Every year, the austere navy blue of our winter uniforms became scratchier with the warming months until time came to swap them for the soft cotton of our striped summer dresses. Daffodils nodded their heads in show-off yellow, lawnmowers whipped fresh grass perfume from garden to garden, and barbecues sent feathery ash scampering across London breezes. Months ripened until fit to burst, before June exploded into July with the giddy chaos of summer goodbyes and papers spewing from stuffed backpacks like plucked chicken feathers. Holidays languished into infinity, autumn and school abstract notions that eluded conceptualization. It was child’s summer, a deep trove of moments and sensations to pick through with greedy fingers.

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London summer was fluffy monster-hair grass that I would pull out in tufts with my toes, picnic blankets scaled by zigzagging ants, the teasing chime of ice cream trucks, sticky trickles of homemade orange popsicles on my chin and hands, my wallpaper glowing with golden evening light, and fat bumble bees droning like hairy dirigibles between flowers.

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But that summer, for all its delectable smells and textures, was just surface summer for me, a top layer to pull back like crisp, creamy linen and reveal the real summer beneath. This was summer at my grandparents’ house in France, where we would spend weeks, or perhaps months. To me, the duration was meaningless, until the final day fell with its unmistakeable weight. But each day before that operated within elastic parameters of time and space. Each year was different; like the oil and water sets I played with, my French summers were a set of familiar colors that spawned unique variations, new patterns and movements that sent the outside world swirling away into nonexistence.

 

I remember the spring-loaded tension of preparing our house for our absence, the interminable taxi ride to Heathrow, the smeary purgatory of the airport, and then soaring up and away over patchwork English fields, the wide blue ribbon of the Channel, the blinding bright swathe of white-tipped Alps, and then the turn and tilt over the coastline that grew increasingly familiar with each year. I would gaze out beyond the silver slab of wing at the strange trio of triangular buildings at Marina Baie des Anges, the villa-studded outcrop of Cap d’Antibes, and the crest of Promenade des Anglais arching away from the airport, where my grandparents would be waiting behind the glass on the way to baggage claim. We’d wave and blow kisses and then, led by jerky-wheeled baggage carts, emerge through the sliding doors that made me nervous with their dramatic reveal. I’d smile through my excitement and shyness.

 

In the car, the landmarks slid smoothly by: the whales painted on the motorway wall, the old town of Vence bunched up at the top of a hill, Churchill’s fingers making a “V” shape on a roundabout. We’d cut through the back end of Cannes, up into the hills of Le Cannet, winding up roads lined with balconied apartment buildings staring at the sun and fat villas eyelashed with breezy awnings, with bars of window grates and balcony railings twisted like ropes of licorice. Unruly greenery and shaggy palm trees with distinct personalities lined the road and spilled over from giant gardens whose swimming pools you could feel laying flat, cool, and hidden from view. From a particularly green and winding road we would emerge and right there at the bend was a tall, off-white wall that ended in a large, ornate wrought iron gate. Past that, the road twisted around to continue its course of unfamiliar homes and other hills, but it was here that we would pause to aim the remote control and, after a long beat, watch the gate swing slowly open. The car would roll down the driveway to the house with a rich chomp of underwheel gravel. This was Val Rose.

 

Val Rose. The name alone was so sweetly evocative to me as a child, ringing with a simple, dignified beauty that blithely ignored the complexity of the life within. Val Rose: a neat, pretty name for a galaxy in which big messy joy, leaden regret, sun-bleached spaces, and dark dusty corners seemed to spin together as inexorably and fearsomely as planets, exerting gravitational pull year in and year out.

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The house seemed on the brink of deterioration, a big old proud recluse whose final collapse was held at bay by scattershot maintenance and the pulses of visiting younger generations. The pale eggshell paint of the exterior was peeling and grubby in places, and while much of the acre of land was sunny and manicured, there were whole unkempt places which faded into murky slopes of dead leaves and brittle trees. Inside, bright and spacious rooms filled with precisely arranged furniture gave way to musty corners, where stringy spiders lurked and the grit of the tiles defied the lazy afterthought of a mop. Backs of cupboards, wardrobes, and heavy wooden chests were lined with dirty paper, and the accumulated clutter of a lifetime spent in enormous, expensive family homes held untold pockets of dust and debris—perhaps some old broken-clasped chain of a necklace or a crusty, monogrammed handkerchief.

