Existence in Epigram

“They say, Lady Hunstanton, that when good Americans die they go to Paris.”

Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance

“I have to rest.” I stop walking and lean forward with my palms resting against my thighs. My back aches. Me feet ache. My chest heaves like the bellows of an accordion.

“You all right?” My oldest son, Andy, needs reassurance. “No chest pain?”

“No. Just out of breath.”

From the corner of my eye, I see him unfolding the map we picked up at our hotel.

“How much farther?”

“I think it’s at the top of this hill.” He points up the street.

I look up and up and up.

We are on the Rue de la Roquette between Boulevard Voltaire and Boulevard de Ménilmontant. The terrain, fairly flat until we crossed Voltaire, now slants sharply upward. The farther we walk, the steeper the incline, and the louder my body protests. Aside from being on the back side of middle-aged and somewhat out of shape, I have a congenital heart defect only marginally improved by open heart surgery a few years earlier. Andy is more than my companion on this adventure. He’s here to to save me from dying alone and friendless in Paris should my heart decide to give out. Because he speaks less French than I do (and I speak almost none), I’m not sure how much of a rescue he can affect. But he’s a great travel partner and almost as much in awe of Europe as I am.

While I catch my breath, I look back at where we’ve been. I now realize that the Île de la Cité, the heart of Paris, beats within a breastwork of hills. The split channel of the Seine is both aorta and vena cava to the Île, the grand, tree-lined boulevards its lesser vessels. When Andy and I arrived the previous afternoon, unwitting characters in our own tale of two cities, we found Paris laid back, its pulse languid, unlike that of frenetic London. Life takes its sweet time here. It pulls up a chair in a neighborhood café, sips strong, rich coffee from small, white cups, and watches the world go by. In Paris, we feel almost as if we’ve returned home to New Orleans. The similarity surprises us, and we are surprised by our surprise. Paris is a grandparent, one whom we’ve been told we resemble, and yet we are astonished when a snapshot reveals the likeness.

Hills surprise us, too. Walking a couple of miles across Paris doesn’t seem unreasonable, but maps are two-dimensional and deceptive. Our destination, Père Lachaise Cemetery, sits atop a hill approximately 300 feet above the city’s leisurely beating heart, a height roughly equivalent to the World Trade Center at the foot of Canal Street in New Orleans. My heart, by the time we finally reach the cemetery, will beat at a pace that could never be described as leisurely.

"If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen,

society would be quite civilized.” Oscar Wilde, The Ideal Husband

Europe is old in ways most Americans find hard to comprehend—old places, old stories, and old scars. We started our vacation in Ireland, a land so dotted with centuries-old castles—some ruined, some still thriving—they seem almost as ubiquitous as McDonald’s restaurants along an interstate highway. Maybe we noticed them more because there were so few trees. According to a plaque in the gardens at Blarney Castle in County Cork, the Brits cut them all down. Ireland’s indigenous trees have been replaced by evergreens imported from the U.S. Pacific northwest. It makes sense. Except for a few freakishly beautiful days or parts of days, the climate in Ireland is basically fifty shades of wet. A lot like Washington or Oregon, I imagine.

At the Cliffs of Moher, I learned the Brits harvested stone, too. Many of the castles in Europe are paved with flagstones quarried from Ireland’s west coast. But the Empire didn’t get all of the Emerald Isle’s best rocks. Enigmatic circles, similar to Stonehenge, monoliths, and dolmen stones are plentiful, and many date back thousands of years B.C. And then there are the so-called “famine walls.” During the Irish Potato Famine, starving men, too proud to beg, worked daily for a few morsels of food by dragging stones from fields and creating the picturesque walls that seem to meander all over Ireland today. The great irony of this, of course, is that food abounded in gardens on English-owned estates. The Irish, too poor to grow anything but potatoes, were ruined when a fungus destroyed their crops; and the English, bent on profit, exported their excesses to tables across the Irish Sea. Some sources estimate as many as one million Irish men, women, and children starved to death. Another million emigrated.

