After my long wait at Charles de Gaulle airport, where the joyful reunions and towering luggage of African families bottlenecked the exits; after the train back to Paris, and the late breakfast my father ate ravenously at the Café de la Paix, where Ernest Hemingway went on his first day in Paris; after Dad and I were seated at the tight-tabled Brasserie Lipp, and the well-dressed older woman next to us, hearing our English, complained in French to her husband that she had had more space the last time.
After all that, my white-haired father and I spent a week mostly in Paris, together.
We did for each other what each of us could not. I spoke French for my father. He paid our way through the city.
He had asked me to make all the arrangements. I’d even booked his flight from Washington, DC, not far from where he lived. In France, I planned to serve as the adult, a cultural chaperone and caretaker. My father, still active but slowing down, accepted my care as would a child.
He had asked, at the Café de la Paix, “When are we having lunch, again?” He never liked eating on aeroplanes.
“Our reservation’s in an hour,” I said.
Our taxi brought us from the eighth arrondissement to the sixth, immediately from one meal to another, over the Seine river and between the well-heeled worlds of the Right and Left Banks of Paris: the street scenes of postcard Paris, which feels like a dream—even, or especially, when you’re really there.
At Lipp, we dug into the sausage, sauerkraut, and other Alsatian wonders for which the place has so long been famous. The wood panelling remained as dark as in the heady memories of my first visit here, as a student of twenty. Signs hung on the Art Deco mirrors, declaring to tourists and regulars that the establishment accepted neither checks nor cell phone use in the dining room. And, that if customers had brought their dogs with them, they should refrain from feeding them scraps from the table.
My father, jetlagged but blissing on the lunch I’d arranged for us, ate slowly. Lipp’s white-shirted waiters moved like dancers. Soft music wafted amid the industrious, aggressive sounds from the kitchen, each time the doors swung wide. Dad paid, smiling, and we left for the eighth arrondissement again, this time for the Hilton near the Saint-Lazare train station, from where travellers leave for Normandy and other points north. I carried Dad’s luggage from the restaurant to the taxi and up to the room. Dad slept hard that afternoon. I went to read, killing time in a nearby café, on the rue Mogador.
I came back to the hotel room in the early evening. Dad was sitting up in bed, having showered, dressed, and curled up again. He was thumbing his smartphone, locked in a ferocious round of Wordle with my aunts, his sisters. Like kids around a Monopoly board.
“So, where for dinner?” he asked, not looking up from his phone. I described a seafood place I’d settled on, called Les Flottes, near the rue de Rivoli, a short stride from the Louvre and the Tuileries gardens. Dad looks like a little boy, I thought, as he played his games in bed.
*****
Dad wouldn’t have come to Paris without me asking him to. My love affair with France reached back more than two decades, since adolescence, and on the wings of my father’s financial support. Later, he reluctantly underwrote a degree in Paris—he thought it useless, during a global financial crisis. He agreed to pay for the rest of school only after a dramatic phone call, my savings dwindling and my classes already begun. My weak voice pleaded from Paris. He cursed and shouted. I murmured my humiliated thanks.
That year, I read Hemingway, and later Edith Wharton. My father had long admired ‘Hem,’ as so many readers called him. Knowing my father’s tastes, and finding it so difficult to talk with him, I sought to understand him through his interest in novels—to ‘read the books my father read,’ like the old song goes. As for Wharton, her novel, The Age of Innocence, is set partly in Paris. The book captures a relationship between father and son, and matters of class and money and American Francophilia, as no book has in the century since it appeared. My own Paris experience taught me a city, despite the traces of shame I carried in my memories ever since.
I shared my knowledge of Paris with my father now. He, retiring only after seventy, had little else to do. His own father had also retired late, having become a colonel in the U.S. Army. I carved out time from a longer summer turn through France’s provinces, with the notion of the low-budget journey, and its culmination in Paris, as research for a book-length travel writing project.
