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.
—
THE 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 mmhmmed 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.
—
IN 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.”
Josée said that she was perfectly capable of talking to herself for free. My mother, searching for backup, asked me if my experiences in therapy had been similar.
“Not really,” I said. “Maybe because I was sixteen. I really wanted my therapist to like me.”
“And your parents were paying for it,” my mother said. “That makes a big difference. You wanted to go, but your parents were paying.”
“I didn’t want to go!” I said. “You sent me because you thought I was crazy.”
“Josée also sent me to therapy because she thought I was crazy,” my mother said.
“Yes, well,” Josée said, “everyone gets told they’re crazy when they’re sixteen years old.”
“I wasn’t sixteen,” my mother said with little-girl hurt. “I was thirteen.”
“You always were precocious,” Josée said.
Somehow, the conversation wound around to the summers they had spent in Ussel, the summers when my mother, forbidden from playing with Andrée, had grown desperate with boredom and loneliness.
“How old were you?” I asked my mother, although I already knew the answer.
“Twelve,” she said with leaden heaviness.
“You were perturbing her,” Josée said. And then, seeing my mother’s face, “You were perturbing her, but it wasn’t kind of me anyway, I’m sorry.”
My mother brushed the apology aside uncomfortably. She talked about the solitary walks she’d taken in the woods.
“But I didn’t know you were so lonely!” Josée exclaimed. “Why didn’t you play tennis?” Doubles matches with visiting friends had occupied Josée’s summer months, but her three daughters remembered only being made to chase the balls and rake the court flat after the games.
“I had no partner,” my mother said.
“You could have played against the wall,” Josée said.
“There w
as no wall,” my mother said.
“Why didn’t you tell me!” Josée said. “I would have built you a wall.”
After lunch, the three of us sat in beach chairs in the sun, reading quietly. I got up to go fetch sunscreen, and my mother offered to accompany me. When I turned around to see if she had followed, she was still standing behind Josée’s chair. She had bent over to cover her mother’s neck with kisses. Josée reached up, put her hands in her daughter’s hair, kissed her cheek in return. A happy warmth spread through me. My mother looked up at me, her chin in the crook of Josée’s neck, and I clasped both hands together over my heart. But my mother pulled her mouth down sharply to one side and arched her brows, an expression I knew meant Something’s wrong.
“So?” I said as she joined my side and we turned to walk together. “That looked so sweet from afar.”
“You know what she said to me?” my mother asked. “She said, ‘But I had no idea you’d been so miserable, my poor Cosette.’”
“And that upset you?” I said.
“Cosette like in Les Misérables,” my mother said angrily. “I don’t need apologies from her.”
Back in the hotel room, my mother ran her fingers through her hair before the bathroom mirror, styling the curls that fell in her eyes. I had cut her hair that morning on our terrace. It was a tradition I had with her, my father, and my brother whenever we were on vacation—they would sit and I would touch their necks and ears, talking softly as I worked the scissors around their heads.
My mother told me she felt uncomfortable with the turns our conversations with Josée were taking.
“I love discovering who my mother was as a little girl,” she said. “But I don’t want to talk to her about my own adolescence. I don’t want to get into recriminations.”
“But,” I said.
“Several years ago, I decided to save her number in my phone as ‘Maman,’” she said. “It’s my present to myself. To let myself have a mother I love. That’s all I want.” I was silent, and she spoke again.
“You don’t understand. It wasn’t neutral. It’s so painful, to bring all this to the surface. I don’t want to settle scores. I don’t need her to apologize.”
“I understand,” I said. “But . . . for me this tension of your shared pasts is interesting. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. And yet I get the sense that Josée is searching for this as well. No one asked her to apologize just now—she offered that on her own.”
My mother sighed. She turned to contemplate me for a moment.
“Okay. I trust you,” she said. “And Josée trusts you. I suppose it’s comforting to both of us that you have an agenda.” She readied herself to leave the room. I trailed behind her, rubbing worriedly at the back of my neck.
—
THE NEXT MORNING, we woke up to rain. We ate breakfast together under an overhang on the hotel’s roof terrace. We were quiet as we watched the ripples on the thermal pools below.
“This is an island of lemons,” Josée said. She ordered herself a fresh-squeezed lemon juice from a passing waiter. She poured water and a packet of sugar into the cloudy liquid.
“I’m going to do a lemon cure,” she said. “I want to nourish myself from all these lemons.” I took a sip of her drink, knowing that she did not like to share her food but would allow me to do so. The acidity was bracing. It felt cleansing. I ordered one as well.
After breakfast, the three of us went downstairs to Josée’s room. We lay on her bed, my mother in the middle with her feet by our heads. She grabbed a pillow to prop herself up, “so I can see you,” she said. We talked idly, half listening to the soft patter of rain on the parking lot outside. Under my questioning, Josée began to tell us about her boarding school days. But then she interrupted herself to say that none of this was very interesting at all. This was something my mother said to me often when I asked her about her life, and she reacted now just as I always had.