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Val Rose was beautiful, but weary with an aging stateliness. I loved it, but every year I would spend my first evening feeling intimidated by the stiffly starched edges of the environment and the conservative standards of my grandparents. Our first night was usually spent eating a light dinner of homemade soup and snacks—ham and tomatoes and yogurt and cornichons—the house around us still dormant, unpacked suitcases waiting in the gloomy entrance hall at the foot of the curved marble staircase. Then, tired from travel and the ebbing excitement of our arrival, we’d settle into our rooms on the second floor,  me on the far end of that wide, dusty-carpeted landing overloaded with decaying tapestries and bulky furniture.

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I always had trouble sleeping, and not just the first night. I was terrified in that long room, with its black fireplace that made scary faces at me, its cabinets stuffed with dolls and figurines, its tall windows with curtains that wouldn’t fully close over eerie peek-a-boo gaps, and long ghosts rising up towards the high, high ceiling. Like the other bedrooms, I had an en-suite bathroom and I’d always leave the light on. Even so, my heart would beat faster every time I got up in the middle of the night, and I’d imagine vampires appearing between the bars of the window above me in the bathroom. Then I’d charge back into the dark, jumping onto the old, creaky bed, and tuck the covers under every inch of my body and over my head in spite of the heat, with just a small hole through which to breathe. Like this, I’d eventually be lowered into sleep by exhaustion, the sweet-burning smell of mosquito plug, and the boomerang buzz of motorbikes driving fast through the night on the road above, sweeping distended spokes of light into my room.

 

I would awaken from those terror-tense nights in a different room, one freed from ghosts and horrible faces, awash with womblike light in lieu of silence. It was then that I’d choose books with exciting covers, whose contents in French or Norwegian I’d struggle to read, or I’d write the beginnings of melodramatic short stories, or I’d simply languish in the pink morning glow, idly scratching the lump of a mosquito bite. If I was awake early, I’d go with my father down the hill to La Rotonde, a squat, round building that housed a newsagent and a boulangerie-patisserie. I’d examine books and magazines and play with the bright wings of a pinwheel or a tacky religious statuette as my father selected some papers, and together we’d head into the bustle of the boulangerie for baguettes and croissants. I loved carrying them, the baguettes teasingly warm and crunchy, peeking over the tops of their paper sleeves, and croissants flaky and buttery-plump. It was tempting to tear off the head of a baguette or the knotty corner of a croissant in the car, but I was distracted by the joy of sharing this routine with my father before the rest of our world had fully awoken, wrapped up in hot-car warm-bread smell.

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Some mornings I would wake up to the sound of my grandmother playing the piano, loud and lively, interspersed with the aggressive whir of grinding coffee, the smells of breakfast winding up towards my room. I would venture downstairs to a morning that brimmed with life, ready to greet me, first in the form of a gentle-souled dog (in my earlier years it was Thallie, a docile German shepherd and after that, Tania, a shaggy, smiling golden retriever). Then I’d find my family, who all expected affectionate greetings that I’d dutifully pass around. The heavy white cloth of the dining room table was always covered in an array of soft-boiled eggs nesting in egg cups, wearing little knitted cozies; toast standing to attention in silver racks; wheels of camembert; smooth tomatoes to eat plain with just a scattering of salt; homemade golden marmalade; velvety butter softening on a china plate…

