The plane tilted back and floated now. Sudden and blissful, that sensation of being pressed into your seat by an invisible hand…
After they leveled off, the boy was silent.
Drinking in all this new experience, Noah wondered, or maybe panicking? Or just bored?
“Something’s up with my ears.”
“The air pressure in the cabin’s less than when we’re on the ground.” He should have warned the boy. “Just yawn,” demonstrating. Now Noah really did need to pee, but he hated to disturb the woman to his right.
Old men are prone to bladder infections, Joan reminded him.
He pulled the pirate notebook out of his satchel. “This is for your travel journal.” Though maybe pirates weren’t as timelessly cool as he’d assumed. Would a plain notebook have been better? “Well?”
“Thanks.”
That wasn’t what Noah had been trying to make Michael say. “It’s to write or draw or stick things in, anytime you like.” From the bottom of his satchel he dug out a ballpoint inscribed Pan-Am Chem Con 2003, which still seemed to be working.
“Sweet.” Leaden.
“Why don’t you start it now?”
“I’m good.”
Funny how that had come to mean no.
“The idea is to record things as you’re going along, before you forget them.” Noah waited. “A little bit, every day of our trip, maybe.”
Michael scored the cellophane with his nail and yanked it off. He held the notebook between his fingers.
Noah couldn’t help himself. “Did you want to start with a family tree, like Rosa suggested?”
Michael gave him a stony look. “For all my new dead relations?” With the ballpoint, he scribble-sketched the classic wide-crowned shape of a tree.
“Hang on. Are you planning to put yourself on the trunk and your parents and grandparents in the crown? That’s always seemed illogical to me. Surely the roots come first, then the trunk, then the branches, so wouldn’t your grandparents be the roots?”
The boy heaved a sigh and drew a huge X through the silhouette.
“Michael! I didn’t mean…” The journal looked awful now; wrecked before it had been begun.
“You do it.” He shoved it toward Noah and dropped the pen on top.
“I was only raising the interesting question of how to represent a family visually.”
“Not interesting to me,” the boy muttered.
Noah thought of Rutherford-Bohr diagrams of atoms, with their dots and rings, or Lewis structures with their dots and dashes. (What on earth was that photo of Margot’s about, the one that showed a circle between two short lines on some kind of box?) For an accurate diagram of ancestry, you’d need something more complicated than DNA’s double helix, even. It was as if many tangles of seaweed had brushed together in the ocean, and two strands—the Young-Selvaggios and the Davis-whoevers—had knotted at a single point: Michael. But how to draw that?
Noah returned to A Life’s Work, jumping to 1944. He’d never thought to wonder what his grandfather had died of, but from the vantage point of nearly eighty, he didn’t find “natural causes” (at eighty-three) quite sufficient as an explanation. The photographer had had ongoing bronchial problems, it turned out, and a previous abscess on the lung, and the fuel shortage that brutal winter hadn’t helped. Margot and he used to fox-trot to the gramophone to keep warm. (Noah enjoyed that detail.) Père Sonne was taking a tar cough syrup containing chloroform, and belladonna cigarettes for asthma, which sounded alarming to Noah.
Here was an oddity: when their apartment building was being converted into offices in 1968, Harstad mentioned in a footnote, a reporter had tracked down Madame Dupont, Père Sonne’s former twice-weekly femme de ménage. (Noah thought he remembered a cleaner in a housecoat and head scarf. Hadn’t she brought a little girl with her sometimes?) She’d told the reporter that Madame Selvaggio hadn’t come home for two nights in a row in the middle of August 1944, and her father had worried himself sick. Madame Dupont had had trouble persuading a doctor to call more than once or twice, in all the chaos of Liberation, and Père Sonne had slipped into unconsciousness on the fifth of September.
Noah reread the whole paragraph. Two nights? What the hell had Margot been up to? For such a devoted daughter to stay away from her frail father that long without a word…
But this could be a scurrilous invention, the old housekeeper trying to cash in on her memories by beefing them up.
