The French House: An American Family, a Ruined Maison, and the Village That Restored Them All

by Don Wallace

  Chapter Ten

  The French Position

  A second year passed without our seeing Belle Île, except in dreams.

  At this point in our plan, we were supposed to have sold our apartment and moved to a two-bedroom. Now, prisoners of our mortgage and the recession, we couldn’t move up, down, anywhere. A lot of people in New York City were in our position. Nobody was in our French position. As my father took pains to point out, at last we’d succeeded in becoming utterly pretentious: “What’s the use of owning a French house if you don’t go there?”

  Our mothers were worse than exasperated. Watchful already over who would get more time with the baby, they regarded Belle Île as an interloper of flesh and blood. La jalousie! Our more sardonic friends picked up on this theme: how interesting that we’d picked a spot as far away as possible from our mothers—in Mindy’s case, halfway around the world from Hawaii.

  The truth of my father’s remark became clear when we were contacted by a friend who was the assistant to Adam Smith, famous for his borrowed moniker and as a money columnist who’d blithely promoted the very market madness to which we’d fallen prey. Would we like to be featured in his next column? Sort of a cautionary tale, heh-heh, but the exposure could be good for our careers.

  Though I was tempted, Mindy saw right through it. “No way we’re going to make ourselves into a laughingstock for all the world to see.” We didn’t need that kind of publicity. What we needed was to pinch ourselves every day and then give thanks that we had such a wonderful baby boy to take our minds off our idiocy.

  Rory was certainly bright and curious, a shining little being. He wasn’t large, but more than held his own against the other milk-fed monsters in our Chelsea neighborhood. His will was truly something to behold. Two early babysitters quit, each demoralized after Rory went on a Baby Hercules exhibition, shoving and pushing all the furniture into the center of the living room, then climbing atop the pile in triumph.

  Meanwhile, the recession reverse-gentrified our neighborhood. Crack vials crunched underfoot, used condoms bloomed like flowers on the withered shrubbery, and transvestite hookers with multicolored Afros nodded off on bar stools at the Empire Diner. They adored Rory. But while we had a beautiful boy, this was not a beautiful life. This was not our maison saine. We owned a ruin in a village we couldn’t visit and a cave in the city we couldn’t leave. We owed every cent we had, and then some, for as far into the future as the eye could see.

  As far as we were concerned, all that remained of Belle Île and Kerbordardoué were memories.

  • • •

  “Hey, do you remember…?” one of us would ask. Lying flat on our backs in the dark, we’d whisper, careful not to wake the baby. Sure, sure… And off we’d go.

  One morning that first winter, we woke to the thump of surf echoing in our village square. After admiring the acoustics, funneled up from miles below, we set forth down the valley lane to check out the source. It was another gray winter’s day, but windless.

  At a low point, where the rutted road dips down to cross a shallow stream, a dozen cows stand around, munching weeds and nettles. We almost miss the man off to one side, in dusty overalls and a long-sleeved undershirt. He’s stout and large, with a cylindrical head topped by an oversized newsboy’s cap.

  “Bonjour,” says Mindy. He nods and lifts his cap an inch off his bare skull, his skin the same tawny yellow as his cows.

  When Mindy tries a little conversation, he squints at her, mouth open, as if taken aback, so she slows down. The cows flow between us, ruminating. Mindy steps back to let one pass. “He thinks I’m a Parisian,” she says in an aside. “His name is Dede”—day-day—and when he overhears his name, he ducks his head and shyly looks away. When we say good-bye, though, his face splits into a huge smile.

  We hop across the stream, then follow it down a lush meadow of wild grasses and cattails. One side is a hill so overgrown with gorse and vetch and blackberry brambles that it takes a minute to notice that it’s actually a huge sand dune. To our right, the valley’s opposite slope hangs over the meadow like a dark wave, broken in places by white limestone crags poking through the gorse. Beneath each crag is a cave, like a blind eye socket, turned toward the sea. Immediately I am possessed by a desire to climb the crags, explore the caves—and Mindy has to grab my sleeve. “Down, boy.”

