Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe? Page 14

  137.

  As was true in Stockholm and Copenhagen, I had the sense that Aunt Beatrice and I were wandering through Paris with no purpose or destination, but in fact there was a purpose, and there was a destination.

  After thirty minutes of walking, we stopped in front of a warehouse. That is, it looked like it had been warehouse, a warehouse that seemed to be a remnant from a former architectural era. It was brick with elaborate detailing on the face and French words etched into the cornice. Whereas surrounding it were parking lots and the piled brick remnants of the buildings that I supposed had been destroyed to make the parking lots, and then new buildings, mostly glass and steel, one or two stories, not residences but businesses: a grocery store, a pet store, a place that seemed to manufacture chocolate and candy, a Renault car dealership. There were people in the businesses, I could see them looking out through the huge windows, clearly wondering what would happen when the world came in. I knew the feeling. It was the feeling I had when I first met my aunt and all the moments I spent with her afterward.

  138.

  “For instance, the Butcher,” my aunt said. We were inside the building now. Which looked as though it’d been abandoned, condemned. There was yellow caution tape everywhere. Several signs, in French, and they were warning of danger. I knew this not from the words, which I could not understand, but the illustration of a man with rocks falling onto his head. For good reason: the interior and walls and ceilings were crumbling, scatterings of brick and plaster pieces on the floor. The place smelled like dust and mice. Other than the wreckage, and the signs and tape warning you of the wreckage, there seemed to be nothing in the building at all.

  “So called,” my aunt said, “because she preferred to cut off limbs and digits and so on rather than treat them. No one ever confused the Butcher with a conventional healer. I watched her cauterize stomach wounds with her cigarette lighter. My bullet wound, she dug out the bullet with a steak knife from the restaurant I’d been shot in. Once, she conducted an abortion in a life raft. She could have performed the procedure on dry land, but no, she preferred the raft. Not once did a patient die on her,” Aunt Beatrice said, and of course by now I realized the Butcher was a doctor, and then my aunt added, “unless the Butcher wanted him to die.

  “Hello!” my aunt then yelled, and waited for a response. I wondered whom she was summoning; I wondered if it was the Sociologist, and if soon a man with good legs would materialize from the building’s jumbled innards. But no one materialized, and no one yelled back. My aunt then yelled some words in a language I recognized as French. She again waited for a response. The words did nothing. It was as though they left her mouth, hung in the air for a moment, and then chased one another down a deep hole.

  It was the first time on our trip that Aunt Beatrice seemed confounded by something. She walked outside the building, stood in the middle of the street, looked at the building. It was noon by now, the sun high and blasting the already scorched-looking bricks. The building’s second-story windows were boarded up. The third-story windows were covered with plastic, but the plastic was ripped, and its tendrils were waving at us in the breeze.

  “Maybe it’s the wrong place,” I suggested.

  “It’s the right place,” my aunt said, and she turned toward the new glassy buildings. “But it’s possible the Butcher is in the wrong one.”

  139.

  The Butcher’s real name was Monique Belknap. Her name—Docteur Monique Belknap—was etched on the glass door that led to the waiting room and, inside the waiting room behind a high counter, a pale-faced receptionist. My aunt reacted to each of these things—the etched name, the glass door, the waiting room, the receptionist—as though they were impossibilities, wonders, miracles, but unwanted ones. When the receptionist said “Can I help you?” or “Do you have an appointment?” (she spoke in French, but I’m guessing she said one of those two things), my aunt once again took off her glasses and looked at the woman in astonishment, the way I must have looked at Gerbie back in Stockholm.

  “I am here,” my aunt said in English, and it was a kind of harsh, barking English—as though it were not my aunt speaking but the dog she’d stolen and then abandoned in Congress—“to see Dr. Belknap.”

  It was the kind of voice that seemed to rule out even the possibility of disagreement, and indeed I don’t think my aunt expected any, because she began to head for the door to the right of the counter, a door that seemed to lead into another, more inner room.