Three hundred years before Columbus laid eyes on the New World, four hundred years before Sir Walter Raleigh planted Elizabeth’s flag in North America, six hundred years before American colonists declared their freedom, England, the last in a long line of conquerors, began crushing the Irish people. It took the Irish eight hundred years to finally overcome their oppressors. They managed it only by rending themselves into Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

“Sure there are good Englishmen,” a jolly Irish tour guide told me sixty years post-emancipation. “But only a few.”

Old places. Old stories. Old scars.

“There is no sin except stupidity.” Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, Part II

“Oh, shit! I forgot the lipstick!”

“You’re kidding?”

We gaze longingly at the intersection less than a block ahead. Then we look back down the hill. Behind us is Roquette Square, a pretty little park with playground equipment and walking paths. Behind us are the houses and apartments of working-class families who visit the park. Behind us are little cafés, bakeries, and mini-marts frequented by the same families. But not one drug store, not a single dollar store, nor anything remotely like a Walmart. How could I have been so stupid?

“We must have passed some place back there that sells lipstick,” Andy says while lighting a cigarette. He takes a long drag and exhales. “I can walk back down and look.”

“No. I’ll do it.”

“I’ll go with you.”

I glance at the intersection ahead one more time. Just a few more feet and we’ll turn onto the Boulevard de Ménilmontant. One block more and we’ll reach the cemetery. Do I really need lipstick?

“You know you want to do it,” Andy says. “It’s the reason you walked halfway across Paris.”

I nod, sigh, and start walking back the way we came. It’s nearing mid-day. The July sun is high and hot, and I feel a fine bead of sweat forming along my hairline. Andy’s forehead glistens.

“Maybe that little store has something,” I say, pointing toward a shop a few doors down. “At least maybe we can get a bottle of water.”

We step inside, but I’m not hopeful about the lipstick. Water, yes. Lipstick, no. Out on the sidewalk again we reassess the situation and decide to backtrack one more block. Then one more. And one more.

I feel like I’m rewinding the day, remembering it in reverse. I see the homeless family camped on the sidewalk, their toddler playing with an old, broken toy, their ratty blankets piled in a doorway. I see the Colonne de Juillet, the “July Column,” stuck like a giant push pin in the center of Place de la Bastille, marking the spot where the infamous prison once stood. I hear horns honking, tourists laughing and talking. I see the Seine shimmering in the early morning light, splitting around the base of Notre Dame Cathedral as it has done for nearly a millennium. I feel a slight chill in the air. I smell croissants and fresh coffee. I hear Paris waking to a new day, a day with me in it. I see our hotel, the Hôtel Familia, in the Quartier Latin on the Rue des Écoles on the Rive Gauche. The dome of the Panthéon rises behind it. I see our room, my bag, my lipstick.

“What about this place?”

“Maybe,” I say, peering through a window.

It looks like the cosmetics counter at Macy’s has been relocated into a storefront on the Rue de la Roquette. Andy waits outside while I look around the store. There is lip “rouge,” plenty of it, but the prices are ridiculous. I just want a cheap tube of lipstick, something that will leave a mark. Is there nothing under $20 in this place? The clerk’s English is about as good as my French, but we manage to communicate.

“Well?”

“Too expensive. I can’t bring myself to spend that much on lipstick I don’t really need.”

“Mom!”

We’re both aware of the irony—to have come all this way, to have spent so much money getting here, only to quibble over the price of lipstick? Stupid, stupid, and stupid.

“There’s another store over there,” I say. “Let’s try it.”

Two stores and three blocks later, I give up, convinced there’s not a single tube of cheap lipstick in Paris.

“Are you sure?”

I nod and, once more, look up and up and up.

“And down the long and silent street, The dawn, with silver-sandalled feet, Crept like a frightened girl.”

