Cato presented the idea as his father’s initiative.
“My father invited us to spend Easter Sunday with him.”
“Are you sure he meant both of us?” I was incredulous.
“Yes, he asked specifically that you come. We’ll join him for Mass first and go to his home afterward for lunch. What do you think?”
“I think that sounds … nice.”
I’d spent every Easter of my life with my family, and here I was meeting Antoine on the steps of La Madeleine. We were late. It was difficult to come by a taxi on Easter morning and we had no choice but to take the métro—Cato’s first time since I’d met him. He covered his mouth for most of the ride, tapping his foot and watching anxiously as the subway line chart counted each stop before we arrived.
“Haven’t I always told you punctuality is a virtue?” Antoine said to his son.
He turned to me and shook my hand as if we were meeting for the first time.
“Please.” He motioned to an usher waiting behind him, indicating that we should follow him down the aisle below the vaulted ceiling and painted domes to our reserved seats a few rows from the altar.
Afterward, we rode home with Antoine in his chauffeured car. His butler received us, and Antoine led us toward the sitting room with the framed military portraits where I’d waited on my first day visiting Cato. The butler offered us drinks but I only took water. He offered us hors d’oeuvres, too, but I was so nervous I declined. It’s not that I was anxious to have Antoine’s approval. It was more that I feared my relationship with Cato could fall prey to a game of loyalties.
At Séraphine’s urging, I’d borrowed a pale gray spring suit from Tarentina. They’d both been as surprised as I was that he’d returned to me after so much time apart.
“You need to be impeccably dressed, chérie. This is the gesture. The old man is acknowledging your relationship. Either that or his son put him up to it.”
I remembered the day Antoine warned me not to return to see Cato, and yet here we were, sitting together in his salon, me on the edge of the mauve sofa and Antoine leaning back into a blue armchair as Cato sat across the coffee table on an ottoman, both of us listening to his father talk about the weather.
“How lovely when Paris resurrects each April, don’t you agree, Laura?”
“Leticia,” Cato corrected.
“Ah yes, Leticia. Forgive me. And what is it you study here in France?”
Somehow, diplomacy didn’t seem like the right thing to say, and I couldn’t very well mention that I’d long ago stopped attending classes at the language institute.
Cato sensed my hesitation, stepping in with, “She studied international relations.”
“Going into the foreign service, are you?”
“I’m more interested in the social aspects of transnationalism.”
He didn’t seem to care what my responses were, but about hitting all his points of inquiry.
“And tell me, Leticia, when is it that you’ll be going back to … to … your country?” He turned to his son, “Where is it she comes from?”
“The United States,” I answered for myself. “I’ll be going back in June.” That was, after all, still the date printed on my return ticket.
“That’s quite soon.” He seemed pleased.
The butler came in to tell us lunch was ready and we could take our seats in the dining room. Antoine sat at the head of the long table, with Cato to his right and me to his left. A second butler arrived to assist in serving an asparagus soup. When the main course of Lapin Rôti was set before us, I froze.
“Bon appétit,” Antoine said, and he and Cato cut into theirs while I picked at the accompanying potatoes and spinach until there was nothing left but the meat and I had no choice but to put my fork and knife down.
The younger butler arrived at my side looking worried.
“Is there something wrong with your food, miss?”
“No, it’s fine. I’m just not very hungry.” I hoped that would be enough.
“You didn’t even try it,” Antoine remarked mid chew, bits of meat on his gums. “It’s exquisite. You must have a taste. I insist.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t eat rabbit.”
“My family keeps them as pets.”
I noticed Cato trying to hide a smile from across the table, but his father was not at all amused.
“Exactly how many rabbits do you have?”
“About thirty, the last time I counted.”
“You keep thirty rabbits inside your home?” Antoine appeared revolted by the notion, staring at his son as if he’d brought some sort of lunatic to the table.
“They live in an enclosed atrium.”
“And you allow them to keep reproducing, as if in the wild?”
“Most of them are neutered”—I had to ask Cato to translate the word neutered. “There might be a few more now. They’re my brother’s.”
“We can ask the chef to prepare something else for you to eat instead,” Cato said.
It was strange to hear the formal tone he acquired in his father’s presence.
“No, thank you. I’m full already. The soup was delicious.”
Over dessert of a custard tart, Antoine asked me who had recommended me to live in Séraphine’s place. I told him how one of my teachers, a relative of Théophile’s, had put us in touch and after I wrote a letter of introduction and filled out the forms, I’d been interviewed over the phone.
