A Rope Trick

In August 1924, one year after a honeymoon tour of India, Alain Coulbec pushed my grandmother down the servants’ stairs at their country home outside Paris. Bruised but uninjured, she promptly pushed the noted aviator from family history, fleeing to Tahoe with her trust fund and newborn son. It didn’t matter that Coulbec had crossed the Pyrenees in a plane that resembled a box kite; that he had flown a hundred combat missions over the trenches; that philatelists already prized his appearance, in goggles and helmet, on a rare-issue, one-centime postage stamp that commemorated an altitude record set in 1919. Coulbec was history to Agatha Babcock, and she sealed the divorce with eyes rolled skyward and thin-lipped smiles if the Frenchman was ever mentioned. She called him “a closed chapter—and a short one.” She mocked anyone who tried to look back. Motivations weren’t important. “The past is past,” was her mantra.

Even twenty years later, when Coulbec disappeared over occupied France, my grandmother spurned all the prying reporters who promised to tell “her side of the story.”

“There is no story,” she answered. “There isn’t even a body!”

Now the storyteller is gone. My grandmother died last week, in her old brass bed, leaving me with the mystery of her first husband, the famous stranger whose name I inherited. To tease her, I used to call him “grandpere, twice-removed by divorce.” To tease me, she’d offer crumbs from her past, a dubious privilege earned by no one else in the family.

Her doctor had pushed me to listen, explaining that it would help the old lady bounce back from her stroke. The prescription surprised me, but I followed orders. I carried bouquets from Rasmussen’s Floral. I emptied her ashtrays without complaint and called the corner pharmacy when required.

One day, at the clinic, the doctor said that grandmother’s behavior fit a familiar pattern.

“That smoking eventually kills you?” I asked.

He paused and tipped his head at me and I suppose he finally noticed that I had been crying. His brown eyes fixed on mine and he touched my shoulder.
“I meant that it’s common for this kind of patient to talk—it may not add up, it may be confusing, but her stories are a sign of recovery. Things are going to be fine.”

“Not in the long run.”

“ ‘In the long run’?” he asked. His eyes crinkled and his weariness lifted and I saw that the doctor was close to my age, a harried employee who had skipped a button on his rumpled lab coat and seemed askew in other ways, too: old shoes that needed a polish, a broken nose that turned to the right, a bit of gray stubble under his double chin. He started to laugh and I joined him—a long, loud peal that echoed down the tiled hall of the clinic so that everyone in the nurses’ station turned to look at us.

“When you talk like that, you sound just like your grandmother,” he said.

Grandmother launched into a coughing jag when I mentioned Dr. Saxena’s remark. “That’s priceless,” she gasped. “Is that little Buddha saying that you wake yourself up with wheezing? That you need to catch your breath after every sentence? I mean, you can cover the waterfront with this family-resemblance stuff. Do I resemble anyone? Does anyone have a crumpled paper bag for a face? And what does it matter if you’ve inherited Coulbec’s long nose? You can hardly see past it, darling—especially with it always stuck in a book.”

The fact that I worked at a library meant nothing to Grandmother. She argued that books were put to better use in her girlhood when she was required to balance a volume of Kipling atop her head, gaze into an imaginary distance, and glide amid the overstuffed chairs and draperies of an Edwardian living room. She couldn’t grasp that books keep me company. I’m one of those girls who always carries a paperback in her purse, the kind of girl you notice at corner tables, who turns pages slowly and never looks up—or if she does, it’s to peer through thick lenses, still dreaming with eyes wide open. When I picture Coulbec’s life, for example, I end up with an adventurer of the nineteenth-century model, a cad from a popular novel patched together from grandmother’s stories. Without quick thinking, he might have ended his days in a cannibal’s stomach. He carried the scar of a Bedouin knife and startled several doctors with shrapnel-filled X-rays. I suppose grandmother left her mark on him, too.

