Eclipse

On the first day of autumn, in the rear courtyard of the Léger estate, Yvette Mongrain was scrubbing down the glass tables and wrought iron chairs that had been trucked in from Paris the morning before and arranged across the flagstones. Already the wind was on the rise, whirling through the vine-strangled trellis above Yvette's head, sketching waves on the koi pond, as it prepared its assault on the mustached men and sparkling-necked women who, in just seven hours, would mill about the courtyard, shaking and kissing each others' hands. By the time the foie gras and oysters had been served and the wild boar rolled out from the house on its bed of braised endive, the women's shoulders would have erupted in goose bumps above their silk bodices and their husbands' noses gone pink at the ends. Yet none of them, Yvette thought as she laid aside her rag to scrape off a belligerent splotch of magpie dung, would request the wraps and overcoats hanging inside the house. The rich never admitted to growing hungry or lonely or cold.

She flicked the brown bits from under her fingernail, hauled her sloshing bucket off a chair and emptied the contents into the koi pond, recently emptied of its original inhabitants by the cook's now deceased tabby cat. Monsieur Léger had ordered as replacements a tank of catfish whose silvery film of excrement the gardener, Pierre, skimmed from the top of the water each morning and used to fertilize the pear and plum trees. The sweet, putrid smell of the fish, their thick whiskers and egg-like eyes, reminded Yvette of the drunken crémier who had once put his sticky thumb on her cheek when she was a girl. Her heart lurched into her throat. She refilled the bucket from the stream that gushed from the mouth of a marble lotus flower, and trudged to another row of tables that sat under a fine veil of dust blown in overnight from the forest.

In the hard light of morning, the glass showed both of her chins, the squared lump of her nose, and the wispy gray hair pinned tight to her head. She had once been a slight girl with blue-white skin and a milky smile who, beginning with the crémier, seduced a long line of men before giving her heart to Gustave, the head gardener at the Léger estate. She had been that girl when Monsieur Léger's father returned to his native village, after fifteen years spent blowing holes in the sides of distant mountains, accompanied by an entourage of engineers and architects who plowed a road into the forest and cleared a space for the house in the trees. She had been that girl the day that she stood with her fist raised at the front door of the estate, her references in the pocket of her well-mended coat, Gustave's good luck kisses still warm on her neck. She was less of that girl when she walked with Gustave down the aisle of the village church, and became even less with the birth of her son, who died after only a week, leaving her with swollen breasts and glossy trails down the sides of her waist. That was the same summer that Monsieur Léger and his wife arrived at the house with the colicky child whom Yvette had rocked through her grief, whose first steps she had applauded, whose picture books she had pretended to read, whose fevers she had cooled, whose nose she had wiped, whose tears she had dried the summer that his mother left the house early, and the next summer when she didn't come at all. And now that child, the only person left who had known the girl Yvette had once been, had, this very morning, looked down his no longer adorably stubby, now long and straight nose and told her with nary a hello that he had seen out the window that the tables looked dull and could she do something about it? The tables that she and the...