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My father wouldn’t allow me to go straight into the pool after meals, so, after our napkins had been rolled back up into our individual silver rings, and the crumb collector had been rolled over the table, I’d drift about with the daydreaming aimlessness of youth, examining the stuffy paintings of the dining room, portraits of my thin-lipped ancestors long dead, the prettiest of whom I’d try to envision as past versions of me as I imagined a life of corsets and candlelit towers. Or I’d spend some time examining my reflection with childish vanity in the flecked mirrors that covered the doors of the dining room and the length of the drawing room wall. Or I’d run outside with Tania, casting her as my intrepid sidekick on adventures into the dark, hidden lands of the garden, beyond the wall of clementine trees along the pool. I’d etch messages into cactus leaves and stroke smooth, shiny dates that fell from the palms, throw sticks for Tania or try in vain to teach her tricks. I’d pretend I was running away from the house that became run by cruel orphanage masters, stumbling dramatically up the loose-stoned driveway before climbing partially up the wrought iron gate—never too high lest my parents admonish me. 

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When my adventures fizzled out, I’d visit my grandmother in the kitchen. I’d find her sitting on the blue wooden bench at the table as she peered through her glasses at the potatoes she was peeling, an enormous copper pot of jam standing by like some magic cauldron. The kitchen was painted a sad old blue, but I liked playing with the magnets on the fridge or reading the messages that my cousins and I had left for her the year prior on the blackboard. She wouldn’t erase our notes until we’d visited again and could write new ones, and so they were relics, up there alongside shopping lists in big curly handwriting.

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Mamounie had a bright, quiet laugh and a steadfast commitment to propriety. To hug her was to be pressed against a small, gentle body and powdery perfume, her pearls nestled in her nicely ironed shirt. To kiss her cheek was to find the softest ripples of wrinkling skin, and the barest dusting of fine hairs that caught the light and made her glow. In her youth, she had looked like a plainer Grace Kelly, with a cheeky smile and mischievous eyes. Her blonde hair was swept up in a casual chignon from which wispy strands would escape throughout the day. Her lipstick was a ridiculous magenta and travelled deeper into the lines around her mouth with each passing year. She sported sensible glasses that hung around her neck on a chain when she didn’t need them, and she decorated herself sparingly but with exquisite jewelry and Hermes scarves. She was reserved but brimmed with a joyful disposition, spending countless hours teaching me simple piano songs, playing dice with my cousins and me, and writing and illustrating short stories about the adventures of siblings, Bluet and Jaunette, which she would bind with ribbon and send to me. Every year, she’d lead me to her walk-in closet to measure my height. I’d stand a little taller under the comforting weight of the book on my head, enjoying the sound of the pencil making that little mark on her closet door, stepping back to discover delightedly how much I’d grown. She’d write my name next to the new line, always hyphenating it, the only person who ever did so: Charlotte-Victoria.

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There was a long marble terrace than ran the back length of the house, reached via French doors that were maddening to close. It was here that my parents and uncles and aunts relaxed under the shade of a rosy awning and where we’d sometimes gather for less formal meals. Wide stone steps led down to the swimming pool, a large white metal swing, and rows of bushes, a squat little date palm, and at the far end, two tall palm trees that waggled their big heads in the sky and framed a spectacular view down the hill that flattened out into the city of Cannes and, finally, the hazy blue of the Mediterranean.

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I liked to wield the long-poled net that skimmed the surface of the pool and collect the flies and leaves that floated within the outlines of their own surface tension, like chalk around murder victims, while some of the little bug bodies still desperately shook their legs as they floated around on their backs. Then I’d brave the unkempt darkness of the space under the terrace where the dirty carcasses of pool toys had been improperly stored the year before. Ducking, and swiping real and imaginary spiders away, I’d drag the animals out to revive them: a fat whale, a small squeaky dolphin, a flat-backed tortoise. I'd seesaw my legs up and down on the foot pump that fed air with a wheezy whoosh through black tubes that detached themselves all too easily from the air openings like salted leeches. The formless plastic would swell into its cartoon animal shapes before us, smoothing out the folds and wrinkles with rubber-smell resurrection.

