need help in literature

Hetty says, ''My mother used to have...'' and pirouettes her fork in her collard greens, and I have no idea, none, how the sentence will end. The Mecca is famous for its greens and its black-eyed peas. Hetty opens her mouth and puts a forkful in that capacious pocket. She licks a speck of bacon off her smile and rolls her eyes at the pressed tin ceiling.

    I think: what is it that mothers used to have? What sort of object or feature or tendency? What do people say over a lunch of greens and peas that they remember that their mothers used to have?

    ''...a pair of falsies,'' Hetty says, and laughs a soggy mouthful to which she claps a paper napkin.

    Nan sits wounded and stupefied under the great satin cowl of her hair, seamed down the middle and gathered at the nape. We are here for Nan, who has been betrayed by a man in some apocalyptically new way, as only a late-twentieth-century feminist can be betrayed, though her googly-blue eyes hold the usual stricken look. The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, I remember from some early reading list.

    Hetty says, ''The molded foam kind? With the little nipples, just one pair. She'd take 'em out of her bathing suit and stick 'em wet in her bra.''

    ''People didn't buy things by the half-dozen then,'' I say.

    Nan taps her fork on the rim of her plate, abstractedly, as if she doesn't know what purpose either rim or tines might serve. Nan has been working for four years on the postmodern theorist Paul de Man. She has been a passionate advocate, a soapboxer, a disciple. Next week she was supposed to read a paper in Tuscaloosa at the biggest-deal Deconstructionist Conference ever to hit the states, headlining the academic hotshot Jacques Derrida. That her paper was accepted was a pedagogical miracle, the take-off point of a promising career.

    But in advance of the conference Derrida has sent out photocopies of some newly-discovered articles, written by de Man in Belgium in the Second World War, betraying a convoluted anti-Semitism

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and ipso facto collaboration with the Nazis. Now the conference is likely to be about nothing but de Man's disgrace.

    Trying to cheer Nan up, I say things like, ''We don't understand the pressure people were under.''

    Hetty says things like, ''B-b's on a bread board, my Mom. I used to have to go with her to shop for linger-ee. She'd make sure the clerk saw her take C-cups into the cubicle, and I'd have to sit there under her armpit while she stuffed her foamies in.''

    I say, ''I was there, and I don't have any idea what I would have done in his shoes.'' This is not exactly true. I was too young for responsibility, but little as I remember of that time, I do know that I lived in an atmosphere of grave integrity hard to imagine at The Mecca in Jepson, Alabama in 1987.

    Nan stares and swallows, picks at the thick red pudding of her nail polish. Nan is twenty-seven and Hetty is forty-two and I am fifty-seven; an even fifteen years between each pair of us. They don't always invite me to lunch with them, and I can only assume that Hetty remembers my father died a hero of the Belgian Resistance. But if this is my purpose here she has not given any sign.

    ''Simone,'' she says. ''Are you using that Tiger Sauce, or what?''

    Nan was born in Pismo Beach, California at the end of the post-war boom. She has the muscular sleekness of surf and steak, the expectations of the period of Awful Affluence. She cut her critical teeth at Berkeley on Cixous, Kristeva, Irigaray -- and came to Alabama because Modern Languages needed either Deconstruction or Queer Theory, and most of the old guard were relieved to get by with a tawny Californian. The universities were in a buyers' market. Nan was lucky to be hired, just as I was lucky twenty-five years ago, although Jepson State was a women's college then, and you didn't need a specialty. Being European was exotic all on its own.

    I could press my claim -- that it was I who lived under the occupation like de Man, I who lived within a few tens of kilometers of the journal Le Soir in which he laid out his anti-Semitic speculations, I whose father was murdered fleeing from the Nazis.

    But I don't want to talk about my father. For one thing, it might make de Man look worse by contrast. Nan, though she may be a mere camp follower of the fads of thought, rings true in grief. I wouldn't trust her politics, but I trust her suffering. Her skin has the parboiled look of mortal shock -- like Breughel's damned, like Bosch's bugs.

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    For another thing, what snags and echoes in my mind is Hetty's lilting phrase: my mother used to have. I try to imagine that phrase falling as effortless from my mouth. What would come next? ''No teenage girl should have to watch her mother try on bras,'' says Hetty, while blue-eyed Nan and her black-eyed peas sit staring lidless at each other.

My mother used to have a doeskin nail buffer, ebony-handled, with which she would sit by the French doors onto the balcony, swiping her short nails back and forth, humming a jazzy tune. She tilted her head to one side because a woman buffing her nails must tilt her head to survey her hand. Sunlight or rainlight splashed at her from the window, on the glossy troughs of her blond marcel, along the perfect brushstroke of her jaw. The transom and sidelights were squares of stained glass, blue and amber. These checkered her face according to the way she turned, leaded lines dissecting her cheeks, her throat. Outside the sun or the rain fell on the Meuse. Our apartment had only one bedroom (and at night my cot was opened in this spot under the window) because that was our choice: to live in a small space with a lovely river view, where my father could walk to his work at the university two blocks away. ''Fenêtre sur la Meuse,'' my father would pronounce, looking out over the water and the facades of the houses on the far bank, ''Window on the Meuse,'' as if the view was a book that needed a title. My father, thin and straight as a staff himself, would take the long-handled hook and open the transom latch just so far. He did this, as all things, faultlessly. My image of him is clear because I was a little older, my consciousness more developed, in the absolutely unforeseeable future when I came to spend much time with him. But at the period I am speaking of, he spent endless hours away in his office, and until I went to school I was home with my mother the livelong day.

