Lives Paris Took

by Rachael Wright

  As he picked his way around the circular tables, heavily laden with cutlery and water goblets, he looked toward the window; the couple were still in view, the man apparently now on his third glass of wine. He hoped the woman, with her swollen eyes, might glance over again, but her head was turned. She gazed at the sky, intent on the swirling dark clouds.

  David sprinted across the street turning his collar up as he did so. The rain began slowly, one drop at a time creating small dots of darker gray on the concrete until those dots began to merge into larger puddles. He couldn’t place when the downpour started, only that it had. Parisians fled in every direction, toward covered doorways or fabric awnings or onto buses. All the while David walked, on and on through the drizzle, through the halos of gold cast by the streetlights and the reflection of the classical architecture on the streets. David saw Paris that day, while others fled the deluge; he alone saw the magic poured out on the pavement.

  THE MORNING DAWNED BRIGHT and clear, the remnants of last night’s storm flung from the sky. David walked the short distance to the Université de Paris and immediately lost himself in the labyrinth of buildings and offices. He wandered down corridors where his step echoed off the walls and through doors that swung loudly on their hinges. In an abandoned courtyard, full of rakes and paint supplies, he found an elderly caretaker who took pity on him and led the way back through the bowels of the university. At the far end of a long corridor, the caretaker inclined his head and left without another word. David sighed and knocked.

  “Welcome to Paris,” a man said as he entered the room. “I am Pierre.”

  David moved forward to shake the man’s hand. Pierre was dressed in a tweed suit, and had a shock of disheveled white hair, with the hint of a belly straining his waistcoat buttons. His dark eyes were full of humor and his boisterous presence filled the room with warmth.

  Pierre St Claire was the head of the English department. However buried the office was inside the campus’s catacombs, it did boast two luxurious windows, which overlooked an inner courtyard. With the stacks of precariously balanced books and mounds of paperwork and randomly placed mementos, it resembled a dragon’s hoard.

  “Merci,” David said.

  Pierre smiled warmly and indicated the chair in which David might sit.

  “Now, let’s get the paperwork settled and figure out your accommodations. I would suggest living here in the fifth arrondissement, the Latin Quarter. It’s full of the Université de Paris’s students and intellectuals; you’d fit right in,” Pierre said as he shuffled through a large stack of books and manila envelopes.

  “Ah, vous voilà,” Pierre beamed, emerging from the mass, waving a plain folder in the air. He rifled through the papers and began to hand over forms for David to sign. “There is a room open above a bistro on Rue Saint-Jacques; a former faculty member owns it. She’s made it available for you, if you’d like.” Pierre looked up from the folder, trailing off, waiting.

  “Yes, of course, merci.”

  “Her name is Jeanne, lovely woman. I’ve told her you will be by. How do you find Paris?” Pierre asked, smiling serenely, as though he was talking about a woman.

  “Full of history.”

  “Ah yes, but full of life. A zest for life that isn’t found many places. Parisians want the best, whether its Chanel or wine or boeuf bourguignon. What is life without the best food, the best Burgundian wine, and the best company?” Pierre said, gesticulating widely.

  He didn’t seem to need an answer to his question, but stared blankly over David’s shoulder, lost in memories. David excused himself and stood up to leave.

  “Do come by anytime. My door is always open,” Pierre said, shaking David’s hand.

  David left the office, much more content than when he had entered it. Students were lined up five deep at Pierre’s door and stared wide-eyed as he left.

  The apartment was located four blocks from the hotel. The bistro sat quietly in its post-lunch lull. Madame Jeanne, the landlady, managed to give David his key, but bustled off saying she was late for a meeting. Though thin, he was forced to twist sideways to make it up the steep staircase behind the bistro. The planks groaned and shifted under his feet and dipped near the middle.

  At the top, David paused, holding the key in his hand, his bags perched on top of his feet. The key hovered in mid air and he stared past it. A sharp shatter reverberated from below and he jumped, his hand plunged forward and the key turned in the lock.

