The Light of Paris(97)

“Yes.”

“And you never got a chance to meet him?”

“He died in the Second World War. He was living in Bordeaux when the Germans occupied it. And I didn’t know until after then.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. I was thinking of my own father, of his comforting presence and how I missed the sound of his voice. But at least I had known him. My mother had never even known her own father. “Have you seen a photograph?” I asked. My mother nodded. She went to one of the shelves by the windows and pulled down a photo album. I remembered paging through it as a child, looking at the nameless faces of ancestors past, their funny clothes and stiff poses, the old cars and the quiet skylines and horizons behind them, but I had never before connected them to me, had never understood the way we were all linked.

The photo had been taken at a café. Sebastien—my grandfather, I thought—was sitting in a chair, leaning back, legs stretched out long before him. He held a cigarette in one hand, and he was smiling slightly at the camera. Off to one side I could see a woman’s legs beneath the table, her ankles crossed, a pair of T-strap shoes on her feet. She had turned away while the photograph was being taken and I could see only the edge of her jaw and the line of her neck. Her hat covered her hair. It could have been my grandmother.

He was tall and slender, his features drawn as sharply as a model’s. His hair was light and unfashionably long, flopping into his eyes. I looked at him, memorizing his face, though I felt as though I had already painted it in my mind a thousand times over the last few weeks. Looking up at my mother, I was shocked to see exactly how much she looked like him—not only her build and her slender fingers, but the sharpness of her cheekbones and the slight raise of her eyebrows, which I had always thought of as an expression of superiority, but on Sebastien looked like perennial amusement.

“You look exactly like him,” I said.

“I know. It broke her heart.” Leaving me with the album, she walked back to the sofa and sat down on the edge, leaning forward and crossing her forearms precisely.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, though I wasn’t sure what I was sorry for—her distance from her mother, never knowing her father, the distance between us. Maybe all those things.

“Don’t be.” She smoothed her skirt over her knees, straightened her shoulders. “As far as I’m concerned, my father was Robert Walsh, the man who raised me. He took me on as his own, after all, when he didn’t have to. And I never had the slightest sense he treated me any differently from how he would have if I’d been his biological daughter. That’s fatherhood.”

“Don’t you wish you could have known him?”

My mother looked out the window into her garden. The trees were in full leaf, spreading warm shadow over parts of the yard, and there were flowers everywhere. She was right—we were the same in that way. Except she had found a socially acceptable way to pursue her art and I had just . . . given up? I’d blamed my parents and Phillip for quitting painting, but I could have resisted their pressure. I could have kept going. I’d blamed my mother for forcing me into marrying Phillip, but I could have said no. A stronger woman would have. The woman I wanted to be would have. The woman I was going to be would.

Because that was the point, wasn’t it? To learn from the past, to learn from my mistakes, the mistakes of my mother and my grandmother. Both of them had lived the lives that were expected of them. I didn’t resent my grandmother for her choices. She had done what she had to do. I just hated that she had to do it at all. And my mother had spent so much time and energy holding me back, holding herself back. Imagine what she could have been if she had only let go and embraced who she was. Imagine what I could have been. Imagine what could happen if we all had the heart to be who we truly are.

“I wish I could have known him because it might have brought me closer to my mother. I wish I could have known him because—well, because there’s something about knowing where you come from, isn’t there?” I looked around at the china cabinets, which, though they had been emptied, were still full of generations of Walsh and Bowers memories. Someday it would be my job to keep these things safe, to remember the stories of the hand-painted plates my grandfather had brought back from a trip to China, to polish the silver someone claimed had been buried in the garden during the Civil War (but really, everyone said that—if it had been true, shame on the Union Army for not figuring it out).

“I can’t believe you never told me,” I said, and I was surprised by how bitter it sounded. I wasn’t angry so much as . . . well, what was it? Disappointed? Maybe if she had told me the truth before, we might have been closer. Maybe keeping this secret from me was part of what had kept us apart.

“It never seemed to be the right time.”

“I guess there never is a right time for that news.” Except it had been the right time, finally. It had been the right time to know I wasn’t a failure in a long line of feminine perfection. It had been the right time to know about my grandmother’s dreams, and to see what giving them up would do to you, would do to your daughter, would do to your granddaughter. She wasn’t wrong to have made the choice she had, but it would have been wrong for me to keep making it when I had nothing other than my own shame and fear at stake.

“Did she ever see him again?”

My mother shook her head, the light falling across her face, illuminating the lines on her skin. “I don’t think she did.”