Ghosts by Daylight

by Janine di Giovanni

  Moineau is tiny and beautiful. She had three boys, but like Monique, she still looked like Brigitte Bardot: a tiny upturned nose, a blonde bob, elegant clothes. When I saw photographs of her holding Bruno as a 2-week-old baby she is already back at her pre-pregnancy weight and wearing a tight sheath, her hair and lipstick perfect.

  She told me that it broke her heart to go back to work when her boys were small, but she had to, and so she hired a teenage nanny. But she ran home from her job during her lunch break so that she could prepare a perfect dinner for her husband and sons. She worked full-time, plus ran the household, plus reconstructed the family mas at Grisail.

  Her early life was about order and perfection, but even as she grew older, she still maintained her rules: she always seemed to be on a diet – something about respecting the rules of time of eating – and lectured me about eating only 70 per cent dark chocolate (the best brand, she advised, being Lindt).

  Before dinner, she usually drank a glass of whisky, which she called a ‘petit apéro’. She and my father-in-law, Philippe, who was as handsome as my husband, and had served as a mountain guide on skis during his military service, were a couple that remained in love until he died snorkeling in Tahiti while they were there together in March 2011. They were petite bourgeois Catholics, and family loyalty was everything.

  She made her own jams from strawberries and raspberries in the summer, and in the winter knitted all of Luca’s sweaters and my hats and scarves. She knew how to find the best price for good handbags or shoes. She smelled, like my own mother, of expensive perfume, of Guerlain.

  There was nothing, I was convinced, that she could not do.

  She had told me over and over, for the first five years I was in France: ‘You must cook French food,’ and she would regard my pastas and roast chickens with slight suspicion. One Sunday, she had enough. She arrived at my house with a basket. It was, she said, a cooking lesson.

  The night before, I had read La Bonne Cuisine Pour Tous (d’apres les vieux préceptes de la grandmère Catherine Giron), stained with red wine and gravy from past Girodon cooks, a book which I had found in the kitchen at the house in the mountains. And the Christmas before, she had given Bruno a notebook with all her own recipes, handwritten, pasted with flowers, painstakingly listing all the ingredients in her careful looped penmanship.

  It was nearly springtime when we started the cooking lessons, so she wanted to do veal. ‘Le menu,’ she announced, unpacking her gear, ‘c’est blanquette de veau, du riz et tarte au citron . . .’

  On Saturday, she phoned and told me to buy ‘une tranche de jarret de veau’ (a slice of leg of veal) for each person, plus carrots, lemons, crème fraiche, butter and sugar. She would bring the cooking wine and the handmade bouquet garni.

  On Sunday mornings, there is a famous market on the Boulevard Raspail outside my front door. They sell beautiful, if overpriced, fruits, vegetables, meats as well as cheese from Normandy, fish from the coast and organic breads. I used to love the Sunday ritual: the little orange trolley on wheels I bought because everyone else has one; the flirtation with the man who sells organic baguettes; the long-haired American hippy who makes raisin cookies; the hot chocolate that is sold halfway down the market; and the towers of fresh lemons, oranges and apples.

  But now it’s a recession and the market is double-priced and I worry about money. So the veal comes from a less pricey butcher on the rue du Cherche-Midi, an old man who takes for ever to cut the meat, and whose wife counts the change and asks about my son and whether or not he would like a steak haché.

  The lemons come from the Arab grocer across the street, who also knows Luca and who gives me a thumbs up early on school mornings as he is raising the awning and I am holding Luca by the hand, and who always gives me overripe bananas for free to make banana bread.

  Moineau arrived early, having gone to mass the night before; Philippe, she said, was at the morning mass. She asked for a cup of chestnut leaf tisane, and unloaded her batterie de cuisine, placing each item delicately on my counter: a tiny steel instrument to make lemon zest and a minute whisk. The bouquet garni was made from fresh thyme, parsley and rosemary.

