I Went to Paris at 58 and Met the Woman My Mother Never Mentioned

I was standing beside a black lamppost across from the Louvre when a woman I had never met walked straight toward me carrying a battered blue sketchbook.

She was tiny, maybe seventy-five, with silver hair cut neatly around her chin and a red scarf tied at her throat even though the September morning was warm. She slowed when she reached me and looked at my face for several uncomfortable seconds.

“You’re Diane’s daughter,” she said.

Not Are you Marla?

Not Excuse me.

Diane’s daughter.

I tightened my hand around the strap of my black purse.

“Yes.”

The woman smiled, but it wasn’t exactly a happy smile.

“I knew as soon as I saw you. Around the eyes.”

Her English was careful and heavily accented.

“My name is Sabine Lefèvre.”

I had seen the name only once before.

Three months earlier, while emptying my mother’s house outside Spokane, Washington, I had found a cream-colored envelope tucked inside an old sewing basket.

There was no letter inside it.

Just a black-and-white photograph of two young women sitting on a stone wall, laughing at something outside the frame.

On the back, my mother had written:

Paris, 1974. Sabine & me.

That was strange for one very simple reason.

According to every story my mother had ever told me, she had never been to Europe.

She had never even owned a passport.

At least, that was what she told us.

I spent two evenings searching the name Sabine Lefèvre online.

There are a lot of women named Sabine Lefèvre in France.

Eventually I found a retired picture framer whose age seemed right. I sent a short email explaining who I was and attached a photograph of my mother.

Her reply came four days later.

Yes. I knew Diane.

Then another line.

If you ever come to Paris, I have something that belongs with you.

That was all.

I was already planning the trip.

I had retired from the accounting department of a medical supply company that spring, after thirty-one years of spreadsheets, invoices, quarterly reports, fluorescent lighting, and eating yogurt at my desk.

Paris was supposed to be my ridiculous retirement gift to myself.

That was the word I used.

Ridiculous.

Because that was the word my mother would have used.

When I told her years earlier that I wanted to see France someday, she laughed.

“Marla, people like us don’t fly across an ocean to look at buildings.”

I can still hear the exact tone.

Not cruel.

Practical.

That was Mom.

Practical shoes.

Practical cars.

Practical Christmas presents.

Practical careers.

When I was nineteen and talking seriously about applying to a photography program in Seattle, Mom sat across from me at our kitchen table and told me that photography was a nice hobby but a terrible plan for paying rent.

I went into accounting instead.

So there I was at fifty-eight, wearing a striped shirt I had bought two days before leaving Washington because I thought it looked vaguely French, standing beside the Louvre while Sabine held out that worn blue book.

I didn’t take it immediately.

“What is it?”

Sabine looked down at the cover.

“Your mother’s.”

I finally reached for it.

The leather was cracked at the corners. A thin elastic band held it closed.

I expected addresses.

Maybe recipes.

Old notes.

Instead, when I opened it, the first page contained a charcoal drawing of a narrow Paris street.

The next page showed café chairs.

Then the Seine.

Then a woman asleep on a train.

The drawings were good.

Not cute little vacation sketches.

Good.

Confident lines. Shadows. Perspective. Tiny details in faces and windows.

I stared at Sabine.

“My mother drew these?”

Sabine’s eyebrows lifted.

“She never told you?”

I shook my head.

Sabine watched me for another second before saying quietly:

“Marla, your mother didn’t visit Paris.”

She touched the open sketchbook.

“She lived here.”

For a moment, I thought I had misunderstood her.

“Lived here?”

“Five months.”

“No.”

Sabine gave a small shrug.

“Almost six.”

I actually laughed.

It came out sharper than I intended.

“My mother grew up in Yakima. She married my dad when she was twenty-four. She worked at the same insurance office for twenty-seven years.”

“Yes.”

“She hated flying.”

“Later, perhaps.”

“She told me she never came to France.”

Sabine didn’t argue.

Instead, she pointed across the plaza.

“Would you like coffee?”

Apparently, when a stranger tells you your mother had an entire European life you knew nothing about, coffee is the next logical step.

We walked for about fifteen minutes.

Sabine wasn’t fast, and I was grateful for that because my thoughts were moving faster than the rest of me.

We ended up at a little café on a side street where the tables were so close together I could hear the man behind me discussing somebody’s plumbing problem in French.

Sabine ordered espresso.

I ordered coffee with milk.

Then she began telling me about a twenty-two-year-old version of my mother I had never met.

Diane Keene arrived in Paris in the spring of 1974 through a small art scholarship offered by a community college in Washington.

She had apparently submitted drawings without telling her parents.

She was one of six students chosen.

“My parents let her do that?”

Sabine smiled slightly.

“Let is perhaps not the correct word.”

That sounded more believable.

Mom’s parents, my grandparents, were good people, but they believed security was something you constructed carefully and defended for the rest of your life.

My grandfather repaired agricultural equipment.

My grandmother worked at a pharmacy.

Art, in their house, would have been something you hung above the couch after everything important had already been paid for.

Sabine met Mom during an evening drawing class.

They became friends because both of them were broke.