  We follow the stream as it wends around the dunes, and we hear the roaring of the ocean before we see it. But when we do top the last dune, the sea is in a mad fury, rank after rank of white-water walls exploding and racing forward like cavalry. The odd arena effect that we’ve noticed before is even more pronounced: the harsh winter light on the sea and spindrift and white sand hurts the eyes. Mindy whirls around to shout: “It’s like ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’!”

  After a long walk above the high-tide line, we reverse our steps and head back up the valley. It’s actually a relief when the sound of crashing surf is muffled and we can talk again without shouting. But the effect of the ocean on our spirits is measurable. We’re floating along when here they come again, a little farther along the stream, the herd of cows.

  This time Dede, the cowherd in overalls and newsboy cap, is more sociable. He hails us first: “Bonjour!” He tips his cap, smiling. It seems as if, having had forty minutes to think it over, he’s decided this makes us old friends.

  What a great, big sweetheart of a guy! With that shy smile, he comes out way ahead of his American Gothic counterparts in all those places where I’ve lived for most of the last decade: California’s Central Valley, Sonoma County, Nipomo, Long Beach, even Iowa City, where Grant Wood painted American Gothic. A snap judgment? Sure. Maybe I’m getting sentimental. This valley is so beautiful and the light so pure that it has an exhilarating effect. He’s just a cowherd, after all. But at least he’s a friendly one, and in all my jobs so far—in agriculture, construction, the oil fields, teaching, and most recently, as a sportswriter—I’ve encountered enough woofing, chest-bumping, and territory-marking to last a lifetime.

  While I’m having these rather uncharitable thoughts about the state of my country’s yeomanry, Mindy and Dede are chatting away like neighbors over a backyard fence—only it’s over the backs of cattle walking slowly to and fro between them. Mindy goes from looking askance to a little alarmed, then more alarmed, because it does seem that Dede is somehow making the cattle parade back and forth, to judge from the glottal clicks, whinnies, whistles, and snickers that issue from the side of his mouth, even as he is making small talk with my wife.

  Gradually Mindy backs away, despite Dede’s increasing flow of chat. She steps close to me. “Time to go,” she says brightly, our old signal that something, or someone, is getting out of hand. Since Dede is smiling, shyly but proudly, I figure it’s just the cows.

  In the spirit of Franco-American amity, I step forward, daring to slip between a pair of slo-mo Bossies—though not without eyeing their docked horns—to extend a hand to Dede. He’s diffident, shy, looking away as he shakes it. “Bonsoir,” I said. He nods, mumbles.

  “Don.” Mindy gives me the look that goes with the old signal. “He just asked me to marry him.”

  “Ah.”

  “He says he is the owner of twenty cows and a house and barn. He says the cows do not sleep in the house with him, but in the barn with his sister.”

  “Okaaaay…”

  “So can we please go now?”

  “Sure. You bet. Time to go.” I turn, wave to Dede. “Au’voir.”

  As I reach Mindy’s side and we turn to go, Dede raises his fingers to his lips. We’re edging around the cattle, trying to get on the path, but in the mud and cow pies and trampled cattails, the going is slow, slippery, fragrant. Dede gives a long, sharp whistle, loud and commanding. The herd of cattle pause in their chewing and raise their heads. Dede whistles again, piercing. There is a moment of gathering tension. Then, as one, the cow
s empty their bladders. There is a thunder-in-the-mud sound, like that of a heavy rain in a land of monsoons. Steam rises around us. We are surrounded by a low-lying cloud bank of piss.

  And then we’re running, if not quite for our lives, then at least to put as much ground between us and Dede as we can in one breath.

  Once we are safely up the steep valley lane and out of sight, we break into gasps, then giggles. “Quite a trick!” Mindy shudders. “Do you think I’m supposed to be flattered?”

  “Totally. He’s got magic. Like Merlin. The old spells, that kind.”

  “How come you’ve never done anything like that for me?”

  “Don’t get me started…” I fake a grab for my pants zipper. She lets out a little shriek. “Well, look at it this way,” I continue, trying to sound like someone who’s taking the long view, a man of the world’s view—a Frenchman’s tolerant view of this attempted dalliance under my nose. “At least your accent must be good, if he thought you were from Paris. And he did offer to do the honorable thing by marrying you.”