Miss Agatha Babcock was another kind of adventurer, an American heiress drawn to the hero she met at a Norman airfield. She had traveled all night from Paris, sobered by the air in an open car, her scarf flying as her passengers guzzled whiskey and promised to introduce her to Alain Coulbec. It had seemed such a fine idea when they left the city, but the riders had all passed out by the time grandmother drove onto the tarmac. Her friends had buried their heads under coats. They sprawled on the seats with mouths agape, snoring loudly as the engine of her Daimler ticked down to silence. A windsock fluttered feebly and the breeze tasted of Channel salt, and she squinted across a vast, closely mowed field where the rising sun lit a million dewdrops and glinted from the polished metal skin of the monoplane. Coulbec wore greasy coveralls. He clutched a rag in one fist, rattled orders to a mechanic and seemed not to notice her—a provocation grandmother couldn’t resist. Coulbec had reached the height of his fame and she had just been dismissed from another finishing school. She favored rakish hats, cut her hair in a bob, and stood close to six feet—no resemblance to the hunched old woman I came to know at the end, the skeleton with the girlish laugh, talking endlessly as she plucked cigarettes from a pack balanced on the bedside oxygen tank.

She never finished that story. I drove her from home to the hospital, running every red light so I wouldn’t kill the faltering engine of my rusty Ford. When the nurses took over, they asked me to wait outside. They leaned the door, but I caught a glimpse of grandmother—my last glimpse, I feared—with her skin turning blue and a mask strapped over her face. She lifted her head and waved at me, like a jaunty pilot chosen for an especially dangerous mission.

And so I waited—a task for which I happened to be “especially suited,” according to grandmother. “I’ve seen you at that library. Half the job is waiting for someone to trudge up the stairs. And really, now, I don’t want to be cruel, but I can guarantee that it’s never going to be someone like Alain Coulbec! That kind of man doesn’t come to the bait. You have to pursue him. You have to take some initiative.”

Grandmother never lacked for initiative. If I propped her up and brought her a drink, she’d rattle off the names of a dozen lovers as though she were reciting an ancient dance card. She recalled moonlit walks and kisses, a romance on a cross-country train, a two-day cruise from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Even after the stock market crash, enough income remained to support a string of husbands, men who burned through the rest of her cash as she moved from the big house at Sand Point, to the cottage in Saratoga, to our little town, outside Plattsburg, where fortunes rarely rise or fall and people assume, quite rightly, that no one will amount to much. Consider my father—her only child—who dropped through the ice on a late-season duck-hunting trip in the Adirondacks. He never bobbed up, although he was famous for arguing that booze is lighter than water. After the funeral, my mother moved south, and soon fell into a marriage with a Pensacola attorney. If she calls we discuss the weather, or her stepson, or her honest surprise, after so many years, at finding tropical fruit in her overgrown garden. I never mention the past and neither does Mom. “Let’s leave that crap to your grandmother,” she announces.

On good days, Grandmother wouldn’t stop talking. She shuffled a handful of photographs and dredged up a ring I’d never seen and sent me to dig an ancient valise from the back of a closet. It held Coulbec’s breakfast set—bowl, spoon, and silver napkin ring in a nest of crumpled paper. I lifted the set from its hiding place and balanced it on the tips of my fingers and felt like one of those scientists who conjure a dinosaur’s shape from a shattered jawbone. Each tarnished piece bore Coulbec’s crest, a rampant hawk, half-hidden by dents and scratches acquired on five continents.

“Are you starting to get the picture?” Grandmother asked.

“Maybe a little—he seems like a dreamer, like someone who was never satisfied with the things he had.”

Grandmother snorted and reached for a cigarette. When she had it lit, she looked at me sharply. “Coulbec was a doer—you’re the dreamer.”

Her words hung between us like the smoke coiling from her cigarette.

“What does that make you?” I asked.

“Oh, me? I’m the patient, darling. I’m the one who’s dying. Doesn’t that bring some privileges?”

