But they don’t press often. Because they know someone else is.
* * *
—
Eleanor searches. She tells me to tell the girls she doesn’t, but I don’t, and they wouldn’t believe me anyway. She has searched online and offline. She has hired two private detectives, fired both, and is constantly interviewing for a third. She is using her university access to audit courses in criminal justice, French, and, “just in case,” forensic anthropology. She has come to know an unsettling amount about jawbones. I often see her using her own when we visit via Skype; for “efficiency” she likes to dine while we talk. Her breakfast is my dinner. I tell her she’s nevertheless welcome to join me in a glass of wine. She says she’s eating healthier. This explains, though not fully, why I have occasionally caught her eating Robert’s brand of granola.
* * *
—
Declan and I dine together not infrequently. After the hotel down the way redid one of its cinema rooms as a “Late Edition” room, they began asking if our store did tours related to the book. I’d called Declan, said I had a business proposition, and then he laughed, and then we were doing tours. Ours is purely a professional relationship now, and better for it, we both agree. We toast to it, in fact, each time he takes me out to dinner, which is every time I pay him. We no longer eat for free; rather, he always tries to spend the exact amount on dinner that I’ve paid him that week. We keep having to find more and more expensive restaurants. Paris obliges. And so does Declan. He’s waiting, and so am I, and neither of us knows quite for what, quite yet. In the meantime, we toast and laugh and drink. And sometimes I hear a three-wheeled minicab whine by, and my pulse goes chasing after it, and I take another silky sip because it’s easier than looking at Declan at just that moment.
Declan, I should point out, does not appear in the book.
* * *
—
Robert does. Does and doesn’t. In Robert’s book, the family lives happily ever after. No posthumous bestseller comes to rescue the store; it makes of itself an old-fashioned success. Week after week, more and more people visit and buy more and more things. Enough money is made that, in one late chapter, the family vacations in the south of France. In another, they take the train to London. There is talk of a trip to Stockholm, but I’ve already told the girls—don’t believe everything you read.
When Eleanor first read the book’s flap, she insisted we call the publisher and have every copy seized and the jacket bio changed to something like “Robert Eady is a pseudonym and any resemblance to persons living or dead is . . .” Fat chance. Besides, I’ve read more than one blogger—for this has become a book everyone has to have an opinion on—who says a good chunk of the book’s sales are due to that tragic bio. And I do occasionally see a glistening eye come up to the register if I’m in the store. Though because of sales, I spend fewer hours there. Like everyone else, I now hire aloof French twentysomethings.
But when some sad American does find me and says I’m sorry for your loss, I simply thank her—I really try to be sincere—and say, it’s okay. And then, if the conversation needs to go on—some grab ahold of me and will not let go—I say, and he’s not really gone, is he? Because I’m really not sure he is. But I don’t say that. I say: he’s right here in this book.
What I believe: that Robert meant to somehow redeem himself by publishing the book—to the degree that the book’s royalty stream could absolve him of his failures, including to provide for us for so long. But it’s a false absolution, isn’t it? Early on, we had the prize money, yes, but beyond that, we largely provided for ourselves (with help from George, Eleanor, and, if I’m being charitable, Madame). I don’t begrudge Robert the attempt, though, because it’s a painful absolution as well: here, at last, has come success beyond measure, and enjoying it lies just beyond his grasp. Eleanor says it wasn’t the world’s recognition he ever wanted, just ours, just mine, just to the point that he left clue after clue. Or so we decided; we’d scoured those one hundred manuscript pages before realizing that the girls and I were the book’s best clues, and the book’s second-biggest mystery: what were we doing in Paris?
In the last sentence on the last page of the published book, as the wife and daughters busy themselves about the store one Saturday, the bell over the door rings.
* * *
—
And so it does each time I leave the store to walk the streets in search of him. Not often and not seriously, and not something I tell the girls, but occasionally, after dropping them at school, I walk on and pretend I’m still in active pursuit. Maybe pretending is all I was ever doing. I don’t think so. I do know what I saw in his eyes the last time I saw him, which is something the mirror shows me every day in mine—I saw our girls, our lives. I think, too, that in Robert’s eyes, I saw love, longing. What’s certain is that bodies, celestial or human, have a pull. It’s impossible to imagine he doesn’t still feel our tug. It’s impossible to imagine him fully gone.
