I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This (31 page)

“I just feel like I would go a little crazy if I couldn't express that part of myself,” I said.

“But you, you started at what age to discover your body?” Josée asked.

“My body? When I was very young. Eight or nine,” I said.

“You didn't caress yourself when you were eight!” Josée said, her eyes widening.

“I did. A long time before I understood what sex was. No one ever told me not to touch my flower,” I said with a self-conscious shrug.

“
Ah bon!
At eight or nine you discovered that all by yourself!”

“It wasn't a sexual act . . . but still I knew that it was something to be done in private. It was part of my . . .”

“Of your well-being,” Josée supplied.

“I guess so,” I said. “It wasn't . . . goal-oriented.”

“Huh,” Josée said. “Well, I suppose nobody ever told you it was forbidden.”

“No,” I said. I had no memory of my mother trying to explain sex to me, nor of ever wondering what it was. When I hit puberty,
she had bought me carefully chosen explanatory books, books that celebrated masturbation and discussed homosexuality without judgment, but I had been quietly reading my parents' collection of obscene comics since long before.

“And you didn't have to go to confession!” Josée continued. “When I was ten, the priest put all sorts of ideas in my head about impure thoughts. But I didn't have any. I looked carefully at the boy who went to school across the street and I rolled down my socks into little sockettes so that it would be more sexy. But that was it. Even when Gerard and I were fourteen, I was only afraid I might become pregnant. I had no idea there could be pleasure. A kiss didn't make me boil.” Josée began to muse that if her grandmother had told her not to touch her flower, then it must have been because she herself was told that as a girl. Which meant that Mélanie, too, had had a flower, and had discovered it. This had never occurred to Josée before.

“It's quite poetic, when you think about it,” she said. “And I, I don't know if my daughters ever touched themselves. I never asked them.”

“Well, no,” I said.

“You see, I never talked about these things with my daughters. Not like I can with you. These are the kinds of conversations only grandmothers and granddaughters can have,” Josée said with a warm smile. I smiled back.

It was past midnight when we stopped talking and I hugged her good night, taking her small body in my arms. As I lay down on the convertible sofa in her living room, I felt a belated stab of discomfort at the turns our conversation had taken.
You've always lacked a clear sense of boundaries
, my mother had said. And yet at the
same time I felt the incredible pull of Josée's smile. She beamed at me as if her love were a physical thing she could give me. I wanted this new intimacy we were forging. I did not know the rules.

—

I
T HAD ALWAYS
felt natural to keep the women I dated secret from my French family. As my mother said, “Why would you want to give them ammunition?” I kept much of my personal life from them, not that anyone asked me many questions.

But now, as I pressed Josée for intimate details, I felt compelled to share my own. My girlfriend would be coming from New York for a visit and I wanted them to meet. A few weeks before she arrived, I went over to the houseboat. I was more nervous than I had been in a long time. In the rest of my life, I always corrected people who assumed I dated men, even when I had no desire to create discomfort. I considered it a small political act to do so. But, I realized, as I walked the long stretch along the Seine from the subway to the boat, I had never really “come out” to anyone before.

“I wanted to talk to you about something,” I said, standing and tugging at my fingers, while Josée set the table on the roof of the boat. She paused and looked up at me.

“You know my boyfriend I've told you about? The graphic designer in New York?” I said. She nodded. I took a gulp of air.

“His name isn't Louis,” I said. “Her name is Lindsay.”

“What do her parents do?” Josée asked mildly, straightening a napkin and reaching for the silverware.

“Her dad is a doctor,” I said. “Her mother manages the family affairs.”

“Well!” Josée said, relieved. “She comes from a good family.
That's all that matters.” I laughed, and relief weakened my knees. I sat down.

“Did you think it would matter to me?” Josée asked. “As long as she appreciates you and makes you happy. That's all I care about.”

