The questions boiled up inside me. “Did you ever ask her? Did you ever talk to her about it?”
My mother shook her head. “I didn’t. I didn’t think I could, really. My mother and I—we were never close. But I understood why after I read the journals. I think I reminded her of him.”
So it ran in the family, then, this estrangement. There was a sadness in my mother’s eyes I had never seen before, and it made my heart ache for her, and for myself. How had we spent our entire lives lying to each other? How had she denied herself to me—her real self—for so long? Why did the women in my family work so hard to make themselves emotionless, to shellac down their hair and close off their feelings, to stay aloof and frozen? The only time my mother ever dug in was when she was gardening. Turning my head, I looked out the window at it and saw it for what it was—my mother’s art. Her gardens were her paintings—color and form and order, experimentation and creation, dirt and birth and success and failure. “You reminded her of Sebastien?”
“Yes.”
“And you never got a chance to meet him?”
“He died in the Second World War. He was living in Bordeaux when the Germans occupied it. And I didn’t know until after then.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. I was thinking of my own father, of his comforting presence and how I missed the sound of his voice. But at least I had known him. My mother had never even known her own father. “Have you seen a photograph?” I asked. My mother nodded. She went to one of the shelves by the windows and pulled down a photo album. I remembered paging through it as a child, looking at the nameless faces of ancestors past, their funny clothes and stiff poses, the old cars and the quiet skylines and horizons behind them, but I had never before connected them to me, had never understood the way we were all linked.
The photo had been taken at a café. Sebastien—my grandfather, I thought—was sitting in a chair, leaning back, legs stretched out long before him. He held a cigarette in one hand, and he was smiling slightly at the camera. Off to one side I could see a woman’s legs beneath the table, her ankles crossed, a pair of T-strap shoes on her feet. She had turned away while the photograph was being taken and I could see only the edge of her jaw and the line of her neck. Her hat covered her hair. It could have been my grandmother.
He was tall and slender, his features drawn as sharply as a model’s. His hair was light and unfashionably long, flopping into his eyes. I looked at him, memorizing his face, though I felt as though I had already painted it in my mind a thousand times over the last few weeks. Looking up at my mother, I was shocked to see exactly how much she looked like him—not only her build and her slender fingers, but the sharpness of her cheekbones and the slight raise of her eyebrows, which I had always thought of as an expression of superiority, but on Sebastien looked like perennial amusement.
“You look exactly like him,” I said.
“I know. It broke her heart.” Leaving me with the album, she walked back to the sofa and sat down on the edge, leaning forward and crossing her forearms precisely.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, though I wasn’t sure what I was sorry for—her distance from her mother, never knowing her father, the distance between us. Maybe all those things.
“Don’t be.” She smoothed her skirt over her knees, straightened her shoulders. “As far as I’m concerned, my father was Robert Walsh, the man who raised me. He took me on as his own, after all, when he didn’t have to. And I never had the slightest sense he treated me any differently from how he would have if I’d been his biological daughter. That’s fatherhood.”
“Don’t you wish you could have known him?”
My mother looked out the window into her garden. The trees were in full leaf, spreading warm shadow over parts of the yard, and there were flowers everywhere. She was right—we were the same in that way. Except she had found a socially acceptable way to pursue her art and I had just . . . given up? I’d blamed my parents and Phillip for quitting painting, but I could have resisted their pressure. I could have kept going. I’d blamed my mother for forcing me into marrying Phillip, but I could have said no. A stronger woman would have. The woman I wanted to be would have. The woman I was going to be would.