by Mary Fleming
Closing early, I pulled down the orange metal grille on Mélo-Vélo, winced at its clatter, and gave my obligatory nod to the Sacré Coeur. I had identified closely with this architectural outlier since first spotting it on the horizon at age nine. With its beehive domes it looked as if it belonged on another continent. Like me. Later I saw a deeper meaning: the two larger cupolas represented my parents, the three smaller ones the three children. I identified too with its stone that changes color according to the light. Today, cold and grey, it looked like wet concrete. I wondered why I’d bothered to lug my camera along.
In comparison, the street to the left looked prosaic and provincial as the late shoppers rushed to fill their baskets before the apples and lettuces were packed away. It was hard to imagine the street had once been a Greco-Roman thoroughfare. It was even harder to imagine Saint Denis, first bishop of Paris, with his two pals Rustique and Eleuthère, freshly decapitated, walking up the road, carrying their heads in their hands. But that’s what the legend says, that the three martyrs-in-the-making walked up this street and past Montmartre, a full six kilometers, until they dropped at the site of what’s now the Basilica of Saint Denis, burial place to the kings of France.
The métro was conveniently on the same Porte de la Chapelle–Mairie d’Issy line as my mother and stepfather and even my brother. In fact, it was the same line that I’d taken to school, first with Edward and my mother or Lisette the housekeeper, and later by myself, almost every day of my Paris youth. By that measure, I hadn’t actually moved very far away, but as I emerged from the rue du Bac station that day, the contrast with the rue des Martyrs was stark.
Here in the 7ème arrondissement on a Sunday, most of the residents had fled the city for their country houses. Of those who remained, not one ugly, unkempt person was in sight. In the faubourg Saint Germain, the less well-endowed physically could afford to cover up unfortunate features and the ravages of time with cashmere, hair dye, and plastic surgery. The grandeur carried over to the architecture: Haussmann resplendence on the boulevards and eighteenth-century stateliness in the back streets, where hôtels particuliers had housed the old, old aristocrats, the ones dubbed by a king, before Napoleonic upstarts began nudging into the nobility with their pushy, bourgeois ways. The hôtels still stood, but over the centuries many had been taken over by the government and transformed into ministries, thereby assuring their survival and lending a regal aspect to their bureaucracy that the French alternately love and hate.
Some families, however, had held on, and it was in just such an eighteenth-century building that I had spent the bulk of my childhood. My stepfather’s father, who was not an aristocrat but the banker for one, had bought an apartment in a hôtel particulier from the duc de Coursault after the war, when money was scarce and help was needed to keep the place up. By the time my mother, Edward, and I arrived on the scene, Edmond’s parents were dead and he was living in its spacious rooms all alone.
For as long as I could remember, nothing at the rue de Verneuil had changed, not even the code on the grand door giving access to the courtyard: B1207, birthday of the now-defunct duc’s long-dead horse. Inside, under the porte-cochère was the concierge’s loge, where for the last thirty years, Monsieur and Madame Morales had been the building’s gardiens. Heavy, uneven paving stones still bumped across the courtyard, and the doors to the former coach houses, now garages, still sagged slightly. Even some of the potted plants and shrubs that dotted the edges seemed to have been there forever.
And on the left, attached to the wall, was my mother’s bicycle, the one bought the only time she had ventured up to the rue des Martyrs, not long after I’d taken over Mélo-Vélo. She’d chosen a secondhand Raleigh with three gears. “There aren’t many hills in the 7th,” she’d said with an embarrassed shrug, “and I like its sturdy English look.” Then, feeling guilty for not choosing something more expensive, she’d insisted on buying multiple accessories: a basket and luggage rack, a rearview mirror, and—despite my assurances that such a high level of security for a rusting, used heap of metal was unnecessarily cautious—an expensive, indestructible Kryptonite lock.
