The Altruists Page 15

  Francine’s teacher in her senior year was a husky-voiced thirtysomething named Joanne who had boundary issues. She seemed as though she’d been waiting for the seventies all her life. She wore knee socks and plaid miniskirts in a sexed-up approximation of the student uniform; years later she would be quietly dismissed for sleeping with two male students who couldn’t keep a secret. Francine was in thrall to her. Joanne radiated knowingness, and prepped her protégé for an eventual trip to the City of Light. There were rules—but they were elegant, sensible rules! Don’t Bring Wine to a Dinner Party. Don’t Wear Sneakers in the Street. Buy Your Bread Fresh Every Day. Francine learned not to get chrysanthemums as gifts; they were considered morbid, used for decorating graves on All Saints’ Day. There was so, so much to learn.

  She excelled at French, and in her last months of high school was looking forward to majoring in it at Wellesley, far away from home where her mother, living with a man who could now be said to resemble a corpse with no exaggeration whatsoever, was beginning to unravel, lashing out and picking at her skin.

  “Why do you have to go that far away?” her mother asked, her fingers trembling as they stroked a scab on her cheek. “Are you a lesbian now?”

  “No,” said Francine, through the collar of a black turtleneck. “They have a good French program.”

  “I don’t believe there aren’t any good programs between here and Massachusetts.”

  “It’s one of the best in the country.”

  “What on earth do you think I’m going to do when you’re gone?”

  “You’ll have Bex for two more years. And she’s talked about Ohio State, right?”

  “Rebecca is a silly girl. She’s not serious. Not smart, like you.”

  Francine looked away. “I’m sorry.”

  “Promise me you’ll buy some new clothes.”

  “What’s wrong with my clothes?”

  “Black. Only black. What are you, depressed or something?”

  “Mom . . .”

  “That’s right. You aren’t.” She shivered as she peeled the scab. “You have no right to be depressed. Hear me? No right at all.”

  When Grandma Ruth died, Francine was the only one who seemed to care. She wept for a whole week. She’d never felt so alone. Meanwhile, her mother annexed the house next door and began discussing an illegal plan to build an addition that would join the two homes into one exceedingly long ranch. There were no speeches, no in memoriams. It fell to Francine to pen an obituary, which ran in the back of the Dayton Daily News.

  Ruth Klein, age 74, beloved grandmother, died in her home in Dayton on Tuesday, March 16, 1971, of natural causes. She is survived by her sister, Myrtle Klein, of Columbus, her son, David Klein, and his children, Francine and Rebecca Klein, also of Dayton.

  “Too many commas,” Mrs. Klein said, reading over Francine’s shoulder. “It’s hard to follow.”

  All told, having no point of comparison, Francine did not consider her childhood to be damaging until years later, when she began to study psychology in earnest, a career path determined (on top of everything else) by a random encounter with a copy of Games People Play that her mother forgot to reshelve in the den.

  * * *

  • • •

  The summer after senior year was marked by two significant pieces of mail. First there was the roommate questionnaire. Wellesley College wanted to know what hours Francine kept; whether she preferred to study in her room or the library; whether she liked to play her music loud. She wasn’t sure how to answer. How could she know her college routines and habits when she wasn’t yet in college? How could she state who she was when she didn’t even know? She had prepared herself for an East Coast education in French language and culture. She had not prepared herself for an education in how to live.

  One question troubled her in particular. Was she a smoker? Strictly speaking, yes, she did smoke. But she hadn’t always smoked. Only these past two years. She had been a nonsmoker many more years than she had been a smoker. She had smoked only as long as she had been interested in French, and even then, the smoking was only an accessory to the language. She didn’t like the idea of herself as a smoker. She was a Francophile, so she smoked. And besides, she didn’t want her mother to find the questionnaire and harangue her about cigarettes. (Mrs. Klein worried about airborne toxins damaging the surface of her paintings.) Francine checked NO. She was decidedly not a smoker.

