Five Quarters of the Orange / Пять четвертинок апельсина

“You see, Mamie,” explained Yannick winningly. “The beauty of it is that we’re not even expecting you to do anything. Just to be yourself. To be natural.”

“I could run a column in the magazine,” added Laure. “”Mamie Framboise Advises,“ something like that. Of course, you wouldn’t need to write it. I’d do all that.”

She beamed at me, as if I were some child who needed reassurance.

They’d brought Cassis with them again, and he too was beaming, though he looked confused, as if this was all a little too much for him.

“But I told you.” I kept my voice level, hard, to keep it from trembling. “I told you before. I don’t want any of this. I don’t want to be a part of it.”

Cassis looked at me, bewildered.

“But it’s such a good chance for my son,” he pleaded. “Think what the publicity might do for him.”

Yannick coughed.

“What my father means,” he amended hastily, “is that we could all benefit from the situation. The possibilities are endless if the thing catches on. We could market Mamie Framboise jams, Mamie Framboise biscuits… Of course, Mamie, you’d have a substantial percentage…”

I shook my head.

“You’re not listening,” I said in a louder voice. “I don’t want publicity. I don’t want a percentage. I’m not interested.”

Yannick and Laure exchanged glances.

“And if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking,” I said sharply, “that you might just as easily do it without my consent-after all, a name and a photograph’s all you really need-then listen to this. If I hear of one more so-called Mamie Framboise recipe appearing in that magazine-in any magazine-then I’ll be on the phone to the editor of that magazine that very day. I’ll sell him the rights to every recipe I’ve got. Hell, I’ll give them to him for free.”

I was out of breath, my heart hammering with rage and fear. But no one railroads Mirabelle Dartigen’s daughter. They knew I meant what I said too. I could see it in their faces.

Helplessly, they protested:

“Mamie-”

“And stop calling me Mamie!”

“Let me talk to her.” That was Cassis, rising with difficulty from his chair.

I noticed that age had shrunk him; had softly sunk him into himself, like a failed soufflе. Even that small effort caused him to wheeze painfully.

“In the garden.”

Sitting on a fallen tree trunk beside the disused well I felt an odd sense of doubling, as if the old Cassis might pull aside the fat-man’s mask from his face and reappear as before, intense, reckless and wild.

“Why are you doing this, Boise?” he demanded. “Is it because of me?

I shook my head slowly.

“This has nothing to do with you,” I told him. “Or Yannick.” I jerked my head at the farmhouse. “You notice I managed to get the old farm fixed up.”

He shrugged.

“Never saw why you’d want to, myself,” he said. “I wouldn’t touch the place. Gives me the shivers just to think of you living here.” Then he gave me a strange look, knowing, almost sharp. “But it’s very like you to do it.” He smiled. “You always were her favorite, Boise. You even look like her nowadays.”

I shrugged.

“You won’t talk me round,” I said flatly.

“Now you’re beginning to sound like her too.” His voice, complex with love, guilt, hate. “ Boise…”

I looked at him.

“Someone had to remember her,” I told him. “And I knew it wasn’t going to be you.”

He made a helpless gesture.

“But here, in Les Laveuses…”

“No one knows who I am,” I said. “No one makes the connection.” I grinned suddenly. “You know, Cassis, to most people, all old ladies look pretty much the same.”

He nodded.

“And you think Mamie Framboise would change that.”

“I know it would.”

A silence.

“You always were a good liar,” he observed casually. “That’s another thing you got from her. The capacity to hide. Me, I’m wide open.”

He flung his arms wide to illustrate.

“Good for you,” I said indifferently. He even believed it himself.

“You’re a good cook, I’ll give you that.” He stared over my shoulder at the orchard, the trees heavy with ripening fruit. “She’d have liked that. To know you’d kept things going. You’re so like her…” he repeated slowly, not a compliment but a statement of fact, some distaste, some awe.

“She left me her book,” I told him. “The one with the recipes in it. The album.”

His eyes widened.

“She did? Well, you were her favorite.”

“I don’t know why you keep saying that,” I said impatiently. “If ever Mother had a favorite it was Reinette, not me. You remember-”

“She told me herself,” he explained. “Said that of the three of us you were the only one with any sense or any guts. There’s more of me in that sly little bitch than the pair of you ten times over. That’s what she said.”

It sounded like her. Her voice in his, clear and sharp as glass. She must have been angry with him, in one of her rages. It was rare that she struck any of us, but God!.. her tongue.

Cassis grimaced.

“It was the way she said it too,” he told me softly. “So cold and dry. With that curious look in her eyes, as if it was a kind of test. As if she was waiting to see what I’d do next.”