The Paris Key

by Juliet Blackwell

  Not to mention, she might need a local lawyer to help her look over divorce papers, whenever those happened.

  She didn’t want to think about that. For a little while, at least. Genevieve could grant herself a few days of respite from worry, of simply enjoying being in Paris.

  On the way back to the village, Genevieve remembered she wanted to buy flowers to replace the dead ones in the sadly neglected window boxes. Though she passed several florists, their buckets of flowers casting splashes of lurid color on the rain-washed sidewalks, there were no live plants. She couldn’t think how to ask for them. When she got home she would have to look up the word for “nursery,” as opposed to “florist,” and ask her neighbors for suggestions.

  Genevieve turned a corner and found herself under the covered, vaulted gallery of the place des Vosges.

  Memories flooded through her. She and Dave and Pasquale—and Catharine when she would deign to join them—had eaten many a picnic here in the small park in the center of the square. It was one of the few places in Paris where people were allowed to sit on the grass, something that was usually a no-no in France.

  She remembered once when their plans were foiled by a sign placed at the edge of the grass: PELOUSE AU REPOS.

  “It means: The lawn is resting,” said Tante Pasquale.

  “What? Why?” asked Genevieve, disappointed.

  “Grass is a living thing,” said Dave. “And like every living thing, it needs a rest now and then. We have to stay off for a little while.”

  “Does this mean we can eat at a table like civilized people?” asked Catharine, making them all laugh.

  Now, as Dave had taught her to do, Genevieve looked up in search of plaques on the sides of the buildings. One gave a brief history of the place de Vosges: In the seventeenth century, Henri IV demanded an opulent residence within the city, an assembly of thirty-six redbrick and stone pavilions surrounding the majestic, tree-shaded square. It used to be called the place Royale.

  Today the place was full of pricey art galleries and a few restaurants. On one corner a young woman dressed in formal attire played the cello, its deep tone reverberating off the groin-vaulted ceiling. Genevieve crossed the square via the park, which was full of families picnicking, children chasing bubbles, young couples lounging on the grass.

  On the other side, another plaque: Victor Hugo had lived there, at number 6 in the place des Vosges. Of course he did. Victor Hugo. As in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables.

  Genevieve had flown in from Oakland a few days ago and now was standing in front of Victor Hugo’s house. She was suddenly gripped by a tourist’s notion: that the world was magic.

  But then part of the wonder of a city like Paris was all the famous writers and artists it had embraced over the years. If she walked far enough, would she stumble upon plaques honoring Baudelaire and Hemingway and Fitzgerald? In fact . . . maybe she really should set up an artists’ commune, as Mary had suggested. She could host her own salon, follow in Gertrude Stein’s footsteps, start a tradition for the new millennium, foment a link between Paris and Oakland, of all places.

  As Genevieve headed back to the village to drop off her groceries, she realized she was smiling broadly. Just like an American.

  Chapter Nineteen

  1997

  “Love laughs at locksmiths,” said Uncle Dave.

  “What?” asked Genevieve, not looking up from her task. An old lock was held tight in the table vise on the side of the workbench. Dave had shown her how to pop off the back with a screwdriver and then do the same with the second panel.

  “I’m thinking of using that for the title of my book on the history of locks and keys. Have you ever heard the phrase?”

  Genevieve shook her head, biting her lip in concentration. She took the keyhole out of the lock, set it aside, and then, just as Dave had shown her, made three incisions, one on top and one on either side of the cylinder. The metal casing fell away, displaying the key pattern.

  “That’s it,” said Dave. “Now remove the thinner casing, see? And this one here, and then you see the pins, voilà!”

  Like an anatomy student at an autopsy, Genevieve studied the insides splayed out in front of her. She was enthralled. All those years of turning doorknobs and using keys, and she hadn’t realized the metal cover plates hid a whole world of pins and plugs and casings. Hadn’t thought about it at all, really; never pondered the magic inherent in a door being locked one moment and unlocked the next, simply by inserting a specially cut piece of metal called a key.

  “You see the pins on the keyhole?”

  She nodded and reached out a finger to touch them.

  “Careful—they’re loose now. Don’t drop them—you won’t know how to put them back in the right order.”

  “What do they do?”

  “Locks are basically just a series of pins of varying length. The pins must align to release the mechanism.” He held a key over the line of pins to demonstrate. “The serrated edges on the key push the pins so they line up. When they line up correctly, the plug is released, and that allows the lock to turn.”

  “It’s that simple?”

  He laughed. “That’s the basic idea, but there are many variations on the theme, and lots of improvements on the original design. Some are downright diabolical! But believe it or not, we still use essentially the same lock that was invented by Linus Yale Jr. in 1861. His father had invented the first tumbler lock, the type that could be operated with the famous skeleton keys, like this.” He held up one of his old keys that he loved so much. The metal bar was round, as opposed to modern flat keys. “A lot of the old places around here still have these types of antique locks on the doors.”

  “They still work?”

  “Oh, of course. They’ll work forever unless they’re improperly dismantled, destroyed by carelessness. Sometimes the old brass wears down over the years, but it takes a lot to hurt one of these babies.”