  But the receptionist managed to disagree anyway. She walked out from behind the counter, and I could see by her clothes—loose green V-neck shirt, matching green drawstringed pants—and by her manner—brisk, officious—that she wasn’t a receptionist or wasn’t only a receptionist: she was also a nurse. “First,” she said, in halting but firm English, “you are weighed and . . .” Here she paused, possibly to think of the right English word. “Measured,” she finally said. My aunt seemed about to once again object, but the nurse said, “Everyone is weighed and measured.”

  That seemed to do something strange to my aunt. She became, at that moment, a patient. She consented to being weighed and measured. The scale and whatever you call the apparatus that measures your height were right there in the waiting room, which also served as the examining room. I don’t know how tall Aunt Beatrice was and how much she weighed—the nurse delivered the information in French, and besides, I’m sure the units of measure were in meters and grams and not pounds and inches—but no one is ever the height and weight they wish they were, and my aunt seemed to shrink at the news. The nurse then asked her to sit in one of the two chairs in the room, and my aunt did. Between the chairs there was a low table, but there were no magazines on it. The nurse said something in French, and my aunt offered her arm. And then the nurse said something else in French, and my aunt pushed up the sleeve of her sweater. Forearm and a swath of bicep. The skin was white as my aunt’s face was brown, white like a fish belly, laced with raised blue veins. It looked like an arm that had spent its long life in a cave.

  The nurse wrapped a thick black strap around my aunt’s bicep, took up the black ball, pressed it and pressed it, then allowed the device to depress. She read the blood pressure on the gauge, announced the reading to my aunt, then announced something else. My aunt opened her mouth dutifully, and the nurse put a thermometer in it, and a minute later she removed the thermometer and announced that reading. Then she looked at my aunt for one long second and said something else in French, and my aunt nodded meekly.

  140.

  To be a patient is to be diminished. This is a universal truth, one so obvious that even my mother, even John Calvin, never saw the need to make a larger theological or cultural point about it. But I mention it because it was the first time I saw my aunt in a position that we’ve all been in and act like the rest of us. She looked so resigned, so lost, so scared. She looked like you or me.

  It was the receptionist who was also a nurse who’d made Aunt Beatrice look this way, of course. And I had the strong desire to avenge my aunt’s diminishment. My mother had written in her famous book, “As John Calvin teaches us, the only vengeance that matters is God’s. Compared to God’s vengeance, all human vengeance is petty, feeble, and not worth considering, let alone pursuing.” And I’d believed that was so until I met my aunt. I was next to the high counter, across the room from where the woman was attending to my aunt; on the other side of the counter was the receptionist’s desk, and on that desk was a computer. It was a bulky desktop, some years old, and I knew its weakness: like a dog or a child, or really most of us, it surrendered and shut down when faced with contradictory commands. I reached across the counter, and with my left thumb and forefinger, hit Control X, and with my right thumb and forefinger hit Control P. The computer stopped humming, and its screen went black. I turned around. The receptionist who was also a nurse said one last thing to my aunt, then turned, walked across the room behind the counter, and sat down at her desk. I went to sit by my
aunt. And we watched and listened as the woman struck keys and pushed buttons and swore in French at her computer and, then, in an act of final frustration, slapped the keyboard with both hands. When she did that, my aunt, very gently, very briefly, placed her left hand on my right, and I knew then that she knew what I’d done, and that I’d done it for her, and that it had made her happy.

  141.

  A minute later the door to the right of the counter opened, and in the doorway appeared a black woman. Trim, wearing slim white pants and a light blue long-sleeved button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. There was a ballpoint pen sticking out of the top of her shirt pocket, and a stethoscope was hooked around her neck. Closely shorn curly white hair. She looked like a runner to my aunt’s basketball player; her face was thin, nearly gaunt, with high cheekbones, and her skin, unlike my aunt’s, was smooth, maintained. I thought I could see the sheen of face cream on her forehead.