Tossed into the pool, those plastic toys would glide about like reincarnations of the dead bugs I had just fished out, herded by gentles breezes, cowering stupidly in the corners. But then I’d jump in, and the water would come alive with the sloshing and slapping of uneven waves as I’d climb onto the animals that protested with rubbery squeals. I’d dive in clumsily, dragging myself out against the waterlogged pull of my swimsuit, only to run back to the deep end and dive again. I’d perform series of underwater rolls, competing with my cousins for how many we could do. With legs splayed out over the sides, I’d hold my nose and hang upside down like an underwater bat or float and feel my hair fan about me weightless and tingling, while my mind wrote tragic poetry about the drifting corpses of heartbroken damsels. I’d emerge with chlorine eyes and watery breath and feel the sun on my skin and the baking cement pool rim under my cooled feet, numb now to the scorching heat. I’d splash water onto those pool edges and draw patterns and words that dried and disappeared like secret messages.

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Away from the shrieks and cannonball crashes of swimming pool play, the house rang with the cold silence of a forgotten tomb, the animation of the elements outside absorbed into the walls as light into black velvet. The damp undersides of my feet collected dust and dog hair as I’d search for some forgotten toy or visit the gloomy cell of the downstairs bathroom, suffering the sticky-wet slap of skin on the toilet seat and the aggravating pink paper that disintegrated into nothing at my water-wrinkled fingertips.

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As lunchtime approached, I was frequently tasked with summoning my grandfather, enclosed in his vast library at the side of the house. Moving with the care of a cat burglar, I’d venture through the TV room and into that grand library, oppressively cool from the red hexagonal tiles to the lofty ceilings, each wall a wooden bookcase lined from top to bottom with the exquisite spines of leather-bound books, embossed with numerals and names I didn’t understand in shiny gold. As I’d round the corner of one bookshelf, I could see to the end of the room, to an imposing painting of Empress Josephine. To the right was a desk that seemed oddly small for the room, bearing smooth glass paperweights and a penholder filled with silver balls that I sometimes sheepishly touched. And behind this was Papouni, peering through his narrow glasses at the tasks before him. His head, frequently topped with a tweed flatcap, was bald and mottled with pale brown flecks and freckles and boasted two rather large ears and a regal nose. He was still handsome, though when he stood, his button-down shirt stretched over his round belly, swollen from bygone alcoholic years and the diet of well-to-do aristocracy. He was stiff and formal, but had a geniality with his grandchildren that bubbled up in amused chuckles or a gently eager stoop to catch a kiss on the cheek. He ambled slowly and importantly, an imposing presence clad in corduroy trousers, the soft sleeves of a cashmere sweater tied about his neck. He looked like his father and all the men before him, though softened by an affectionate smile that was absent in the photos of all those cold-eyed, laughless predecessors, all disapproval in black and white. It was hard to imagine any of them responding to a child with anything more tender than a curt nod or a tut, but my laughter and innocence, any inadvertent impoliteness or silliness, was always met by my grandfather with wry amusement. Nevertheless, I felt small next to him and in awe of the mere fact of his physical presence, his commanding demeanor. He was the distant patriarch, king of my holiday world, with his cold lair at the edge of it.

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After lunch, everyone would stay inside, the adults massaged into quiet languor by heat and food. As though under a fairytale spell cast by the sun scowling in its hottest hour, all would retreat into private pastimes: naps under the flippy air of a ceiling fan, the idle turn of a magazine page. My grandmother would read for a while on her pale green chaise longue, before her head would fall lopsided with sleep, her legs stretched out straight in front of her, enmeshed in varicose veins. I’d prowl about and find various activities to amuse me, or sneak butter cookies from a round tin or soft Vichy mints from a little porcelain box.

