“But we’re wasting time with all this walking. Come on, here’s a stairway. I bet we can hail a cab at the top.”
“We’ll be broke at this rate.”
“At least we won’t be crippled.”
“Ha, ha.” The woman glanced back at her husband, her expression a mixture of exasperation and affection.
With a sharp stab of envy, Genna recognized the bickering as the back-and-forth of a marriage that had settled over the decades into comfortable predictability. The woman worried about money; the man grumbled at the first sign of physical discomfort. The pattern would continue for the rest of their lives together.
Why couldn’t she have had that? What had she done wrong?
She watched the pair climb the stairs to the road and decided the man had a point. Walking had its place in the grand scheme of sightseeing, but not when it began resembling the Death March of Bataan. Genna reached the road just in time to see the couple disappear into a white taxi. Within minutes, she flagged down her own.
“La tour Eiffel, s’il vous plâit.”
The driver glanced back at her, bushy eyebrows raised above eyes veined red with exhaustion. He looked like he would kill for a soft bed and a respite from stupid tourists. “C’est près, madame.” It’s near.
She shrugged, he shrugged, and seconds later they screeched into the traffic.
The Eiffel Tower was close, and it was enormous. The driver dropped her off across the street, so she had a good view of the tower’s four massive pylons enclosing a huge square across which snaked long lines of hot tourists. She crossed the street and joined one of the lines. Ahead surged a large group of boisterous schoolchildren. She moved to a different line that was longer but consisted of docile-looking seniors led by guides holding umbrellas aloft. Several of the poor dears looked as if they’d much prefer a nice sit-down and a cup of tea to shuffling toward what was essentially an elevator ride.
The line moved quickly, the wait just long enough for Genna to gaze up at the crisscrossed underbelly of the premier étage—the first level—and contemplate the feat of engineering it represented. Built in 1889 for the Paris World’s Fair, the tower was meant to be taken apart a year later. Was a structure built well over a century ago sturdy enough to carry an average yearly load of six million tourists up its gray-gold girders?
It didn’t bear thinking about.
Genna rode straight to the second level along with a gaggle of seniors that, from the sound of them, hailed from the north of England.
“Eeee!” exclaimed one as the elevator lumbered skyward. “It’s a good thing that breakfast we had was so sparse.”
“Aye, I’d have murdered for a fry-up.”
“I’ve a mind to complain. Imagine! Five bloody euros for a glass of juice and a bit of bun.”
“It’s a disgrace.”
“Aye.”
Squashed into an outside corner, her face turned to the view, Genna thought fondly of her Yorkshire-born granny.
“Mabel’s got the gout, did you hear?”
“No! Mind you, it’s to be expected.”
“She’s always been one for the rich food.”
“Aye.”
One of the ladies elbowed her way in front of her companions to stand next to Genna. “She’d have been well chuffed with this,” the woman said. She smelled of lily of the valley and face powder.
“With what?”
“This here. The view.”
“Aye. Champion.”
“Do you think there’ll be somewhere to sit up top? Me poor feet are howling.”
“You shouldn’t have worn them shoes.”
“Aye, well, serves me right then.”
Genna resisted the temptation to give the woman a hug. She’d have thought she was mad, but what a story to tell when they got back home! Genna’s grandmother had dragged her grandfather on bus trips all over the continent and never remembered what she’d seen.
The elevator juddered to a stop at the deuxième étage. Genna detached herself from the tour group and found a place to sit overlooking the view.
Two young women strode past.
“I told Joy she must leave him before it’s too late.”
“Did she?”
“Of course not! Joy’s so stubborn, she’s . . .”
The two women looked to be in their thirties, both tanned, sleek, and North American. Before Genna was able to find out more about Joy’s stubbornness, the women turned the corner to continue their conversation without so much as glancing at the view.
“I told you to put that away!”
“Mom!”
A young woman stopped near Genna and dropped to her knees before her sniffling child, a boy of about six. One chubby hand clutched a video game.
“This vacation is costing us a fortune,” the mother hissed. “You can play your game in the hotel and that’s it.”
The venom in the woman’s voice was so palpable that Genna flinched. Her reaction was not so much distaste at the mother’s behavior as recognition of her own. She heard the same frustration she remembered feeling with her own children when they hadn’t done something she wanted.
The little boy’s face was crimson, his eyes teary, but his grip on the video game defiant. What did he care about a bunch of rooftops?
“Do you hear me?” the mother demanded.
The boy nodded tearfully. “But, Mom, I’m bored.”
“Bored? You’re in Paris!”
“I want to go to the hotel.”
The mother saw an inroad and, to Genna’s relief, regained control of herself.
“All right,” she said, her voice softening into the universal tones of parental wheedling. “How about you put away the game for now and we’ll look through this nice telescope? Then you can play the game while we’re having a snack.”
The little boy looked up at his mother and then beyond her to the telescope. Genna could almost see the wheels grinding as he weighed his options. Slowly his fingers softened their hold on the video game. His mother took out a tissue and wiped his face, and then suddenly clasped him to her chest. She turned toward Genna and smiled sheepishly.
“It’s a lot for little ones to take in,” Genna said. “I remember needing to make time for breaks when my children were young.”
The mother nodded. “I’m starting to realize that.”
“But they grow up so fast. The next time you come, he’ll be chasing the French girls.”
The mother managed a weak laugh as she stood up and took her son’s hand. “Have a nice day,” she said.
“You too.”
The woman led the boy to a telescope where she was joined by a man and a girl of about ten. The girl was reading the descriptions of the skyline that circled the ledge and giving her father a bossy commentary.
The two children looked to be the same age apart as Genna’s two children. At twenty-seven, Becky was making a success of her first real job as a junior curator at Vancouver’s anthropology museum, while Michael at twenty-three was . . .
Genna despaired of her son’s lack of direction, although she wouldn’t put it past him to figure out a way to show up in Paris. The prospect of free accommodation and his mother’s cooking might prove irresistible. All he’d need would be the fare, and he’d find a way to get it if he wanted to. Michael might not be ambitious, but he was resourceful.