The Second Sight, page 3
This was something the Rothchilds certainly did not know, unless Christopher had told them. Had he talked about her with these people? Lla Kahina gave Cathy a quizzical look.
“Is what I’m seeing about you the truth?” she asked. “You must help me or I won’t be able to go on.”
“I guess so,” Cathy said. “We’re connected through the Empress Eugenie, or so they say. Her mother was one of our cousins who married some ancestor of Don Jorge’s. It’s true about the painting, but I don’t think I look a bit like Eugenie.”
“Shuffle.”
Lla Kahina then told Cathy things about herself that she had to admit were true—that she had never liked to study, that she could not remember things, that she had never had friends, that her worst fault was jealousy, that she had only loved once, and this had been an overpowering love that was destroyed by jealousy. Still, Cathy was not impressed. These facts were common knowledge; even Maria knew that much about her, or could have guessed. God knew what Otto might know. He spied on everyone, all the time.
Cathy’s skepticism did not bother Lla Kahina. She asked Cathy to shuffle the cards over and over again. Sometimes nothing showed up.
Bored, Cathy said, “Does each card mean something?”
Lla Kahina looked up. “There is nothing in the cards themselves,” she replied. “I just use them to help me see.”
“What do you see? Is it like the movies?”
“No.”
Cathy cut the cards again and laid out the four piles. She could not get them even, and she tried to do it over again. Lla Kahina pounced, pressing the fingernail of her index finger into the back of Cathy’s hand.
“No. Leave them. There’s a reason why they’re not equal.” Lla Kahina picked up three more cards.
“I see why you have been fighting me,” she said. “You have secrets. Something very bad happened to you in a room where there were big pictures of you, photographs in which you look even more beautiful than you are.”
This was true. Cathy had decorated her apartment in Rome, the place where the man had beaten her, with huge enlargements of photographs of herself. But no one knew that. The apartment was a secret, the place where she met lovers.
Cathy’s hands trembled. Lla Kahina chose three more cards, then put them down.
“If you don’t want me to see more we can stop,” she said.
Cathy cleared her throat. “No. Go ahead.”
Lla Kahina picked up the cards. “You were beaten by a man you let make love to you. This man hates you, not you yourself, but what you are. He is a political, so he is like an actor, always living somebody else’s lie. He hates you because of his politics, because you are beautiful and American. But he went too far. You thought he was going to kill you. So did he. He could hardly stop himself in time. You were very close to death.”
Cathy, shivering violently, got up and pulled a blanket off the bed. Lla Kahina stopped talking. Cathy wrapped herself in the blanket and sat down again.
“Does this disturb you?” Lla Kahina asked. “We can stop if you like.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Cathy said. “Go on.”
Lla Kahina looked at more cards. “Who is this other man—the one you love so much?” she asked.
“My husband,” Cathy said.
“But he’s not your husband any longer.”
“No. Will he love me again?”
“No. Another woman is waiting for him already. He will love her, and no one else for the rest of his life.”
The symptoms of jealousy—shortened breath, quickened heartbeat, mental images of Christopher talking to other women, looking at other women, touching other women—flooded into Cathy’s breast.
“What woman?” she said. “What’s her name? What does she look like? Why does he love her?”
“She is nothing to do with you, she would have come anyway,” Lla Kahina said. “We should stop now.”
“I want to go on.”
Cathy raked in the cards, shuffled them rapidly, and cut the four piles. Her hands were steady and she was warmer now, wrapped in the blanket and heated by jealousy and anger.
Lla Kahina looked reluctantly at the cards, then put them down without speaking. She seemed to be very happy. Why?
“What do you see?” Cathy said. “Tell me.”
“You are with child,” Lla Kahina said.
