Secrets of Paris_ A Novel - Luanne Rice [9]
Now here she was in France. She snuggled closer to Michael, who stirred. France satisfied her in every way except that it was far from the heart of her family. In spite of the art, beauty, and romance, everywhere Lydie went she felt as though she were missing something back home. She wondered how her mother was getting on without her. It made her sick, really ashamed, when she remembered one day last week. She and Michael had met for a glass of wine. They had sat at a café across the Seine from the Louvre and the Jardin des Tuileries. Michael was silent; he seemed to be thinking about something that had happened at work. Sitting there, Lydie just absorbed the scene.
The sun cast gold light on a row of poplars that must have stood there since the time of Napoleon. Holding Michael’s hand, Lydie had gazed at them. She had imagined the great artists who had sat in the same spot. She had pretended to be Monet regarding the poplars; she had just started to see them as an Impressionist would, all light and color, when she had a vision of her home. It was twilight; there was her mother standing alone in the walled garden behind her house. Her mother’s face was sad. Lydie blinked hard, to get rid of the image. She wanted to enjoy the present. But the idea of home was a veil, and there were days Lydie couldn’t lift it to see Paris.
She had squeezed Michael’s hand. “You’re a dear man,” she had said.
“Who am I?” Michael had said. “Monsignor Mangin?”
“Oh, God,” Lydie had said, catching his drift. “I do sound like my mother, don’t I?”
“Give it another try,” Michael had said.
“You make me weak in the knees, baby.”
“Much, much better,” Michael had said.
Lying in bed, Lydie remembered that. Her thoughts returned to her parents. Julia and Cornelius, known as Neil, had sailed from Ireland to New York the same year but separately when Julia was nineteen and Neil was twenty-five. They had met at night school, where Julia was a student and Neil a janitor. Julia washed the cardinal’s clothes at St. Patrick’s by day. One day the cardinal found her crying. “What is the matter, child?” he had asked. Of course Julia cannot remember his exact words, but that is the phrase distilled from years of retelling: “What is the matter, child?”
“I am homesick, Father,” Julia had said.
“Ah, do you know the poem, by Yeats, ‘Under Saturn’?”
Well, no cardinal would really expect a young Irish washerwoman to know Yeats, but Julia had stood tall, tears running down her cheeks, and recited “ ‘I am thinking of a child’s vow, sworn in vain, never to leave the valley his fathers called their home.’ ”
Then the cardinal had asked where she had learned the poem, and Julia had said “In school, in Ireland, Father.”
“Do you miss school?” the cardinal had asked.
“Oh, yes, Father,” Julia had said.
And so the cardinal had arranged for her to take evening courses in education at Marymount, where Neil Fallon worked a second job as the night janitor, trying to save enough money to start a business. They fell in love and married by the spring semester. Within four years, after two miscarriages, they had Lydie, and within six Julia had her degree. And now, forty years later, Neil had been dead eleven months.
Lydie and Michael went about their morning ritual. In Paris they had separate bathrooms, but only one person could use hot water at a time. Lydie showered first while Michael shaved; when he heard her shower stop, he stepped into his own. Lydie boiled water for coffee. Since she took longer to dress, Michael went to the pâtisserie for croissants. On his way back to the apartment, he bought the International Herald Tribune. This early-morning, wordless cooperation was one thing Lydie loved about marriage. They knew each other so well. Lydie knew that Michael liked silence at the breakfast table; he was probably reviewing his