I liked the doors. French doors, of course, my mother would have no other kind, with round over-doors set atop each of the four entrances. I loved the sight of their delicacy centered amidst the hard stone. Like me, in this “cottage” my mother had demanded, fragile within its sturdiness.
There were times when Ginevra and I snuck into them, when my mother entertained no one, no small tete-a-tetes. Those times were rare. We made our place in the vast foliage cave beneath the weeping beeches. Freedom and segregation, no matter how disparate, were ours there, as we wanted it to be.
On the warmest days, such as this one, the doors of the teahouses stood wide open on all four sides. Here my parents, though in truth rarely my father, had afternoon tea sheltered beneath these small cupolas, the
