ONE
In later years, I would think back to that cold March day in 1897 at the convent orphanage in Aubazine.
We orphelines sat in a circle practicing our stitches, the hush of the workroom interrupted only by my occasional mindless chatter to the girls nearby. When I felt Sister Xavier’s gaze, I quieted, looking down at my work as if in deep concentration. I expected her to scold me as she usually did: Custody of the tongue, Mademoiselle Chanel. Instead, she drew closer to my place near the stove, moving, as all the nuns did, as if she were floating. The smell of incense and the ages fluttered out from the folds of her black wool skirt. Her starched headdress planed unnaturally toward heaven as if she might be lifted up at any moment. I prayed that she would be, a ray of light breaking through the pitched roof and raising her to the clouds in a shining beam of holy salvation.
But such miracles only happened in paintings of angels and saints. She stopped at my shoulder, dark and looming like a storm cloud over the sloping forests of the Massif Central outside the window. She cleared her throat and, as if she were the Holy Roman Emperor himself, made her grim pronouncement.
“You, Antoinette Chanel, talk too much. Your sewing is slovenly. You are always daydreaming. If you don’t take heed, I fear you will turn out to be just like your mother.”
My stomach twisted like a knot. I had to bite the inside of my mouth to keep from arguing back. I looked over at my sister Gabrielle sitting on the other side of the room with the older girls and rolled my eyes.
“Don’t listen to the nuns, Ninette,” Gabrielle said once we’d been dismissed to the courtyard for recreation.
We sat on a bench, surrounded by bare-limbed trees that appeared as frozen as we felt. Why did they lose their leaves in the season they needed them most? Beside us, our oldest sister, Julia-Berthe, tossed bread crumbs from her pockets to a flock of crows that squawked and fought for position.
I pulled my hands into my sleeves, trying to warm them. “I’m not going to be like our mother. I’m not going to be anything the nuns say I’m going to be. I’m not even going to be what they say I can’t be.”
We laughed at this, a bitter laugh. As the temporary keepers of our souls, the nuns thought constantly about the day we would be ready to go out and live in the world. What would become of us? What was to be our place?
We’d been at the convent for two years and by now were used to the nuns’ declarations in the middle of choir practice or as we worked on our handwriting or recited the kings of France.
You, Ondine, with your penmanship, will never be the wife of a tradesman.
You, Pierrette, with your clumsy hands, will never find work with a farm woman.
You, Hélène, with your weak stomach, will never be the wife of a butcher.
You, Gabrielle, must hope to make an adequate living as a seamstress.
You, Julia-Berthe, must pray for a calling. Girls with figures like yours should keep to a nunnery.
I was told that if I was lucky, I could convince a plowman to marry me.
I pushed my hands back out of my sleeves and blew on them. “I’m not going to marry a plowman,” I said.
“I’m not going to be a seamstress,” Gabrielle said. “I hate sewing.”
“Then what will you be?” Julia-Berthe gazed at us with wide, questioning eyes. She was considered slow, “touched,” people said. To her everything was simple, black and white like the tunics and veils of the nuns’ habits. If the nuns said it, we would be it.
“Something better,” I said.
“What’s something better?” Julia-Berthe said.
“It’s...” Gabrielle started but didn’t finish.
She didn’t know what Something Better was any more than I did, but I knew she felt it just the same, a tingling in her bones. Restlessness was in our blood.
The nuns said we should be content with our station in life, that it was God-pleasing. But we could never be content where we were, with what we had. We came from a long line of peddlers, of dreamers traveling down winding roads, sure that Something Better was just ahead.
TWO
Before the nuns took us in, we’d been hungry most of the time, our clothes torn and dirty. We spoke only in patois, not French. We could barely read or write because we’d never gone to school for long. We were savages, the nuns attested.
Our mother, Jeanne, worked long hours to feed us, to keep a roof over our heads. She was there but not really, her eyes turning flat over the years so that they seemed to look through us. They searched instead for Albert, always Albert. Our father was usually on the road, peddling old corsets or belts or socks. He was incapable of staying in one place for long, and our mother, a fool for love, was always chasing after him when he didn’t return when he’d promised, pulling us down country road after country road with her whatever the season.
They were together just enough that our mother was always pregnant, Albert leaving us for months at a time to fend for ourselves with no money. She was a laundress, a maid, whatever she could find until she died at thirty-one from consumption, overworked and brokenhearted.
When she died, no family members wanted us, especially not our father. That shouldn’t have been a surprise. How could he travel from market to market—and bed to bed—with all of us? Still, weren’t fathers supposed to take care of their children?
We were three girls and two boys. Julia-Berthe, the oldest, then came Gabrielle, then Alphonse, then me, then Lucien. Alphonse had been just ten and Lucien six, no bigger than spools of thread, when our father had them declared “children of the poorhouse.” He’d wasted no time turning them over to a peasant family as free child labor and delivering us girls to the nuns. We hadn’t heard anything of our brothers in the three years we’d been at the convent.
Meanwhile, our father was off living the free life, as he always had, caring only about himself.
“I’ll be back,” he’d said to my sisters and me with the gilded smile of a salesman as he left us at the convent doorstep, patting Gabrielle’s proud head, then disappearing into the horizon in his dog cart.
Julia-Berthe, who didn’t like change, was inconsolable, not understanding where our mother had gone.
Gabrielle was too angry to cry.
“How could he leave me?” she’d say over and over. “I’m his favorite.” And, “We can take care of ourselves. We have been for years already. We don’t need these old ladies telling us what to do.” And, “We don’t belong here. We’re not orphans.” And, “He said he’s coming back. That means he is.”
And me, then age eight, I cried, confused, not used to the strange ways of the nuns, skirts swishing, rosaries clacking at their sides, clouds of incense drifting by like ghosts, the pungent smell of lye.