  The second piece of mail, which arrived one month later, was a letter from Mary Rooney, whom the college had paired with Francine on the basis of their questionnaires. It read,

  Dear Fran (can I call you Fran?),

  I’m so looking forward to living with you. I think college will be great. My older sister went to Wellesley and she enjoyed herself very much. I’m from Bala Cynwyd, in Pennsylvania. I like field hockey but I’m not going to do it in college. There probably won’t be enough time. Here’s a question: which one of us should bring the stereo? I woud like a stereo in the room. I can bring mine unless you were already going to bring yours.

  Yours Sincerely,

  Mary Rooney

  The benign missive riled Francine. Maybe it was precollege nerves, but she was irritated by Mary’s note, particularly the assumption that Francine owned a stereo—which she did, but still. Not everyone owned a stereo! What kind of person made such an assumption? There were people, like her friend Ellie, who did not. Francine wasn’t able to bring her stereo, anyway, as she shared hers with Bex, not because the Kleins couldn’t afford two stereos, but because one of Mrs. Klein’s bizarre rules was: No Doubles.

  In September of 1971 Francine moved to Massachusetts, having made the private vow never to return home again—not until she was her own person, independent, with her own life. She was immediately taken with New England, and the campus’s perfect, Olmstedian distillation of the region. The lake, the glacial topography, the conifers turning for autumn—she was smitten. She lived in stately Cazenove Hall. Mary Rooney turned out to be a decent person (though Francine regretted lying about smoking, which became an inconvenient secret to keep) and the camaraderie of her hallmates buoyed her through a rocky adjustment period. She made friends with interesting stories, and from interesting places: a physics wiz from the Upper Peninsula; the defecting lesbian heir to a retail empire; a poet with a summer home somewhere called Cape Cod. The lack of men was not a problem, for the most part. Francine missed boys, the sight of them, their charming sort of idiocy, but she was here to learn and become worldly, to be taken seriously. Wellesley was the kind of place that made serious women out of girls. And then there was Boston, the bus that took you from campus to Harvard Square, dropping you smack in the middle of all that history and brainpower, all that redbrick and iron-gated excellence.

  Home tugged at her sleeve every now and then. Mrs. Klein insisted that her daughter double major because French was a “thin” subject. Francine chose psychology. “Well, I suppose two thin subjects are better than one,” said her mother. Psych was less glamorous, but Francine had a knack for it. It would take a few years before she admitted to herself that she had a gift for the subject that she lacked in French, despite her enthusiasm for the latter. The DSM read like a road map to her parents’ minds.

  But her underclassmen years were leading toward one thing, one place, a place where she could use her education, a place where she could smoke in the open, in the streets: Paris. In the spring of her sophomore year she enrolled in a two-semester program that would take her there.

  * * *

  • • •

  The apartment was in the 5th arrondissement, near the métro Censier–Daubenton, and on weekend mornings the chatter and fuss of the markets on the rue Mouffetard massaged her consciousness, and Francine woke to the mingled smells of fresh bread and garlic sausage, the sounds of salesmen peddling Honduran grapefruit and California lemons, pigeon eggs, rabbit, char
cuterie. She lived with a friend from college, Linda Sussman, one-quarter Corsican and known at Wellesley as the MBWoC, or Most Beautiful Woman on Campus, who had managed, with a few tasteful photos posted across the Atlantic, to line up a boyfriend in Paris before she even set foot in Europe. Jean-Charles had blue eyes like Linda’s. His father was an Egyptologist.

