A Place of Greater Safety Read Free Page A

marriage within the next five years. The time came to Jacqueline when sickness, then fear, then pain, was her natural condition. She did not remember any other kind of life.
     
     
    T hat day Aunt Eulalie read them a story. It was called “The Fox and the Cat.” She read very quickly, snapping the pages over. It is called not giving your full attention, he thought. If you were a child they would smack you for it. And this book was his favorite.
    She was quite like the fox herself, jutting her chin up to listen, her sandy eyebrows drawing together. Disregarded, he slid down onto the floor, and played with the bit of lace at her cuff. His mother could make lace.
    He was full of foreboding; never was he allowed to sit on the floor (wearing out your good clothes).
    His aunt broke off in the middle of sentences, to listen. Upstairs, Jacqueline was dying. Her children did not know this yet.
    They had evicted the midwife, for she had done no good. She was in the kitchen now eating cheese, scraping the rind with relish, frightening the servant-girl with precedents. They had sent for the surgeon; at the top of the stairs, François argued with him. Aunt Eulalie sprang up and closed the door, but you could still hear them. She read on with a peculiar note in her voice, stretching out her thin, white, lady’s hand to Augustin’s cradle, rocking, rocking.
    “I see no way to deliver her,” the man said, “except by cutting.” He did not like the word, you could see; but he had to use it. “I might save the child.”
    “Save her,” François said.
    “If I do nothing, they’ll both die.”
    “You can kill it, but save her.”
    Eulalie clenched her fist on the cradle, and Augustin cried at the jolt. Lucky Augustin, already born.
    They were arguing now—the surgeon impatient at the layman’s slow comprehension. “Then I might as well fetch the butcher,” François shouted.
    Aunt Eulalie stood up, and the book slipped out of her fingers, slithered down her skirt, fell and opened itself on the floor. She ran up the stairs: “For Jesus’ sake. Your voices. The children.”
    The pages fanned over—the fox and the cat, the tortoise and the hare, wise crow with his glinting eye, the honey bear under the tree. Maximilien picked it up and straightened the bent corners of the pages. He put his sister’s fat hands on the cradle. “Like this,” he said, rocking.
    She raised her face, with its slack infant mouth. “Why?”
    Aunt Eulalie passed him without seeing him, perspiration broken out along her upper lip. His feet pattered on the stairs. His father was folded into a chair, crying, his arm thrown over his eyes. The surgeon was looking in his bag. “My forceps,” he said. “I shall make the attempt, at least. The technique is sometimes efficacious.”
    The child pushed the door just a little, making a gap to slip in. The windows were closed against the early summer, against the buzzing fragrance from gardens and fields. There was a good fire, and logs lay ready in a basket. The heat was close and visible. His mother’s body was shrouded in white, her back propped against cushions, her hair scraped from her forehead into a band. She turned to him just her eyes, not her head, and the threadbare remnants of a smile. The skin around her mouth was gray.
    Soon, it seemed to say, you and I shall part.
    When he had seen this he turned away. At the door he raised a hand to her, a feeble adult gesture of solidarity. Outside the door the surgeon had taken off his topcoat and stood with it over his arm, waiting for someone to take it away from him and hang it up. “If you had called me a few hours ago …” the surgeon remarked, to no one in particular. François’s chair was empty. It seemed he had left the house.
    The priest arrived. “If the head would emerge,” he said, “I should baptize it.”
    “If the head would emerge our troubles would be over,” the surgeon said.
    “Or any limb,” the priest said hopefully.