“How nice,” my mother said. “How nice for them, I mean—how nice of you.”
“Quite so,” allowed my grandfather. “Well, in any case, a nice Dutch woman I know would like to buy it from me, and I would like to sell it.”
My mother searched for a response my grandfather could not interpret as offensive in any way and settled on “Ah.”
“Yes, well …” My grandfather paused. Doubt and regret filled my mother’s mind: Should she have been more enthusiastic? Or less so? Was ah too casual? Too inarticulate? She was still pondering the prudence of elaborating on her response when my grandfather resumed talking. “The thing is, it turns out that your mother’s name is on the deed, and I need a power of attorney from her.” His voice dropped all pretense of pleasantness when he said the word mother. It slid out of his mouth, acrid and bitter, and hovered in the ether while my mother held her breath. “So I just wondered if you might call her and explain to her that I need her signature. I cannot think why—no, even she could not possibly cause trouble. I took care of it all these years. The bills, the taxes. A frightful expense.”
“Yes, all ri—yes, of course,” my mother said, perplexed as to what my grandmother could have to do with a property in France—and even more as to how the most loquacious person any of us knew could have failed to mention it before.
“Very good. I’ll have my notaire send along the appropriate documents. Je t’embrasse.” He hung up.
When my mother returned to the table and related the conversation to us, memories of that Sunday with my grandfather flooded over me, and I remembered my deep desire to live in La Roche.
“I know that place,” I told my parents. “That’s where he took me to vote.” I searched for words to describe it to them, feeling slightly panicked as I recounted my day there. What if La Roche really was my home, and what if I never saw it again?
Later my mother sat down in her blue velveteen chair and called my grandmother. “Oh yes,” Grandma said. “I remember I bought that house.”
“Really? Why have I never heard about any of this? He says it’s his.”
“That’s just like him,” my grandmother sighed.
“Well, now he wants to sell it. He says he needs you to sign a power of attorney.” I sat at my mother’s feet, leaning against the arm of the chair, trying to decipher the muffled voice of my grandmother through the mouthpiece, trying to picture how she would react to this information. Would she say yes and make the house go away forever?
“Why would I do that?” Grandma asked.
“Well, I don’t know,” my mother replied. “You tell me! How on earth did you end up with a house in the South of France?”
My grandma emitted one of her peppery rhetorical noises that made it sound like she was picking up a story she’d left off a few seconds ago in another dimension. “I read an article in Combat, or L’Humanité—one of those left-wing newspapers—by some artist, talking about this old village, falling apart, with beautiful houses you could buy and fix up. You know, start an artistic, intellectual utopia, a new life after the war. And I love history.”
When would this have been? My mother searched for a question that would connect this explanation to a fixed point in the space-time continuum, but Grandma wasn’t one to pause and wait for you to catch up. “So I went there—on the way back from Marseille, taking my parents to the boat to Israel, you know.” My mother didn’t, but my grandmother had already taken off down another path. “Your father had a little money saved up from the Trials and thanks God I was there to do something sensible, otherwise … my Godt. You know what he bought with his first paycheck? A silk tie. With a baby at home. Real silk. Yellow. Can you imagine?”
Not for nothing did my mother write her doctoral dissertation on the insanity defense. She pressed on. “When was this?”
“November.”
“November what?”
“November. Your father had already gone to New York. He came back to help us move to America in December but got real sick; he made me call a doctor. You imagine? Me a doctor, and he makes me call another one. He said I was trying to poison him.”
The story about the time my grandfather got the flu and accused my grandmother of trying to poison him was legend in our family, and my mother pounced on it. “So that would have been in 1948?”
My grandmother ignored her in a way that, after a lifetime of interpreting her speech, my mother took as assent. “I was pregnant with your brother, and so sick. The lady in the inn I stayed in was so nice—she could see I was pregnant, she didn’t say anything, kind of just looked me over and gave me a bouillotte”—the term hot-water bottle had never made it into Grandma’s vocabulary—“and of course the only reason I got to sign that day was it turned out the notaire was the cousin of a friend of mine from Hauteville. I had to wait for him to get out of Mass. Then I got back to Montélimar for the train. You just have to talk to people, you know?”
“That’s when you brought me the nougat!” my mother exclaimed, allowing herself to slide down one of Grandma’s tangents. She caught herself, though. “So are you going to sign?”
“Why would I do that?” Grandma asked again. “I’m the one who bought it.”
“Did you ever see it again? Did you ever think about it?”
My grandmother’s high-wire chatter slacked off into silence for a fleeting moment. “What do you think?”
“Honestly? I think you should do whatever you want.”
“I’ll think about it,” Grandma concluded. “ ’Bye.” As always, she hung up immediately, the second she decided the conversation was over. Then she called my mother back.
“No,” she said.
After a few more phone calls with my grandmother, my mother summoned her courage and telephoned my grandfather.
“Of course,” my grandfather fumed, “that woman has been trying to ruin my life from the moment she met me. After the money, I daresay.”
