I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (34 page)

As I plucked a two and a seven out of the caramelized
choux
, I fought a small wave of embarrassment. Some of my friends were
turning thirty that year, and even their celebrations weren't as lavish as mine. It was an evening befitting a wedding.

A friend pulled me aside and looked in my eyes with surprising seriousness. “Your grandmother,” she said quietly. “She loves you.”

—

M
Y MOTHER
AND
I spent the night on the boat. The following day, the three of us would go to a funeral parlor to plan Josée's final arrangements.

We ate lunch on the roof, picking through the leftovers. To Josée's amazement, I called up the music she had chosen for her service on my phone. She suggested we listen to it on the speakers I had brought for the party. Purcell's grand and somber
Funeral for Queen Mary
floated out onto the water as I squinted into the sun, eating the sugary remains of the
pièce montée
.

Josée was in high spirits. My mother was as well. She was pleased to be the daughter chosen to execute Josée's wishes, even though it was in part because her sisters had already refused the honor. I had invited myself along, and now that Josée saw me here, eager, with my notebook already out, she seemed quite glad to have us both. She was not afraid of death, she'd told me often. She knew what to expect. There was a tunnel, bells, and then, finally, all the people you had lost, waiting for you with outstretched arms. There was nothing to fear.

“Did you attend Mina's funeral?” I asked my mother. I remembered the creaking sound of the trapeze in my room, how it had slowed at the sight of my mother's face.

“Non!”
my mother and Josée said at once, both quite angrily. I started and looked from one face to the other.

“I was quite disappointed in fact, Françoise,” Josée said.

“But you were the one who told me not to come,” my mother said, instantly small.

“I would never have said a thing like that!” Josée said.

“Mais si Maman,”
Françoise said. “You called me right away to tell me Mina had . . . You said the date for the funeral hadn't been set. And then you told me—something like, ‘It's not worth you flying over. You're so busy in New York.'”

“But where did you go fetch such an idea?” Josée said. “I was very hurt you didn't come.”

“I should have just booked a flight anyway,” my mother said. “But no one even told me the date.”

“Everyone asked where you were!” Josée said.

“It's one of my big regrets,” my mother said, staring sadly at the food in front of her.

“It was embarrassing for me,” Josée said. “I had to explain that one of my daughters couldn't make it.”

My mother sighed and served herself the rest of the salad from the bowl. I saw her take a moment to locate her adult self. Her features rearranged themselves, her voice dropped an octave. She changed the topic, and the lunch ended pleasantly.

It was the weekend of the flower festival in Neuilly and the central square was overrun with bright plants. Parking was unusually difficult to find, even with Josée's special disabled pass.

“I can't wait to be done with all this,” she said as she circled the block. “In my coffin, I'll finally get some rest.”

The funeral home was the same one where she had made the arrangements after Mina's death. It had the clean and restful anonymity of a doctor's waiting room, with simple furniture and a
vase of white lilies. A mild young man, the sole employee on this quiet Saturday afternoon, arranged three chairs opposite his desk and prepared a cup of espresso for each of us.

“But it's scalding hot!” Josée exclaimed as she took a sip. “I'm not here for a cremation.”

“I'm sorry, madame,” the young man said.

“I can see you're in a hurry to have me dead,” she replied, and he reddened. But he walked us through the details calmly. My mother took notes in her notebook, as she always did at every important appointment. I took notes as well, as did the young man. I could tell this pleased Josée, having her wishes recorded in triplicate.

She announced that she did not want the hearse to take the highway when transporting her from the church to the cemetery. “I want a view,” she said. “Take the scenic route.” The young man made a note of this. We all did.

“Do you still place death announcements in
Le Figaro
?” Josée asked. “Or is it done by text message these days?”

“Yes, madame, we place a notice in the
Figaro
. And we'll mail a death announcement to your contacts as well.” He pulled out templates of death announcements. Josée quickly chose the least ostentatious and asked for a copy so that she could edit the language. She would write the death announcement for the paper. She would address the envelopes herself and leave them for us.