That Fall, I learned that the buzz of a prop plane, no matter how distant, stirred memories of Coulbec for grandmother. She talked and I could picture him near the end, an old man risking another crash, approaching some aerodrome in a heavy fog. He fixed on the night with the glazed eyes and rigid neck of a mannequin. When he banked right, beads of condensation branched on the windscreen. He saw a cluster of haloed lights far ahead. He sought a triumph to cap his career, a crowd to cheer his arrival.

If dreams had a smell, this one would reek of oily smoke and anxious sweat in a cabin that Le Monde once described as “somewhat smaller than a coffin.” Coulbec’s hands and feet would be icy, his vision blurred. But in my dream the old man’s instincts remained as true as a compass.

Night flights were always his pleasure, reminding him of the arc of heaven beyond the Marne, barely eight years old and observing a milk-blue comet through an uncle’s telescope. Fireflies had brought stars to earth at the meadow’s edge. The dark brimmed with crickets and frog songs. Water trickled over the weir. Decades later, those sounds joined the throb of his engine, his sole company in the fog.

“We’re keeping her overnight. We want to observe.” Dr. Saxena stood by my table in the far corner of the hospital cafeteria. He didn’t ask to sit down. He just did it. So I pushed my plate aside and tried not to look surprised. “We’re lucky you got her here so quickly,” he said. “It looks like a relapse.”

“That’s not what my grandmother calls it—not a ‘relapse.’ She tells me she’s dying. She’s been saying it for weeks.”

The doctor looked away—at the coffee cup in his knotted hands, at the half-lit cafeteria where chairs were upturned on tables and the clock had stopped an hour ago, at the moment when I’d come down here, abandoning my post in the waiting room.

The doctor sighed. “It’s not uncommon for patients to seek control. For them, it’s a matter of dignity.”

“Is it dignified to hurt my feelings?” I asked. “Grandmother smiles when she talks about dying. She acts like she can walk away from anything—from her life and from me. Does she think I don’t care about her?”

My heart was pounding. I wanted to drag the truth from Dr. Saxena—the facts or his feelings or whatever it was that had brought him here in the night. I hated that he seemed embarrassed in that quiet way that I know so well—a discomfort that keeps me from hoping, that keeps me turning the pages of romantic novels, that keeps me nodding, unable to speak until events pass me by.

“Does she talk to you about someone called Alain Coulbec?”

“That’s all she wants to talk about!” I pounded the table and the doctor’s coffee splattered the front of his lab coat. “Oh, God, I’m sorry—”

I jumped with a handful of napkins, but the doctor gestured for me to sit as he slowly dabbed at the stain. “This is just why we wear these things,” he said. “It’s a messy job—in all kinds of ways. Patients talk to us as if we could give absolution. We hear it all—beginning with anger. Sometimes you can smell their fear. With others, you see the regret in their eyes. But your grandmother is different.”

“She’s like Coulbec,” I said.

“So you’ve met him?”

The doctor leaned forward and I didn’t know what to say. The stories came in a jumble, just as Grandmother had told them, except that I was whispering with eyes fixed on a half-eaten burger and French fries. I couldn’t make myself eat. So I fell back on public triumphs, the kind that anyone could trace on the fly-specked globe in the library reading room. Faded by decades of sunshine, the globe mapped a world of colonial powers where a Frenchman might push his wife down the stairs, might disappear on a night flight, then show up years later: a ghost in a grainy snapshot, sporting jodhpurs and a riding crop despite a pilot’s professed aversion to horseflesh.

And so I spun the globe for Dr. Saxena. I spun it and Coulbec began to move: step by step across the Hindu Kush with a mule train packing his glider, by sail to the Azores in record time, always walking away from crashes, from women, from anything that might compromise his ability to nap at a moment’s notice.

When I peeked at the doctor, he was reaching across the table. He plucked a limp fry from my plate and chewed it meditatively.

