Monsieur Mediocre

by John von Sothen

  Although she’d been raised by artists, Anaïs always maintained a sort of noble solidity to her nature—which includes an unbowed sense of integrity. She’s one of those rare people who prefer not to gossip about others, which is all I want to do. For her, critiquing somebody who’s not present to defend himself not only shows cowardice, it’s vulgar and petty, qualities that, again, I’ve always valued.

  * * *

  When I met Anaïs in New York in 2000, I didn’t know she was a French blue blood. And even if I had, I probably wouldn’t have cared that much. Nobility doesn’t mean squat in New York. Sure, you gloss over a couple of aristocrat names here and there in the Vanity Fair event pages—Count von Hollenlohe something or other at the Hamptons Film Festival, and you wonder who that person is, only because they’re standing next to real American royalty because actual royalty sticks out like a sore thumb next to Hollywood royalty like Ryan Gosling or The Rock.

  Half of those claiming some sort of royal status probably aren’t even aristocrats, Anaïs told me. They’re “usurpers,” meaning they’d usurped the title from someone else and made it their own. And there were a bunch of usurpers apparently in the States, she said, where people were less equipped to sniff out these fakes. I was intrigued by this usurping business, not just because it’s such a great verb, but because there was also a Barry Lyndon–like treachery to the whole thing my life needed more of.

  Anaïs told me that in France usurping happens all the time. Some bourgeois arriviste (social climber) would assume an aristocratic name as a way to gain an invitation to a Sotheby’s auction or a lower bank rate, or—in the 1970s politician Valéry Giscard’s case (he later became Valéry Giscard d’Estaing)—the position of French president.

  There was even a story about Anaïs’s own family name being usurped. That cad had gone so far as to write to Anaïs’s great-grandfather asking permission to use the name. He was thanked for his polite request, of course, but no, that was completely impossible. And soon a social equivalent of a cease and desist letter was sent out. The usurper ran with the name anyway.

  This would start what Anaïs’s family would call the “fake branch.” Although there was outrage at the outset, eventually the fake branch would prove to be a convenient alibi. If there was ever a wayward cousin the family was embarrassed by, all anyone needed to say was “Oh, he’s from the fake branch.” That gross far-right politician who’s always yapping on TV?—Never met him, certainly a usurper.

  In a crazy coincidence, Anaïs and I would meet one of these in-the-flesh homonyms later in life, face to face. He, it turned out, lived in the Perche, where we had our country home, and ironically shared the same exact name—first and last—as Anaïs’s father. We made his acquaintance at a midnight mass at the local church on Christmas Eve, and later visited his home to meet his wife. It was clear they had done quite well for themselves. They had a château near our house, which was owned by the elder brother, who was something like the governor of the region. The usurped name carried great weight now, more weight than it had when wielded by the “old” branch, I reminded Anaïs.

  Seeing its immediate benefits, I began to freely float Anaïs’s family name in the Perche. I signed the bill for the electrician in her last name. I gave the grocer her name for a delivery. Eventually even the French fry stand guy at the municipal pool knew my new last name, and, of course, assumed, since my family was also the governor’s, maybe he could get a new stand next year? I’m not proud of it, but I must confess I responded, “We’ll look into it,” and my foreign accent made the claim even more legit. For them, I was the German branch maybe, a Count von Hohenlohe or something or other. I was having a ball.

  And no, I didn’t have qualms. If anything, it was payback usurping, something I considered fair and aboveboard. I’m sure if I was French, I’d blush each time I used Anaïs’s family name. But the fact that I’m American meant it was water off this American duck’s back. And because I was this outsider, I felt I’d been given license to play with something others took super seriously. I look at it as a rare reward for having to file two tax returns, to misunderstanding much at a condo owners’ meeting, and never knowing if I’m cutting the Brie correctly.

