Family Secrets (73 page)

She had investigated various places. East Hampton and Malibu were out, as was the rest of America, because she was single and it was too difficult to live a normal life as a single woman. Either there were the singles complexes, the pleasure mini-cities where the unattached paired and mated frantically as quickly as seals and then parted to find other momentary partners, enjoying the new sexual freedom, or there were the less homogeneous communities where she would already be too old. She would be a leftover, a castoff: “Why haven’t you ever married?” She didn’t want to be known as a single, an unmarried woman, she wanted to be Paris Mendes, writer, and what do you do? In Europe at least they would start out by knowing her as an American, and that label would be so strong that the fact that she didn’t have a husband would be as unimportant as the fact that she had brown eyes.

She liked London. She had always felt at home there. But London was no place to buy a summer home because it was a city. She wanted to be in a beautiful summery place, near water, a country place. So when a couple she knew invited her to spend a few weeks in their house in St.-Paul-de-Vence, she went with delight and hope. She liked France, but she had been frightened of the Riviera because there were too many phonies, too many millionaires and fake millionaires, too many seventeen-year-old girls with beautiful bodies, long straight blonde hair (the nemesis of her high school days), bikinis, golden unmarked youthful skin, and ancient eyes. She didn’t want to go anywhere where she had to compete in order to find friends. She wanted a place that was natural, where there were writers and artists and friendly people who would accept her simply because she happened to live in their town. She wanted a town square, where people could sit and have a drink in the late afternoons after working or playing, where they could become friends, and then meet each other as friends, demanding nothing, not competing, not showing off, just enjoying their lives. She wanted other Americans, but not a tourist place, at least not a notoriously tourist place where magazines came to take pictures of what everyone was wearing this summer. She wanted it to be near enough to the sea so that she could drive there whenever she wanted to. She wanted good weather, old houses, and a view. She wanted it to look like a painting she had seen once. She didn’t know if she would ever find it.

The moment she saw the ancient walled city on top of the mountain her heart sank. Walls! Windflower had walls, and people left there feet first. She hated walls, and electrified barbed wire, and fear. But then when she was inside, looking down at the incredible view, and around her at the colors, the quality of preserved beauty, she realized it wasn’t like Windflower at all. St.-Paul-de-Vence was the opposite of Windflower because it was old, it had a history, while Windflower was only a place where people waited. There were little squares here, and there were writers and artists and Americans, and some tourists, and you could walk from one end of the town to the other if you had the strength, and certainly drive it, and you could drive to the sea. Her friends, an art dealer and his wife, who was a painter, both Americans, knew a lot of people and introduced her. It seemed good, it seemed right. Paris waited, and hoped.

In the mornings when she woke up she opened the shutters and looked out, breathing in the clear air, and every morning she felt the same rush of happiness as if something new was beginning. There were no memories here. It was a joy to turn a corner, to see an old wall of a building, or a tree, and not to feel a sad memory. There was a past here but it was not hers. Here, for her, was only a future. Her two friends were good-hearted and open and warm, they liked people and food and conversation, and every kind of artistic endeavor their friends were interested in interested them. Their friends, who became Paris’ friends, were the same. Their houses were completely informal and yet they cared; you could tell in the way plants grew and things they loved and had collected were displayed to be enjoyed. It could be a painting or a shell, or a dozen of each.

Near the end of the season there was a small house available. It was just big enough for Paris and two houseguests. Rima had already promised to come visit her wherever she was, and Paris thought perhaps there would be other people she wanted to invite who would want to come, but if they didn’t she wouldn’t be lonely anyway. She felt at home here now. She rented the house for a month with the understanding that she might buy it. First you had to live in a house to see if it was the right house for you.

From the beginning she knew it was right. Every day she planned ways she would decorate it, simply, but in her own way to make it hers. When you are planning to redecorate a house you know you already feel you own it. She wondered if she would be lonely, but she didn’t feel lonely, she felt happy.