Our building, with its long windows and smooth façade, stood at the back of the courtyard. I took the steps of the wide stone staircase two by two and pressed the polished brass doorbell, next to which the letters “H-L” were discreetly printed. From the other side of the reinforced door, I could hear the flat soles of my mother’s shoes slapping over the wide herringbone parquet.
“Hello, T,” she said, opening the door and offering up each of her downy cheeks to me for a kiss. “You’re here a little earlier than usual. Would you like a quick something?” Though she had lived in Paris for thirty years, Helen Stanford no-longer-McFarquhar Harcourt-Laporte had retained much of the Wall Street lawyer’s daughter. The “quick something” of a Long Island cocktail party, the steady, slightly splayed step, and the good bone structure of well-established New York society.
“I just need to wash my hands,” I said, holding them up. “I didn’t quite get all the grease off.”
Her eyes fluttered, almost imperceptibly. “All right,” she said stoically before turning back to the living room and calling in French now: “Trevor is here.”
I walked by the guest WC, with its scalloped bar of rose hip soap in a porcelain dish and its white linen towels, ironed by the fierce hand of Lisette into rigid rectangles, to the pockmarked enamel laundry sink in the pantry, with its solid bar of no-fuss savon de Marseille and a brush.
As I scrubbed, Lisette called from the kitchen: “Trésor, is that you?”
I dried my hands, walking toward her at the stove. She put down the wooden spoon and wiped her hands on the old white apron as she pulled me to her ample bosom. “How’s business?”
“Thriving,” I answered.
“Good, good,” she said, picking up her spoon again. “Lunch is almost ready.”
As a boy I’d spent hours with Lisette in the warm kitchen, sitting on a stool and listening to her chatter as she prepared supper. Over the years she had become plumper and plumper, so that now, with her short, round body, her tripled neck, and bulging eyes, she resembled a pug dog. She was the one person in the house I didn’t want to irritate or disappoint.
With my hands scrubbed, if not spotless, I approached the family circle. Just before I entered, the sun flashed through a crack in the clouds and illuminated the living room. It shot through the old glass cabinet containing some of the boxes my mother collected. My camera was there, on the entry hall table. I grabbed it, pulled off the lens cap, put my eye to the viewfinder, and adjusted the shutter speed, then the aperture, just as the sun disappeared. I pulled the camera from my eye. Missing these moments was like watching the train leave the station while I stood dumbly on the platform. I could regret them for weeks. At least no one had seen me. I laid the camera down quietly.
The living room was a high-ceilinged rectangle with three large windows looking over a garden that belonged to a building on the parallel rue de l’Université. The floor was warped and the oak planks creaked unpredictably, even the parts covered by an expansive Persian carpet. The furniture was a mixture of English and French, mostly antique, but with a few comfortable sofas providing a splash of Americana comfort. And strewn across end tables, laid out in that damn glass cabinet, were the boxes my mother had been collecting since she was married the first time, to my father. She picked up one box on every trip she took. Large and minuscule, round and rectangle, wood and enamel, French and American, even Chinese, they were everywhere.
“Brother,” said Edward as I walked in. “How’s life in the chain store on the hill?”
“Probably better than life in the stock-ades,” I answered.
“That would surprise me,” Edward answered, his arms closing across his chest, glass of white wine in one self-satisfied hand. Everything about my brother suggested success and prosperity, from his quick eyes and cocky smile to his slimly cut tweed jacket with the double v
ent and the ironed jeans, crease front and back. Mostly European but, like my mother, with some carefully selected American elements: today country shoes from L.L. Bean, to sustain a transatlantic image.
“Though I have to say,” he continued with that slightly foreign accent he cultivated in both French and English, “that since you insist on living like un petit bourgeois, you should at least have considered a boulangerie. Bakers make packets of money and retire to large, ugly houses they build for themselves in the country.”
“They work too hard,” I said. “And I’m not interested in country living.”
I turned my back on him. Really there were times when I wondered what we shared besides a métro line and a mother.
“Hello, Stephanie,” I said as I kissed each of the ever-soslightly hollowed cheeks.