  She looked appalled at the state of my knives, but my best casserole, which was a gift from a French friend, seemed to mollify her. She melted oil and butter and put her ear to it to listen to it bubble. Then she added water, white wine, carrots – she does not use chopping boards, finds them boring, instead she cuts while holding her hand upright: – ‘It’s how my mother taught me, c’est comme ça,’ – and peeled some small onions from Chez Picard.

  She left it for two hours and turned her attention to the tarte au citron. She peeled two lemons in her hand, using the twist of a knife, and leaving behind a beautiful curl of yellow skin, which she told me to throw into the fire that night as it would make the room smell good. The naked lemons went into the blender with sugar and egg white. She put the yolk of the egg into a small cup for the veal sauce.

  She then taught me to make rice the correct way. While waiting for it to boil, she made me a rose blossom tisane and showed me exactly how many teaspoons of rose petals to put in the pot. The tea went into fragile china cups that belonged to my grandmother and were shipped across the Atlantic from Italy to America, then back across the Atlantic to England, then across the Channel to France.

  She told me news about Monique, her best friend, and about her brother, J.P. and how worried she was about Philippe since he fell from a ladder the summer before fixing something in the house. She spoke sadly about the pained relationship with her own mother, Mamie (whom we had buried five years before, on a rainy April day, my birthday), but how beautifully Mamie served and how she made Moineau a white dress for her graduation. She told me how much she loved her father, a judge in the naval court. She told me about growing up in Morocco and Senegal under French colonial rule, and about how much she loves her husband, whom she met when she was twelve. She told me about studying economics, about her favourite professors. About films she loves, always romantic ones, or ones that make her cry.

  Then, after the tisane, while we were still talking and while the sky was growing darker with oncoming rain, the meal was ready and everything happened at once. The veal was spooned into a thick white bowl. The rice was buttered. My father-in-law, whom we call Bapu, arrived late from morning mass, and Bruno and Luca brought me flowers.

  We laid the table with six handpainted plates that came from our Lyonnais ancestors, a wedding gift from a snobbish cousin called Jean-Louis, now dead. We opened the wine – Moineau wondered if Bruno would mind, in fact, he did not, or tried not to; he often opens wine himself and sniffs it and pours it for everyone else, the test of his endurance – and we sliced the baguette at the last minute to make sure it stayed fresh. Bruno, who never seemed to eat in those days, only smoked, for once sat at the table with us, and we lifted Luca into his Swedish chair, which grew along with him because it had little slots that we moved down as he grew so his feet didn’t touch the bottom. I took the cheese, a brebis from Corsica, from the fridge to soften, and sat between my son and my husband. My mother-in-law seemed happy, content. She took small bites and did not complain. We ate the veal, followed by the cheese and salad, followed by the lemon tart, which tasted of spring. The language at the table was French.

  It seemed, for a short while, that this was a perfect little family again, that nothing bad would happen, and that for the moment, even if it was short, a respite from reality even if it was just a Sunday afternoon, and the rains were coming, it was an impasse, everything was all right. I tried to hold that to me, to believe, against everything, that my intuition, which always had served me, which had kept me alive for so long, was wrong and that something bad was not going to happen after all.

  Part Four

  ‘Choose something like a star’

  Robert Frost

  14

  Finding a Place

  The Sunday before Ascension – the French holiday that break
s the month of May in two and heralds the beginning of the summer season – the chicken man in the organic market on Boulevard Raspail gave me a free demi-poulet. It was not, as I saw it, simply the fact that I had gotten an extra two breasts and two wings of a chicken: it was a major and significant turning point of my life in France.

  Every book I had ever read about earnest foreigners in magical Paris always included a generous shopkeeper: the butcher who gave extra bits of meat for their dog; the kindly baker who dropped another pain aux raisin into their bag for their toddler; a legume seller who took ten minutes to explain how to make a fresh artichoke salad. I had the Algerian fruit seller who gave me bananas, but the magical food world of Paris, the generosity of Parisians, had never really touched me. When I would go to Nicolas, the wine merchant on the rue du Cherche-Midi, and ask for a wine to go with our dinner of lamb or fish, I never got a lecture on the difference between Burgundy and Bordeaux, which I wanted and hoped to get. Instead, in a perfunctory way, the shopkeeper picked a bottle from the shelf and rang it up.