“It’s a shame about Théophile,” he said.
“It is. I’ve heard a lot about him. I would have liked to meet him.”
“He was a kind man, from what I remember. Very sensitive, is what they say. He hanged himself in one of the top floor bedrooms. One of the grandchildren found him.”
Cato and I were both in disbelief at hearing his father’s recollections.
“I didn’t know that,” I managed, wondering if it had been Loic or Gaspard.
“As they say, every house has its secrets.” Antoine sipped from his wineglass. Cato and I exchanged glances.
“I must say your French is quite good, Leticia. But you may want to consider taking elocution lessons. It would help the problem of your accent.”
“How is it a problem?”
“It’s certainly not terrible, but, how shall I put it? It is a bit distracting.” I could tell he thought he was being complimentary.
“She already speaks several languages,” Cato came to my defense. “A subtle accent is hardly anything to be concerned with.”
“That’s very unusual for an American. I assume you were nationalized.”
“I didn’t have to be. I was born there.”
“How fortunate for your parents.”
“I met Lita’s parents when they came to Paris,” Cato told his father. “They’re very warm and gracious people.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes.”
“And tell, me Leticia, what is it your father does for a living?”
“He works in food distribution.”
“Is that another way of saying he is a waiter?”
“It’s another way of saying he owns the largest Latin American food manufacturing company in the world.”
Antoine was quiet for a moment. He then moved the conversation to more neutral ground, complaining about the traffic and what he feared would be an imminent infrastructural collapse when all the fanatical soccer fans and tourists arrived for the World Cup that summer.
When Cato and I prepared to leave, I thanked his father for the invitation, and he took my hand, cupping it with his other.
“Perhaps we won’t see each other again as you will be leaving France in the relative near future, but I do wish you well in your endeavors.”
“She hasn’t decided yet if she’s leaving,” Cato said, which surprised me. “She’s considering extending her stay.”
“I see.” Antoine dropped my hand and took a slow step back. “Well, you will have to excuse me now, children. I’ve enjoyed your company but now I must rest. Leticia, please send my regards to Séraphine.”
He turned his back to us and started down the hall to his study. Séraphine later forced me to write a note to Monsieur de Manou dictated by her, thanking him for his kindness and telling him how I’d so enjoyed the pleasure of being in his home.
On the walk home that Sunday, Cato and I tried to make light of the afternoon.
“Are you sure your mother didn’t have an affair?” I teased. “Maybe he’s not really your father.”
“My mother was faithful to a fault,” he laughed. “He’s definitely my father.”
After a few more steps, he added, “When you get to know him better you’ll see he has some very good qualities.”
“Like what?”
“To begin, he’s extremely brilliant. Really, he’s some kind of genius.”
“I was taught it’s not what you are that matters, it’s what you do with it.”
“I don’t know if I believe that.”
“What do you believe then?”
“I think all people are fundamentally good.”
“So if I’m a saint in my own mind but a demon in the streets, what would that make me?”
“Are you calling my father a demon?”
“No, I’m saying it’s our actions that define us.”
“People are not only one thing all the time, Lita. He’s just a man like I am just a man, and he’s allowed to be complex and contradictory. There are many different sides to him. That’s human nature.”
“Not with my father. What you see is what you get.”
I admit, maybe I sounded smug.
“Well, you’re very lucky your father is so perfect, but Antoine is the only father I have.”
I was quiet, regretting that I hadn’t shut up sooner. Cato paused, too. When we were back on rue du Bac, the noise of the banging drums of a protest on the boulevard headed our way, Cato halted on the sidewalk, and met me with a desperate look I’d not seen on him before.
“Don’t you think I wish I could change him? Don’t you think all my life I haven’t dreamed that he would wake up one day and just be different? I can’t change him, Lita. He never changed for my mother and he is not going to change for you or for me.”
“I’m sorry I—”
I was silent.
“I know how you feel,” he said. “It’s just the way things are. But I’ve forgiven him for the way he is even though he’s never asked me to.”
I thought of my own father. When I was a child I asked him if he ever forgave his father for having abandoned him in the park that day. He looked thoughtful and took his time before answering, “Mi amor, sometimes you have to let part of yourself die so that the rest of you can live.”
A few days later Séraphine started calling each girl down to her room to ask if she planned on staying in the House of Stars another year or if she should make the room available to a new tenant at summer’s end. When it was my turn at her bedside, I told her I didn’t want to go home when the lease on my room was up.
