Keep the Baby, Faith Page 3

  And then there was the business about where she wanted to go to college. Mr. Gold, the principal, intimated that in light of her situation, admissions departments would be inclined to disregard the inevitable drop-off in her grades over those last two marking periods, so Faith didn’t really need to worry about any of the applications she’d filled out back in the fall.

  Even Sue, possibly her only friend, had come up with the idea of their going to the same place. Faith loved Sue, she really did, but it was just impossible. She wished people wouldn’t ask her to explain.

  Anyway, Faith had already decided college was out of the question. There was just no way she was going to put herself in that kind of situation, where everyone she met would be bright and nervous, eager to make new friends. Where are you from? Decided on a major? What does your father do?

  No. There was no way she was ready to face that question from a hundred, a thousand, kids her age with full sets of parents and homes to go to. She had to get away.

  No one could stop her. She’d turned eighteen at the beginning of June, old enough to vote, drink, join the Army, get married, whatever she wanted. She was decidedly old enough to get a passport.

  And she had money. There was the insurance money, and the money her father had invested for her. The income was plenty for a girl of simple tastes to live on. She could go to college any time.

  But first, Europe. Paris. After years of pain and bedpans, Faith wanted glamour, and excitement, and all the other clichés a well-read Westchester adolescent can pick up about the Queen of Cities. Above all, she wanted something foreign and new. She wanted to drown herself in new stimuli—if she spent her time wondering what the man in the charcuterie was trying to tell her about the jambon fumé, she couldn’t be wondering if she’d cared enough, done enough, to make her father’s going less painful, more dignified.

  She would go to Paris. She would learn French (she’d taken Spanish in school). She would talk to people, tourists and natives, when she felt the need, but when the questions led her down painful ways, she would remember an engagement, or she would not have enough of the language. She would find herself an apartment, in a non-touristy area. She would walk boulevards and sit in cafes and go to museums and see landmarks until she was exhausted, and she would come home and go right to sleep. She might have an unpleasant dream or two, but she had unpleasant dreams already.

  She might even, she told herself, try to write. She had harbored a desire to write since she was ten; it was a mark of their friendship that she’d told Sue about it. She and Sue used to do comic books; Faith would create elaborate swashbuckling adventures, with plucky heroines “who while not beautiful, had about them an air of spirit and mischief that drew men to them as iron filings to a magnet,” and resourceful heroes of a handsomeness limited only by Sue’s ability to draw them.

  Now, maybe Faith would find out if she could finally admit her desire to write to a wider circle, maybe even do something about it. The only thing wrong with that (and the objection used to make Faith smile—about the only thing that did, lately) was that Faith hoped to be the kind of writer who’d be original enough to reject the musty cliché about alienated young Americans Coming To Paris To Write.

  She went to Paris, anyway. She learned a lot of things that weren’t clichés—or, a lot of things she hadn’t known before, at least. Like how much it rained. Faith arrived in the middle of September, and stood in line in the rain outside the tourist office on the Champs-Elysées, hoping that one of the fashion buyers that pack the city at that time of year (she hadn’t known about that, either), would drop dead, or go home, or find religion and enter a convent, or get arrested. Anything that would free up a hotel room and get her out of the rain.

  Eventually, she found a hotel to stay in—three hotels, actually, since the vacancies were only available for a day or two at a time. She got used to showers in the rooms, but toilets down the hall. She faced the fact that it was impossible for an American to use a bidet without feeling like a complete idiot. She went out and explored the city. And fell in love with it. It rained eighteen of the first twenty-one days Faith stayed in Paris, but she just bought an umbrella and went out on every one of them.

  She bought French bread, French pastry, French peanuts. She rode the Métro, everywhere. Or she walked the Métro. At the Charles de Gaulle-Étoile stop, Faith estimated it was possible to walk a mile and a half underground to get from one train line to another. None of the guidebooks she bought had anything to say about the topic.

  She went to museums and shops. She went to Shakespeare & Co., the successor to the famous bookstore and literary hangout of the great writers of the twenties, Hemingway and the rest. The ones who’d come to Paris to write before it became a cliché. She respected the history, but was disappointed with the place itself, which was musty, badly organized, and more than a little smug. Also, the roof leaked.

  Faith found, through a combination of diligence and luck, an apartment in the fifteenth arrondissemént, in a modern building with an elevator and a friendly young concierge. It cost approximately one third what the equivalent apartment in New York would cost. It was, like practically all the apartments in France, furnished. She settled in, bought a typewriter, and began to write.

  Nothing serious, of course, nothing she actually expected (or wanted) to be published. Just thoughts, descriptions. Restaurant reviews. Film reviews. She saw a lot of movies in Paris, American movies, in English (“VO” for version originale), with French subtitles.

  She didn’t write any letters. Not to the Golds, not to Sue. She kept telling herself she should, but just thinking of it reminded her of home, and that reminded her of her father, and that made her want to think of something else.

