Maybe together we can make it even better. I love living at the hotel and working there. It’s the only life I ever wanted.” As she said it, he felt acutely guilty for not getting her out of the hotel more often. He didn’t want her adult world confined to a small hotel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He spent the rest of the drive into the city trying to convince her she was wrong.
“Why are you saying that?” she questioned him finally. “Don’t you like what you do, Papa?”
“I love it for myself but not for you. I want you to have so much more.” And then as he said it, he heard himself saying all the same things his parents had said to him thirty years before. He was giving her all the same reasons they had given him, wanting him to be a banker or a doctor or a lawyer. They had done everything to dissuade him from the Ecole Hoteliere, just as he was doing to his own daughter now. He suddenly fell silent as he looked at her and realized that she had to make her own choices, and if this was what she loved and wanted to do with her life, he had no right to stand in her way and dissuade her.
“I don’t want you giving up your life for a hotel,” he said sadly. “I want you to have kids and a husband and a bigger life than mine.”
“Are you unhappy at the hotel?” she asked, as she watched him, and he shook his head.
“No, I love it,” he said honestly. He had found his niche early on, no matter what his parents thought about it.
“Then why won’t you let me do what I love? I’ve loved being in the hotel all my life. There’s nothing I could ever love doing more than that. It’s what you taught me and what I want to teach my children one day, to pass it on.”
Hugues laughed softly as she said it. “They’ll probably want to be doctors and lawyers.”
She smiled at him. “Well, I want to work with you till we both grow old.”
“And you’re telling me you want to leave me and go to school in Switzerland for two years,” he said sadly.
“You can come over and visit. I’ll come home for holidays and vacations, like Christmas and spring break.”
“You’d better,” he growled as he put an arm around her. A page had turned for her while she was in Paris, and they both knew it. She had stepped out of her childhood into adulthood, and the adult life she wanted was at his side, running the Hotel Vendome. “I never should have let you go to Europe this summer,” he grumbled good- naturedly, looking at her and seeing how much she had matured in two months. She looked terrific and seemed very sure of herself and the future she wanted, more than ever before.
“It would have happened anyway. I don’t want to go to NYU or Barnard. I want to go to hotel school. I’m proud of what we do, and I want to learn how to do it better so I can help you.”
“All right,” he sighed, as they pulled up in front of the hotel. He turned to his daughter with a resigned expression. “All right, you win. And welcome home.”
He followed her out of the car and into the lobby as all the bellmen, desk clerks, and concierges ran to greet her and welcome her back. He could see that the child she had been had vanished forever, and the woman she was becoming had returned. Somewhere between Paris, Bordeaux, and St. Tropez, a butterfly had been born.
Chapter 6
HELOISE BEGAN HER senior year at the Lycee with more self-assurance than she’d ever had before. She knew what she wanted to do now, and had established clear goals. She sent her application to the Ecole Hoteliere de Lausanne in October.
She told Mrs. Van Damme about it when she did. Her old dog Julius had died several years before and had been replaced with a white female Pekingese named Maude. Mrs. Van Damme emphatically approved of Heloise’s idea of going to hotel school since it was what she loved. Her grandson Clayton was at Yale and wanted to study photography eventually, which Heloise knew from talking to him that summer, and his grandmother was encouraging him to pursue his dream too. She said that in the end it was all one had, and turning those dreams into reality was the only worthwhile path. Heloise liked hearing from Clayton but hadn’t seen him for several months. She had been too busy since the summer, and he was enjoying his freshman year in college and seldom came to New York. But he called Heloise from time to time and said he liked Yale but was thinking of transfering to Brown, where he could study photography.
The elderly doyenne seemed to be failing in the past year. Heloise worried about her and always promised herself she’d visit her more often, but she was particularly busy with school-related activities, and it was her last year at home, if she got into the hotel school in Lausanne, as she hoped.
Over Thanksgiving Mrs. Van Damme got ill. She caught a nasty cold that turned into bronchitis, and to pneumonia after that. Hugues stopped in to check on her daily. And Heloise came in to see her religiously every day after school, and brought her little vases of flowers that Jan made for her. Her son came to visit her from Boston, and after consultation with her doctor, they put her in the hospital. She left the hotel by ambulance. And Heloise kissed her goodbye and promised to take care of her dog. Hugues and Heloise visited her and brought her a big bouquet of flowers. But Mrs. Van Damme seemed less and less interested as the days went by, and a week before Christmas, she quietly slipped away in the night. She was eighty-nine years old and the only grandmother figure that Heloise had ever had. All her real grandparents had died before she was born. And she mourned the loss of the elderly lady who had been kind to her all her life. And she was grateful when her son allowed her to keep Maude.
They went to her funeral at St. Thomas, and many of the hotel employees attended as well. Hugues asked Jennifer to arrange for a van to get them all there, there were so many. Even Mike the engineer went, wearing a dark suit. So did Ernesta, Bruce, Jan, several of the maids, an elevator man, two bellmen, Jennifer, Heloise, and Hugues.
Heloise saw Clayton there with his parents, but they barely had time to say hello as they left the church. He looked as bereft as she felt. And living in the same hotel with her, Heloise had had the chance to see her more often, and perhaps know her better, than her own grandson, who didn’t see her often and rarely came to New York. It was a somber day for Hugues and Heloise, and put a damper on Christmas for them.
It was a busy season at the hotel, and Heloise had already tried to implement some of the things she had seen in Paris. Jan was trying to do their flowers for the lobby now like Jeff Leatham at the Georges V, from photographs Heloise had taken there. And she had added many things to their brunch menu that she had noticed at the Ritz. People were already commenting on how spectacular the flowers were, and how great the brunch. Hugues was proud of her and she was pleased. And she was applying what she had learned in Bordeaux to the wines she selected from their cellars. And as soon as she’d gotten back after the summer, she went back to work organizing their donations to the food bank, and working downtown at the soup kitchen and family shelter once or twice a week. Hugues was very impressed.
But the high point for Heloise came in January, when the Ecole Hoteliere de Lausanne accepted her for the fall. She hadn’t applied to a single other college. And she was ecstatic when she got their letter. It was exactly what she wanted, and it was her dream. She called all her friends at school to tell them, none of whom knew what colleges they were going to yet and wouldn’t know till March. She was all set.
The months after that flew by, with the usual activities at the hotel, important guests, VIPs, foreign dignitaries, famous movie stars, and politicians. Her father narrowly averted a strike by the kitchen staff. Some employees quit or retired, and new ones were added. She rarely had time to stop and peek in at the wedding receptions. And she spent every weekend working at the front desk, for experience and practice. And everything he saw her do had a bittersweet quality for Hugues, knowing that she was leaving in a few months, even if it was only for a year or two. He was hoping that she would do her year of internship for her degree at their hotel, but Heloise wasn’t sure. She was thinking of trying her wings at another hotel, possibly in Europe, before she came back to the Vendome for good.
Hugues was sad about her leaving to go to school in Europe and said so to Jennifer, but she thought it would do him good. It was time for both of them to cut the cord. And she knew it would be hard because they were so extremely close.
Heloise went out with some of the boys from her class that spring, but she had no serious romance. Her whole focus now was on leaving and starting school in Lausanne. It was all she thought or talked about. And Hugues planned a trip around Europe with her for the month before he dropped her off at school in Lausanne. It was going
