Fantôme
Lori’s essay, Fantôme, won the Arizona State Bar Association’s 2020 Creative Arts Competition for nonfiction.
All the times I’d wished for a sister, I had one; I just didn’t know about her. I learned about her existence from my father as he was dying. My father had been a lonely young airman on a two-year military tour when he met the mother of that other daughter. Years later, when my daughter and I were on a summer road trip through Europe, I would announce an unplanned detour through Metz, to stand in the city of the daughter my father loved.
My father had been the first in his family to attend college. He met my mother, a few weeks before graduation, during rehearsals for a production of The Pirates of Penzance. My mother’s older brother was singing the tenor lead, and my father had been recruited from the fencing club to play a pirate in the chorus. She was fair-freckled and achingly shy. My father was a tanned, hard-muscled, California artist with a big personality and a sly sense of humor. My mother didn’t drive, so she did her algebra homework during rehearsals, waiting for a ride home with her brother. My father’s graduation from junior college triggered his eligibility for the draft, and he enlisted in the Air Force before the Army could call him up. My father and mother’s courtship was brief and chaste; they married in a judge’s chambers a few days before my father left for basic training. They lived together for about five weeks before my father shipped out for a two-year assignment in France. My mother remembered those early weeks like playing house. When their apartment manager knocked on their door because water was raining onto the sidewalk from a window in the shower, my mother wasn’t sure what to do. She said she didn’t know him well enough to walk in on him in the shower. She was pregnant when he left for France, and I was born while he was gone. I was nearly two the first time he met me.
In the black and white picture I have of his homecoming, I am in his arms, gleefully pulling his Air Force service cap off while his dark, handsome face remains smooth and perfectly blank. I idolized this distant and mercurial father. I would watch him comb his hair, sides back; black wing swept over his forehead. He would arch one eyebrow as he checked his image in the mirror. When finished, he would slip the comb into the back pocket of his Levis and smile. For emergencies, he’d said.
He loved maps. Sometimes he would sit me on his lap with an atlas and point to the countries as he named them. I am like him in more ways than I admit; I understand he longed always to be going somewhere. He told me stories about France, about how he sometimes bought a third-class train ticket to Paris carrying nothing but his sketchbook and a pack of cigarettes. He described the art he saw at the Louvre and the Musée National d'Art Moderne. He told me what it was like to walk along the Seine, but he didn’t tell me he had loved a woman and a daughter in France. He didn’t say he had not wanted to come back. In my memory, his longing is palpable
In 1955, the year he went to France, only officers were allowed to take their families on assignment. Young enlisted men, like my father, left wives and families at home when they were assigned overseas. The young airmen at Chambley Air Base lived four men to a room in two-story wooden barracks with a latrine down the hall. Most of the men stayed close to the base where the language and food were familiar. My father, raised in an immigrant family, spoke fluent French. The French, who still adored their American liberators, welcomed an American who spoke French like a prodigal. My father traded his L&M cigarettes for Disque Bleus in the local café, bought a second-hand tweed jacket, a beret, and a new Rolleiflex camera. He prowled the dirt lanes of the countryside, ate apples picked from roadside trees and asked barefoot children if he could take their pictures. On the nights he made the long walk back to the base from the Metz, he said he saw the ghost of a soldier. The fantôme wore an odd combination of uniforms from different wars.
I am uneasy as my daughter, and I approach Metz in our rental car. On the outskirts of the city, farm fields are divided by low stone walls, and vineyards march up the hillsides. Ground fog condenses in the summer twilight, laps among the trees, and pools at the feet of the hills. I glance at my daughter; she is tall and fair like her father, her eyes are an arresting green and, thankfully, she has only a hint of my nose. I have my father’s nose and dark, heavy-lidded eyes; my profile looks like a woman you might see on an ancient Roman coin. My daughter can sense my mixture of excitement, sadness, and dread. When she asks me what is wrong, I tell her the little I know about my sister.
I sit in the Cathedral of Saint-Etienne, where my father said he went to light candles for the ghost he had seen on the road. The cathedral is hushed. Sun streams through the stained-glass windows, kaleidoscopes across the floor and shatters like confetti around my feet. I am looking for my father; I wonder which pew my he might have chosen; I imagine him kneeling, reciting the Latin liturgy of his childhood, and waiting breathlessly for the bread on his tongue to turn to flesh. I drop a euro in a box and light a small white candle; I expect a sadness that doesn’t come.