5
CATHY LAY NAKED UNDER A SHEET IN THE GYNECOLOGIST’S OFFICE. The doctor wore a mirror on his forehead and a long white coat with his name, Docteur Jean-Henri Petitchou, embroidered above the pocket, like a garage mechanic in America. He had just discovered the half-healed incision made by the surgeon in Rome. There were just the two of them in the room; his nurse could be heard through the curtained glass door, talking on the telephone in the outer office. He looked down into Cathy’s face, his hand in its rubber glove resting negligently on her rib cage, just beneath her left breast. Cathy could hear him breathing; his long face was slightly flushed. She knew his symptoms well.
“Your surgery is quite recent,” he said. “What was it for?”
“I had an operation in Rome to remove my spleen.”
“Why?”
“I was in an accident; they said it was ruptured.”
“Italians! You’ll have a scar.”
“One expects to have a scar after surgery.”
“In your case it is a pity. Wonders can be done nowadays. We have excellent plastic surgeons in Switzerland.”
“I don’t doubt it. May I get dressed now?”
The doctor took his hand away and left the room, stripping off his gloves as he went. Cathy stood up, an act that was still painful after her surgery. Her clothes were hanging on a rack, the same ones in which she had said goodbye to Christopher in Rome—a green Loden cape she had bought two winters before in Saint Anton, a tweed skirt and blazer, and a cashmere sweater. She had left everything else behind in Rome, wanting nothing from her former life.
The gynecologist was waiting for her behind his desk when she went into his office. He had taken off his mirror and his stethoscope.
“We will perform the usual tests,” he said, “but there is no question as to your condition, Madame. You are well advanced into the second month of pregnancy. May I ask when exactly was your last menses?”
“Let me see your calendar,” Cathy said. He handed it over, politely turning it so that the print was right side up. She flipped the pages, then pointed to a date. “That is the date of conception.”
Acting again, the doctor raised his eyebrows. “You can be so sure?”
“There is no question. When will the child be born? I’m no good at arithmetic.”
“Normally, mid-April. But you should consider this carefully.” “Consider what carefully?”
“Whether to go through with it.”
“Go through with it? What choice do I have?”
The gynecologist smiled again, charmingly. “Pregnancy is not an irreversible condition,” he said. “In Switzerland, provision is made for women in your circumstances.”
“My circumstances? What circumstances are those?”
“This pregnancy could be—will be—quite dangerous for you and for the child.”
“Dangerous? I don’t understand. Is something wrong with the baby?”
“Madame, your spleen was removed almost, it would seem, at the same moment that your child was conceived. Recovery from such an operation is very taxing to the system.”
“I was told I’d never miss it.”
“Obviously your doctor did not realize your condition. The spleen is very important in pregnancy. It is the organ that discharges new blood cells into the system and filters out worn-out blood cells. The mother’s blood is vital to her child, and to herself.”
Cathy said, “What does my baby look like now?”
He shrugged. “Nothing. An embryo.”
“Does it have fingers and toes? Can it move?”
“As I said, it is an embryo, a thing, not a person,” the doctor replied. “You should not trouble yourself with such thoughts. I advise you to give up this thing, and then, after you are well again, to have another child.” He leaned forward in his white coat and smiled yet again. “It’s quite easy if you watch the calendar.”
Cathy listened in silence. Then she said, “You’re advising me to have an abortion. Is that what I am to understand?”
“We prefer to say therapeutic termination. But yes, that’s what I am proposing.”
“And you can arrange to do such a thing? I thought it was against the law.”
“So it is, in your country and most others, even in France. But this procedure is provided for under Swiss law if the physical or mental health of the mother is threatened. In your case one could argue that both are in jeopardy.”
“You think I’m mentally disturbed?”
“Certainly not. But as your condition progresses and your body tells you that it is not sufficiently healed from its injuries to manage a pregnancy, you will experience anxiety.”
“I’m experiencing it already, just listening to you.”
“There you are. The law requires that you consult another doctor who will confirm my diagnosis and concur in my recommendation for treatment.” He put his hand on the telephone. “Shall I make an appointment?”
Cathy said nothing.
