So, she told him about Picasso. Luc had always been a good listener. Even now, he listened as a horse would—patiently, without comment, but keenly attentive to every nuance in her voice as it rose and fell.
“I am going to have a baby,” she said finally. She saw him absorb this. He was still holding her hand in his.
Quietly he asked, “Do you love this man?” As young as he was, Luc already possessed the kind of clarity and toughness that suffering sometimes produces; he exuded the intelligence of a man who knew that time must not be wasted on foolish grudges and things that should not matter.
Ondine knew the answer now, because she could feel, within her own flesh, how different love felt when it came from a young man who was brave enough to care about someone besides himself.
“No,” she said in a low voice. “I’m not in love with Picasso.” Luc smiled triumphantly.
“Then, never mind,” he said decisively. “Nobody needs to know about it. I ask only two things.”
“What do you want?” Ondine asked, her eyes misty as he kissed her again.
“That the child will always think of me as its father,” Luc said. “And, if it’s a girl, we name her after my mother. I promised her I’d do that, just before she died.” Luc’s mother had been a teacher who worked hard with him to make sure he learned everything he could in school. She’d died when he was only fourteen, and his face now revealed how deep the loss of her had been. Ondine, still crying, flung her arms around him, and pressed her wet face against his bearded one.
“Of course,” she said. “If it’s a girl we’ll name her Julie.”
They held each other for awhile. Then, very seriously, he said, “Some Americans told me about a place where you and I might be able to open a restaurant of our own. I learned a lot, working in one. Maybe there, you can be the great chef you say you want to be.”
Ondine could hardly absorb what he was saying. “What is this place?” she asked, her eyes wide.
“It’s called New Rochelle,” he replied. “It’s near New York, right by the sea. It was settled by the French, and named after La Rochelle. One day, we’ll come back to France if you like. But now, this money will pay our fares to America and to start our own business. Come be with me, and be my wife.”
All Ondine knew was that she loved the melody of his voice, the way it resonated in his chest, the warmth of his presence. It filled her heart with joy, and she had forgotten what this felt like. She did not want to ever forget again. The American town with the French name sounded lovely.
“But, Ondine, are you ready to leave home?” he asked tenderly.
Now that it was a reality, she had one last regret about no longer sitting in the garden under the Aleppo tree. She thought of the reassuring view of her mother’s head in the kitchen window, calling out to her; and her father sitting in the front room, counting his money. But they would never let her marry Luc, nor keep this baby. She had been ready to run away alone. With Luc, she was ready to go anywhere.
The train pulled into the station. The conductors helped disembarking passengers to descend the metal steps. A familiar, well-dressed man alighted, mopping his brow with a handkerchief. Ondine’s throat tightened when she saw Monsieur Renard. “Oh, Lord, it’s him!” she cried. “He’ll stop us!”
Luc squeezed her hand reassuringly. “Nothing will ever stop us again,” he promised.
Monsieur Renard waved; he appeared to think Ondine was waiting for him, and she fleetingly felt sorry for him. Then he saw Luc, and his face hardened, and so did her heart as Renard came walking toward them with a stern expression. “What a scoundrel you are, Luc, showing up now!” he exclaimed. “Keep away from Ondine, or her father and I will have the police escort you out of town for good.”
Luc never took his eyes off Ondine. “This is our train,” he said steadily. “Are you ready to go?”
“Yes,” she said, surprised at the strength in her own voice.
“You’re coming home with me, young lady!” Monsieur Renard said sternly to Ondine, yanking her by the arm. This surprised her; she’d never seen him like this, but it was Luc he was staring at and talking to, and she could see it was male business that had nothing to do with her. And now she saw Luc stiffen, with a hard new glint of fearlessness in his eyes as he sized up his opponent.
Instinctively Ondine put a hand on Luc’s chest. “Don’t give them an excuse to put you in jail,” she warned. She turned furiously to Monsieur Renard. She recalled the day he drove her home in his fancy auto and they saw Picasso out for a Sunday stroll with the blonde girl who was pushing a baby carriage. Monsieur Renard had sneered, I could never take up with a woman who’s had a child by another man.
