Free Paris Was Ours by Penelope Rowlands Page B

each one more insistently than the last, about their various doctors. As we observed that combination of braggadocio and old-man resignation, my mother and I, without saying a word to each other, started laughing. We couldn’t stop. When we left the restaurant a few minutes later, she explained to me, wiping a few tears from her eyes with a tissue, that if people spoke loudly in a restaurant, it wasn’t eavesdropping—they
wanted
you to hear them.
    After briefly going back to the hotel to change for the evening, we went to see Tina Turner in concert. Afterward, proudly toting our oversize programs, we went to La Coupole, feeling “branchées,” as the French say for “hip,” as we walked through the rows of bustling, well-lit tables to our own. We were so high on the thrill of being in Paris, of spending time together, of doing all the things we loved to do, that it was no problem for either of us to stay up so late. Of course the fact that I was seventeen probably had something to do with it inmy case. For my mother, I think it was the sheer excitement of being alive.
    It wasn’t such a huge leap, then, for me to decide that I, too, should go to Paris at the age of twenty-three. My mother had been gone for a little more than three years by then. I had graduated from college and had a year on my own in Washington, D.C. (a place I was drawn to because it had no connection to her in my mind), and, I, too, was ready for a change. Most of all I didn’t want to be at home in New York without her.
    I arrived in September and stayed in a cavalcade of apartments, finally moving to the rue Saint-Sulpice just as the rainy season was ending and it was beginning to get cold. My studio, which I discovered through a friend of a friend, was small, but I found it charming, with slanted wooden eaves and recessed windows covered by brown velvet curtains. Each piece of furniture had its own sense of humor: an uneven little table, two chairs whose legs splayed at odd angles, an armoire whose door wouldn’t close.
    I wanted a job, a life, a circle of friends. But most of all, I was on a mission to find my mother, to try to relate to her as a young woman. For some reason, during that year in Paris, the search to rediscover my mother, to know her in all her aspects—both as she was when I knew her and as she must have been long before I was born—took a geographical bent. In pursuit of my mother’s memory, I stopped before the odd, silvery green of the city’s art nouveau Métro signs that she had admired so, went back to museum rooms to spend time with paintings we had seen together, sat for long spells at her favorite people-watching cafés, wandered down the little shopping streets in the sixth arrondissement where she had loved to go, all in an attempt tofeel her effervescence once again coursing through me. Sometimes, if I was in the wrong mood, the beauty of a place would turn cold on me. I could see in the site of some former or imagined happiness only my mother’s absence, and I felt even more alone. Then Paris became for me like a vault to which I had no key. Instead of repositories of treasure, I had access only to a series of chill, blank exteriors.
    Other times it worked, and I felt an urge to laugh, her spirit a gorgeous secret known only to me. Standing before a butcher’s window to watch the care with which he placed a row of frilly paper flowers on the tiny bone stalks of a prized rack of lamb, I appreciated his delicacy and patience all the more for being certain they would have delighted her.
    When I started looking for a job in Paris, I sent my résumé to someone my mother had known socially, a woman in her fifties, and arranged for an interview. She was curt on the phone, but quite engaging in person. She looked at me intently with her clear blue eyes, and I saw warmth and interest. She asked me about my mother, and when I told her she had died, she stood up and kissed me in the French way, on both cheeks. I told