“They had free bread at a café near our school,” Sabine explained. “We went there too often.”

That made me laugh.

My mother, stealing free bread in Paris.

I could almost see it.

Then Sabine showed me a photograph.

Mom was sitting cross-legged on the floor of a tiny apartment.

Her hair reached almost to her waist.

There was paint on her jeans.

A cigarette burned between her fingers.

I stared at that cigarette for a long time.

“My mother told me smoking was disgusting.”

“Oh, Diane smoked.”

“You’re kidding.”

“She was terrible at it.”

I laughed again.

For the first time that morning, Sabine laughed too.

We spent nearly an hour going through photographs.

My mother beside the Seine.

My mother on a bicycle.

My mother carrying a loaf of bread.

My mother asleep at a table with her face resting beside a pile of drawing paper.

I felt strangely jealous.

Not of Sabine.

Of my own mother.

She had possessed this younger version of herself and never introduced her to me.

Then I asked the obvious question.

“Why did she leave?”

Sabine became quiet.

She folded her napkin twice before answering.

“Her sister was hurt.”

I knew about that.

My Aunt Lorna was seventeen when she was in a car accident.

She survived, but her left leg was badly damaged. She went through several surgeries and nearly a year of physical therapy.

Mom had always described that year as the time the family “pulled together.”

I had never realized she had been in France when the accident happened.

“Her father called,” Sabine continued. “Diane left three days later.”

“And that was it?”

Sabine nodded.

“She planned to return.”

Something in her tone bothered me.

“Planned?”

Sabine reached into her purse and removed a folded piece of paper.

It was a photocopy of a letter.

Mom’s handwriting.

I recognized the way she made her capital D.

Sabine had kept the original.

The letter was dated August 1974.

Mom wrote that Aunt Lorna still needed help getting to appointments and that my grandmother had reduced her hours at the pharmacy.

Then came the part Sabine had underlined.

Dad says Paris will still be there next year.

Another sentence appeared lower on the page.

I think he knows I’m not going back. I think I know it too.

I read it twice.

“Did she have something to come back for?”

Sabine looked toward the street.

“Yes.”

Here it was, I thought.

A boyfriend.

Some great romance.

The sort of secret families discover forty years later and turn into stories at Thanksgiving.

But Sabine surprised me.

“Work.”

“Work?”

“Diane had been offered a place with a restoration workshop.”

Mom had spent several weeks assisting a woman who restored damaged drawings and prints.

The owner liked her.

She offered to train her.

“It was not glamorous,” Sabine said. “Your mother would have spent much time cleaning things with tiny brushes.”

That made perfect sense.

Mom would have loved tiny brushes.

She was the woman who cleaned dust from the spaces between the buttons on the television remote.

“What happened to the offer?”

“She refused it.”

I leaned back.

“So she gave everything up.”

Sabine shook her head.

“I would not say it like this.”

“How would you say it?”

“She made a choice.”

“She didn’t have much of a choice.”

“No. But it was still a choice.”

I was irritated by that answer.

Maybe because it sounded like something Mom would have said.

For the rest of that afternoon, I walked alone.

I crossed the Seine twice without needing to.

I bought a bottle of water and forgot to drink it.

I sat in the Tuileries Gardens staring at Mom’s sketchbook.

I should probably tell you something.

My mother and I loved each other.

That matters.

We were not one of those families where people screamed at each other and stopped speaking for ten years.

She babysat my daughter when Callie was little.

She brought soup when I had the flu.

She called me every Sunday.

When my marriage ended, she arrived at my house carrying two grocery bags and said, “You can cry after we put this food away.”

That was Diane.

She loved through tasks.

But she could make your dreams sound irresponsible in under thirty seconds.

When I wanted photography school, she asked about health insurance.

When Callie considered studying theater, Mom asked what theater majors earned.

When I mentioned Paris, Mom talked about airfare.

I had always assumed she simply lacked imagination.

Now I knew that wasn’t true.

She had once had more imagination than I did.

And for some reason, that made me angry.

I met Sabine again the following morning.

This time we went to her apartment.

She lived on the fourth floor of an old building with a tiny elevator that looked as if it had been designed for one thin person and a baguette.

Her apartment was full of framed drawings.

Several were Mom’s.

Seeing her signature beneath them was unsettling.

D. Keene.

I had seen that handwriting on permission slips, birthday cards, grocery lists and checks.

Never artwork.

Sabine made tea.

Then she brought out a cardboard folder.

“These came later,” she said.

Inside were letters Mom had written over the years.

Not many.

Sometimes five years passed between them.

Mom wrote about my father.

About me.

About Callie.

About work.

About ordinary things.

One letter from 1997 mentioned my photography.

Marla used to carry a camera everywhere. I think I spoiled that for her. I wanted her to be sensible. Maybe I wanted her to be more sensible than I was.

I stopped reading.

Sabine said nothing.

The next letter was from 2009.

Mom wrote:

It is strange what parents pass down accidentally. My father was afraid I would choose a difficult life, so he taught me to fear unstable things. I thought I was protecting Marla when I did the same.

I read that sentence several times.

