Free Paris Was Ours by Penelope Rowlands Page A

twenty-five. I always refused. I got mad at her for trying to boss me around about something so important, something over which she theoretically shouldn’t have any say. Besides, she herself hadn’t gotten married so young. Reminding me that she didn’t want me to go through the difficulties she had experienced, the loneliness and doubt that had tormented her until she finally married my American father at the age of thirty-four, long after her family had given her up as a lost cause, she always finished with one of her favorite child-rearing maxims: “Do as I
say
, Valerie, not as I
do
.”
    I didn’t really believe my mother when she said it had been hard to be alone. In Paris she worked for Air France. Because of her gift for languages, she was given a job behind the check-in desk at the airport, and I would imagine her, fetching in her uniform, having conversations with a long line of handsome travelers, each en route to another mysterious destination. My mother tried to tell me that it hadn’t been that exciting. But then there must have been other times, I countered, of going out in Paris, of being young and beautiful and unattached. My mother explained that beneath the glamour of being single there had been a lot of sorrow and anxiety, even a few mishaps. During that year, for instance, a friend of hers called her upand asked her if she wanted to be in the Audrey Hepburn–Fred Astaire movie being filmed around town. The day my mother arrived on the set it was pouring, and as an extra in the train station scene, she was soon completely drenched. She couldn’t help noticing that Miss Hepburn, as the star of the movie, got whatever she desired—a cup of hot chocolate, a fresh pair of shoes. My mother, however, got nothing, other than pneumonia, which meant that her last three months in Paris were spent in an extremely unglamorous fashion—sniffling in bed.
    For the rest of her life, my mother loved Paris. Everything about it inspired her—the city’s rich past, its magnificent buildings, its vibrant intellectual scene. She appreciated the French dedication to life’s refinements, and spent hours truffling through the city, unearthing the best handbag maker, the bakery where you could get the most delectable coffee éclairs. Whether on a trip with my father, my sister, and me or, if we couldn’t join her, on one of her regular solo jaunts, she would pack her days with lunches and dinners and teas, interspersed with visits to museums, galleries, and all kinds of specialty boutiques. Some of the women she knew there would refuse to go out to dinner with her unless a few men were invited, too, not wanting to be seen in public unescorted, but my mother had no compunction about navigating Paris on her own. (Why would she? She had my father, that sturdy anchor, waiting for her back at home.) Bursting with presents and stories and energy, my mother would come home to our Manhattan apartment with beautiful new clothes for me and my sister, a handsome homburg for my father, and, invariably, another batch of funny, self-deprecating tales.
    The few times we went, just the two of us, my mother insistedon only one rule: there was no being tired. There were too many plays and exhibits to see, haunts to revisit, places to discover. Typically, we’d arrive at the hotel, drop off our bags, and then head out on the town, walking and shopping and stopping for lunch at someplace like the Bar des Théâtres, a lively bistro on the avenue Montaigne. I loved going there with her. On one such trip—I was seventeen, my mother was fifty-two, just having recovered from a round of chemotherapy for the breast cancer that had struck her, and by extension our family, out of nowhere—she and I found ourselves seated in the front room next to a table of older men, who leered boisterously at every young girl who walked by, only to turn back to their own conversation, which consisted mainly of listing their aches and pains and complaining,