What was it her little girl had been called? Something out of a song. Michelle? No, the detail slid further away as Noah tried to hook it.
The woman to his right was awake now, so Noah got up stiffly and beckoned the boy to follow him.
“I don’t need to.”
“Right now, Michael, so we won’t have to disturb our neighbor too often.”
When they’d come back and clambered into their seats again, Noah saw that two pages of the boy’s notebook were filled with a crudely drawn airplane shooting up into the sky. From one oval window, a stick figure in a ball cap pantomimed excitement. In a speech bubble: Me (Michael Malcolm Young) in the sky and not dead yet, unbefuuckinleevable. “I like the drawing. But remember you’ll be handing this in to your teacher?”
A small groan. “Negative consequences,” Michael said in a parodic singsong. He went to work with his ballpoint, covering fuuckin with a black shape.
“What’s that you’re adding?”
“Some bird flying by, about to get his ass blenderized in the engine.”
“Which engine? This is an Airbus 380, the world’s largest passenger airliner. It’s got four—there, there, there, and there.” Noah indicated with his finger.
Michael added flames spurting out of each spot.
“So now the plane’s on fire?”
Noah spoke more loudly than he meant to, and the woman to his right gave him a horrified glance.
“Nah, just turbocharged.”
The flight attendants handed out those little steaming cylinders.
“Is this a snack?” the boy asked.
“No, a hot towel, to clean our hands.”
Michael liked that, Noah could tell. And the free Coke from the cart. (He ordered it before Noah could think to say water.)
Noah had a cognac, himself. He took a baby aspirin to reduce his chances of a flight-related heart attack or stroke. Though it increased the risk of intestinal bleeding, so…six of one, half-dozen of the other.
At dinner he put his fedora back on to keep it out of harm’s way. Michael peeled back the foil from his special child meal, which didn’t look any more appetizing than Noah’s salmon in goo. “We ate already. You don’t have to have any,” he told the boy. “By the way, if you feel sick, there’s a paper bag in the seat pocket—”
“I’m good.” Michael crimped the foil back down.
Noah would have loved a cigarette about now. Instead he watched an exhausting film about a nineteenth-century fur trapper surviving a bear mauling.
Michael’s choice featured a horribly scarred superhero, strippers, and torture. Noah poked his own Pause button, then—taking three tries at it—Michael’s.
“Hey, I was watching that!”
“It seems extraordinarily violent.”
“Nah, it’s just messing around. Fourth wall breaks all the time.”
Noah had no idea what that meant.
With his phone, Michael snapped a close-up of the frozen screen: the superhero’s face in a rictus of agony. “I’m strictly D.C., but Marvel’s funny.”
“You must be too young for this one. What’s the rating?”
“So’s yours violent.” Michael gestured at the trapper’s bleeding face in the snow.
“Well, that’s history.”
“What’s the difference? It’s all blood.”
Noah puzzled over that one. “It’s educational to learn what our ancestors lived through.”
“Deadpool’s educational too, about the future. Mutant-cell regeneration and sh
it.”
“Would your grandma have let you watch it?”
Michael’s face contracted.
“I wasn’t criticizing her,” Noah rushed to say.
“She didn’t care about movies. She just wanted me home, off the corner,” Michael growled. “Safe.”
“OK.”
Each went back to his own screen. But Noah had lost the thread of his wilderness epic. Brooding over everything Ella Davis must have toiled to shield her grandson from, for as long as she’d been able.
Noah woke with a start in the dimmed cabin, and his screen said Time to destination: 2 hours 37 minutes. He shouldn’t have slept at all; groggy, haggard. His hip throbbed.
Hunch and drop those shoulders, Joan ordered. Circle those feet, if you don’t want some deep-vein thrombosis.
Noah made a few half-hearted movements, which hurt.
To his left, Michael was slumped in the kind of wormlike position that looked as if it would cause damage, except that he was so young.
