smiled at the comment. It was after all an academic and not a commercial book. “I’ve been busy too. I’ve been back at my research at the local branch of the Mormon library for the last three weeks. It’s incredible the documentation they’ve collected. Do you realize they have more than two hundred camera operators in forty-five countries around the world, taking photographs of local records, for people to use in genealogical research? Their real purpose is to help people baptize their relatives into the Church, even posthumously, but anyone is free to use the records for ancestral purposes. They’re incredibly generous with the information they’ve gathered, and very helpful. Thanks to them I’ve traced the de Margeracs all the way back to New Orleans in 1850, and I know they came to the States from Brittany around that time. Some of them were there long before that, from another branch of the family, but of the same name. Our direct descendants came from Brittany in the late 1840s.” She said it like a news bulletin, and Brigitte smiled. It was her mother’s passion. “That would be my great-grandfather, and your great-great-grandfather, who came over then,” she went on. “What I want to know now is the history of the family before they got to America. I know that both a Philippe and Tristan de Margerac came to America, and there were several counts and a marquis in the group, but I don’t know much about them, or anything actually, before they left France.”
“Wouldn’t you need to research it there, Mom?” Brigitte asked her, attempting to be interested in it. For some reason, although anthropology fascinated her, her mother’s tireless genealogical search for family history had always bored her to tears. She had never developed her mother’s curiosity about their ancestors. It seemed like such ancient history to her, and so irrelevant today. And their ancestors all seemed so dull. None of them seemed exceptional to her.
“The Mormons probably have more of that history than any library in France. They’ve photographed local records there. The European countries are the easiest to research. One of these days I’m going to go to Salt Lake City and pursue it, but I’ve gotten a lot of good material from their library here.” Brigitte nodded politely as she always did, but her mother knew how little the subject interested her, and they moved on to other things-the theater, opera, ballet, which were passions of Marguerite’s too, and the current novel she was reading. Eventually, they talked about Ted, inevitably, and his dig in Egypt. The subject couldn’t be avoided any longer. Marguerite was still sorry about what had happened, and sad for her daughter. She knew it was a huge disappointment, and Marguerite was impressed by how philosophical Brigitte was about it. She wouldn’t have been, in her shoes, to be abandoned after six years. Brigitte was taking a lot of the responsibility on her shoulders, although Marguerite didn’t entirely agree with her. She thought he should have invited Brigitte to go to Egypt with him, and instead he was using it as an opportunity to end the relationship and move on.
They talked about the schools Brigitte had sent her resume to. She was still determined to stay in the Boston area, but it was too soon for them to have responded to the resumes she sent out. Brigitte knew that the colleges were all busy processing applications, and after that they’d be dealing with acceptances, and their wait list. She doubted that she’d get any response to her letters until May or June. She wasn’t panicking, and she was willing to wait until then. She just needed to find something to do in the meantime, but her mother’s never-ending ancestral project wasn’t it. She wanted to be helpful to her mother, but cataloguing generation after generation of similarly respectable people seemed as dry and predictable to her as her own book. She wished at times that they would turn up a criminal or a creative scoundrel in their background, someone to bring more life to their family tree than what was there.
Both women turned off the lights and went to bed at midnight. The fire was out by then. And Brigitte slept, as she always did, in her childhood room. It was still decorated in flowered pink chintzes, which had been her choice as a young girl. She liked coming home to the familiar fabric and old room, and her long intelligent conversations with her mother. They got on well.
The next morning, they had breakfast together in the kitchen, and then Marguerite went out to do errands, buy groceries, and play bridge with friends. She had a pleasant life, and had been involved with someone for several years. He had died a few years earlier, right before she retired and there had been no one since. She had a wide circle of friends, and went to lunches, dinners, museums and cultural events, mostly with other women, and a few couples. She lived alone but was never bored. And her genealogical project kept her busy on weekends and on nights when she didn’t go out. She had learned to put inquiries out through the Internet, but most of the information she had, she’d gotten from the Mormons. She dreamed of putting it all in a book one day, for Brigitte, and in the meantime, she loved the search, and the hunt for history and relatives of centuries past, even if Brigitte found them tedious and unexciting.
She showed Brigitte her latest notes that afternoon when she came home. Brigitte had done some shopping, and then went up to Columbia, to visit a friend who was a professor there, who promised to keep an ear out for any openings in admissions. He suggested that she might consider teaching instead of admissions, but she didn’t think she had a knack for it, and wanted an administrative job, which gave her more time to write and take classes toward her doctorate. Brigitte looked in better spirits than she had the day she arrived. Her mother had been right, and it was good for her being in New York. Everything seemed electric and alive, although she liked the academic world around Boston. The atmosphere was more casual and younger. But being in New York gave her a nice change of scene. There was a lot more to do here, which was why Marguerite loved it.
When she looked at her mother’s recent research, Brigitte was impressed by the information Marguerite had gathered. She seemed to have the birth and death dates of all her direct ancestors, and many cousins. She knew the counties and parishes in New Orleans where they had lived and died, the names of their homes and plantations, the towns they had migrated to in New York and Connecticut after the Civil War. And she knew the name of the ship one of them had arrived on from Brittany, in 1846. The family seemed to have stayed in the South until just after the Civil War, and then migrated North in the 1860s and 1870s, where they had lived ever since. But what had happened in France before that remained a mystery to her. If anything, Brigitte thought that segment of their history might be more interesting than what her mother knew so far.
“It’s not that long ago, Mom. You ought to be able to get that from the Mormon library too, or a trip to France.”
“I really have to go to Salt Lake to do that. They have more of the European records there and a much larger facility. I just haven’t had time. And libraries that size terrify me. You’re much better at all that than I am.” Her eyes begged Brigitte to help her with the project, and her daughter smiled. Her mother’s enthusiasm touched her heart.
“You know, you have enough here for a book, if you ever want to write one,” Brigitte said encouragingly. She was always impressed by her mother’s diligence and perseverance.
“I don’t think anyone would care about it except our family, and that’s mainly me and you, and a few cousins scattered here and there, unless we still have relatives I don’t know about in France. But I doubt that we do. I’ve found no recent de Margeracs in France. And everyone here has pretty much died out. There’s no one left in the South, and hasn’t been in a hundred years. Your grandfather was born in New York at the turn of the century. There’s really just us now.” It was a labor of love that had fascinated her for years.
“You work so hard on it, Mom,” Brigitte said admiringly.
“I love knowing who we’re related to, where they lived, and what they did there. It’s your legacy too. Maybe one day it will seem more important to you than it does now. There are some very interesting people perched in our family tree,” Marguerite said with a smile, but Brigitte hadn’t found that to be so. They were aristocratic, but there was nothing unusual about them.
In the end, Brigitte spent the rest of the week in New York. She had no pressing reason to go back to Boston. She and her mother went to the theater together, the movies, several small, casual restaurants for dinner, and took long walks in Central Park. They enjoyed each other’s company and her mother tried to stay off painful subjects. There was nothing left to be said about Ted, except that in Marguerite’s opinion Brigitte had wasted six years. And she suspected now that Brigitte thought so too. Ted had proven himself to be totally selfish in the end. Brigitte hadn’t heard from him since his text the morning after they broke up.
On Saturday afternoon they spent a lazy day at home, reading the early edition of the Sunday
“I wish you’d go out to Salt Lake City for me, Brigitte,” she pleaded with her. “You do so much better research than I do. That’s not my forte, but it is yours, and I can’t go any further back now, until I trace the family back to France. I’m pretty much stuck around 1850. Any chance that you’d go there for me?” She didn’t want to add “now
