Read Pedigree for Free Online Page A

Quai de Conti on a moped. He was deeply devout. I once asked him, provocatively, “What good is religion, anyway?” He had givenme a biography of Pope Pius XI with this inscription: “For Patrick, so that he might learn ‘what good religion is’ …”
    Often my father and I were alone on Saturday evenings. We saw movies at the Champs-Elysées and the Gaumont Palace. One afternoon in June, we were walking—I don’t remember why—on Boulevard Rochechouart. The sun was very strong and we retreated into the darkness of a small movie house, the Delta. At the George V cinema, there was a documentary on the Nuremberg Trials,
Hitler’s Executioners:
at age thirteen, I discovered images of the extermination camps. Something changed for me that day. And what did my father think? We never talked about it, not even as we left the theater.
    On summer nights we would get ice cream at Ruc or the Régence. Dinner at L’Alsacienne on the Champs-Elysées, or at the Chinese restaurant on Rue du Colisée. In the evening, on the dark red leather-covered record player, we’d listen to test pressings of vinyl records he wanted to put on the market. And on his bedside table, Iremember one book:
How to Make Friends
, which today helps me understand his solitude. One Monday morning during the holidays, I heard steps on the inner staircase leading to the fifth floor, where my room was. Then voices in the large bathroom next door. Bailiffs were carting away all of my father’s suits, shirts, and shoes. What ploy had kept them from repossessing the furniture?
    Summer vacations in 1958 and 1959 in Mégève, where I was alone with a young girl, an art student who watched over me like a big sister. The Hôtel de la Résidence was closed and looked abandoned. We crossed through the unlit lobby to use the pool. After 5 P.M ., an Italian orchestra played around that pool. A doctor and his wife had rented us two rooms in their house. Strange couple. The wife, a brunette, seemed crazy. They had adopted a girl my age, sweet like all unloved children, with whom I spent afternoons in the deserted classrooms of the nearby school. Beneath the summer sun, a smell of grass and asphalt.
    Easter holidays, 1959, with a schoolmate who took me to Monte Carlo, so I wouldn’t be left alone at the boarding school; we stayed with his grandmother, the marquise de Polignac. She was American. I later found out that she was a cousin of Harry Crosby, the publisher of Lawrence and Joyce in Paris, who killed himself at age thirty. She owned a black car with front-wheel drive. Her husband dealt in champagne, and before the war they had socialized with Joachim von Ribbentrop, when he too was a champagne salesman. But my friend’s father was a former Resistance member and a Trotskyite. He wrote a book about Yugoslavian Communism with a preface by Sartre. I’d learn all this later. In Monte Carlo, I spent entire afternoons at the marquise’s, leafing through photo albums she’d put together, starting in the 1920s, illustrating the easy, carefree life she and her husband had led. She wanted to teach me how to drive and gave me the wheel of her 15 HP on a sharply twisting road. I missed a turn and we nearly went hurtling into the void. She broughtus to Nice, her grandson and me, to see Luis Mariano at the Pinder Circus.
    Stays in Bournemouth, England, in 1959 and 1960. Verlaine once lived in that area: scattered red cottages amid the foliage and white villas along the seafront … I don’t expect to return to France. I’ve had no word from my mother. And I think it suits my father for me to stay in England longer than planned. The family I’m lodging with can’t keep me any longer. So I show up at a hotel reception desk with the three thousand francs I possess, and they let me sleep free of charge in an unused sitting room on the ground floor. Then the headmaster of the school where