  With a crash, he tumbled into the apartment, tripping over his suitcase and coming to land in a sprawl on the hardwood floor. David scrambled to his feet, blushing as he pulled himself together. The walls were brilliantly white, though they seemed to gleam gold in the light of the ceiling skimming windows. The main room contained both a kitchen and a small living area. A worn, earth-tone couch with luxurious curves lay in front of an intricately carved mantle. The kitchen was small with a short line of cupboards. Hanging over the edge of the sink was a tri-folded red tea towel. In the bedroom, a large wardrobe took up most of the south wall. On the bed a small sprig of baby’s breath, tied with a purple ribbon, lay on top of the pillow. The bathroom lay beyond, holding only a chipped claw-foot bathtub, sink, and toilet. David slipped off his shoes and placed them next to the wardrobe.

  He turned and walked back to the living room, his feet slipping quietly over the smooth wood floors. Snow settled on the windowpanes, giving the outside world a soft white border. The rooftops began to curve, and frost crept along the glass. Fewer pedestrians trudged down the streets.

  He watched, hypnotized by the beauty, by the ever-whitening world. Soon enough, as if it were waiting its turn, his face fell into familiar lines of invisibility, and he left the idyllic scene behind to begin the short process of moving in. A framed copy of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly’s, “Un bel di, vedremo,” was set onto the mantle, and a faded photograph of his brothers — resplendent in full uniform — took its place at his bedside.

  David looked around, thrilled at his luck and connections, which had provided the apartment, and his eyes fell on a telephone tucked into the back corner of the kitchen counter. He contemplated calling home, letting them know he’d arrived. A quiet rap on the door echoed across the room. On the topmost step was an overflowing brown bag, a long baguette stuck out of the top. David smiled, hauled the goods in, settled down to a lovely dinner, and completely forgot about the phone.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Rachael - October 2015

  “YOUR GRANDMOTHER IS DYING.”

  At those words I dropped everything, left my husband alone to pack our house, caught a plane, and flew eleven hundred miles home. She wasn’t just anyone. She was everyone, rolled up into a woman so picturesquely wonderful that the world — my world — wouldn’t exist without her.

  And then she died and, perversely, the world kept spinning. I stood by her bed in a quiet corner of the retirement home, and a piece of my existence seemed to fall away. My mind spun inside the sphere of her final moments. Her last gasps for air were so labored … my body absorbed her pain. Tears fled my eyes and my back curled under the pressure. A wailing cry escaped me when she failed to breathe again … as the seconds ticked by and the room went cold.

  My father and I stayed in the room for hours afterward. I sat, and felt her personhood, her soul, slip out through the vent, the minute cracks in the window moulding, and under the door. She left us alone, and it was just a body lying there, shrunken and pale — so unlike the monument of a woman chambered in my memories. We waited for the doctor to pronounce her death and for the undertakers to be called. We sat unseeing as nurses spoke their condolences. I wanted her back.

  My mother, his ex-wife, tried to come into the room. I could hear their angry voices echoing through the cheap plywood door, rising and falling in a perverse operatic harmony. I looked down at the body in front of me, the skin grew more grey by the moment, but the eyelashes were still the same. The short stiff bristles without curl. I never heard he
r complain about them. I couldn’t even remember if she wore mascara. She must have … right? Why didn’t I notice? I noticed her perfectly styled hair and sharp outfits and costume jewelry … why didn’t I notice the mascara?

  The undertakers came and draped her body in a faded, well-worn quilt. I pondered what they must have had underneath that softened facade because, once covered, she looked more like a tree log than a person. She left in the back of a black suburban. I couldn’t stand that she would be alone — that I would be alone. My body collapsed in on itself, and I was consumed with pain.

