And didn’t the good sisters get to come along?
Of course they came along, riding the wind, their great robes spread like sails or wings. How brave they were, jostling and tumbling over the treetops, or swooping so low that their hems skimmed the water of the pond!
At the seaside they would embark on a boat and sail across the ocean, having many adventures along the way. However various, these adventures adhered to the strictest of conventions. The sisters were to stay in the crow’s nest, all of them except Sister Cook, who labored in the kitchen making meringues. All major discoveries and solutions must necessarily be the work of the little girl, figuring things out By Herself, though By Herself did not exclude the participation of Lloyd, her thoughtful pony.
Sometimes, however, Prince Daddy would never arrive and Clementine would have to stay with the sisters.
Why did he not appear?
He had been locked inside a boulder.
Who had locked him inside the boulder?
Mr. Boulder.
Why had Mr. Boulder locked Prince Daddy inside a boulder?
Because the Swan Fairy had turned Mr. Boulder into a boulder in the first place, so this was Mr. Boulder’s revenge.
Ah. But couldn’t Mr. Boulder be persuaded to let Prince Daddy go?
No. Yes. Only if the Swan Fairy went away forever. So the Swan Fairy agreed to go away forever because she loved Prince Daddy very much and anyway she needed someone to take care of the little baby she had left with the sisters and who else was going to do that?
—
These stories were important for her, I told myself, part of her great effort to illuminate her past. They were her way of making things make sense. I told myself that I could help her. I could be the sisters she didn’t have. I could be her pony, Lloyd. I could be Prince Daddy. But then, when she was seven or eight, the swan stories stopped. Once on a train trip I had started reading an actual book to her, something about a spaceship stuck in an apple tree. I remember nothing else about the book, only that from then on, for Clementine, it was as though the world of the Swan Fairy had never existed. From the spaceship in the apple tree until long after she could read fluently on her own, she sat on my lap through thousands of pages, caring less about the books themselves than the state she entered, twisting the ends of her hair or picking at her toenails while I read. Should I try to engage her in elaborations, in speculations about what had happened before or after, she objected curtly, as though I had sought to pierce the bubble of the story out of sheer malice or perversion. She especially hated my attempts to endow characters with different voices. “Just read it,” she would say. “Just read it normal.”
It was not until some years had passed, until she was on the verge of adolescence, that she asked me outright why she had spent those months with the nuns. We were in the library, the branch library near the apartment; we went there together most weekends. She had gone off by herself, browsing the shelves; I was at a table, correcting proofs for a forthcoming article. She appeared at my elbow and pronounced the word hammer-hedge.
“Pardon me?”
“Catastrophic postpartum cerebral hammer-hedge.”
“I think you mean hemorrhage, darling,” I said.
“Hemorrhage,” she repeated. “Cerebral hemorrhage. Is that like a stroke?”
“It is, a brain bleed.”
“Is hemorrhage French?”
“It’s regular English.”
“But didn’t Mommy die in French?”
“She died in France.”
“Of a cerebral hammer—hemorrhage.”
“Who told you that?”
“Nobody. I looked it up in the encyclopedia. That’s what it was, wasn’t it?”
“You looked it up?”
“Wasn’t it?”
What was I going to say? She did not seem upset, standing there balanced on one foot, her other foot braced against her inner calf to make a figure four.
“Well?” she said.
“That’s right. It was. A cerebral hemorrhage. There was nothing anyone could do.”
It was in this way that Clementine managed to inform herself of what she wanted to know. One day she would display a fascination with medical details (how do strokes work? can you have a stroke in your knee? in your butt?), while at other times she would ask about the events themselves. What had the doctors done to try to save her? Had the doctors asked me to sit down before they gave me the news?
In time her fascination with medical details eased its hold on Clementine, as though she had learned at last what she had wanted to know. Her curiosity shifted toward what she called “the big argument.”
“After the big argument, Mommy’s parents wanted to take me home with them, right?”
“That’s right.”
“That’s stupid. You’re my dad.”
“Doesn’t Oren at school live with his grandparents? Is that stupid?”
“That’s different. They adopted him. He calls them Mom and Popster.”
“That’s what Mommy’s parents wanted too, to adopt you.”
“So you had to wait for the police to tell them no.”
“Yes, but it wasn’t the police. It was someone called a magistrate. Anyway, the doctors and the sisters had to make sure you were healthy and happy. And I had to practice changing diapers and making bottles!”
Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai.
Click.
So long have I loved you, I will never forget you.
Click.
Then nothing.
I tried to reverse-dial the number. Nothing. I called Clementine’s voicemail, my own. Nothing. Shouting at the operator, I made demands, entreaties, threats, was disconnected: nothing but silence on the line. It did not matter that the song was common, that every schoolchild in France learned it sooner or later. What mattered was that it was my song, our song, the bedtime song I
