by Mary Fleming
Mother’s bedroom, the logical place to start, was both eerie and comforting. It looked as it had before her illness: medicine bottles had been removed, and the bed was made up without a wrinkle. The closets and chest of drawers were still filled with her clothes. Her belongings meant that even if her spirit was gone, her presence could still very much be felt. But she wasn’t there and never would be again. And once I had removed all trace of her, wouldn’t her presence disappear too?
Wandering the apartment, shadowed by Cassie, I couldn’t bring myself to touch anything. Until I got to her collection of boxes. Edmond had instructed me to leave them in place; in them my mother would fittingly live on at the rue de Verneuil, and I could get started on the clean-up job that would take me the whole week to accomplish.
At night I would lie in my old bedroom and look at the triangle of sky that I had first seen when trying to wish myself back to Connecticut and a complete family. The bit I’d stared at many afternoons after school, and subsequent nights when I couldn’t sleep, and again as a teenager, dreaming about my future in the US where I would rediscover eternal happiness. And finally, in my last days at the rue de Verneuil, bashed in body and soul, that triangle had been there for me to stare at for hours at a time, while I convinced myself that the word Future had been stripped of any meaning for me.
That whole week, in fact, my mind flooded with remembered events, impressions, and sensations of the place, and it occurred to me that that is really what we mean by home: our private garden of memory.
I got some relief from Edward and Anne-Sophie who, between Mother’s illness and Anne-Sophie being too pregnant to go anywhere, were stuck in Paris and on their own. The older children had gone for two weeks to the not-quite-completed house in Nantucket, with Stephanie, Bruce, and a Danish fille au pair. The youngest, theirs, had been sent to Biarritz with cousins.
In my cupboard-airing mode, I asked Edward if he knew about Franny’s death, about Mother and Edmond. He did not, but being Edward, he of course had a completely different reaction.
“I guess it’s good to know what happened, though I can’t say I’ve ever lost sleep wondering about all that stuff.”
“About the death of your sister, then your father? About the relationship between your parents?”
“Come on, Trevor,” he said. “You know I have a terrible memory and certainly can’t remember anything before the rue de Verneuil. Even then . . .” he trailed off. “I remember BP picking me up from Boy Scouts one Saturday.”
“And you’re married to an historian?”
Anne-Sophie shrugged her shoulders and smiled her heartshaped smile; Edward got that weird, misty look in his eyes. The effect of her natural sweetness and composure on my less than sweet, driven brother seemed nothing short of a miracle. Though I still didn’t feel a great sympathie with either one, I admired their easier approach to getting through the day, now that I’d dropped the unreasonably rigid requirement that everyone in my family be just like me.
Near the end of my clean-up, I opened the drawer of my mother’s bedside table. Amid the nail scissors and pens and coins and other junk lay what I first thought was a book.
Photo albums from our first life were kept in the bottom drawer of Mother’s oak desk in the bedroom. These albums had not been thrown away, but neither had they been left out in the open, placed next to the French photo albums, for example, which sat on the bookshelves lining the corridor. This meant consulting them was a clandestine activity, one which I had indulged in somewhat obsessively at different times in my childhood. As far as I knew, this was all there was in terms of a photographic record of our previous life. But there in her bedside drawer was a little album of only a dozen or so pages. The leather cover was darkened from much fingering, and many of the inside plastic sheaves were cracked near the binding from much leafing. Every photo was of Franny, starting when she was a few hours old. In the second-tolast photo, Franny was sitting in Mother’s lap on the front porch in Connecticut. Mother had her arms protectively around her and was kissing her ear. It almost looked as if she were whispering a secret. The sense of intimacy between mother and daughter was so strong, I couldn’t pull my eyes away for some time.
The last picture in the book was a family photo, taken of the five of us outside the house in Connecticut, at the time of Edward’s christening, which meant it must have been taken not so long before Franny’s death. Edward was in Mother’s arms, trailing a white gown. To her left stood my father, with Franny in his left arm. I stood in front of my parents with one hand raised, in a wave or a salute, as if I had just conquered the world. We all looked smiling and victorious, a big happy family.