But then it’s impossible to imagine I’m a filmmaker, though I really am now. Or that’s what the instructor—I’m finally taking classes again—tells me to tell myself when I get frustrated. Film is about time, he says, take time. So I do.
And time takes me. Summer has finally fallen to winter, and it’s cold here. Sometimes, when crowds are thin, I pay to go up the Eiffel Tower, and start my (tiny, high-tech) camera rolling. I don’t let myself get distracted by the view to the north, where the vast expanse of the Palais de Chaillot always makes it seem more important than it is, or to the west, because America lies there, along with Belgium and Wales and Stockholm and the two Wisconsin Parises, all those little towns that say, and not just to me, remember? And I certainly don’t look south, where the thick black Montparnasse Tower feels like a cinder in your eye. I look east. Toward the Louvre, and Montmartre, and Europe—and Ménilmontant. In the meager cast credits of The Red Balloon, Lamorisse acknowledges his son and daughter and a handful of others, before acknowledging the support des ballons de la région parisienne. Depending on what the day, the weather, and my eyes are up to, it doesn’t take much squinting to see all of them, in flight or about to rise.
And down the hill from Ménilmontant, down, down, down toward the Seine, I can almost see my store. I don’t need my camera now. I know it. Bright red. And inside, a party well under way, not just my women but so many others, all the living and the dead, including Walt Whitman, maybe Walt Whitman’s son—Whitman the textbook author, not the poet, though the son enjoyed the confusion—who started a bookshop named Le Mistral and then renamed it in honor of Sylvia Beach, unable to reopen her own Shakespeare and Company after the war. I think of Sylvia Beach and her shop. I think of mine. I think of distant countries, centuries, cities brought together on bookshelves.
I think of Albert Lamorisse, and his young son, now old, Pascal, who lost his father so long ago, and I think of what Pascal thinks when he sees that old film, The Red Balloon, if he even watches it, if he can bear it, Pascal in almost every frame, Pascal looking down at the camera while taking flight in that famous final shot, borne above Paris by a bouquet of balloons. Neither father nor son could have known then how it would end, just fourteen years later, in Iran—Lamorisse in a helicopter with the shah’s own pilot as it rises, stutters, falls. There are very few accounts of Lamorisse’s death and fewer still that mention this: Pascal, no longer the little boy of The Red Balloon but a young man, was aboard the ill-fated helicopter, too. Pascal somehow made it to safety just seconds before the crash. His father did not.
I never told Robert this.
Nor this: at the end of every one of Lamorisse’s most celebrated films, the protagonist disappears.
* * *
—
Nor, finally, this, but Bemelmans fan that he was, Robert must have already known: Bemelmans died young. Not as young as Lamorisse, but he never met the grandchildren he longed for. At his death, Bemelmans was working o
n a final Madeline book, Madeline and the Magician, which drew on “Madeline’s Christmas” features he’d done for women’s magazines in the mid-1950s. But this new iteration would focus on the magician, not Christmas. It survives only in fragments—some paintings, drawings, sketches. (Ellie and Daphne found this arcana; as they grow older, Bemelmans’s work for younger readers has somehow become more important for them, not less.) The artist knew he was ill, knew he didn’t have long, and try as he might to keep the story sunny, he could not. His life leached into it, as life does. The angular, indefatigable Miss Clavel, who led Madeline and her other charges across all Paris, lies ill, bedridden, beyond the reach of medicine. A magician appears—his name, Mustafa—and with a flourish vastly improves “the old house in Paris covered with vines”: a lake appears, a papaya tree, even “mountain goats from the Himalayas.”
The girls are delighted, but worry and wonder about Miss Clavel, so sick; would it be too much to ask if—
But of course! Mustafa works his magic on Miss Clavel, and she comes back to life. Miss Clavel is not pleased, however, by the changes Mustafa has wrought in her absence and asks him to undo them. He does; she casts him out into a snowy night, where he promptly vanishes.