—

W
HEN
J
OSÉE F
IRST
TOLD
Paul she had applied to be an airline stewardess, he laughed and brushed her off. It was an impossibly glamorous job in 1951.

Many gorgeous young women responded to the open call. Josée bit her tongue and waited. In March, the women who had applied were called all at once to the TWA offices on the Champs-Élysées. A man read off the names of the accepted in ranked order. Josée was called first.

“I was called
first,
” she told me often, with a very rare flash of pride. Not only was she called first, but because there was still a month to go before her twenty-first birthday (and therefore a month before she could be legally hired), they made an exception for her. They let her fly on test flights. They flew her to New York.

For Josée, Americans were the ones who had covered her city with bombs, saying they were aiming for the Germans and instead spraying all of Paris. The Americans had liberated France, they had died for France in Normandy. And yet for Americans, Europe didn't count. They had come only for the Germans. Americans weren't people “like us.” They were big brawny superheroes; they were rotten with cash.

Josée saw New York. It fell on her face in all its excess and grandeur. The South Street Seaport bustled with boats, the Empire State Building towered above her. But it only fit with what she had
imagined: a scene straight from the movies. Americans were from another planet. They were beings of constant excess, with their loud voices, their hugs, their too-tall buildings. The whole city lit up at night.
What degeneracy!
Josée thought. Even after the war, she carefully extinguished and saved her candles.

Josée could no longer remember a specific moment of that time in New York. She was there for ten days, she saw what she expected to see, and she left with no wish to return. She would see many things as a hostess: the electricity in Egypt was unreliable, Greece was lovely, all of Italy was in flower. Wherever they traveled, the crew were received like movie stars. Bottles of champagne were sent to their hotel rooms and their pictures appeared in the papers. Josée was paid incredibly well. Her already high salary was in strong American dollars. She gave Mina part of the money, saying that it was for rent on her childhood bedroom. She rarely brought back souvenirs for her mother or her brother, but for Mélanie she stole whole bags of the mints she passed out to passengers.

Paul chased her from city to city, driving hours in his Citroën, Paris to Rome, Rome to Milan, only to discover that she had already taken to the air again by the time he arrived. Fed up, he used the only means he had to force Josée to quit. The stewardesses were contractually obligated to be single. He proposed. “Who would give up a job like this one?” the other flight attendants said. “You're crazy!” But Josée was in love. She wanted nothing more than the stability of a family. A year after she had been hired, she quit.

Paul assured her that he had told his parents her secret. Josée thought them very polite for not mentioning it. Paul came to visit Eugène, entering through the office window, and asked for Josée's
hand in marriage. Eugène, delighted, slapped Paul on the back and promised a generous dowry. By the seventeenth of June, they were officially engaged. By the thirteenth of July, the engagement was off.

Paul broke it off by telephone. His parents had hired an investigator to compile information on their future daughter-in-law, he told her, and it seemed he had not told them her secret after all. They had discovered that she was a bastard. Paul couldn't marry so far beneath himself, his mother insisted. No matter that Paul's father was only a veterinarian from a small town. No matter that several farm girls in neighboring villages had children who looked suspiciously related to Paul's father.

As soon as she hung up the phone, Josée took off her engagement ring and mailed it back. No note. She didn't even send it by registered mail. Then she collapsed into sobs.

Paul's parents, Josée discovered later, tried to match him instead with a former president's daughter. But whatever existed between him and Josée was passionate. He soon realized his mistake. He spent the summer ringing Josée's doorbell, extravagant bouquets of flowers in hand. Mina answered the door and told him her daughter was out. Josée entered and exited through the servants' entrance in the back. Paul took up vigil in his car across the street. He slept there for ten days and ten nights. He threatened to kill himself. He swore he wouldn't eat until she spoke to him. Mina watched from the window and brought updates to her daughter. “Let him die then,” Josée said.

And then she forgave him. When I asked her why she changed her mind, she shrugged her shoulders and said simply: “I loved him.”

