Anna and Armand in Geneva, 1944.
A loose photo fell into my lap. It showed my grandmother on another balcony leaning on an iron railing, her head tilted toward her shoulder. A single curl had escaped from her bun. Her dark dress with its lace collar hung from her body, still thin from starvation, making her look like a child playing dress-up. Her eyes looked terribly tired, but the expression in them hovered somewhere between shy and girlish and intensely passionate, so intimate that I felt slightly embarrassed meeting her gaze or looking at the picture at all. In the bottom left-hand corner was a blur, the photographer’s finger—my grandfather’s finger, I surmised. As if he could not bear to keep all of himself behind the camera, separated from her. There was an inscription scrawled across the back of the photograph in my grandmother’s spiky handwriting: “Geneva 1944. Cours de Rive, where Angèle was conceived.” Angèle is my mother.
At first, no one could figure out why my grandfather wouldn’t send her the deed. This made my grandmother furious. Now it was she who phoned my mother: “Do something, Angèle.” My mother consulted a family friend with a law firm in town. He referred her to a lawyer in Atlanta who specialized in family property law. The lawyer in Atlanta referred her to a lawyer in Paris, who specialized in international property disputes. The words swam around the family: power of attorney, deed of sale, joint ownership, sole proprietor, communal property, pre-nup, a sea of solutions and laws and stipulations. Marriage license, divorce papers, property deeds—all of it secret, locked away, hidden, lost. Storms of phone calls and opinions flared up and died away as various legal professionals faded in and out of the picture, their advice ignored, their ideas dismissed, their letters unanswered, their requests unheeded.
Time passed. And the question became, why are they holding on?
CHAPTER SIX
MY GRANDPARENTS WERE SO MASTERFUL AT stymieing each other from afar that any possibility of actually selling the house in La Roche quickly foundered and was lost in the deeps of their inscrutable silence. Life went on. To no one’s surprise, my grandfather did not attend my high school graduation.
I left for college, which was a revelation: I wasn’t bored, and I didn’t feel like a misfit, though I probably was the only person on campus who wore an Uzbek silk tea cozy and a feather boa instead of a hat and scarf. Martha Beck describes the Harvard experience as “heady, exciting, even thrilling, but … laced with heavy doses of fear and misery … like having lunch with a brilliant, learned, witty celebrity who liked to lean across the table at unpredictable intervals and slap me in the mouth—hard.” And since that is an excellent description of life with most members of my family, I thrived there. I adored it. For the first time in my life, I felt as if I had emerged from the all-too-interesting shadows of my quirky relations and could become my own person.
The house in La Roche faded from my mind in the tumult and excitement of my new life, but it lay in wait in a corner of my memory. One clear winter day I was standing in front of Hilles Library with my friend Helen and chatting about our bluestocking daydream of creating a sort of artists’ colony somewhere, and a vision of the house, the stones and the sunlight and the castle on the hill above it, surged back to me. Perhaps if I occupied it with a group of friends all working on various academic or creative projects, my grandparents would see its utility, and they would decide conclusively not to sell.
My feeling of removal from the labyrinthine complications of my grandparents’ relationship must have been pretty complete, or else my coup de foudre for the house had deprived me of my reason, because during my sophomore year in college, I wrote to both of them to ask whether my friends and I could spend the summer in Alba. My grandmother, who was always enthusiastic about any project I embarked on, said yes right away. “But I think you should go there alone,” she cautioned. “Get to know people. You don’t want the villagers to get the wrong idea about you.” My grandfather took longer about it, but he, too, assented. “Just don’t go there by yourself,” he warned. “The people there are all drunkards and thieves.” I set about applying for a summer grant from the Harvard College Fund to study village life in medieval France and turned my attention to other things, lulled into a temporary belief that things could ever be so simple in my family.
Then one morning, not long before spring break, my mother called, sounding slightly harassed, saying that my grandmother wanted to go to Alba. “What for?” I asked.
“I’m not sure.” She sounded worried. “She’s really, really stirred up about it for some reason. She says she absolutely wants to see the house.”
Not yet comprehending what the whole affair had to do with me, I said, “I guess it’s only fair—she did buy it, after all. She must feel kind of cheated about it, that she never got to see it again. It makes sense to me.”
“Well, your uncle thinks it’s a terrible idea. He says she’s too old to travel, and she shouldn’t go.”
“What do you think?”
“Well, she is eighty-seven, and I certainly think she shouldn’t go alone—you know how hard traveling has gotten for her. And I can’t go with her. But she’s totally set on it.”
“I’ll go,” I volunteered, feeling a rush of excitement. In my mind, I was still fully the child and she the adult. I loved traveling with my grandmother, and I felt nostalgic for the easy camaraderie we had shared when I was younger. I was always on the lookout for ways to reconquer the distance that had settled in between us when I entered adolescence—especially ways that didn’t involve my being a faithful correspondent or spending too much time just sitting and being with her, which would have been the best solutions but were beyond the ken of my nineteen-year-old self. Besides, I wanted to see the house again, too.
“I don’t know,” my mother wavered. “I’m just not sure it’s such a good idea.”
“It’s her choice to make, isn’t it?”
“Yes, of course it is. And she says she really wants to go to France one last time. But I don’t know—even getting down to Asheville is an ordeal for her now.”
“Well, tell her if she wants to go, I’ll go with her, and then she can make up her own mind.”
I had seen changes in her myself, but I had not yet realized it was possible for my grandmother to actually diminish or weaken in any way. The grandmother in my head still did headstands and hung from a chin-up bar. The last time we’d both been in Asheville together, she’d invited me to a topless bar with her friend John, an adjunct professor at the university where my mother taught.