The Light of Paris (30 page)

I allowed myself to watch my mother carefully, in a way I never had before, the delicate flutter of her fingers, the glittering green of her eyes, so unlike mine, her high cheekbones, the tilt of her head. Every move she made, I wondered where it had come from, which echo of the past was ringing out in her—was the way she drank her coffee the way Sebastien had taken his? What about her gift for gardening? Her cool, calm way of handling crises and public speaking? The way she walked with tiny, quick steps, almost on her tiptoes? My mother had always been inscrutable to me, but this added an entirely new layer of mystery.

How could I not have seen it before? I pictured my grandmother, who looked almost exactly like me, with broad shoulders and heavy thighs and uncooperative hair, and my grandfather, who was tall and rangy and had black eyes. And there was my mother, blonde and slender and small, just the way my grandmother had described Sebastien.

Finding out Sebastien was my grandfather had not shaken my foundations the way it might have if I had discovered I had a different father. But it had made me see my mother differently, and recast the chain of connection—my grandmother, my mother, me.

She had been reading the newspaper and it was spread out over the sofa beside her, open to the society pages. I could see Ashley Hathaway's
toothy smile in one of the larger photographs, a choker with pearls the size of marbles around her neck like a collar. “So you're back.”

“I am.” I'd shown up on her doorstep, unannounced, with rather more suitcases than my last visit, and she'd taken one look at me and nodded and stepped aside, opening the door without ever inviting me in. I suppose it's not so much “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,” but “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in, but they don't have to be happy about it.”

“And what does this mean? How long are you staying?”

“As long as you'll have me. And I think you know what it means. I've left Phillip.”

My mother let out a long, slow sigh, as though she had been holding a century of air. “I see.”

“That's it?” I asked. I had been bracing for an onslaught. Her response seemed underwhelming.

“What would you prefer I say? Shall I jump up and down for joy? Throw you a parade?”

I winced at her sarcasm. She was right, I supposed. What is the culturally appropriate thing to say to someone when they tell you they're getting a divorce? “I'm sorry”? “Congratulations”?

“Don't be mean, Mother.”

“I'm not being mean,” she said, though she was. “I just don't know what you expect me to say. Am I supposed to be excited about your divorce?”

“You could be supportive. I wouldn't be doing it if it weren't the right thing.”

“So you're sure, then.”

“I'm sure.” I was sure of very little just then, the future opening in front of me like a hungry maw. The one thing I was sure of was my future had no place for Phillip in it, and it would be so much the better because of that.

“Well, I'm sorry. I don't know how to behave. No one in our family has ever gotten a divorce before.”

“That's what you're worried about? That I'm the first person in our family to get a divorce? Don't you care about my happiness? Or do you only care about how you look at the Ladies Association?”

My mother's eyes flashed at me, hard and brilliant green. “Of course I care about your happiness. You're my daughter.”

“Then why have you spent your entire life criticizing me? Making me miserable?” Tears caught in my throat, and I hated them, tried to push them down. I hated the way they made me feel weak, out of control, like a child. I hadn't cried when I had left Phillip. Any emotion I had invested in him had been gone so long ago it would have been stranger to cry than not. But my mother—I had never been able to protect my heart from her. No matter how many times she had shut me down, I had never stopped wanting her approval.

“I have tried to keep you safe. I have tried to keep you from making choices that would only end up in disappointment. I have tried to save you from pain. I have never, ever, ever tried to make you unhappy.”

“You have. You always have.” I shuddered in a long, slow breath. “You didn't want me to paint. You wanted me to go to cotillion, even though I hated it. You wanted me to go to college, when I only wanted to go to art school. You wanted me to stay with Phillip when I wanted a divorce. You wanted me to be
you
and I can only be myself no matter how messy and inconvenient and broken I am.”

My mother's normally smooth brow was wrinkled, and she looked genuinely pained. “I wanted you to have an easy life, Madeleine. All the paths you wanted to take were only going to leave you heartbroken.”

“How can you know? How can you know unless you let me try? It's exactly like Grandmother,” I said, shaking my head. I snatched a tissue out of the box on the end table and blew my nose, loud, ugly, unconcerned with being ladylike or attractive. I was done with that. I was done
with the performance of fragility, done pretending to be beautiful, or delicate, or any of the things I was not and didn't care to be.

“What do you mean?”

“She wanted to be in Paris. She wanted to write. She wanted to live abroad, and she didn't want to get married or have children. And she didn't get to do any of those things. She ended up doing what her mother wanted anyway.”

“And wasn't that for the best, in the end? Wasn't she better off married to your grandfather, with a good life and a stable home and never having to worry about where her next meal was coming from? She made herself miserable wanting things she couldn't have, and all I wanted was to save you from that.”

“And all I wanted was the chance to choose for myself.”

Folding her hands in her lap, my mother stared down for a moment. “I see that,” she said. “I can't apologize for wanting to keep you safe. I can't apologize for wanting to protect you from failure. But I see that.”

And for the first time, I felt like my mother heard me.

My tears were slowing and I blew my nose again, long and loud and unattractive, until I could breathe again. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry I've disappointed you. I'm sorry I'm not the daughter you wanted. I'm sorry I'm not Ashley Hathaway. I'm sorry I don't like the things you like.”

My mother looked up at me, surprised. “You do like the things I like.”