  THE MEMORIAL WAS HELD on a chilly November Saturday. After so many days of pain, my mind pleaded for a break from the emotional upheaval. I wanted to be back with my husband and daughter. But there was still my grandparents’ house. Death isn’t simple. It wasn’t a new concept, but such an emphatic reminder of the complexities of human existence — once it has ceased … so many forms to fill out, steps to take and legal responsibilities to be claimed. We arrived at the house on a Monday. My father slumped over the steering wheel as his old truck crept up the driveway. His face was crumpled, but it was his eyes that betrayed him.

  “There’s just so much to go through,” he said as we entered my grandmother’s house.

  “Why don’t you go on? I can handle this for a few hours,” I said. He looked thankfully at me and fled toward the car, shouting that he’d be back later.

  I turned the key in the lock. The deadbolt was stuck so completely that it took five minutes to jigger it loose. A wave of stale air flew from the house. It seemed as if the shell of that old place had died long before she had, but its soul was alive and well.

  I walked through the nearly empty rooms, and dreamt of the furniture that once stood on the worn carpets and the sounds of squealing children, which used to echo off the walls. The dining table still stood at the far end of the kitchen in front of a set of large windows.

  There I sat down, taking comfort in the chair that had always been mine, the one closest to my grandmother. At first, I was a bit surprised to find it in precisely the same place it had always been. But then I corrected myself. Of course it was. I knew she loved our conversations between those two chairs as much as I did. The divot on the right side of the seat that just fit the pad of a child’s finger was still there. I dropped my head. The air crackled and teemed with memories and the warm wisps of love, which tumbled and flipped across the house like dust mites.

  Where to start? Where to even begin, I thought, my mind roaming from room to room. My body joined my mind, and in the end I tramped out to the study, which sat above the root cellar, a little ways off from the house. My grandfather’s desk, the surface from which he’d written out every one of his sermons, was gone from the room, but everything else seemed untouched since my childhood wanderings. Except the boxes. Across the room I saw boxes lining the entire south wall. They say you can’t put a life into a box … but they are so wrong. There I knew immediately would be my starting point.

  Tax forms from 50 years ago; checkbook registers all in gray rows, and faded campaign advertisements from every Republican presidential nominee since Herbert Hoover stuffed the insides of some of the cardboard life containers. Memory stirred inside those boxes. I could feel them pulse life through the dusty papers left behind, the receipts for the weekly flower purchases my grandfather had made religiously for 20 years to ‘surprise’ my grandmother, and through the box of worn and faded Valentine’s Day cards.

  I worked steadily for two hours, shivering each time I had to step out of the study into the chilling breeze to lug box after box to the dumpster. Each trip, the cold shock awakened me to the fact I was still among the living, not one of my dead grandparents’ many memories trapped back inside. I sat down, finally, in front of the last four boxes. Unlike the rest, they were labeled. ‘Letters’ each one declared. They might have contained at least three hundred faded envelopes each. A feeling of unease tore through me, as though I was being impolite, peering behind a veil that I shouldn’t.

  There, among the letters to my grandmother from her mother and sisters, were fragile envelopes from a sailor on a ship. His hand was instantly recognizable my stately grandfather. Reading the words on the page, one could conjure the far-flung places the war has sent him to. Far beneath the stories of adventures was the tone of a man very much in love and equally confident in the love his wife had for him. I smiled and held them close, wanting to believe that I could summon my grandparents to me—that they weren’t as far away as reality would place them.

  I sat, amongst papers still bearing their presence, until it became too much. Loss clutched at the edges of my heart. I gathered the boxes of letters, one at a time, and took them into the house. If anything, they belonged to my father and his brothers. The lid fell off the last box. A great line of orange hung over the creamy whites of the smaller letters. My hand plucked the manila without conscious thought. It wasn’t that it was addressed to my grandfather that gave me pause. It was the return address that struck me, a doctor at a hospital in Dallas, Texas.