  “I think he says that to all the girls.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “No, I mean, really. I do feel sorry for him. He was so proud when he told me about his cows and his house. I think he really is very lonely.”

  Once sympathy enters the picture, all appetite for even the gentlest kind of teasing fades. We continue in silence, enjoying the chatter of the nesting birds, the soughing of the wind in the treetops. The road up to the village turns into an alley of windbent cypresses, their tops dense and green, their trunks reddish-gray and weathered, marked by old and new scars where branches have been twisted and broken off by the storms of the Côte Sauvage. The sun at our backs lights the center stripe of grass, leaving a trail of red-gold for us to follow. Somewhere behind and far below a cow gives vent to a lonely moo.

  • • •

  At times memories were not enough, and we succumbed to doubt and despair. Did we make a mistake? Would we ever get back there?

  Perhaps most alarming was how sometimes, when we shook the imaginary paperweight to reawake our memories, nothing happened. To fail to summon the spirit of Belle Île was desolating. Here’s a question for philosophers: Has something you can’t remember ever happened? What we thought we had on Belle Île, who we were there, was vanishing.

  In our different ways, Mindy and I both struggled with how badly we’d managed things. The apartment was sucking us dry. My job at Success was purgatory, punishment for a literary dreamer. Several of my coworkers were in the same straits, chained to mortgages and babies like galley slaves on a ship of fools. We consoled each other and conspired on plans for escape. But two coworkers were noxious, scheming, feral. Fans of an Anglophile club that called itself “Vile Bodies” after the Evelyn Waugh novel, they did everything they could to live up to the name in hopes of being asked to join.

  The editor in chief was a puffed-up tyrant, a brilliant suspender-snapping orator given to venting lava flows of rage upon his underlings. He loved to make the girls cry. For us boys, he’d provoke quarrels by picking favorites and then inviting us to “take it outdoors” and settle our differences “like men.” Reality TV was still twenty years in the future, but this was the pilot.

  There were days when I felt myself becoming just another faceless cheap-suiter wearing out his shoes on the Gotham sidewalks, but each night after putting Rory to bed, I emigrated upstairs to a vacant apartment and wrote. I wasn’t going to let that dream get snuffed out. Belle Île had worked like a charm before when we needed a change in the weather, a lucky break. Time to conjure up the luck of the island.

  What we got was a call from a friend who’d scored a film deal with her first novel, saying she wanted to help with our house. It was a sincere and tactful offer, but at bottom the underlying question hurt: “Want to sell?” Of course we could always come for a visit.

  Next we got a letter from Gwened saying she was embarrassed for us but, more seriously, embarrassed personally, that we had not paid Denis LeReveur so he could pay the contractors.

  What? Had there been a bill that we’d missed? We went through our folders, ransacked drawers. Nothing from Denny the Dreamer in over two years, which was a little strange. And we were a bit remiss for not noticing. Perhaps he’d gotten the address wrong?

  Mindy wrote Denis and Gwened, separately, saying the same thing to each:

  “This summer we are coming back to Belle Île.”

  Easy to promise, but could I really hope to reason with my boss, a man who bragged of getting by on four hours of sleep? He once boasted he’d never taken a vacation in thirty years—not once. (“My wife thinks I’m an asshole,” he’d added with disarming modesty.) Until tonight I’d always avoided him whenever possible.

  Tomorrow, however, I’d track the dragon to his lair.

  Chapter Eleven

  Wards of the Village

  What a bewitching land it is! What a garden! Surely the leagues of bright green lawns are swept and brushed and watered every day and their grasses trimmed by the barber… Surely the long, straight rows of stately poplars that divide the beautiful landscape like the squares of a checkerboard are set with line and plummet… It is wonderful. There are no unsightly stone walls, and never a fence of any kind. There is no dirt, no decay, no rubbish anywhere—nothing that even hints at untidiness—nothing that ever suggests neglect. All is orderly and beautiful—everything is chastening to the eye.”