I stared hard at my parents in that photo, trying to get underneath their smiles. My father’s was always a little tight, like mine. I’d thought it was a result of our apparently similar natures or his feelings of professional inadequacy. But now I wondered if it didn’t have something to do with my parents’ relationship. I looked at my mother. Did her smile have something sad and frustrated in it? Or uncomfortable, not quite satisfied, as she stood next to my father? Had she loved him at all, or was Edmond her only true love? And what did my father really know about all that? Did he feel unloved—did that explain the melancholy my mother had talked about? Looking at that photo, another question suddenly struck me: had Edward been named Edward because it was only three letters away from Edmond? His name certainly didn’t have any family significance, as mine did. These were things I would never know, things that even if Edmond knew, I would never be able to ask him.
The image of her poring over this album at night—thumbing its pages as religiously as a Bible—haunts me to this day. How could I ever have presumed to judge the depth of my mother’s suffering?
While I was rendering my first favor ever to my stepfather, he was doing the same on the other side of the Atlantic. Or Aunt Tiffy was. The Long Island house, as predicted, had sold immediately, and even she was surprised by the huge price it had fetched. Edmond was staying into September “to tie up loose ends,” but from phone calls, I gathered that Aunt Tiffy was doing most of the tying.
The house proceeds alone would easily allow me to go ahead with the plan I had outlined on the pont des Arts that day, including the bit about handing over the shop to Wanda and Piotr. With my long and frequent absences, they were already doing most of the work, and that, Piotr told me, had completely cured Wanda of any mal du pays. And I liked the symmetry of it: the shop had fallen into my lap, and now it was time for it to fall into someone else’s.
As for the other part of my plan, I already found myself taking more photos. Of Mother during her illness and in the hours after she died. Of the rooms at the rue de Verneuil while I was cleaning up. Of the empty city during my morning strolls with the dog.
And Béa in all this rummaging through my past and planning for the future? I had the disembodied version on the phone daily and at length, but I was missing the real thing sorely. For once in my life it had very little to do with sex. I wanted to absorb her spirit, her human energy, the quality that had abandoned Mother when she died. To touch, feel, smell her. To hear that laugh without the help of France Telecom. On the other hand I still worried (I hadn’t changed that much) that once life was less emotionally charged and demanding, once it had settled back into the humdrum—well, that that’s how she’d view me—dull and dreary.
Still, I was desperate for some uninterrupted time together and had figured out how to get it. We would dog- and house-sit at Hautebranche while Cédric, Viviane, and André went to Aix for a holiday. It had not been easy to convince Viviane. In her state of guilty mourning, she was refusing to do anything that might improve her outlook. She had a million reasons why she should never budge again. Being intimately familiar with this frame of mind, I eventually managed to persuade her she might as well try a change, for her husband’s sake if not her own. From what Cédric told me, she was still catatonic, except when talking about God, but I held out hope tha
t a combination of being away from her house, where every corner held a trove of painful memories, and breathing the sunny air of her beloved Aix would help the old Viviane resurface.
The day of Béa’s return I had one more task: removing Mother’s bicycle. It was still down in the courtyard, attached to the iron bar and in a sorry state. In the course of our conversations, she had mentioned that since “that business five or six years ago,” she hadn’t ridden it. I’d left it until last because in all my cleaning up, I had not come across the key for the Kryptonite lock she’d insisted on buying with the secondhand Raleigh. Edmond didn’t know where it was. Neither did Lisette. “Etrange,” she said, when I phoned her at her sister’s. Needing more than a sturdy pair of cable cutters to remove a Kryptonite lock, I eventually called in the locksmith Jean-Baptiste. Just back from his holiday, he came with his young son and equipment to remove the intractable lock.
“What a lady,” he said gravely. We—Jean-Baptiste, his son, Cassie, and I—were standing over the bicycle as if gathered around her coffin. “There’s no sense, no justice.”
I nodded. After a moment of respectful silence, I said: “I hope you can break this lock. They’re made to be indestructible.”
