“Well, you can make a roof out of slate or asphalt shingles or tile . . . or even grass like in Sweden.”
“No, styles of roofs.” Her arms burned in impatience. “Use the technical term. Be technical.”
“Do you need to take another tranquilizer, Auds?”
“A kind of roof that begins with an m.” She was nearly crying.
But he didn’t know.
She went to the library. It took all of five minutes.
Mansard.
Not one mansard roof on Graham Street in Portland, Maine. Mansard. It sounded French. It seemed French, like the houses in Madeline.
At a New Year’s Eve party, Frances said her father had been with them for a few days over Christmas.
“What a riot that man is,” Elinor said. “Why weren’t you there that night? Were you out of town?”
“Yes, we were visiting my mother,” Audrey said, low so Larry wouldn’t hear.
“I gave him the new Greene novel,” Frances said. “He loves Graham Greene.”
Madeline. Mansard. Graham Greene. It was clearly a puzzle she was meant to solve. She tried. That winter she drove up and down Green Street, Greenleaf Street, Greenwood Lane, Madeline Street, French Street, Queen’s Court. She had a babysitter with a license who could pick up the kids at school now, so she didn’t have to worry about time. She found a few mansard roofs, but they were mostly single-family houses. The two that weren’t had women’s names above the second-floor buzzers, no hairdressers on the bottom floor.
But she liked driving through the neighborhoods at dusk. She could see it so vividly at that hour, the tall house with the French roof, the hair salon closed for the evening, everything dark save the band of light around its middle, the second floor all lit up and glowing, waiting for her arrival.
SOUTH
They head south, and as they move out from under the dense Baltimore sky toward air and ocean and hot sun, Flo and Tristan beg their mother, Marie-Claude, to tell stories. Flo loves the ones about when Marie-Claude was as young as she is now, and Tristan wants to hear, over and over, how he was born.
Because Marie-Claude does not want her children to talk about their father, who left her at the end of last spring, nearly a year ago now, she gives them the stories they ask for. She tells Flo about Alain Delor, her first crush, and Tristan about the market in Paris where her sac broke as she stood buying peaches in the rain.
But when she begins the story about her first dance, Flo interrupts her. “What about the ghosts in Austria, Mom? Is there one about some ghosts at a fancy ball?”
Marie-Claude shakes her head, certain she has never told either child that story.
Using the headrest, Flo pulls herself up closer from the back seat. “Yeah, there is.” Some of her mother’s fine hair tangles around her fingers, sticky from candy.
“That hurts, Florence,” she says. “Dammit,” she adds in English.
“Maman!” Tristan says, truly shocked to hear an American swear word out of his mother’s mouth.
Marie-Claude is surprised, too, and a bit alarmed by the sudden swell of anger. She had promised herself no harsh words to Flo today.
She looks at the enormous clock beside the speedometer: four more hours. She wonders if Flo or even both of them should have gone with their father to New York instead of coming with her to Hatteras. She cannot predict her moods or the size of Bill and Karen’s house or whether Tristan and Flo will like her friends’ children. She wishes she had enough money to fly them home to Lyon for Easter. She takes her eyes from the road to the fields beside them, a movement as welcome as straightening her legs might be. She wishes she could go on looking sideways.
Tristan says, “What story about ghosts in Austria? Watch the road, Maman. What story about ghosts?” She knows he will persist, never forget, not for one day of their vacation.
“It was in a castle,” Flo says, “a really old spooky castle that used to be a big deal, like a king or a count used to live there or something. And Daddy was there. I think they were engaged then. Were you engaged to Daddy then? Please tell it, Mom.”
This is new, Flo calling her Mom instead of Maman, and Marie-Claude hates it.
She wonders how Flo can know about Austria. Sometimes it feels there is nothing about her life her children cannot uncover, cannot redefine. Once she had thought there would be a certain amount of grace and mystery in being a parent and that what went unsaid about her experiences would be respected and what was revealed would be absorbed without contradiction, occasionally sanctified. Wasn’t that how she had treated her own parents’ pasts? Perhaps it is because they have become American, these children of hers.