  It wasn’t that she wanted to be cut off from America. Living in Paris, Faith became a better-informed citizen than she ever had been living in the States. She bought the International Herald Tribune every day, and read every word. She got the international editions of Time and Newsweek, and read them cover to cover. Every week, she went to the W. H. Smith bookstore on the Rue de Rivoli, and bought the New York Times Book Review, People, Sports Illustrated, and every other American magazine she could get her hands on.

  She followed America like a soap opera, clucking her tongue over campaign gaffes, or smiling at the celebrity gossip. She found that there was a peculiar calming, insulating effect to living abroad. The problems that caused ulcers for concerned Americans looked much smaller from a distance. And it was obvious that everybody in France (everyone in Europe, she later learned) was obsessed with America and things American. They ate American breakfast cereals (that came with instructions that said “pour on milk—cold milk is best”). They wore American blue jeans, and T-shirts from American colleges. They drove American cars, when they could afford them. They watched American TV shows—“Dynasty” (and God help us, Faith thought) was the top-rated show in both England and France.

  Whether they professed to love America or hate it, they never stopped using it as the standard against which everything at home was measured, from economic stability to cultural influence. Faith found it hard to worry too much about her country when she was surrounded by people who (a) depended so much on it; and (b) didn’t seem to be too worried themselves.

  And she made new friends. North Americans, mostly—she was learning French rapidly, but not rapidly enough to have the kind of conversations that could lead to anything. At first, the friends found her—a Canadian couple she met at the laundromat on the end of her block, the only decent one, they assured her, in Paris. He was an engineer, and they’d just decided to take a year off and Do France Before They Were Too Old. They helped Faith a lot, answered a lot of questions for her. After a month or so, they went back to Calgary.

  As she learned more of what was going on, Faith began to adopt people the way the Canadian couple had adopted her. People scratching their heads in front of Métro maps, or sitting in cafes wondering what hamburger au chevaux could
be. Middle-aged people, mostly, or young couples with kids. Most people seemed delighted to hear an American voice, which kind of made Faith wonder why they’d come to France in the first place. For her part, Faith got a kick out of playing Old Paris Hand. It was good for her confidence. It made her feel grownup, and that, she guessed, was the real idea behind all of this—she had run away to grow up.

  For that reason, she avoided places like the Bureau de Change at the American Express office near the Opéra, or the cafes or fast food joints around the Boulevard Saint Michel, where the students from the Sorbonne hung out. She didn’t want to meet college students; she especially didn’t want to meet American college students studying abroad. They’d think she was one of them. They’d ask the same questions. They’d want dates, and Faith had had dates before. They’d probably want sex, which Faith had not yet experienced, and frankly did not think she was ready for.

  She steered clear of student-aged Americans until just before Christmas, when she took up with Bess.

  It was a cold winter, colder than Westchester. There was a fierce, dry wind that burned and chapped your skin, and sometimes it blew small, abrasive snowflakes before it, so that it felt like you were walking through a storm of Ajax. The weather didn’t discourage the crowds from their last-minute Christmas shopping, and it didn’t deter Faith from exploring.

  She preferred, however, to walk at a New York pace, New York being the only big city she’d known before coming to Paris. It was a pace somewhat faster than the Parisians liked—except when they sprinted along the already rapidly moving sidewalks in the Métro, of course. And with current conditions, Faith would be lucky to be able to get moving at all. There was a large, American-style shopping mall across the street from Faith’s building, and the sidewalks and a good part of the streets were packed solid with people.

  It occurred to her that this freezing afternoon of December 23 would be an ideal time for her to explore the neighborhood around the university. She’d see a few students, of course, but the weather would keep people from talking, and all of the Americans would have gone home for the holidays by now.

  That same idea had not occurred to Bess Waters of Hillsdale, New Jersey, who was visiting Paris over the holidays with her widowed mother. Bess was looking for American students to meet, or English-speaking people of any kind, or stray dogs, or anybody she could talk to. Her mother, it seemed, as she frequently did on these trips, had Found Romance, and Bess was sort of in the way. Faith first saw Bess feeding a one-legged pigeon in the Place de la Sorbonne. She was telling the pigeon not to be greedy, but the bird wasn’t listening.

  She sounded so miserable, Faith forgot her various resolves, and went over to talk to her. At that, it wasn’t so bad, because aside from what’s your name and where are you from and what brings you to Paris, Bess didn’t ask any questions. She talked about herself, and never (mercifully) seemed to notice that Faith volunteered no information of her own. Mostly she talked about How Wonderful Her Mother Was, so alive, so fun-loving. And beautiful, really, simply gorgeous, you’d never believe she was as old as she was. She talked about How Close she and her mother were.

  She didn’t say she hoped her mother choked, but Faith heard it loud and clear between the gushes.

  Anyway, Bess invited Faith to spend Christmas with Mother and her. Faith, who’d been dreading Christmas—being alone, remembering her father in an apron, fixing the best turkey stuffing in Scarsdale—was delighted to accept. Also, Bess had something she wanted to do Christmas Eve. Once again, Bess said nothing about one thing depending on the other, but living in a different language had taught Faith to read between the lines.