Her friends found her a maid who came every day for two hours to clean and was willing to cook whenever needed. Paris wanted to shop and cook herself, to entertain new friends who had entertained her, and she realized that in this particular house with these particular friends “entertain” was the wrong word; it was a word from Windflower. What she wanted was to enjoy her friends, and have them enjoy her and her new home.

At the end of the month her friends helped her with the arrangements to buy the house. Paris felt strange. She had never bought or owned anything in her life, except her car, and that had been bought for her by her parents, who then made her too frightened to drive it because they worried so that she might be killed. She had always saved her money and she could afford the little house, but it wasn’t that which felt strange, it was having responsibility for the first time. She wondered if it would frighten her. It didn’t. She liked owning the house; she wanted to do everything in it herself, even put down the tiles on the patio floor.

She knew her parents would be horrified, full of worries about how she had been cheated, how the house would fall down around her ears, how she would die without a doctor (but there was a doctor in the town, he just wasn’t their family doctor), and how she couldn’t be trusted to act like an adult person, wasn’t this the proof of it? Buying was so permanent. She was going away from them, going away from Windflower. She knew her father would understand, because secretly he had always harbored a wish for adventure but had put it away in favor of practicality. She also knew her mother would finally have to accept it, and would eventually even defend her decision, as her mother finally had with everything Paris had done on her own. Paris didn’t care any more if they approved or not, but now she just didn’t want to hurt them. It was the sign she had finally grown up. She was the one with the power now. It always happened at a certain time between parents and children, this reversal.

EIGHT

In March Lavinia and Jonah went to Windflower to see that everything was all right, to close things up, because no one would be coming up that summer. Since Paris had bought her house in St.-Paul-de-Vence (who had influenced her to do such a crazy thing?) Lavinia had no real wish to go to Windflower for the summer, and Jonah had finally persuaded her to spend six weeks in Israel, his dream. Part of the persuasion had been the fact that Paris had invited them—was allowing them?—to visit her for a week and stay in her newly decorated guest room.

“It’s very simple,” she told Lavinia. “Don’t expect anything luxurious.”

Luxurious! As if Lavinia cared! All she wanted was to see her daughter, to see the house, to be sure everything was all right. Paris was so pleased and proud of her new possession. Lavinia remembered her own pride in her new house in Windflower, despite all the difficulties getting the things they needed during wartime, and she almost felt excited herself.

Jonah was excited about going to Israel. For years he had talked longingly of seeing Israel, telling Lavinia the names of friends of his who had been there not just once but many times, and she had ignored him, but now she was going to go there with him. They had booked everything the best, air-conditioned hotels, a guide, an air-conditioned car the guide would drive while he showed them the historical and new sights. Lavinia would like it, he was sure. He had made sure she wouldn’t be uncomfortable for a minute, sparing no expense. What was he to do with his money after all, now that he was a middle-aged man? Jonah never thought of himself as old. An old man didn’t walk five miles every day the way he did, winter and summer, and his doctor had told him he had the body of a man twenty years younger. Lavinia was the one who was fragile, who hated hot weather and uncomfortable beds not her own, so he would be sure that she enjoyed this trip and then perhaps she would be willing to go with him to other places and do other things. Ah, Israel! Jonah was so proud of the Israelis, the Jewish people taking an active role in building a new land, the poor babies who had been orphaned by Hitler now grown up and secure in their own country with healthy children of their own. The past and present melded sometimes in his mind, and he would never forget those photographs he had seen after the war. He had given up the formal aspects of his religion for Lavinia, but he had never given up his strong identity as a Jew. A person could worship in his heart; he didn’t have to go to temple.

They had hired a car and driver for the day to go to Windflower. Lavinia had not let Jonah drive a car for years, except to go to the supermarket in the summers. In the summers they rented a car. Who wanted to own a car, such a problem and a nuisance? The driver waited for them in the turnabout, leaning against his long black car, smoking, while they went to their house to do what they had to do.

