13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [31]
“Is it because of this that we cannot make love now?” he asked of the cross, its metal warmed by her skin.
The question bit fiercely at Louise’s heart, and she wondered if he meant to hurt her with it. She decided that he was in earnest when she saw his eyes, so lost and boyish. It was difficult for her to imagine the sweet and befuddled young men in her life—her cousins and her own brother—as soldiers. And the men who were old enough to be prepared for a battlefield, like her father, such men were too old to fight. There was no suitable age, but no matter. They all served anyway.
“You know I’m yours,” she whispered. “You know you’ll have me.”
“All right,” he said, looking for some measure of happiness in this promise. To seal it, he decided to give her a present, though he hadn’t thought of doing so until just that moment. He sat up and reached for a thing in his pants pocket, and pulled it out slowly. He presented to Louise a delicate silk handkerchief, with flags and military drums painted at its four corners.
“My father gave this to me for luck on the battlefield. I think you should have it to remember me by. It’s an important piece of my family,” he said as he pressed it into her palm.
She looked at the cloth unfurled there, so thin and nearly transparent, and felt that she should refuse the gift—that to take it from him would be ill luck somehow, since it was intended to preserve him from harm.
“Are you sure?” she asked gently.
“Yes. When I make love to you on our wedding night, you can give it back to me.”
She wanted to believe in this eventuality so much. She wanted to have faith in the inevitable union of their flesh more fiercely than she ever wanted religion, but she was not sure that she could manage this thing, this blind and confident love.
She was nineteen years old and he was twenty, and though they did not know this yet, Camille would never make love to Louise.
This crucifix was given to Louise by her father after her confirmation in the year 1908, now that she was a true woman before the Lord. The engraving was done by his newest apprentice, Pierre Cleper, who seemed to have a genuine gift for it. He had not yet taken on the apprentice Henri Brunet at that time—at that time before the whole world exploded around them.
*
It is a big piece of jewelry that the young Louise wore with great pride, but the adult Louise—the Louise who sleeps now on this night between Tuesday, November 6, 1928, and Wednesday, November 7, 1928—this Louise thinks the cross is too big. She doesn’t want to be this showy with religion; the performance of it at that level makes her uncomfortable. The feel of the gold warming up against her skin would seem to be an accusation of the unbelieving heart inside her, this heart that takes such pleasure in petty sin like telling false sex stories to startled priests.
The heat of the metal against her skin might remind her too much of what she turned away: the feel of him, just once.
Her heart ails, and sometimes she lets herself know it, like on this morning of Wednesday, November 7, after she sends her husband off to work on a breakfast of tea and fresh croissants from the bakery downstairs. Now that she is alone in the house, she goes to her jewelry box to look through her small treasures.
She starts, of course, with this gift from her father, engraved so well by Cleper:
Then she works her way down to the most secret compartment of the box, seldom visited: a sliding drawer at the bottom. On the red velvet lining rests a large key. It is the key to a farmhouse near the small city of Bracieux,