“Well then, chérie, what do you want?”
“I want this life, here, not necessarily in the House of Stars, but I want the life of who I am today, going where I want when I want, doing what I desire. I want the chance to keep exploring.”
“You don’t want to leave your Cato, do you?”
I shook my head.
“Then stay.”
“You don’t understand how it is with my family. They’d die if I decided not to go home.”
“I do understand. I was in your position once. Théo and I lived in Athens for one year in the sixties. He had business there and was very busy, and I met a marvelous Greek man and we spent several months as lovers. When it was time for Théo and me to return to Paris, the Greek asked me to stay in Athens with him. We planned that I would go to the airport with my husband but let him get on the plane without me. The Greek—I can’t remember his name—waited in a car outside the airport. But at the moment my Théo reached for my hand and said, ‘Séra, come, the plane is going to leave without us,’ I could not help but follow him.”
“You chose Théo.”
“No. It was not Théo I chose, but the life that waited for me here, in Paris. I was born for this life, this house. It was my destiny. For a time I regretted how I left the Greek man, but now I think it’s best to leave that way, without tears and embraces. Good-byes don’t serve anyone.”
“You think I should go home.”
“Oh, Leticia, I don’t have advice for you. I only have my stories. But if you do decide to stay, please remind your father to send a check for the deposit, yes?”
“You never heard from the Greek again?”
“Perhaps fifteen or twenty years later, I returned to Athens with Théo. We went to a restaurant in Plaka and I saw a man walking by a row of shops. He was the man I’d loved yet not the same man, tired, with wrinkles and a slow gait, and I understood love is not always what it appears to be. Love was not that stranger. Perhaps I even invented him. Love was the man at the table beside me, though sometimes we did not care much for each other. Love was my family name and my country.”
She rubbed her cigarette into her ashtray.
“Come, chérie, come to my side.” She made room for me on the mattress and took my hand in hers. “My dear Leticia. Sometimes the worst thing is bliss, because once you have experienced it, you know it is very unlikely you will find it again.”
I stayed with her a while longer. We talked about other things. She told me she had decided that this summer she would make it out of the House of Stars and take a trip to Deauville, where she used to love to go for the parties and casinos with Théo.
“I’m going to die soon, and I don’t want to leave this life without seeing the sea one last time.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not?” She clutched my hand tighter. “Even a woman facing death can have a dream. And mine is to see the sea again. I have had a long and full life, chérie. I am now coming to the end of it. There is nothing wrong in saying so and telling those I care for that they should prepare for me to leave them soon. It’s the truth. And we must love the truth even when it is the opposite of what we desire.”
Those weren’t her last words to me, but they’re the ones I remember now.
She died that night.
They didn’t want us in the house when they came to take her away. Loic said she wouldn’t have wanted to be seen in such an unflattering light. She would want to be remembered as the woman she was the day before, not as the large body removed on a folding metal gurney by the muscles of four men from the funeral service company.
The funeral was only for family. We thought that included us, but Loic said it didn’t. They buried her beside Théo in the de la Roque family plot near Chantilly. After the service, Loic and Gaspard returned to the house with their family, which included Séraphine’s niece and nephew and their spouses, and an older woman I later learned was Loic and Gaspard’s mother, Nicole. They went into the salon and closed the double doors behind them. Loic came out two or three times, calling for the maids to bring them fresh coffee and something to eat. Hours passed. A few of us gathered by the stairs on the second-floor landing, trying to guess what was going on.
The next morning the maids went around knocking on the bedroom doors summoning us to a meeting held over breakfast in the dining salon. At nine, all the girls were seated and present, though some of us were still in robes, while Loic and Gaspard sat side by side in two chairs at the head of the table. They looked almost like twins that day in their white button-down shirts and black trousers, their eyes worn with the same rings of weariness dipping down to their cheeks.
Gaspard put his palm to his brother’s back as if to give him the strength to speak.
“I apologize. I haven’t had much sleep.” Loic cleared his throat. “Let me begin by saying I know you are all grieving as we are. The past few days have been difficult as you may imagine, but with the participation of other family members, we have come to some decisions. We hope you will find them agreeable.”
“The House of Stars will remain open through the summer,” Gaspard continued as if they’d been assigned their lines. “But we will close the house at the start of August, at which point we will begin liquidating its contents in preparation for it to be placed on the market in September.”
“We’re being evicted?” asked Tarentina, the designated spokesperson for our group.
“Believe me,” Loics sounded regretful, “my brother and I would like nothing more than to keep the house open, but we are not the ones responsible for this decision.”
