The Paris Key (21 page)

What had gone on between Angela and Dave? Was this why they hadn't visited, all those years? What could have been so serious to have caused such a break?

Her heart hurt for them both.

What could—

A tapping at the window. She looked up to see her neighbors Daniel and Marie-Claude.

After a round of
bonjours
, they invited her to join them for espresso.

“Oh, thank you, but I have to run—I am going to visit Notre-Dame this morning, and then I'm going to have lunch with my
cousine
Catharine.”

“Please give them our love,” said Daniel. “To Catharine and Pasquale.”

“I will.”

“Catharine never comes back here,” said Marie-Claude with a sad shake of her head.

“Never?” Genevieve asked.

“Too many memories, I think.”

They all fell silent for a moment.

“Maybe, when a little time has passed, it will get easier.” Even as she said the words, Genevieve felt as though they were trite, a platitude. Still, trite was often true.
“Time heals all wounds,”
her mother used to say.
Healed, perhaps,
Genevieve remembered thinking, looking at her mother's arm,
yet not without leaving scars.

“Perhaps I could join you tomorrow morning,” Genevieve suggested. “Or I'd love to at least come by and look through your store. I remember my uncle used to get old locks from some of his neighbors. . . .”

“Oui, bien sûr,”
said Daniel. “I put them aside, always for him. Always he is working on his book. You are looking to complete his book, I think?”

“I . . . I didn't . . .”

Marie-Claude clucked and said to Daniel in a chastising tone: “It is not because she asks about locks that she is going to finish his book.”

“Ah. Sorry,” said Daniel. “
Quel dommage
—it is only that it is a shame he did not finish.”

“Maybe . . . perhaps I will.”

1997

O
f all the tourist meccas in Paris, the only one Genevieve specifically asked to go see was the top of Notre-Dame. Home to the famous gargoyles.

Her aunt and uncle were not up for climbing the steps, and Catharine (already put out that her parents insisted she accompany them on their “family outing”) just laughed and said she would visit the gargoyles in her dreams.

They waited with Genevieve in the long line, though: Catharine perched on a balustrade on one side of the cathedral, reading her book the whole time, sighing when she had to get up and move as the tourists shuffled forward, one group of twenty at a time.

Uncle Dave made the most of the long wait by browsing the tourist traps that lined the street. He kept insisting Pasquale and Genevieve check out the treasures he found, bringing one after another over to the line for them to look at, sometimes with a shopkeeper yelling at him to
either buy it or bring it back
: tiny hand-crank music boxes that played tinny renditions of “Frère Jacques”; aprons covered with the famous
chat noir
—black cat—of Paris; silly snow globes featuring the Eiffel Tower.

When finally they reached the head of the line, Uncle Dave looked apprehensive about letting Genevieve go by herself. At the last minute he offered to go with her, but Pasquale pooh-poohed the idea, saying he would collapse before he was halfway up.

“I'll be okay,” Genevieve had said. “I'm not a baby.”

“I know
you
aren't,” he said with a wink. “But
I
am. I'll wave at you!”

“You won't be able to see me, all the way up there.”

“I'll wave anyway, just in case. Look for me!”

The circular stone stairs wound up, up, up the tower, narrow and steep. Genevieve climbed, keeping a steady tempo, following on the heels of the man in cargo shorts in front of her. There were so many people right behind that she prayed she wouldn't stumble, for if she did, she would knock over everyone below her like dominoes, all of them falling and thumping their way down the steep stone steps and spilling back out the side doors of the church.

She could see the headlines:
GENEVIEV
E
MARTIN
CAUSES
TOUR
IST CATASTROPHE!

There were grooves worn in the center of the stones, the rock worn away fraction of an inch by infinitesimal fraction of an inch over the centuries. She imagined brown-robed monks and black-robed priests, and perhaps a hunchback or two in rags, climbing the never-ending stairs to the tower to ring the bell.

When she finally emerged at a platform, Genevieve was disappointed to find they were not at the level of the gargoyles yet, but instead at a visitors' center. Yet another place to buy souvenirs, as well as the ticket for the rooftop visit. Some of the sightseers, incredibly, decided not to ascend any farther, already defeated by the rigors of the steps.

But Genevieve figured she had come this far, why stop now?