Oscar Wilde, The Harlot’s House

My great-great-great-grandfather was born in Ireland. His name, on Louisiana census records, is spelled McKinney in some places and McKenney in others. I’d tried researching the name while in Ireland, but McKenna kept popping up. In the library at Trinity College in Dublin, I met a genealogist who suggested McKenna might be a Scottish name. The British, in an effort to tame the “wild Irish” had introduced docile Scotsmen into the mix by offering them land in what is now Northern Ireland. Et voilá! Scots-Irish! Maybe that’s what we were.

From Ireland, Andy and I flew to Edinburgh. Along the Royal Mile, somewhere between Edinburgh Castle and Holyrood Palace, I found a booklet in a tartan shop. “Clan McKenna,” I read on the front cover. On the back, I found a list of names derived from McKenna. One of them was McKinney.

“Your ancestors were illiterate,” the store clerk said. Disgust dripped from his words like blood from a thorn.

“Excuse me?”

“They couldn’t read or write. If they could, they would have spelled their name correctly. The census-taker spelled it phonetically.”

I’d reasoned this out long ago, but I hadn’t expected to be reminded of it so rudely.

“See that green border around the book?” the clerk continued. “Green means it’s Irish. There’s no McKenna clan. No tartan. The Irish don’t have tartans.”

“They told me in Dublin that McKenna might be a Scottish name.” When did I say anything about tartans? .

“It’s not.” He tapped the green edge of the book and, without further comment, turned and walked away.

I learned nothing about my family, but I learned a lot about what it means to be Irish in the U. K. Or maybe the Scots are just a miserable lot. After all, who else so proudly acknowledges the most dismal places in their country?

Each year, the architectural magazine Urban Realm hands out three prizes collectively known as “The Carbuncle Awards.” The top prize, “The Plook-on-the-Plinth Trophy,” which Urban Realm describes on its website as the “award nobody wants,” goes to the most dismal city in Scotland. A plook, I learned from the Oxford English Dictionary, is a spot or a pimple. This year, the pimple erupted in Aberdeen. However, not to be out-blemished by its most dismal peer, Edinburgh brought home the two remaining honors, “The Pock Mark Award” for the worst planning decision and the “Zit Building Award” for the worst (read ugliest) building.

“These people just seem beat down,” Andy said. “I think, when the English killed William Wallace, it took the life out of them.” Andy is a fan of Braveheart.

Perhaps he’s right, but three days in Edinburgh are hardly enough to get the true measure of its culture. And we had just left Ireland, a country whose people are consistently voted among the friendliest in the world. How could the unfortunate pimpled and pock-marked Scots, who had never managed to wriggle out from under the English thumb, possibly compete?

Still, I couldn’t shake Andy’s words. Scots-Irish I may be, but I’m American enough to say “give me liberty or give me death.” I’d rather be Irish and scorned than Scottish and defeated.

“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.” Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost

Père Lachaise, encompassing 110 acres, is the largest cemetery and the largest park in Paris proper. The Mairie de Paris website claims one million people are buried here, though only seventy thousand tombs survive. The bones and ashes of another million people are housed in the cemetery’s ossuary. Two million people—eerily equal to the number of people who starved or emigrated during Ireland’s “Great Famine”—lie in this place. Many of the interred are famous—the writers, Molière, Proust, Honoré de Balzac and Gertrude Stein; the painters, Modigliani, Seurat, and Pissaro; the chanteuse, Édith Piaf; the composer, Frédéric Chopin; the twelfth century lovers, Abélard and Héloïse, whose remains were moved here long after their deaths; the philosopher, Merleau-Ponty; and, the American musician, Jim Morrison. But the grave more people visit than any other—one of the ten most visited in the world, in fact—belongs to an Irishman of ill-repute, Oscar Wilde.