    My mother used to have the life of a generic femme de ménage, academic subspecies: she spent her day cooking potatoes and mussels and brown bread. It would never have crossed her mind to put lacquer on her fingertips. Still, she had an ostrich puff, a perfume bottle in carven cobalt blue, an oval mirror between the cherry uprights of the vanity. She dipped her ostrich puff in a box of loose powder and patted her nose and brow. Contemplative, she buffed her nails. She tilted her head and looked into nowhere. I seem to remember that I was not to disturb her at her toilette, but this is not something she ever would have said, so

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either I am making it up in my memory or else what I remember is that I made it up at the time.

''Everybody in my family lied,'' says Hetty. She doesn't shrug her shoulders, but her wide mouth makes a shrug. Hetty is tall and angular like me, but dark, and unlike me she moves easily, stirring the space around her. She has American gestures, open-handed, who-gives-a-damn, whereas mine are constricted and restrained, and have been mistaken as both standoffish and mysterious.

    ''They lied all the time, automatically, on principle. My mother told people we had a Van Gogh hanging in the living room. The neighbors used to come to look. It was the sunflowers, one of those prints on textured cardboard?''

    Nan has not spoken since the iced tea pitcher was plunked down. Ordinarily she would be bopping along with surfer-girl enthusiasm about how language does not really refer to anything, and we are never really talking about what we are talking about because the fact of our talking about it merely points to its being absent. Now for the first time today she hazards a sip of tea. ''It changes the nature of so much he said.''

    She means de Man. ''Well, of course,'' I say.

    ''But in a poignant way. In a touching way. It touches me.'' Nan lifts her tragic gaze from the peas. I have been here before. This is Mistreated Woman excusing Suffering Man. This is Chick With Broken Jaw pleading His Sad Childhood.

    However, I agree, more or less. ''I wouldn't want to be held responsible for everything I believed when I was twenty-two.''

    Hetty says, ''Forget those guys. All they're ever saying is learning can't be fun.''

    But Nan is not ready for this. I have sat with many a broken heart and I know that no good can come of badmouthing the heartbreaker. One half of the fractured organ is still attached to him by sinew, valves; no matter how blatant his sins you will only alienate her by rehearsing them. That Nan never laid eyes on Paul de Man is beside the point. That all she ever encountered was a rarified mind in opaque prose, as if it were not the new clothes that were imaginary, but the Emperor, is beside the point. One day -- not because he betrayed the Jews but because in doing so he betrayed her -- Nan will blow him off like dandruff. Not today.

    Hetty has taken up the Jepson Weekly Torch (''Very weakly torch,'' the students say) and turned to the horoscope. ''My mother

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lied about her sign,'' she pursues. ''She was a Gemini but she claimed she was a Virgo. Virgo! Virgos are organized and meticulous. My mother couldn't hit the laundry basket with a dirty sheet.''

    ''I'm a Cancer,'' Nan admits mournfully.

    I pick up on this more or less in Hetty's style. ''Why do you think Cancer is a crab? I looked it up but it doesn't help. Both the constellation and the disease come from Old English canker, but it doesn't say why. Ulceracion, spreading sore. Because the blotches looked like a crab, do you suppose? Still, that's wrong way round. Cancer would be named for the crab, not crab for cancer.''

    Hetty rolls her eyes -- affectionately, I think -- to indicate that I am forever looking things up. ''Did you ever read Tropic of Cancer? Most boring book in the universe. It could put you off sex for life.'' She continues without transition, ''The horoscope in this newspaper is a crock. Not,'' she acids ''that that proves there's no truth in astrology.''

    ''No,'' I say. I can tell by the way my mouth feels that I have gotten on my high horse. ''That doesn't prove it. There are plenty of things to prove astrology's a crock.''

    ''Well,'' Hetty pouts. ''You can't discount the influence of the stars.''

    ''Watch me.''

    ''How about the moon and tides, then?''

    ''The moon and tides are a scientifically observable phenomenon.''

    ''What does it say for Cancer?'' Nan asks as if all hope is banished, and Hetty runs her finger down to find the crab.

My mother used to have a best friend two floors up in the dormer apartment at the top of the house, Lotte something, an infectious giggler. The house was four stories tall, and narrow, with only one apartment on each floor. We would mount the dim stairs nearly every morning, nearly every afternoon, Mama with her language book and buffer, me with my shoebox of paper dolls or my Pinocchio. Lotte's apartment had slanted attic sides, and her window was much smaller than ours, but its view was over the roofs across the river, tiled and shingled, shining like a turtle's back.

    Lotte's husband was a clerk of some sort for the city of Liege. He kept records of streets or sewers, he filed things to do with municipal works. This information has no more authority than a guess. I don't remember what he looked like. I remember that I

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loved to go up to Lotte's because she had cupboards full of kitsch -- a rabbit painted in wildflowers, a pewter teapot shaped like a goose that spewed the tea through its arched neck and out its beak. She had a long-handled waffle iron suspended from a fleur-de-lis hook on the wall, and ranged on a shelf a whole set of dishes formed to represent vegetables and fruits: a cabbage plate, an apple creamer and strawberry sugar bowl, a water pitcher in the shape of a radicchio.