“What are you talking about? Fundraising committees make me want to slit my wrists with a butter knife.” I blew my noise again, loudly. My eyes were hot and swollen and I was unexpectedly exhausted, as though I could have lain down and slept as long as a princess in a fairy tale.

“Not that,” my mother said, waving her slim hand dismissively. “We love reading, and art. We love to make beautiful things. My garden, your pictures. We are like my father, both of us.”

I furrowed my brow, thinking of my grandfather, who, like my own
father, was always hidden behind some dreadfully boring financial newspaper and thought savings bonds were a good gift for children. “I'm nothing like Grandfather.”

“Not Grandfather,” my mother said softly. “My father.”

My eyes widened and my breath caught sharp in my chest. “You knew?” I asked, the words carried out on a breath.

“Of course I knew. I read the journals and the letters.”

“You said you didn't.”

“It's so hard to talk about.”

The questions boiled up inside me. “Did you ever ask her? Did you ever talk to her about it?”

My mother shook her head. “I didn't. I didn't think I could, really. My mother and I—we were never close. But I understood why after I read the journals. I think I reminded her of him.”

So it ran in the family, then, this estrangement. There was a sadness in my mother's eyes I had never seen before, and it made my heart ache for her, and for myself. How had we spent our entire lives lying to each other? How had she denied herself to me—her real self—for so long? Why did the women in my family work so hard to make themselves emotionless, to shellac down their hair and close off their feelings, to stay aloof and frozen? The only time my mother ever dug in was when she was gardening. Turning my head, I looked out the window at it and saw it for what it was—my mother's art. Her gardens were her paintings—color and form and order, experimentation and creation, dirt and birth and success and failure. “You reminded her of Sebastien?”

“Yes.”

“And you never got a chance to meet him?”

“He died in the Second World War. He was living in Bordeaux when the Germans occupied it. And I didn't know until after then.”

“I'm so sorry,” I said. I was thinking of my own father, of his comforting presence and how I missed the sound of his voice. But at least I had
known him. My mother had never even known her own father. “Have you seen a photograph?” I asked. My mother nodded. She went to one of the shelves by the windows and pulled down a photo album. I remembered paging through it as a child, looking at the nameless faces of ancestors past, their funny clothes and stiff poses, the old cars and the quiet skylines and horizons behind them, but I had never before connected them to me, had never understood the way we were all linked.

The photo had been taken at a café. Sebastien—
my grandfather
, I thought—was sitting in a chair, leaning back, legs stretched out long before him. He held a cigarette in one hand, and he was smiling slightly at the camera. Off to one side I could see a woman's legs beneath the table, her ankles crossed, a pair of T-strap shoes on her feet. She had turned away while the photograph was being taken and I could see only the edge of her jaw and the line of her neck. Her hat covered her hair. It could have been my grandmother.

He was tall and slender, his features drawn as sharply as a model's. His hair was light and unfashionably long, flopping into his eyes. I looked at him, memorizing his face, though I felt as though I had already painted it in my mind a thousand times over the last few weeks. Looking up at my mother, I was shocked to see exactly how much she looked like him—not only her build and her slender fingers, but the sharpness of her cheekbones and the slight raise of her eyebrows, which I had always thought of as an expression of superiority, but on Sebastien looked like perennial amusement.

“You look exactly like him,” I said.

“I know. It broke her heart.” Leaving me with the album, she walked back to the sofa and sat down on the edge, leaning forward and crossing her forearms precisely.

“I'm so sorry,” I said, though I wasn't sure what I was sorry for—her distance from her mother, never knowing her father, the distance between us. Maybe all those things.

“Don't be.” She smoothed her skirt over her knees, straightened her shoulders. “As far as I'm concerned, my father was Robert Walsh, the man who raised me. He took me on as his own, after all, when he didn't have to. And I never had the slightest sense he treated me any differently from how he would have if I'd been his biological daughter. That's fatherhood.”

“Don't you wish you could have known him?”

My mother looked out the window into her garden. The trees were in full leaf, spreading warm shadow over parts of the yard, and there were flowers everywhere. She was right—we were the same in that way. Except she had found a socially acceptable way to pursue her art and I had just . . . given up? I'd blamed my parents and Phillip for quitting painting, but I could have resisted their pressure. I could have kept going. I'd blamed my mother for forcing me into marrying Phillip, but I could have said no. A stronger woman would have. The woman I wanted to be would have. The woman I was going to be would.

Because that was the point, wasn't it? To learn from the past, to learn from my mistakes, the mistakes of my mother and my grandmother. Both of them had lived the lives that were expected of them. I didn't resent my grandmother for her choices. She had done what she had to do. I just hated that she had to do it at all. And my mother had spent so much time and energy holding me back, holding herself back. Imagine what she could have been if she had only let go and embraced who she was. Imagine what I could have been. Imagine what could happen if we all had the heart to be who we truly are.

“I wish I could have known him because it might have brought me closer to my mother. I wish I could have known him because—well, because there's something about knowing where you come from, isn't there?” I looked around at the china cabinets, which, though they had been emptied, were still full of generations of Walsh and Bowers memories. Someday it would be my job to keep these things safe, to remember the stories of the hand-painted plates my grandfather had brought back
from a trip to China, to polish the silver someone claimed had been buried in the garden during the Civil War (but really, everyone said that—if it had been true, shame on the Union Army for not figuring it out).