Father's Day (3 page)

A
FEW DAYS
before Harvey's father arrived in Paris, she sent an email, reminding him to get to the airport four hours early in case there were lines. She also advised him that packing liquids in hand baggage would delay him at security.

Sophie had given Harvey two days off from work and told her to come in for only an hour on the third day to look at proof sheets, introduce her father, and show off the projects she was working on.

On the Métro home, Harvey watched a woman rip clumps of bread from her shopping bag. The woman got off at the same station but went in the opposite direction.

Harvey stopped at Murat's grocery to see if her apartment key was ready. Murat's was open all night, and only a short walk from Harvey's apartment on the rue Caulaincourt. On warm afternoons, elderly men and women stopped there to chat. At night, it was bright inside the shop, and there were fruits and vegetables stacked in cardboard boxes. Murat sold everything from cakes to cleaning supplies, and there were tubs of sweets, windup toys, and pocket flashlights on the counter, with prices written out on orange paper that Murat had cut into stars.

The concierge to Harvey's building, Monsieur Fabrice, had warned her when she moved in not to lose the key to the front door, as the lock was an obsolete make and no locksmith
in Paris could copy it. But it was important to Harvey that her father have his own key when he came to stay, so she had sought Murat's advice.

“It will have to be cut entirely by hand,” he had said, holding it up to his eyes. “But there is someone I know who can do it.”

He told Harvey to leave it with him one morning, and he'd try to have it ready by the time she came home.

As promised, Murat had the original and the copy waiting for Harvey when she stopped in. “It looks different,” he said as she held them both up. “Because only that round barrel part is necessary. The rest is for show. Very French, huh?”

Harvey paid Murat for the key and bought gnocchi, basil, olive oil, cake mix, cookies, and three bottles of alcohol-free beer. She had bought much the same only a week before. Her cupboards were full, and the refrigerator smelled like oranges and cheese.

Harvey told Murat that her father was coming in a few days and she needed to stock up. Everything in the apartment was cleaner than it had ever been, she told him, and Murat said he now understood why Harvey had bought Old Spice shower gel
.
Then he held up a bottle of the alcohol-free beer from her bag of things.

“I thought maybe you had a nice Muslim boyfriend—but am pleased to hear it's your father. A girl only gets one father in this world.”

H
ARVEY COULD NOT
speak French when she arrived in Paris two years before, so her company paid for lessons. Her tutor's name was Leon. He was from South America and taught French, Spanish, and Italian from his apartment in the République section of the city, where he lived with his six-year-old daughter, Isobel.

Isobel's mother lived in Chartres, and Leon took his daughter there every weekend on the train from Gare du Nord.

Sometimes Isobel sat with her father and Harvey during the lesson, scrubbing away with a crayon. Sometimes she folded paper and cut bits out to reveal an accordion of faceless bodies.

In the last ten minutes of each lesson, Leon would give Harvey a short passage to translate by herself so he could run a bath for his daughter. Once Harvey asked if they had bubble bath in France, and Leon told her that shampoo was just as good.

“But I want bubble bath!” Isobel said.

H
ARVEY SPENT THE
day before her father's arrival on the sofa with a French paperback novel called
Outre-Atlantique
. The story was about an old man who didn't know where he was born or when. Harvey lay back with a blanket pulled over her body. She closed her eyes for long periods. The writing
was dense, and the rhythm of words, like a current, dragged her out to sleep.

Everything was ready for his visit, including the gift she'd been preparing for Father's Day. It was a box of objects from childhood, and each one stood for some vital moment of their lives.

The most important piece was an envelope containing official documents. She would show these to her father on the last day, and free him from the secret he had been keeping for almost twenty years.

Harvey had discovered the secret by accident. Some minor issue with her French work visa had required her to contact the office of births, marriages, and deaths back home on Long Island. If the Nassau County Clerk had sent the documents directly to her French lawyer, as requested, Harvey still wouldn't know.

She suspected that her father had kept the truth hidden to protect her. There was no other explanation.

I
N THE AFTERNOON,
Harvey watched a black-and-white film that crackled and made the walls flicker. Women in the film went to bed with makeup on. Men wore dressing gowns with their initials under the pocket and smoked over breakfast.

It was gray outside, and keeping the lights on made Harvey feel safe. Around six, she drew an early bath, then put on her pajamas and pushed a piece of salmon around the frying pan.

