Facing the Rivals

Though Henri and Marie-Céleste took the spotlight off me, they did not relieve me of my primary burden. Their rapport was principally with my father, who appreciated both their humor and their intellect—I always thought that my dad, who worked in factories from age fourteen until his retirement, might in different circumstances have become an academic himself. I had few conflicts with my father, the more broad-minded of my parents by some distance. My mother clearly enjoyed the company of Henri and Marie-Céleste, but wasn’t quite as close to them, because they lacked the one quality she considered essential: piety. My mother was a hard-shell peasant Catholic who had never read the Bible but believed fervently in rituals, icons, beads, scapulars, and above all the spiritual benefits of hardship. Although I kept it secret from her, with adolescence I had lost all trace of belief. Fearing for her mental and emotional stability, I continued to keep up the fiction of regular attendance until I was in my late thirties, but she intuited early on that I had chosen the left-hand path. So my war with her continued apace, and she frankly didn’t care about my alleged gifts, or the possibility of worldly success.

After college I came home less and less, although I was held fast to the schedule of major holidays. At some point, Henri obtained his degree and he and Marie-Céleste went back to Belgium. The holiday table wasn’t the same after that, the laughter in the house largely stilled. My father went back to his solitary regime of war memoirs and televised sports, my mother to her hours of daily prayers and the devout old widow ladies she fed on alternate Sundays. But the spectre of Henri and Marie-Céleste persisted. Ever since Henri had assumed the role of my older brother, a golden boy who could do no wrong, he had been held up to me as an example. He wasn’t just an inveterate joker but a hard worker who, quite unlike me, was assuring his future step by step. The proofs of this multiplied. He had been awarded a professorship at the local university. He was appointed to institutes and commissions, took on administrative duties, appended his name to significant research papers. My postgraduate studies in low-life bohemianism seemed even shoddier by contrast.

A decade later, in the early nineties, having in the meantime embarked on my own career, I began to plan my third book, a sort of memoir that examined my life against its historical background: my family, my city, Belgium, emigration. I had been awarded a fellowship to conduct research and was eager to spend time in my native land. I lucked out: Henri and Marie-Céleste were leaving their apartment for a huge modern house in the suburbs, and they offered me the last months of their lease. I had to meet with Marie-Céleste several times to work out the details. I was looking forward to it, because I had never talked with her alone, and I had grown to like her dry humor. She seemed to me the more interesting of the pair, largely because she was an introvert. But she was brisk and to the point, did not engage in chitchat. For her, familiarity meant not having to make nice.

So I took over their spacious apartment, which they’d left minimally furnished, and felt immediately at home. Even more luckily, I became fast friends with their neighbors across the hall, a German woman my age I’ll call Beate and her much older husband, Alphonse, a former priest. In subsequent visits to Belgium for my research, I stayed with Beate and Alphonse, who fed me well, took me on field trips to German museums, and taught me more about Belgium than I could have got from mere books. Alphonse became like a second father to me; in my mind, he holds up a crooked index finger and says, “Great is the littleness of mankind.” Beate was a complex creature, full of wicked humor and perverse decrees and the occasional nutso theory presented as unqualified fact. Although a German-born scholar, she loved to talk trash in gutter French. The two of them knew Henri and Marie-Céleste, of course, but they weren’t especially close. Beate, though, was a major-league gossip who seemed to keep tabs on every occurrence in town. I remember several reports about Henri’s career, and about how Marie-Céleste, so ambitious, maybe pulled the strings while he pranced.

I didn’t see Henri again until a while later, more than a decade after he’d returned from Belgium. He, Marie-Céleste, Beate, Alphonse, my wife, and I all went out to eat at a novelty restaurant: Walloon cuisine. What on earth could that be? asked those of us who had grown up eating it. That unremarkable hybrid of French and German had never been considered a “cuisine.” I couldn’t tell whether the restaurateurs had invented the dishes or were delving into manuscript recipes from the deep past. In any event, my penchant for ordering the most disgusting thing on the menu led me to an inedible monstrosity, a cow’s udder filled with sirop, a reduction of pears and apples with the viscosity of hot tar. The instant I plunged a fork into it, a jet of sirop spurted all over my jacket.

