only because a dog, attracted by the odor of vomit, drew the attention of its master to the small human form on the forest floor, zipped in its bag. The dog’s master managed to drag Miriam, still in the sleeping bag, up the logging road to his car on the main route. At the hospital her stomach was pumped and her condition stabilized, though she remained comatose for nearly a week.
When Miriam had recovered bodily, she was moved to a psychiatric facility, where she met daily with a doctor she referred to only as Monsieur le Médecin. While she credited the dog’s master with having saved her from death, it was Monsieur le Médecin she believed had saved her life. What they discussed, however, Béatrice did not know; Béatrice and Miriam had met only afterward, once Miriam had moved to a residential facility where Béatrice was serving as chaplain. Their friendship flourished, and with it Miriam’s renewed interest in the church, so that after she was released, she spent an additional two months at Béatrice’s monastery in Leuvray. Together they reread Miriam’s beloved Simone Weil, and Miriam came to the belief that her suicide attempt and subsequent survival had been in some sense providentially willed, that these events were the first, agonized stages of a true religious vocation.
“And that is what you believed too,” I said.
“I did not know what to believe. I did not know Miriam before the suicide, her attempt, I mean. But what struck me then—as it strikes me now—is the clarity of her resolve. I do not know why she tried to kill herself; she will not discuss that with me. But I wonder at the resolve it took to accomplish her plan, just as I wonder now at her resolve to take her preliminary vows. There is an absence of doubt, and normally we believe that vocation without doubt cannot be true vocation. Still I cannot help but sense in her—no, I cannot help but envy in her—that absolute conviction, and I want to believe that such a conviction is possible, and not just possible, but rare, precious.”
It was late now. Outside, a stillness brooded over the millpond. As she spoke, Béatrice had pressed a short groove into the tabletop with her thumbnail. By the end of her story, more grooves had accumulated at right angles, the pattern expanding outward in a rectilinear spiral, as symmetrical and regular as a Greek motif.
TWENTY-NINE
Over the