“Our mother.”
Dominique uncovered the full story later. Nicole, with additional support from her cousins, who were due to inherit a small percentage of Séraphine’s estate, decided to sell the house as Nicole had always wanted, promising her sons their share so they could each buy a small apartment. Loic and Gaspard had argued that the house was a treasure and they’d be fools to give it up. They said they’d assume responsibility for its upkeep and maintenance, if only the family was willing to hold on to it. They loved this house in a way none of the others did. But Nicole refused.
We got a good look at her the next day when she let herself into the house. She was an especially pale woman with a drinker’s face, a kerchief of short blonde hair, with no feature in common with her mother beyond those de la Roque aquamarine eyes. She wore no makeup and was thin like her sons, dressed in ill-fitting navy pants and a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar that appeared on its fourth or fifth wearing without a wash. She was followed by the real-estate agent she’d appointed to find a buyer.
“The house needs a lot of work,” I heard her tell him as they walked through the grand salon, “but I insist it be sold as is.”
She led him upstairs and knocked on each of our doors to show the man our bedrooms, pointing to walls that could be knocked down to create larger rooms. She never introduced herself or asked our names. Cato and I waited silently by my doorway as she stood in the middle of my room telling the man, “The house will of course be much easier to show once the tenants have cleared out all their belongings.”
And then she received a call on her mobile phone.
“I’m just finishing up some business here,” she told the caller in near-perfect English. “You wouldn’t believe the headache it’s been. I’m looking forward to the day when I can leave Paris and never think of this house again.”
A month passed and the house was still somber, cool with Séraphine’s death, yet outside spring flooded Paris in a lagoon of blooming flowers. I still felt her presence, heard her voice call my name every time I passed through the foyer upon recognizing my footsteps from the boots she hated so much. I’d gone to plenty of funerals for people my family knew but none for someone I’d known as dearly as Séraphine, who’d talked to me like an old friend, offered me all her truths when she felt I needed them. Even though she’d likely distributed those same truths to a hundred girls who came before me, she let me believe I was as unique to her as she was to me.
Cato knew death. He understood it early in life from losing his mother, the bomb, and the threat of his illness. He took in Séraphine’s death with solemnity, watching over me as I adjusted to her absence as though he knew, more than I did, that I’d have to learn this particular strength on my own for another day.
The loss of Séraphine bound the residents closer and we spent most days gathered together, conscious that our days as a group were coming to an end. I’d managed to convince my parents to let me stay an extra month into July, so I could witness the spectacle of the World Cup hosted by France. But just weeks later, we’d be locked out of the House of Stars. I’d no longer be able to speak to Maribel through the cottony wall that separated our bedrooms or fall asleep to the hum of Saira’s TV overhead. There would be no more late-night bossa nova and cachaça-swigging fests in Tarentina’s room and no more gossip sessions over breakfast in the dining salon, though the maids would be remaining in the house as employees of the new owners.
For the rest of the girls, there was the matter of making other arrangements, trying to piece together a future that would keep them from drifting apart. There was no apartment big enough to house more than a few girls. For some, letting go was easier. Saira announced that she’d move into her family’s apartment on rue Royale; Stef wasn’t allowed to visit her there but she said they’d figure something out. Dominique considered making a fresh start in London, and Maribel, who only had one year of school left until graduating, would room with a Mexican friend on rue Pergolèse while the others planned on taking an apartment together as close to our original address as possible.
Tarentina, however, toyed with the ideas of returning to Brazil though she had no family left, only a few childhood friends, or of finally letting herself be adopted by the Professor. She was endlessly intrigued by the subject of my family, how my parents, two dispossessed children, had managed to create their own devoted clan, though she often teased that when I spoke of them, it sounded like I was speaking more of a cult than of a family.
She didn’t know that, as a child, I’d often wondered what it would be like to be parentless like her. As a little girl, I’d been terrified of reliving my parents’ painful past by becoming an orphan myself. Yet as I grew older, when passing a pair of panhandling New York runaways, or cast-off Bogotá street children selling gum at street corners, I’d indulged in a passing fantasy of being forsaken, wondering what it would be like not to be accountable to anyone else. I wasn’t sure I would know what to do with that kind of freedom.
“I’ll only tell you this once,” Tarentina told me one May afternoon when I joined her for a cigarette on her terrace. “I really envy you. It must feel good to know you have a family waiting for you to come home. Sometimes I think the only person who will notice if I die is my accountant.”
