—
Maman had the copper bathtub brought up to Papa’s studio, where the afternoon light stretched yawning across the room. I couldn’t lay in it, not enough to soak my whole back, so I sat on the floor in front of her chair. She dipped a washcloth into the warm saltwater and held it against my skin until some of the splinters, soft, worked their way to the surface.
“I saw something in your face, you know.” She squeezed the cloth in the basin and brought it again warm against my back. “I’ve always known when you were lying to me.”
“Maman, I’m not. I just—”
“Shhh.”
Water dripped down the curve of my spine. “It’s really not as bad as it seems.”
“Is that what you think?” Her voice was tight. The heat of the washcloth disappeared. “That this seems somehow worse than it is? I’m picking wood out from my baby.”
I’d seen men leave pieces of themselves on the battlefield. All of themselves. I didn’t answer her.
Around me were the shapes of my childhood. The skeletons of easels. Neat stacks of canvases. Moth-eaten armchairs and scroll-armed sofas. A tarnished cauldron. The head of a papier-mâché dragon. The trunks of costumes, the garishly painted swords and helmets, the swirls of silk scarves tied here and there. The props of a theater, in the studio of an artist. I’d grown up within it.
“I come up here more often these days.” Maman dropped the washcloth into the basin with a soft splash and picked up a pair of curved tweezers. “I know that things are dreadful out there. It’s a war, after all.” I bent my head closer to my crossed legs. “But here, safe in the château, surrounded by the beauty of Claude’s art…I can forget.”
For a quiet space of an afternoon, so had I.
“I try,” I finally said. I felt her tweezers against my back. “There’s art, even where I am.”
She paused. “Truly?”
“When we’re en repos, we stay—” I caught myself before I revealed troop movements. “We stay in a rocky area. Some of the men, they carve straight into the rock. The sound of the chisels against the stone, the smell of broken limestone, it all makes me…it makes me feel like I’m home again. Like I’m a boy again sitting beneath the worktable in your studio.”
Behind me, Maman had quieted.
I cleared my throat, embarrassed at my little admission. “There’s some real talent there. Men carving things that could find a place in Monsieur Santi’s gallery or one of the others on the Quai du Voltaire.”
She tapped the tweezers against the side of the basin.
“Insignia, rolls of honor, tapestries in stone. Memories of the things they left behind.” I rubbed at the damp hair at the nape of my neck. “One solider has been working on a wall with an allegory that would impress even Papa. Dancing peasants, toppled towers, swans, laurels, falling moons, Death crowned in crows’ feathers. Every time we are en repos, he adds a little more to the wall.”
“What have you carved?” she asked.
“Nothing.” I tensed as her tweezers found a deep-seated splinter. “I don’t know how to do that. I’m not the sculptor in the family.”
“You’ve watched me enough. You know the technique. And you’ve always been able to see beyond the two-dimensional.”
I didn’t tell her how my fingers traced the grooves in the stone walls, how they twitched to pick up a chisel, how they once drew Mille Mots in the dust on the floor of the caves. “I can’t.” A soldier who was never really an artist to begin with, he had no business taking up space on the walls of the cave. He wasn’t the person to leave a memorial behind. “But you could sculpt. You should. You used to be magnificent.”
I thought she’d bristle at the instantly regretted “used to,” but she was pensive today. “I’ve thought about it. After I made those little clay santons for the children at Christmastime, it was like something had been reawakened. I hadn’t sculpted in years, you know.”
“I know.” I looked around Papa’s studio, where she’d moved her tools all those years ago, where there’d always been a block of granite, half roughed out. It was all still there, the block covered over by a dust-choked cloth. “Then why haven’t you?”
She didn’t say anything for a moment. “It was so long ago. My art was a piece of my past, a piece that I had to put away as I grew up.”
“Papa never asked you to.”
“He didn’t have to.” Her words were steady, but her tweezing became more fierce. “He needed me at the desk, managing things. I knew that. The household needed someone not always lost in a fairy-tale world.”
I turned. “Do you know why I never wanted to enter art school? Why I never sought that future?”
The sunlight touched her graying hair with gold.
“It was because you stepped out of that future and into another. You put art aside in favor of practicality. I grew up watching you make do with Papa’s art rather than make your own. And be happy with it.”
“I was happy.”
“Did Papa and the household need you all that much?”
She stopped and put the flat of her hand against my back. “You needed me.”
“Not anymore.” I caught her hand. “I’m grown. I’m gone. Why not now?”
“You come to me with a back full of splinters, and then you tell me you’re grown and gone.” She took my shoulders and turned me around. “You still need me.”
I’d spent all these months protecting her, hiding from her the dangers I faced every day. Dodging shells and death, and then writing to her about last night’s cabbage soup.
She searched my eyes. “Luc, stay.” Her grip on my shoulders tightened. “I’ll watch you, I’ll hide you, I’ll keep you safe.” Her voice cracked. “Please.”
Instead of answering, I stood and went to the shelf where her old tools waited, shrouded. I took down the bundle, wrapped in soft cloth, and unrolled it on the floor in front of her. A dozen narrow chisels, a mallet, rasps and rifflers. Tools that hadn’t been touched in a decade and a half. She watched them warily.
“Take them up again.” I picked up the slender point chisel and opened up her hand. “In all of this ugliness, you need a weapon. You need to find beauty.”
She closed my fingers around the chisel. “I think perhaps you need it more than I.” Her hand wrapped around mine, around the faded ribbon still tied, and she pinched the inside of my wrist. A silent entreaty to stay safe and do my best. To be a good Crépet.