Noah tried Père Sonne: A Life’s Work again. For lack of shampoo, and because hair salons closed down, he read, Frenchwomen often wore turbans during the war. Their shoes had soles of wood or cork, laces of string, newspaper for insulation. Had Noé had a pair of clogs at three or four, or was he making up that memory? He thought of the clomping sound of wood on cobbles, and the hush of cork.
Only when the breakfast cart was clinking past did Michael uncoil, rubbing his eyes.
Noah leaned past him to shove up the shade. A fluffy white expanse. “Look, snow!”
But the boy was hard to fool. “You must be high, dude.”
He grinned. “Why don’t you take a picture?”
“I’ve seen clouds before.” Michael looked instead at the double spread of photos in Noah’s book. “Hey, same kind of dumb-ass hat as yours.”
“You’ve got a sharp eye. That’s my grandfather wearing this hat, on a visit to his dealer in Paris in 1934.” Standing beside Robert Capa, though Michael was unlikely to have heard of Capa either.
“Hell no! The same actual hat?”
“Hell yeah.”
That made Michael grin.
Noah turned the fedora upside down and traced the darkened sweatband. “See that pebbly pattern pressed in? They stopped doing that in the late ’20s.” Margot must have brought the hat with her to New York, in 1944. It had sat on Noah’s dresser as a reminder of his pépère, until one day at the university when it had occurred to him to put it on, for a joke. Since then he hadn’t worn it every day, but whenever he did wear a hat it was this one.
Michael wrinkled his nose. “The leather’s all greasy. Didn’t you or your grandpa ever clean the thing?”
Noah examined the torn cloth of the lining; a mysterious stain on the brim. “I’d be afraid it would fall apart.” It came into his head that ineradicable wrinkles in vintage clothes were known to conservators as memory. Why was he able to hold on to such arcane details, when he occasionally fumbled for the code for picking up his voicemail? Over a lifetime you packed your brain tight with data, like an overstuffed suitcase, only for it all to fall out in the end. He stroked the fine brim. “The hat itself is felt. Rabbit and chinchilla.”
“It’s made from a fucking bunny rabbit?”
The woman to Noah’s right quivered.
The kid’s language is not my problem, he told himself; I’m only a temporary carer. A fill-in. “And a chinchilla, a sort of South American squirrel.” Endangered nowadays, no surprise. His fingers gripped the concavities at the front. “These are called the pinches.”
“Shouldn’t it be in a museum or something?”
“Oh, they have his photographs. I’m keeping the hat.” Noah set it back on his head.
“So where’d he get his handle?”
“What?”
“His street name.” Michael tapped Père Sonne, the serious black letters across the book’s jacket.
“Well, artists often had nicknames based on their real names, like…” Nadar, Christo, Izis; the boy wouldn’t know them. “Have you heard of, let’s see, Man Ray?” he asked without much hope. “Even more famous than my grandpa. He began as Emmanuel Radnitzky.” Maybe he’d been trying to sound less identifiably Jewish. “Look, here’s a picture of Man Ray that Père Sonne took in 1922.” Noah leafed through the pages to find the ambitious night shot of the man dancing cheek to cheek with his own camera—or rather pretending to dance but standing still for a sharp focus, while the crowd on the Promenade blurred around him. “But to answer your question, my grandpa’s surname was Personnet, which in French sounds almost the same as personne—meaning no one.”
Michael frowned. “Person means no person?”
“Confusing, isn’t it? So Père Sonne sounds like no one, but also like father—that’s père, in French—and just to complicate matters, sonne is French for ring.”
“Like bling? A gold ring?”
“No, that’s bague. Sonne means ringing, like the sound of a phone. So the whole name means father rings, but also no one.”
“Daddy Ring.” Michael tried it out. “Daddy Nobody Ding-a-Ling. Kind of creepy. Or Nodaddy Ding.”
What Père Sonne had signed on the back of his prints was actually PS, it struck Noah—postscriptum, what you put at the end of a letter in either French or English when you had one more thing to say. And the man did always have one more thing to say, artistically; he’d been inexhaustible.
A grinding sound rose from the airliner’s belly, and Michael twitched.