Up farther, so many steps, round and round and round. Until emerging, finally, at a platform partway up the church façade. The gargoyles' lair.

The view of Paris below was stunning, of course: the Eiffel Tower; the star of streets radiating from the Arc de Triomphe; the Seine flowing around narrow islands as it snaked its way through the city; the faraway dove-white dome of the Sacré-Coeur perched atop the butte of Montmartre.

But it was the gargoyles that held everyone's attention and elicited oohs and aahs. And Victor Hugo's ghosts were alive and well up here in the tower: the hunchback condemned to forever toll his bell, the beautiful gypsy to whom he lost his heart.

Genevieve knew the real story. She and her mother had seen Disney's cleaned-up version (they called it Quasimodo-lite) last year, even though Genevieve was too old for cartoon movies, because Angela really wanted to go and talked her daughter into it. They had shared a bucket of buttery popcorn and hooted at Frollo, then applauded when he met his well-deserved end.

But in Hugo's original tale, Esmeralda sure didn't live happily ever after. In fact, when the beautiful, free-spirited Esmeralda was forced to choose between the noose and the man (the real monster, Frollo), she had chosen death. And then the ever-loyal hunchback had lain down beside her body and died of starvation. Later, when someone tried to separate their skeletons, his bones turned to dust.

Love was destined to destroy you, was Victor Hugo's basic message, as far as Genevieve could tell. A couple of years ago Genevieve had wanted to believe in love. But now . . . now that her mother's abandonment had nearly killed her, she understood. Hugo got it right. Love was out to get you. To destroy you.

“Are you going to let that little lock defeat you? Love defeats every lock, Genevieve; trust your old uncle.”

She knew Dave believed it when he said things like that, and she wanted him to be right. But she wasn't sure.

Genevieve looked down to the courtyard in front of the cathedral. It was a dizzying height, and the plaza was full of groups of tourists, but finally she spotted Dave and Pasquale. Dave was looking up, waving both hands. She couldn't see the expression on his face, but she imagined he was smiling, calling out to her.

He probably couldn't see her but simply hoped she could see him. The off chance that she could, she imagined, was enough for him to make a fool of himself. Gladly. He was like that.

The gargoyles were worth the climb: Some seemed so real they could easily have been demons turned to stone. One appeared to be biting the head off of some much smaller creature—a tiny man?—clutched in his claws. Another was contemplative, his monkeylike face resting in the palms of his oversized hands, as he observed his domain. Others stuck out their tongues, bared their teeth, made faces. Their expressions were so elastic and whimsical it was hard to believe they were carved of stone.

Yet another, apparently made from stone of a different quarry, had not withstood the weather: the face was half gone, the carving sloughing off over centuries' worth of pelting rain and hail. These melted sculptures seemed more sinister, somehow, than the well-preserved ones, as if they were spirits emerging from their stone cocoons.

Genevieve suddenly remembered the scars on her mother's arm, the injury she had never explained to Genevieve. The slick, melted-looking surface. After her mother's death, Genevieve asked her father about it.

He'd said,
“Paris,”
and that was all.

G
enevieve started up the steps of Notre-Dame, hitching her backpack higher on her shoulder and remembering the last time she'd been here, as a teenager, how she had prayed she wouldn't trip.

The backpack was heavy with the presents for Catharine:
Star Trek
paraphernalia and a little taste of the South. After long consideration, Genevieve had decided to bring what she had to her cousin and perhaps buy her something else while she was in Paris.

She wished she didn't feel so awkward around her cousin. Catharine wasn't a bad person; she was just off-putting. Or so Genevieve had always felt. And Catharine's insistence on Genevieve's divulging her dreams wore on her. It seemed to her that certain things should remain private. How was it that Catharine was so annoying when her parents were so lovely, so warm and welcoming?

But then, Genevieve wasn't much like either of her parents, was she? She had aspects of each, she imagined, but she certainly wasn't her father. As for her mother . . . that was harder to know.

Had her mother climbed these steps? She must have. There was that photo of her and Dave here with the iconic gargoyle, the monkey-faced one with wings looking out to the city below. The tour was so orchestrated that every visitor stepped the same way, so their feet would be falling on the same spots.

Did each person leave a minuscule trace? Was there some sort of historical butterfly effect? Did the footfall of one's mother (or one's fourteen-year-old self) leave something behind: the tiniest imprint, the tiniest groove in the stone?