“I’ll notice.” I smiled.
“Will you?” She sounded less self-assured than I’d ever heard her.
“Of course. But you’ve got to promise not to disappear.”
“You’re the one who needs to make that promise.”
I stared at the garden below us, the trees still decorated in candy-colored lanterns Saira had hung up for her design school’s fashion show a few nights ago.
“If I had the money, I’d buy this place myself and keep it forever just the way it is now.”
“Don’t be stupid. I’ve been here five years and I do have the cash to buy it, but I wouldn’t take this house if it were given to me. I’m afraid I’d end up like Séraphine, all alone in my bedroom with nothing but stories, guarding this house like it’s a fucking fortress. You’re free now. We all are.”
“Do you think we’ll all stay friends after we move out?” She knew better than I did how these things went.
“Some of us will keep in touch. Others will fade away. It’s always like that.”
“Really?”
“We’ll see each other through weddings and children, I hope, and if there are divorces, we’ll see each other through those, too. We don’t need this house for that. Remember, they call this place the House of Stars, but we are the stars. Without us, it’s just a house, and we’ll go on being stars whether we live here or somewhere else.”
If in Paris I was finding a slow peace, completing the last of my term paper orders for the girls ending their semesters, the windows of the house opening to the debut of summer, what I heard about my home in New Jersey was the opposite, imbued with creeping tension and anxiety because my little brother was declining, the positive effects of his latest treatment wearing off. He’d regressed to his occasional catatonic states, suicidal ideations, and refusal to speak to me when I called. My family hoped that my return would, at least temporarily, help to improve his condition.
I didn’t want to burden Cato with these details, as if I could keep our own panorama pristine. But he heard my end of phone conversations with my parents and Santi, and even though we spoke in Spanish, he could see the trepidation on my face. As much as Tarentina proclaimed it, I was not free at all.
When we were kids, Santi and I used to say, even though we held dual citizenship, we were not American or Colombian. We were del Cielo, our own country. When we learned the pledge of allegiance in school, we made up our own pledge to our family. Ours was the only home I’d ever imagined knowing, and even now, I felt the pull on my heart.
Cato wanted me to stay.
One night in bed he’d said to me, “The way it happened between us, I don’t think it could happen again with anybody else. Not like this. Do you?”
“No. Not like this.”
He looked up at the ceiling and back at me on the pillow next to him.
“I don’t want you to go.”
I saw that he was beginning to depend on me in the way one depends on family, a love taking root beyond the early tumbles of new romance. I said, and believed, that I still had the choice and that I wanted to stay in France beyond my scheduled departure. For another year or two or forever. He believed me, too, even when my certainty slipped into negotiations: I could do both, return home for a while, then come back to France. I could live in both places. I could find a way to be everything to everybody.
Loic arrived at my door holding a small tissue-paper bundle like a pigeon in his hands.
“Gaspard and I have been going through our grandmother’s things, you know, before the others start scavenging and leave us nothing to remember her by. We found this and thought you might want to have it.”
He handed it to me and within its folds I saw Séraphine’s silk kimono blouse with the dragon painted on the back.
I wore the blouse that night when Cato and I went for a walk to Île Saint-Louis, a bottle of wine in hand, settling onto the edge of quai Henri IV amid a crowd of lovers and friends. At nine in the evening the city was just beginning to darken, the Notre Dame lights radiating a golden sheen over the river. We found an abandoned padlock on an empty patch of concrete, probably fallen off one of the bicycles lining the quai. Cato decided to keep it. Later, when we started on our way home, we passed in front of the cathedral where painters and artists stood by easels offering cartoonish portraits to tourists. Cato asked one artist if he could paint our names on either side of the lock. The artist, who said she was an art student from Shanghai, used a tiny brush to print our names in yellow paint, and Cato held the lock by the tip of his fingers as it dried, and we crossed back onto the Left Bank, walking the long stretch from quai de la Tournelle to quai Voltaire, where Cato led me to the wall overlooking the water.
He held me, his face warm against mine.
“I want you to know that if you leave me you won’t ever leave me.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“But if you do go, it will be all right. We will both be all right.”
He pulled apart from me and threw the painted lock with the most force I’d seen come out of those arms, so far across the water that it was impossible to know where it broke the surface.
He took my hand to his lips and kissed my palm.
“I think we should get married. Nobody would have to know. Just us.”
“We already are married,” I said, as if it were the most natural thing, and for that reason I knew it was true, in the only way that mattered.