An arresting sketch survives of the girls tearfully following a funeral cortege bearing the magician’s hat, a fez: we would all love our magician back, Miss Clavel acknowledges, but some things are not possible, not in real life. Instead, she offers the girls a stray. A cat.
The cat, of course, is the magician, who explains:
I changed myself so that I could stay around the house
and be with you—I’ll be as quiet as a mouse.
And keep it a secret—
A secret is something which nobody knows.
And with this, our story comes to a close. . . .
* * *
—
Once upon a time, whenever I saw myself in Robert’s words, the feeling was tactile, I was thin and delicate, some pressed form of me, a flattened leaf that fluttered and sometimes tore as the pages turned.
But now I find books so vast, too vast. Not just Robert’s, but all of them, all the ones about Paris, all the ones about everywhere. Reading, walking, chasing, longing, I’ve come to feel that Paris’s greatest gift is vertigo, the feeling we get when we discover that that which was so familiar or close is actually so far away. Which is not unlike what I feel whenever I set out in idle pursuit of a man and find a city instead. It’s a pursuit that, some mornings, I hope will go on forever, like a favorite book, like my life here. It’s only with mild surprise I find I don’t so much read anymore, but rather teeter, wonder, take flight, like Pascal, like Madeline, like Bemelmans, like Lamorisse, like my daughters. Like Robert. Like anyone who has ever started or finished a book, or a love affair, or confused the two, in sweet anticipation of the fall.
Fin
It is a nice thing to take over a household so living, complete, and warm, and dig up radishes that someone else has planted for you and cut flowers in a garden that someone else has tended.
—Ludwig Bemelmans
“The Isle of God,” an essay on the origins of his Madeline series
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong, but one American, despite (or because of) his affection for Paris, can be; I apologize for any errors herein. I did rely on roughly fifty million resources, however, and am grateful to all of them for the information and advice they gave.
Thank you to my earliest readers, Alfredo Botello, Lauren Fox, Dan Kois, and Emily Gray Tedrowe, and to Christi Clancy, Aims McGuinness, Jon Olson, and Annie Rajurkar. A very special thanks to Caroline Leavitt, whose early enthusiasm made all the difference, and to Susan Richards Shreve, who connected us.
Thanks, too, to all those whose expertise I tapped, including Professor Larry Kuiper, Emily Griffin, and Susan Keane for French-language advice. Thanks to Professor Tami Williams for help with French cinema, and Professor José Lanters for help with Dutch zines. To Dr. Kevin Wheeler for advice medical. To my Parisian readers, Nataša Basic, Sophie Rollet, and Ingrid Johnson, for insights on parenting, Paris, French, the French, and combinations thereof. A special mrc to my teen-SMS linguist, Hattie Rowney; to Antoine Laurain for his advice on French bookstores and bookselling; and to Michael Bula and James Frasher for alerting me to “imminent peril.”
And to those who saved me from constant peril—my agent, Elisabeth Weed; her colleagues Dana Murphy and Hallie Schaeffer; Jenny Meyer; and the mighty Maya Ziv, this book’s editor and champion and merciless savior, and her colleague, Madeline Newquist—mille mercis.
And thank you to the incomparable Daniel Goldin, of Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee, for his insights into the art of bookselling and his support of authors everywhere (this one in particular).
* * *
—
I encourage those interested in the life and work of Ludwig Bemelmans to consult a beautiful book by Bemelmans’s grandson, John Bemelmans Marciano, Bemelmans: The Life and Art of Madeline’s Creator (Viking, 1999). Much of the Bemelmans lore I share, especially the material relating to his final project, comes from this book. Marciano acknowledges, as I will, the exhaustively detailed Ludwig Bemelmans: A Bibliography (Heineman, 1993) compiled by Murray Pomerance. It’s an extraordinary guide for those who want to read beyond Madeline (or to know where to read all of Madeline’s many iterations). For an introduction to Bemelmans’s “work for grown-ups,” as Leah and the girls describe it, the anthology Tell Them It Was Wonderful (Viking, 1985) is a great place to start. Finally, the exhibition catalogue Madeline at 75: The Art of Ludwig Bemelmans (Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, 2014) by Jane Bayard Curley is a rich resource, and includes a gorgeous illustrated essay by Maira Kalman.