Then I said, “She could have told me.”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t she?”

“I asked her.”

“And?”

Sabine gave me a tired little smile.

“She said Americans do not like apologizing.”

“That is absolutely not true.”

“She also said she personally did not like apologizing.”

“That part is true.”

Sabine laughed.

Then she handed me one final envelope.

It had my name on it.

Marla.

Mom’s handwriting again.

The envelope was never sealed.

Inside was a letter dated twelve years earlier.

I won’t pretend it was beautiful.

My mother did not suddenly turn into a poet because she was writing about regret.

It sounded exactly like her.

She complained about the price of stamps in the second paragraph.

She reminded me to rotate my tires.

Halfway through, though, she wrote something I have thought about almost every day since.

I used to think giving something up made the thing childish. That was easier than admitting I missed it.

Then:

When you wanted Seattle, I heard myself at twenty-two saying I wanted Paris. I got scared for you, and instead of telling you that, I made your idea sound foolish. I’m sorry.

I covered my mouth.

Not because I was sobbing.

I wasn’t.

I just needed somewhere to put my hand.

At the bottom of the letter, Mom had added:

You may be forty-six when you read this, or sixty, or never. But if you do read it, please do one thing I didn’t do enough. Pick something unnecessary and do it anyway.

I looked at Sabine.

“Why didn’t she send this?”

Sabine sighed.

“She said she would.”

Of course she did.

That was Mom too.

She would spend three days choosing the right storage containers but postpone an emotional conversation for twelve years.

I stayed in Paris for another six days.

I did not have a movie-style transformation.

I did not throw my return ticket into the Seine.

I did not buy an easel.

I did not fall in love with a handsome French widower.

I mostly walked.

And took pictures.

At first I used my phone.

Then, on my third day, I passed a camera shop.

I stood outside for several minutes.

A younger version of me would have gone inside immediately.

The older version checked prices through the window.

Then I heard Mom’s sentence.

Pick something unnecessary.

I bought a used camera.

Nothing fancy.

The man behind the counter showed me how to change a few settings.

For the rest of the trip, I photographed things nobody needs photographs of.

A waiter stacking chairs.

A woman reading beside the river.

A little boy pulling his father toward a bakery window.

Rain on the roof of a taxi.

A pair of shoes left outside an apartment door.

On my last morning, I went back to the Louvre.

I found the same black lamppost.

A tourist from Wisconsin took my picture.

In it, I’m wearing the striped shirt and beige pants from my first day. My purse is hanging from my shoulder. My hair looks terrible because of the wind.

I love that photograph.

When I got home, Callie picked me up at the Spokane airport.

She asked how Paris was.

I said, “Complicated.”

“That sounds expensive.”

I laughed because that was exactly something Mom would have said.

That weekend, I showed Callie the sketchbook.

She turned the pages slowly.

When I told her everything, she sat quietly for a while.

Then she said, “Grandma was kind of a mystery.”

“No,” I said.

That answer surprised even me.

“She was just a person.”

I think that is what changed for me.

As children, even grown children, we divide our parents into simple categories.

Strong.

Strict.

Funny.

Difficult.

Practical.

Selfish.

Generous.

My mother was “practical.”

For fifty-eight years, I treated that word as an explanation.

It wasn’t.

She had been twenty-two once.

She had smoked badly in a Paris apartment.

She had eaten free bread because she was broke.

She had been talented.

She had been scared.

She had made one necessary decision, then spent years pretending she hadn’t wanted the other life at all.

And later, without meaning to, she handed some of that fear to me.

I don’t blame her anymore.

I also don’t excuse everything.

Those are different things.

A month after I returned home, I signed up for a Saturday photography class at the community college.

There were eleven people in it.

I was the second-oldest.

The instructor gave us an assignment to photograph a place we passed every day but had stopped noticing.

I photographed the laundromat near my house at seven in the morning.

Mom would probably have asked why anyone needed twelve photographs of washing machines.

I wish I could show her.

One of her Paris drawings now hangs in my hallway.

Beside it is the photograph of me standing near that lamppost outside the Louvre.

Two women from the same family.

Two different trips.

Forty-something years apart.

Sometimes Callie teases me because I stop the car to photograph strange buildings or light coming through trees.

Last month she called and asked whether I wanted to travel somewhere with her next spring.

“Where?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“How much?”

She laughed.

“There she is. Grandma Diane.”

I started laughing too.

Then I caught myself.

“All right,” I said. “Forget I asked.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

There was a pause.

Then Callie said, “Who are you and what have you done with my mother?”

I told her we’d talk after she picked a place.

I still keep Mom’s old sketchbook in the top drawer of my desk.

Occasionally, I open it to the last page.

It isn’t the best drawing in the book.

Just a quick pencil sketch of a woman standing with a camera hanging from her neck.

Mom added it decades after Paris.

Underneath, in her small familiar handwriting, she wrote:

For Marla, who always noticed things I walked past.

For years, I thought my mother had never really understood me.

Now I think she understood more than she knew how to say.

And maybe that was the saddest part.

Or maybe, because I finally got to hear it, it wasn’t sad at all.