    We must have been going to Lotte's before my memory began, perhaps I lay on her floor in swaddling clothes, I suppose I did. Until you are three or four other people's memories are in charge of your existence, and when they vanish that much of you disappears with them. No, what I'm really saying is that it seems badly arranged, if I was to have a mother for ten years, that I should waste three or four of them not remembering, and the rest ogling a pottery rabbit.

    Still, like eyesight memory has a periphery. My mother used to have an angular, modern way of moving and a raucous man's laugh to Lotte's tinkle. The two of them smoked and drank coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon. They mended stockings and buffed their nails. At some point they began to study English, but whether this was because my father was a teacher of philology, or as an act of political defiance, or merely cool like the jazzy tunes, I do not know, because I do not remember when it was.

    Lotte was something of a linguist, anyway. There, then, this was not considered unusual. She spoke her native Ghentenaar, high Netherlandish, German and a round-voweled mellifluous French. Perhaps it was Lotte's idea to add another trophy to her shelf of languages. ''My dress is blue,'' they would say, writing slowly, each in a bound notebook. This was the first English I ever learned. ''My dress is blue.'' Then there would be gales of laughter, I suppose because the dress that either of them happened to be wearing was blue or because it was not. ''My dress is blue.''

    Lotte was short and luscious, my mother tall and elegant, like a chocolate puff paired with an Erté. They danced sometimes to no accompaniment but their humming. At some point I was old enough to sit with a shoebox of paper dolls. I bent the tabs of their paper dresses carefully over their cardboard shoulders, a short dark one and a tall pale one, and set them dancing. I was allowed weak tea in the pewter goose, from which I served them at the footstool while my mother buffed her nails and Lotte chattered in four languages.

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    My mother used to have a tarot pack she spread out on the table. I knew nothing of tarot but I know that to lay out love was good, and death bad, and a journey ambiguous. I know that the point was to control the future by uncovering it. I know there were moons and stars on the backs of the cards and that death had a skull for a face and a scythe taller than himself. The eyes of love were sorrowful and sly. Big deal. If I'd never seen a tarot pack I could guess as much as that. I think that love came up a lot around the time I was eight, and that death put in its appearance increasingly as the jackboot crossed Europe and my mother's health began to fail. I also think that such a memory partakes of the same insidious process that drives people to the tarot pack and the horoscope, to make coincidence a cause.

Hetty says, ''My mother was New Age before there was Old Age. Palms, crystals. The first time I walked in on her with a guy she told me he was teaching her aromatherapy. And that was in the sixties!''

    The immediate dilemma is whether Nan should go to Tuscaloosa in spite of de Man's being outed. Hetty is all for it, on the principle of don't-let-the-bastards-get-you-down.

    '''Cancer,''' she reads. '''Plug into a task, get the job done, and mull over a decision. Go within yourself for answers, and be sure of yourself, despite others' challenging points of view.'''

    ''Oh,'' sighs Nan with a searching look. ''Read it again?''

    I interrupt. ''What's Virgo?''

    Hetty tracks down with her finger. '''Though the unexpected occurs and behavior is erratic, you get a sense of caring. Be understanding, but don't let another's quirks cause you a problem.'''

    ''There,'' I say to Nan. ''That sounds just as good. I think you should plump for Virgo, like Hetty's mother.''

    ''You don't get to pick your own sign,'' says Hetty.

    ''Why not? Why give in to astrological hegemony?''

    ''That's the point, it's in the stars.''

    Mabel clears the plates. Her name really is Mabel, etched in plastic on her real bosom. She really says, ''Get'ch anything else, Sugars?'' and I see incipient panic on Nan's skin. What the hell, I don't have office hours till two and Department Meeting after that. I say, ''I'm going to have a sundae. Fudge with coconut, please, Mabel, hold the cherry.'' Hetty gapes a little, because I am not known for ordering dessert, but by the time her mouth is fully open she has got a sense of caring.

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    ''Is there poppy seed cake? I think Nan needs a dose of opium.''

    Mabel guffaws and swipes clean the oak top, the sugar shaker and the mini-juke. The Mecca is what passes in Alabama for antique, forties booths and malt machines and the aforementioned pressed tin ceiling. Safe for the length of dessert, Nan shrinks back into the oak arm and lifts her stricken eyes. She ventures a quotation in the key of doomed, the lover remembering the tender words of the beloved.

    '''The dialectic of self-destruction and self-invention that characterizes the ironic mind is an endless process that leads to no synthesis.'''

    Hetty doesn't have a thing to say to that.

My mother used to have a string bag of magical capacity. Like a womb, it scrunched up to nearly nothing in her jacket pocket, and then expanded to contain the meats and fruits of days. In the early years there was a market on the quai just two short streets from our front door, where plums and celeriac and the perfect little globes of ripe tomatoes were set out in slanted boxes. There were trugs of the dirty delicate root called salsify, and artichokes no bigger than you could hold in a fist, which we bought by the dozen. There was a fish cart with slabs of salmon, skate with flat dead eyes, a bucket full of squirming river eel that the fishmonger would pick out, admiring, and chop on his board where they writhed. There was a stall hung with saucisson as if with meat chandeliers, manned by a mountainous proprietor in a bloody apron, who, while my mother stood projecting a skeptical, indifferent air, would draw a mammoth knife across a salami as thick as his arm, and hand down to me a salty sliver so thin I could see his fingers through it. The string bag would start the morning limp on my mother's arm, and then begin to puff out with packets of greased wrap and newsprint, root vegetables on the bottom, squashable ones on top, till it was distended, gorged with its meal. Last stop the sweet stall: three petit fours or three macaroons in a little paper cone that my mother tucked in the top of the bulging bag -- and for me a marzipan, according to the season mouse- or star- or chick- or flower-shaped. I would walk the short way home with my hand in hers, tilting on the cobblestones, the rough grain of sweet almond between my teeth.