  Or so Mark Twain said of France, writing in his first book, The Innocents Abroad. For us, on the other hand…

  • • •

  Dust, dirt, mold—everywhere. Shutters so battered, so rotted, so delicious in their deliquescence that someone has taken their photo and turned them into a popular poster: fenêtres paysannes rustiques. Just off the ferry, we stop dead in the street of Le Palais to stare into an art boutique.

  “Isn’t that our window?”

  “What!”

  “Rustic peasant windows?”

  Laughing, we hurry on to see the real thing.

  The downstairs is dank and dusty and exhausted. But the new roof’s black slates shine in the sun. Inside, the two dormer windows inhale the light, breathing it into the upstairs bedrooms where it blazes in the panels of pale yellow northern pine. Too bad we can only see this by standing on the rough dirt floor: there’s no staircase. No way we can stay up there, even if we climb up using the ancient, termite-holed ladder we find in the weeds behind the house. Rory is at the fearless stage and there are no railings.

  But we’ve lucked out. We can rent Madame Morgane’s green cabane, a wooden hut nestled out in a cypress windbreak. It’s snug and well-made, if tiny as a doll’s house. Apparently it was once used to shelter family from the mainland who came to help with the harvest. It makes no concessions to modernity: no toilet, no shower, no electricity, no heat. Plenty of mosquitoes, though. During the daylight hours we go to our house to use the bathroom, climbing up the fifty-year-old ladder. (Rory is still in diapers and sometimes I envy him.) At night we go in the fields behind the windbreak.

  Once, up in the night to answer nature’s call, I march out into the field. Standing in the rain wearing a poncho, Wellingtons, and nothing else, I spot a large shape moving toward me in the dark. Sure I am being charged by a bull, I lift my poncho above my knees, prepared to run…

  “Don?” calls Mindy, for it is she, in her poncho, obeying a similar call.

  Another, more cheery ritual involves bathing Rory in a great tin tub out in the yard among Madame Morgane’s chickens. We heat the water on the stove, then let Rory steam in the sunshine, while scandalized roosters cluck and cluck.

  We’ve come in early September, the time of great, sweeping tides. At the beach at Donnant, la grande marée exposes half a mile of undulating golden sand that ripples like the waves that so recently departed. Each day while the tide is receding, Rory and I b
uild scores of interconnected canals and dikes, channeling the draining water into lagoons, shoring up levees as they bulge and breach. Searching for weak spots, Rory scampers over this maze of ours, shouting, “Stop the water! Stop the water!”

  On the second or third day of the grande marée, a team of French sand engineers—well, a father and son, the latter about nine years old, both in Speedos—spend the entire afternoon building an over-the-top château below us, closer to the waves. I think I recognize it from our long-ago visit to the Loire Valley: Blois? Chenonceaux? No, it’s my favorite, Azay-le-Rideau. To give them credit, they’re really getting it right.

  But Rory looks a little dispirited, and understandably so. Our levees and berms aren’t anything special to look at, though they do hold back the water admirably. Meanwhile, our rivals are boasting and exclaiming as they construct ramparts, dig moats, dribble witches’-hat towers. They’re even using tools, and argue spiritedly over details as they work. They’ll probably produce a sheaf of regulations before the day is done.

  I try, but their loud self-congratulation and preening is hard to ignore and finally gets to me. Just do the castle, all right? Don’t march around blowing your horn. Don’t think I don’t see you sneaking looks at us, too. As his father, I can’t help but get a bit defensive on Rory’s behalf, even if our fortress is Neolithic in comparison.

  Late afternoon, long shadows like wraiths are bending across the rippled sand. The sea has retreated a half a mile, at least. The flow of water is reduced to a trickle. But in our construction zone far above the water’s edge, we’ve created a network of dams and impoundments. We’re holding back a good thirty or forty gallons of seawater, by my estimate.

  I’m wondering if my engineer grandfather, Charlie Wailes, would be pleased with me. Funny to think he was invited by the French government after World War II to come and help guide the reconstruction of Paris…and here I am having to watch this mini DeGaulle frown and stare and frown again at our massive pool and finally point down at his château’s dry moat and look directly at me with a prissy fonctionnaire look.