  ‘Eighteen Euros. Merci.’

  There were no friendly lessons from the cheese vendor, either, trying to sort through the 400 varieties of French cheese at the beautiful but overcrowded cheese shop Quatrehomme on rue de Sèvres. Someday, I thought, I would buy a book that would explain the difference between goat’s cheese and sheep’s cheese and when to serve each, and the seasonal changes of cheese, but I knew it would probably sit on my bedside table like Paris for Kids: 68 Great Things to Do Together. But the Sunday before Ascension, the day before Luca was due to leave for his first classe decouverte – nature class trip – I decided I wanted to go to the Sunday market to buy a roast chicken.

  I was with a friend who was visiting from Afghanistan. It had been raining for two weeks in Paris, sometimes gentle rain, sometimes thundering tropical storms that reminded me of Africa. He wanted to see the market and we went early. That morning, the sky was turning from grey to blue and back to steel. It was drizzling as I wheeled my orange basket down the street and stopped at the first stall to begin to pile it with vegetables. At the chicken stall, the man who cooked the chickens on a spit and drove up from the countryside each Sunday, asked me how many adults and how many children I was having for lunch.

  ‘We’re a lot,’ I said. ‘But just give me one big chicken.’

  He looked perplexed. ‘You won’t have enough to eat.’

  ‘We’re fine. It’s plenty,’ I said.

  I could see him thinking, weighing something out, and when he loaded my chicken into a paper sack, and poured hot juice over it, he also piled extra breasts, wings, and legs.

  ‘You should feed your guests properly,’ he said. ‘People like to eat on Sunday.’ He charged me 19 euros, the price for one roast chicken, though he had given me nearly double that. He handed me the sack and said I was très jolie, and why shouldn’t I have more chicken when I had such a lovely smile?

  I smiled again, for the man was close to seventy, and he was not being lecherous, he was being kind. I put the waxy sack into my trolley and smiled all the way through the crowded market, with people shaking drops of water off their umbrellas and Japanese tourists taking photographs of piles of rhubarb. It was a small victory, completely insignificant in the scale of the other things going on in my life, but the extra chicken for lunch made me infinitely happy.

  Luca was five years old, in his first year of real school, école maternelle, when he went away on his first school trip alone for two nights. I was not happy about it. But the ethos of his school, l’école Alsacienne, an old Protestant institu­­­­tion founded in the 1850s by French protestants, was autonomy. Children were meant to be independent as early as possible. They were meant to be able to put on their little coats by laying them on the floor, then threading their arms inside, then flicking them over their heads. The first time I saw Luca do that, shortly after he started at the school, I was amazed. Where had my son learned that?

  I had been preparing myself to say goodbye to him for a long time and I had known about this trip long before he started school. It was part of the school’s philosophy, one that I had previously regarded as brutal. Separate children from their parents? A New Yorker friend had been the only one in his class not to let his 9-year-old go to Brussels for a week. He took his son, instead, on a trip back to USA to see relatives. ‘Nine is too young to be alone for a week in a foreign country,’ he insisted, and I agreed with him. But Bruno, being French, did not.

  ‘That kid will be stigmatized by being the only one in his class not to go,’ he said. ‘It’s a bonding exercise.’

  Luca’s bonding time came fast, and the school and the parents were prepared. A psychologist was brought out one evening, to answer all our questions. The director of the farm where the children would go and live for the few days came and explained how the doors locked from the inside and how each child slept with another friend with a hole in the wall for adult supervision.

  Leaflets were distributed weeks in advance with instructions for packing, for writing letters to our five-year-olds that would be read to them while apart from us, so it would not be dramatic when it came to saying goodbye.

  A few weeks before, perhaps sensing my own nervousness, Luca began to say he did not want to go. Bruno warned me not to talk too much about it as a separation, but as an extended time to play with his friends.

  ‘It’s going to be fun,’ I told him half-heartedly, remembering going to camp for the first time, being separated from my mother, and waking up in the middle of the night crying. And I was twice his age at the time. ‘It will be great.’