“Go on,” he said.

And so I did.

I went on, as I always do.

Bear that in mind if anyone asks why a trained librarian lets the telephone ring without answering. Why I know the name of every neighborhood dog, but rarely get out at night. Why the pregnant women with strollers always seem to be former classmates who want to know how I’ve been—as if the appearance of one long dead were an everyday matter on Main Street. I always admire their babies—the blond bundles with wiggling toes, the redheads with tumbling curls, the girls and boys, the blue and pink, who have already staked a place in the dappled light of oak-lined streets, under falling leaves, where the whole of creation seems varnished—an old, old globe of golden light, sealed away from the air, dimming gradually, over centuries, so that time lags and events grow shadowed, even those involving Dr. Saxena, who once held my hand as I wept in the basement lunchroom of Mercy Hospital, who offered a potent tranquilizer, who said it was OK to let the tears flow, that it was plain that my grandmother meant the world to me and I thought, No, it’s Coulbec who really matters.

Do you see him now? On his final flight, the old man smiles faintly, as I do when I am alone, caught in the glow of the cockpit instruments. He still has an hour of fuel—and he’s far ahead of his rivals. Pallozzi and Berger are dead. Vian has turned to his memoirs, Hackwood to the family estate. Other pilots are gone, reduced to a line in the record books, their souls consigned to hand-tinted slides—now fading—which once drew crowds to the lecture halls of Europe. In those days, flight was a novelty. Now even poets disdain such venues: stained ceilings, ripped seats, and a mustiness that might be memory’s scent: brittle letters and crumbling diaries; open trunks exhaling the past.

That’s the smell I adore in the library’s farthest stacks, where sunlight never penetrates and the hush wraps me like a blanket. An old man can’t breathe in such an atmosphere. But Coulbec coughs and stirs to life if I close my eyes, if I press my brow to the cracked leather spine of Wortham’s three-volume History of the Presbyterian Church in Massachusetts. A browser, stumbling into me, might guess that I was praying. But I’m just paying attention to the hum of the fluorescent lights and the rustle of icy air from the ceiling vents. Somewhere in that noise I can hear Coulbec’s plane in the distance. He leans into the controls and holds the plane level. He peers ahead, still hoping that those distant lights are Le Bourget’s beacons, that he will have crossed something more than a finish line.

In his forearms he feels the plane’s power, but darkness looms amid darkness as fog spawns hillsides and trees to tangle his wings. Pulling higher, he whistles a fragment of melody, repeating it under his breath. He taps the dials, which seem too steady. He rubs his eyes and wonders if a crowd has begun to gather. Are they lining the rainy field just outside the lights, pilgrims pressing the fence, awaiting an apparition, looking upward at the sound of the plane’s approach?

Grandmother said that she and Coulbec had joined a similar crowd outside Delhi, a thousand faces turned up like flowers at midday, each following a fakir’s rope as it uncoiled over their heads, stretched full-length, and held in mid air. Later, at their hotel, the English manager had volunteered explanations, invoking mass hypnosis, the Hindu mind and the well-known suggestibility of crowds. The honeymooners had laughed at him. The manager hadn’t been there, squinting into the sun. He hadn’t seen the miraculous ascent. He hadn’t felt the power of that neat, brown man who never acknowledged his silent audience. At the top, the fakir had vanished—was he ever up there? Then he reappeared amid fallen rope, which he coiled as the crowd tossed coins.

Grandmother called it a mystery, but I’m not sure about that. What is so mysterious about anyone’s disappearance? The rope tossed in air, the plane lost over France and never recovered—aren’t these just the theatrical side of a common experience? I mean when friends turn their backs, when the calls and letters stop coming, when a ninety-six-year-old woman dies in her sleep—or this, my own disappearance, when I gaze at life through the eyes of an ancient stranger, when I struggle for words, when I speak to you and the only answer is silence.