—

I
N THE BEGINNING
, they were happy together. But Josée alluded to those happy times only vaguely, always followed by a “but then . . .” The happiness had been so often overwritten with anger that I caught only glimpses of it.

Not even a year into their marriage, Josée began to discover Paul's constant lies. She was pregnant with Sylvie when she cut her hand and rushed to Paul's hospital, believing he was working an overnight shift, only to be told he was not there. Soon after, there were other women's belongings in his car. Soon after, she called home and he, mistaking her for one of his mistresses, answered in an angry hiss, “I told you never to call me here.” Although these were not the real problems, she told me. A woman you could fight against. A gambling addiction you could not.

On the morning of their first Christmas together, she and Paul had an argument. Mina rang the doorbell, Josée's young brother in tow, both dressed in their holiday best. Paul screamed, “Your whore of a mother is here!” He opened the door, told Mina that she was never to set foot in their home, and slammed it in her face. Josée was furious. But from then on, she saw her mother very little. There was no room for her past in this new world.

Meanwhile, Mina held three secretarial jobs simultaneously, often working through the weekends. She struggled to make the rent on her apartment, but still refused to give it up. She sent Josée's brother to the best schools and cut corners everywhere else. She worked until she was well into her seventies, but her taste for finery never faded.

In one of our more intimate conversations, Josée told me that one of her few regrets was not helping her mother more in those
years. On Josée's brief visits, Mina would occasionally intimate that she needed certain things, that, for example, her washing machine was broken and she couldn't afford to have it fixed. “It would have been very easy for me to help,” Josée said. “We had piles of cash stashed all around the house. I helped myself to it when I liked. Paul would never have noticed. But I didn't.” Though when I asked why, she said, “It didn't occur to me. I was far too busy being a wife and a mother.”

One of those Sundays when Mina babysat while Josée and Paul went to the track, Josée bet on a horse named Mélanie. The horse was not favored, and it was a sentimental whim. But the horse won, the bet was multiplied fourteen times, and the winnings were huge. Josée giddily gave all of it to Mélanie that evening. It was money that Mina, who ran the household, could have put to good use. But it was also enough to emancipate the aging Mélanie from her dependence on her daughter. And yet, upon Mélanie's death in 1961, they found the bills, untouched, tucked away in the back of Mélanie's sock drawer.

“Why do you think she didn't spend it?” I asked.

“Because we found it in her sock drawer,” Josée repeated testily.

“No, I mean why, in your opinion, didn't she spend the money?” I said.

“Oh!” Josée said. “You mean, if I were to put myself in Mélanie's place and try to imagine?” She hesitated, the exercise unfamiliar.

“I don't know,” she huffed eventually. “You know, people who have known the war . . .”

I tried to reconstruct a scene of one of the Sundays when Josée dropped Françoise off for babysitting. In both Josée's and
Françoise's tellings, those afternoons had gone the way of all things routine, a blur of collapsed time. But now I pictured it as a frozen instant. I saw Josée sitting in the driver's seat of a fancy new car, one hand raised in a distracted salutation. She would have been on her way to the horse track, effortlessly elegant in the latest sixties style. I pictured Mina in the doorway in a dress she had sewn herself, perfectly coiffed in anticipation of this moment when she would step outside. And I imagined Françoise running from car to doorway, all scraped knees and short hair, suspended in motion.

And I saw now what my mother had not, at the time: that Mina must have felt a stab of jealousy to see her daughter awash in the wealth she had only so tenuously known herself. That Josée must have sensed her mother's envy, and felt a certain inevitable pleasure.

And then my frozen moment sprang back into motion. Josée's car pulled off into the road, Françoise fell into Mina's arms. Mina took Françoise, Josée's least favorite daughter, and loved her ferociously. I saw a pattern forming, like a series of skipping stones that sent ripples through the generations: all the granddaughters and grandmothers who loved each other, all the mothers left stranded in between.