Standing in the spacious bar of The Bank on College Grove, mesmerized by the stained glass ceiling, I was not worried that I had arrived before Paul. I was early. I had left my car in the parking lot at St. Vincent’s. Taking a taxi made more sense than driving in a city I didn’t know, in the rain. I hadn’t imagined how quickly the taxi would get me to my destination. I had time to take in the striking interior of The Bank. Mosaic-tiled floors, intricately decorated plasterwork, sparkling chandeliers—a masterful restoration.
“The bar was once the main banking hall,” came his voice, “when this was a branch of the Belfast Bank.”
I turned around. “Paul,” I said.
He took my hands and pulled me toward him, kissing my cheek. He held my hands a moment longer, his so strong, so alive. “You are a vision, Jordan,” he said.
I was glad I’d splurged on the cerulean blue raincoat—stylish, Grace had pronounced—rather than one of the gray or beige boxy types that I usually bought on sale. My skirt and sweater were unremarkable, but the raincoat apparently had made a good impression.
“It’s great to see you,” I said. I could have said he was a vision. Exactly as I remembered. Salt-and-pepper hair, just long enough to be a little wavy. Strong facial features, warm smile, eyes that looked deep into mine.
Someone appeared to assist us—never a problem with Monsieur Broussard—and took our raincoats. No one asked if we had a reservation. We were ushered to the dining room where the maître d’ greeted us and summoned a starched waiter to seat us.
“Good to see you again, sir,” said the young server in his lilting Irish accent.
Promptly a young woman from the wait staff asked if we cared for a drink.
“Shall we have a glass of wine?” Paul asked. Wine was not my customary lunchtime beverage, but this seemed like an occasion for an exception.
“I intended to be early, to be waiting for you,” he told me when the servers had gone.
“You weren’t late,” I said.
“I made the mistake of checking into my hotel first. The rain, the traffic, and a taxi driver who may not have believed I know the shortest route to the Temple Bar area—exasperating.”
I smiled. Paul was spoiled by having his own driver in Paris—even a driver in the little town in Provence where we’d met. He seemed to read my smile. He made a little dismissive gesture and said, “It is not important. I am here, and you are here.”
He leaned toward me. The table, with its white tablecloth, was a small two-top. I suspected that if he’d wanted a larger one, we’d have it.
“Tell me, now, about your visit to Ireland, and Alex, and your friends,” he said.
I tried to hit the highlights, telling how Alex and I had known Colin and Grace for so many years and how delightful Shepherds was. I mentioned our visits to Kilkenny and the Rock of Cashel. Paul gave a knowing nod. No doubt he’d been to both sites. As for Bridget, I kept it brief, saying she would be getting treatment in Dublin for problems with prescription drugs. And then our wine arrived. I knew it was a French wine; I’d heard Paul order. Otherwise, I knew only that it was red and exquisite.
“So unfortunate about the young woman. I suppose that happens often,” Paul said. “I can only imagine her parents’ worry.”
“I think she’s resilient—and so are Colin and Grace,” I said.
I brought the elegant glass to my lips and waited a moment, thinking how we might move forward in the conversation, acknowledge that “elephant in the room.” Paul wasn’t helping. He was just gazing at me, with the hint of a smile that was—sort of irresistible.
“Was the weather awful, in a small plane? Not that yours is all that small,” I said.
“The sun was shining in Paris,” he said. “We hit turbulence over the sea, but it was not a difficult flight. I have an excellent pilot. You met him.”
I made the wine swirl a little. Paul looked at me over the rim of his glass. We could have reminisced about that other whirlwind flight, but I was relieved that Paul stayed in the moment. “I’ll be returning to Paris tomorrow after I meet with a gallery owner I have needed to visit for some time. It is an opportunity to mix business with pleasure, as one says.”
“I couldn’t believe you’d fly to Dublin just for lunch,” I said in a breezy tone.
But Paul was all seriousness. “Believe it, Jordan. The meeting I arranged was an afterthought. I am here because of you.”
And there was the server, a pleasant young man with menus and his recitation of the lunch specials. Without consulting his menu, Paul said, “I must tell you my favorite lunch, especially on a rainy day, is the venison stew, but I have enjoyed many excellent dishes here.”
“I’ll take your recommendation,” I said, and Paul gave a nod at my wise choice. The ordering was accomplished without much ado.
Paul and I exchanged another one of those meaningful looks, and he said, “It has been much too long, Jordan.”
“About that,” I said.
“Yes, about that,” he said with a soft curve of his lips. “I have much to tell you, and I’m glad you have given me the opportunity to explain—at last.” Was that just a hint of scolding?