    My mother used to have dinner parties, or perhaps soirées, because someone sometimes sang, or read from a manuscript, or held forth in a poetic way. Lotte was not present at such occasions.

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Sometimes she would help my mother pare and chop in the afternoon, but by evening she was gone and the door swung for people palpably different in some indefinable way. I was not then aware of the divide between the intellectual and the petty bureaucrat.

    These evenings the little fiat became more cramped, the table pulled out into the center of the living space, the books and magazines stacked in piles, the cushions bunched in the corners on the floor. My mother would serve lobster bisque from a huge tureen, anguille au vert -- the bright white cylinders of eel meat steaming on a spinach bed -- rable de lièvre larded with strips of smoked bacon back. My father sat perfectly still, a tall, thin, beaming benevolence. I would not have said that he failed to help my mother but that he did not distract from her radiance. Professor Vanderleven would squeal culinary compliments and dribble spinach on his tie. Dr. Sarraute would speak in his voice both at ease and booming. A topic would be proposed in the smell of coffee with just a hint of chicory. The room became dense with energy and smoke; my father would crack open the stained glass transom. I see a woman all angles with her hair chopped from anaubergine, a short bespectacled man with a beard as fuzzy as his mohair vest; I see a waiflike boy, palely intense, with a flower of a woman on his arm. I see that my memory is a string bag, tucked in a pocket all these years, but expandable as I fill it with scraps and packets, these husks and candied violets.

    I was allowed to stay up, to set the bowls of bisque ever so carefully in a row on the tablecloth, then to huddle in the corner on a cushion until I began to drowse, then to be put to bed in my parents' room on the high fourposter under a lofting of down duvet. My sleep was laced with laughter and the tone of urgent argument. When I woke I would be in my own cot under the window in a room in shambles, the dishes piled with shells and bones, the air sweet with the aftersmell of lobster, cognac, and cigar.

    I don't remember when scarcity began. Perhaps because sugar outlasted meat, I didn't notice. At some point the parties stopped. At some point we began eating omelettes for dinner instead of for Sunday brunch. At some point the profusion of the market stalls thinned out; there were roots but no leaf vegetables, and then such potatoes as there were came small and wizened. The smell of coffee turned more bitter with chicory. Salami disappeared

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and we ate blood sausage for a time, which I hated because it had little cubes of rubbery lard in it, but which I later longed for when there was no meat at all. My mother and I went to market earlier and earlier, to encounter a mood no longer festive but dour and strained -- neighborliness, I suppose, at war with need. After a time there were no sweets, and then no fish, no milk, no apples, and then no market. Where the stalls had been, uniformed soldiers patrolled in twos and threes, as if to prevent an invasion of hostile foodstuffs.

    My mother began to leave me at home while she foraged in the outskirts, into the back streets where there might be black market vegetables, and then into the country hoping for eggs or cheese. At first I was told that Lotte would be upstairs if I needed her. Then Lotte and her husband went away, and the apartment at the top of the house was closed, and when my mother could not get back by curfew I was by myself in the dark, and sometimes when my father did not get back either, alone all night. By this time I was ten. Where was my father? I have no memory of it.

    My mother used to have a red flush on the bone point of each cheek when she bent to tell me that she was going out to look for food. This was in the mornings as she was sending me off to school. She wrapped her arms around me, smelling of toilet water called ''4711'' -- not that I remember the name or the scent but that I have since seen the same bedizened gold and turquoise bottle for sale in department stores in Atlanta and New York, and know that unlike my mother the manufacturer of toilet water outlived the war.

    ''I won't be here when you get back but I'll try to be here with something delicious'' -- très appétissant -- ''by suppertime.'' I would stand skeptical and cool, as I had watched her stand in front of the sausage man.

    After school I would dawdle, though I had been told not to. The playground gave down a few steps to an alley and a cafe where a few old men sat with their beer or schnapps. There, then, no one would have supposed this proximity of bar to school could have been a corrupting influence. The men were wholly self-absorbed, or waved vaguely as I headed along the quai toward home. Where was my father? I would let myself in, up the dim stairwell, into the empty flat, and if the weather was warm, which was not often, I would kneel outside on the balcony, sink sideways onto a haunch and press my face against the medallion at the center of the grill. If not, I would pull the curtains over the French doors inside and watch through a slit beside the jamb. It

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was boring, but I had been bored a lot, like any child. Most of Lotte and my mother's conversation bored me, her cooking bored me, the buffing of her nails. With that bland background I had been free to distract myself with my toys, inhabit whatever fantasy I chose. Now I discovered the place that boredom intersects with loneliness. I watched the grille, the quai, the river water, the cobblestones in the direction from which she might come. There was little movement in the streets, and even that ceased at dark. As the curfew hour approached and I knew that I would spend the night alone, I would drag my cot to its place, making nonchalant gestures for nobody's benefit, flinging my coverlet against the sickness in my chest. Then I went back to my post.