  Sometimes I get the impression people think my usurping is not just exhaustingly conspiratorial, but also somehow lucrative. I meet my target in a New York bar. Claim a sketchy profession. Play the aristocrat card. And all those “Well, John’s done quite well for himself, hasn’t he,” nudge-nudge wink-wink comments seem to convey I am part of some club now, and that by marrying Anaïs, my ship had come in.

  But my ship hadn’t. I mean not in a substantial fashion. Nobody from Anaïs’s family had offered me a job running the Hong Kong desk. There wasn’t some three-bedroom apartment waiting for us in the Eighth if we wanted it. Sadly, I’d come to learn, Anaïs’s family wasn’t as influential as I needed them to be. They were fairly frugal actually. If anything, there was a tendency to shun the title even, thanks in large part to Anaïs’s father’s generation—counterculture sixties kids known in France as the soixante-huitards (’68ers—in reference to the protesters in 1968), who’d run from, not embraced, the wave of patronage that had broken upon them. Anaïs’s father had forgone inheriting the château (which comes with being first in line), seeing that the deal required him to live in it full time, something his music business wouldn’t allow. Anaïs’s aunt had become the first female bus driver in France. No, she wouldn’t make it a career, but that wasn’t the point. Other aunts were musicians, some were professors, and one uncle was a journalist. The most aristocratic thing about them was that everyone spoke at least three languages. They’d all grown up in Spain. And all, except for one, had married foreigners.

  * * *

  The more I learned about French aristocrats the more I realized the Downton Abbey vision I had of them was a tad off, and that the group, as a whole, didn’t have the decadent reputation I’d assumed. If anything, les aristos (as they’re called) are the butt of many jokes inside France, looked upon much like we do the reclusive women of Grey Gardens, the cult documentary by Albert and David Maysles; charming and eccentric sure, a bit dotty yes, and most likely, broke. It’s gotten to the point that if someone describes an aristocrat in France, they’re much more likely talking about tattered sweaters and hocking jewelry than polo matches and fox hunts. And I was fine with that, too. If anything, it made me feel at ease with my belle-famille, only because they resembled the world my mother’s family inhabited.

  Although my mother’s family didn’t have a château, the Murdochs did own a sprawling farm estate outside Pittsburgh where my mother had grown up. By the time I was born, my grandmother had downsized to a rickety three-story Victorian in the city with a tin roof and a large overgrown garden out back, where she lived with my uncle Charlie, and her eighty-year-old cleaning lady, Missouri. My grandmother’s house was on Ellsworth Avenue in what people normally considered to be the posh neighborhood of Shadyside. But the fact that a rough-and-tumble street called Tay Way bordered her backyard convinced my grandmother she lived on Skid Row.

  When she moved from “the farm,” Granny had taken everything with her, down to the doorknobs, so when you entered her new home, you had the impression you were in a holding house for luxury thieves. The floors were covered with oriental rugs of all sizes, stacked on top of each other in double or triplicate. Heavy mirrors were either on the walls or placed on mantelpieces. Chandeliers hung next to each other in haphazard fashion. Silverware was everywhere. Vases covered each dresser. Bronze candlesticks sat by the half-dozen on every table, and every inch of wall was covered in framed oil paintings. There were porcelain ashtrays by the dozens. Crystal decanters. The fireplace had three sets of pokers. There were iron doorstops by every door. It was as if every object was standing in line, patiently waiting its turn to be used. The house was also as dark as an opium den. Velvet curtains covered the windows that already had bl
inds. And in each of those windows hung stained-glass works my grandmother had crafted in the sixties. Even if you were light and wanted to get in, Granny’s windows wouldn’t let you.

  And amidst this Miss Havisham clutter sat Granny in her living room, aboard a leather couch, a mink shawl draped over her shoulders, a dozen bracelets dangling from each arm, her torn pantyhose halfway down her leg, while her beagle, Pal, lay next to her and my uncle Charlie sat across from her in a leather chair, chain-smoking. Most of the time she was reading a folded newspaper with a magnifying glass, shouting out stock quotes to a phone receiver that rested sideways on the coffee table. Her trader, Bob Fleckenstein, was on the other end of the line apparently listening to her distant instructions.