As a student, my love and shame about Paris had danced a long, difficult number together. My father, a prosperous businessman, had raised a son who felt empowered to consider options outside commerce. As wise men have said: one man becomes a soldier, that his son may become a merchant, that his grandson may become an artist. In Paris, I earned a master’s degree, which I assumed would earn praise, not condemnation, from my go-getter father. At that time, as always, he hid away the problems in his business—all his professional pressures. Asking him for money made those stresses combust.
All of that lay fifteen years in the past already. I encountered far greater embarrassments later: the vicissitudes of early-career work and self-provision, occasional joblessness, and a heart-shredding divorce two years before the trip. My father, too, had suffered his own divorce. His marriage to my mother had ruptured just before I started grade school.
Dad and I had more in common than ever on this trip. At home afterwards, speaking about the end of my marriage, he told me, in loving warning: “You’ll be dealing with it the rest of your life.” He would know.
*****
Since childhood, I had learned of France as a place essentially female. My father sent me to schools that perpetuate such notions. My classmates’ fathers spoke of ‘taking their wives to Paris,’ in the falsely modest boast of men who vacation well and don’t mind sharing as much with friends and strangers. The longer I took French, through high school and college, the more female the classes became, in student ratio and in subject matter. Conversation, culture, the refinements of fashion and cuisine and savoir-faire: from Julia Child to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, ladies like these were the embodiments of what French and France meant, or was supposed to mean, to bright-eyed American adepts looking for polish. I came to know France while becoming a man.
In that sense, my French studies and my coming-of-age blossomed together. Living in France first as an undergraduate on exchange, and coming to Paris a few years later, I pursued the language fully, studying hard. I pushed to understand its essence, to solve its puzzles. I mastered its crushed r’s, its pure unbending vowels, its subjunctive tense and its endless irregular conjugations. Like a boy learning the piano, mocked until he can play something beautiful, my French, and the time I spent in its sourcelands, felt foolish until it, too, proved worth the chase.
*****
“She has terrific posture!” my father practically shouted at Les Flottes. A curvy, high-breasted hostess in a flame-colored dress had seated us, trailing perfume and a smile. Dad had always had an eyebrows-up disposition to casual female beauty. He had not come of age at a time when honest heterosexuality was thought illegitimate, and when expressing as much in words, even in euphemism, could put a younger man before a tribunal with human resources. My father’s interest balanced virility and harmlessness. There was nothing toxic in it. He had raised me to understand the difference.
My father and I dined on sea bream and calamari. He faced the room and I, him. Dad lit up, grinning, every time the woman walked by, not at her but after her, in appreciation and a kind of longing, too.
At mealtimes, especially, Dad and I shared our thoughts and took our time. Often we explored the neighbourhood around the hotel, across the eighth and other arrondissements of Paris’ northwest. After a Sunday walk around the Parc Monceau, its leafy perimeter obscuring mansions, we descended the boulevard Malesherbes and onward nearly back to our hotel by the Gare Saint-Lazare. For lunch, we found a sturdy bistro, Le Dêpart Saint-Lazare, which looked out to the station and the weekend travellers milling at its doors. The weather was unseasonably cool for August. One of the waiters wore, over a crisp white shirt, a navy Moncler vest. The place kept its windows open. An autumnal breeze fluttered the paper napkins on the zinc bar.
And we lingered there, over a late lunch for two. Dad had needed to rest his legs, which he’d never asked to do before, after the walk down from the Parc Monceau. I don’t remember much about what we discussed. Mostly, I recall my father’s contentment, as he sat smiling in his chair. I remember the breeze, and my meal of rare steak and the shoestring fries, and both my heavy-poured glasses of red Côtes du Rhône.
Wind, wine, flesh and blood. Dad and I could have flown home that day, satisfied.
*****
The Hilton at Saint-Lazare gathered the international business caste to which my father belonged absolutely. In the large sunny breakfast room, men circulated in their weekend wear—styles from global suburbia, if not straight from the office. The logos on the vests and golf shirts read things like Orvis, Patagonia, Under Armour, Morgan Stanley, Mutual of Omaha. My father, for his part, wore top-and-bottom LL Bean: bygone Americana, in clothing form.