Though, like Leah, I treasure the book version of The Red Balloon (Doubleday, 1956), the best way to get to know Albert Lamorisse is through his films. White Mane (1953) and, of course, The Red Balloon (1956) are available in beautifully restored form from the Criterion Collection. Lamorisse’s son, Pascal, made a haunting short documentary, Mon père était un ballon rouge (2008), that’s available from Shellac Sud.
Piet E. Schreuders’s remarkable magazine, Furore, devoted almost an entire issue (no. 21) to hunting down locations and other information about The Red Balloon; it’s deeply researched and engrossing. I’m grateful to another magazine, Bidoun, for introducing me to the piercing montage assembled by Lamorisse’s Iranian collaborators after he died. The Red Balloon critic mentioned here is Charles Silver; the quote comes from a brief essay of his on the Museum of Modern Art website.
Even when I was not in Paris, I did my best to live there through books. I benefited from Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) by Rosecrans Baldwin; Shakespeare and Company (Harcourt Brace, 1959) by Sylvia Beach; My Paris Dream (Spiegel & Grau, 2015) by Kate Betts; Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology (Library of America, 2004) edited by Adam Gopnik, as well as Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon (Random House, 2000); The Red Notebook (Gallic Books, 2015) by Antoine Laurain; Time Was Soft There (St. Martin’s, 2005) by Jeremy Mercer; Petite Anglaise (Spiegel & Grau, 2008) by Catherine Sanderson; A Family in Paris (Penguin Lantern, 2011) by Jane Paech; and The Only Street in Paris (W. W. Norton, 2015) by Elaine Sciolino.
I found these sources in a variety of archives and libraries, and I’m indebted to them for their assistance, including the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Cinémathèque française (this research was supported in part by funds provided by the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee), the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library of Yale University, the New York Public Library’s Rose Main Reading Room and the Milstein Microform Reading Room, the New-York Historical Society’s Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, the DeGolyer Library of Southern Methodist University (with special thanks to David Haynes, Rebecca Graff, and Joan Gosnell), and the Univer
sity of Wisconsin–Milwaukee’s Golda Meir Library, in particular librarian Molly Mathias, for finding information on a man even harder to track down than Robert.
For those wishing to track down the books Leah mentions, titles include: Swahili Grammar and Vocabulary (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1910) by Mrs. F. Burt; Suite Vénitienne (Bay Press, 1988) by Sophie Calle; Walks in Paris (George Routledge and Sons, 1888) by Augustus J. C. Hare; Helsingør Station (Secker and Warburg, 1989) by Aidan Higgins; Fair Play (Sort of Books, 2007) by Tove Jansson; “We Two Grown-ups” from Men Giving Money, Women Yelling (William Morrow, 1997) by Alice Mattison; So Long, See You Tomorrow (Knopf, 1980) by William Maxwell; “Wants” from Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985) by Grace Paley; Pale Horse, Pale Rider (Harcourt, 1939) by Katherine Anne Porter; Indiana (Oxford, 1994) by George Sand; Sculpture of the Eskimo (McClelland and Stewart, 1972) by George Swinton; The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003) by Monique Truong; and Fools Crow (Viking Penguin, 1986) by James Welch. From the children’s floor: Dieu tu es là ? C’est moi Margaret ! (L’Ecole des Loisirs, 1986) by Judy Blume (translated by Michèle Poslaniec); Le Poids d’un Chagrin (Editions Auzou, 2008) by Sandrine Lhomme and Roxane Marie Galliez; and Mon Premier Cauchemar (Chocolat! Jeunesse, 2009) by Selma Mandine.
* * *
—
Two notes on intentional errors, or, to use a novelist’s term, fiction.
At the time of this writing, France does not have a “magic” visa program for bookstore owners like the one Leah and her daughters enjoy. It’s not a bad idea, though. In the meantime, don’t overstay, and obey all laws, including those about standing on bridge railings above the Seine.
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