“I should have returned your call,” I said. I was tempted to add, the call you finally made after two long months of silence, but I didn’t.
He seemed to be studying me. Maybe he was reading my mind.
“I apologize,” I said with no great warmth.
“I accept your apology,” he said. “And now it is my turn to say how sorry I am for any disappointment—or perhaps even distress—that I may have caused you. Ah, Jordan, you deserved much better than I have given you these past months. My failures have been unforgiveable, and yet I hope you will find it in your heart to forgive me.”
Unforgiveable. That was about right. But the man did have a flair for the magnanimous apology. Whatever indignation I had brought with me seemed to be seeping away.
But not too fast, I reminded myself.
“I’m listening,” I said.
Our server brought warm brown crusty bread and creamy butter, managing to do so with minimal interruption, but Paul waited until he was gone. “I spoke with Emil at length after the reception in Atlanta. He said the show was excellent, much credit to you and Alex. It was truly my loss, to miss that evening.”
“You had that urgent personal matter,” I said.
Paul moved his wine glass a fraction of an inch on the table.
I took a deep breath. “Paul, we were just getting to know each other in Provence. It would have been wonderful if you had come to Atlanta, but you couldn’t, and you called, and I shouldn’t have made so much of it. You weren’t obligated to me, except to be truthful.” I chose my words with care. “Even if the urgent matter involved someone—what I’m saying is, if you were involved with someone—what I’m trying to say—is that all I expect from you is the truth.”
“Jordan, I have never been untruthful to you,” he said. “You are right. There was someone. But it is not at all what you think.”
My throat tightened. What was I supposed to think? “All right,” I said, the words sharp, betraying the fact that maybe it wasn’t really all right.
“I was truthful when I told you I had business in New York that prevented me from being in Atlanta before the day of the show.”
“I believed you.”
“As well you should have done. But something else happened in New York, the last night of Emil’s show there. A young woman introduced herself.”
I turned the cool crystal stem of my glass around and around. “You can thank Emil for keeping your secret,” I said.
“Emil may have noticed her speaking with me, but he did not know who she was. I did not know her.” Paul leaned in even closer. “I was astounded—shocked. Jordan, I did not know that I had a daughter.”
I was only marginally interested in the lunch salad with goat cheese. Paul scarcely touched his.
He had told me something of his time in New York when he was in his twenties. I knew he was divorced after a short marriage. I never knew his wife’s name.
“Amanda,” he said now. “I am sure the attraction for me was that she was so American, or what I imagined an American to be. So exuberant! Such joie de vivre! Also beautiful, but—headstrong, I think, is the word. We had great passion in the beginning. We did not know each other long or well when we married, and we were young.” His gaze was reflective. “Passion is a wonderful thing and much to be desired in the calm seas, but it is not enough for the storms.”
He let that sink in, and I saw where he was going with it. I knew about the storms of a marriage, even when the marriage felt solid.
“After a little more than a year, we parted ways. The divorce was accomplished quickly by today’s standards. I gave her a considerable sum, ensuring she would be most comfortable. All of it—the romance, the marriage—was like a dream. I woke up in Paris and could scarcely believe Amanda had ever been in my life. And that was a long time ago. I did not even know that she had died last year. Ovarian cancer. Terrible.” Paul took a drink of wine that was more than a sip. “I have told you about Amanda because her daughter is much like her. Isabella. She is the young woman who came to Emil’s show in NewYork.”
Nibbling on bread with a bite of salad now and then, I listened in a kind of daze as he described that encounter and their subsequent meetings, his amazement that Isabella—Bella, he called her with fondness—so resembled his former wife, and his skepticism when she first revealed that before Amanda’s death, she had imparted a great secret. In her last dying days, she had told Bella that the man she had known as her father, who had been killed in a boating accident on Cape Cod when she was fifteen, was not her true parent.
“She had a plausible story—but was it just that, a story?” Lines in Paul’s face that I’d never noticed had deepened. “She knew a great deal about me. Yes, she said Amanda had told her everything she knew, but a man in my position would not be prudent to simply accept her statement. I would need verification.”
I spoke at last. “It would be expected.”
“Yes! You understand.” He said this in a kind of rush that was not like Paul Broussard at all. Nothing I’d seen before now had shown Paul’s vulnerability quite so clearly.
“How old is Bella?” I asked.
“She is thirty-four. She was born two months after I returned to Paris. Amanda and I worked through our attorneys. We did not see each other. I knew nothing about a child.”
I put down my fork. “And did you get the verification you needed?”
“Yes. It is true. Bella is my daughter,” he said.
