I suppose it makes the most sense to begin this account with the morning I arrived in Paris. I’ve tried to think back over my first moments in the city: Was there a sound that brushed just right against a memory? Or a smell that was in some distant way familiar? But the fact is that after all those hours on the plane, everything felt so new and odd to me. When I finally stepped off the airport shuttle bus and onto the boulevard de Sébastopol, the only thing I remember noticing was that it was very early in the morning.
At that hour there was a hush that country people don’t expect of a city. The loose spokes of a bicycle’s wheel made a musical sound across a cobbled alleyway, and the sun was just beginning to light up the rows of buildings, all done in the same milk-washed stone. But I didn’t stop to appreciate the quiet. I was worried about my Aunt Cat’s old suitcase. The clasps had given way and I’d found the suitcase on the baggage carousel in its own plastic tub, wound in tape with a sticker explaining that my luggage had been damaged during the flight.
I should have known that the suitcase wouldn’t stand the trip, I’d thought, but I didn’t dare undo the tape and open it there at the airport—I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get it closed again. In any case, all my notes and the important documents were safe in my carry-on; the suitcase only had my clothes and a few books in it, I told myself, and it wasn’t until I was already on the shuttle leaving the airport that I remembered that among those books was the latest biography of my mother, published just a few months ago. I needed to have it with me for my appointment at the French National Archives the next day, and I had no idea if I would be able to buy another copy in Paris.
So, as soon as the shuttle driver handed me my luggage I got down on one knee on the sidewalk and started unwrapping the baggage handlers’ tape. I’d put the book in last, right at the top of my suitcase, not thinking about how old those clasps were or how a heavy book would be the first thing to fall out.
I got the suitcase open. The undershirts I’d packed were rumpled, like they’d fallen out and been stuffed back inside, but the book was there. It had a smear of grease across the cover, and I took out my handkerchief to try to clean it. It wasn’t that I cared at all for the book itself: another sensationalized retelling of my mother’s life by a British professor named Carter Bristol. Bristol has written a number of revisionist biographies, and if he’s come to tasteless conclusions about several household names, it has only made him more successful. The cover of the book, with Bristol’s name superimposed over a photograph of my mother, particularly annoys me, but I wiped the grease off anyway. It’s a lovely picture, one of the few I’ve ever seen in which she is looking directly at the camera. Against the shadows her pale eyes have an eerie quality, and I was reminded of a description I once read in a magazine article: Inga Beart looked out at the world through a pair of blank spaces, it said. Her eyes were two small gaps in creation that had never been inked in.
I got the book cleaned up as best I could and wrapped it in a shirt. After all, I owe Bristol a debt of sorts. It had taken me most of a lifetime to work up the nerve to come all the way to Paris, and it might have taken me the rest of one if it hadn’t been for him. Because even as Bristol twists the facts of my mother’s private life to fit his purposes, in his chapter on Inga Beart’s final years in Paris he does seem to have made a genuine discovery: a handful of letters and unpublished photographs that Bristol claims were taken of my mother during the summer of 1954. The footnote says, “Fonds Labat-Poussin, Archives nationales de France.” If it’s true, then this is the first new material anyone has found on her in years.
My Aunt Cat’s suitcase was not the kind that rolled. It was heavy, and with the broken clasps I had to carry it carefully. I’d chosen a hotel near the National Archives, not realizing how hard it would be to find. First I turned down a narrow passage that ended in a high stone wall, then found myself on a number of little streets that weren’t included on my map, all of them ending at odd angles to where they’d begun.
Of course I started right off wondering if maybe Inga Beart had walked down one of those same streets some early morning a good half-century ago. If she might have left a party as the streetlamps blinked out, leaning for a moment against one of them to steady the same patch of lightening sky. I’ve seen photographs from those Paris soirées: Inga Beart is usually at the edge of the frame, drifting toward unconsciousness on somebody’s arm or turning away from the lens—which in any case was no longer focused on her, but on the new writers and artists and the day’s fresher beauties. They wouldn’t have noticed my mother as she slipped away, unsteady on her feet, stumbling, perhaps, as the heel of one shoe caught a gap in the stones and tore free.
I happened to be passing a shoe repair shop just then, and I stopped for a moment to look in the window. I set my luggage down to give my arms a rest and peered in through the glass at the dusty back shelves. It wasn’t that I actually expected to see a pair of red high heels that might have been left for repairs some fifty years ago in among the galoshes and summer sandals that customers had forgotten to reclaim. But I looked for them anyway, just to be sure.
I hadn’t noticed that I was taking up most of the narrow sidewalk, bending down to look in the window. A young woman with a suitcase of her own stepped into the street to go around me. Her suitcase bumped off the curb and rolled over. I turned to apologize and the girl stopped short, saying something I didn’t understand.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and when she looked confused, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak—”
“Ah, no, okay. It’s okay,” the girl said in English. No point in asking her for directions, I thought. She spoke with an accent I was sure couldn’t be French.
“Let me help you with that,” I said. I picked up her suitcase and set it back on the sidewalk. “I’m afraid you’ve lost a wheel.” I looked to see if it had gone down into the gutter.