“Trevor, hello.” Her low voice rumbled, purred. Her snug black trousers allowed full appreciation of her long legs and perfectly rounded rump. The green eyes, deeply set into her gingery complexion, smiled back at me. A hand ran through the straight and shiny gold-red hair. Gorgeous.
I turned reluctantly to my stepfather, greeting him in the same chilly, brisk manner I always addressed him. He was my mother’s, not mine, and that was a message I had communicated to him relentlessly over the years, even long after he’d given up trying to win my favor. Edmond Harcourt-Laporte, known to Edward and me as BP, nodded but averted his grey, inscrutable eyes, his aquiline beak. He couldn’t stand the sight of me.
“Time to call the children,” Mother said. It was, of course, exactly 1:20. Stephanie disappeared toward the back of the apartment, where their three children, aged eight, six, and three, were playing in our old bedrooms.
We proceeded across the creaking floor into the dining room next door and the large oval table, laid in its silver and porcelain splendor. The extra leaf was in; this was the first lunch where the children would be joining us, instead of eating in the kitchen. Matthieu and Henri came running in from the back, jumping and howling. Stephanie sauntered in with Caroline, who looked just like her mother.
“Come and sit down, boys,” my mother said steadily above the ruckus. “You know you’re not allowed to behave like wild animals in this house.”
My mother, though allergic to discord, had not wholeheartedly embraced her daughter-in-law. Beautiful though she may have been, Stephanie lacked breeding, an element that in my mother’s eyes was as vital as the air she breathed. Without it, one produced wild, ill-mannered creatures like her own grandchildren. Her role, one might even have called it a crusade, was therefore to care for them regularly and counteract Stephanie’s slack regard for discipline and decorum.
Indeed, the boys did calm down; they were used to bending to Mother’s authority. Caroline stuck close to Stephanie. She was dressed in a skimpy dark skirt. Like her mother’s black trousers, it showed off her long legs nicely.
Lisette made her stout way among the children and adults, with the platters she then placed on the warming tray at the large oak sideboard. She clucked and scolded that the soup would get cold, that the meat would dry out.
“I really think the children would be better off in the kitchen,” said Stephanie to my mother. “It’s what they’re used to.”
“No, no, it’s time that they learned to sit still. To endure adult conversation,” answered my mother. “That’s the way it is here in France.”
So we all sat down at the well-armed table and this first crossgenerational experiment in dining. Under the soup bowl was a flat plate for the main course, always a roast, green vegetable, and potatoes. There were side plates for bread and later cheese and salad. The heavy and ornate silverware, my mother’s grandmother’s, lay gleaming and straight. Two forks on the left, two knives and a soup spoon on the right, and a dessert fork and spoon crossed at the top. Two silver candlesticks, elaborate things with long, loopy arms, waved about over the table. What a production.
“J’aime pas la soupe,” Henri whispered to his father.
“Just eat three bites,” Edward answered, echoing our mother’s litany to us as children. Henri looked to his mother for sympathy, but her face was firmly planted over her own soup bowl. He grimaced and picked up the oversized spoon in his fist.
My mother sighed.
Edward said to him: “No, Henri, not like that.” And he plied the child’s fist from the spoon, adjusting his grip to the polite norm between thumb and forefinger.
“Trevor,” Stephanie looked up suddenly, “do you have any children’s bicycles? Caroline has outgrown that thing I bought for her at the Bon Marché.” While the rest of the adults spoke French at the table, a practice that had begun when we’d first moved in— to help Edward and me learn the language, and out of respect for Edmond—Stephanie spoke and was spoken to in English by everyone except her own children. They went to a French school, the same one Edward and I had attended, and were only exposed to English at home. Though they understood their mother’s tongue, they refused to speak it.
“Maintenant elle est à moi, la bicyclette,” piped in Matthieu as he tossed a proprietary look of triumph at his sister. Just as Caroline looked like her mother, little Matthieu resembled Edward. The curly hair, the confident round face, the light hazel eyes. He had his mother’s freckles, but that was about all.