  The apartment wasn’t much, a galley kitchen and a common space with an alcove that made for a semiprivate second bedroom, but who cared? This was Paris. Every morning Jean-Charles and his friend Guillaume, a film student, brought baguettes over. Francine and Linda would be waiting with coffee, butter, and jam. These four, plus the two Pierres (le Blond et le Brun) and a recovering heroin addict named Cecile, comprised a bande d’amis who met for lunch at the Quatre Sergents. The Quatre Sergents crew communed across from the Lycée Henri-IV after morning classes. There were all sorts of juicy dynamics to navigate. Guillaume had dated Cecile, and helped her get clean, but now Cecile was interested in Pierre le Blond. Linda, with her philosophy minor and Connecticut nose, had caused Jean-Charles to leave his ex, who was Guillaume’s sister. Nourished by this extremely French-seeming gossip (and Guillaume’s occasional flirtations), Francine enjoyed every minute at the Quatre Sergents. There was a jukebox stocked with American music in the back, and every now and then Pierre le Brun would put on “Johnny B. Goode” and sing with a heavy accent. They convened so often at the Quatre S that the owners, M. and Mme. T——, regularly stopped by their table to ask if anyone wanted cigarettes. Francine always said she did, in part because each time M. T—— returned with a pack of Rothmans rouge for her, he’d set it down and say, with a wink, “Rouge et mûr comme les tomates en Californie.”

  If being American lent Francine a bit of exotic intrigue, it was nothing compared to the status boost she received from rooming with Linda Sussman. Linda was built for a see-and-be-seen city like Paris, a city of street-facing chairs. The Bande du 4S had assembled around her. Even Guillaume, whose sister was heartbroken when Jean-Charles dropped her for Linda, could not hold a grudge against her beauty.

  On Saturday afternoons, Francine went to the movies. Linda was usually busy with Jean-Charles, or studying at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (though it was impossible to imagine anyone as ruthlessly stunning as Linda Sussman hunched over something as anachronistic as a book), but Guillaume, who found easygoing Francine a welcome change from manipulative, addiction-prone Cecile, was usually happy to tag along. They’d open a copy of Pariscope and survey the listings. This was the year of Francine’s cultural education. It was the year of Hitchcock, Antonioni, Godard, and Fellini. She watched only two contemporary films in all her time abroad. One was American Graffiti, at Linda Sussman’s homesick urging; the other, Can Dialectics Break Bricks?, at Guillaume’s.

  It was also a year of conventional education, albeit with a European-inflected air of intellect and theory that not even Wellesley, with all its rigor, could provide. For her thesis paper, Francine had chosen as her subject the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty was something of a minor figure in philosophy, when one considered the grand sweep of the field, but Francine identified with his position. She was not exceedingly ambitious, like Guillaume (who longed to pioneer a new movement in cinema), nor did she command attention like Linda Sussman. Francine was simply smart, and smart enough to know what she wasn’t capable of. She was never the standout in her Wellesley classes, never the Sartre. She was always the Merleau-Ponty—smart and dependable, contributing in discreet but important ways. And there was the added benefit of his field, phenomenology. Studying his work, Francine was in effect writing a psychology paper—it just happened to be in French.

  On Armistice Day, the whole Bande du 4S took a train to Café König in Baden-Baden where, vindicated by history, they ordered croissants and spoke loudly in French before giddily fleeing the scene. They spent the night in Strasbourg at Guillaume’s parents’ place.

  “Donc, Francine, tell me: What will you do with your life?” his mother said.

  The question had an odd ring to it. Francine realized her mother had never asked her this before. “Well,” she said, clearing her throat, “I think—I think I would like to study, and then practice, psychology.”

  Guillaume’s mother looked puzzled, then muttered something to her son. “Ah!” she said suddenly. “Psychologie! Bon.” She nodded meaningfully. “Good. I think you will do this. I think you will be magnifique.”

  Francine slept with Guillaume twice that winter, but felt nothing for him beyond friendship, and was happy to feel nothing. She had no need for anything more. Cecile dumped Pierre le Blond, found heroin again, and then, with Guillaume’s help, she quit. Nothing befell the Bande du 4S that friendship could not fix.

  In the spring, as soon as it was warm enough to travel, Francine and Linda booked a trip to Austria. In her last days, Grandma Ruth had signed a check for $1,000, which she passed, with shaky hands, to Francine. Francine had cashed the check but was unable to find a purpose for the money worthy of her grandmother—until now.

