Deasey family. - A letter from Paris: a true story of hidden art, lost romance, and family reclaimed

A LETTER FROM PARIS

Louisa Deasey is a Melbourne-based writer who has published widely, including in Overland , Vogue , The Australian , and The Saturday Age . Her first memoir, Love & Other U-Turns , was nominated for the Nita B. Kibble Award for women writers.

Scribe Publications
1820 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia
2 John Street, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom
3754 Pleasant Ave, Suite 100, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55409 USA

First published by Scribe 2018

Copyright Louisa Deasey 2018

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

Cover design by Scribe
Cover photos from Shutterstock.com: cards by Oleg Golovnev, leaves by Nonchanon, Paris by givaga, couple by George Marks/iStockphoto.com
Back cover image by Catarina Belova/Shutterstock.com

9781925713312 (Australian edition)
9781911617457 (UK edition)
9781947534612 (US edition)
9781925693034 (e-book)

A CiP record for this title is available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.

scribepublications.com.au
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In loving memory of
Denison Deasey and Michelle Chom.

Verba volant

Scripta manent

(Spoken words fly away

Only what is written remains)

Latin Proverb

Contents

Prologue:

Part One: Letters

Part Two: Art

Part Three: Kin

Prologue

Melbourne, Australia

The first letter I ever received as a child came from Paris. It was magic to see the French postmark, Gisles address carefully printed on the back in her distinct script:

Apartment 10
24 Boulevarde de Grenelle
Paris, France, 75015.

Gisles love and thoughts reached out from her apartment overlooking the rooftops of Paris, France, to our weatherboard house in Melbourne, Australia. She was a connecting thread to my dad, too, even though he was no longer alive. Gisle was my godmother, and had been dads wife before he met mum.

The idea of a letter with words written from so far away seemed like science fiction: with a stamp, some paper, and a pen, I could receive a message across time and space from another country, all the way across the sea.

Paris was a world away from Melbourne, and all I could picture of France was held in the mysterious photos in our family album and the prints on the cards that came from Gisle. The parks and gardens looked smaller and much prettier than the giant expanses of greens and browns that dotted our Australian landscape. My older sister, Ayala, with mum and dad, had even stayed with Gisle in Paris before I was born. I knew this from three photos taken on her balcony, laid out in Ayalas photo album, which also contained the only photos of mum and dad together.

Ayala, in a little blue pinafore, was playing with her flowers and a plastic windmill, Paris streets below.

As magpies carolled outside in the rambling cottage garden mum had planted after dad died, I pictured Gisle in her apartment with that tiny balcony that reached out towards the Eiffel Tower. Her pots of pansies lit with sweet reds and yellows against a champagne sky.

Perhaps Gisle was still working for French radio? I didnt know what she did, exactly, just that shed once worked as a radio journalist. Her letters to us were always so much about us, anyway, about our special days, about how much she thought about us, wanted to see us again

My Australian family , she wrote, never referring to problems or anything bad, always on such beautiful stationery.

My-little-dot-on-the-map-of-Australia , on the back of a card for my birthday, packages and parcels wrapped in ribbon arriving all the way from a Parisian store.

For Christmas, she sent me a precious necklace, a ruby stone embedded in the pendant.

For my fifth birthday, a pearl on a gold chain.

I know it was strange, that we considered Gisle family, but I didnt realise this until I was older. Gisle had been dads wife for many years before or when he met my mum (I never quite knew), and perhaps it was even stranger that shed been appointed my godmother.

But mum encouraged our relationship, buying me stationery and stamps because I loved to write to her, because she understood the importance of a living connection to dad and the life hed led before I was born.

I sensed that mum knew Gisle held some of the secrets about dad. Perhaps even about me.

Dad died when I was six, and a precious par avion letter from Gisle came on my seventh birthday a month later, timed to the day.

Seven little kisses for seven year old Louisa , she wrote on the back of an illustration of children holding birthday balloons in the Luxembourg Gardens. Ask Ayala if she remembers Paris parks? was in the postscript. Seven kisses marked X along the bottom of the card, to match my new age.

Gisle calculated the lengthy overseas transits perfectly, and her carefully wrapped treasures arrived exactly on our birthdays, or a few days before Christmas to sit under the tree.

To see the little French stamps and her delicate handwriting on an envelope when I got home from school meant that something miraculous was waiting inside.

A link to dad, the wonder of air travel, words that had sped from a heart to page to letterbox across time.

When I learned that having dads ex-wife as a penpal was a little unusual, I realised mum was quite avante-garde in her approach to life and love.

When I was a child, mum didnt have a car; instead, shed take me and my siblings on Sunday trips to the library on our bikes, shopping on a shoestring at the local market co-op for fresh produce shed then cook, insistent that we live in the inner city, where wed be confident travelling around to school and events on our own.

We never had the TV blaring with sports on the weekend; mum preferred the national broadcasters, SBS or ABC.

I still remember my first trip to a suburban shopping centre in an actual car when I was twelve, because it was as exotic as an inter state trip .

France wasnt just a place dad had once lived: there was a sense that Id inherited some kind of French connection through the time hed spent living there with Gisle.

I took French lessons at school, we watched French films on SBS, and the living-room bookshelf held a thin, dusty book of cartoons called Fractured French . I used to pull it down sometimes, thinking of Gisle, wondering when and how dad had lived in France, who and what sort of person hed once been.

Through Gisles letters, I learned my first French words: par avion , bonne anniversaire , joyeux Nol , and rue for street.

I always planned to visit her in Paris one day, when Id finished school and saved enough money. I didnt know h ow ol d Gisle was, like I didnt really know or fully understand how o ld da d was when he died.

Just that they were both from a completely different time.

Ten years after dad died, Gisle came to Australia. I was sixteen years old. She seemed full of life, impeccably chic everything about her was so typically French. Something about her sense of self-containment and self-preservation stayed with me.

She carried herself with a formidable sense of dignity and enjoyment that wasnt at all self-conscious. I remember her taking mum and me out to dinner, and her smiling and saying things like Marvellous and Arent we lucky every time the waiter delivered food to the table.