“If you wanted,” he started carefully, “instead of going home this summer, you could stay in France longer. In Paris. Or … you could stay here … with me.”
I wanted him to be sure of what he was asking, and he must have known, because he offered something of a plan.
“You could find a job here easily with your English, or you could study at the university. Not forever. I know you have other plans for your life. But for a while longer. For as long as you like.”
I was relieved to hear he wanted me beyond the expiration of my carte de séjour. Though if I didn’t officially maintain a student visa, I’d have to leave and return as a visitor, or stay on, illegally.
I watched him sleep easily that night in his own bed, searching the shadows of the room for a sign, a rune cast in the moonlight over the chipping paint of the walls. I tried to envision a new life. I could find work translating, teaching English, or tutoring. I figured the countryside might be less competitive than Paris and already knew I could find plenty of work writing academic papers for lazy students. I could look after somebody’s kids. I could take up another degree in some kind of French history at the Université de Caen, like he said.
But to go anywhere, to begin again, one must leave something behind.
My family. My home.
He pulled me close.
“I love you, Lita.”
He said it first in French, then English, and Spanish, and the words pushed deeper, but I stopped him, “Don’t say that,” because it didn’t matter the language; they weren’t the words I wanted.
“What should I say then?”
“Don’t say you love me. Say you choose me.”
“I choose you.”
“And say it again every day.”
When we returned to Paris we found an ambulance parked inside the courtyard, the front doors to the House of Stars wide open with a group of paramedics standing around the foyer while the other girls arranged themselves on the stairs to take in the show below. Cato and I took a place among them.
Earlier that night, as Violeta helped her get ready for bed, Séraphine had fainted, sliding off her mattress onto the floor. By the time the medics arrived, she was lucid and forbade them to take her to the hospital. The ambulance workers stood around waiting for a decision to be made while Loic and Gaspard tried to convince their grandmother to let herself be examined, but all the girls heard was her howling echo against the marble of the foyer.
“Leave me in my house! Leave me!”
Loic appeared, a hand on his temple.
“She won’t go. She absolutely refuses.”
As if she heard him, Séraphine shouted from her room, “I will not leave my house! Leave me in my house!”
“At least we know she’s not short of breath,” Tarentina offered, but the medics ignored her and warned Loic she needed to be seen by specialists, not just the doctors that came for house calls and to deliver prescriptions.
Loic and Gaspard looked at each other. It was the first time I saw any shred of fraternal union between them.
“I’m sorry to waste your time,” Gaspard said. “There’s nothing to be done. She won’t let herself be taken from her house.”
When they’d cleared out, Tarentina asked if we could go in and see Séraphine while Cato waited in the foyer with the other guys.
That night we saw Séraphine free of artifice, in her eyelet nightgown, face wiped clean of her lotions, tints, and pigments, just the vague outline of kohl liner. Her long white hair was brushed smooth, parted in the middle, falling to her elbows, though the fat bun she often wore turned out to be a hairpiece now lying in a neat bundle on her bedside table.
She pulled the blanket above her chest when she saw our cluster inch through her doorway.
“Don’t tell me they’ve sent you all in here to try to convince me to go,” she said.
“No, the medics have all left,” Tarentina assured her. She went to Séraphine’s side, holding her hand while the rest of us crowded around her bed. “We just want to make sure you’re all right.”
“My darling girls,” she sighed, “nothing good comes from being old.”
“Maybe you should consider going to the hospital sometime, not today, of course, so they can take a look at your heart,” Giada tried.
“Why? To help me die faster?”
“They can do tests and find ways to make you more comfortable.”
“Chérie, when people my age go to the hospital they don’t come out.”
She set her stare back on Tarentina, clutching her hand tighter and pulling it to her chest.
“I will die in this house.” She closed her eyes.
“Don’t talk like that.” Tarentina lowered herself to sit on the bed at her side.
“This house is mine to die in. It’s what I want.”
“You still have many years ahead of you.”
“Please, Chérie. Time forgives no one.” She let go of Tarentina’s hand and stared at the photographs on her walls as if they held answers, her eyes bluer than ever.
“Do you have any idea how many girls have passed through this house?”
We were all silent.
“I’ll tell you. There have been hundreds of you. Hundreds.”