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As the sun’s sternness softened into the rich shadows of late afternoon, we would spill once more into the pool, re-dampening the cushions and towels that had been blasted satisfyingly dry in our absence. When the chlorine started to sting, and the sun-sparkled water became a dirty blue in the seeping shadows, I’d sink into the still-warm folds of a towel and sit on the rusting white swing that heaved heavily to and fro with the straining tips of my toes. Suddenly exhausted in my terrycloth cocoon, hair slicked down, eyes red, I’d watch the pool water toss about with the ebbing memory of our movements before settling finally into near-perfect stillness. The villas in the darkening hills about us lost their features and became instead dots of orange lights, like satellites to the illuminated city below, and found distant twins in the lights of the boats in the bay, they in their inky sea, and we in ours. The swimming pool turned milky with the underwater light, and I washed outside in the grotty shower hidden to the side of the terrace, under spider webs and a silky evening sky from which a pale spool of a moon began to cast stars, initially as hard to determine as the tip of needle seen head on.  

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With freshly combed hair and sun-stained nose, clothes deliciously light and dry on my skin after the cloying layers of sunscreen and chlorine, I’d join my family in the deep orange glare of the wood-paneled dining room. None of us would sit until my grandmother had brought out the final dish and had taken her seat, chair pulled out for her with old-fashioned gallantry by my grandfather. We’d then pass around platters of veal or buttery sole, rosy roast beef and dill-sprinkled smoked salmon, icy gazpacho, langouste with mayonnaise, floury potatoes and green beans, lemony carrots and steaming ratatouille. With relaxed chatter and the tap and scrape of silver on china, we’d enjoy our food, left hands on the table as was considered polite, slices of crusty baguette by our plates, a tiny morsel of which my grandmother would save as the final bite of her meal. Afterwards, my grandparents moved to the TV room, each in their own hideous velour reclining armchair, watching the news and “Questions Pour un Champion,” a game show that my father and I jokingly called “Questions pour un Champignon.” My grandmother had favorite contestants, usually for some inane reason as their town of birth, and didn’t hold back in her contempt for others. “Mais quel cretin!” she’d trill with irritation at the screen, as the dog trotted between us and rolled about on the floor, rubbing its hair into all those big, expensive rugs. I’d watch with them; I thought the host had nice eyes, and I could occasionally guess an answer correctly, but I also busied myself with the wall of photo albums behind me.

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There was at least one for every year, from 1907 up to the previous year, which my grandmother had painstakingly put together, documenting everything from daytrips to vacations, visits from friends or family members, pets and cars and houses long buried or sold, mountains and beaches and back yards and living rooms, distant relatives and familiar faces and summer girlfriends. There were black- and-white portraits of serious men in uniform with piercing eyes, blotched and faded sepia scenes of children balancing on walls and playing in snow, brides in veils that puffed out like lion manes or made gauzy rivers on church floors, the flared jeans and miniskirts and block colors of the seventies, my young father posing in a cowboy costume with a school friend, my aunt beautiful and laughing brazenly into the camera with a cigarette in hand, my grandfather slimmer and sporting a thick head of hair and smoking his pipe, my grandmother holding her first son in her arms with the careful poise of a new mother. There were old people I didn’t know but in whose eyes and noses and skin tones I identified my own features—faces that changed from year to year as haircuts and colors were altered and weight fluctuated and wrinkles grew across softening visages like vines.

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My grandmother’s meticulous chronicling extended to the diaries she kept. The writing desk in her bedroom housed book after book that spanned years and were filled with the same turquoise fountain pen ink that she used to label the photographs. In the evening, she sat at the desk in a long, elegant white nightgown, her fine hair falling in soft whorls about her shoulders, and she’d set down the details of her day. I sometimes sat next to her and watched, admiring her handwriting, looking for mentions of me, waiting with her while she held the pages open to let the ink dry.