  He patted one of his antique locks lying on the workbench. The metal was decorated with scrollwork so elaborate it looked like a work of art. Several of the old locks and keys were tagged with explanations for the book Dave was writing. He had drawers of old keys, bins full of them, and sometimes rather than pick a lock he would simply try one key after another because, as he said, “there is something delightful about helping a key find its way back to a lock, so it can do the work it was meant for.”

  Genevieve continued to peer into the mechanism, delicately pushing at the loose pins with her index finger, imagining how they moved in the secret darkness, hidden behind the lock plate.

  “Now that you’ve got that open,” Dave said, “make a key for it.”

  “Make one?”

  “Sure.”

  “Me?”

  “Who else? You’re the one who took it apart.”

  Dave showed her how to remove the top set of pins, leaving the bottom pins in place. She studied the guts of the device for another moment and then started to fit the casing back over it, careful not to drop any of the pins.

  “You put the blank into the keyhole to see where you need the grooves. Use a metal file to shape the blank into a key so that when you use it, the remaining pins lay flat. You see?”

  As she started to file the blank—a laborious process—she asked her uncle, “So what does it mean? Locksmiths laugh at love?”

  “It’s the other way around: Love laughs at locksmiths. Important distinction!”

  Uncle Dave’s laugh easily filled his tiny shop; Genevieve imagined it could fill nearby Saint Paul’s Cathedral, or even Notre-Dame, the way it boomed, lush and generous and green like the fennel bushes back home. One of her chores on the farm was to dig up the fennel, all the way down to the taproot that reached deep into the earth, keeping the plants verdant despite northern California’s cyclical summertime drought. Genevieve hated weeding but she c
hose it over cleaning out the animal pens; at least the fennel smelled good, like licorice, and the bushes had no thorns. Only sheer tenacity.

  Uncle Dave was like that, Genevieve thought. Whether a lock was threatening to overwhelm him with frustration or Pasquale was chastising him or he was recalling some terrible memory from a war-torn Paris . . . still his eyes twinkled; he laughed his booming laugh. It was as though Dave had a taproot reaching down through the dark underground to glean every possible drop of moisture from this life.

  “It’s a quote from a Shakespeare poem, one of the long ones,” said Dave. “In French they say, l’amour force toutes les serrures, which means ‘love forces all locks.’ For once the English is more poetic than the French, n’est-ce pas?”

  Genevieve nodded, though she still wasn’t sure what he was talking about. But speaking of love—she took her eyes off the mechanism for a moment to glance up at Dave’s grizzled jaw, feeling a sense of . . . what was it? Joy, and connection, and life. A bright spark lighting up the dreary, bleak days she had felt ever since her mother’s illness overwhelmed her, mired her whole family in the tar pit of sorrow and regret. Last night, as she crawled into bed in the room she shared with her cousin, Genevieve realized she was . . . sort of . . . in love. Not in a creepy way; it wasn’t romantic love or anything. But everything Dave did held her enthralled, enraptured. She loved the way he left a trail of rusty nuts and bolts and hardware throughout the house, the way he ate as though each and every meal was a revelation, the way he waggled his crazy eyebrows when he told a joke.

  At home her silent, dutiful father seemed to sleepwalk through life, rarely laughing or speaking, even before her mom got sick. And Angela, when she was alive, had plodded along as though keeping her eyes on the muffin pan in front of her was the only thing keeping her going, as though if she looked up from her task, she would float off. And indeed, Genevieve had often come upon her mother gazing out the little kitchen window that overlooked the carrot patch, and she seemed to be a thousand miles away. But whenever Genevieve asked her what she was thinking about, Angela would stroke her daughter’s hair, cup her chin in her hand, smile into her eyes, and say, “You, of course.”

  Genevieve would smile in return, but she knew her mother was lying. She knew it with the unshakeable sense of a child tuned in to every nuance of her parents’ actions.

  Sometimes her mother seemed caught in an endless circle, an inescapable vortex made up of three points: stove and counter and freezer. She would spend long hours preparing whatever was in season. Peaches or figs or cherries. Canning tomato sauce and pickles and apple-plum sauce. Filling the commercial freezer with carefully wrapped hunks of organic meat that came back from the butcher in lieu of the chickens or pigs or turkeys that her father had taken to slaughter. Angela’s only breaks were to drive carpool and to drop off cupcakes at school events—whole-wheat carrot cake with no processed sugar, the healthy option that remained (embarrassingly) on the table long after the chocolate chip cookies and brownies and lemon bars had been devoured.

  Or she would stay in bed for days at a time with a “sick headache,” a washcloth on her brow, staring at the wall.

  Had her mother ever been truly happy? Joyous and passionate and full of life, like Uncle Dave?

  Once Genevieve finally finished filing the key, she painstakingly reassembled the lock, then tested the key. It stuck a little, but it worked. The new key opened the lock.

  Uncle Dave hooted in triumph.

  “Would you look at that? On your first try! Perhaps you will go on to best your old uncle, eh?” he said, ruffling her hair and sending chills of proud delight down her spine. “Since you did so well, I will show you something very special.”