  While Granny barked stock lingo into the void, I’d wander through the house like a miniature antique dealer staring up at the paintings, studying the tchotchkes, much the same way I’d later admire Anaïs’s family portraits at her grandparents’ house. And in both situations, there was a comfort knowing I was part of an odd bunch that drove buses although they owned paint-peeling châteaus or lived in a battered old Victorian with schizophrenic uncles buying and selling blue-chip stocks.

  * * *

  As the years passed and I spent more time with Anaïs’s family, it began to gnaw at me how little I knew of my last name, von Sothen, which was odd considering it was kind of, sort of, aristocrat-ish. The fact I couldn’t even place the von Sothens inside Germany seemed suspicious.

  Had I been a Smith or a Jones, my ignorance wouldn’t have come as a surprise. Expecting Americans to know much about their history or anything about geography beyond the United States is a notorious lead balloon for the French. They’ve been let down so many times by Americans unable to even name a single department in France, let alone a town in Burgundy, they’re just happy if you don’t think Hezbollah is a country. But when there’s a von tagged to your last name (a particule I’m told it’s called), you’re expected to provide documentation. Whereas Anaïs’s people had parks named after them and streets, not to mention a published book to lean on if anyone asked, all I had was a flimsy alibi based on a hard-to-believe yarn.

  The crux of the story involved a black sheep count named Karl, who apparently renounced his title in nineteenth-century Bismarck Germany, trading it in for a ticket to America with his young bride. Legend has it there was a shipwreck near the Canary Islands. The wife perished with the ship, and the suddenly widowed von Sothen met his rebound wife on the very island, traveling with her to the United States, where eventually they settled in the German neighborhood of College Point in Flushing, New York. There, my grandfather was born, and later, in the long tradition of American patriotism, he’d return to Germany, not to learn his roots, but to fight in World War I against his father’s people.

  Because my great-grandfather died young, nobody spoke German at home, and nobody had contact with the German von Sothens. All I knew growing up about my grandfather was that he moved to Schenectady and then to Syracuse because he worked for GE. And each time I told this humdrum part of the story to anyone who asked, I could see in their faces boredom more than anything; no Knights Templar, no lawn croquet, just a company guy in upstate New York.

  * * *

  Determined to find out more, I began focusing on an interesting lead from a hard-to-find archive in a place I’d never visited before, page two of a Google search. There I discovered a von Sothen had commissioned an eighteenth-century chapel in Austria. He’d also owned a giant castle nearby. Voilà! I thought. The von Sothens were a family of substance, and because the fact that the French aristocrats were broke didn’t mean the Germans would be. Hell, maybe there was a castle left for me—the result of some hiccup in a great-great uncle’s will. Maybe all we had to do was show up, and the town’s bürgermeister would receive me with a speech, pointing to the deed that had been awaiting my signature for years. A German Mr. Bates would then take us to our new domain, where Bibi’s harp would be sitting next to her six Afghan dogs.

  My hopes were dashed, though, when I read that the same castle owner had been lynched by an angry mob, and the castle in his name no longer stood. By then I’d moved on to page three of the Google search results, where I found my son’s name, Otto von Sothen, only he wasn’t a six-year-old in Paris, but the former CEO of PepsiCo . . . living in Brazil.

  Great. Germans sharing my last name and living in Brazil. What a pleasant surprise.

  To add to the schadenfreude, some of the Brazilian von Sothens, namely the twenty-something girls, most likely the daughters of the PepsiCo CEO, were always ranked higher than me on Google. Every time I searched my name (which I do almost every day), their faces would pop up. And for what? Smiling at insipid magazine parties? Didn’t they know that was my domain?

