Suzy Says

Here’s your Halloween frisson of horror: The venerable Samaritaine in Paris has started charging for access to its roof, which has a panoramic view of Paris. I personally prefer the Samaritaine to dealing with the horrors of waiting in line at the Eiffel Tower and the slight yet terrifying sway of the tower, not to mention the overly close proximity to other tourists. Also, La Samaritaine has what the Eiffel Tower never has, and never will: shopping.

It seems ironic that a store named Samaritan (as in Good) is behaving as its antithesis. Unless you spend 30 Euros or more, and then roof access is included.

And now, a Halloween memory.

In the long-ago days of my childhood, back when England still used shillings and sixpences and there were no Euros, the rule in my family was that you couldn’t go trick or treating until you were 5. I don’t know how my parents arrived at this edict; many, if not most, parental edicts have a very arbitrary quality about them.

Anyway, my brother, who is three years younger than I am, was dying to go trick or treating. Just imagine the hell this boy was in: his two older sisters, besides being bossy and worst of all, girls, got to go out and get free candy while he had to stay home. Unbelievable. I think there’s something like that in Dante’s Purgatory somewhere.

The year my brother was four years old, we all went to a Halloween party at the house of our friends, the Cades (digression: Tom Cade, the host of this party, is the founder of The Peregrine Fund). At that time, they lived in a wonderful Victorian mansion perched on top of a hill. The house had its own graveyard, which was not unusual for a house in the country built so long ago, but you can imagine how fascinating that was to those of us who lived in houses with cemetery-free backyards, and also made it the perfect setting for a Halloween party.

The plan was that after the party, the parents would take the kids into the village to go trick or treating. My brother saw his chance and piled into someone else’s car, along with a bunch of other kids. By the time my parents realized what was going on, it was too late (this feeling became increasingly familiar to them as my brother grew up). I will never forget seeing my brother running down the sidewalk of the first house he visited with his bag of candy, calling out joyfully, “It works! It works!” He just couldn’t get over the fact that one day a year, all you had to do was say the magic words and you’d actually get candy.

At least one a day a year should definitely be magic.