Secrets of Paris_ A Novel - Luanne Rice [47]
Trust me not to waste a moment’s time. It is my bad luck to encounter delays where others do not. Sometimes, I feel the impulse to smash china, just as you do!
—TO FRANÇOISE-MARGUERITE, AUGUST 1680
PATRICE WONDERED HOW it was possible to be sitting beside her mother in her own house and feel homesick. Or was it loneliness she felt? The feeling was familiar but distant to her; she hadn’t felt it for years, since moving to France. It reminded her of the years before she met Didier, nights when she would eat a pint of ice cream just to fill herself up. She glanced at her mother, the half-spectacles perched at the tip of her nose as she read Paris-Match, and knew the empty feeling would go away when her mother returned to Marblehead. Lydie would certainly never feel this way with her mother.
No American had ever adopted France and the French more willingly, more immediately than Patrice had; she felt sure of it. Arriving in Paris with Didier, she felt she had come home. She remembered that flight from JFK, with Didier at her side. Watching Jamaica Bay give way to the Atlantic, Patrice felt as though someone had untied the ropes that held her down, each rope representing some unlovely aspect of her life and American culture: pointless television, lonely nights with Chinese takeout, her mother’s voice, the silver flatware her parents had bought on the occasion of her birth for the occasion of her wedding. She had imagined that flatware as ballast, and she felt the plane rise as each fish fork, butter knife, gravy ladle was jettisoned. “We don’t need that flatware,” Patrice had been thrilled to tell her mother, who for at least six years had despaired of Patrice’s finding a husband. “Didier has the ancestral silver.”
“They’re saying Princess Caroline is pregnant again,” her mother said, reading the magazine. “I wonder if she loves her husband. I wonder what Grace would think of him.”
“Did you know Kelly is named for Grace Kelly?” Patrice asked, feeling a mean little thrill, knowing that this would get her mother’s goat.
“Kelly? The maid?”
“Yes. She’s nice, isn’t she?”
“She’s fine.” Eliza Spofford’s thin mouth looked set, as if something was causing her pain.
“Do you think I’m too familiar with my help, mother?” Patrice asked.
“I didn’t say that. But I could do without her chattering about Boston versus New York versus Los Angeles. She’s a regular gazetteer. Has she made the demography of the United States her life’s work?”
“Actually, her life’s work is cleaning toilets,” Patrice said. “And she has a college degree. Without splitting hairs, she is more highly educated than you are.”
“I hate that expression—‘splitting hairs.’ ”
“Well, mincing words, then. I’m trying to work out some way for her to get to America, where she can get a decent job.”
“They all want that. And the trouble is, there aren’t enough jobs to go around—not even for our own citizens.”
“What about America’s origins? It was founded by immigrants, wasn’t it? I think it’s strange that you’re from Massachusetts, just a few miles up the coast from Plymouth Rock, and you have that attitude. I was hoping you might sponsor Kelly. She needs someone who lives in America to petition for her.”
Eliza took off her glasses. She looked pale, a bit tired. For an instant Patrice was struck by her age, and she felt sorry for her. “Patsy, are you baiting me?” Eliza asked. “You know how I feel about this issue—I’ve always said America has left the door open for too long. I think Kelly is nice. I like her well enough, but America can’t keep doling out. Can’t you respect my political views?”
“Not that particular one.”
“I came all the way to France to visit my daughter, and this is what happens.”
“The only problem with that is, your daughter happens to be me,” Patrice said.
“Where do you get that idea? I love you.”
“You just hate my life.”
“My darling, I just wish you’d married someone closer to home. Is that so terrible?”
Listening to her mother