“There are few problems concerning a lock that I cannot resolve,” Jean-Baptiste said. He looked and spoke more like a hippie professor than a locksmith, with a mop of blond hair, thoughtful blue eyes, and a thick beard surrounding a serious mouth. “On y va, mon grand,” he said to the boy, who must have been about seven. He stood in the shadow of his father as metal met metal in a piercing whine. The sparks began to fly, and the boy put his hand on the back of his father’s hip, peering around, both wanting and not wanting to witness the scene. Cassie jumped back and forth, expressing her canine version of the same conflict. The breaking of a lock is indeed an ambivalent—and in this case a violent—act. Whether it represents a release or a rupture is open to interpretation, and I wasn’t at all sure what was being accomplished here. For the first time in the last weeks, I felt the tears pricking my eyes.
After many minutes, having drilled the mechanism out entirely, Jean-Baptiste pulled apart the lock. The rusty bicycle was free, and my work at the rue de Verneuil was finished. Jean-Baptiste, who refused to be paid, wound up the long electrical cord he’d dragged across the paving stones and walked away solemnly with his drill in one hand, his other around the shoulder of his young son. I was left alone with the dog in the courtyard. In fact, the whole building was empty except for Cassie and me. Even the Morales were away. I stood there gripping the handlebars on the bicycle that had been my mother’s, that I couldn’t even ride, and the tears were streaming down my cheeks. I didn’t think I could stand so much emotion. It was too painful, too confusing.
Eventually I took a deep breath, wiped my eyes on my sleeve, and looked at my watch. It had taken Jean-Baptiste longer than I’d expected, and I still needed to get the bicycle back to Mélo-Vélo and myself up to the Gare du Nord for Béa’s train. I pushed the airless tires forward. Stuffing the bike in the back of the small car was not easy—I had to contort the wheels and twist the rearview mirror on the handlebars—but I finally got it in. Cassie, in the front next to me, sat at full attention at these unusual proceedings. I pulled out into the street with a bump. The bicycle clattered, and Cassie almost lost her balance before regaining her alert posture at my side. I looked at my watch again. The train was arriving in half an hour. Amid my turmoil, there was one certainty: I wasn’t going to be late.
About the Author
MARY FLEMING, originally from Chicago, moved to Paris in 1981, where she worked as a freelance journalist and consultant. Before turning full time to writing fiction, she was the French representative for the American foundation The German Marshall Fund. A long-time board member of the French Fulbright Commission, Fleming continues to serve on the board of Bibliothèques sans Frontières. The Art of Regret is Fleming’s second novel. She writes a blog called A Paris-Perche Diary at http://mf.ghost.io.
Author photo © William Fleming
Selected Titles from She Writes Press
She Writes Press is an independent publishing company founded to serve women writers everywhere. Visit us at www.shewritespress.com.
A Drop In The Ocean: A Novel by Jenni Ogden. $16.95, 978-1-63152-026-6. When middle-aged Anna Fergusson’s research lab is abruptly closed, she flees Boston to an island on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef—where, amongst the seabirds, nesting turtles, and eccentric islanders, she finds a family and learns some bittersweet lessons about love.
A Cup of Redemption by Carole Bumpus. $16.95, 978-1-938314-90-2. Three women, each with their own secrets and shames, seek to make peace with their pasts and carve out new identities for themselves.
Anchor Out by Barbara Sapienza. $16.95, 978-1631521652. Quirky Frances Pia was a feminist Catholic nun, artist, and beloved sister and mother until she fell from grace—but now, done nursing her aching mood swings offshore in a thirty-foot sailboat, she is ready to paint her way toward forgiveness.
Shelter Us by Laura Diamond. $16.95, 978-1-63152-970-2. Lawyer-turned-stay-at-home-mom Sarah Shaw is still struggling to find a steady happiness after the death of her infant daughter when she meets a young homeless mother and toddler she can’t get out of her mind—and becomes determined to rescue them.
What is Found, What is Lost by Anne Leigh Parrish. $16.95, 978-1-938314-95-7. After her husband passes away, a series of family crises forces Freddie, a woman raised on religion, to confront longheld questions about her faith.
Tzippy the Thief by Pat Rohner. $16.95, 978-1-63152-153-9. Tzippy has lived her life as a selfish, materialistic woman and mother. Now that she is turning eighty, there is not an infinite amount of time left—and she wonders if she’ll be able to repair the damage she’s done to her family before it’s too late.