Paris Summer

by Rosemary Friedman

  Everyone had his reasons. Foreign visitors who came to see what Boston had to offer, and were too busy trying to make a living to frequent the galleries in their countries of origin; veteran tourists, with the Museum of Fine Arts on their whirlwind itineraries, many of whom, preoccupied with bad backs and sore feet took nothing whatsoever away with them apart from a postcard or a poster snapped up on their way to the restroom; philistines who looked more often at their watches than the paintings, and could hardly wait for the moment when it was time for the promised break in the coffee shop. A minority, familiar with the modesty of true art, were extremely knowledgeable. I liked that. I liked engaging in dialogue with those people who loved paintings and who knew what they were talking about. I learned a lot from them and it always made my day as did the schoolchildren, my favourite pupils, gathered round me on their camp-stools and convinced that the haze that enveloped Monet’s haystacks was due to the fact that he had been staring at the sun and summer tears were in his eyes.

  In one way, Paris and Boston were similar. Both were walking cities. Compact and convenient they could be neatly sliced up into digestible segments like pumpkin pie. The similarities ended there. While Boston was a metropolis with small town sensibilities, Paris was a metropolis: period. Only a hop away from home, Paris, even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, was an aristocrat to Boston’s hoi polloi for whom getting and spending had replaced religion, and whose place of worship was the shopping mall – Loulou’s Lost and Found with its repro souvenir Maxim’s plates and Pan Am ice buckets, or Red Wagon with its funky baby clothes.

  Beacon Hill, where we have our house, is Boston’s social and geographical pinnacle and the only noise, according to legend, comes from the sound of dust settling on old money. Jordan’s family is old money. His mother still lives in a ten-bedroom mansion, with high ceilings and large windows, overlooking Boston Common. A stern woman, who prides herself on the erroneous fact that she hasn’t a selfish bone in her body, she demands constant attention and since Jordan’s days, weekends often included, are twenty-five hours long, the attending frequently falls to me.

  Laetitia Mercy Flatland, strong-minded and with an exalted social position, had managed to produce only one son. I was hardly surprised. One look at the austere body which moved in its own aura, repelling intimacy, and the mind boggled at the notion that she had managed to do anything so down to earth as give birth, not to mention the essential preliminaries. Everything about her, her clothes, her hair in its savage bun, was ascetic, and it was hardly unexpected that her house was furnished in Shaker mode or that her Puritan conscience dictated rigorous self-examination, the acceptance of God’s punishment for the smallest sins, a Bible reading to start the day and Church (twice) on Sundays. Had she been born in another era I have no doubt that the mother-in-law that I acquired along with Jordan would not have flinched from spinning wool, dyeing cloth, attending personally to the health of her household and even, when occasion demanded it, performing simple surgery.

  Although she lived alone, Laetitia lived in style, dining nightly at a deceptively modest table (it was insured for a small fortune) capable of seating sixteen and which was clean enough to eat from without mats or cloths. There was no such thing as a TV dinner. No such thing as a TV, the emission from which she equated with that from a sewer. She spent her time reading, history mainly – she had a fine mind – making petit point chair seats, cushion covers and bell-pulls that she gave away as Christmas presents – she would have no truck with the garish vulgarity on offer in the shops – listening to opera, Galli-Curci and Rosa Ponselle, and socializing with her equally snobbish friends. Born with a silver spoon in her mouth, she never let you forget it and somehow managed to give the impression that she had not only sprung from some quite other planet but, given the chance, would have taken part with her militant sisters in supporting such historic events as the Boston Tea Party and the Siege of Boston.

  She had never quite accepted me. In throwing in his lot with a native New Yorker, Jordan, who was destined for someone much higher up on the social register (I wasn’t even on the first rung), had demeaned himself and was constantly reminded by his mother, in subtle and indirect ways, of his seminal gaffe. In my company, looking down upon our friends who were venture capitalists, fund managers and successful professors and doctors, she spoke of heirs to shipping fortunes or industrial entrepreneurs whose financial holdings and far-reaching economic interests assumed a leading role in the affairs of the Bay State. These luminaries wielded extensive political influence, enhanced their dominance through the powerful agency of kinship and marriage, and breathed a rarefied air in which Laetitia made sure I felt deprived of oxygen. When I mentioned to Jordan that I felt ill at ease in his mother’s presence he said I was hung up about it and not to take any notice; her bark was worse than her bite. But she didn’t bark, that was the trouble; she was much too much of a lady. She hissed like a viper and when she was good and ready and had reduced you to the point where your self-esteem was hovering around nil on a scale of one to ten she went for the jugular, finishing off what remained of you with one sharp thrust of her puritanical tongue.

