Madeleine Is Sleeping Read Free Page A

Paris that is covered with vines live twelve little girls in two straight lines.
    Madeleine is the twelfth girl. The smallest and the wickedest. Sister Clavel has been instructed to take special care of her.
    How the sisters wept when they first saw her! Her hands swaddled in snowy strips of muslin, Mother picking absently at the invisible insects that she feared were infesting the poultices. The sisters gave Madeleine a brand new prayer book and a straw hat strangled by a broad brown ribbon. She went with them happily.
    The other little girls stroke her bandages as if they were touching the hem of Christ. Their eyes grow enormous and glassy and she can hear the prayers escaping beneath their breaths, a slow hiss of perforated air. At night, as they lie in their two rows, the moon rises and she shadows it from her cot, her arms arcing like a ballerinas, her milky fists rising like two false moons, like two spectral dollops of meringue.
    She takes pleasure in her helplessness. Everyone must wait on her. She cannot even pee by herself. Bernadette, the eleventh girl, would like eventually to become a saint, so now she is practicing on Madeleine. She has made it her special duty to clean her when she menstruates, her little holy hands becoming sticky with the blood.
    Bernadette's fingertips are warm when she parts Madeleine's knees and passes a damp rag between her legs. From her cot, Madeleine can hear the plash of water against the bowl, the
trickling of fluids as Bernadette wrings the cloth. She waits for the firm hands that will pat her dry, tuck a clean rag against her wound, press together her splayed thighs. She wonders if the abbot at Rievaulx, when ministering to the bloodied Saint Michel, was as unflinching as Bernadette.

Delivery
    M. JOUY HAS NOT forgotten Madeleine. On Christmas Day, a brown paper package arrives from the hospital at Maréville; out of the package spills a fluttering array of drawings and charts. No message or holiday wishes enclosed. Mother walks into the village and asks the local chemist to decipher the contents.
    Ahhhh, he murmurs. They have measured M. Jouy's brainpan! And he holds up the diagram for her to see.
    It looks like the moon on its back, Mother observes.
    His anatomy is quite regular, no signs of degeneracy, the chemist continues, peering at a new sheaf. Oh, but look! His scapula is protuberant.
    Shuffling through the papers, the chemist hums to himself, his spectacles propped on the bald crest of his head. Mother furtively examines a bottle of whooping cough remedy that within days, it was rumored, could miraculously resuscitate even the most exhausted breasts.
    So, she interrupts, are they ungodly or not?
    Ungodly? the chemist echoes. He frowns briefly. Why, not at all!
    Are you sure?
    He clutches the drawings: These sketches are the work of medical professionals! It seems as if M. Jouy would like her to have them. As a keepsake, perhaps. This picture—he picks out a physiognomic chart—is a very good likeness.

Conversion
    THE DRAWINGS ACCUMULATE.
    The small brothers and sister discover that they make buoyant kites. Jean-Luc ties one apiece to the posts that support the pasture fence, and on gusty days, the kites swell into the sky, dodging and nodding to one another as if in conversation.
    Mother begins to enjoy the delicate swirls of the cranial diagrams, so she cuts them in quarters and decorates her pots of preserves.

Custom Made
    WHEN SISTER CLAVEL lays out her tidy uniform, Madeleine slips it neatly over her head, and then, with exuberance, her bulky fists burst through the careful seams, like twin whale snouts breaking the surface. So it is decided that she must have special dresses made for her, with long and liquid sleeves like those of an Oriental concubine. The diminutive tailor clangs the convent bell and Sister Clavel ushers him up the back stairwell and into a sunlit room, where Madeleine awaits him, perched on a tiny embroidered stool, wearing nothing but