Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [83]
Perhaps he should have remained silent with this knowledge. There is no need for a father to oversee his daughters’ territories for them. Adult children are no longer children; they know more than they appear to, they can put up with more than a parent thinks. But Lucien took these betrayals upon himself, coaxing each clue from the shifting group around him. The lovers would hold their breath as he walked the corridors of the large house at night. The youth had gall and the charm of an arriviste, and dis-armingly, he was a good poet. Lucien Segura did not know what to do.
When Lucette confided to her father that she was pregnant and that her wedding needed to be moved forward, Lucien insisted they take a walk across the fields and discuss it. But once alone with him, Lucette refused to admit to Pierre’s existence within her emotions. She stared at her father’s seeming madness when he brought up the young poet’s name, and took shelter in mentioning the very goodness of her own fiancé. Then she referred casually to the possibility of her sister’s marriage in the near future. Lucien began to doubt his suspicions; perhaps his cast of mind had become jaded over the years. It was to be a brief walk, and Lucette was married three weeks later, and at the wedding he performed like a contented father. For all he knew, she had ended her affair with the talented, deceitful poet.
Shortly afterwards, Pierre Le Cras published a remarkable sequence of poems dedicated to his future wife, Thérèse. They were vague enough to prevent any physical identifications, so the poems had a ‘universal’ quality. But at the same time the emotion within the verses was heartbreaking and generous, and soon Paris was celebrating the young writer. All this led to plans for a second wedding. Thérèse was ecstatic, her mother delighted. There was, Lucien felt, a fever in the household. It was all a false portrayal. He watched them and listened to them and saw no awareness of an alternative truth. The true portrait was the photograph in his study, where the two lovers simply watched each other openly. This man had swept into their home as if under a protected spell, which Lucien could not control. Lucette had grown up with a natural grace and politeness, rising from her chair for any new guest or messenger. She was determined to be a writer like her father, constantly improving herself, perfecting herself, just as she would carefully erase her faults on a page and pencil in a better rhyme or metaphor. In recent years, she had even helped him clear away a sentiment or two in his own work. He’d watched her small bony hand brush away the curled fragments that contained the erased phrase from a page of his, so that she could write in a more modest word, asking him tentatively with her eyes if this might be better. Sometimes with a work, such as an astronomical treatise by Flammarion, he would purchase two copies so he and Lucette could read simultaneously, so they could share the landscape of the same book as each of them roamed through it. She had come to think like him, he believed.
But during the capsizing months on either side of the two weddings, he felt everything change. He knew that while Lucette did not wish to harm her sister, she would enter the bedroom of Thérèse’s intended