The cobblestone streets of Metz are narrow; the front doors of the houses open directly onto the sidewalk, and pots of red geraniums stand in the place of front gardens. I wonder if my sister lives behind one of these doors. The Croix de Lorraine, the battle symbol of Joan of Arc, is the emblem of Metz. When the region fell to the Nazis, local citizens placed a broken Cross of Lorraine in a nearby Basilica with the inscription, Ce n'est pas pour toujours (this will not last forever).
My father fell in love with France. My pregnant American mother was not French, and California was not Lorraine. The California of 1955 was scattered with artless stucco towns and expanses of cauliflower and artichoke fields. My mother saved my father’s letters. He wrote on thin airmail paper, illustrated the margins with cartoons and pencil sketches, and mailed the letters in envelopes marked poste aérienne. He quoted Shakespeare and Songs from the Portuguese. He asked her to name me Lorraine. When the Air Force ordered him home, my father said he’d had no choice but to pack his B-4 bag and returned to California. Staying in France would have taken a brand of courage my father never possessed, so he convinced himself he was doing the right thing, leaving my sister and the woman he loved behind. He came home and trained to be a cabinetmaker. My father’s skin always smelled of the sweet fragrance that is not quite smoke, and not quite sawdust, that happens when the blade of a saw burns as it cuts. He tried to paint, but he couldn’t. His art was connected to France in a way he could not come back from. If he painted at all, the images were bleak California deserts and threatening black clouds that roiled over featureless landscapes. Anger made him drunk, and drunkenness fueled his fury.
By the time I was about six, my father’s Air Force greatcoat was the only remaining artifact of his tour of duty in France. I liked to burrow into the depths of my parent’s closet, behind my mother’s one good dress, to wrap myself in the coat that smelled like mothballs and strange cigarettes. I found a letter and a black and white photograph in the coat’s inside pocket. The dark-haired girl in the picture was about my age. There was a family resemblance that made me think it was a picture of my father’s youngest sister. The glossy photograph had sharp, scalloped edges. Yes, my father said years later, the picture I’d found was my sister. An old Air Force buddy had sent it to him. No, he said, he had never answered, and no, he wouldn’t tell me her name. I remember taking the letter and the picture to my mother. I remember anger and sadness in our house that night. The next time I excavated my parent’s closet, the picture and the greatcoat were both gone.
My daughter and I pick our way around the sidewalk flower pots, and down the narrow street that opens into the Place Saint Louis and I smell lavender and sharp, savory cheese. Bright vegetables and flowers fill the market stalls, and my daughter and I watch as a sidewalk artist paints a watercolor. The façade and doorway of a narrow house across the square appear beneath the artist’s brush, red geraniums, and all. I long to be able to draw but cannot translate what I see onto paper. I may have been able to draw once, but I showed my father a picture I had drawn, and when he pointed to all the ways it wasn’t artful, I tore the drawing into tiny pieces. I wanted my father to love me. I understand now he could not see me without imagining my sister. It was I, and not my sister, who was his fantôme. It was I, who haunted him, dressed in the strange collection of uniforms from our wars and costumed in the hundreds of little cuts of his cruelties. Perhaps he loved me as much as he was able, imagining as he did, all the ways she was the better daughter. He was dying when he told me about her. He said he’d never tried to find her because it wouldn’t have been fair to her. My father, self-absorbed as he was, didn’t care about fairness. I knew him. In his mind, he could be perfect for that daughter, frozen in the shutter-click of his Rolleiflex, as long as she didn’t know him. He said he hoped her life had been good, but never regretted the life or the love he’d refused me. At the end, he opted for hospice, but in his waning hours, as he got sicker and the pain got worse, he panicked. He insisted on being transferred to a hospital, where heroic measures were attempted, and where he still died a few hours later. It seems we die as we live; in the end, he died without ever being all in or all out.
No icy rush breathes through me at the Cathedral at Saint-Etienne. I am relieved that I find no trace of him here. A contraction clutches my heart. I try once again to convince myself that even though I was never the right daughter, I am enough. Then I light a white candle - not for our father - but for my sister, who will never know I stood in her city or that we may have been only the width of a door apart as I stepped over her pot of red geraniums.