  My aunt stood up. She seemed somewhat restored. “Dr. Belknap,” she said in her usual bright way, again with ironic emphasis on the title.

  But if that were bait, the Butcher, so called, didn’t rise to it. She said something in French, and my aunt started to say in English, “Butcher—,” but the Butcher interrupted.

  “Docteur Belknap,” she said with no emphasis. I’d only just met the woman, but she was clearly right about that: whatever had made her the Butcher had clearly been erased, drained, excised, amputated.

  My aunt stared at her for three beats, and then continued. “This is my nephew, Calvin.” I waved at the Butcher, but the Butcher didn’t wave back. She said something to my aunt in French. My aunt then walked toward her and the open door. I made to follow, but my aunt said, “Please wait for me here, Calvin.”

  This confused and then annoyed me. Why, I wanted to know, did my aunt drag me off the train and through Paris and to the doctor’s office only then to sit in the room outside the doctor’s office? Aunt Beatrice must have sensed my annoyance because she said, in that uncharacteristically meek, patient-like way, “An old lady does like being accompanied to the doctor’s office.” And then she followed the Butcher through the doorway and shut the door behind her.

  142.

  I remembered that my aunt had said something similar when she asked me to accompany her into the Boston airport, and I felt sure I was being manipulated then, and I felt sure I was being manipulated now, too. Whatever subject being discussed inside that office, I felt sure that it wasn’t health related. No, I felt sure that it had something to do with the Sociologist: where he was, who else was looking for him, how Aunt Beatrice might find him before they did.

  143.

  To kill time, I once again took out my phone. I looked at it for twenty minutes. There was nothing on it worth reporting. The only reason I mention it now is that right as Aunt Beatrice and the Butcher emerged through that door, I remembered that the Butcher had spoken French to my aunt, and then I remembered the Record function on my phone, and then I touched Record.

  144.

  My aunt walked out first, a little unsteadily, I thought, clutching her purse with both hands. She nodded at me and I followed her to the main office door. But before I left the room I noticed the Butcher standing in the doorway to her inner office. She was small, but her presence seemed to fill the doorway and the rest of the room, too. I recognized that: it was the way my aunt usually seemed to me. It was the way everyone who knows something important seems to everyone who doesn’t. Doctor Belknap’s whole face was shining now, not just her forehead.

  “Beatrice,” she shouted out to my aunt. My aunt stopped and looked at the Butcher. And then the Butcher said many French words that I didn’t recognize and that my aunt seemed not to acknowledge. When the Butcher stopped talking, Aunt Beatrice turned her back and continued on her way, and I then stopped recording and followed her out of the office.

  145.

  “When people pretend to be from somewhere in America,” my aunt said once we were out on the street, “they always say they’re from Sheboygan, Wisconsin.” It took a moment for me to realize that my aunt was telling me why she thought Caroline was Interpol. And it says a good deal about how much my aunt had changed my way of thinking that this made even a little bit of sense to me.

  146.

  We retraced our steps back toward the train station. My aunt seemed to have recovered somewhat from being a patient, but still, there was something thoughtful and melancholy about her. I wanted to ask her about what the Butcher had said, but I knew she wouldn’t answer my question. And I didn’t need to, because I had the recording and a way to translate it. All I needed now was the time and space and privacy to listen to it.

  “The Butcher,” my aunt finally said. “I almost didn’t recognize her.”

  “Has she changed much?” I asked, and when Aunt Beatrice nodded, I asked, “How?” and my aunt said, “She’s stopped trying to get away with something.”

  147.

  “Our cultural moment is dominated by people whose loftiest goal is to get away with something. As John Calvin teaches us, none of us ever gets to heaven on the basis of what we’ve gotten away with.” This is a passage from my mother’s famous book. I’m certain, after spending this time with my aunt, that those words were directed at her as much as they were directed at our cultural moment.