    Such loneliness is immobilizing, and in that immobility the time stretches out on a monotonous, nasal-sounding thread, a suspension between madness and self-containment. I thought I heard that note again, much later, in the chant of ''Ommmmmmm,'' which I was told brought peace but in which I could hear only the humming emptiness of those nights of waiting, waiting. I crouched or stood and watched the plopping ripples on the surface of the river. Nothing else stirred. If a cat passed, that was an event -- although, one night, late enough that I had begun to doze standing between the curtain and my cot, I heard a scuffle and running feet in the street below, and two youngish men in the rolled sleeves and drab waistcoats of the petty bourgeois flung themselves belly-foremost against the balustrade of the river bank. One climbed and made to dive, and the other, who was heavyset, had just got a foot up when they were both downed in a staccato of rifle shot. Blood burst from them over the cobblestones and the quai. The first pitched headfirst into his dive, and the indifference of the future rolled over him. The other caught there on the stone, one leg up and one leg down, his head concealed on the river side. A pair of soldiers no bigger and no older than their prey ran up to him, and one of them caught the heavyset man by his waistcoat on a bayonet and tipped him over. Then the soldiers ran on, not the way they had come but as if they had been briefly deflected from a more important mission, forward, in the direction of the disused market.

    For years those several seconds used to flash on the inside of my eyelids, until the image faded and what I mainly remembered was the sudden flash of it, contentless, a muscle spasm. But I always held that image, too, as the paradigm of victimhood. I notice now that I do not know this was the case. For all I know

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the two young men were somehow culpable, caught committing some atrocity in the next street. Why, for example, if they were Resistance, did the soldiers not check the pockets of the second man?

    I went to bed. I lay awake for most of the night with my arms straight at my sides, and still not all the night, because I was asleep when at lift of curfew my mother came back. She held me and asked me what I had seen. I think it would have been harder if she had not. Later she went down with a bucket and brush to scrub the balustrade. ''We must find another way,'' she said. But what other way was there? She had to find food. My father? had to do whatever he was doing.

    So I waited again perhaps three or four times a week, and was more afraid, and still the fear was not as all-consuming as the loneliness. I think now that if I had known my mother was to die, I should have made better use of those waiting evenings; and yet all the same I think I was in training unbeknownst. In training for my life without her and, to a certain extent, in training for my life.

Monty Hodge, on his way to another table with a bowl of gumbo, stops thigh to elbow with Nan, sets down his soup, and leans on a fist beside her poppy cake.

    ''Nan, dear'' he says. ''I heard about de Man. Are you all right?''

    Mont has a broad, naturally consoling face and a beard like excelsior. Now that everybody is downsizing to short back and sides, he has decided to do hair (any radical alteration of the hirsute level can be recognized as part of the divorce syndrome). A strawy mane emanates from his head, backlit and gently fanned by The Mecca's ceiling fixtures.

    Nan seems to consider this. Is she all right? She tests the looping fall of her own hair with a tentative hand. She focuses on the indelible wound. What is it about the hulking deep-voiced blanket of a man's sympathy that carries so much more weight than a woman friend's? Nan has got a sense of herself back for a second. She splays a hand beside the fist beside the poppy cake.

    ''I haven't taken it in yet,'' she admits.

    ''I haven't processed it,'' she amends.

    ''I'll be okay,'' she assesses bravely.

    Monty says, ''Good girl.'' He's a nice guy, Mont, just divorce-prone and currently, dangerously, recovering. By the time he has opened his fist and rolled it expertly over to squeeze Nan's manicure, I can see the double rebound, the romance, the wedding,

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the sturm und drang, the breakup, the alimony. In the surface of the gumbo a cross-section of okra surfaces, a perfect flower in a pool of slime.

    However, neither Hetty nor Nan seems inclined to ask Mont to join us, for which I am grateful -- I might say impressed.

    He says, ''Good girl,'' again. ''If you want to talk about it -- any time. I'm not an expert, but I have dabbled around the edges of postmodernism...''

    Amen to that. Monty turns the smothery blast of his goodness on me now. ''You were there, my God.''

    ''I was a little girl,'' I say.

    ''It must have been at the same time de Man was writing for Le Soir, though, no?''

    ''I don't have much memory of the war.''

    ''You must have some.''

    ''Some.''

    ''What a fantastic life you've led!''

    Why does this have to come from Monty Hodge, philanthropist philanderer of Eng. Lit? It would have been nice if Hetty mentioned it, for instance, if Nan's too distracted.

    ''I've led a pretty ordinary life,'' I say, ''if you count the number of Europeans that got bumped out and ended up in'' -- I bite my tongue on third rate -- ''American colleges...''

    ''But my God, look how much you had to endure and change!''

    ''...or the number of divorces that are burned out on their jobs,'' I finish, pointed.

    Monty picks up his gumbo, aims his index finger at me, grins and carries on toward a farther booth. Nan looks after him with a quizzical, lightened look.

My mother used to have something alien in her liver. Elle avait quelque chose au foie. Now, I lived in a house of words, where my father, taciturn, nevertheless insisted on the minutest attention to language. In French the word for liver, le foie, masculine, is next door to feminine la foi, for faith. I have thought long and hard on this. I certainly knew the difference between faith and liver, but I was also almost certainly aware of incipient pun. As a child might think, in English, a liver is one who lives, so in Liege, at ten, I thought: ma mère a quelque chose à la foi: my mother has something wrong with her faith.