  A last-minute case of whooping cough kept Linda from going, but rather than invite Guillaume, Francine decided she’d go herself. Some time alone might be nice, she thought. Some time apart.

  She was a young woman traveling the continent by herself, and she took a certain amount of pride in her navigation of the buses and trains and the airport. She made her way into the valley, found a place to stay, and soon she was breathing in what people must’ve meant when they said “mountain air.”

  She wasn’t at peace for long.

  Never in her life was she able to figure out how, 4,500 miles away, her mother was able to track her down at the bed-and-breakfast in Innsbruck, but somehow, Mrs. Klein found her. The housekeeper called Francine inside and passed her the telephone.

  “Hello?”

  “Francine! It’s your mother.”

  “Mom?” She cringed at the hysterical voice.

  “That’s what I said. Listen. Are you there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Can you hear me?”

  “I can.”

  “It’s about your father.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “No, no, no! Everything is not okay! Your father is sick. It’s awful, awful. You should have seen him. He couldn’t swallow. Understand? He couldn’t swallow. His face was like mush. His words came out funny. Francine, he’s at the hospital now. You need to come home.”

  “Where’s Bex?”

  “She’s here.”

  “Is Dad okay?”

  “He’ll be fine. We’re bringing him home tomorrow. But it’s not the same. No, it’s not the same. You’ll need to come home.”

  “Mom. I’m in Austria.”

  “All the more reason to get here right away.”

  “I can’t come home. Not now.”

  “You went to France, you had your fun. Now it’s time to come home. You have certain responsibilities. Your father couldn’t swallow. His face was like mush.”

  The thought of returning to Dayton to take care of her father was inconceivable. Untenable. The provincialism! The narrow-mindedness! Her mother’s painted harlequins! The empty house next door, Grandma Ruth’s house, taken over, changed—no. It couldn’t be. Not when there were two months left in the semester. And the summer. The summer in Paris!

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t.”

  “Francine. Don’t be a brat. Don’t leave me here with him.”

  “You have Bex. That should be enough.”

  “I don’t want your sister, I want you. Come home.”

  Francine made a quick mental calculation. She had enough money to finish out her term, assuming some help from her friends. “I’m sorry.”

  “Francine Klein, you will come home. I gave you life, I raised you myself, without anyone’s help, I made sure you had food to e
at, I enrolled you in that school—you will come home. Understand? You will come home. It’s right that you should come back. It’s—it’s only fair.”

  The word gutted her. Fair. Tears wet her freckles. She had resolved not to return to Folsom Drive. Fair or not, she couldn’t do it.

  “No, Mother,” she said. “I’m staying.” Then she hung up the phone, turned around, and walked out through the front door to the porch where she’d been sitting. She pulled up her chair and took the last sip of the orange juice on the table before her. The mountains rose up with unqualified majesty behind the neat row of colorful buildings in the city center, close enough, it seemed, to touch. The peaks were draped with snow.

  “Noch eins?”

  She looked up. The housekeeper was standing in front of her, pointing at her glass. Francine must have seemed confused, dazed, because in the moment it took for her to realize herself and begin to formulate an answer, the housekeeper asked, in English, “Another?”

  NINE

  The tornado tore the roof off Concourse B.

  Though it took only thirty hours for the maintenance crew to restore the airport to 80 percent functionality, to determine which gates to reopen and how, to cordon off the areas that needed cordoning, to make cosmetic repairs and achieve a standard of operation that the FAA could, under pressure from the major carriers, deem “safe,” for an out-of-towner who hadn’t heard the news, the shabbiness of the building—the boarded-up windows, the doors slapped with caution tape, the blacked-out light fixtures—was cause for concern. Anyone could tell it was a perilous rush job. A ramshackle portent. And unfortunately for Arthur, his children did not require further proof that St. Louis was a low-rent city abandoned by history and held together with staples and glue.