Paris by the Book(103)

In the last sentence on the last page of the published book, as the wife and daughters busy themselves about the store one Saturday, the bell over the door rings.



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And so it does each time I leave the store to walk the streets in search of him. Not often and not seriously, and not something I tell the girls, but occasionally, after dropping them at school, I walk on and pretend I’m still in active pursuit. Maybe pretending is all I was ever doing. I don’t think so. I do know what I saw in his eyes the last time I saw him, which is something the mirror shows me every day in mine—I saw our girls, our lives. I think, too, that in Robert’s eyes, I saw love, longing. What’s certain is that bodies, celestial or human, have a pull. It’s impossible to imagine he doesn’t still feel our tug. It’s impossible to imagine him fully gone.

But then it’s impossible to imagine I’m a filmmaker, though I really am now. Or that’s what the instructor—I’m finally taking classes again—tells me to tell myself when I get frustrated. Film is about time, he says, take time. So I do.

And time takes me. Summer has finally fallen to winter, and it’s cold here. Sometimes, when crowds are thin, I pay to go up the Eiffel Tower, and start my (tiny, high-tech) camera rolling. I don’t let myself get distracted by the view to the north, where the vast expanse of the Palais de Chaillot always makes it seem more important than it is, or to the west, because America lies there, along with Belgium and Wales and Stockholm and the two Wisconsin Parises, all those little towns that say, and not just to me, remember? And I certainly don’t look south, where the thick black Montparnasse Tower feels like a cinder in your eye. I look east. Toward the Louvre, and Montmartre, and Europe—and Ménilmontant. In the meager cast credits of The Red Balloon, Lamorisse acknowledges his son and daughter and a handful of others, before acknowledging the support des ballons de la région parisienne. Depending on what the day, the weather, and my eyes are up to, it doesn’t take much squinting to see all of them, in flight or about to rise.

And down the hill from Ménilmontant, down, down, down toward the Seine, I can almost see my store. I don’t need my camera now. I know it. Bright red. And inside, a party well under way, not just my women but so many others, all the living and the dead, including Walt Whitman, maybe Walt Whitman’s son—Whitman the textbook author, not the poet, though the son enjoyed the confusion—who started a bookshop named Le Mistral and then renamed it in honor of Sylvia Beach, unable to reopen her own Shakespeare and Company after the war. I think of Sylvia Beach and her shop. I think of mine. I think of distant countries, centuries, cities brought together on bookshelves.

I think of Albert Lamorisse, and his young son, now old, Pascal, who lost his father so long ago, and I think of what Pascal thinks when he sees that old film, The Red Balloon, if he even watches it, if he can bear it, Pascal in almost every frame, Pascal looking down at the camera while taking flight in that famous final shot, borne above Paris by a bouquet of balloons. Neither father nor son could have known then how it would end, just fourteen years later, in Iran—Lamorisse in a helicopter with the shah’s own pilot as it rises, stutters, falls. There are very few accounts of Lamorisse’s death and fewer still that mention this: Pascal, no longer the little boy of The Red Balloon but a young man, was aboard the ill-fated helicopter, too. Pascal somehow made it to safety just seconds before the crash. His father did not.

I never told Robert this.

Nor this: at the end of every one of Lamorisse’s most celebrated films, the protagonist disappears.



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Nor, finally, this, but Bemelmans fan that he was, Robert must have already known: Bemelmans died young. Not as young as Lamorisse, but he never met the grandchildren he longed for. At his death, Bemelmans was working on a final Madeline book, Madeline and the Magician, which drew on “Madeline’s Christmas” features he’d done for women’s magazines in the mid-1950s. But this new iteration would focus on the magician, not Christmas. It survives only in fragments—some paintings, drawings, sketches. (Ellie and Daphne found this arcana; as they grow older, Bemelmans’s work for younger readers has somehow become more important for them, not less.) The artist knew he was ill, knew he didn’t have long, and try as he might to keep the story sunny, he could not. His life leached into it, as life does. The angular, indefatigable Miss Clavel, who led Madeline and her other charges across all Paris, lies ill, bedridden, beyond the reach of medicine. A magician appears—his name, Mustafa—and with a flourish vastly improves “the old house in Paris covered with vines”: a lake appears, a papaya tree, even “mountain goats from the Himalayas.”

The girls are delighted, but worry and wonder about Miss Clavel, so sick; would it be too much to ask if—

But of course! Mustafa works his magic on Miss Clavel, and she comes back to life. Miss Clavel is not pleased, however, by the changes Mustafa has wrought in her absence and asks him to undo them. He does; she casts him out into a snowy night, where he promptly vanishes.

An arresting sketch survives of the girls tearfully following a funeral cortege bearing the magician’s hat, a fez: we would all love our magician back, Miss Clavel acknowledges, but some things are not possible, not in real life. Instead, she offers the girls a stray. A cat.