  When these von Sothens had come over from Germany and whether they were even my people wasn’t clear, but what was certain was that the Europe aristocracy I thought I’d uncover was quickly turning out to be either disgraced barons or Brazilian party girls.

  Ironically, around this same time, my other primary research tool (Facebook) began harvesting stray von Sothens, one being a Klaus from Germany, whom I eventually met in Paris at the Fumoir café, a teak-floored lunch spot directly across from the Louvre. Klaus and I swapped stories about our different families, mine being a bit far-fetched for his taste, his being a bit too boring for mine. Months later, he followed up with scraps of photos of clumsily drawn family crests and illustrations of dinky châteaus. Our correspondence eventually became an interrogation, only all of the questions were directed at me: questions about my great-grandfather, my grandfather, and my parents; where they lived and what they did. I was starting to get paranoid.

  “I mean what’s to say he’s even a von Sothen?” I told Anaïs while cutting onions one night before dinner. “I never saw a business card.”

  “And even if he did have your last name . . .” she interrupted, looking at me under her glasses, “what’s to say he’s not a . . .”

  Usurper. It was obvious she was enjoying all of this, probably because she’d uncovered additional family a week earlier simply by walking Otto to school. There she’d met Fred, whose son, Lucien, was in Otto’s class. And since aristocrats have a way of cutting to the chase with names, Fred and Anaïs realized they might be distant cousins.

  Soon Fred became my best French dad friend, someone you cross each day at school, or spend early evenings splitting a carafe of wine with at a nearby café while your kids play soccer in the park. French dad friends will eventually replace your actual friends and become your only friends. Fred was also the aristocrat I always dreamed existed.

  His last name stared with a de as well, but, unlike Anaïs’s, his ended with a town you could find on a map, because, you see, it used to be his family’s. The enormous family château was now a park, and Fred’s father, a baron, lived high up on a hill in the town outskirts, tending to his lawns and his genealogical tree. Fred’s childhood was spent between Switzerland (where his gallivanting mother stuck him in boarding school) and New York (where his gallivanting mother stuck him in hotels while she dated the head of the French Connection). Afterward, Fred lived in LA for a bit where he knew Angelica Huston, produced a documentary about Hillary Clinton, had a child with a world-famous perfumer, and now here he was, married to a much younger actress.

  I wasn’t sure if it was his bio that made Fred so aristocratic or his style of backgammon play, the way he tossed the dice and moved his chips with quick nonchalance, a level only countless summers on the beach at a place like Monte Carlo could have taught him. Fred could also ski backward. He could ride horses without a saddle. He bought art he didn’t need. And all of this I witnessed first-hand over the years we hung out. Plus, like Hughes, he was an oxymoron. He lived in a rent-controlled apartment in a middle-income housing project, yet he kept a convertible Bentley in the garage of his building. On occasion, we’d drive
around the neighborhood, the top down, just to pick up a case of wine.

  Both Fred and Hughes shared that ability to adapt to any social situation, no matter how complex. It’s a social chameleon-ism borne of a fundamental tenet Anaïs’s grandmother always spoke of when explaining how she taught her kids to navigate the fussiness of socializing. “You treat a peasant like a prince and a prince like a peasant.”

  Hughes had recently moved to Kuala Lumpur, where his wife was stationed for the European Commission. We assumed a Montmartre-bred musician over sixty-five would melt in an Asian Tiger cub country of malls and poorly designed thoroughfares, especially considering that under Malaysian law, the spouse of a working foreign dignitary was considered a “femme de diplomate” and prohibited from working. Instead Hughes flourished, quickly befriending the French cultural attaché, who included him on every select invite to every cocktail or dinner the city held. There, Hughes schmoozed mothers (because he volunteered to teach music at the select Lycée Français), entertained their boring husbands, who worked for the oil company Total, and met the princess of Qatar, whom he’d eventually perform a concert for in Dubai.