 

There were fireworks almost every night during two weeks of the summer. We would gather on the marble steps of the back terrace and look to the bay, where the displays sent their colors erupting through the night, the sound always a little behind, the smoke splattered across the sky in sharp lines before swelling and dissolving into messy tentacles. With the two tall palm trees at the foot of the swimming pool as a perfect frame and the other audience members invisible in their villas all about us, we watched as though seated in some colossal amphitheater built for our personal enjoyment, applauding performances choreographed for our critique. One after the other, shots of light were launched into the sky like dive-bombing birds, each alike until the moment they burst. In reds and greens and oranges and purples and silvers and blues, there were fireworks that bloomed like lichen across the sky, and others that heaved with the smooth swell of swimming jellyfish. Others bubbled like freshly popped champagne, or dripped down like the pendulous branchlets of a weeping willow. Sprouting and fizzing and booming and crackling like the toys of celestial giants, they cast textured light on the thickening air about them, while breezes carried towards us wafts of the accompanying music played at top volume down on the Croisette and hints of gunpowder. The displays gained momentum as they approached their grand finales, fountains of colors overlapping, light begetting light begetting light, with no pauses amidst the crescendoeing roars that echoed over the hills. Then a cacophony of sight and noise, rapturous and uninhibited, thundered wildly and set the night ablaze before it collapsed into a big, saturated silence. Then after a beat, the last deafening boom shook the world and left us behind with our smoky sky and our beating hearts and the distant boats that began to sound their horns in jubilant appreciation, scaring away the lonely quiet that tried to roost in the place of the dissipated fireworks.

Before I knew death or loss, I would tell my mother that I imagined these displays as the sublime throes of a deathbed experience, something like a celebratory send-off, the beautiful moments of one’s life flashing before one’s eyes, a dignified and exuberant tribute to the memories of a departing soul. I couldn’t imagine the leaving of this world, mine being so filled with light and beauty, so richly and prettily decorated, to be anything less.

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* * *

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There were variations on our routine, determined by what other family members were there with us, what tenants occupied the basement apartment that I often forgot was there, my age and changing interests. The best times were spent with my cousins, listening on repeat to our uncle’s mix tape of pop music or choreographing dance routines that we’d perform for our amused family. We’d play round after round of Yahtzee, delight in the teasings of our uncle, shout out instructions to one another in the childish weirdness of our play, get lost in games of hide and seek, and stay awake in our bedroom, giggling until late at night, suspended in our private universe.

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There were summers when I’d play alone with my grandmother’s childhood dollhouse that would appear as if by magic on the underused upstairs terrace by the guest room, rearranging furniture and directing little dolls in strange stories. There was the time I got very sick while my parents weren’t there, and my cousin took care of me, making me bowls of plain angel hair pasta that I immediately threw back up into a blue bucket. There was the summer I had just discovered The Hobbit on tape and listened to it over and over again on my Walkman, through headphones that made my ears itch. There was the summer when I had bought my first CDs and listened to them by the pool. There were the later years when I found MTV and often escaped indoors to watch music videos for hours at a stretch, when TLC and Eminem and Jennifer Lopez were new sensations. There were the people that my youngest uncle brought around, different girlfriends that my grandmother invariably disliked or his friend Benoit, whom we all thought was terribly uncouth, joining us shirtless for lunch, beer gut pressing up against the table.

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There were years when the dark underside of our family would smash through the veneer of decorum and pretense and sow sneaky lies and bitter accusations like weeds, reminding everyone of all the stories that we had silently agreed to never address. There were times when disagreements reared up like startled horses and died down just as fast, arguments tentatively started then abandoned in favor of private, whispered admissions of resentment. I’d watch these events from a distance, eavesdropping, surveying through the railings of the stairwell, interested and yet quick to forget once the veneer had been restored. Somehow, while those were the real monsters in that big house, they seemed far less frightening than the ones I had dreamed up alone in the dark. Living the sheltered life I did, I experienced a perverse thrill at these undercurrents, with my safety never compromised. In fact, I enjoyed discussing those things with my mother like an adult, like a spectator, dissecting the family members and their motivations with a slight air of superiority. What’s more, I interpreted such things almost as affirmations of family, manifestations of our deep ties, as opposed to the symptoms of sickness they truly were.