  Inside the bright manila folder was a single sheet of paper, and a long unaddressed envelope.

  02/04/1989

  Dear Mr. Golike,

  I had the great honor to be your brother’s doctor when he passed away last November.

  I regret that we were incredibly busy that night, and I didn’t have the chance to post this for Mr. Golike before he died.

  Indeed, he didn’t even write to whom the letter was intended.

  I send this on in hopes that you can help assure that it reaches its intended recipient.

  My condolences on your loss,

  Dr. Nathaniel Grey

  The letter from Dr. Nathaniel Grey lay suspended between my fingers as they shivered with electricity, charged with the family mystery I felt I’d unearthed. I looked down at the envelope at my feet, as innocent as an envelope is possible to be. It wasn’t sealed.

  It seemed an age that I sat with the letter on my lap, staring at the rise and fall of unsteady letters across the faded page. I blinked. Twice. Three times. A million times. The dust mites settled around me like a small snowstorm. My mind turned over a torrent of questions. His brother. My grandfather’s brother. I don’t know him. I don’t know anything about him.

  Outside, gravel flipped and whirled across the driveway and the muffled shouts of my father echoed strangely in the cold autumn air.

  “Rachael …” he was calling.

  I sprang to my feet, gathered the manila envelope and the letter, and stuffed them inside pocket of my peacoat. The satin lining rubbed against my neck as I pulled the collar tight. I imagined the cream Burberry tag, and the life this coat had seen. She’d given it to me when I turned eighteen; it was wrapped in pale pink tissue paper. To wear it was to bring a piece of her with me, and that was a great comfort.

  My breath came in great gasps as I poked my head out the door and called out to him. His dark hair, twenty years out of the Marine Corps and it was still cut in a high-and-tight, was speckled with snowflakes and his cheeks were a bright red. He smiled and hauled the boxes of letters into the covered bed of his truck. Driving home the letter burned against my side. I could feel it through the wool of my sweater. Dad only prattled on about plans for fertilizing the fields and repairing fences up at the top of the property. I nodded at the correct places: that’s all you had to do with him and he’d talk happily for hours.

  We ate dinner. Chicken wild rice soup and French bread with whole garlic cloves baked in. A light Bordeaux fluttered in our glasses. We both stared off into the distance, awash in our own memories. He brought up the divorce first.

  “It should be finalized in two months; the final orders hearing was scheduled.”

  “And then?” I asked slowly.

  “And then I suppose we get on with our lives?”

  “She’s my mother. I don’t think that’s possible.”

  He looked up, “I guess I move on then.”

&
nbsp; “She’s royally messed up,” I said, fingering the stem of my wine glass.

  “She’s been messed up for a long time.”

  “She wanted to get in to see your grandmother … that’s what we were arguing about. The head nurse came up to us and threatened to call the police. What a nightmare.”

  We lapsed into silence. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I just sat in my chair, fingering the wine stem. It rolled precariously around my fingers.

  “I’m glad my parents aren’t around to see what she’s done, the damage she’s caused, how she’s dragged our good name through the mud. They’d be so ashamed.”

  “Why?”

  He looked at me, as though the answer was obvious. “They didn’t believe you talked about this sort of thing.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “Divorce, abuse … you name it.”

  “Why? You haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “They took pride in their reputation.”

  “That’s just ridiculous. I think they’d be more concerned about you than a good name.”

  But it was at this my father seemed to drift to another place, as he so often did. I doubt he’d even heard me. He just took a long drink of wine and stared out at the brown fields beyond. A flock of birds swirled through the air and settled in a long line along a fence. Short gaps here and there separated the twittering distractions where they avoided the barbed wire.

  I looked around the kitchen to where a group of family photos hung in blue and brown frames, faded faces smiled brightly out of them. There was a little boy, sitting on some sort of tall box in my grandfather’s family photo. He looked at least twelve years younger than his six siblings. He was also strangely angled away from the camera.