Over our venison stew, Paul told about Bella as any father might, with pride and some amusement, but there was something guarded, too, in his manner. He said with a frown, “I mentioned to you once that I thought I might have been a good father. I had no idea. It is an experience like no other.”
I nodded.
“Bella and I had a furious disagreement, the night before I was to leave New York.” He added, “Before you and I would have been together in Atlanta.”
We were getting to the heart of things, at last.
The argument, it seemed, had to do with whether Bella’s claim was truthful. Paul had told her of the need to consult his attorneys. Now he insisted that he’d handled that conversation badly, but from an outsider’s point of view, I could see it seemed only reasonable that he would have doubts about someone coming out of the woodwork, laying claim to his fortune. Wouldn’t any intelligent thirty-four-year-old woman have realized that?
“I was at the airport, just moments from boarding, when the call came that morning. Bella’s jogging partner had come by her apartment. Bella had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. She was barely alive when they took her in the ambulance. Her friend knew I was leaving the city and she found my number in Bella’s phone. Bella had confided in her about everything.”
Paul finished off his wine. Our waiter who was so in tune to every nuance at our table appeared to offer more wine. Typical of Paul, he looked at my glass, still half full, and smiled. “I expect we will order coffee instead—and dessert?” I shook my head, and Paul said, “Coffee, then. Deux.”
He continued, describing the day at the hospital, waiting for the doctors to say that Bella would recover, waiting to see her. “The guilt and anguish I felt—I can’t explain,” he said. “And why could I not tell you the reason I had to stay in NewYork?” He turned his palms up. “My mind was—I can only say I was not myself.”
“I suppose you weren’t thinking about anything but Bella,” I said.
“Something like that. But I have reproached myself a thousand times. As time went by, it became even more difficult to tell you about Bella—such a long story. As you might imagine, these months have been complicated.”
Our coffee came. Paul took his time stirring in the cream and sugar. “I stayed in NewYork for another week—no, two weeks, I think it was.” He gave me a significant look. It was around that time that we had talked. He still had not explained, and then he didn’t call again for two months.
“I found an excellent psychiatrist for her,” Paul said. “It seems Bella suffers from a depressive disorder but had never been diagnosed. Her mother’s death, trying to accept that the man she believed was her father was, in fact, not, confronting me with the fact that I am her father, which took great courage, and finally my reluctance—my caution, as I saw it—all of these things pushed her over the edge, as they say.”
Paul talked with more ease, as we lingered over our coffee. He said, “I am not sure if it is possible to catch up when you lose thirty-four years, but we are trying.”
“You’ve stayed in contact, then,” I said.
“Indeed. She came to Paris and stayed several weeks. Every day I showed her a new sight, a museum, or a wonderful gallery. She is quite artistic herself. We met with my attorneys and took care of a number of items, as you might expect.” He gave a gesture signaling the business matters were not important. Things like changing his will, making her a beneficiary on insurance policies—those things came to my mind. “I found a nice apartment for her in Paris. I want her to visit often. I would never have imagined all the things a father might do to ensure a daughter’s happiness.”
I didn’t say a word about overindulgence. Who was I to make judgments? I had known my children all their lives, loved them from before they were born. Paul hadn’t had that opportunity. He was certain she was his daughter. He had every right to catch up. Whatever business he was conducting that related to Bella, he could no doubt afford it. I could not say what it was that nagged at me about this new, overpowering focus of his.
Lunch ended after nearly two hours, and Paul said, “Voila! The rain has stopped. So it is with the weather in Ireland.” He suggested a walk along the River Liffey. It wasn’t far to Wellington Quay and the beautiful river. Neither of us was surprised when the sun came out, bright as a jewel. We spent another hour, strolling, holding hands. As we grew more relaxed with each other, I couldn’t resist telling him about the priest hole and the gold chalice.
“The girl hid in the priest hole with her child? Mon Dieu!” he said. I wondered if the thought of his own daughter’s erratic behavior crossed his mind. But he was as fascinated with the discovery of the secret chamber and its contents as I had imagined he would be. “If I can be of assistance with the authentication process, I can recommend an expert archeologist. I am acquainted with two men who are world-class in their field.”
Of course he was.
The sunlight took on that late-afternoon glow. I looked at my watch, and I didn’t have to say anything. Paul said, “I know. If you must go, we can get a taxi at that corner.”
At the corner, he touched my face and turned it up to his. It was a long, lovely kiss. He gave me one of his deep, lingering gazes and said, “Let us say all is forgiven between us and leave it at that. Yes?”
“All is forgiven,” I said.
A taxi pulled up, and Paul opened the door for me. He raised my fingers to his lips and kissed them. “Always, it seems, we are saying goodby, rushing to somewhere else, you and I.”
And that was how we left it.