The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted (4 page)

I could still picture the three of us in one of the upstairs bedrooms, my mother sitting on the edge of one of our beds or moving to the window, where she leaned out into the cool night. Elysius and I would let our hair, damp from a bath, create the impressions of wet halos on our white pillows.
The cicadas were always clamoring, always ratcheting up then fading then ratcheting up again.

“In the beginning,” my mother would start, because the first story marked the birth of the house itself, as if the family didn’t exist before the house was arranged from stone—and she would tell the story of one of our ancestors, a young man who had asked a woman to marry him. He was in love, and it was a great love. But the woman declined. Her family wouldn’t allow it; they didn’t think he was worthy. So the young man built the house, stone by stone, all alone, night and day, sleepless for one year. He was fevered by love. He couldn’t stop. He gave her the house as a gift—and she fell so deeply in love with the house and the man that she disobeyed her family and married him. He was weak and sick from having built the house in such a frenzy of love, and so she tended to him for their first newlywed year, bringing him back to life with bowls of pistou and bread and wine. They lived to a hundred. The husband died and the wife, heartbroken, followed within a week.

The house was built as an act of love. That’s what we were supposed to understand. A portentous story, no? It was a little weighty for two girls to take to heart. But there were more like it.

My great-grandparents owned a small shoe shop in Paris and were incapable of having children. My great-grandmother was called back to the house one winter to care for an old-maid auntie. But they were so in love, he couldn’t stand to be apart from her. One night he showed up on the doorstep,
and he stayed for a week. Every night they heard the ghostly chatter of cicadas—who shouldn’t make any noise in winter. They conceived a child there—and went on to have six more.

And so we were told that the house could make love manifest. It was capable of performing miracles.

Their oldest daughter, my grandmother, was a young woman in Paris during the celebrations at the end of World War II. She was stubborn, brash. She met a young American GI in the crowds around Place de l’Opéra. He kissed her passionately, and then the crowds shifted like tides. They got separated. They searched for each other, but they were both lost in the mad swirl. After the war, he made his way back to France, and through a series of more small miracles, found her in this house, far from where they’d met. And they made a vow never to be apart again.

The house had the power to seal two love-struck souls together forever. We loved the stories, even as we were outgrowing them. We passed the stories between us like two girls playing Cat’s Cradle, handing off the intricate patterns from one set of hands to the other and back again. When Elysius’s interest was fading, I would force her to ruminate on motives, what each person must have looked like. We invented details, elaborated, made the stories longer and more complex.

Leading up to our last trip the summer when I was thirteen, however, Elysius and I started to poke holes in the stories. “What was the series of small miracles?” My mother didn’t know. “There are medical reasons why someone can’t
have a baby for a time and then can again, aren’t there?” The answer was yes, but still … And of course it’s not physically possible for a man to build a house of stone, by hand, alone, forgoing sleep and proper nourishment.

“Yes,” my mother said. “But that’s what makes it an act of pure love!”

Years later, my sister would be converted. This was the place where Daniel, after eight years together and his solemn vow not to remarry, would propose to her while she was soaking in the bathtub.

And I was almost swayed into believing once. One day during our final trip together, the three of us were in one of the upstairs bedrooms, folding and sorting clothes that had dried on the wooden rack. This was my sister’s room and the windows faced the mountain. I don’t know who saw it first, but soon the three of us were collected at the window, watching an outdoor wedding on the mountain. The bride was wearing a long white gown, and her veil blew around in the breeze. We had a pair of binoculars for bird-watching. My sister grabbed them off the shelf and we took turns looking at the scene.

Finally, my mother said, “Let’s get a closer view.”

And so the three of us ran down the narrow stone stairs, through the kitchen, and out the back of the house. The wedding party was fairly high up the mountain so we walked down rows in the vineyard, passing the binoculars back and forth. I remembered adjusting the binoculars each time to fit my small face, and the view through the smeared lens, blurry,
surreal, and beautiful. The bride started crying. She cupped her face in her hands, and when she pulled her hands away, she was laughing.

And suddenly my mother, my sister, and I found ourselves in a swarm of butterflies—Bath Whites, to be exact, white with black spotted markings on their wings. Elysius looked them up in a book at a small bookstore in Aix-en-Provence later during our stay. They fluttered around us madly, like a dizzy cloud of white.

I could see only snippets of my mother’s bright pink skirt and dark hair. Her white blouse was lost in the white butterflies. And so her voice seemed almost unattached to her body.

“Are butterflies supposed to swarm like this?” I asked.

“No,” my mother said, and she told us that it was another enchantment.

We argued with her because we felt it was our role, but I believed in the Bath whites, and I knew, secretly, that Elysius did, too.

That’s the summer I’ve remembered most vividly. I was full of longing in that way that thirteen-year-old girls can long seemingly endlessly because their longing lacks direction. I wanted to be enchanted. I longed for the brothers who lived in the big house next to ours. The older one knew how to balance things on his forehead—sizable things like wooden chairs and rakes—and the younger one would sulk when his brother got attention, and splashed me mercilessly in the pool, which was more green than blue. They had dark
hair and eyes. They smiled sheepishly. They were the exotics, the boys I would have dated if my grandmother had kept my grandfather in France, refusing to give up her home, her country, her language. I imagined that they would understand me in a way American boys didn’t.