Andy and I pause just inside the main gate, overwhelmed by the scene before us. It might be the Garden of Eden, so lush and tranquil it appears. Rays of sunlight caress tender leaves and fragrant blooms, warming them until, like scented candles, they release their aromas into the ether. Graveled paths disappear into shadows only to reappear higher up in the terraced garden. Birds twitter among the branches of graceful trees before diving toward the grassy lawn and then climbing, climbing, climbing above our heads and, at last, spiraling back to their berths.

And there are stones—blocks of granite and marble, cut and carved, engraved and embossed—as natural in this place as limestone boulders along the west coast of Ireland. Demure angels peek through flowering shrubs. Grecian and Doric columns reach skyward amid fat tree trunks. Effigies keep watch over generations of bones. Up and up and up the stones ascend to the top of the hill where Louis XIV, early in his reign, watched civil wars determine his fate in the Paris Basin below. His bodyguards maintained quarters on this hill, then known as Mont Louis. Were they the musketeers immortalized by Alexandre Dumas? Later, great parties were held here to garner favor with the king’s confessor, Père De La Chaise, who lived among the Jesuits. But the king and his priest died. The Jesuits were driven away. A new Louis and his bride, Marie Antoinette, were reviled. Et vive la révolution! Mont Louis was reclaimed by the people—about two million of them.

“It’s beautiful,” I say.

“It’s huge.”

“That, too.”

“Ready to find him?”

Yes, but where to start?

Andy watches my face, reads my thoughts. “There,” he points to the path straight ahead.

My disfigured heart pounds in my chest. I hear blood whooshing in my ears, feel it coursing through my veins. I take a steadying breath and close my eyes. I want to savor this moment, this excitement, a bit longer.

A man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world. Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance

Andy and I took a train from Edinburgh to London just for the railway experience. We had hoped to view the countryside from our windows as we made our way south, but early morning fog blanketed what we might have seen of Scotland. England, though more visible, offered little more than a series of dull towns with shabby houses and shabbier train stations that all looked the same.

Yet the trip was cathartic. The gloom of Edinburgh lifted like the fog with every mile we traveled. Stepping onto the platform at King’s Cross Station was like stepping into a different world—the bright, vibrant, non-stop world of London. No wonder J. K. Rowling chose King’s Cross for her Harry Potter books. The place is magical. And because of the Harry Potter movies, it felt familiar.

But even the cavernous station with his high arched ceiling could not prepare us for the enormity of London. The city, of course, is huge and teeming with people. But the buildings are beyond grand. Andy, who harbored a great deal of cynicism about the imperialist wealth underpinning London’s landmarks, stood dumbstruck at the sight of Big Ben.

“It’s so big. Much bigger than it seems in pictures,” he said at last.

I stood behind him nodding and smiling. He tried so hard not to love London. Loving London made him feel unfaithful to Ireland. But London seduced him. It seduced us both.

We spent our days between our matchbox of a hotel room in Belgravia and the Tower of London. Around every corner, it seemed, stood something monumental, often very old but sometimes extremely modern. We rode double-decker buses from Victoria Station to Westminster Abbey. We strolled the Queen’s Walk in Southwark from Tower Bridge to the Globe Theater. Our path took us past Sir Francis Drake’s Golden Hind and the Tate Modern Museum. We zigzagged the Thames on the Millennium, Tower, and Westminster Bridges. We lunched in the shadow of the London Eye and then strapped ourselves into a speedboat that took us bouncing and blowing past St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Egyptian Obelisk (whose twin we later saw in Paris), past the river gate through which the doomed were carried by boat into the Tower of London, past the vast financial district where skyscrapers mingle with ancient cathedrals and castles.

In the evenings, we explored our fashionable neighborhood, home at one time or another to the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Mozart, Mary Shelley, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Elle MacPherson. We sampled the local cuisine—fish and chips at the Bag O’ Nails, tandoori chicken at Top Curry (allegedly patronized by Princess Diana), and authentic Italian pasta at O Sole Mio. And late into the evening we lay with our windows open as the city enveloped us, the muffled sounds of buses and pedestrians floating up from the street below lulling us into satisfied sleep.