“Now, what about flowers?” she asked. The young man replied that the flowers were usually left to the discretion of the family. “It can be healing for them,” he said gently, “to make a few decisions themselves.”

“I don't want unsightly flowers at my funeral,” Josée said. “I'll choose the base and they can add a few wreaths if they want.”

Next she inquired about the speech the priest would make
during the service. She did not want him to say the kind of nonsense he'd said at her mother's funeral.

“He'll meet with your daughters to get a sense of you,” the young man said. “The family will provide him with a brief welcome text and biography. And then they will also give the speeches they've prepared.”

“I'll write the welcome text myself,” Josée said. “I've already given Andrée a poem to read.” The young man told her that this would not be possible—the church followed its own procedures.

Josée became agitated. “I don't want them to say ridiculous things about me,” she repeated.

“My sisters and I will write the texts in advance,” my mother promised gently. “We'll let you edit them.”

Finally, Josée clapped her hands together and asked to be taken to choose the coffin. The young man led us down to a basement room. “There's the bathroom where I threw up after Mina's death,” Josée showed us as we passed it. In the basement, mounted on the walls, in columns sorted by the type of wood, were lengthwise cross-sections of each coffin.

“Oh,” Josée said, disappointed. “I wanted to climb inside them.” The young man, who by now had warmed to her frank humor, laughed.

“It's not a joke,” she said, annoyed. She rolled her shoulders. “I wanted to see how they'd fit.”

“I assure you they're all very comfortable,” he said.

Josée scanned the room and chose almost instantly. She had a vast store of knowledge, from her many houseboat renovations, and she knew she wanted a coffin made of oak.

“Can this one come with a different lining on the inside?” she asked. “I'd like it to be cream.”

“Certainly,” the man said.

“Good, ivory has never flattered my complexion,” she said. “It makes me look green. Oh look, there's a pillow. I'm going to be quite comfortable in there.” She reached out and tested the handles. She declared them painful, the metal cutting into the palm.

“Don't worry,” the young man said. “The porters are quite used to it.”

“Let's change the handles anyway,” Josée said. “No point bothering anyone.”

“I imagine my mother would carry the coffin herself if she could,” my mother added, amused.

“One last thing,” the man said, checking off Josée's choices on a sheet. “Would you like a small cross on the top?”

“Why not?” Josée said. “It might come in handy.”

As we climbed the stairs again, not ten minutes later, I remarked that this was probably the fastest anyone had ever made all these decisions.

“Yes, well,” Josée said brusquely, “I'm not about to spend the rest of my life picking out my coffin.”

As we sat down at the desk to finalize the paperwork, the question of pallbearers arose. The man said that Josée could assign the task to up to three people, and that the fourth would be a professional.

“There are no men in my life,” Josée said with a small hint of pride.

“There are your two grandsons,” my mother said. “I know my son would be honored.”

“You think so?” Josée asked with surprise. My mother assured her he would.

“I would be honored as well,” I said. Josée laughed. “No, really,”
I said. “You need three, and you have three grandchildren. I'm pretty strong.”

“Can she do that?” Josée asked.

“It's not traditional,” the man said with a smile. “But I don't see why not.”

“Okay,” Josée said. “You'll have to hide your hair under a baseball cap.”

I kissed her cheek.

“You won't drop me?” she said.

“I promise,” I said, laughing. “I won't drop you.” But then I imagined myself actually carrying her coffin. It wouldn't be like my grandfather's funeral, I realized for the first time. I would be devastated.

“You'll stay close?” I asked her quietly, when my mother could not hear. “I mean after. You'll stay close to me?”

“Oh,” Josée said. “I don't know. I'll have such a great many things to
do.”