    It was necessary to get a paper of some kind from an official of some kind in order to go to the doctor. We went to the bureau of authority which was nothing but the downstairs vestibule of a

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house that had been commandeered from someone richer than we were. There was a squat bureaucrat -- can I really remember that he had a moustache the shape of Hitler's own? -- and there was a disagreement. My mother insisted that we go to this doctor, and the squat man in the moustache insisted that we go to that. My mother became indignant and I saw that she was tearful but concealing it behind a rigid mouth. She was offered a paper which she at first refused.

    The man said, ''This is the doctor our own soldiers see, Madame.'' My mother said, ''I am not one of your soldiers, Sir,'' and her eyes flared. But she took the paper, with its stamps and flourishes.

    I think now that the paper was a permission she did not use, because she went to Dr. Sarraute to whom we had always gone, in a clinic downstream and away from the river, in a neighborhood full of pompous houses. My mother went to this clinic often and then more often, perhaps three times a week, always late in the afternoon and by unfamiliar, circuitous routes, which gave me the impression that she was not supposed to go there. At first she tried to get me to stay home, but though I hated the clinic I pleaded with her: if I could not go with her for food at least I could go for the ''traitements.'' We arrived, as I say, by diverse back ways, but always entered by the same side door, down a corridor and across a small courtyard with a fountain on which a naked boy poured water from a cornucopia, both the boy and the horn green with mold.

    Sometimes the doctor was still with someone else, and then we would sit in the courtyard until he signaled from the window, and inside he would be locking the front door. The waiting room was a square, plain place in spite of the grandeur of the neighborhood, with folding chairs set up as if for a classroom. Dr. Sarraute was an engulfing bearded man soft in his manner and his flesh. He would take my hand in both of his, in which it would disappear halfway up the forearm. His fingers were colossal. Once he had painted my throat with stinking purple stuff, and I had thought it was his fingers that prodded, that made me gag. The very benevolence of his tone and smile made me shrink from him because I knew my mother would disappear with that hugeness behind a curtain and through a door beyond which I was never invited.

    I was used to waiting by this time, and I had chosen to be there, but perhaps for that very reason I waited with bad grace. What

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had been desolation at the apartment window was pent up and petulant in the clinic. I don't remember what the floor was made of but I remember the grit of it under my worn soles. The chairs were of slatted wood designed, it seemed, to poke at your bones. There, then, it had not occurred to anyone to leave magazines as an amusement for the relatives of the ill. I could have gone into the courtyard where the moldering boy poured his unending supply of water on a ring of stone -- I had not been told not to but the square was damp with neglect and not like the outdoors at all. Nothing grew except a few clumps of nettles between the broken paving stones and the fur of moss like a green shadow on one side of everything. Besides, the courtyard had a window onto the room where my mother had disappeared, and although the shade was drawn I found it vaguely threatening to be within sight of that window. The smell of damp fought with the metallic stench of the waiting room, and I suffered from a sense of something being covered up, in which I was implicated, as if it was I, and not whatever procedure went on behind the shade, that was furtive and unclean.

    What sort of shame was that, compounded of weeds and ether, the dank corruption of the little courtyard? My mother, too, when she emerged, was flushed and flustered, overcheery, smelling of sweat and chemicals. The doctor held her hand reassuringly in his great hand and offered me a sugar cube, long after sugar cubes had vanished from any legitimate source.

    My mother used to have a brittle, mechanical manner after her traitements, hurrying through the twilight to beat the curfew, skipping up the steps with energy I did not believe she had. How could she have something in the liver if she had more energy than I? In those days supper was always minimal, but ordinarily my mother invented ways of disguising its meagerness. On clinic evenings she set a dish of potatoes in front of us, or a single egg stretched out with a bit of flour. My father would listen gravely to her telling what this or that had been predicted, what action or substance had been prescribed, what the doctor's current view was of the something wrong.

    My mother used to have a cot under the blue and amber window. It was my cot. I slept now on the daybed which was filled with horsehair and scratched through my thin sheet. My father no longer spent endless hours at the office, he came and went sporadically, which was the way I went to school. I seem to remember that Lotte returned for a time, but this memory is

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washed-out like the faded rug, a pattern of pyramids and squared-off birds that had sat under the window too long and which I now watched too long so that its ruined colors were burnt into my eyes even as the main events occurred on my periphery.

    Sometimes I looked out along the cobblestone and the river but there was no point in it because the person I looked for was behind me in my own bed, mostly sleeping. Soft-fleshed Dr. Sarraute came once when my father was not there, and having put his hand to my mother's forehead, which seemed intrinsically appropriate, then strangely put my mother's limp hand to his forehead and held it there for a long time. Aromatherapy, I suppose. The long-drawn-out note of loneliness was gone and in its place came an anger of spurts and starts, the place that boredom intersects with blame. I remember the feeling in the muscles of my mouth, distaste, recoil. I was on my high horse.

    My father, it was, who went for food now, mostly potatoes, sprouts, a few withered beans. There was no more oil to sauté -- butter was a memory -- so we boiled whatever we had, like the English, and ate it from the pot. My father was attendant but distracted. Sometimes he went out at night and left me alone with her, who needed silence and no longer could attend to what I needed. When she was awake she had a forced smile and the faraway nail-buffing eyes. People told me -- who? -- Lotte perhaps? -- certainly my father -- that if I were very quiet and attentive to my mother, she would get better. I think now that there was never any chance of her getting better, and that it occurred to no one how long or how hotly I would resent that lie.

