Stanley Park by Timothy Taylor Read Free Book Online Page A

him as an iconic place, a site he might identify with his own beginnings.
    A site of important kitchens too, Jeremy understood. The kitchen of the large restaurant where his mother’s father and uncles had worked as busboys and dishwashers. The kitchen at home in which they had eaten and in which his mother and father had had their first conversations. Jeremy carried a composite mental picture of it based on his parents’ separate, scattered recollections. A cold tile floor. A wooden table big enough for the entire clan, where the Professor had done his interviewing—copious notes on sheaves of yellow paper, Jeremy imagined.
    The young man was interested in the
vardo
, Hélène’s father had explained to her. How some of them still lived, yes, although he also seemed interested in how they liked living in an apartment after having known the
vardo
.
    Hélène told her father to tell the young man with his paper and pencils that she liked their apartment very much, and that she had been far too young to remember her short life in the wagons. But when she cooked dinner that night, it had been a stew of lamb marinated in yogurt and lemon juice. An old recipe, an open tribute. Tart and unexpected. The flavours contradicting themselves by being at once deep and light. Difficult to pin down. The Professor ate, watched her. Hélène looked away.
    Handsome and beautiful, Jeremy imagined. His father described a small woman, with a precise figure, smoothdark skin, a large mouth and shining volumes of mahogany-coloured hair. His mother remembered a young man of strikingly intelligent eyes, angularity, likeable oddness. Jeremy wondered if perhaps she had also liked the young man’s permanently erased history.
    They married in a civil ceremony. Her father’s suggestion. The once-traveller now proud to wear his black city suit in front of the Justice, proud to wish them well, his daughter and her new husband. To bless their trip across the sea to Canada. To bless their remaining days with a touch of his thumb to each of their foreheads, a kiss on the lips. It was a serious but unsentimental goodbye at the Gare Part-Dieu.
    As it happened, Jeremy never found either building. He had an address torn from the corner of an envelope found in his mother’s desk drawer. Even so, no luck. The streets seemed to have changed. At a grocery store that looked to date from the same time, Jeremy stumbled over his words, asking about an apartment building that might have been across the street. A large restaurant that might have been nearby.
    The man thought he remembered a restaurant. He didn’t think it was a very good one.
    “Pas Bocuse,” he said, chortling.
    He felt lonely then, riding the train back to Dijon. And now, school finished, work begun—in a very different part of the country, a place for his own new beginnings—Jeremy drew deeply on his cigarette and felt lonely a second time. He thought about climbing out of the valley and up onto the ridge above St. Seine l’Abbaye. From there he might have a view of the whole town. But setting out in that direction, he passed the
relais
and stopped instead.
    To his surprise, there were lights in the window and cars parked in the gravel lot. To his further surprise, there were no gleaming salon cars. He counted instead a couple of dented Renault Cinq, a Citroën 2CV and several flat-bed trucks like those the local farmers used.
    He went inside, and there Jeremy found that the dining room was noisily full. There was a scumble of country French conversation with no pause for his arrival. Nobody noticed him as he entered the room, except Patrice, their waitress from Pellerey, who was out front alone that evening. She came out of the kitchen with a chicken carved in the bourgeois style—cut up and reassembled for presentation on the table with a bunch of watercress sprouting from the cavity.
    Patrice flashed him a crooked-toothed smile and gestured back towards the kitchen. When he went in, he