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On a warm, sunny April day in the year 2000, my grandmother went outside to fetch my grandfather for lunch and found him floating face down in the swimming pool that he’d been trying to clean, dead from a heart attack. His expansive library was sold, and my grandmother moved into a top-floor apartment near the Croisette. We continued to visit her regularly, but the family was never all together again. My cousins and I grew up and apart; my aunt later died, her son disappeared, and her daughter, a tired beauty slathered in bad makeup, periodically reemerged with a new man and new baby and new pleas for more money; my parents divorced, as did my youngest uncle; the once opulent treasure trove of beautiful things my grandmother owned was pillaged under her very nose, her money mishandled both unintentionally and otherwise; she stopped cooking, save for some sad, watery soups she stashed in the freezer; she held on to her piano but I never heard her play it again.

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I frequently found myself staying with my grandmother in that apartment. She still napped on the same chaise longue, and we still shared meals together, though at the kitchen table now, on those old blue benches. And we would talk. Under the ugly glare of the kitchen light, our elbows in breadcrumbs, she would tell me about meeting Papouni, his alcoholic days when he violently demeaned and punished his children, and the time she threatened to leave him and he stopped drinking. I came to understand her as a woman who had long ago decided her most comfortable option was to remain in the security of the marriage to which she had committed and whose life had been defined and hobbled by motherhood. She began to reveal the dark thoughts and raw impulses that had been long buried under the reserve of an upper-class upbringing that valued manners above self-expression, that demanded a carefully tended image of properness. She told me of her regrets over how she had raised her daughter, her anguish at watching her shrivel before her eyes.

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I’d examine pictures of her as a young woman: the girl who adored her father, a straight-backed, sparkle-eyed gentleman; the girl who had lived through occupied France and was stubbornly distrustful of Germans for the rest of her life; the girl who stole a tin of sardines as a teenager during the height of rationing and would later tell with a glint in her eye how her parents had chased her around the kitchen table in fury; the half-Norwegian girl who harbored a deep love for the grey rock and bright blue fjords of that country.

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And then I’d look at the old woman before me, with her hunched shoulders and grey, thinning hair she no longer bothered to dye, sharing pieces of herself with me as casually as after-dinner mints. One of her hearing aids would start whistling and she’d chuckle as she readjusted it and then shrug. “Mais bon!” she’d exclaim, “Je suis philosophe!”  

 

* * * 

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I drove past Val Rose a number times over the years, catching glimpses of the upper landing through the big glass window, spying the empty spaces of several felled trees. The house had been painted a deep, garish peach. Though while I craned my neck with curiosity, it was without sentiment, tied as that sentiment was to an incipient nostalgia, my memories still too fresh, and the feelings they evoked still as remote as the lagging sounds of the fireworks I’d watched from that terrace.

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My thoughts of that house are now often preoccupied with the life of my grandparents between our visits, her in her kitchen, he in his library, and the dog padding quietly between them. It seems now like insufficient life to fill all of that space, those three heartbeats lost in that endless network of rooms. But then I remember Mamounie recounting how Papouni would stand next to her with his hand on her shoulder as they consulted her diaries, reading about what had happened on that day in prior years, and I remember Papouni getting up while we were having dinner, walking to her side of the table and kissing her softly on her temple. I think about the ornate silver buttons on her cashmere cardigans and the white socks emerging from his brown leather shoes, her conspiratorial wink and the gold fillings glinting through his smile. I see the ghostly statue in the entrance hall and the green Aston Martin my uncle kept covered in their garage, and I hear that singular quality of laughter as it gets splashed about in the waves of a swimming pool, and the clatter of the shutters being closed one by one at night, and the mosquitoes whining in my ear in the dark. I feel the cold marble stairs under my feet and the spiky grass outside and the green velvet cloth draped over the piano keys. I taste the chocolate milk and brioche that my grandmother set out for us at our four o’clock goûter, soggy bits of pastry collecting at the bottom of the china cup like tea leaves revealing a future I had no need to divine. And I remember waking from those frightened nights alone into mornings that cradled me gently and delivered me to a world that was both infinite and contained, radiant with warmth and music, and in whose thinning threads of harmony I saw not the evidence of unravelment, but merely the frayed features of any object well-loved.