I had to laugh. I could not remember her being defiant in this way.

I said, So the wedding part does not bother you.

She said, Don’t let them criticize you. Live your life.

I wish I could give this fierceness to all young women.

Mam showed me an enormous old family Bible. On the Births, Deaths and Marriages pages, someone had scrawled after my great-great-great-grandmother Bridget-Margaret Muireb’s name, Biddy. She was nine years old when she left Ireland during a famine. What did she do? Who took care of her? She had got pregnant by a soldier back from the Crimean War and she died in childbirth at sixteen. Hunger. Child pregnancy. Death. This tale of her life was written on a piece of vellum paper in fountain pen ink and tucked between the pages of Genesis by the same anonymous and neat hand that had written her nickname on the family tree.

Mam said, Our whole line comes from that girl.

—

For a while I tried to forget about Kosmos. I got a job with an airline magazine, easy, disposable writing, flip it open, wait for the flight to be over. The editor was Jacques Payac, a former newspaperman and a war correspondent. He had been hit by shrapnel and his left leg was amputated above the knee so he took a desk job. At the interview I told him about my life in Paris, about living in a bookshop and working at the print shop on the Place des Vosges. I showed him a couple of my pieces, one about releasing ortolans from their fate as a delicacy to be eaten under napkins. He laughed at that one and hired me for features and said, I don’t have much money. But you’ll have fun. Short trips. Write for tourists. Find interesting angles.

I said, Sounds good. Thank you.

He rose crookedly, righted himself, extended his hand to shake mine and said, Start tomorrow.

I picked up my bag and when I was partway through the door he asked, By the way, are you pregnant?

I said, See you in the morning.

He said, All right.

I thought, Even if I do not get to keep this job I will be friends with this man.

This began a busy time of travel and the best job I could have hoped for. I went for a week to Egypt to write about the pyramids because of a new direct Cairo route. While I was there I did not stay in the airline hotel but I lived with an old woman in the tombs in the City of the Dead below the Mokattam hills. I wrote about that. I went to Angkor Wat because of new flights to Asia and I travelled to the pepper fields to see the hidden HIV villages. Back at home I travelled on a float plane up the Labrador coast to cover some American hunting lodges and I stopped at Hebron where all but four people died of the 1918 flu. The survivors chopped holes in the ice and weighted the corpses with rocks in the freezing water until they could bury them in the spring.