“How desolate it is here!” Lavinia said to Jonah, looking down at the huge expanse of bare land, the black leafless trees, the huge, full, rushing waterfall swollen with melted snow. “I wouldn’t want to live in the country all year round.” She shivered.

“I don’t know why Andrew and Cassie want to go to the country every weekend in the winter,” Jonah said. “Of course, theirs is an all-year-round house.”

“Ours could be too,” Lavinia said. “I just wouldn’t like it. Andrew loves it. For me, it’s so boring, nothing to do, just sit around and eat too much.” She thought of Andrew and Cassie in their country house, their married children coming up every weekend, summer and winter, and she wondered what made some people love the country and others not. But she knew it wasn’t the country, it was more, it was the family. She was no fool. “Why?” she said. “I wonder.”

“Why what?”

“Why do Cassie’s children stay and all of ours leave? All right, Everett is a poor soul, but Melissa did the best she could. And Richie, who could ever understand him? Buffy is strange. But Paris, what did we do wrong? What didn’t we do? I always made her get to know the family. I wanted her to have a sense of the family. We went to Papa’s every Sunday, and every holiday, and it was Cassie who never brought her children. I used to say: ‘Your children won’t ever have a sense of family.’ Do you remember how every Thanksgiving we all got together and Cassie’s children were never there? They were always at their school dance, or with friends, or on a date, or at a party. Cassie let them go off with their friends instead of being with the family, and I used to think they’d never get to know us. I always
made
Paris come to family get-togethers, I wanted her to know the family. And now she goes off and Cassie’s children have all come back. I don’t understand it.”

“Maybe …” Jonah said thoughtfully, “Maybe we were unfair to her to make her commute all those years. All those summers here alone, maybe she was lonely and we didn’t know it. We always thought just being here was enough.”

“It was enough for me when I was young,” Lavinia said. “I was so happy being with my family, my brothers and sisters, my parents. We all had such good times together. We had friends. Paris never wanted friends. When did she ever invite company? I put two beds in her room so she could have company, but she never wanted any. It wasn’t my fault.”

“Nobody says it’s your fault, Lavinia.”

“It was Papa’s dream for us to have this place …” How lucky they had all felt when they moved into this beautiful estate! Lavinia remembered it now in all its good parts, the warmth of being together, the safety, the beautiful afternoons under the striped lawn umbrellas in Papa’s garden, all of them young, hopeful, grateful for having the money to do this, despite the little inconveniences of having to share a house. All right, sometimes it wasn’t so easy to get along all in the same house, but they had managed. And Paris had seemed so glad not to have to go to camp any more. She had loved her room. She had seemed difficult at times, brooding, but all adolescents acted that way, Lavinia knew that. Paris had seemed so close to her then. She remembered when Paris was twelve and going to her first school dance, and had asked her: “Mother, do I have to dance cheek to cheek?” And hadn’t Lavinia answered her: “You do exactly what you want to, and you don’t have to dance cheek to cheek if you don’t want to.” Why, she had always told Paris to be her own person. She had never forced her to do anything! So why was she such a villain that Paris had to run away?

She wished Paris would get married to some nice man who would take care of her. What would happen to Paris when they were gone? She would have enough money, thank God, but she would be all alone, who would take care of her? She needed a husband, a companion. It wasn’t too late. Paris could get married and she didn’t have to have children if she didn’t want to. She could adopt children. Why didn’t Paris want to get married?

Cassie’s children had each moved into their own apartment when they graduated from college, and then each of them had been married within a year. Paris had her own apartment, Lavinia had let her; hadn’t she furnished it with all the best, paid for everything, been a friend and a mother at the same time? Why, she remembered one time when Paris wanted to buy a table and had said: “Mother it’s so expensive, it’s a hundred and fifty dollars,” and hadn’t Lavinia told her to go right ahead and buy it? She hadn’t been a villain. Why had Paris run away?