I watched with a kind of horrified fascination as my mother went back and forth between her parents, trying to broker some kind of deal. I remembered the awestruck, infatuated feeling that had overtaken me upon my arrival in Alba, remembered the castle and the town hall and La Roche with its strange volcanic excrescence, remembered my daydreams of cooking dinner in that old kitchen, shelling peas on the terrace and watching the river and the trees, painting those battered shutters and that creaky door. Mostly I remembered how beautiful it was. I had been amazed to discover the house was actually—if only partly—my grandmother’s, and terrified to think she might let it slip away. I could not bear to believe that such a beautiful place would disappear from my life.
That summer I visited my grandfather and, as tentatively as I could, broached the subject of the house, venturing to inquire about why he wanted to sell it.
“It’s been so long since I spent any time there at all,” he sighed. “It’s been nothing but a source of unhappiness and worry to me for a long time. It will be a relief to sell it.” He began cleaning out his pipe. “That is, if that woman ever decides to stop making trouble about it.” Holding his pipe above the crystal ashtray on the dining room table, he tapped until the burnt remains of yesterday’s tobacco landed in a little black pile. “I’d give it to you,” he added, “but I’m afraid it would be more of a burden than a gift.”
I hesitated. I didn’t know how to describe everything I had felt in the few hours I had seen La Roche. I was afraid to tell him I had fallen in love with the place; asking him for a house seemed like the kind of thing that would send him into a blinding rage. Certainly, he had cut people out of his life for less than that.
“That woman” he groused again.
I tried to head him off at the pass. “But I thought—they said—if you faxed the deed—”
“It’s very nice of you to care.” The scary saccharine note in his voice spelled trouble. “I know you probably think she is a sweet old lady with white hair who bakes cookies.” Again with the cookies, I thought. Was it because she’d decided to live in America that he thought she baked cookies?
“Seraphina—I call her Seraphina, ironically, you know.”
“Yes, I do, yes.” For as long as anyone could remember, Seraphina had been the epithet my grandfather employed in situations where he would not otherwise have been able to avoid uttering my grandmother’s name. Once I had looked it up in one of the big dictionaries he kept by his desk. I’d found no entry for Seraphina, but under seraph I read, “A seraphic person, an angel.” I wondered whether the nickname had once been earnest and loving. Under seraphic the dictionary said, “… worthy of a seraph; ecstatically adoring.” I strained to picture Anna and Armand ecstatically adoring each other. “The presumed derivation of the word from a Hebrew root saraph to burn, led to the view that the seraphim are specially distinguished by fervor of love.” The ominous silence in the kitchen reminded me that my grandfather’s current fervor was anything but loving.
“She’s spent years trying to ruin my life.” His angry voice shattered the quiet.
“But she—”
He ignored me. “Do you know what she’s doing?”
I shook my head, no.
“This is all part of her plan. She is waiting around for my pension.” He paused to let this sink in. “Now she wants the house, too.”
I had been doing my best to remain neutral, but this seemed so silly, I felt compelled to protest. “Grandpa—” I laughed, thinking about my independent grandma relying on anyone else for anything at all, let alone income. “She isn’t waiting for your pension. She has her own pension. Besides, didn’t she tell your notaire that she would agree to sell, as long as the money went to the children?”
His jaw tightened. “The money?”
Oh no, I thought. What have I done?
“Does she think I care about that? I don’t give a damn about the money!” His face quivered with indignation.
We were silent. His face had that washed-out, shipwrecked look again. A year spent scuffing his carpets and dropping crumbs under the dining room table had not made me any less frightened of incurring his wrath. I waited. Finally, he spoke. His voice had lost its anger, and he delivered each word in a strange, even tone.
“You know, she was the reason I had to stop coming to your house.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I could smell her, you know. I could smell her in the bed. I couldn’t bear sleeping with her there.”
I didn’t know how to tell him that my grandmother had never once slept in the guest room of my mother’s house.
When I returned home to Asheville, I got out my mother’s old photos and thumbed through them again, past my great-aunts and -uncles and my beautiful young grandparents. There were only two pictures of Armand and Anna together in the whole album. In both, they were standing on a ledge at the top of a building. In the first picture, my grandfather was posed behind my grandmother, his hand resting on her shoulder. Her black hair was combed back into a neat bun, and she wore a fitted blouse and a dark skirt. She gazed directly at the camera, smiling. He, in a shirt and tie, was looking sternly at the sky. I was rather taken aback by this photo, not because it showed them together but rather because I had never seen my grandparents look so ordinary.
In the second picture, my grandparents appeared to have been blown apart by a strong wind. They leaned as far away from each other as was possible in that narrow space, he up against the wall, she against the railing. My grandfather’s hair, smooth just a moment before, now stood on end; my grandmother’s, too, had escaped from its bun and frizzed away from her head in unruly tendrils. Their smiles had turned tiny and grim. I looked back and forth between the two pictures: tidy and pulled together in the first, messy and blown apart in the second. Or was it messy and blown apart in the first, and tidy and pulled together in the second?