Five Tuesdays in Winter(45)

But when she begins the story about her first dance, Flo interrupts her. “What about the ghosts in Austria, Mom? Is there one about some ghosts at a fancy ball?”

Marie-Claude shakes her head, certain she has never told either child that story.

Using the headrest, Flo pulls herself up closer from the back seat. “Yeah, there is.” Some of her mother’s fine hair tangles around her fingers, sticky from candy.

“That hurts, Florence,” she says. “Dammit,” she adds in English.

“Maman!” Tristan says, truly shocked to hear an American swear word out of his mother’s mouth.

Marie-Claude is surprised, too, and a bit alarmed by the sudden swell of anger. She had promised herself no harsh words to Flo today.

She looks at the enormous clock beside the speedometer: four more hours. She wonders if Flo or even both of them should have gone with their father to New York instead of coming with her to Hatteras. She cannot predict her moods or the size of Bill and Karen’s house or whether Tristan and Flo will like her friends’ children. She wishes she had enough money to fly them home to Lyon for Easter. She takes her eyes from the road to the fields beside them, a movement as welcome as straightening her legs might be. She wishes she could go on looking sideways.

Tristan says, “What story about ghosts in Austria? Watch the road, Maman. What story about ghosts?” She knows he will persist, never forget, not for one day of their vacation.

“It was in a castle,” Flo says, “a really old spooky castle that used to be a big deal, like a king or a count used to live there or something. And Daddy was there. I think they were engaged then. Were you engaged to Daddy then? Please tell it, Mom.”

This is new, Flo calling her Mom instead of Maman, and Marie-Claude hates it.

She wonders how Flo can know about Austria. Sometimes it feels there is nothing about her life her children cannot uncover, cannot redefine. Once she had thought there would be a certain amount of grace and mystery in being a parent and that what went unsaid about her experiences would be respected and what was revealed would be absorbed without contradiction, occasionally sanctified. Wasn’t that how she had treated her own parents’ pasts? Perhaps it is because they have become American, these children of hers.

“You two tell me stories. I’m tired of talking.”

“No,” says Flo. “Tell the ghost story. Please, Mom, please. Please!”

Tristan joins in, and Marie-Claude lets them continue far past the point at which she’d assumed they’d stop, until their chanting unsettles her more than the idea of telling another story. “Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

“Your father wasn’t with me then,” she begins. “I hadn’t even met him.” She tries but fails to conceal the pleasure she takes in this fact. “I went with my cousin Giselle. She had been invited by her best friend at boarding school in Lausanne, Sigrid. The ball was just outside Linz at a palace that had once belonged to a Habsburg archduke, Franz or Friedle or someone, one of Francis the First’s sixteen children. The palace was later confiscated when the imperial family was forced out of the country by the new government. Eventually, it was resold to this Sigrid’s grandparents. I didn’t know much of the history. I just knew that Giselle traveled with a pack of rich friends and that Sigrid wasn’t the only one who could throw a party in her own castle. And I was a bit more like your father then. I loved big houses and beautiful clothes.”

“He does not,” Flo says, but even in her irritation at one of her mother’s jabs, she can’t muster up enough conviction to pursue an argument. She has already begun to notice how her father seems more pleased when she plays at Janine’s house with the pool than at Bree’s apartment.

Marie-Claude instantly regrets the comparison, regrets this mood on the first day of their trip, and rushes on. “My date was one of Sigrid’s cousins, a sullen boy who seemed to want to talk about nothing else but the strategical blunders of the French army. His country gets occupied twice during one war, and he has the nerve to bring up the failure of the Maginot Line! But I didn’t really care. I was at a ball in a fancy dress and could laugh at just about anything.”

Flo marvels at the thought of her mother (whom friends call a slob, who always wears her hair yanked back with the brown rubber band off the newspaper) in a ball gown, patiently humoring her date. Flo is beginning to question these images her mother feeds them of her disposition before she married their father. She always makes herself out to have been giggly and lighthearted, the gravity of life never pulling on her until she found herself married with children to raise. But her mother’s face is serious, has always been serious, her expression in even the most spontaneous childhood photographs resembling, as her father once said, the portrait of a disgruntled cabinet minister.

Slowly, the story begins to make Marie-Claude feel better as she describes the carriage they rode in, the view of the Danube, the black horses in the twilight. She senses her children’s full attention, Flo’s syrupy breath near her ear and Tristan’s small body turned sideways toward her, and this audience makes her feel needed in a more extravagant, less basic way than usual.

There is so much to tell: the gardens, the courtyard, the intricate bodice of her dress. Finally, the words she chooses are the right ones; they take on the exact shape and magnificence of the moment they describe. She feels strong and alive, driving her children south on a smooth highway.