“But for me it’s fascinating,” my mother said.
“It’s interesting now, maybe, to talk about it, because it’s raining and we have nothing else to do,” Josée said. “But otherwise no. You might as well read a good book.”
“Discovering that you spent your whole childhood . . . it blows me away,” my mother said.
“That I was a child?” Josée said archly.
“No,” my mother said, unsmiling. “That you so rarely lived with your mother. I didn’t know.”
“We never really talked, did we, you and I?” Josée said. “I was a wife more than a mother. And then you left for America . . . It’s only thanks to this troublemaker here and her endless interrogations . . .” She swatted me gently, leaning over my mother’s feet.
“Did you talk about it with my sisters?” my mother asked.
“No, I never talked about it with anyone,” Josée said. “I still don’t see why anyone would be interested.”
“But weren’t you interested in your own mother’s story?” I asked.
“She never told me her story,” Josée said.
She told us how, after Mina had had a hip operation late in life, they’d gone for a walk outside the hospital and sat on a bench together. “I asked her if she’d ever had the desire to run around on my father—or no, I said, ‘My father, did he have other women? He offered you lovely vacations, to have you forgive him.’ I told her about a photo I had of her as a young woman on a cruise ship, where she looked radiantly beautiful. And she clapped her hands together and said, ‘Si! Si! Le capitaine!’ She smiled this smile I’d never seen before, the one she must have had at twenty years old. She told me she’d had an affair with the Greek ship captain. Apparently, she cheated on my father once. In 1935.”
“So you were asking a question, about the relationship between your parents,” my mother said thoughtfully, more to herself than to us. “Did I ever tell you what Mina told me about her life?”
“You must have, but I’ve forgotten,” Josée said.
And so my mother began to tell the story as Mina had told it to her, in 1978. My mother and father were in France on a visit, and my father had just made one of the first outlines for Maus. My mother had translated it into French and typed it up for a small French magazine. When she went to see her grandmother, her head was filled with the stories of Vladek and Anja and she shared them with her.
“You’re looking for stories?” Mina said. “I have a story to tell.” Over the course of two days, she told my mother her life.
I had heard the story from my mother several times over the years. At first she had told me that I had been there, too, a baby cradled in her arms. But later she’d corrected herself and said that I had not been there that day after all. She had been alone with Mina, she was sure of it. I felt something deep inside me being taken away. The traces I had conjured—Had a teakettle whistled? Had I grasped a cool white porcelain statue in my fist?—began to fade.
This was Mina’s story, as she told it to my mother.
—
MINA HAD BEEN christened Fernande, but she’d never liked her name. She went by the nickname Nanda until late in her life, when Beppo gave her the pet name Mina, which she loved.
Her parents, Mélanie and Alfred, ran an auto shop with a small buvette, a canteen counter, attached. I do not know where they lived in 1904, when Mina was born, but in later years they lived together as a family in rooms over the buvette. This was in Boulogne-Billancourt, home to the Renault factories, where the Seine exited the southwestern confines of Paris before making its sharp U-turn back up toward Neuilly. It was a proletarian neighborhood, a typical French lower-class setting, and Mina dreamed of a grand escape. She threw herself into her studies. She was first in her class. But when she was fourteen, her parents declared that her schooling was over. She had received her certificat d’études, completing her legally mandated education, and now she was an adult. She was to ta
ke a job and help support the family. Mina’s teacher came to their home—an extraordinary occurrence—to plead Mina’s case. The girl showed such promise. Who knew what a few more years of schooling might bring? But her father refused, and Mélanie didn’t take Mina’s side. Mina never forgave her mother for that, Françoise often said.
In 1918, Mina took a course in stenography. “She did her formation,” one would say in French, so that learning is another act of being shaped, and through being shaped, becoming. World War I had pulled women into the workforce in the vacuum left behind by all the dead young men. Young female workers were organized into vast well-trained secretarial pools.
To capture speech back then was as elusive as capturing emotion, and stenography was as much an art as a technique. One method used a series of strokes to capture consonants, another captured phonemes; one used five hundred characters annotated with dots, another used semicircles that moved like phases of the moon. Secretaries could not decipher one another’s notes. Only the woman who had made the markings could expand them back into language. In that way, shorthand was like memory, condensing the gone-by-too-fast into symbols intelligible only to the one who held the key. Secretary, ghostwriter, editor—I called upon the three generations like muses. But I was none of these things. I was the narrator, giving shape to memories that weren’t my own. And that, I was learning, was a much more violent act.
In the 1920s, the image of the young secretary, with her short hair and hemline, represented a popular sexualized fantasy. It was taken for granted that her only dream was to marry her boss. But though Mina knew other secretaries who had tried to go that route, she kept her eyes squarely on her work.
She found her pleasure in the open-air guinguettes on the banks of the Seine, where she went dancing every Saturday. The wine flowed freely and the artists mixed with the factory workers. With her wide eyes, heart-shaped face, and Cupid’s-bow mouth, Mina was a beauty made for the era.
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