She reached for her cigarettes but thought better of it and dropped her silver case on the floor with resignation.
“Some girls stayed a few months. Some for a year or two or three.” She looked at Tarentina. “Or
five
. You become my daughters. You become my heart. And when you leave do you know how many return to see me? Do you know how many write me a letter or offer me a phone call? Can you guess how many? In all my decades opening my house to you girls full of your passions and dreams, maybe two or three. To all the rest, I am forgotten.”
“Séraph—” Tarentina started but Séraphine cut her off.
“My house will become a story you will tell your husbands and children and friends at dinner parties. My little birds, mark my words, you will soon leave me and you will forget me. But this is natural. It’s to be expected. I have given you my house but my house belongs only to me. And no matter what anyone says, because they think I am an old woman and this gives them the right to tell me what to do, I will remain here in my house because it is my right and it is what I desire, until my last breath.”
Cato presented the idea as his father’s initiative.
“My father invited us to spend Easter Sunday with him.”
“Are you sure he meant both of us?” I was incredulous.
“Yes, he asked specifically that you come. We’ll join him for Mass first and go to his home afterward for lunch. What do you think?”
“I think that sounds … nice.”
I’d spent every Easter of my life with my family, and here I was meeting Antoine on the steps of La Madeleine. We were late. It was difficult to come by a taxi on Easter morning and we had no choice but to take the métro—Cato’s first time since I’d met him. He covered his mouth for most of the ride, tapping his foot and watching anxiously as the subway line chart counted each stop before we arrived.
“Haven’t I always told you punctuality is a virtue?” Antoine said to his son.
He turned to me and shook my hand as if we were meeting for the first time.
“Please.” He motioned to an usher waiting behind him, indicating that we should follow him down the aisle below the vaulted
ceiling and painted domes to our reserved seats a few rows from the altar.
Afterward, we rode home with Antoine in his chauffeured car. His butler received us, and Antoine led us toward the sitting room with the framed military portraits where I’d waited on my first day visiting Cato. The butler offered us drinks but I only took water. He offered us hors d’oeuvres, too, but I was so nervous I declined. It’s not that I was anxious to have Antoine’s approval. It was more that I feared my relationship with Cato could fall prey to a game of loyalties.
At Séraphine’s urging, I’d borrowed a pale gray spring suit from Tarentina. They’d both been as surprised as I was that he’d returned to me after so much time apart.
“You need to be impeccably dressed, chérie. This is
the
gesture. The old man is acknowledging your relationship. Either that or his son put him up to it.”
I remembered the day Antoine warned me not to return to see Cato, and yet here we were, sitting together in his salon, me on the edge of the mauve sofa and Antoine leaning back into a blue armchair as Cato sat across the coffee table on an ottoman, both of us listening to his father talk about the weather.
“How lovely when Paris resurrects each April, don’t you agree, Laura?”
“Leticia,” Cato corrected.
“Ah yes,
Leticia
. Forgive me. And what is it you study here in France?”
Somehow, diplomacy didn’t seem like the right thing to say, and I couldn’t very well mention that I’d long ago stopped attending classes at the language institute.
Cato sensed my hesitation, stepping in with, “She studied international relations.”
“Going into the foreign service, are you?”
“I’m more interested in the social aspects of transnationalism.”
He didn’t seem to care what my responses were, but about hitting all his points of inquiry.
“And tell me, Leticia, when is it that you’ll be going back to … to … your country?” He turned to his son, “Where is it she comes from?”
“The United States,” I answered for myself. “I’ll be going back in June.” That was, after all, still the date printed on my return ticket.
“That’s quite soon.” He seemed pleased.
The butler came in to tell us lunch was ready and we could take our seats in the dining room. Antoine sat at the head of the long table, with Cato to his right and me to his left. A second butler arrived to assist in serving an asparagus soup. When the main course of Lapin Rôti was set before us, I froze.
“Bon appétit,” Antoine said, and he and Cato cut into theirs while I picked at the accompanying potatoes and spinach until there was nothing left but the meat and I had no choice but to put my fork and knife down.
The younger butler arrived at my side looking worried.
“Is there something wrong with your food, miss?”
“No, it’s fine. I’m just not very hungry.” I hoped that would be enough.