  Although I knew now it wasn’t as though my mother hadn’t tried to get away with something. That safe, for instance, that my mother and my aunt had stolen from their father’s church. It had been heavy. It had taken the two of them to steal it.

  148.

  My aunt abruptly stopped walking, right in front of a pharmacy. She reached into her bag and first pulled out a skull. It gleamed white in the sun, and I thought I saw something like eternity in its gaping mouth and eye sockets. “Where’d you get that?” I asked, but I knew it had come from the Butcher’s office. I was sure that the Butcher had not given it to my aunt; I was sure my aunt had stolen it. She returned the skull to her purse and pulled out a prescription pad. My aunt took out a pen, filled out and then signed one of the prescriptions, tore it off the pad. Then she smiled at me, proudly gap toothed, restored, and walked into the pharmacy.

  “Take these,” Aunt Beatrice said when she came out of the pharmacy. She was holding a pill bottle, and out of it she shook four tiny white pills and popped two in her mouth and then handed me the other two.

  “What are they?”

  “Painkillers.”

  “But I’m not in pain,” I said.

  “Not yet, at least,” my aunt said in her way, and I wondered what she meant by that, if anything. Nevertheless, I didn’t take them but instead put them in the pocket of my shiny blue German shirt.

  Then we continued walking. The streets were still full of dark people, but I wasn’t as aware of them, and I was proud of that; I’d felt like, again, I’d made some progress. But then I became aware of my relative lack of awareness and wondered how that could ever be any kind of progress. And in any case how, if I were still aware that the streets were still full of dark people, could I really be not as aware of them? It was as though I’d already taken the painkillers. My thoughts were looping around, loops within loops. I needed something to straighten them out, something to focus on. There, in the distance, not far from the subway station, I saw an enormous man, his back to me, and on the back of his enormous black T-shirt were these words, in large white block letters: im difficult to kidnap.

  “T-shirts have more to say about our cultural moment than movies or TV or books,” I said, thinking that this was the kind of generalization my aunt would make, or like made.

  “Oh, Calvin,” my aunt said. She sounded dismayed, and I thought at first she was referring to the quality of my generalization. I turned to face her and saw that she had stopped walking and was now looking at her phone. She handed it to me. On it was the homepage of Congress’s local paper. And on the homepage was news that our house—hers and mine, and my father’s, and mother’s
, and her parents before her—was gone. It wasn’t an article that told us so. Our local paper had no articles. It had photos with captions. The caption said that our house had burned to the ground two days earlier, that it had been the house of the revered high school sports coach, Roger Bledsoe, and the world-famous writer, Reverend Nola Bledsoe, both recently deceased. The current owner, their son, Calvin Bledsoe, had yet to be located. The caption said that the volunteer firemen were considering the fire suspicious. Congress had six volunteer firemen. In the photo, four of them were holding the hose, which was spraying the smoky ruin with water, but apparently not enough and apparently too late. Charles Otis wasn’t in the picture, but to the left of the hose bearers was his father, Leland Otis, a toothpick sticking out of the corner of his mouth, not doing anything except facing the camera and holding an ax across his chest, the way the Paris gendarmes were holding their automatic weapons.

  149.

  I didn’t cry when my father died or when my mother died, but I cried when I learned that my house had burned down. Cried as we descended into the subway, and cried on the subway, and cried as we exited the subway, and cried as I entered into the train station, where I still cried, loudly, heavingly, under the arrivals and departures board. I didn’t care who saw me crying, and whoever saw me didn’t seem to care either: people just kept walking past me, to and from their trains. My aunt did nothing to stop me or console me. She just let me cry until I felt empty. Which was how I’d often felt when I was in my house: empty. Which was really why I’d been crying. And my aunt must have realized that because when I finally stopped crying she said, “It’s okay, Calvin. You weren’t really using that life anyway.”