Closing the curtains before bed, she could tell it was raining by the sound of traffic five stories below her balcony. It was a busy street—a steady climb through Montmartre that
was dangerous in winter when snow dusted the roads, and people huddled in the windows of the bakery, watching for the dazzle of a bus.

Some weekends Harvey invited people over or stayed out at cafés drinking wine. When her friends left to catch the last Métro sometime before midnight, Harvey liked to linger at the table and watch people out late in the darkness. Some strolled with a dog, or walked quickly with bags of food from Murat's, or picked through an early Sunday newspaper, stopping to discard sections of little interest.

Harvey had made some good friends since moving to France. Most of them worked with her in the art department of a media company, which took up three floors of a building that used to be a school. There was a cobblestone courtyard where the executives parked cars or scooters—and where people could go out to smoke or make private calls. Harvey was the only American in the department, and from mid-July to mid-August she spent most of her weekends at colleagues' family houses in the country, returning to Paris with packages of honey or local wine or tiny strawberries that grew wild and didn't last more than a few days.

She often went in on Saturday morning when the office was empty, then spent the afternoon window-shopping along the rue Saint-Honoré, once the main route for prison carts taking people to the guillotines on Place de la Concorde. Harvey would picture the grim, dirt-streaked faces. The pull of the wagon. The echo of horseshoes on cobblestones. People on the street listening to the cries of those who called out for help or mercy or prayers.

There was a café Harvey liked with seats near the window,
and she often went there. The café was expensive, sandwiched between Lanvin and Hermès, but one of the few places to eat near her office. Harvey sometimes looked out past the tourists choosing cakes from a glass cabinet, and with each bite of her meal imagined the dry mouths of people who were long gone from this world, but whose innocence had somehow persevered. They were remembered now, Harvey thought, not for what they had done but for what had been done to them.

She would tell her father about it when he arrived. Watch the expression on his face as she explained it.

Being so far away made Harvey feel their closeness. The physical separation was harder for him because he knew she would never live at home again. But in the two years since Harvey's departure, he had never once complained about her leaving, nor emailed asking her to come back. She used to think he was too proud, but had come to realize that it wasn't pride at all.

So much of her own life had resurfaced on those evenings spent hunched over a language textbook, studying French at Leon's apartment, watching him sharpen Isobel's crayons with a kitchen knife, or clean out her school bag, or wash some favorite item of clothing in the sink so it might dry in time for school the next day.

Like her own father, Leon was always tired and on the verge of some small crisis that could not have been anticipated but which Isobel thought was exciting.

The toilet is leaking. Isobel:
Do you want me to build a boat in my room in case there's a flood?

The carbon monoxide detector won't stop beeping. Isobel:
If you die in your sleep tonight, do I still have to go to school?

The elevator randomly stops between floors. Isobel:
Shall we leave cakes and yogurt in there for anyone who gets stuck?

One evening Leon fell asleep in the middle of Harvey's lesson, so she tiptoed Isobel into the next room and ordered pizza with her cell phone. While they were waiting, Harvey helped Isobel draw a cartoon cat on her iPad. When Leon woke up, he was angry with himself, but Harvey said Isobel was fed, in her pajamas, and had been teaching her French expressions.

Later that night, Harvey took out a photograph of her own father from years ago. She touched his face. Could tell he was happy, despite a reluctance to smile.

After brushing her teeth and getting into bed, Harvey opened her laptop and composed an email to her father, saying she had a free round-trip airline ticket that had to be redeemed soon. She suggested that he look online for times. Perhaps try to make it for Father's Day in a few months?

H
E KEPT A
photo of Harvey on his bedside table.

She was on her bike at the baseball field. Moments before the picture was taken, Harvey had ridden without training wheels for the first time. She was hot and out of breath. Everything looked dusty. He'd been trying to keep up and was out of breath too.

That bicycle still hung in the garage at home. It had stickers on the seat and a silver bell that Harvey used to ring with her thumb. Sometimes her father would set it upside down, let her spray oil on the chain. He used to carry her bike to the car with one arm. She marveled at that.

Harvey imagined him back at home, watching television in bed to fall asleep, or drinking coffee in his socks under bright kitchen lights. She sensed the emptiness she had left behind, a future animated by past—and how the best years of her father's life had only been the beginning of hers.

