San Francisco, CA
June 1947
Clarice sat on her bed, paging through the family photo album. There were many pictures of Mommy and Daddy; her favorite of those was their wedding portrait. Daddy looked so serious in his suit; Mommy was wearing a light-colored dress and a pretty hat.
There was another photo taken that day; Grandmere hadn’t yet gone back to France. She was a tiny woman with white, wavy hair; she leaned on a walking stick, but her smile was broad and happy for the camera. It was she after whom Clarice had been named: the grandmother she’d never met.
The older photos showed a more stoic Grandmere, and Mommy’s Beau-Pere. Mommy said it was because it took so long for the cameras to be ready back then; people would have to hold their poses forever and a day, it seemed, so that the photographer could capture the image.
The wedding picture for Grandmere and Beau-Pere was just such a one. Grandmere’s suit and hat were green, Mommy said; Beau-Pere’s suit was chocolate-brown. Mommy had been a little girl then; her Papa had passed away. Beau-Pere was her famous stepfather, the portrait artist Gilbert Rochambeau.
Clarice looked up to her bedroom wall; one of Beau-Pere’s portraits of Grandmere hung there. She’d been painted in the Fauvist style; no one would ever believe her hair was blue or her face that shade of pink. Yet, it was unmistakably Grandmere.
The fact of Beau-Pere’s fame as an artist was a cornerstone of Clarice’s life: their lives were held together during the worst of the Depression by income from the many paintings he’d done.
Clarice often wished she had known them … and that Mommy remembered more about her mysterious Papa. There were no photographs of him in any album, although there was one of Claire in the old-fashioned ivory walking suit she wore the day they wed. One day, Clarice decided, she would know the reason.