  Once, soon after Jordan and I had become engaged and I sported the family emerald on the fourth finger of my left hand, we were summoned to dinner. The company consisted of a couple of senators and their high-born wives, and a descendant of the Boston Associates, who maintained his pre-eminence in the city by devoting his time and money to supporting cultural, educational and charitable institutions, one of which was the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. When the conversation turned to a self-congratulatory exposé of the United States as a bastion of freedom, apparently planted on virgin soil and destined to be a light unto the nations, I blithely ventured an opinion to the effect that this so-called freedom had been built on the sweat of pioneer brows and that, although many Americans had indeed toiled hard, the ultimate source of their prosperity, their start-up capital as it were, lay in what was in reality the theft of a continent and the destruction of those who inhabited it. To say that you could have heard a pin drop would be to put it mildly. The dining-room became distinctly more chill as the senators, steeped in the great American myth and impervious to fact, refused, like most of their fellow countrymen, to contemplate the truth, although deep down they must have known that the wealth and affluence under discussion rested on the shaky foundations of slaughter and slavery. Taking refuge in historical amnesia, Laetitia fixed me with her fading ceanothus-blue eyes and proclaimed in her clipped tones and distinctive nasal twang, ‘You are hardly the best judge of the United States, Judith. Your mother, after all, was an immigrant.’ There were countless other put-downs which I won’t go into here, with which she had decimated me over the years. She always seemed to wrong-foot me, no matter how hard I tried, and although I usually managed to wait until I was safely on my way home in the car, I frequently ended up in tears.

  There are people like that. Just as some individuals have the knack of making you feel good, others are equally adept at making you feel bad. I only put up with her for Jordan who, incapable of doing wrong – apart from marrying beneath him – was his mother’s blue-eyed boy. Funnily enough, Laetitia adored Michelle who didn’t have to mind her P’s and Q’s. Her grandmother’s sharp gaze was capable of perceiving only in black or white. While I was black, and nothing I did or could do would alleviate the situation, as far as Laetitia was concerned, Michelle was unequivocally white and could indulge in the most bizarre teenage behaviour without bringing any opprobrium on to her head. She could sit barefoot on the floor fiddling with her toes, play with her long hair which she slung constantly over her shoulder, flaunt her nose stud, guzzle bags of chips in the library, try on her grandmother’s rings which she would one day inherit along with her hand-patched quilt and Jordan’s oak cradle, and tell the most outrageous stories to do with her love-life which her grandmother never tired of hearing. Perhaps because Michelle was straight up like Jordan – she even loo
ked like him – and wouldn’t dissimulate for anyone, she got away with it. Joey was more like me, and Laetitia made no secret of the fact that her monosyllabic grandson, annihilating manic waves of enemy fighters and bombers, or repelling a Mongol invasion on his Game Boy and patiently waiting till it was time to go home, got on her nerves.

  We had been in Paris for six blistering weeks and it was one of the hottest of the hot days, when I arrived home with a fretful Joey – who kept dropping the baguettes with which he had been entrusted on to the sidewalk – and enough provisions to sustain a small army, to find that the ailing elevator had finally decided to give up the ghost. The concierge had helpfully attached a note to it, which in a spidery hand on a piece of squared paper torn from an exercise book declared it to be en panne. Five floors of steep stairs ahead of us, and the Le Bon Marché bags, some of them laden with frozen food on which I had stocked up, not to mention Michelle’s shoe repairs and Jordan’s dry-cleaning, weighed a ton.

  ‘What’s en panne?’

  ‘Broken down. It’s not a bit of use rattling the cage.’

  Bent almost double, Joey was squinting up the lift shaft, one of the baguettes wobbling perilously.

  ‘I think it’s on the fourth floor.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what floor it’s on. It’s out of order.’

  ‘Why don’t they get the repairman?’

  ‘Take this. And this.’ I dumped some of the stuff on Joey. ‘This is Paris, not Boston.’

  ‘I’m tired, Mom. I’m thirsty…’ The baguette fell to the floor.

  ‘Joey!’ I didn’t mean to scream at him.

  ‘I didn’t do it on purpose.’

  ‘Start walking.’

  I thumped the button, of which there was one on every landing, to light the first tranche of the broad corkscrew staircase, which proclaimed well-heeled silence and social conformity, its niches filled with plaster busts. Like Joey, I was hot, my Calvin Klein teeshirt was sticking to my back, perspiration was trickling down my legs and I was seriously dehydrated. I stopped for breath on the first half-landing and yearned for Beacon Hill with its serendipity, my house with its mulberry tree and its cool lawn.

  It was Michelle’s eighteenth birthday and the day had not begun well. Dropping her off at the Sorbonne before taking Joey for his music lesson, I had had an encounter with an HGV followed by an altercation with a van-driver in the Place de la Concorde. Joey was sitting next to me in the Renault with his violin case on his lap, and Michelle, still half asleep – she had been out until the small hours – was in the back fixing her hair and eating a croissant and drinking a bol of breakfast coffee when the lorry, which had been tailgating me for some time, drew up alongside. The bronzed driver, wearing a string vest which revealed his muscular torso adorned with tattoos, leaned out of his open window and, kissing his fingertips, smiled down at me provocatively. It was not until I returned his smile with a dazzling one of my own that I realized that the kiss had been directed not at me, but at Michelle. Humiliated, I had neglected to indicate that I was about to take a right turn and had narrowly avoided a collision with a delivery van, the driver of which had treated me to a stream of vernacular abuse which even I, with my limited French, knew had mainly to do with the organs of reproduction.