Now Ondine leaned forward and whispered in Renard’s ear, “I’m going have a baby. What will your mother say? Do you really want me to marry you and then tell everyone it’s not yours? Because I will, you know. I’ll shout it from the rooftops! But if you let us go, your family name is safe.”
Monsieur Renard gasped, then drew back in stunned horror, releasing her from his grasp.
Ondine took one last look at the world she was leaving behind. For some reason, all she could think about now was the cat and the dog, waiting for her in the backyard. She was still girlish enough to feel tears in her eyes for her beloved pets.
“Goodbye,” Ondine whispered to the wind so that it would carry her message to the Aleppo tree, to tell the animals not to wait for her return. “Give them all my love.”
She took Luc’s arm, and hurried up onto the train.
Discovery: Céline in Mougins, 2014
I LEFT MONSIEUR CLÉMENT’S LAW office still feeling stunned. To suddenly recast my mother’s entire story of Grandmother Ondine’s last days at Gil’s mas instead of at the café presented mind-boggling new possibilities.
“I’ve been following in Grandma’s footsteps all along, right there at the mas,” I told myself, feeling goosebumps at the thought. That was where I needed to do my searching.
Standing in the labyrinthine center of the old town I realized that I had no way of getting back. I decided it was high time I got my own wheels. I lucked out at a nearby car rental; someone had just returned a pale blue Peugeot. Driving off, I felt a sense of independence and triumph.
Back at the mas I recalled that Gil arranged for my classmates to be out in the fields this afternoon. Aunt Matilda later told me they did a stint of farm work—milking wary cows, feeding nervous chickens and pigs, collecting eggs from indignant hens, picking the day’s multitude of vegetables and fruit.
Maurice reminded me of this scheduled farm work while I was trying to creep past his concierge desk in the lobby. I mumbled something about having to first attend to “a personal matter” and I hurried up to my room to plan my next move. Searching for Grandma’s Picasso here at the mas would be tricky; we had only three days left of the cooking course, and each was carefully mapped out; for instance, tomorrow was a trip to the museum.
So, with the whole class out in the fields this afternoon, this might be my best chance to snoop through my classmates’ rooms. It wouldn’t be my top priority to search the women’s area, since Monsieur Clément said that Grandma Ondine had become unable to climb stairs and her bedroom was on the ground floor. But I wondered exactly where those older bedrooms were. Then I recalled that the desk in my room had a get-acquainted brochure about the mas.
I saw now that it contained a map of the buildings and grounds, which I could use to plot my search. The brochure described it all in glowing P.R. terms:
This typical Provençal farmhouse, built entirely of local stone, was made in the tradition of creating a completely self-contained entity producing everything its owners needed to live independently: vegetable and grain, meat and poultry, fruit orchards, a dairy, and even its own silkworm farm called a magnanerie.
The “mas” or big main building is laid out in an L-shape facing south for maximum light and protection from the north winds. As you enter the lobby w
ith its updated marble flooring, a spiral staircase takes you either upstairs to guest bedrooms; or downstairs to the bar, dining room and kitchen of Gil Halliwell’s Michelin-starred restaurant, called “Pierrot”. This large modern kitchen and dining area did not exist in the original mas; it was only a barn-like room where the animals were kept indoors in winter.
—
THEREFORE, THE KITCHEN that my class had been cooking in all this time wasn’t Grandma Ondine’s kitchen, I concluded, scrutinizing the map before continuing to read.
The other side of the mas—the shorter leg of the “L-shape”—was where the earlier owners spent their indoor hours, especially in winter. There were only two bedrooms and a farmhouse kitchen. In the summer, cooking was done in outdoor ovens, but in the winter months the owners cooked and ate in this original, large kitchen, using the big fireplace and its built-in ovens; so the room served as a combination kitchen-dining-and-living area. This section of the mas is currently undergoing expansion and reconstruction, as are the outbuildings, some of which were once used to grind and store grain, or to store fruit and vegetables. Our pool and spa are the first examples of our state-of-the-art renovations of the outbuildings.
