As we neared the house we noticed there were chickens running free in the yard.
Jestine laughed. “Don’t kill anything,” she warned me.
“I’m too old,” I informed her.
“Don’t be silly. Old women are the fiercest ones of all.”
We chuckled as we traipsed along, our skirts dragging. Madame Halevy had told me I wouldn’t begin to understand the world until I was her age. Witches are made, not born. That was what she’d whispered to me on the night my son brought us to her house for dinner. Remember that, she’d said before I left. Remember me.
We knocked on the back door as if we were expected guests, and ignored the protests of the kitchen maid, who was startled to find two old ladies calling and did her best to put us off. We said we were too tired to be turned away, and demanded tea before the poor woman could question us about our intentions. When steaming mugs of tea and small lemon tarts had been offered and accepted, the maid explained that her employers and their little boy had gone to Paris for the day. She didn’t have the authority to entertain guests and might find herself in trouble if her mistress discovered she’d allowed strangers into the house. I threw Jestine a knowing look. The original kitchen maid was now an employer with a long list of dos and don’ts. We assured the maid we were well meaning, there to see the new member of the family, and that we had traveled too far to turn heel and leave.
Now that we were inside, I took the opportunity to evaluate my son’s situation. The house was rough hewn, but not without charm. A good thing, since I was paying for it. My son the anarchist had no trouble letting the money from our family business pay his bills. When the maid had been convinced we were harmless, we were brought into the parlor, where lovely lace curtains had been hung over the windows There was the baby in the cradle.
“Do they call her Rachel or Jeanne?” I asked the maid. I hoped it wasn’t Jeanne, the name of her other grandmother, the one who tended orchards near Dijon and likely plucked chickens each evening for a stew.
“They call her Minette.”
I was pleased to hear this. It was a pet name for a little cat. They could call her whatever they wanted as long as they didn’t call her Jeanne. As far as I was concerned, her name was Rachel.
I wished either Jestine or I could have remembered the words Adelle recited to protect a child from harm, but neither of us could recall her prayer. I wished Frédéric had been beside me. I still talked to him inside my head, and so I told him now how happy this visit had made me. My namesake was a beautiful child, with dark eyes. I believe she recognized me when I stood over her cradle. I told her about the butterflies who created a second moon of light, and of blue birds as tall as people, and of a woman who swam away from the cruelties of humankind. I’d brought a gift for her, my mother’s diamond earrings. I left them on a tray beside my son’s easel with a brief note—Comte tenu Rachel de Rachel, From Rachel to Rachel. Most likely he would think the jewels wasteful, silly extravagant things, and would sell them in order to pay his bills. Perhaps that was what they had been meant for all along when my mother sewed them into the hem of her dress.
I’d brought a gift for the household as well, a basket of apples. But as we left the house I noticed there was an orchard just beside the house. We picked apples to eat on the train ride home. The light was deep and gray and the fields were purple, exactly as my son painted them.
NOT LONG AFTERWARD I moved to smaller lodgings, in the Ninth Arrondissement. Our apartment had always been too large, and I had found myself going from room to room as if searching for my husband. My new lodging happened to be close to my son’s studio and an apartment he rented for the nights he spent in Paris, while the mother of his children cared for their home. The children came to me on Thursdays. I marked that day of the week on my calendar with a star. Camille carried the baby and held the little boy by the hand. He reminded me so much of Frédéric, for he had the same sort of tenderness with his children.
“They’re not too much for you?” Camille asked. He called the darling little boy Marmotte, sleepyhead, the same name I had used for him. “They won’t tire you?”
“Do you think I’m ancient?” I said.
“I do,” the little boy said. “A hundred years old. You’re a very old goat.”
I laughed despite myself. I liked a boy who broke the rules. “Did you teach him to be so polite?” I asked my son. “Or maybe your mother told you I was a goat,” I said to my grandson, who laughed and hid behind his father, peeping out every now and then with a grin on his face.