The Light of Paris(96)

“You could be supportive. I wouldn’t be doing it if it weren’t the right thing.”

“So you’re sure, then.”

“I’m sure.” I was sure of very little just then, the future opening in front of me like a hungry maw. The one thing I was sure of was my future had no place for Phillip in it, and it would be so much the better because of that.

“Well, I’m sorry. I don’t know how to behave. No one in our family has ever gotten a divorce before.”

“That’s what you’re worried about? That I’m the first person in our family to get a divorce? Don’t you care about my happiness? Or do you only care about how you look at the Ladies Association?”

My mother’s eyes flashed at me, hard and brilliant green. “Of course I care about your happiness. You’re my daughter.”

“Then why have you spent your entire life criticizing me? Making me miserable?” Tears caught in my throat, and I hated them, tried to push them down. I hated the way they made me feel weak, out of control, like a child. I hadn’t cried when I had left Phillip. Any emotion I had invested in him had been gone so long ago it would have been stranger to cry than not. But my mother—I had never been able to protect my heart from her. No matter how many times she had shut me down, I had never stopped wanting her approval.

“I have tried to keep you safe. I have tried to keep you from making choices that would only end up in disappointment. I have tried to save you from pain. I have never, ever, ever tried to make you unhappy.”

“You have. You always have.” I shuddered in a long, slow breath. “You didn’t want me to paint. You wanted me to go to cotillion, even though I hated it. You wanted me to go to college, when I only wanted to go to art school. You wanted me to stay with Phillip when I wanted a divorce. You wanted me to be you and I can only be myself no matter how messy and inconvenient and broken I am.”

My mother’s normally smooth brow was wrinkled, and she looked genuinely pained. “I wanted you to have an easy life, Madeleine. All the paths you wanted to take were only going to leave you heartbroken.”

“How can you know? How can you know unless you let me try? It’s exactly like Grandmother,” I said, shaking my head. I snatched a tissue out of the box on the end table and blew my nose, loud, ugly, unconcerned with being ladylike or attractive. I was done with that. I was done with the performance of fragility, done pretending to be beautiful, or delicate, or any of the things I was not and didn’t care to be.

“What do you mean?”

“She wanted to be in Paris. She wanted to write. She wanted to live abroad, and she didn’t want to get married or have children. And she didn’t get to do any of those things. She ended up doing what her mother wanted anyway.”

“And wasn’t that for the best, in the end? Wasn’t she better off married to your grandfather, with a good life and a stable home and never having to worry about where her next meal was coming from? She made herself miserable wanting things she couldn’t have, and all I wanted was to save you from that.”

“And all I wanted was the chance to choose for myself.”

Folding her hands in her lap, my mother stared down for a moment. “I see that,” she said. “I can’t apologize for wanting to keep you safe. I can’t apologize for wanting to protect you from failure. But I see that.”

And for the first time, I felt like my mother heard me.

My tears were slowing and I blew my nose again, long and loud and unattractive, until I could breathe again. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’ve disappointed you. I’m sorry I’m not the daughter you wanted. I’m sorry I’m not Ashley Hathaway. I’m sorry I don’t like the things you like.”

My mother looked up at me, surprised. “You do like the things I like.”

“What are you talking about? Fundraising committees make me want to slit my wrists with a butter knife.” I blew my noise again, loudly. My eyes were hot and swollen and I was unexpectedly exhausted, as though I could have lain down and slept as long as a princess in a fairy tale.

“Not that,” my mother said, waving her slim hand dismissively. “We love reading, and art. We love to make beautiful things. My garden, your pictures. We are like my father, both of us.”

I furrowed my brow, thinking of my grandfather, who, like my own father, was always hidden behind some dreadfully boring financial newspaper and thought savings bonds were a good gift for children. “I’m nothing like Grandfather.”

“Not Grandfather,” my mother said softly. “My father.”

My eyes widened and my breath caught sharp in my chest. “You knew?” I asked, the words carried out on a breath.

“Of course I knew. I read the journals and the letters.”

“You said you didn’t.”

“It’s so hard to talk about.”

The questions boiled up inside me. “Did you ever ask her? Did you ever talk to her about it?”

My mother shook her head. “I didn’t. I didn’t think I could, really. My mother and I—we were never close. But I understood why after I read the journals. I think I reminded her of him.”

So it ran in the family, then, this estrangement. There was a sadness in my mother’s eyes I had never seen before, and it made my heart ache for her, and for myself. How had we spent our entire lives lying to each other? How had she denied herself to me—her real self—for so long? Why did the women in my family work so hard to make themselves emotionless, to shellac down their hair and close off their feelings, to stay aloof and frozen? The only time my mother ever dug in was when she was gardening. Turning my head, I looked out the window at it and saw it for what it was—my mother’s art. Her gardens were her paintings—color and form and order, experimentation and creation, dirt and birth and success and failure. “You reminded her of Sebastien?”