So, I noted, the bedrooms on the shorter side of the “L” were where the men in our class slept. It appeared that they were both at ground level. I was willing to bet that one of them was Grandmother Ondine’s bedroom—right near the old kitchen, where she might cook and take her meals. No stairs to climb.
The women in my class called that section the “boys’ dorm” and everyone joked on the first night about how we’d been gender-segregated. Surely that was where I should search, and the sooner the better. Feeling inspired, I rummaged in my suitcase for any supplies I might find useful, and came up with an LED flashlight that I always take with me when I travel, and my nylon carry-on bag. I was optimistic enough to think that if I found the Picasso I could stash it inside. I hurried out of my room, moving quietly through the lobby. Maurice had gone back into his office, so he didn’t see me.
I stole down the spiral staircase to the lower level, past Pierrot, Gil’s restaurant, which had a cocktail area with a zinc bar and an enormous Art Deco mirror bearing needle-etched images of the legendary Pierrot and Harlequin clowns gaily chasing each other. I continued beyond the restaurant’s empty dining area, elegantly designed in burgundy and pale rose. Tomorrow it would be buzzing with weekend customers; you had to make reservations weeks in advance even in the off-season, and whole months ahead in summer. The tables on the terrace were especially popular.
Next was Gil’s shiny silver spit-spot-clean new kitchen where our class had been taking cooking lessons. I’d never gone beyond this modern kitchen because the other door was marked Staff Only. I opened it now, and stepped into a short vestibule leading to a heavy wooden door that appeared to be made of halved tree logs. Once I’d pushed past it, I found myself in the oldest section of the mas.
Shining my flashlight ahead, I could see that this long hallway eventually led to the old kitchen, now under construction. The site was like a big black pit with lots of treacherous scaffolding. But immediately to my left and right were two doors facing each other across the hallway.
“The old bedrooms!” I said, excited now as I squinted at my map. “So this is the boys’ dorm.”
The door on my left was ajar. I pushed inside. It was quite a large, elegantly decorated bedroom suite with a fireplace, and two alcoves containing beds. There was also a sizeable adjoining sitting room. The sitting room had a bed in it, too, so there was ample private space here for all three of my male classmates.
A pair of pajamas with a Texan flag on the breast pocket was draped on the sitting-room’s bed; Joey’s Chicago Cubs baseball cap lay on a table in one alcove; and, in the other alcove I spotted a British newspaper which surely belonged to Peter, the English wine steward who had become so chummy with Aunt Matilda.
I crossed the suite to a large closet and yanked open its door. I felt a stab of guilt, rummaging through my classmates’ clothing that was folded on shelves and draped on hangers. Then I thought of my mother stuck in that awful nursing home, and I quickly stooped down to the floor where the men’s empty suitcases were stacked. I hauled them out and examined the floorboards, which were slightly warped; and I noticed that, in the far right corner one particular plank wiggled like a loose tooth. Still, it took considerable work to pry it up. Once I finally got it out of there, I shined my flashlight and peered in.
I felt my pulse quicken, once again recalling what Mom had said about a secret storage area under a closet floor, where during the wars Grandma’s parents hid the café’s best champagne from the German soldiers…
The hollow space below was deep and wide enough to surely be such a storage area.
“Just like she told me!” I whispered, thrilled.
I had to lie down on the floor to really see into its corners. There I discovered only one item, tucked far in the back. Focusing my flashlight on it I reached in, gingerly at first, in case some mouse was nesting nearby. I hauled up the item and put it on the floor beside me.
“Whoa!” I exclaimed in disbelief. It was a cellophane cylinder, dry and brittle from being in its hiding place. I opened it and carefully slid the curled-up contents out: sheaves of large paper, heavy and linen-like. I could see that the interior side had vivid drawings done in strong black lines and bright colors—red and yellow and blue and green.
