Chapter Fifteen #2
Thirty minutes later, Henry walked into the Café Le Petit Pont, a charming place whose patio faced Notre Dame.
He had arranged to meet Celeste’s grandson, Jean-Luc, here for a late breakfast, and he was as nervous as a much younger man meeting his girlfriend’s parents for the first time.
He tried to tell himself that in the end it didn’t matter what Jean-Luc thought of him, but that wasn’t true at all.
Jean-Luc could eliminate Henry’s access to Celeste with a single phone call.
And he could throw up a roadblock when Henry asked to take Celeste to the Jackson Quick concert, which was the real reason Henry was here.
He asked for a table and was already halfway through his first coffee when a fiftysomething man with silver hair hurried through the door, explaining in French to the waiter who greeted him that he was here to meet a “very old American man.” The waiter pointed, and Henry obediently stood and waved to let Jean-Luc know that he was there, though the description smarted a bit.
Of course, he was, in fact, a very old American man, but it had galled him for the past twenty years that once a person crossed the threshold of his late seventies, his one defining quality in the eyes of others was his age.
Younger people reduced their elders to walking stereotypes in their minds, not realizing that if they themselves were fortunate to live long enough, they’d soon have their own identities erased, too.
“Bonjour, bonjour,” Jean-Luc said, hurrying up to the table. “Or hello, hello. A good excuse to practice my English. You are Monsieur McGee?”
“Call me Henry,” Henry said with a smile, extending his hand. “Thank you so much for meeting me.”
Jean-Luc’s handshake was firm, and he looked Henry in the eye with a genuine smile as they both sat down. “I still cannot believe you have traveled all this way to visit my grandmother.”
“She has always been the love of my life,” Henry said, cutting right to the chase.
The younger man exhaled slowly. “You understand that this is very strange for me. You see, I loved my grandfather very much. To think that there was someone else my grandmother loved before him…”
“I, too, was married for many years, and I think my granddaughter, Melanie, is having trouble knowing that there was a woman before her grandmother.”
Jean-Luc leaned back in his chair. “It is clear from my grandmother’s diaries that she believed you had died.”
“I believed the same of her. I went to visit her uncle after the war. I still can’t understand why he lied to me.”
“I can’t say for certain, sir, but he was captured by the Germans and spent two years in a prisoner of war camp under horrific conditions,” Jean-Luc said.
“He took my grandmother in after the war, did you know that? I think he bore a grudge against Americans for the rest of his life; he thought you should have entered the war sooner.”
“We should have,” Henry agreed.
“My guess? He didn’t want his last living relative leaving him for someone he blamed for his circumstances.”
Henry looked down in dismay. He understood what Jean-Luc was telling him, but it was almost inconceivable that his whole life had been shaped by a lie borne of one man’s misplaced anger.
“Had I known your grandmother had lived, Jean-Luc, I would have waited for her until the end of time. But that means I never would have had my son, and he wouldn’t have had Melanie.
And if your grandmother had married me all those years ago, you wouldn’t be here, either. ”
Jean-Luc blinked. “I suppose that’s true. And now that you have seen her, what do you think? Do you regret coming to Paris? There is not much of her there anymore.”
Henry knew what the younger man meant, but he bristled at the implication that she was mostly gone. “Actually,” he said as politely as possible, “I still see much of the Celeste I once knew.”
“How so?” Jean-Luc looked unconvinced.
“Well, for one, she still speaks fluent English.”
Jean-Luc squinted at Henry. “My grandmother speaks English?”
“Indeed she does. And her spirit. She’s just as sassy as ever.”
“Sassy?” Jean-Luc looked confused. “But when I visit, she has so little to say.”
“How often do you see her?”
Jean-Luc looked across at Henry with a guilty expression. “Not as often as I should, I admit. It is very sad to me to realize that she has mostly disappeared.”
“But what if she hasn’t?”
They were interrupted then by a waiter asking if Jean-Luc would like a cup of coffee and if Henry would like a second cup.
They both agreed, and each ordered grilled toast with butter and jam.
There was nothing in the world like the bread in Paris.
When the waiter had departed, Jean-Luc leaned forward. “Sorry. You were saying?”
“Your grandmother is still in there,” Henry said.
“Dementia is like a slow stripping away of the years, and the memories that go with them. But I also think that a person remains who she is at her very core for a long time, even after the memories are gone. And I think that in many cases, the older memories are still there, locked somewhere deep inside.”
Jean-Luc drummed his fingers on the table. “You’ve thought a lot about this.”
“I lost my wife to dementia,” Henry replied. “Many years ago. And even as the memories slipped away, she was still herself in many ways until the very end. I just had to be patient and wait for her to come back to me now and then.”
“Hmm.” Jean-Luc looked unconvinced. Their coffees and breakfast arrived then, and for a moment, they busied themselves with their food.
It was Henry who broke the silence between them. “I’d like to take your grandmother to a concert this Friday.”
Jean-Luc looked up from spreading jam. “Pardon?”
“A concert. I’m a songwriter, you see, and my biggest hit song—‘City of Light’—was performed some thirty years ago by a fellow named Jackson Quick. I wrote it for your grandmother.”
Jean-Luc’s knife clattered to the table. “I’m sorry, you’re telling me that ‘City of Light’ is about my grand-mère?”
“You know it?”
Jean-Luc choked out an astonished laugh. “The whole world knows that song, I think. But in Paris, we are the City of Light. That song was like an anthem to us in the 1990s. You really wrote it?”
“I did. And I am hoping that if your grandmother can hear it, too, it will remind her of who I am—and of who we were together.”
“Hear it?” Jean-Luc looked unconvinced. “She has lost much of her hearing, I’m afraid.”
“All the more reason to bring her to the concert, where she’ll be able to feel the music in her bones. Jackson Quick himself is arranging tickets for us. You’re welcome to come.”
“To a Jackson Quick concert,” Jean-Luc repeated dubiously. “With you and my grandmother.”
“And my granddaughter, Melanie.” Henry held his breath as Jean-Luc stared at him, clearly trying to make up his mind.
“Well,” Jean-Luc said after a long pause, “I suppose there is no harm. But, Henry, I don’t want you to get your hopes up. She isn’t the same person she was then, you understand?”
Henry smiled. “I think, Jean-Luc, that life pushes us this way and that and bends us to its will. But we are who we are our whole lives through.”
Jean-Luc frowned. “I’m not sure I believe that.”
“You’ll see,” Henry said. “Your grandmother is still in there. We just have to find a way to remind her who she is.”