“It is a simple procedure, perfectly safe,” Dr. Petitchou said. “You will come here one morning. An injection will be administered to help you relax. There will be only mild discomfort, nothing one could call pain, and then it will be over. You will rest for an hour, I will give you something to help you sleep when you go home, you will feel quite normal, and the next day…
He was already dialing the telephone.
“What about the next night?” Cathy said.
He gave her a look of surprise. “Madame?”
She placed a blue one-hundred franc note on his desk and rose to her feet.
The doctor cupped his hand over the mouthpiece. “If it is a question of religion, Madame,” he said, “let me explain that no religious question exists. I am myself a Catholic, and I assure you that life has not yet begun.”
“Does that cover your fee?” Cathy asked, pointing to the money. “Two hundred-fifty, if you please,” Dr. Petitchou said, hanging up the phone.
6
MARIA AND LLA KAHINA MET CATHY IN A CAFÉ IN THE PLACE DU Molard, just around the corner from the gynecologist’s office. Maria had seen her coming across the square and ordered tea for her. As Cathy took her chair, the waiter set it down, a thick seamed glass in a metal holder equipped with a handle like a tea cup.
“You ought to get one of these rigs for Otto,” Cathy said.
“He won’t use them,” Maria said. “Too crude. Where have you been?”
Cathy did not reply; she had said nothing to Maria about going to a gynecologist. She drank some tea. It was dark and terribly bitter. Cathy made a face and put the glass down. Lla Kahina, sitting opposite, tore open two fat packets of sugar and poured them into the cup.
Lla Kahina said, “Was I right?”
Swallowing, Cathy nodded.
“Right about what?” said Maria sharply.
Cathy said, “I think I’d like to buy some clothes. Do you know which stores to go to yet, Maria?”
Maria was not diverted. She said, “What was Lla Kahina right about?”
“Something she told me in the reading night before last.”
Maria looked from one woman to the other. “You’re pregnant,” she said. “I knew it. You looked different when you got off the plane. I mean it wasn’t just your face.”
Cathy held Maria’s stare for an instant, then picked up the bill and opened her purse.
“You are, aren’t you?” Maria said.
Cathy separated a hundred franc note from a large wad of Swiss money she had bought for dollars at the airport bank. She always carried a lot of money with her; because she so often got lost even in familiar cities, she had a fear of being left alone and helpless in a foreign place. Money was the universal language.
Maria looked at the francs in disgust; she had always thought that Cathy had too much money, in addition to too much beauty. “Don’t you have anything smaller?” she asked. “The waiter will complain.”
Cathy gave the waiter her hundred franc note and smiled at him. He bowed and scurried off to find change.
“See?” Cathy said. “He didn’t mind at all.”
Maria was not finished with Cathy. “Let me understand this,” she said. “Paul got you pregnant and then kicked you out?”
Cathy stood up and put on her cape. Across the room, a man watched her arched body as she swung the heavy garment around her shoulders.
7
THE NEXT MORNING AFTER BREAKFAST CATHY PLAYED FOR OTTO while Maria went shopping for groceries in the village. He had a small piano in his room, but it had a good tone. Sight-reading from a book of pieces she found inside the piano bench, she played the adagio from Schubert’s Fantasia in C major. She played it very well. Music was, besides riding, Cathy’s chief accomplishment.
Otto listened with his eyes closed. He was sitting up in bed against fresh pillows, wearing a silk polka-dot dressing gown and another of his ascot scarves. Otto’s bedroom, formerly the salon, was a gallery of his acquisitions: his Klee, his Persian rug that was ancient not merely antique, his Rembrandt drawing, his millefleurs tapestry, his Louis XVI commode and desk, his many books bound in calfskin and signed by the famous and near-famous authors who had been his intimate acquaintances.
“I haven’t heard that played in thirty years,” Otto said. “Paul’s mother used to play it in Berlin.”
“Paul’s mother played the piano?”