O
n the island of Ischia, off the coast of Naples, there was a resort of natural thermal baths run by friends of friends. The spring of Josée's eighty-fourth birthday, my mother called to suggest the three of us go there to celebrate. It was to be her gift to her mother, and to all of us.

“But that'll be great for my book!” I blurted. My mother's trips to Paris, though frequent, were brief and frenzied. I longed to have the three of us together in one place.

“Yes, I know,” my mother said, her tone indulgent. “Finally, something that might make everyone happy.”

Josée was thrilled. Emails bounced between us as we planned the trip. My mother would fly from New York to Paris, where we would all meet in the airport and board the same plane for Naples.

The day of our departure, Josée wore an impeccable traveling outfit: a tan linen pantsuit, a cream-colored shirt, light scarf, and pink sunglasses. As we passed through security, her boarding pass disappeared. She'd put it in the bin with her purse, she insisted.

“It must have blown away inside the X-ray machine,” she said, showing the security agent the empty bin.

“Perhaps you have put it back in your purse,
madame,
or in
your pockets
,
” the woman said, her voice somehow unimpeachably neutral and at the same time dripping with contempt.

“I've already checked there,” Josée said curtly. “It's stuck in the machine.”

The security agent locked eyes with me over Josée's head.

“Would
you
look in her purse?” she asked me, and her eyes said,
We both know what happened
. I stared back for a beat too long, surprised. Then I dropped my gaze and gently took Josée's purse from her. I dug around inside.

“It isn't here,” I said quickly, with relief, though it might have been.

The agent sighed and told us to go get a new one printed at the gate.

“
Alors!
” Josée said as we walked away. “That idiot must deal with this often if she knows exactly how to replace them. What a bad system.” We repeated this to each other several times, trying to erase the memory of my hands in her purse.

The screens showed that my mother's plane from New York was delayed. Josée declared that if Françoise missed our flight to Italy, we would go straight on to the island without her. She did not want to waste half her day sitting in the hot gritty sun of Naples. I made a noncommittal sound that meant
We'll see.
I knew I would refuse to leave my mother behind.

The seats on the plane were arranged by threes. Josée had the window seat and I had the middle. I sat in the aisle and put my bag on the seat between us.

“What are you doing?” Josée asked.

“I'll move if someone comes to sit here,” I said.

“Of course someone will come sit there,” she said. “Don't play games.” I sighed and moved over. Seconds later, a woman installed
herself in the aisle seat. Josée raised her eyebrows at me meaningfully. I laughed, conceding the point. Then I turned and anxiously watched the front of the plane. The flow of people had slowed considerably. Josée rested her head against the seat back and shut her eyes.

My mother was the very last person to board the plane. I shouted when I spotted her; her face was so wonderfully familiar that I barely saw it as a face at all. I scrambled over the woman beside me and fell into my mother's arms.

“That cry!” Josée said, a hand on her chest. “That
cri de coeur
! ‘
Ç'est ma maman!
'” She imitated me in a strangled high pitch. “I'll remember that cry all my life,” she said. “You shocked me out of my sleep.”

In Naples, my mother and I left Josée by the taxi stand with our luggage—my mother begging her to sit down in the shade, Josée insisting on standing in the sun—while we weaseled answers about the Naples bus system out of the reluctant woman staffing the airport information desk. As we walked away, I ran back to ask for a map of the city. I presented it to my mother with a flourish.

“What a good idea!” she said. And then we took a taxi to the port, as I'd always known we would. My mother was a woman who liked to know her options.

In Italy, my grandmother appeared suddenly old. In her own home, every object was an extension of her. She never seemed frail there, even when she'd broken her wrist and was unable to cut her own food. Her entire being diffused and she became more than her body; she became the whole room. But here, far from Paris, the unfamiliar atmosphere compacted her back into herself. The lines in her face deepened, and I saw her fragile bones and thickly veined hands. I felt the tones and movements other people used to
cushion the air around her. Even my mother treated her delicately, taking Josée's weight on her arm as they walked and worrying over every movement she made.