    So I became the mother of my mother, keeping a cup of fresh water by her cot with superstitious regularity, rubbing her forehead with a cool cloth for ritual. I brought the toilet water in its gold and turquoise curlicues and dabbed her temples -- but this, I think, was because I could still smell the alien combination of microbe and drug. No doubt the world was disintegrating for hundreds of miles in every direction, but I freely confess that in the whole period of which I am speaking, I had no interest but self-interest, not in the dead flipped in the river nor the heavy-booted boys that patrolled the quai, not the government in exile nor the deserted schools. Hunger itself was a dull constant in a dull anger. Of course I knew there was a war, but what I mainly experienced was simply that things disappeared, that something just beyond my sight could always take something more away.

    My mother used to have a body and a spirit, flesh and sinew

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and nerves and bone. My mother had desire and bitterness and sex. She had underwear and toenails. She had attitude and irony, she had longing and, at the core of things, like every creature on this earth, concealment. My mother used to have a secret that was not burned with a letter or hidden in faded ribbons or whispered to her friend Lotte but concealed at depth, readying in the nerves or veins, the misfiring synapses and detoured signals of mortality.

    No teenage girl should have to watch her mother try on bras.

''Well, Nan,'' says Hetty, hunkering down to it over coffee. ''I don't see any reason you should be ashamed. You didn't do anything.''

    I say, ''She was duped. You always feel ashamed of being duped.''

    ''Well, okay. But what is it that he did? What did he say, de Man?''

    ''It's not clear yet,'' Nan says in a small voice. ''There are only half a dozen of the articles translated, out of more than ninety. But he talks about 'Jewish decadence.' He says something about a 'Jewish problem.'''

    ''Ouch,'' Hetty says. ''Is it possible he was doing, like, underground? You know, I mean, ironic code?''

    ''Well, and of course,'' says Nan eagerly, ''there's the possibility that the articles deconstruct themselves. Maybe they don't say what they seem to say.''

    ''You mean if you go on up to Tuscaloosa maybe the theorists will be able to theorize them away,'' I say.

    ''Well, Simone, it's not like you to argue that she shouldn't find out,'' Hetty admonishes me. ''You're the research fanatic.'' I could point out that Hetty's the one who's been operating on the principle of distraction. But I hold my tongue. ''What do these guys believe anyway? That language itself is a tool of the power structure.''

    ''The hegemony,'' says Nan.

    ''Of which we are a part,'' I say. ''As employees of the state.''

    ''And that all stories self-destruct.''

    ''All narrative,'' Nan corrects her dully.

    ''All the better. Just look at it, like, he's a writer whose narrative self-destructed. He's his own best proof. If he didn't turn out to be a Hun of some kind, he'd contradict what he was preaching all along.''

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    ''That's sophistical,'' I say.

    ''Sure. Listen, sophistry is underrated. Growing up with liars is great training for lit. crit. Anyway, everybody's being outed as some kind of pervert. Writers, politicians. Kennedy to start. T. S. Eliot, F.D.R., Philip Larkin, fahcrissake. Not to mention poor old Ezra Pound, which we already knew about. Who's next? Truman prob'ly. The prick stops here or something.''

    And now, picking up on Mont's cue a dozen beats late, Hetty pulls the upside-down bowl of her spoon out of her mouth and aims it at me. ''Wasn't your dad some kind of hero in the Resistance?''

    ''I don't know for sure,'' I say. ''I was twelve when he died. But what I pieced together is that a colleague of his named Vanderleven -- I do remember him because he was a slob -- made some sort of a speech defending Jews. 'Positive Influences of Judaism on the Literature of Ideas' -- something foolhardy like that. I don't know if he was Jewish himself, but my guess is not. My guess is that he'd've been underground by that time if he was.''

    I say I have pieced it together but even as I say this, I know that piecing is not what I have done. Rather, this conviction grew or seeped or accreted in me like mold on stone, to become at some time I can no longer remember an axiom. It is my doctrine, my credo, my Article of Faith.

    ''In any case, they came and asked my father to denounce Vanderleven, and my father wouldn't. I know the kind of objection he would make. He'd say that he could only denounce slovenly scholarship, and Vanderleven's seemed to be impeccable.''

    Nan begins to sob, and I realize with alarm that I have just done what I told myself I wouldn't do, bragged about my father and damned de Man by contrast. Cowardly, instantly, I begin to backtrack. ''But look, that's what I figured out. I don't know. For all I know my father was just as duplicitous as de Man, or just as weak. For all I know he was murdered by the underground, or by accident. What I'm saying, Nan, I don't know.''

    So I stumble on, undone by a hood of hair and callow grief, offering up the dearest convictions of my life. At the same time I am thinking about the proximity of Brussels to Liege, wondering how many months our little market may have crossed with the distribution of Le Soir before the food gave out. I wonder if any of the newsprint in my mother's string bag was from that source,

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whether de Man's perfidy once wrapped a hunk of cod or a phallus of saucisse d'Ardennes.

My mother used to have a plain stone in the municipal cemetery downriver beyond the Palais des Congres and the parc de la Boverie. This shamed me. I wanted her in the marble mausoleums of Saint-Martin, where tinted pictures of the dead were ringed with flowers, and whole families were stacked in stone drawers behind wrought iron fences under pediments in the Grecian style. Some had weeping angels, gilded crosses, even windows to display relic bones. My father explained to me that these were Christian graves, which would dishonor and displease my mother, who eschewed all forms of organized religion. She was not superstitious. She had been estranged from her family for these convictions, my father said. Chastened, I complained no more. But I wanted ribbons on her grave. Now it occurs to me that, after all, she did lay out the tarot cards. She had something the matter with her faith, perhaps. Elle avait quelque chose à la foi.