Every morning, to keep Dad comfortable and occupied, I ducked out to the newsstand at the train station and bought an International Herald Tribune for him. He pored over the paper, sitting in the breakfast room long after the waitstaff—Belarusians and Filipinos and Nepalis, the curious global mélange of Paris’ workaday, fluent English speakers—had cleared his plates. I collected him once I was ready. Then we plunged into the bosom of Paris.
One morning we made our way across the river, back into Saint-Germain-des-Prés, to the museum which used to be the studio of Eugène Delacroix. The painter animated the world’s notions of France’s great moments, like “Liberty Leading the People,” the bare-breasted archetype charging past smoke and barricades. Delacroix the man lived out his own complexities. Never married, many have said Delacroix married his art. Yet his longtime housekeeper, a Breton single mother named Jenny Le Guillou, took daily walks with Delacroix in the nearby Luxembourg Gardens. The painter painted her, as well as her daughter. Delacroix left the Le Guillous his inheritance. Delacroix described his Breton domestic as “The only being whose heart is mine, without reservation.”
I watched Dad ponder Delacroix’s studio, his Moroccan-themed canvases, the mysteries of his legacy, and the unsettled paternity of the Le Guillou daughter.
Dad and I ate lunch nearby, at the Café de Flore, the onetime home of French intellectuals, now a magnet for gawkers and tourists without imagination, taking selfies while wearing berets. But it was where Dad wanted to go. Our table had Americans seated on either side. A grey-haired professional type sat to my right, facing me; his blonde, younger girlfriend, in outdated wedges and flared jeans, heard me speaking French with the waiter. Whether the couple wore rings, I couldn’t see.
“You must live here?” she asked, turning to me.
“I used to. As a student.” I gestured over my table. “Thanks to my father.”
They laughed, and as Dad and I left, we wished the couple well. The man was taking his wife, or at least his woman, to Paris. Like Delacroix and Le Guillou, I wouldn’t know, wouldn’t dare ask, their actual status, romantically or otherwise. He seemed a man of means, and she had found a man to hold onto, perhaps.
My father and I—carrying one divorce each—had wanted to be trusted, even needed, by a woman. Yet in my father’s divorce as in mine, our wives had filed first.
Why had he and I been let go?
What had our wives preferred, longed to arrive at, in the Paris of their minds?
Something or someone better. Someone neither him nor me.
*****
“Smell that sea air? I love it!” Dad exclaimed as I hailed a taxi from the Deauville train station to our hotel. He was buzzing, a wellspring of enthusiasm that exceeded all apparent stimulus. I pointed out the masts of the sailboats, which we could see from the station parking lot, as they bobbed and tilted. We could not yet see the open Normandy coast and the English Channel beyond. Dad released another shout of pleasure. His passions always skewed randomly and without justification. That was his way. Later, he told me he’d return with me just to Deauville, skipping Paris altogether.
Deauville is a horse town. It hosts races and a wider, full-blown equine industry, with a calendar of auctions for yearlings. Moguls and aristocrats, from the Aga Khan to Winston Churchill, have made the journey here, for the races and the society that come with them. The town’s American film festival has drawn Hollywood stars for decades, and our hotel marked the tradition by renaming its rooms in their honour. Dad loved that we were staying in “La Suite Nicole Kidman,” which he pronounced with a French accent (“Ni-KÓHL Kid-MÁHNN!”), aloud to himself, intoning the syllables repeatedly and giggling like a child.
Dinnertime led us to a beachside, tepid restaurant. Its floor-to-ceiling windows pulled the violet sky inside. Riders rode horses, alone or in small groups, along the beach. Dad stopped eating whenever a horse passed, taking in their beauty and the rippling sheen of their musculature in the semi-dark. Couples and families tread the boardwalk, bundled and scarved against the unusual chill. At eight o’clock, the restaurant remained all but empty. Around dessert time, I asked our waiter why.
“The season is not with us,” he said, adding that inflation and lingering pandemic restrictions had discouraged the normal inflow of Deauville’s tourists.
