Ah! We had also cleared up one other item of vital importance. Claire and I could cook a mean Gran Marnier souffle - even if we were on a Goddamned sailboat!
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I doubt if it would surprise you to learn that within a week Madeleine and I were going out with one another almost every night. She belonged to a tennis club that had a very nice swimming pool, and I cheered her on while she took lessons in the evening. We would follow that on most nights with her beating me at tennis (and by humiliating margins, too), then we would head out and grab a quick bite before returning to the boat for some serious exercise. It was all very nice. Paris is like that. Nice. Of course, there were riots in the suburbs, almost unbearable heat as June droned along and old people were dropping like flies, and there was Madeleine's looming commitment to return to Darfur in September for another three month stint. But, like most people in Europe, Luc, Claire, and Madeleine were scheduled to take their six week vacation in July and early August. Accordingly, I planned to take off from Paris and putter along slowly for a couple of days until they could join me for the rough passage through the canals toward Lyon.
That was when Jean Paul called to tell me that Mom had died.
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Sitting in an Air France 747 flying over the Atlantic, I watched as hundreds of miles of ocean passed underneath in what felt like the blink of an eye; those miles are hard won in a sailboat, of course, and I thought about that for a while. Perhaps that seems out of place, given the circumstance, so perhaps I'd better explain.
Jean Paul was with me that morning, and we sat quietly as the jet arced across the Atlantic towards America, and I suppose we were lost in all manner of thought. I was sitting by a window on the left side of the plane, looking down at the sea as time reeled by so quickly, and I hurt so badly inside at my mother's passing that it left me feeling cold and empty. The passage of time; I guess that's what was really on my mind. Not the passage of miles.
We had put her on this very same flight not two weeks ago - it felt like only hours ago - and I reached into memory to remember her face as she looked at me that last time, and I felt her cheek on mine as she kissed me. Had she sat looking out this same window, I wondered? What had she thought about on that hideously long flight back to Denver. Alone. Moving back to France, certainly. Grandchildren? Probably. In fact, I supposed that was a certainty. I didn't have to wonder about her feelings about my decision to live aboard: that much she had made abundantly clear over the past few years.
No, as the jet slipped through time I wondered what she had learned in her life. Why had she loved my father so fiercely? How did she make the transition from France to Colorado? What had she left undone at the end of her life? What were her regrets, what had she never done that she wanted to?
Why had I never taken the time to ask her these questions? Why do sons take their mother's love so pitifully for granted?
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Mom left directions - explicit directions, really - on what to do with her remains. They were on the kitchen table, along with a note from her attorney to call when we got in. The first thing I did, after JP and I got settled in, was to read her last thoughts.
There was a tree on the estate in Hennequeville. She had drawn a map, as a matter of fact, that revealed in remarkable detail just where to find their tree. It was the tree where her father had found my father, dangling upside down in his parachute harness late one February afternoon in 1944, and it was here that she wanted her body - and my father's - to intermingle one last time. As stardust, perhaps, but joined in the soil of her France one last time and for all eternity. I smiled as I read her directions to find the tree, remembering our walks there when I was so small she had to carry me most of the way. Yes, we all knew where the tree was, where the initials Dad have carved into the stately old oak were, even the very branch where he had become lodged, and his ankle had snapped. It was a part of our mythology now, a part of our family's community of memories. A part of our memory of place.
Mom had spelled exactly which verses from which books she wanted read, and what food to serve in the garden later that day. I think she left the wine to our discretion, or perhaps I lost that page in my connivance. I'm not sure anymore. She specified who she wanted to attend, and who should not be invited, and it was then I noticed that she had scribbled these notes down two nights before she passed on.
She had known. Known what was coming.
And she was ready.
Mom also wanted Liz and Marie to be at the treeside service. If Mom had been there as I read that, she would have caught an earful. I read this request to myself once again, then again - aloud - for my cousins benefit . . .
"Mon Dieu, mon Dieu," Jean Paul muttered as he listened to me read that passage. "I never knew she had it in her to be so . . . I don't know . . . so adroit? Is that the word I search for?"
All I could do was laugh. I think JP thought me a little crazy that evening as he watched me laughing. Laughing until I cried.
And there wasn't a drop of rum in the house.
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And Liz came, bless her heart. I think the audacity of my mother's last wish wasn't lost on her, too, but she came anyway. We walked the Norman beaches one last time together, Liz and I, and even held hands for a while as we remembered how things had once been, how life had been special once, between us. But she seemed like a different person now, like she was alien to my personal landscape - now decidedly out of place. She no longer wanted a reconciliation. I think she sought redemption in my Mother's rest.
Madeleine and Claire were there, as well. Luc was engaged with a lecture and could not make it, but I think he had the presence of mind to tell Madeleine more about Liz and the circumstances of her being there than I had the stomach for. And Madeleine was amazing. She laid back, avoided playing the possessive's hand and gave Liz and I the space we needed to say this last goodbye.
Family was there, all of our family. And this was my family now, this was where I belonged in that most spiritual sense. If thoughts live in the shadows of our senses, then surely with that realization I had found that peace which had eluded me for so long.
Chapter Three forthcoming
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