Her mother had come to Paris and had her picture taken in a cabaret, sitting beside a handsome man. Why had Genevieve never known this? Why were there pictures in the farmhouse of Dave in Paris, photos of Angela and Jim on their honeymoon, but only the single one of Angela's later trip?

Or perhaps there were dozens more tucked away in photo albums or shoe boxes. Nicholas had dealt with their parents' things after their dad passed away. He had asked Genevieve if she wanted anything and she begged him not to throw anything away until she had a chance to go through it; but of course she had never made the time, or the mental space, to do so. Had he kept the items in boxes that he tripped over, swearing at her each time? Or tucked in the closet of the spare room, or out in the barn where the insects and vermin would eventually eat through the cardboard and ruin everything so he could feel justified in throwing out the leftover effluvia of not one but two lives?

Like everyone else huddled out on the parapet, Genevieve wished she were alone. But the other tourists jostled and pushed around her. A trio of children spotted ice cream for sale in the courtyard so far below and started to whine about the heat (though the day was chilly and overcast) in a play for a cone upon descent. Two teenage boys spotted friends waiting for them sitting on benches in the courtyard and yelled down, repeatedly, apparently convinced that if they only bellowed loud enough the girls would hear and (Genevieve presumed) be impressed.

But most took photos. So many photos and videos that Genevieve wondered if they were actually seeing anything in the here and now, or whether they would return to their homes in the suburbs of Columbus and Nagasaki and Berlin and look at the photographic evidence of their visit, and say: “Hey! Would you look at that! There was a gargoyle eating the head off a little man. Honey, do you remember a gargoyle eating the head off a little man?”

The walkways were covered in a heavy wire mesh. It made her feel like a bird caged high above the city, crowded into this jail with a flock of foreign fowl. She hadn't remembered that from the last time she was here. Clearly someone—or many someones—over the years had attempted to climb over the stone balustrades in order to obliterate themselves, or to grab an
awesome
photo opportunity, or to prove he or she wasn't afraid.

Or perhaps the mesh was put up to keep tourists from petting the gargoyles, some of whom appeared to invite such ignominious treatment.

To the rear was the steeply pitched roofline of the cathedral below. This roof was unseen from any other vantage point, but nonetheless it was decorated with a line of statues along the eaves. All men: popes or bishops or saints, Genevieve supposed. Realistic (idealized) men, each of which was probably the work of a master craftsman. Still, it was no surprise that everyone came to see the horrifying gargoyles, rather than the martyred saints.

Why would the church higher-ups commission such fearsome sculptures from artisans through the years? And for that matter, why were there a host of them guarding the roof of the greatest cathedral in Paris? This had never occurred to her, but now Genevieve was burning with curiosity. Why would they build a magnificent Christian sanctuary, then top it with demons?

A docent urged the pack of visitors to move along (“others are waiting in line for their turn”) and showed them the access to the bell tower. Only a few climbed these stairs. They were wooden and clearly redone recently, and featured a jarringly modern sign with no words, but a picture of a stick figure falling on its head:
faites attention
, be careful.

And then they were invited to climb farther up, to the very top of the spire. There were no gargoyles here, but an amazing view of the city of Paris, laid out before them like a 3-D map.

Winds buffeted Genevieve, whipping her hair around her, Medusa-like. She enjoyed the feeling of it, even while realizing she would need to find a restroom to put it right. No self-respecting Parisian would ever walk around town with wild snakes for hair. But for the moment she reveled in the sensation: it made her feel base, primordial. Part of the elements.

A visual struck her: What if she were to turn to stone right here and now, hair forever wild, a stricken, slack look upon her face, hands made into claws that clutched the balustrade?

What would Catharine make of that?
she wondered with a laugh.

One of the ice-cream whiners eyed Genevieve with concern, and she realized she must have looked like a crazy lady with her hair whipping about her, standing alone, laughing aloud. The thought made her laugh some more.

Next time Catharine asked about her dreams, Genevieve would tell her this: She stood at the very top of Notre-Dame, winds pummeling her, and she was turned to stone, condemned to use her demonic powers forever to guard the church.

Or could she be guarding the tower from the line of saints and martyrs below?