Paris by the Book(11)
I almost wanted someone to give me a medal—it could be small, like the ones they give mothers here in France who have four kids or more—for all my various parenting accomplishments, including not running a tavern in our living room, as my parents essentially had, and not raising my daughters as underage barbacks. Never once did our girls have to empty ashtrays, haul glassware, bang on the ice machine to make it cough up more cubes. And this showed, or I was sure it did, on our girls’ faces: they smiled a lot. The world smiled back.
Not that we saw much of the world, though. Despite Robert’s vow, we never got to Paris, not even back to a Wisconsin one. That said, the prospect remained, not unpleasantly, on the horizon of our lives, greatly encouraged, of course, by Ludwig Bemelmans and Albert Lamorisse.
The girls’ experience with Lamorisse was mine to curate, and the results were strange. Though we had ready access to the film, our daughters, like me, preferred the book and insisted, in their earliest toddler days, on “reading” it to me. Those are Robert’s quotation marks, and it’s true, the girls did not yet know how to read. But they nevertheless pretended to, and did so intently, not with real words but unintelligible whispers whose soft, husky sibilance reminded me of skates cutting across pond ice. Hush, hush: Robert called it Whisper Theater and professed not to know why I loved it so. What needed explaining? The girls’ milky breath on my cheek, their bodies knitted with mine on a beanbag or a bed, the three of us sometimes so exhausted by Lamorisse’s story that we fell asleep together, especially nights when Robert was away. If he was there, he’d nudge me awake and I’d pretend to be grateful as he squired us all to our individual beds. But nights he wasn’t there, nights I’d surface from sleep around 2:00 or 3:00 A.M. with the girls still beside me, I’d lie awake in the most beautiful insomnia I’ll ever know, the book flat across us, and on either side of me, little breaths huffing fast or slow as dreams required.
But as they grew, as they learned to read, they fell harder for Bemelmans. It wasn’t really a fair fight. Lamorisse’s oeuvre is smaller, weirder (1965’s Fifi la plume, anyone, where a Parisian cat burglar finds a nightgown, a circus, sprouts wings?). Bemelmans, though he could be equally strange—a 1953 Holiday magazine Robert bought on eBay featured a cheery Bemelmans illustration of a murderer dismembering a corpse in a Paris attic—provided endless entertainment. Madeline backward and forward, of course, versions in Spanish and German and French and a coveted one in Chinese. And long before I thought them ready, Robert read to them from Bemelmans’s essays and sketches written for adults, which recount various adventures, loves, and losses, including that of his brother, Oscar, who plummeted to his death in an elevator shaft at the Ritz in New York. Dark stuff. But also funny stuff, obscure stuff, enough to firmly establish Bemelmans as a member of our family, something like the ribald grandfather who occasionally upsets Mom. Lamorisse, meanwhile, served as the uncle whose exploits are legendary but who is rarely seen. Both dead too soon. Both inescapably intertwined with France.
Which is why, when the girls were old enough, when we had time enough, when we had money enough—well, of course: we’d go. I even took French classes (actually, the same introductory class, many times) and enrolled the girls in a magnet school that offered French immersion (they progressed rapidly, or Daphne did). And I stayed employed, my unfinished film studies degree having somehow qualified me for a job writing speeches and PowerPoint presentations and making the occasional (stunningly scripted and shot) video for the university president.
What I mean is, I did my part.
And Robert did his. He organized carpools and dentist appointments and 3:00 A.M. laundry when vomiting or bed-wetting required. He was an excellent cook and involved the girls in the cooking. Juice-box-size trophies he’d won for coaching tiny teams bejeweled our bookshelves.
He navigated all this uncomplainingly, if distantly, as though he was studying these various activities rather than taking part in them. And I studied him. I learned to predict when he’d feel the need to disappear—it was like a simmering, a swelling, though that’s not quite it, because there was never a sense that anything might explode. Instead, he’d just announce that he needed some “time,” and off he’d go. He worked in spurts, taking off on a Thursday, say, and coming back Saturday. Or he’d leave predawn Sunday and return at bedtime. In the meantime, he’d have found a hostel or lodge or a convent. A coffee shop or a planetarium. He’d come home dazed, bedraggled, happy-tired, like a runner post-race. Again, I never complained or questioned: a day away, an hour, a weekend, time alone to do his work. It was what we had agreed.
But what we’d also agreed was that he’d always leave a note. We never received communications during his time away, but always a note before he went away. Three words, be back soon, was the custom, unfailingly appended with an estimated time of return that was unfailingly accurate. And it worked. For years. We didn’t ask other people to understand (especially after I’d made the mistake of offhandedly mentioning Robert’s frequent absences on some soccer sideline, leaving other mothers aghast). Children of firefighters and surgeons and sailors get used to their parents’ unusual schedules; so did ours. Dad’s off writing, Daphne would say if she found the note. He loved hiding these in places the kids might find them, a fortune-cookie-size slip taped to the back of a toothbrush, a purple Post-it tumbling out with the Cheerios. “Be back soon!” Ellie might chirp.