“If she keeps treating me like this,” Josée murmured to me as we boarded the boat, “I'll become an old woman.”

The sun was on its way back down when we finally made it to the island of Ischia. My mother, who had left New York more than twenty-four hours before, gave no signs of exhaustion. She checked us into the hotel by the spa. Two rooms side by side, one for Josée and one for us to share. When the door to our room closed behind us, my mother and I fell into each other's arms like lovers. I hadn't realized until that moment just how much we had been holding back.

The spa was nestled in a bay. Rich foliage on small cliffs gave way to the beach below. Twenty-three thermal pools were embedded in a labyrinth of stone paths. There were pools with jets and undulating pools with water the exact temperature of the human body. The water came from deep within the island, heated by a dormant volcano and infused with minerals from the earth. Marco, who ran the spa along with other members of his family, explained that the water here held a small degree of natural radioactivity. The body fought against it, he said, then gave way to fatigue. It promoted a deep relaxation.

He ended his tour at the restaurant on the terrace, where we sat and looked out at the sea. A waiter brought us fresh green olives and huge hunks of Parmesan cheese. Marco talked mostly to my mother. He was a fan of the children's books she published and knew them each by name, even those that had come out years ago. I had often sat quietly by while people had similar conversations with my father, but it was rare to meet someone who knew my mother's work so well.

She gently turned the discussion away from herself and toward him. He told us that many men who grew up on the island became sailors. He had tried but had not been suited to the work.

“
Ohhh!
” said my mother with a grin, and she leaned back, sweeping her arm toward my grandmother. “My mother,” she said grandly, “lives on a houseboat!”

—

A
T NIGHT
, when the boisterous Italian families with day passes to the spa had departed, only the hotel guests populated the glowing terrace. The pools were still and dark and empty. Waves lapped against folded beach chairs, smoothing away footprints.

“It's far too cold now to swim in the ocean,” Josée said. “If only we'd come a month later, the island would have been in bloom.”

Over dinner, looking out at the sea, we tried to find a path into the past. I asked my mother and grandmother about the early vacations they had shared. My mother recalled learning to swim on the Côte d'Azur and fishing alongside her father.

“We never ate the fish your father caught,” my grandmother insisted, though my mother's memory of eating them was vivid.

“Oh!” I said then, the bright
Oh!
of one who has suddenly remembered something. I turned, placing my hand on Josée's arm. “Did you ever tell my mother the story about the lottery?” I felt her stiffen under my touch.

Haltingly, Josée tried to tell the story. The facts became jumbled. The details changed. There was another girl involved. Josée forgot to say, until I prompted her, that the lottery had never been drawn. The story lost its punch line.

“Yes, then there was the Munich Agreement,” Josée concluded. “And so the lottery was never drawn.”

“The Munich Agreement?” my mother said, perplexed. The story hung heavily in the air.

“You're not cold?” Josée asked me sharply. She had asked me several times to put on my jacket.

“No,” I said. “I'm not cold.”

“Just looking at her makes me turn to ice,” she said.

“I must have warm blood,” I said. “I'm not often cold.”

“You're enrobed,” Josée said enunciating the syllables—
en-rob-ée
—as if I might miss her meaning.

“Yes, that's true,” I said, with a nervous trill at the back of my throat.

“To be enrobed, it's common knowledge . . . the best swimmers carry a small layer of fat like this, like a dolphin or a fish. You would be a good swimmer.”

I shrugged, smile in place.

“I didn't know all this,” my mother said then, and it was clear that she wasn't referring to my body but to Josée's past. But when she tried to ask about Mina and Mélanie, Josée parried her questions with a fencer's grace. “Would you like some pineapple?” she asked. I felt a tiny prick of pride. My mother did not yet know her way through Josée's rhythms.