  ‘Mama, I don’t want to go to the big house,’ he told me, because we had seen pictures of the large castle-like building where he would be staying. And to Bruno, he said he did not want to go because Stephanie, his teacher, had told them they would give themselves showers, but would not be able to wash their hair.

  ‘That’s because Mama will wash it before you go,’ Bruno said practically. ‘And I’ll wash it when you get back.’ Luca seemed unconvinced. The morning of the trip, Bruno woke me at six-thirty. ‘Wake him gently,’ he said. ‘And don’t make it a big deal. It’s like any other day.’

  I had packed Luca’s clothes the week before in my own little red wheeled suitcase and I had added the special label with his name the school had given me. I had, for the sake of my son, followed instructions carefully, something that went against the grain for me. ‘Follow the list!’ the teachers had lectured us. ‘Don’t put extras in the suitcase!’ For once, I was not rebellious.

  I had written two letters to Luca which would be given to him at mealtimes, saying how much we loved him, how proud we were. I had packed his Thomas the Tank Engine backpack with ‘one snack, one small bottle of water, one doudou – a stuffed animal – and one game.’

  At 7 a.m., I carried my sleepy son, who still had his round baby cheeks, reddened by the impression of his pillow, and smelling like lavender soap, to the sofa in the living room. As I passed the hall mirror, I saw myself with Luca, whose legs were now so long that they hung down to my knees when I carried him. His size shocked me. In my mind, he was still a baby, but his size, his language, his actions – he was, after all, going to spend two nights alone with his classmates in a forest outside of Paris! – told me my little boy was growing up, very fast, and very sweetly.

  I wrapped him in the striped blanket, a larger version of the one I had swaddled him in when he was an infant. I laid him on the sofa. He closed his eyes and smiled, moving his face towards the sunlight coming from the east, from the Luxembourg Gardens. I made him lemon crepes with brown sugar and fresh orange juice. I picked out a red Spiderman vitamin, bought in America, and carried it to the low table by the sofa, the one Bruno had bought in Indonesia.

  I cuddled my son in my arms, fighting anguish, and he woke up and began to talk about a lemonade stand that he would build in the summer. This was one of the few bits of Americana I had instilled in him: Thanksg
iving, a song I had learned as a child called ‘Over the River and Through the Woods’, and lemonade stands and blueberry pie from Maine. I fed him the crepes, and in between bites, he said how he would build the lemonade stand:

  ‘You take scotch tape and put up a sign. Then you mix lemon with sugar and water, but . . .’ he leaned his mouth towards my ear, ‘it’s a secret recipe. Then like Bugs and Daffy on Baby Looney Tunes, you build a desk and sell the lemonade for one cent. You put your piggy bank on the desk and people put money in. One cent.’

  ‘You can charge more than that, sweetie,’ I said.

  ‘Five Euros?’

  ‘Twenty cents is fine. And you can give them a free cookie with it.’

  ‘Yeah! Anna’s cookies.’ Anna was his American au pair, who made peanut butter and sugar cookies and played American games with him like Mother May I? and Hopscotch.

  ‘Anna’s cookies,’ I said.

  But as he was dressing, he became a baby again. ‘Mama, I don’t want to go to the big house,’ he said, shivering slightly.

  ‘It’s OK, it’s going to be fun,’ I said, unconvinced.

  Bruno brought a bag from the bakery across the street: warm croissants and pain au chocolat, and he and his only son lay on the floor together. I watched their faces, so much alike, and I wondered why Bruno did not seem to feel the sharp pain I did that Luca’s babyhood was finished. He would tell me, often and solidly, when I spoke of how hard it was to let the days on rue du 29 Juillet go, ‘They were beautiful days, and these are beautiful days. Don’t grip on to things. Let them go and other things come.’

  Many years ago, in Maine, Marc, who would become my first and very young husband, before I had begun reporting war, when I was still a student who wanted to grow up and become a professor or a novelist, had said to me when I complained that I remembered so little, ‘You’re not hanging on to enough of the moment.’