  ‘Mom!’ Joey’s voice from the floor below interrupted my thoughts. ‘Can I go to Andy’s?’

  I held the banister and looked down at the small figure laden with baguettes. Andy was an English boy who lived in the same building.

  ‘After you’ve done your homework – ’

  ‘It’s gonna take me two seconds.’

  ‘ – and practised the César Franck.’

  ‘Andy’s father said we can go swimming.’

  ‘I don’t care if the President of the United States says you can go swimming. You have to practise the César Franck.’

  It was at that moment, as if to punish me for my lack of generosity, that the lights went out on the staircase leaving us, hung about with heavy shopping and feeling our way, in the dark.

  chapter three

  I recount all this in detail because later, when my life had been turned on its head, it seemed important to remember the exact sequence of events. After Joey had located the light switch, once more dropping the doomed baguette about which I was too exhausted to comment, we completed the ascent to the fifth floor where in the apartment we found the telephone ringing plaintively and Helga, wielding an impotent mop, standing barefoot in the shallow lake which was the kitchen floor.

  ‘Der kühlshrank ist kaput.’

  It was the understatement of the year. It hadn’t been much of a refrigerator in the first place, but now it and the inadequate freezer compartment that topped it, had finally given up the ghost. By the time I had answered the telephone, which was of course for Michelle, and undergone an inquisition as to her whereabouts and estimated time of arrival, taken the mop from Helga, prevented Joey from scooping up and eating melted and possibly contaminated ice-cream, located the number of a repairman in the Pages Jaunes and screamed at him in my execrable French (only partly understanding his voluble response to the effect that the weather was exceptionel, madame and his services were at a premium), Joey was in the salon doing battle with the César Franck and Jordan’s key was in the door.

  Looking at Jordan, his shirt sticking to him, only slightly puffed from the climb – knowing him he would have taken the stairs two at a time – I wondered why he was home so early. Then I remembered with horror that before looking in on Michelle’s birthday party, which was to be held at a trendy disco near the Pompidou Center, we were due for cocktails at the Embassy and later on a black-tie dinner, something to do with the bank.

  ‘Hi honey,’ Jordan seemed to notice neither my dishevelment nor the fact that I was sporting rubber gloves.

  The laboured strains of the César Franck stopped abruptly and erupting from the salon Joey threw himself at his father as the telephone rang again.

  ‘Dad, can I go to Andy’s?’

  Jordan looked at the telephone then at me. ‘Aren’t you going to answer it?’

  ‘It’ll be for Michelle.’

  ‘Dad, can I…?’

  ‘Sure you can. Why not!’

  Glaring at him, I picked up the receiver.

  ‘Hallo? Michelle’s out! Sorry. Hang on…’ I handed the phone to Jordan. ‘Sherman.’

  ‘Call him back. I’m going straight into the shower. Fix me a drink, honey. Plenty of ice.’

  Had it not been so funny I would have laughed. As it was I stared at Jordan who, having dumped his coat and briefcase, was already on his way to the bedroom peeling off his sodden shirt.

  Jordan and I had been married for eighteen years. I was three months pregnant with Michelle when we tied the knot although we pretended to his mother that the baby was premature.

  Tall, powerfully built and an all-round athlete with the looks of a movie idol, Jordan Flatland had been every girl’s ideal. Intended for politics like his father, he had developed an astonishing aptitude for business and once steered by his Harvard mentors in the direction of banking he had never looked back. Revelling in the world of commerce, in which he was now a star performer, he not only thoroughly enjoyed his work but drew sustenance from it. The fact that he had been made a senior vice-president at Pilcher Bain, a prestigious investment bank, while still in his thirties was due not only to his business acumen, his unique flair for reading the runes of a volatile market-place, but to the fact that he was in addition very much a people person, which was one of the reasons he had come over to clinch the transaction in Paris. An exceptional deal-maker with a deep core of self-assurance, possessed of a unique ability to simplify complex problems and a quiet confidence which concealed his inner drive, he owed his success in pirhana infested waters to the fact that he was a brilliant strategist and that as far as he was concerned all men were equal. He brought out the best in even the worst of them, and made a point of looking not only at his enemies, but at h
is family and friends with one eye shut. Of course his affable demeanour (he was only rarely ruffled) concealed the streak of ruthlessness, inherited from his mother, that went with the job.

  While absolutely determined to succeed, he was not remotely interested in killing the other side. He was the first to acknowledge that there was room on the playing field for everyone and even as his opponents wilted, they regarded Jordan with a grudging admiration. Pleasantly spoken, with no trace of aggression in his voice, he rarely put backs up and had the enviable knack of rejecting and refusing both people and deals with the minimum of offence. Somehow he never turned down anything, be it a suggestion or a sale, outright. Promising to ‘think about it’ he inspired colleagues with faith, and those who tried to interest him in their wares, with hope. He was possessed of an extraordinary capacity to concentrate on whatever preoccupied him at a given moment, and attracted both men and women by giving them the impression that they filled the whole space of his attention and were a crucial element in some very important enterprise. When Jordan switched off, the light went out and the room went cold.