“You didn’t even try it,” Antoine remarked mid chew, bits of meat on his gums. “It’s exquisite. You must have a taste. I insist.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t eat rabbit.”
“Why not?”
“My family keeps them as pets.”
I noticed Cato trying to hide a smile from across the table, but his father was not at all amused.
“Exactly how many rabbits do you have?”
“About thirty, the last time I counted.”
“You keep thirty rabbits
inside
your home?” Antoine appeared revolted by the notion, staring at his son as if he’d brought some sort of lunatic to the table.
“They live in an enclosed atrium.”
“And you allow them to keep reproducing, as if in the wild?”
“Most of them are neutered”—I had to ask Cato to translate the word
neutered
. “There might be a few more now. They’re my brother’s.”
“We can ask the chef to prepare something else for you to eat instead,” Cato said.
It was strange to hear the formal tone he acquired in his father’s presence.
“No, thank you. I’m full already. The soup was delicious.”
Over dessert of a custard tart, Antoine asked me who had recommended me to live in Séraphine’s place. I told him how one of my teachers, a relative of Théophile’s, had put us in touch and after I wrote a letter of introduction and filled out the forms, I’d been interviewed over the phone.
“It’s a shame about Théophile,” he said.
“It is. I’ve heard a lot about him. I would have liked to meet him.”
“He was a kind man, from what I remember. Very sensitive, is what they say. He hanged himself in one of the top floor bedrooms. One of the grandchildren found him.”
Cato and I were both in disbelief at hearing his father’s recollections.
“I didn’t know that,” I managed, wondering if it had been Loic or Gaspard.
“As they say, every house has its secrets.” Antoine sipped from his wineglass. Cato and I exchanged glances.
“I must say your French is quite good, Leticia. But you may want to consider taking elocution lessons. It would help the problem of your accent.”
“How is it a problem?”
“It’s certainly not terrible, but, how shall I put it? It is a bit distracting.” I could tell he thought he was being complimentary.
“She already speaks several languages,” Cato came to my defense. “A subtle accent is hardly anything to be concerned with.”
“That’s very unusual for an American. I assume you were nationalized.”
“I didn’t have to be. I was born there.”
“How fortunate for your parents.”
“I met Lita’s parents when they came to Paris,” Cato told his father. “They’re very warm and gracious people.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes.”
“And tell, me Leticia, what is it your father does for a living?”
“He works in food distribution.”
“Is that another way of saying he is a waiter?”
“It’s another way of saying he owns the largest Latin American food manufacturing company in the world.”
Antoine was quiet for a moment. He then moved the conversation to more neutral ground, complaining about the traffic
and what he feared would be an imminent infrastructural collapse when all the fanatical soccer fans and tourists arrived for the World Cup that summer.
When Cato and I prepared to leave, I thanked his father for the invitation, and he took my hand, cupping it with his other.
“Perhaps we won’t see each other again as you will be leaving France in the relative near future, but I do wish you well in your endeavors.”
“She hasn’t decided yet if she’s leaving,” Cato said, which surprised me. “She’s considering extending her stay.”
“I see.” Antoine dropped my hand and took a slow step back. “Well, you will have to excuse me now, children. I’ve enjoyed your company but now I must rest. Leticia, please send my regards to Séraphine.”
He turned his back to us and started down the hall to his study. Séraphine later forced me to write a note to Monsieur de Manou dictated by her, thanking him for his kindness and telling him how I’d so enjoyed the pleasure of being in his home.
On the walk home that Sunday, Cato and I tried to make light of the afternoon.
“Are you sure your mother didn’t have an affair?” I teased. “Maybe he’s not really your father.”
“My mother was faithful to a fault,” he laughed. “He’s definitely my father.”
After a few more steps, he added, “When you get to know him better you’ll see he has some very good qualities.”
“Like what?”
“To begin, he’s extremely brilliant. Really, he’s some kind of genius.”
“I was taught it’s not what you are that matters, it’s what you
do
with it.”
“I don’t know if I believe that.”
“What do you believe then?”
“I think all people are fundamentally good.”
“So if I’m a saint in my own mind but a demon in the streets, what would that make me?”
“Are you calling my father a demon?”
“No, I’m saying it’s our actions that define us.”
“People are not only
one
thing all the time, Lita. He’s just a man like I am just a man, and he’s allowed to be complex and contradictory. There are many different sides to him. That’s human nature.”