“I have a few children’s bikes,” I said. All I could concentrate on, with her looking at me, was how utterly beautiful she was. The rounded forehead, the slightly ski-sloped nose, the strong, pointed chin. Those feline eyes.
“Maybe we’ll come up and see sometime.”
“Don’t forget C-h-r-i-s-t-m-a-s is coming soon,” Edward said. His jaw muscles were grinding, always the telltale sign that he was perturbed.
But as we moved onto the main course, a mischievous smile replaced the tense jaw. “What do you shopkeepers think of the new government?” He paused and wiped his mouth on the white cloth napkin. “They’re trying to make it easier for small businesses.”
“That’s what they always claim,” Edmond answered for me. “Then nothing ever changes but the number on an impenetrable form that takes months to fill out.” Politics always got him going, while family matters, from the children’s manners to my aloofness, he left to my mother. “But they’re better than the Socialists, that much I’ll concede. Fourteen years of Emperor Mitterrand would have ruined us, if he hadn’t done a complete turnaround two years into office. Fortunately for the country, all he really cared about was his own grip on power.”
“At least the Juppé government is addressing the social security issue,” said Edward. “It’s scandalous, these régimes spéciaux where train drivers and other state employees can retire at fifty or fifty-five. Before long, no one will have to work at all.”
“Whatever his plans, the prime minister is an egghead,” I said. “As a well-trained bureaucrat, everything he does looks fine on paper, but it won’t work in practice. BP is right about small businesses.” I threw a look his way. From time to time, I still liked to toss him a bone, make him believe we were on the same side. “You know that no French worker has ever given up one single acquired right, and why should he? The whole system is based on the battle between the haves and the have-nots. The elite looks out for its own, and the rest of the population scrabbles for whatever it can get through confrontation.” I paused, irritated at my brother’s silence. “If the people had more real power . . .”
Bingo.
“More power!” He lifted his quick and springy frame slightly from his cushioned chair. Though not quite as tall as his wife, he was just as athletic. “Every time a reform is proposed, your dear workers take to the streets, and after two days, the government has conceded and given them everything they want. If that’s not power, I don’t know what is.” He pointed angrily at no one in particular. “I say fire them. Then they’ll have something to demonstrate about.”
Mother cleared her throat and began sawing vigorously at her meat.
“It is true,” she said, “tha
t in this neighborhood, with all those ministries, there are so many demonstrations, it’s hard to keep track of who the people are and what exactly it is that they’re complaining about. I try and ignore them.”
“They’re like spoiled children,” Edward said haughtily.
“If that’s the analogy you want to draw,” I answered, trying to control my voice. He too knew exactly which buttons to press. “If you insist on portraying the workers as childish and spoiled, then I’d say the grown-up leaders are decadent, irresponsible, selfish, and ergo, unfit parents.”
“The point is,” Edmond said calmly, “change in France always occurs through conflict.” Mother looked at him gratefully for intervening. “In many ways, nothing has changed since well before Louis the sixteenth lost his head. The titles have evolved, but the dynamic has remained the same: instead of a king, we have a regal president. Instead of a ruling aristocracy in the king’s court, we have bureaucrats, the highest achievers in the country, running the place. And meanwhile, the people form their own impenetrable factions.” As so often with Edmond, on abstract issues he got right to the point, straight to the heart of the matter. Even I, the only family member who voted Socialist, had to agree with him here.
By now, little Henri had finished his potatoes. The meat and beans sat cut and untouched on his plate, and any proud pleasure he may have felt at sitting with the grown-ups was long gone. He had descended from his chair and was rearranging the large reference books that had been used to raise his stature at the table. And he was doing it ever more loudly. “Come sit on my knee, Henri,” Mother said to him. He obeyed immediately, settling into the crook of her arm and inserting his thumb firmly in his mouth.