“You two tell me stories. I’m tired of talking.”
“No,” says Flo. “Tell the ghost story. Please, Mom, please. Please!”
Tristan joins in, and Marie-Claude lets them continue far past the point at which she’d assumed they’d stop, until their chanting unsettles her more than the idea of telling another story. “Okay,” she says. “Okay.”
“Your father wasn’t with me then,” she begins. “I hadn’t even met him.” She tries but fails to conceal the pleasure she takes in this fact. “I went with my cousin Giselle. She had been invited by her best friend at boarding school in Lausanne, Sigrid. The ball was just outside Linz at a palace that had once belonged to a Habsburg archduke, Franz or Friedle or someone, one of Francis the First’s sixteen children. The palace was later confiscated when the imperial family was forced out of the country by the new government. Eventually, it was resold to this Sigrid’s grandparents. I didn’t know much of the history. I just knew that Giselle traveled with a pack of rich friends and that Sigrid wasn’t the only one who could throw a party in her own castle. And I was a bit more like your father then. I loved big houses and beautiful clothes.”
“He does not,” Flo says, but even in her irritation at one of her mother’s jabs, she can’t muster up enough conviction to pursue an argument. She has already begun to notice how her father seems more pleased when she plays at Janine’s house with the pool than at Bree’s apartment.
Marie-Claude instantly regrets the comparison, regrets this mood on the first day of their trip, and rushes on. “My date was one of Sigrid’s cousins, a sullen boy who seemed to want to talk about nothing else but the strategical blunders of the French army. His country gets occupied twice during one war, and he has the nerve to bring up the failure of the Maginot Line! But I didn’t really care. I was at a ball in a fancy dress and could laugh at just about anything.”
Flo marvels at the thought of her mother （whom friends call a slob, who always wears her hair yanked back with the brown rubber band off the newspaper） in a ball gown, patiently humoring her date. Flo is beginning to question these images her mother feeds them of her disposition before she married their father. She always makes herself out to have been giggly and lighthearted, the gravity of life never pulling on her until she found herself married with children to raise. But her mother’s face is serious, has always been serious, her expression in even the most spontaneous childhood photographs resembling, as her father once said, the portrait of a disgruntled cabinet minister.
Slowly, the story begins to make Marie-Claude feel better as she describes the carriage they rode in, the view of the Danube, the black horses in the twilight. She senses her children’s full attention, Flo’s syrupy breath near her ear and Tristan’s small body turned sideways toward her, and this audience makes her feel needed in a more extravagant, less basic way than usual.
There is so much to tell: the gardens, the courtyard, the intricate bodice of her dress. Finally, the words she chooses are the right ones; they take on the exact shape and magnificence of the moment they describe. She feels strong and alive, driving her children south on a smooth highway.
She tries not to think beyond it where somewhere there is an unfamiliar dirt road that she must find in the dark. They will arrive late, and Marie-Claude, who promised to be there for dinner, will be treated like a reckless child by Bill and Karen, who are a real family, complete with bicycles and a live-in sitter. And no matter how many games her children invent in the water or how relaxed she feels half-asleep in the sun, the sight of Bill’s large, winter-tender feet hobbling down the rocky path to the beach will remind them all each day of what is gone.
“Mom,” Flo says. “Where were the ghosts?”
“The ballroom was enormous and filled with these fabulous gowns and tuxes and champagne goblets. The floor was black marble, and I remember how beautiful my shoes looked against its surface. Have you ever seen black marble? It’s so pure and sleek, like sapphires or the fur of a black panther.”
“Is that where you saw them, on the dance floor?”
“No, I saw her in the garden.” Marie-Claude feels a face, a squat forehead, the sharp edge of an aquiline nose, an ugly, distended mouth, taking shape within her. “She was young, perhaps the same age as I was then, but her face was old with sadness. She held herself straight, upright, but inside she was bent with grief.”