All the better for us, I thought. I could guide my father around town without the stress he might feel from crowds, the pressure it might put on his legs, his mind.
The following day we walked the beach, stopping for morning coffee and later a portside Italian lunch. Moored sailboats listed some yards away. Dad sat in the sun, facing the water, taking in the scene and the reassurance of travelling in a slow, guided, very private tour. He had his sunglasses on, and a smile. I was happy seeing my father happy.
We left on an afternoon train back to Paris, after a one-night jaunt to the Normandy coast. Farmland rolled past, in places looking so much like the suburbs of Virginia where my father had raised me. Horses stood in the passing fields, steady, chewing grass or doing nothing at all, as if waiting for something. I figured Dad loved horses because they mirrored his own best qualities: patient and quiet and capable of great strength.
Back in Paris, we went to dinner again at Les Flottes, but the well-postured, lovely-breasted hostess wasn’t there.
*****
Our last days in Paris proved the least attractive. Not even a trip to the Louvre could hold Dad’s interest. The line, starting outdoors had been long and slow-moving. A humid heat had returned to the city.
Once inside the museum, large clots of tourists made simply getting from one room to another a recurring ordeal. We joined the line for views of the Mona Lisa, the wide-set ropes allowing visitors to advance two dozen abreast—like marching soldiers, or lemmings over a cliff. Everyone wanted their selfie, turning with the famous painting behind them to face their phones and the sweaty crowd pressing in. Dad and I got our photos, which was pleasant enough; the images show us smiling, separately and together. Then Dad surprised me.
“Hey, son.” He paused, as if embarrassed. “Let’s get out of here. My legs are shot.”
So we left, having spent twenty minutes inside Western art’s high holy place. It didn’t matter. Dad wanted out, so I took that as my command. We made for the basement exit, passing the Louvre’s exposed foundation stones, and surfaced in the humid light of the afternoon.
The following day, our last full day in Paris, we went to Les Invalides, the former veterans’ hospital that is Napoleon’s final resting place. Dad and I entered the church with the maroon Russian quartzite sarcophagus which holds the emperor’s remains. It sits below ground in a cavernous, circular crypt that soars up to the gilded dome several stories above. The emperor had endured his own failed marriage: to Josephine, who bore him no children. In the pressures of their time, no children meant an unviable union—and no line of succession. Napoleon divorced Josephine and married again, starting a family with a woman he had not loved first. Neither wife was buried with the emperor. In that light the sarcophagus looked like a repudiation.
After lunch in the Invalides neighbourhood, where Wharton, in The Age of Innocence, set a moment of baton-passing between father and son, Dad and I relaxed at the hotel. He resumed his Wordle as I made plans for the evening. Here again, I played the adult, while Dad worked at his play.
In these places—Paris, and the approaching future between an ageing father and grown son—he would depend on me till the end.
*****
The evening light descended slowly upon Boulevard Haussmann. The people moved along its sidewalks, down in the canyons of built sandstone, matching their sluggish pace with the languid summer dusk. Brasserie Pastis, a Provence-themed restaurant in the eighth arrondissement, flaunted a décor of dried-flower bouquets and pink and green pastels, with wide-open windows and dance music blasting overhead. The establishment—what the French call une bonne adresse—had come recommended from the hotel’s younger receptionists. Their age, more than their taste, decided me on the place. I wanted a youthful energy for our last night in Paris.
With packed tables outside, friends and couples laughing and smoking in the gloaming light, Dad and I seemed, at seven o’clock, like the first ones to order dinner. We were seated inside. The meal was good but unremarkable, yet I recall the inarticulate feeling of the evening. One of the waiters paused at moments to dance with furious joy behind the bar, Dad showed unusually frequent smiles as he took in the atmosphere. He and I reflected on the week. We had done Paris. Gone up to Deauville. Considered Delacroix and survived the Louvre. Brasserie Pastis let us call our time there—at the restaurant, and in Paris—everything needed for a well-rendered memory.