“If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.” Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“Look! They have a cemetery map. Why didn’t we get one of those?”

“I didn’t see them,” Andy says. He eyes the couple standing a few yards away with their heads bent over a piece of paper.

I watch them, too. The young woman lifts her arm and points. She says something in what sounds like German. The young man looks in the direction she indicates, shakes his head, and returns to the map.

It’s been an hour since we entered Père Lachaise, and I’m tired of searching in vain. I’m also just plain tired. After making the long trek across Paris, doubling back, and then climbing the last half mile of Rue de la Roquette twice, Père Lachaise presents its own challenges—seventy thousand of them.

“Maybe they speak English,” I say, boldly walking toward them.

“Mom!”

“No, really. People from other countries often learn English. Maybe they’ll let us take a look.”

Not only do they speak English, but they offer us their map. They have finished touring and are simply determining how to get out of the cemetery.

“So where is he?” Andy asks, peering over my shoulder.

“All the way in the back.” Like an embarrassing cousin no one wants to claim.

I can’t say exactly when I fell in love with Oscar Wilde; it was a gradual thing that started when I first read The Picture of Dorian Gray. It became one of those books I read again and again, like Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, and Agnes Grey. Wilde’s photo on the cover of intrigued me. Something about his posture and the sadness lurking in his eyes were endearing. I Googled his biography, downloaded and read his complete works on my iPad, and grew to love him more. The irreverent Irishman who insinuated himself into English society while simultaneously thumbing his nose at it, I felt, was a man out of season. His time had not yet arrived. His type of love, “the love that dare not speak its name,” though common enough, could not be acknowledged. He crossed the line between self and society and paid dearly with his reputation, his career, and eventually his life. I grieved for him. And so I came to Père Lachaise to do as others had done before me. I came to leave my mark on his gravestone.

He is buried at the top of old Mont Louis, maybe on the very spot where a young king once paced nervously as his countrymen fought each other below. A highly stylized angel—large, naked, and flying—soars above the grave. Ironically, the angel’s genitalia are missing, vandalized and stolen in a final act of castration that began with Wilde’s imprisonment in 1895 for homosexuality.

If hiding Wilde had been the plan, it failed. People find him, thousands every year. So many, in fact, that a seven-foot glass wall was erected in 2011 to stop kissers from leaving damaging lipstick stains on his gravestone. The great flying angel is clean now, but the glass is a slimy mess of greasy, multi-colored lip prints that seem to float in mid-air like gravity-defying worms.

I approach the stone and with bare, trembling lips read the inscription taken from Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol: “And alien tears will fill for him Pity’s long-broken urn,

For his mourners will be outcast men,

And outcasts always mourn.”

His mourners, at first, were few. William Butler Yeats, a contemporary and fellow Irishman, wrote in his memoir, Four Years: “The dinner table was Wilde’s event and made him the greatest talker of his time…” But the greatest talker became the greatest outcast. Seduced by its glamour, he’d climbed up and up and up the London social ladder only to be thrown cruelly from it. Critics and priggish London society scorned him while he lived and sullied his memory long after he died. Old wounds, old stories, old scars.

“You’re not really going to kiss that nasty thing are you?”

“I am.”

“But what’s the point? You’re not wearing any lipstick.”

I find a relatively clean spot on the glass. My heart races as I position my lips near it. I understand my purpose now, though it has changed since I started this journey. I’m no longer a common tourist determined to leave my puny mark. With a solidary kiss, I touch and am touched by the underdogs and downtrodden—William Wallace and his fighting Scotsmen, generations of witty, gritty, indomitable Irishmen, the Parisians who won their independence from a debauched monarchy, and even the historically oppressive Brits who battled Nazi oppressors. But most of all I am marked by the legacy of Oscar Wilde and those like him who risked everything to be free.