—

T
HE NEXT EVENING
, Josée asked a local man to recommend a nice restaurant. My mother corrected her—we wanted a good restaurant, not a nice one. We wound up in a place with white linen tablecloths and many forks. The waitstaff displayed the fish to us whole before cooking and serving it. I winced at the prices, but I knew my mother was proud to treat her mother lavishly. In that hushed candlelit interior it felt as if time had stopped.

My mother asked Josée a question about her childhood, the answer to which was a story I already knew. Josée glanced up at me across the large round table. I nodded almost imperceptibly. Her childhood unspooled through the courses. She told my mother about the war, the years she'd spent shuttled between hiding places. She had told me scattered anecdotes, ricocheting back and forth through the years, but now a clearer and more linear narrative emerged.

When Josée came to her early years in Nanterre, living with Mélanie on Aunt Lucy's property, and when she mentioned the older cousin with whom she had biked to Mina's apartment in Paris, my mother caught an inconsistency I had not thought to press.

“But Mina's brother died when he was nine,” my mother said. “And Mina had no other siblings. Who was Aunt Lucy? Who was this cousin?” Josée's answers were vague—these were not questions she had thought to ask as a child. But under my mother's questioning, a genealogy slowly emerged.

Josée's grandfather, Alfred, had had a wife before Mélanie, and children. Aunt Lucy, Josée conceded, might have been Mina's half sister from her father's first marriage. And, she told us then, though Alfred had separated from his wife when he met Mélanie, he had not divorced her and married Mélanie until several years after Mina was born.

My mother drew her conclusions from this with awe: Mélanie was
fille-mère.
This was the term for a woman who'd had a child out of wedlock: a girl-mother. And Mina, my mother said, had also been a bastard! Josée tried to backtrack—Aunt Lucy might only have been a family friend—but my mother simply
mmhmm
ed and shifted the conversation forward, asking Josée about later years. My mother had told me often how much it pained her, the
shame Josée continued to feel over a stigma so long outdated. I could see how much it meant to Françoise, this missing clue in the mystery of her mother.

When dessert was long over and the rest of the restaurant had emptied, I excused myself to go to the bathroom. I stood in front of the mirror longer than necessary, splashing cool water on my face, savoring the moment to myself. When I returned, my mother and Josée were still talking. The staff began setting the tables for the next day. It was only when our waiter apologetically presented the check that Josée and my mother blinked and reentered the world.

Later, my brief absence expanded in my mother's mind to cover nearly the whole meal.

“While you were gone . . . ,” she said several times, eager to fill me in. I had been there. I had asked some of the questions myself. But eventually I stopped reminding her of this.

—

I
N THE POOL
exactly the temperature of the human body, jets sent up bubbles strong enough to make a person float. My mother and I took turns holding each other under the arms so that the rest of our bodies stretched out on the water's surface. When I twisted to leave my mother's grasp, she gathered my legs against her instead, cradling me like an infant. I rested my head on her shoulder, the water bubbling around us. Josée stood at the pool's edge, a heavy sweater on. The wind had picked up. She was cold and she wanted to go eat lunch.

“I'm doing a rebirth,” I told her.

“You should get out and put some clothes on,” she said. “You're going to come down with the flu.”

My mother asked Josée to take a photo of us and she did, fumbling with the phone's camera for a moment. “Let's go,” she said.

“Just a minute longer,” my mother said, nuzzling my neck.

“You're both going to die of bronchitis,” said Josée, “and I'm going to be left with this stupid photograph, saying, ‘Those idiots, I told them to put on clothes!'”

At lunch, my mother mentioned therapy, and how useful she had found it to speak to someone over the years.

Josée was skeptical. “Why would you pay for advice from a, what do they call it in New York again? A shrimp?”

“A shrink,” my mother said. “And they don't really give you advice. Mine almost never talks at all. It's hearing yourself talk that's useful. It's talking without fear of being judged.”