After a long hour we paid and left, the diners still few. Plumes of smoke and sound dissipated above the streetside tables.
On a meandering walk back to the hotel, Dad and I passed a café storefront done up in a thousand pieces of plastic vegetation, and a watermelon’s colour scheme—again the pink and green. A neon sign in the café window screamed out a phrase from Hemingway, giving the wheel of cultural interpretation another turn: the French on Americans on France. “PARIS EST UNE FÊTE,” it proclaimed, aping the title of the French-language version of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, his posthumous memoir of his Parisian days in the 1920s.
Paris is a party, I translated for Dad, explaining the reference. He reacted with glee, a shout of joy echoing down the boulevard.
Hemingway today might provide a textbook model of toxic masculinity: a man obsessed with bullfighting and boxing, with hunting and domination over animals and other men. And with victory over death. All these masks failed to cover the insecurities that would ultimately push the writer, in a bout of manic depression, to shoot himself. Hemingway’s sense of manhood, so exhaustively published, lifted him up and cast him down. My father was enthusiastic of his own masculinity yet wise enough to keep tenderness within it. Dad’s softness, the vulnerability of healthy fatherhood, had brought him through a divorce, an entire career’s hard knocks, and the onset of his silver years. His humanity had kept him alive, to revel in Paris at seventy-plus. I was grateful for the burdens my father had borne to arrive here. He had carried me with him.
*****
Dad and I parted ways where we had convened, at Charles de Gaulle airport. We had booked separate flights home from there, mine leaving a few hours after his. From Paris, we rode a morning train east, through the graffiti-ed suburban stations, their names ringing with incongruous pastoral tones of fields and forests: La Plaine, Aulnay-sous-Bois, Parc des Expositions.
Before boarding the train at Gare du Nord I led the way into a large, underground square. Entrances to tunnels, the onward parts of Paris, pocked the middle ground. I was hauling one of Dad’s bags for him.
“Whoa-oh!” he exclaimed. “I’m glad you’re leading the way, son!”
I laughed, yet the moment told me how much Dad had relied on me, up to the very last hours of the trip.
Inside the airport, past the turnstile separating the stairs between the train platforms and the low-ceilinged, halogen-lit walkways, Dad declined my offer to walk with him further. We stood by a departures-and-arrivals screen, its messages flowing right to left in French and English. Morning light filtered through the windows and brightened the slim green horizon beyond. Loose groups of others swirled around us: the French and other Europeans, other Americans, the well-dressed flight crews and airport staff. Again the African families.
My gate lay in the opposite direction. I handed Dad his bag.
“You don’t want me to keeping going with you?” I asked.
“Nope!” he said, with a cheerfulness that surprised me. “I’m good from here. Thanks for a great trip, son!” He gave me a hug and turned, his LL Bean jeans plodding down the hallway toward his flight home.
My own flight was delayed. I killed time at one of the forgotten terminals which are the province and speciality of budget airlines everywhere. I pitied the mother who struggled with her unruly two-year-old as he sprawled and screamed on the carpet. My father never tolerated such outbursts in my siblings and me. Dad taught us discipline, starting even at that tender age, sharing some of the self-control and concentration that so mark his character. Not long after my toddler days, my father became a new divorcee. He was younger then, than I am today.
*****
When I saw him back in Washington, Dad thanked me, for the trip and the work I’d put into it. He had also thanked me all over Paris, almost from the first day. Dad’s gratitude about Paris, his insistence on it, helped absolve the shame I felt from my student days there. I felt lighter now. I had shared the gift with the giver.
In the final scene of Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, the son falters where a woman is concerned. Just before a social call, the young man panics, doubting he’ll find the words to say. His father responds with a bestowal of prodigious good faith: “My dear fellow, don’t you always know what to say?” The father addressed his child as an adult. He blessed him as an equal.
Travelling with my father, moving through our own Paris, I, too, had known what to say—provided it required saying in French. In the balmy sluggish days of that August, Dad and I put aside other problems, even those of family and marriage and fallout from divorce. There were no women to compete for the special affection between an adult son and his white-haired father.
