The last item, a stub for a train ticket issued to “Abend D” on the date of the ambulance transfer, one way, Nevers to Paris. They were on the reverse side of the ticket stub, the last four lines of the poem, the words written out longhand in painstaking block capitals:
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.
FORTY-TWO
You have your ticket, I have mine. That is what Miriam had said. I can hear her saying it. I can see her lips move, can feel, as she speaks, her breath on my own lips.
À chacun son billet.
It is what each of us said, and yet each of us made the same mistake: we believed we knew our respective destinations. Miriam believed her destination was the monastery. For my part, I believed that my ticket was an airplane ticket back to New York. It would be in my jacket pocket, nested inside my passport, when I handed my apartment keys to the concierge and walked my single suitcase two blocks to the taxi stand. When I passed through U.S. Customs, the stub of my ticket would still be in my passport, the passport agent would glance at it and return it to me with a brusque “Welcome home, Mr. Abend.” After I retrieved my bag, I would drop the stub into the trash, along with the newspaper and a roman policier I’d read on the plane.
But of course Miriam’s ticket was not for the monastery. It was, instead, her token to cross the last river, the river without an opposite bank. And as for me, I was not to leave France that month, or the next. Two years would pass before I finally handed over my apartment keys to the concierge. I would hand in another key as well, the one to the office I’d leased in a cabinet de psychiatrie, a practice maintained by colleagues from my year at the American Hospital. There, in a small consultation room, I would see patients in the morning and evening, American or British citizens ineligible for reimbursement by French health services, professionals and diplomats wealthy enough to pay my full fee. In fact it was in Paris, as a temporary partner in that cabinet, that I established a pattern of work I have maintained throughout my professional life: two blocks of appointments, early and late, with the midday held open. Midday in Paris, I would make my way across the city to the Maison Nôtre Dame, where a community of Ursuline sisters, assisted by a staff of therapists and social workers, cared for a dozen or so orphans and other wards of the state.
Before Clementine took occupancy of her bassinet at the Maison Nôtre Dame, however, she spent the first nine weeks of her life in a neonatal unit in l’Hôpital Necker, the chief pediatric hospital in Paris, where the private ambulance had brought her. Whether she had in fact been born eight weeks before term, as her measurements indicated, or whether her low birth weight, liver enzyme irregularities, and respiratory difficulties were complications from the opiate addiction she had inherited from her mother, her doctors never specified. Although I was not one of her physicians, it was assumed from the beginning that I should attend all meetings concerning her care. I had saved her. I had arranged and paid for her costly private transfer to l’Hôpital Necker. And even after weeks had passed, I could always be found in the waiting room, reading a book about infant care or detaining the nurses with premeditated experiments in small talk.
One day, one of these nurses, the shift supervisor, looked up from some paperwork she was completing and remarked that such a lovely, scrappy little girl needed a proper name.
“Jeanne DuPont seems to suit her well,” I said. This was the name on her file, the name on the little card affixed to her bassinet.
“Ah, surtout pas!” said the shift supervisor, laughing. “That is the name for anybody without a name. Her mother, I am sure she was registered as Jeanne DuPont too.”
In my confusion I heard myself asking if she had any suggestions.
“Vous demandez ça à moi, Docteur?” she said. “Ça c’est au papa de décider! Enfin, ou au résponsable légal—” That’s for the dad to decide—I mean, the responsible party—
“Ah, oui, the responsible party—” I said.
“Otherwise, a social worker will provide one,” she said, indicating with a gesture that nothing would be more foolish than letting a social worker think up a name.
So why did I say “Clementine” then? Had I ever known a Clementine? Had I overheard the name somewhere? These questions occurred to me only later, but there, when the shift supervisor asked me, I said it as though Clementine had been Clementine from the beginning, as though her name had been my secret.
“Ah, Clémentine! J’adore!” said the nurse. “A French name, for a French little girl!”
—
Months would pass before a magistrate, satisfied that no parent or other ascendant had come forward, would name me Clementine’s legal guardian, on the grounds of my involvement in her care since her birth. Long before that, the nurses on the neonatal unit at Necker had taken
