“All right.”
So that was that. We turned out the lights, snuggled down against each other, and went to sleep.
Julien and I were married on March 25, 2006, seventy years after my grandparents met, almost sixty years after they bought the house in La Roche, some fifty years after they ceased speaking to each other forever, and nine years after my grandfather first brought me to Alba. “To think that house I bought so long ago brought you to the love of your life,” Grandma wrote.
Wonders never cease.… You have my blessings and prayers for a good outcome!… I continue to wonder what I am still doing here, the only highlights being your mother’s and your existence, as well as the wonder of a purchase, made on a dreary November day, that led to an alliance.… Strange and miraculous at the same time, which brings up questions of destination and predestination and such.
By then Julien and I had made a lot of decisions about our future, notably that it was time to leave Alba for Paris. I found a job as a translator. Julien, once he had finished his projects in the Ardèche, would begin work at a company in Versailles that restored historical monuments. Our wedding crowned and concluded our time in the village, marking the beginning of a whole new life.
We got married at the Alba town hall, the same town hall I’d once sat in front of while my grandfather voted. Now it was filled with people we loved. Julien’s mother sang, and everyone joined in:
Dodi li
My beloved is mine
Va’ani lo
And I am his.
Haro’eh, bashoshanim.
Who pastures among the lilies.
When she had finished, the mayor cleared his throat several times and blew his nose loudly. “I’ve watched Julien grow up, you might say, with particular interest. He’s a fine young man, with a fine set of parents, a fine future ahead of him. And I remember Miranda’s grandfather from when I was just a teenager—when I saw her here for the first time, I thought, I know she’s coming home. Young people are the life of our village, and when I look at these two, I feel confident in our future. It seems only right,” he concluded, “to be marrying them—two of the village’s children—and I couldn’t be more pleased.”
He read aloud the French civil ceremony, and Julien and I exchanged rings and signed the paper that made us husband and wife.
“Now for the best part,” the mayor announced. Julien and I kissed, and the room filled with whoops, hollers, and claps; a musician friend began to play, and everyone spilled out onto the town hall steps in a melodic springtime hubbub.
We ate, drank, and danced all night, and the music seeped out of the stone walls, into the streets, across the vineyards, down to La Roche, to hide in the chinks of the darkened house among the shadows. I imagined another generation of dreams and intentions coming to rest in that abandoned place, abandoned to time and unknown to all but those who’d left them there. If Grandma was willing to accept that life unfolds slowly and mysteriously, across many decades, then I would, too. The house was not for me. My grandparents’ secret was not mine. And maybe that was all right.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A WEEK AFTER OUR WEDDING MY GRANDFATHER’S neighbor called me. “I think you need to come quickly. I ran into your grandfather in the elevator, and he told me he’s being evicted.”
I arrived in Geneva the next day to find Grandpa sitting at his dining room table in a snowdrift of papers.
“They keep saying I haven’t paid the rent. They say they’re going to throw me out of the apartment if I don’t pay. Those dogs. I know I paid, I know I did.” He gestured in mute frustration at the papers on the table, then looked up at me. “Can you do something?”
In the silence that followed his question, I understood he had been pretending for a long time, and I’d wanted so much for him to be all right that I’d let him. He’d done nothing with the carefully ordered piles and to-do lists I’d made him—nothing but hide them away. I took a week off from my job and set to work, locating old bills, late rent notices, letters from collection agencies, and empty tax forms. I dragged loads of papers—newspapers, discarded mail, circulars, magazines, newsletters—to the recycling bins, fascinated by the flotsam that churned up as I sorted: a letter I’d written him when I was eleven (corrected, of course); wedding invitations, obituaries, pictures of the babies of unknown friends; ancient birthday cards. And everywhere, battered photocopies of that poem he’d sent me all those years ago.
It is late last night the dog was speaking of you;
the snipe was speaking of you in her deep marsh.
It is you are the lonely bird through the woods;
and that you may be without a mate until you find me.
Sometimes my grandfather hovered and watched me work; at other times, he retired to his sitting room and leafed through a book of poetry or read the newspaper. Whenever I told him what I was about to do—file his papers, engage an accountant, settle a bill with a collection agency—I cringed, expecting him to lash out at me. But he said nothing. I waited until the end of the week to tell him that I was arranging for meals to be delivered to his apartment twice a day, for someone to stay to heat the meal and remind him to eat, for a nurse to come check on him daily, for weekly house calls from a doctor and a social worker. I stood back when I had finished, afraid he’d never speak to me again. Instead, he touched my cheek. “You’re like a fairy. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”
That night I made dinner for the two of us, and in the silence as we ate, I almost could believe that everything was normal, that my grandfather was still an elaborately defended fortress of grudges, rules, and resentments. But then he would look up, and I would see the shy, unassuming smile of a little boy, reminding me that his intimidating presence and inflexible will were all but gone. When he smiled, he left off eating, the fork and knife forgotten in his hands. “Eat your dinner before it gets cold,” I urged gently, and he obeyed. After dinner I washed the dishes, and he dried them. I made us an infusion of verbena, and as I poured the hot water from the kettle, I thought of the way verbena tea was once special and absolute, like everything else in his life, and how its aesthetic perfection had once seemed like a reprieve from the eggshells I tiptoed over all day. He served it in a pottery pitcher he reserved for herbal infusions. Its matching cups were precisely the right width and thickness, so that the infusion cooled quickly enough but not too quickly.
“Where are your verbena cups?” I asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“The green and yellow bowls we used to have our verbena tea in.”