Free Paris Was Ours by Penelope Rowlands

Island, my Canadian friends had headed back to Montreal and Halifax.
    Just before I left Paris, I joined Una and Terry and Josiane and Jay and a French teacher named Elizabeth and a few other people in a Montmartre fondue joint where the owner sang and danced and gallivanted around and drew the blinds and locked the door to any new customers as soon as the place was full. We ate a lot and drank a lot and sang a lot. Then Una unexpectedly burst into tears.
    “Why are you crying?” I asked her.
    “Because we’ll never see each other again after tonight,” she exclaimed. “We’ll never all be in the same room together again.”
    “Yes, we will,” we consoled her, but we were wrong. Some of us stayed in touch, some of us crossed paths again. But most of them I never saw again, not Terry, not Josiane, not Elizabeth, not Una. We were all saying good-bye to the best year of our lives that night, and only Una was smart enough to realize it.
    Thirty years later, on one of many return trips to Paris, I was walking through the Luxembourg Gardens when I spotted Jay standing in the middle of the path, perhaps twenty yards ahead. He was positioned not far from that horrendous student restaurant that had kept me alive so many nights whenmy bankroll was getting thin. He seemed lost in thought. I was now at the point in my life when I was nostalgic for the city of my youth. When I first came here at age twenty-one, Paris was old and I was young. But now Paris seemed young and I felt old. Maybe Jay, whom I was seeing for the first time in twenty-five years, even though we had both lived in New York the whole time, was thinking the same thing.
    “What are you doing here, Jay?” I asked.
    He looked up, not at all surprised to see me, as if we had just seen each other the night before at Polly Maggoo’s, as if the last quarter century had not somehow vanished without our noticing.
    “I could never get this place out of my head,” he said, smiling. He might have been talking about the jardins du Luxembourg, or that particular spot in the jardins du Luxembourg, but I knew he was talking about Paris. No, none of us could ever get Paris out of our heads. None of us ever could. Wherever you are, Una, thank you for the eyeglasses.

VALERIE STEIKER

    Fledgling Days
    T HERE IS AN old photograph of my mother standing in front of the Paris Opéra in 1955. Wearing a plaid suit, a pair of brown gloves dangling from her ringless left hand, she is holding on to her hat with her right hand and smiling into the wind. It is a picture of independence, and like everything about her life before my father, the photograph was a source of endless allure. Bold, dramatic, fascinating, my mother’s adventures as a single woman seemed to be part of a trajectory of pure freedom.
    My mother was twenty-three years old when she moved to Paris. She had lived in New York for a while by then, and felt ready for a change, but had no desire to return to the confines of the Jewish community in small-town Antwerp, Belgium, that she had so eagerly escaped at the age of nineteen. It was a time when ladies still wore gloves, gentlemen wore hats, and the little sparrow known as Edith Piaf held sway over all of Paris. For a little more than a year, my mother stayed with her distant cousin M. and his wife, R., in the sixteenth arrondissement, in a large, rambling, antique-filled apartment whose prize possession was a birdcage that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette.
    The truth is, it wasn’t an especially happy period for my mother. She didn’t have a gang to run around with as she had had in New York, nor did she have anyone in her life romantically. Paris is a good place to be young and melancholy, she used to tell me. After she got started talking about those days—this usually involved her playing some of her Piaf records and telling me how truly those songs about love and loss had moved her—she ended by asking me to swear I’d be married by the time I was