“That’s only the wheels being lowered,” Noah told him. “Look down, you might get a shot of the Eiffel Tower.”
But the cloud cover was thick, so Paris was invisible.
Michael hunched, pressing his ears.
Why did it hurt so much more when you were a child? “You need to yawn,” Noah urged him, “to equalize the air pressure in your Eustachian tubes.”
In unfamiliar pain, the kid was unreachable.
“See what the air pressure’s doing to this?” Noah asked it loudly as he showed his weirdly crumpled water bottle.
Michael straightened up, intrigued, and snapped it with his phone.
“Now let the air in…” Noah unscrewed the cap, and the bottle gasped and swelled.
His right ear was slightly blocked up from the flight; he tugged at it and stretched his jaw, achieving nothing. Waiting for the elevator in the terminal, he pointed to a sign that said Aéroport de Paris-Charles de Gaulle. “De Gaulle was the leader of the French Resistance, during the war.”
“Your one, not your dad’s one?” Michael mimed his right hand being severed.
“That’s right, World War Two.”
The boy whistled a sad four-note tune. Then, seeing Noah’s blank face, he did it again more slowly, spacing out the notes.
“What’s that, the theme from Close Encounters?”
Michael looked equally puzzled. “The Resistance in the Hunger Games, dude. The mockingjay call.”
“Well, unlike in your fantasy movie, this was real. Resisting the Nazis. You know, like fascists today? White supremacists?”
A casual nod: “The alt-right.”
“Don’t call them that. They’re not an alternative, they’re the same old racists. Anyway”—Noah tried to remember his point—“when the Germans invaded, the French had to decide whether to let the enemy boss them around, or fight back.”
“I’d have fought back like the Gaulle guy.”
“Well,” Noah said bleakly, “probably most people thought that, till it came to the crunch.”
He set his watch six hours forward. “Let’s see your phone?” But Michael’s device had reset automatically, to 10:35. Noah was confused, until he saw that the boy had already managed to log into the airport’s free Wi-Fi. These kids, it was like breathing. “Your body clock will still tell you it’s four thirty-five,” he warned Michael. “Have you done time zones at school?”
A long yawn.
Noah wondered if that meant
no. “It’s still night over Brooklyn, see, but here in Paris the sun’s been shining for hours.”
“No it’s not.” Michael jerked his head at the expanse of glass, the dull gray.
“Well, it’s up, at least.”
They would have had a two-hour layover if they hadn’t landed late. Layover struck Noah as misleading, with its suggestion of lolling on benches at a Roman feast rather than scuttling between terminals, with further delays because some administrator behind glass was mwah-mwahing and chatting with colleagues instead of dealing with the line of drooping tourists. Damn it, the two of them would be lucky to make their next flight. Noah didn’t run, these days, as a matter of policy.
“Douanes—that means Customs,” pointing, just to take his mind off the length of time he’d been chafing in this line already. But why would Customs mean anything to a child who’d never crossed a border? “Where they check you haven’t brought in too much of anything,” he explained. What else? “Entrée interdite, ‘Entry is forbidden.’”
“You’re like a human Google Translate,” Michael muttered.
“Oh, so you’d rather guess all the words on your own?”
“We’ll be back in America in six days, right?”
Such a short trip, and would any of it be what Noah had hoped for? “But you might study French at school sometime.”
Michael puffed out air to suggest the unlikelihood of that.
Some of the signs came with their own stern translations: Passport Control, Submit Now. Michael did take a picture of that one, with his left hand holding up its middle finger in the foreground.
Noah secretly sympathized, even as he murmured, “Stop it before the guards see you.”
When it was finally their turn he handed over their passports, and the Letter of Consent for Travel of a Minor Child. His ear was still woolly; he could make out the agent’s questions through the Perspex barrier, but only just. “Son grand-oncle,” he said: he was the boy’s great-uncle.
The agent turned his gaze on Michael and switched to accented English. “Who is this man?”
Looking for confirmation this wasn’t an abduction, Noah realized.
Michael stared dully.
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