My fingers trembled a bit as I gently smoothed the paper which had clearly lain here for a very long time. At first it didn’t want to uncurl. There were at least five or six sheets, all rolled together…Slowly, carefully, I flattened out the top one and gazed at the artwork in my lap…
“Wallpaper,” I said aloud.
Scraps of sample wallpaper. With lots of clowns on it. And dogs and cats, also dressed in clown gear like ruffs and peaked caps. And believe me, the wallpaper artist may have been earnest, and even successful. But he definitely was no Picasso.
“Merde!” I growled. Dispirited, I rolled the pages back up, slid them into their cylinder, and deposited them in their burial chamber. I replaced the floorboard, stacked the suitcases on top, and, turning to the beds now, I cast the flashlight’s beam to examine the flooring beneath them. Nothing.
Nice going, Céline, I thought, thoroughly disgusted.
I straightened up, replaced everything as I’d found it, and went across the hall to inspect a smaller bedroom—lo and behold, this was the one decorated with clown wallpaper. In spite of myself I had to laugh when I saw more of the fanciful, Art Deco masked clowns chasing each other across a black-and-white checkerboard. The bed and armoire were modern, inexpensive Scandinavian furniture. Nothing here could be from Grandmother Ondine’s day. There were no clothes in the closet and nothing unusual about this room, which appeared unoccupied.
Maybe this wallpaper inspired Gil to name his restaurant Pierrot, I mused. It was such a modest-sized room, I wondered what Grandma used it for. A guest bedroom, no doubt. My parents might have stayed here when they visited. Well, if Dad had slept here, then this would be the last place that Grandma would hide a treasure that she didn’t want him to know about!
But just to be sure, I dove under the bed and checked for any more loose floorboards. Then, as I came to my feet, I had the strange feeling that I was not alone. I turned around, and spotted a little boy standing in the doorway holding a suitcase, and wearing a polite, puzzled look on his face.
“Hullo,” he said. “What are you doing in my room?” He had an English accent.
“Oh,” I said. “Oh. Hi there.” I had to smile; there was something innately sweet about him.
He studied me carefully. “You’re snooping around for something, aren’t you?” he asked. I could not answer. He grinned. “You’re not supposed to be here, you know.”
I recovered enough to say, “Well, who are you and what are you doing here?”
Very seriously he said, “This is my playroo
m now. My name is Martin, and my dad owns this place.”
I absorbed his little speech. Could this kid actually belong to Gil? Of course he did. He was a pint-sized version of Gil: blond, curious, lots of intelligence in his eyes, and a touch of sadness. He was wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt, too, just like Gil. I guessed that he was about ten years old.
“I sleep in the dovecote,” he said proudly. I had no idea what he meant.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Look, can you keep a secret?” I said. “I lost something. So, I was just checking to see if I could find it. I didn’t know you were staying here. I thought the room was empty.”
Martin considered this. “Well, okay,” he said doubtfully. “But what’s your name?”
“Céline,” I replied.
“Hi, Céline,” he said, reaching out his small paw, offering to shake hands. I found this touching, and although his handshake was firm, his fingers were delicate. He struck me as fragile, somehow. Then I remembered what Aunt Matilda said, about Gil’s wife committing suicide. The poor kid.
“Do you play cards?” Martin asked eagerly. “I have a brand-new deck of cards.”
“Yes, I do,” I said gently, “but I can’t play now. I know some folks around here who love to play cards. I’ll introduce them to you next time. But right now, I have to go.”
“Oh,” said Martin, failing to hide his disappointment. “Okay.” He really was so sweet.
I left, determined to see this through for Mom’s sake. I retraced my steps to Gil’s new kitchen, then slipped outside beyond the terrace, and set off on the winding footpath that led away from the main house, weaving past terraced orchards with a view of the olive groves, vineyards and farmland beyond. Scattered along this path were smaller, freestanding stone outbuildings with terracotta-tiled roofs, looking like miniature versions of the main building, which gave them a sweet, playhouse appeal.
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