    After my mother died, my father stopped going to the university. My school had been closed by that time in any case; the university may have been closed as well. There, then, a man had no expectation of having to raise a child, and I think he tried his best to be both father and mother to me. It must have been frustrating and diminishing, after those eager young scholars, to have no charge but an awkward eleven-year-old girl. He was unalterably kind, but he had not the knack of it. His straight back wilted like a tulip, whereas I was oppressed by his unrelieved attention. I longed for him to be there but ignoring me the way my mother had. I longed for him to spread the cards behind my back, gaze into space, to hum and dance at the periphery while leaving me to my fantasies of Pinocchio or my paper dolls.

    He set me to parsing and composition; he adjured me gravely that I must never let a point of curiosity go by, because curiosity, like a muscle, will atrophy if unexercised. Therefore he taught me to haul down the great Dictionary of Etymology and the Rhetoric. He taught me English, and for this I used my mother's own notebook, a cover of shiny marbled stuff bound down one side. I copied the sentences she had copied -- My dress is blue -- and moved beyond her in the grammar book, as if, having first become her caretaker I was now, literally, taking up her life.

    My mother used to have the space between my stomach and my lungs. For a long time the pressure of her absence lodged

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there, bloated like a string bag full of holes and scarcity. My father devoted himself to me. Yet I notice now that until my mother died he had continued at the university, where to continue must have meant, to a certain extent, to accept the context of the German occupation, just as to write in a newspaper sanctioned by the occupation meant to accept that context. Just as to visit that moldy courtyard meant to accept the context of decay and death.

    My mother used to have mourners who dropped by the flat and sat with blue and amber squares of rainlight on their faces. I remember Vanderleven sitting there. What chiefly interested me about Professor Vanderleven was, still, his prodigious fat, the way his lower lip protruded so you could see the shiny inside of it when he talked. After he had praised my mother and wept over her anguille au vert, my father sent me, unusually, into the bedroom that he had shared with her and which was now his, stripped of her scents and puffs, alien and austere. I heard the voices from where I sat on the low stool under the window into the shaft, an urgent pleading on the professor's part, and on my father's -- what? Denial, soothing? My father was not a soother. The tone was calm but firm. Tearful when he spoke about my mother, Vanderleven continued tearful. What was he saying and what was its tone? Pleading, warning, threatening? I remember the urgency of it, the strangeness of being exiled to my father's room. I remember that their voices raised, but whether in anger or anxiety or excitement I do not know.

    It was not long after -- how long? a few days, that week, a few weeks? -- before my father said that we must leave, and that I could take nothing but my birth papers, which I must sew into the hem of my skirt.

    And is that all? Is that the whole of the remembered text? And where, then, did I get the notion that my father died for truth and Professor Vanderleven? Where, when did I put together the meaning of these half remembered, unremembered, spottily remembered objects and features and tendencies? What do I know, as knowledge? ''Positive Influences of Judaism on the Literature of Ideas?'' Out of what art flick of the fifties did I make up such a thing whole cloth? Who was dark and saftig, clever Lotte; and why was my mother's best friend not allowed to join my father's colleagues at their soirees? Why was the dormer apartment abandoned in the middle of the war?

    And why do I suppose that my father, who lost the freedom of his profession, and then his job and at the same time his wife, had

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any interest in the threat of ideological contagion in the world? How do I know that when we ran, we were running from the Nazis and not from my mother's grave, from the oppressive memories of that apartment, from Vanderleven, from the war itself?

    When I think of these events they appear as a sort of historic prelude to my life, more and more distant, derealized, abstract, and foreign. But on the other hand and inversely, the ''real'' events, the effective and indelible history was already taking place, there, then -- a thunderous prelude to a lighter and less serious theme: America, Alabama, academia. What I live is a posthistoric afterlife.

''Don't go,'' I say to Nan with some vehemence, so that I register Hetty's recoil, a little flicker of exasperation in the comer of her wide mouth: Simone is off on one of her tangents.

    ''Make a clean break with all of them,'' I advise. ''Why let yourself in for all that pain? They'll only wallow in it. You'll get a Ramada Inn full of breast-beaters and apologists.''

    ''Shit,'' says Hetty. ''How can you say that? You're the one that's always insisting on the facts and the follow-through. Screw 'em, Nan. You've gotta know the worst.''

    My mother used to have a secret behind her eyes, some secret that could not be understood by a ten- or an eleven-year-old girl and cannot be revisited by a fifty-seven-year-old woman who, nevertheless, by this time must have a certain generic knowledge of the secrets that a woman might parcel up behind her eyes: my husband is cold and dry, I am having an affair, my husband is weak and fearful, is collaborating with the enemy.

    ''Don't go where pain is,'' I tell Nan.

    ''Buy yourself a pair of killer boots,'' says Hetty, ''and go kick academic ass.''

    ''Just walk away from it. Let it go.'' Nan is still weeping into a disintegrating wad of paper napkin. I drop my eyes. I note inanely that -- among the constants of civilization -- my dress is blue.

This story incorporates, with the intention of homage, several phrases and paraphrases from the article ''Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's War'' by Jacques Derrida, which appeared in Critical Inquiry No. 14 (Spring 1988) [commat] The University of Chicago.

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END