I stole a photo of the two of them—the older boy, Pascal, balancing a pogo stick on his forehead, tall and handsome, already muscled, while the younger brother, Julien, watched disdainfully from a lawn chair. I’d kind of fallen in love with the older boy, the one who’d really been trying to get Elysius’s attention. And I kind of hated the one in the lawn chair—the sulker and splasher. I folded the picture up and put it in a zippered pencil pouch in my desk drawer.

In the years that followed, though, I mainly remembered my mother, who was strangely distant on that trip—wistful, quiet—as if she knew, in some way, what might be coming. Maybe her relationship with my father was already fractured—it seemed so to me, and I didn’t know anything about marriage.

The next summer, when I was fourteen and Elysius was seventeen, my mother went to the house without us. She disappeared not for a short stint, but for the entire summer—after the discovery of my father’s affair, something that my mother was frank about, in a typically French manner. She sent my sister and me letters on tissue-thin airmail stationery, as frail as sewing patterns. I wrote her back, every time, on the pink monogrammed stationery she’d gotten me for Christmas, but never sent the letters. I hid them in my
desk. That was the summer of 1989. The last day of August, she called to tell us she was coming home.

Once home, she began making the small pastries she’d fallen in love with while in France—tarte au citron, flan, tiramisu, crème brûlée, pear pinwheels. She never opened a single cookbook. She seemed instead to be working from memory. She’d never been much of a baker before that, but after her trip she seemed to pour herself into the small, delicate desserts. I wanted to be with her, and so I lingered in the kitchen. Maybe this was where I first learned to equate the ephemeral art of baking with abstract things like longing—although, for many years, I’d prefer to call it art, and only until after meeting Henry would I think of it as an act of love. My mother and I sat at the table in the breakfast nook and we tasted cakes—critiquing them quietly in hushed, reverent tones. After a while, she would proclaim that we would never get this one just right. She would claim to give up baking for a day or two, but then she would be back in the kitchen and we would move on to the next dessert.

My mother was quiet and pensive, and a week or so after her return, the last of her letters arrived. It told the story of how the entire mountain had caught fire. The flames came all the way to the back stone steps of the house, but that was where the fire stopped.
A miracle
, she called it. As fond as she was of proclaiming miracles, this one seemed true. But when we asked her to describe the fire, she didn’t want to discuss it. “I wrote it down so you can keep the story forever,” she told us. It was strange that she wouldn’t tell us, but I didn’t pester
her. We were lucky she was home. She was fragile, and, moreover, she’d proved that she could be run off. I let it be.

One day she stopped baking. She said that we’d tried all the pastries and gotten them all wrong. There was no need for more. After she made the announcement, she seemed less restless, more peaceful, and so I took this as a good thing.

But I kept baking, alone, at first in a clumsy attempt to lure her back into the kitchen to spend time with me, and then simply to be lost in the world I’d found there.

All those years later, I would catch myself pinching dough in a specific way or smelling an exact scent that brought me back to myself as a young woman alone in our kitchen, and I would wonder where the picture of the brothers had gone. Where were my mother’s letters now? Where were the letters I wrote back on pink stationery and never sent? Thrown out. Buried away. Lost like everything else.

y mother had led us inside the house and we were now standing in the kitchen. Elysius’s kitchen was restaurant grade, stainless steel and marble, with elegant lighting, kept pristine because she barely ever uses it. Her refrigerator was reliably stocked with things like baby carrots, yogurt, and healthy organic sprout salad takeout boxes, alongside exotic things like certain types of fish flown in from far-off islands, edible flowers, and bulbous roots that, I swear, were black market and vaguely illegal. In general, though, the inside of her fridge lacked color and density. It was airy, had a little echo to it, a lot of white staring back at you.

Now the kitchen was bustling with caterers. A woman in a blue cocktail dress was giving orders. She glanced at her BlackBerry and whisked out onto the deck to take a call.
There were tureens with ladles, long trays stacked with frothy appetizers, towers of shrimp, mussels, and clams, cases of wine, rows of stemware.

My mother was trying to explain to Abbot, once again, that no one had been hurt in the fire, that it was very far away in France. “It was only a kitchen fire. We don’t know how much damage, but everyone is okay!”

Abbot was rubbing his hands together in unrelenting worry. “How far away was the fire? Where’s France?” he asked, and she started explaining all over again.

But I wasn’t listening. I felt unmoored. The news of the house fire seemed to have jarred something loose. Suddenly there were the memories of the house from my childhood, and once they flooded in, there was no stopping my brain. I’d taught myself how not to linger on memories of Henry, but Henry was here, and now I couldn’t resist. I felt unable to stop the image of him—vivid and real—from appearing in my mind. It was like being pulled under by a great tide. Henry and I had been introduced in a kitchen filled with caterers, after all.

Henry Bartolozzi at twenty-four, standing in a kitchen, just before he met me. He was wearing a pair of nicely creased pants, a sport coat, and Nikes. He had black hair, combed but still curly, and light blue eyes. We were both in culinary school at the same time, and we’d both been invited—through friends of friends—to the house of a prominent chef in town. My mother had warned me not to fall in love with a creative type. By this point, Elysius had
been living in New York for a few years as a struggling painter and had dated too many starving artists. My mother was sick of them. “What’s wrong with a med student?” she would say at family dinners. “What if someone chokes? I’d like at least one person here to be able to do a solid Heimlich, someone who can fashion a breathing tube from a Bic pen in an emergency. Do you want one of us to fall on a knife and bleed to death?”