“Oh, yes. The Christophers always marry musical women. There’s a verse from ‘Der Wanderer’ that goes with that piece Lori always recited it before she played:
Die Sonne dünkt mich hier so kalt,
die Blüthe welk, das Leben alt,
and was sie reden, leeren Schall,
ich bin ein Fremdling überalln.”
“Translate,” Cathy said.
“It means, approximately, ‘The sun in this place seems to shine so coldly, the flowers fade, life is too long, what others say is empty words, I am a stranger wherever I go.’ It sounds much better in German—sentimental nonsense always does. Schubert was a pederast, you know, what the Vienna police called a chicken hawk. He and his friends stole little boys from the poor quarter and abused them. That’s why his music was hardly ever played in public in his lifetime. Decent Viennese wouldn’t listen to his work. He was an outcast.”
“Otto, how do you know these things? Why do you remember them?”
“I’ve lived as a foreigner in other people’s countries since I was younger than you. It doesn’t pay for an exile to forget anything.” He coughed, then chose a small flask from his tray of medicines. “Here. Put six drops of this in a glass of water.”
Cathy fixed the medicine and watched him drink it. She said, “Tell me about Paul’s mother.”
“She was highly intelligent,” Otto said, “and beautiful in that unflawed German style. Also daring, for her time and class. Paul was conceived out of wedlock, you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Maybe Paul doesn’t know, though God knows Lori kept very little from him; he was treated as an equal even as an infant. That drawing he has of the nude girl—that’s Lori, pregnant with him. The Gestapo arrested her before Paul’s eyes on the day before the day the war began. Very traumatic. They grabbed her off a train at the French frontier and sent Hubbard and Paul across the border. Lori and Hubbard had been smuggling Jews out of Germany on their sailboat; it was insane, the risks they took. Lori was never seen or heard from again. No one knows what happened to her. Hubbard never got over it. I don’t suppose Paul did, either. But I’m telling you things you already know.”
Cathy gazed at Otto for a long moment.
“No,” she said, “you’re not.”
“He never told you?” Otto said. “How odd. But you should talk to Lla Kahina. She knew Lori better than anyone.” He composed his lips in a smile. “Better, even, than Hubbard.”
8
THAT AFTERNOON CATHY TOOK A NAP IN THE BEDROOM, BUT WAS awakened at about five o’clock by a hand on her face. The hand smelled of dishwater. She opened her eyes and saw Maria standing over her, wearing a white sweater with an exaggerated turtleneck that looked like an Elizabethan ruff.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Maria said. “I want to talk to you.”
Wind and rain rattled the window. “Why can’t we talk here?” Cathy asked.
“Outside is better.”
Maria spoke in a low voice, almost a whisper. Cathy giggled. “You mean you think this place is bugged?” she said.
The paranoid drill of espionage—fear of microphones that did not exist, fear of being followed by enemies who were not there, the whole childish business of false names, passwords, and secret meetings—had always seemed ridiculous to her.
“It’s raining outside,” Cathy said. “Why can’t we stay inside and whisper, instead?”
“Just get your cape,” Maria said.
They walked down to the lake. Half a dozen swans bobbed up and down in the choppy water. The Alps were now obscured by a gray veil that was not quite fog, not quite cloud. Water and sky were the same shade of zinc. The wind blew steadily, creating a steady, nagging tone.
“The Bise, that’s the name of this wind,” Maria said in Otto’s tone of voice, telling Cathy something that she was far too American to know. “It blows for days at a time, all winter long. The sun never comes out. The Genevese commit suicide in droves; it’s worse than Budapest.”
Cathy, bundled up in her Loden cape, turned her back to the storm. Maria seemed to enjoy the rain and wind in her face. Foul weather had never bothered her. She had been the captain of field hockey at Farmington, and Cathy’s most vivid memories of her were ones in which Maria, plastered with mud and oozing blood from pink scrapes and scratches, sat around the locker room after a victory, leading the other girls in song.