The evening was convivial if not especially intimate, but I noticed that Henri was really putting away the red wine; the table was already on its third bottle when we were done with the starters. He was a different person from the one I’d seen at my parents’ house. Once lean, he had grown an enormous paunch, had all sorts of worry lines incised among his features, and bore no trace of the class clown. Instead, his face grew redder and redder as the evening progressed. He began fulminating against his professional rivals, accusing them of ignoble motives and unspeakable practices. As if he had been reading Sun Tzu during a stretch in the cooler, he declared that he was going to root out his enemies—and kill them! By now he was bellowing, as the whole restaurant hushed.

I next saw the couple three or four years later. My wife and I had bought a summer house on a dirt road in the Catskills, sufficiently remote that we had few visitors. But Henri and Marie-Céleste, on a stateside visit, chauffeured my parents up there. It was a sombre occasion. My father’s Parkinson’s had begun edging toward dementia, and he sat silent and hunched. My mother, who earlier in life would have admired the trees and asked about the animals, barely gazed around her, absorbed behind her social mask. Henri did his best to become the Henri of old, and we joined in the somewhat forced merriment for my parents’ benefit. Marie-Céleste, who was hoping her breast cancer was in remission, played nurse, attending to my parents’ every need. We heard all about Henri’s various enterprises and looked at photos of their colossal house, like a set from an Antonioni movie. (They had no offspring.) But I came away feeling that, for all their sins, Henri and Marie-Céleste were much better children to my parents than I was.

My book was published in French about a year later, and for a month or two I was everywhere in the Belgian media: newspapers, radio, television, live events in several cities. I heard no word from Henri and Marie-Céleste and didn’t have time to reach out to them. Soon after that, my son, Raphael, was born, the same week that I began commuting upstate to teach at Bard, and three months later I had to have my father committed, his dementia having entered a violent phase. We moved upstate full-time the following summer. I was writing, teaching, and helping to raise an infant, and all the while I was driving to New Jersey to check up on my mother and regulate my father’s affairs. They celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary, but my father did not appear to be in his body. His eyes were no longer focussing, and he had stopped speaking and never would again. Both my parents died, within two and a half months of each other, in the aftermath of 9/11, not that they knew about that event. In the rush of things, I heard from Henri and Marie-Céleste in occasional messages, by greeting card or phone call. They promised Raphael a complete set of the Tintin books, but never sent it. They did not attend my parents’ funerals—or, actually, they did not respond when I called and wrote to inform them of their deaths.

When things had calmed down a bit, I decided that maybe they hadn’t received my voicemails or letters. I had no fewer than six phone numbers for them, but none seemed to work; some rang endlessly while others immediately disconnected. I had two or three e-mail addresses, but they either bounced back or fell down a well. I went to the university’s Web site, searching for Henri, but shockingly couldn’t find a listing. All the links led to a professor in a different field who had the same common name. I was flummoxed. My wife suggested that perhaps they were angry at me for having been inattentive to Marie-Céleste’s medical woes, but the mystery ran far deeper than that. It was as if they’d fallen off the map.

After a while I stopped being preoccupied with Henri and Marie-Céleste, although their disappearance nagged me now and then. Then I had occasion to go to Belgium, and went to visit Beate, Alphonse having died a few years earlier. I was travelling with Raphael, who was on spring break from a semester in Berlin. He’d last met Beate when he was six, but soon they were comparing notes on their shared passion for the First World War. My thoughts strayed to the apartment across the hall, and I mentioned my inability to get in touch with Henri and Marie-Céleste twenty years earlier. Beate’s blue eyes widened. “You mean you never heard? Well.” She rested her palms on the table.

According to the rumors, Henri had been in the running for the position of rector of the university. He had the backing of many in the upper echelon, but he had a serious rival, an insurgent candidate from a different discipline. Then unsigned letters began to make their way to members of the administration denouncing the rival, saying terrible, actionable things. The administration quickly identified the pattern and involved investigators to find the source of the letters. Saliva residue under one of the stamps was traced to Marie-Céleste. She and Henri hadn’t been heard from since.

They would likely have relocated within the E.U., I remember Beate saying. They would have changed names and appearance. They probably had cash squirrelled away somewhere, but if not they had enough practical business-world skills to find work. I was entranced by the image of Henri and Marie-Céleste as Bonnie and Clyde. A few weeks later, I was in Spain, and found myself searching for their faces among the crowds in Madrid and Barcelona. I naturally saw them wearing dark glasses, a caudillo mustache on Henri and a Dutch bob on Marie-Céleste. I imagined their weeks or months on the run, saw them changing cars behind a barn somewhere, procuring false papers, sanding down their fingertips, giving each other hand signals through plate-glass windows. I imagined Marie-Céleste packing heat.