T
HE NIGHT BEFORE
her father's arrival, Harvey had a bad dream. Everything she cared about in life was gone.

In the shower Harvey pieced together what she could remember of the dream: She had somehow slept through her alarm, then arrived at the Charles de Gaulle Airport hours late to find it completely abandoned. Taped to the walls in baggage claim (the way she taped things above her desk at work) were photos of her as a child with her father. They were doing things she had forgotten about. But in the dream it was all happening for the first time.

Then, at the empty airport, Harvey remembered that the airplane her father was on had crashed into the sea, or had never taken off, or never existed—and when she looked outside, realized the airport had been closed for years. A runway cracked and overgrown with weeds. Birds circling the control tower.

In the dream she had lived always
there
. Had never been born in the same way she would never die—and the details of her life conjured from emptiness and longing—her father's death as much a fantasy as his life.

Then she was in the hospital.

A child is being born.

First a head. Then a glistening shoulder. A film of blood across the body. A clear, sticky liquid over the mouth wiped hurriedly by a nurse.

Inhalation, then screaming.

The baby is weighed. Her limbs flap because she doesn't know what they're for. She is alive but sees nothing and will remember nothing. This is a world we call
the
world.

B
Y THE TIME
Harvey was out of the shower, the remaining fragments of her dream had come apart like tissue in water. She stood in its wake at the kitchen window, taking mouthfuls of cereal.

Across the courtyard, figures moved between parted curtains. The white corner of a nightgown. The gleam of a pan. A single hand turning, then steam from a tap.

If Harvey wanted coffee before six
A.M.
, she had to hold a blanket over the espresso machine to muffle what sounded like a heavy truck passing through her kitchen. She had learned early on that otherwise affable Parisian neighbors were intolerant of any noise not made by the human voice.

She drank her coffee standing up. Then she rinsed the cup out.

The closet in Harvey's bedroom had a sliding door with a mirror. She dressed carefully, then looked at herself. She had a pair of new ballet flats that some friends had helped her pick out at Galeries Lafayette. She took them from the black shoebox and removed tissue stuffed in the toes.

The taxi stand near her apartment on the rue Caulaincourt had only one car waiting. The bald driver was reading a newspaper over the steering wheel. He opened the window and asked where she was going.

Taped to the dashboard was a tiny calendar with certain days circled. Also, the photograph of a boy. It was early for a
Sunday, and Harvey asked the driver if his son would still be in bed. The driver replied that he'd most likely be up playing video games. His wife worked in a factory making in-flight meals but had weekends off. Sunday-morning traffic was always easy, he said, except in August, when everyone was going on holiday. Then he drove with one hand on the wheel and didn't speak until they were almost at the airport.

The photograph of the boy made Harvey think of Isobel, sitting at the table with her crayon, listening to her father's instruction, as people learned to read and write.

Harvey enjoyed the moments of their family life that coincided with her weekly lesson. Last month a doll shoe had been lost and was not between the cushions of the sofa nor in the transparent case of the handheld vacuum. Harvey heard Leon tell his daughter to wait until the lesson was finished before turning the apartment over. Another time Isobel's bedroom was so untidy that her father just stood there shaking his head. “It's like we've been robbed,” he said, “except they brought toys.”

Weeks earlier, Leon had found mouse droppings in a kitchen cupboard. Isobel spent the afternoon looking for the mouse hole, which she told Harvey would probably be a small, arched opening somewhere in the wall. A week later, their lesson was interrupted by screams of horror when Isobel discovered a box of mousetraps in the weekly groceries.

The echoes of play, and the rituals of their domestic life, made Harvey remember things about her own childhood on Long Island.

It was not difficult now for her to recall when her father was the same age as Leon. But somehow
her
father had seemed
always older—or never quite so young as he must have been to himself.

As her taxi neared the terminal where her father's airplane would soon land, Harvey closed her eyes and pictured her room growing up. It came with the pale darkness of summer nights, the muffled voices from television, and the occasional rising laugh of her father, sitting alone in the next room.

Then she was able to smell the garage in winter and even brush the damp sides of a box of Christmas things kept under the counter below her father's tools. These sleeping objects, now less than shadow, all conjured unintentionally by association, were not like most memories—these Harvey felt in her body, a longing without pain.