  He opened a skinny drawer and extracted a black iron ring, full of different kinds of skeleton keys.

  “What is it?” she asked, her tone reverential.

  “It’s a Victorian burglar set. Can you believe that? One of these will open just about any old padlock from the era. Just imagine.”

  “You mean some burglar had these made to break in to places?”

  “Exactly. What do you think of that? I use them every once in a while to open old padlocks, that sort of thing. But mostly I just think they’re sweet as molasses.”

  “So they won’t open all the doors anymore?”

  “Not all, of course not. But back in the day . . . they probably opened most of them. Just like love—this is what the saying means. Love laughs at locksmiths: love cannot be locked in or out. Remember that, Genevieve. Love has its own set of burglar keys!”

  • • •

  When she returned home from Paris, Genevieve’s father picked her up at the San Francisco airport and they rode the hour home without exchanging a single word—Jim not recognizing his daughter’s sullenness as anything more than what it had been before she had gone to France.

  But this was much worse, for now Genevieve had been betrayed. Not only was her mother gone, but she had been sent back to Petaluma, to the farm, where her father and brother worked in the muck, apparently content. Exchanging occasional cheerful complaints about the harvest, remarking upon the heirloom tomatoes and the special spotted chickens. Asking for nothing else. Nothing more.

  But she had tasted something more and now realized what she had been missing. Genevieve had tasted Paris.

  Genevieve could walk for hours, and she did, making up stories in her mind. Before going to Paris she used to imagine she was a secret CIA operative, living an undercover life on a farm in Petaluma but actually keeping an eye on a suspiciously James Bond–like billionaire intent on ruling the world from his secret lair underneath one of the big new houses that were relentlessly encroaching upon their farm.

  But she had returned from France with a secret talent. She was a superhero, and her special power was not flying or becoming invisible, but unlocking doors. Letting herself in.

  She emerged from a small copse of trees to see the Landons’ house. It was huge, with a swimming pool and a three-car garage.

  She knew the family was away, enjoying the last week of summer vacation before school began. Probably in Hawaii or Jamaica, someplace exotic and expensive where they could work on their tans. The three Landon girls were blond and pretty and always wore the right clothes. Mr. Landon sported a deep tan and unnaturally white teeth and golfed a lot; Mrs. Landon was thin and energetic to the point of frenetic. The Landons had gone up against Genevieve’s parents at the city hall meeting about the keeping of livestock—specifically, the aromatic pigs—in what they kept referring to as a “residential area.”

  Not long after Angela’s death, Mrs. Landon and her girls had come by the house with a casserole and a sympathy card, at which point Mrs. Landon had earned Genevieve’s undying enmity by making her cry in front of her trio of perfect daughters, who all made sympathetic clucking noises although they’d never once spoken to her in their entire pampered, hypocritical lives.

  Genevieve stared at the Landon place for a long time as an idea formed. She looked around: The house was shielded from the road by trees on all sides. Unseen, unnoticed.

  She wouldn’t hurt anything. She just wanted to see if she could do it.

  She went to the front door and rang the bell. If someone answered she’d pretend she was raising money for a band trip. She wasn’t in the band, but how would they know? Kids were forever raising money for band trips, knocking on endless doors and begging for spare change to be allowed to play their instruments—one of those things that grown-ups were always claiming they wanted kids to do, but which they weren’t willing to pay for.

  No one answered.

  “Choose your point of entry,” Uncle Dave had taught her. The front door was usually equipped with the most difficult lock. She circled the house and knelt before a set of French doors on the back patio, by the pool.

  She rubbed the key she wore around her neck.
r />   “Defeat the lock. Gain entry. Will you let yourself be defeated by a silly old lock?”

  Genevieve studied the lock before her. It looked like a Schlage single side pin. She hesitated.

  “A locksmith never abuses the power to open locks.”

  But he had sent her back.

  A wave of anger surged inside of her. Uncle Dave had sent her back here, to the middle of nowhere, where she took long rambles and no one thought to ask where she had gone. To silent dinners with her father and brother. To collecting eggs and weeding the vegetables before school, and then sitting through endless classes with hateful students who wore the right clothes and giggled about boys and who made her feel ugly and awkward. A freak.

  Now it would be even worse, as hard as that was to imagine. Now she would go back to school as the kid whose mother had died.

  Her mother was dead.

  When her mom first got sick, no one would tell Genevieve what was going on. She was fourteen, but they treated her like a baby, like she couldn’t handle the truth. Her father, her brother, the doctors. So she looked up cancer on the Internet, and that’s when she learned why no one would talk to her about it. She read about how, a lot of times, cancer took root and grew inside of people because they were unhappy. She read that sick people could choose to live or to die, that overcoming cancer had to do with the power of your spirit, your desire to heal yourself.

  Genevieve had begged her mother to choose to live. She had lain in Angela’s skeletal arms, ignoring the stifling heat and strange smells of the sick room, and cried and pleaded with her. Genevieve promised to make her mother happy, to do everything right and not complain anymore, ever. She would learn to bake and knit and whatever else Angela had always tried to teach her that she’d railed against.