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yesterday. The apartment rambled, each room connecting to the next, with high, coffered ceilings and immense windows that filled the space with a granular gray light. The bathroom was abnormally large—as big as the communal lavatory at St. Rose, at least. Evangeline remembered her mother’s clothes hooked upon the bathroom wall—a lightweight spring dress and a brilliant red silk scarf knotted about the hanger’s neck and a pair of patent-leather sandals placed below them, arranged as if worn by an invisible woman. A porcelain bathtub crouched at the center of the bathroom, compact and heavy as a living thing, its lip glistening with water, its clawed feet curled.
    Another memory Evangeline held close, playing and replaying it in her mind as if it were a film, was of a walk she had taken with her mother the year of her death. Hand in hand they went along the sidewalks and cobblestone streets, moving so fast that Evangeline had to jog to keep up with Angela’s stride. It was spring, or so she guessed from the colorful abundance of flowers in the window boxes hanging from the apartment blocks.
    Angela had been anxious that afternoon. Holding Evangeline’s hand tightly, she led her through the courtyard of a university—at least Evangeline had believed it to be a university, with its great stone portico and the abundance of people lounging in the courtyard. The building appeared exceptionally old, but everything in Paris seemed ancient compared to America, especially in Montparnasse and the Latin Quarter. Of one thing, however, she was certain: Angela was searching for someone in the masses of people. She dragged Evangeline through the crowd, squeezing her hand until it tingled, signaling that she should hurry to keep up. Finally a middle-aged woman greeted them, stepping close and kissing her mother on both cheeks. The woman had black hair and her mother’s lovely, chiseled features, softened only slightly by age. Evangeline recognized her grandmother, Gabriella, but knew that she was not allowed to speak to her. Angela and Gabriella had quarreled, as they often did, and Evangeline knew not to put herself between them. Many years later, when both she and her grandmother lived in the United States, Evangeline began to learn more about Gabriella. It was only then that she came to understand her grandmother with some clarity.
    Although so many years had passed, it still upset Evangeline that the one thing she recalled from the walk with her mother with extreme precision struck her as bizarrely mundane—the gleaming leather of her mother’s brown knee-high boots worn over a pair of faded blue jeans. For some reason Evangeline could recall everything about the boots—the stacked heels, the zippers that tracked from ankle to calf, the sound the soles made upon brick and stone—but she could not for the life of her recall the shape of her mother’s hand, the curve of her shoulders. Through the haze of time, she had lost the essence of her mother.
    What tortured Evangeline perhaps most of all was that she had lost the ability to recall her mother’s face. From photographs she knew that Angela had been tall and thin and fair, her hair often tucked up in a cap in a way that Evangeline associated with gamine French actresses of the 1960s. But in each picture, Angela’s face appeared so different that Evangeline had difficulty creating a composite image. In profile her nose seemed sharp and her lips thin. At three-quarters her cheeks were full and high, almost Asian. When looking directly at the camera, her big blue eyes overwhelmed all else. It seemed to Evangeline that the structure of her mother’s face shifted with the light and position of the camera, leaving nothing solid behind.
    Evangeline’s father had not wished to discuss Angela after her death. If Evangeline inquired about her, he would often simply turn away, as if he had not heard her speak. Other times, if he had opened a bottle of wine with their dinner, he