Mallory was furious. She sharply told them there was nothing to celebrate and they should stop wasting her time. And before they could grasp what had happened, Mallory was stomping up Le Saule Pleureur’s darkened wooden staircase to her private rooms in the attic.
That night, when she passed through her sitting room on her way to bed, Madame Mallory once again saw the empty space on the wall, and a parallel bit of emptiness opened up in her heart. She took this ache into her room, sat on the bed, and involuntarily gasped at the thought that suddenly thrust itself into her head.
She would never get her third star.
Mallory could not move. Finally, however, she undressed silently in the dark, the stiff girdle peeling off her like an avocado skin. She shrugged on her nightgown and passed through to the bathroom for the usual bedtime rituals. She brushed her teeth violently, gargled, and lathered anti-wrinkle creams into her face.
An elderly woman’s pale face stared back. The digital clock in her bedroom flipped a minute shingle loudly.
The realization came then, so big and ugly and monstrous she closed her eyes and brought a hand to her mouth. But there it was. Unavoidable.
She was a failure.
Never would she rise above her current station in life. Never would she join that pantheon of three-star chefs. Only death awaited her.
Madame Mallory could not sleep that night. She stalked the attic, wrung her hands, muttered bitterly to herself about the injustices of life. Bats flitted through the night outside her window snatching bugs, while a lonely dog on the other side of the church cemetery howled its anguish, and together the beasts seemed to perfectly articulate her lonely torment. But finally, in the early hours, unable to stand the pain any longer, Madame Mallory did something she had not done in many, many years. She got down on her hands and knees. And she prayed.
“What . . .” she whispered into her clasped hands, “what is the reason for my life?”
The only sound was emptiness. Nothing.
Shortly thereafter the exhausted woman crawled into her bed, at long last entering a kind of unconscious state among the tangle of her sheets.
Le Saule Pleureur was closed for lunch the following day, so the exhausted Madame Mallory uncharacteristically allowed herself to stay in bed later than usual. She thought it was the pigeon cooing on her windowsill that woke her. But it fluttered away and she finally heard the yelling, the strange voices, the commotion rising up from the street, and Mallory rose stiffly from her bed and crossed the room to the little attic window.
And there we were: ragged Indian children hanging from the Dufour estate’s windows and turrets.
She couldn’t quite comprehend what was going on. What was this she was seeing? Diesel-belching Mercedes. Yellow and pink saris. A ton of tatty luggage and boxes stacked up in the cobblestone courtyard, Mummy’s gray Storwel closet still tied to the roof of the last car.
And in the middle of this courtyard, my bearlike father raising his arms and yelling.
Chapter Six
What blissful early days. Lumière was one big adventure—of unexplored cupboards and attics and stables, of lumberyards and pastry shops and trout streams farther afield—and I remember it as a joyous period that helped us forget our many losses. And Papa, too, was finally restored to himself. For restaurant work was his center, and he immediately commandeered a rickety desk just inside the main doors, burying himself in the details of remaking the Dufour estate in his Bombay image. In no time at all the halls were filled with local craftsmen—plumbers and carpenters—with their tapes and tools and hammering noise, and it was once again the fever of Bombay re-created in this tiny corner of provincial France.
My first real sighting of Madame Mallory was perhaps a week or two after we had moved in. I was strolling through the headstones of the neighboring cemetery, furtively smoking a cigarette, when by chance I glanced over at Le Saule Pleureur. I instantly spotted Madame Mallory on her knees, bent over her rock garden, gloves and spade in hand, humming to herself. The damp stones to her left were warming up under the surprisingly strong morning sun, and trails of steam rose from the rocks, disappearing in the air.
Behind the chef stood the glorious granite slabs of the Alps, bottle green pine forests broken by patches of pasture and hardy cows grazing. Madame Mallory pulled her weeds vigorously, as if it were some satisfying form of therapy, and I could hear, even from where I stood, the violent sound of tearing roots. But I also saw, in the softness of her round face, the woman was calm and at peace tending to her corner of earth.
Right then the stable door across the road slammed open with a mighty bang. Papa and a roofer with a ladder suddenly emerged from the door’s shadows and they hobbled over to the front of the house. The roofer secured the ladder against the guttering while Papa roared, waddled back and forth across the courtyard in his armpit-stained kurta, and by sheer heckling backseat-drove the poor roofer up the ladder.
“No, no,” he yelled. “The gutter over there. Over there. Are you deaf ? Yaaar. That one.”
The tranquillity of the Jura was shattered. Madame Mallory wrenched her head sideways, her eyes rooted on Papa. She was squinting under the straw garden hat, her liver-colored lips pressed tightly together. I could see she was both horrified and strangely mesmerized by Papa’s grotesque size and vulgarity. But the moment passed. Mallory lowered her eyes and pulled off her canvas gloves. Her quiet gardening moment was ruined, and, clutching her basket, she wearily climbed back up the stone steps to the inn.
Her back was to the street when she hesitated after unlocking the front door, just as a particularly virulent burst of Papa’s roars rolled across the forecourt. From where I was standing, off to the side, I saw the look on her face as she paused before her door—the lips pursed in utter disgust, the face a mask of icy disdain. It was a look that I would see many times again as I made my way through France in the coming years—a uniquely Gallic look of nuclear contempt for one’s inferiors—but I will never forget the first time I saw it.
Then, bang, the slam of the door.
The family discovered the local pain chemin de fer—rough and gnarled and tasty—and this “railroad” bread immediately became our new sauce-mopping favorite. Papa and Auntie were constantly asking me to pick up “just a few more” loaves at the boulangerie, and on one such foray, cutting back from the town center with the crusty bread wrapped in paper under my arm, through the back alleys where the wealthy watch merchants once kept their horses, I casually glanced over a stone-and-stucco wall.
It was, I quickly realized, the back view of Le Saule Pleureur. The small hotel’s garden was quite long and deep, almost a field, and it gently sloped down a hill to where I stood. The verdant property was filled with mature pear and apple trees, and against the far wall there stood a fruit-drying shed made of rough Lumière granite.
The boughs of the trees were bent with heavy brown Bosc pears, ready for the picking, and autumn bees were buzzing drunkenly around the sugar-filled fruit. But there were also tidy rows of boxed herbs under glass next to bow-shaped beds of wildflowers and patches for cabbages and rhubarb and carrots, all neatly embroidered by a flagstone path that ambled through the garden’s fertile plots.
Down at the bottom of the garden, a compost heap stood in the moist corner to the left, while an iron-and-copper tap in the shape of a nymph gurgled water into a heavy stone trough off to the right, next to a bench and yet another ancient and majestic willow tree.