  Bess wanted to go to Midnight Mass at Notre Dame. They’d been here for Christmas three times, and she’d never made it to Notre Dame—never made it to mass at all, actually. By the time Christmas Day rolled around, Mother was usually too tired to be bothered, and it would be such a drag to go by yourself…

  Faith had no great enthusiasm for the plan, but she agreed. Something else to do, something else to see. She didn’t think she was going to change her whole life.

  They made plans. They’d meet tomorrow at seven-thirty, and take the Métro to the cathedral. Afterward, they’d go back to Faith’s apartment (Mother would undoubtedly be Out). Then Christmas morning, they’d join Mother and whoever, and have Christmas dinner.

  Things did not exactly go according to plan. Faith never met Mother, and she never saw or heard from Bess again after the end of the mass. Faith didn’t mind. It was months before she even realized it.

  CHAPTER SIX

  IT WAS COLD CHRISTMAS Eve, and the night was so clear Faith could almost believe, the way the ancients had, that the sky was a crystalline sphere. Stars shone around the towers of Notre Dame, peeping at her under the flying buttresses. Everyone, Faith noticed, was walking with his head up, even though this meant stretching necks from the protection of scarves (everybody in France wore scarves all the time) and exposing the flesh to the night air. It was all very beautiful.

  Then she reached the cathedral itself. She and Bess found themselves part of a huge, noisy crowd, a sort of sidewalk UN, jostling and shoving, and just generally making itself obnoxious in a dozen languages. Unbidden, the word “rabble” came to mind. She remembered the old movie that had scared her so much when she was a child, with Charles Laughton pouring boiling oil, or molten lead, or something unpleasant on the crowd surging below. She was beginning to understand what he had in mind.

  Still, the press of bodies tempered the wind. The only part of her that was still freezing was her feet. The sidewalk sucked the heat from them. Faith was aware of them only as a dull ache.

  It took forever. Bess got into a mutually incomprehensible conversation with a family of Danes, who seemed to be enjoying the weather. “Do you like Paris?” Bess would ask brightly.

  “Ja,” the Danes would reply earnestly.

  “How long are you going to stay?”

  “Ja,” the Danes would reply earnestly.

  And so forth. Faith tuned out after sixteen Jas, and concentrated on her feet. At one point, there was some excitement when a shock wave of twisting bodies and bad language(s) made its way through the crowd. Faith was somewhere near the focus of the phenomenon, and was nearly knocked off her feet.

  “What happened?” Bess demanded. “What happened?”

  Amazingly enough, she got an answer from a faceless voice somewhere in the crowd, speaking English with an accent Faith couldn’t recognize.

  “He is wait too long,” the voice said. “He is drink too much, so he make the water. Then he is punch in the mout’ by a man, because he make the water on the trouser of the man.”

  “Merry Christmas,” Faith muttered. Bess said, “Isn’t this exciting?”

  “These people are supposed to be coming here to worship.”

  “But it’s a holiday,” Bess protested.

  After that, Faith decided on silence. She knew it was a holiday, and she knew the word holiday came from “holy day,” and this was Christmas for God’s sake, and these people were supposedly waiting to go to High Mass, and even though she wasn’t much of a Catholic, Faith had more respect for the church, for the idea of church in general, than most of them seemed to.

  About nine o’clock, a priest in a black cassock began appearing periodically from an insignificant door behind a fence to sneak looks at the crowd. Counting the house, maybe, or just teasing. Faith decided he was trying to be on hand to administer Last Rites to anyone who might freeze to death.

  Faith shifted from foot to foot, and wondered how long it would take before she became one of his first customers.

  At nine-thirty, they opened the huge (maybe fifteen feet high, six inches thick), metal-studded wooden doors. They swung back ponderously, but with no noise that could be heard above the crowd.

  Up till now, this expedition had been merely uncomfortable and inconvenient. Now it became a nightmare.

  They rushed the place.
As soon as the electrically simulated candlelight shone through the crack between the doors, this international gathering of the devout roared like a storm on the ocean and surged forward like a lynch mob.

  Faith knew she and Bess would be separated. Before she’d finished the thought, the mob pinched between them and swept Bess away.

  “Wait inside!” Faith screamed. “Inside the door!”

  Bess apparently decided it made no sense straining her voice, too. She just nodded emphatically, and gave herself up to the current.

  Faith didn’t move fast enough, and the press of thousands of heedless bodies pushed her hard into a low stone wall at the base of the fence of metal spears that surrounded the cathedral. The edge of the rock dug cruelly into the back of Faith’s calves. She could feel her balance going, but fear of being trampled to death made her fight to keep on her feet.

  The only thing to do now was to rush forward herself, become part of the cattle stampede rushing for the big wooden doors, get inside. The idea of being killed trying to get into a church bothered her.

  That’s when she saw the baby. A dark-haired, dark-eyed little girl, maybe three years old. White tights, patent-leather Mary Janes, and the edge of a pink dress were visible at the bottom of the kid’s coat. Her holiday outfit, no doubt. She was probably a pretty child, but it was hard to tell, because now her face was wet with tears and twisted with terror.

  The little girl was staggering under the weight of collisions with adult legs. Faith didn’t know what was keeping her from falling. Trampling feet drowned out the child’s voice, but Faith could read her lips—maman.