“Not with my father. What you see is what you get.”
I admit, maybe I sounded smug.
“Well, you’re very lucky your father is so perfect, but Antoine is the only father I have.”
I was quiet, regretting that I hadn’t shut up sooner. Cato paused, too. When we were back on rue du Bac, the noise of the banging drums of a protest on the boulevard headed our way, Cato halted on the sidewalk, and met me with a desperate look I’d not seen on him before.
“Don’t you think I wish I could change him? Don’t you think all my life I haven’t dreamed that he would wake up one day and just be
different
? I can’t change him, Lita. He never changed for my mother and he is not going to change for you or for me.”
“I’m sorry I—”
“Don’t. Don’t.”
I was silent.
“I know how you feel,” he said. “It’s just the way things are. But I’ve forgiven him for the way he is even though he’s never asked me to.”
I thought of my own father. When I was a child I asked him if he ever forgave his father for having abandoned him in the park that day. He looked thoughtful and took his time before answering, “Mi amor, sometimes you have to let part of yourself die so that the rest of you can live.”
A few days later Séraphine started calling each girl down to her room to ask if she planned on staying in the House of Stars another year or if she should make the room available to a new tenant at summer’s end. When it was my turn at her bedside, I told her I didn’t want to go home when the lease on my room was up.
“Well then, chérie, what do you want?”
“I want this life, here, not necessarily in the House of Stars, but I want the life of who I am today, going where I want when I want, doing what I desire. I want the chance to keep exploring.”
“You don’t want to leave your Cato, do you?”
I shook my head.
“Then stay.”
“You don’t understand how it is with my family. They’d die if I decided not to go home.”
“I do understand. I was in your position once. Théo and I lived in Athens for one year in the sixties. He had business there and was very busy, and I met a marvelous Greek man and we spent several months as lovers. When it was time for Théo and me to
return to Paris, the Greek asked me to stay in Athens with him. We planned that I would go to the airport with my husband but let him get on the plane without me. The Greek—I can’t remember his name—waited in a car outside the airport. But at the moment my Théo reached for my hand and said, ‘Séra, come, the plane is going to leave without us,’ I could not help but follow him.”
“You chose Théo.”
“No. It was not Théo I chose, but the life that waited for me here, in Paris. I was born for this life, this house. It was my destiny. For a time I regretted how I left the Greek man, but now I think it’s best to leave that way, without tears and embraces. Good-byes don’t serve anyone.”
“You think I should go home.”
“Oh, Leticia, I don’t have advice for you. I only have my stories. But if you
do
decide to stay, please remind your father to send a check for the deposit, yes?”
“You never heard from the Greek again?”
“Perhaps fifteen or twenty years later, I returned to Athens with Théo. We went to a restaurant in Plaka and I saw a man walking by a row of shops. He was the man I’d loved yet not the same man, tired, with wrinkles and a slow gait, and I understood love is not always what it appears to be. Love was not that stranger. Perhaps I even invented him. Love was the man at the table beside me, though sometimes we did not care much for each other. Love was my family name and my country.”
She rubbed her cigarette into her ashtray.
“Come, chérie, come to my side.” She made room for me on the mattress and took my hand in hers. “My dear Leticia. Sometimes the worst thing is bliss, because once you have experienced it, you know it is very unlikely you will find it again.”
I stayed with her a while longer. We talked about other things. She told me she had decided that this summer she would make it out of the House of Stars and take a trip to Deauville, where she used to love to go for the parties and casinos with Théo.
“I’m going to die soon, and I don’t want to leave this life without seeing the sea one last time.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not?” She clutched my hand tighter. “Even a woman facing death can have a dream. And mine is to see the sea again. I have had a long and full life, chérie. I am now coming to the end of it. There is nothing wrong in saying so and telling those I care for that they should prepare for me to leave them soon. It’s the truth. And we must love the truth even when it is the opposite of what we desire.”
Those weren’t her last words to me, but they’re the ones I remember now.
She died that night.
They didn’t want us in the house when they came to take her away. Loic said she wouldn’t have wanted to be seen in such an unflattering light. She would want to be remembered as the woman she was the day before, not as the large body removed on a folding metal gurney by the muscles of four men from the funeral service company.