“Well, no. She says she’ll think about selling if you send her a copy of the deed and an appraisal.” My mother took a deep breath before uttering the next sentence, which she knew would send my grandfather into a rage. “She says it’s her house, too, and if it’s going to be sold, she thinks the profits should be divided evenly between the children.” This was meant as a jab from my grandmother to my grandfather, one last attempt to strong-arm a man who had refused to pay child support and disinherited my mother and uncle. But my grandfather was too furious to notice.
“Her house?”
“That’s what she said.”
“Very good. I see she still has no compunctions about lying.”
“Do you have the deed?”
“Of course I do.”
“Well, maybe if you showed it to her, to prove you were the owner, it would solve the whole question.”
Some people manage to write exactly as they talk, but my grandfather is the only man I know who manages to talk exactly as he writes. “I did not spend decades trying to obtain a divorce from that woman to have to prove something is my own. If she would like to reimburse any of the myriad expenses I have undertaken—taxes, the roof, the walls, the windows, electricity, running water; I shudder to think how much money I have put into that house, money thrown away—should she choose to contribute to any of that, I might consider her in some way owner of the house.
“Not to mention, of course,” he added, “that buying it was my idea in the first place—I read about it in Combat.”
“That’s interesting—” my mother started to say, She says she was the one who read about it. She thought better of continuing and closed her mouth.
“What’s interesting? That she wants to steal something that was purchased with my money? It was my money, you know. She may have gone down there, but it was my money. Can’t you do something about this, Angèle? The woman is impossible, you agree?”
My mother was silent. Finally, she conceded, “I’ll phone her again.”
“I knew you’d see reason
about this,” my grandfather approved.
I watched with a kind of horrified fascination as my mother went back and forth between her parents, trying to broker some kind of deal. I remembered the awestruck, infatuated feeling that had overtaken me upon my arrival in Alba, remembered the castle and the town hall and La Roche with its strange volcanic excrescence, remembered my daydreams of cooking dinner in that old kitchen, shelling peas on the terrace and watching the river and the trees, painting those battered shutters and that creaky door. Mostly I remembered how beautiful it was. I had been amazed to discover the house was actually—if only partly—my grandmother’s, and terrified to think she might let it slip away. I could not bear to believe that such a beautiful place would disappear from my life.
That summer I visited my grandfather and, as tentatively as I could, broached the subject of the house, venturing to inquire about why he wanted to sell it.
“It’s been so long since I spent any time there at all,” he sighed. “It’s been nothing but a source of unhappiness and worry to me for a long time. It will be a relief to sell it.” He began cleaning out his pipe. “That is, if that woman ever decides to stop making trouble about it.” Holding his pipe above the crystal ashtray on the dining room table, he tapped until the burnt remains of yesterday’s tobacco landed in a little black pile. “I’d give it to you,” he added, “but I’m afraid it would be more of a burden than a gift.”
I hesitated. I didn’t know how to describe everything I had felt in the few hours I had seen La Roche. I was afraid to tell him I had fallen in love with the place; asking him for a house seemed like the kind of thing that would send him into a blinding rage. Certainly, he had cut people out of his life for less than that.
“That woman” he groused again.
I tried to head him off at the pass. “But I thought—they said—if you faxed the deed—”
“It’s very nice of you to care.” The scary saccharine note in his voice spelled trouble. “I know you probably think she is a sweet old lady with white hair who bakes cookies.” Again with the cookies, I thought. Was it because she’d decided to live in America that he thought she baked cookies?
“Seraphina—I call her Seraphina, ironically, you know.”
“Yes, I do, yes.” For as long as anyone could remember, Seraphina had been the epithet my grandfather employed in situations where he would not otherwise have been able to avoid uttering my grandmother’s name. Once I had looked it up in one of the big dictionaries he kept by his desk. I’d found no entry for Seraphina, but under seraph I read, “A seraphic person, an angel.” I wondered whether the nickname had once been earnest and loving. Under seraphic the dictionary said, “… worthy of a seraph; ecstatically adoring.” I strained to picture Anna and Armand ecstatically adoring each other. “The presumed derivation of the word from a Hebrew root saraph to burn, led to the view that the seraphim are specially distinguished by fervor of love.” The ominous silence in the kitchen reminded me that my grandfather’s current fervor was anything but loving.
“She’s spent years trying to ruin my life.” His angry voice shattered the quiet.
“But she—”
He ignored me. “Do you know what she’s doing?”
I shook my head, no.
“This is all part of her plan. She is waiting around for my pension.” He paused to let this sink in. “Now she wants the house, too.”
I had been doing my best to remain neutral, but this seemed so silly, I felt compelled to protest. “Grandpa—” I laughed, thinking about my independent grandma relying on anyone else for anything at all, let alone income. “She isn’t waiting for your pension. She has her own pension. Besides, didn’t she tell your notaire that she would agree to sell, as long as the money went to the children?”
His jaw tightened. “The money?”
Oh no, I thought. What have I done?
“Does she think I care about that? I don’t give a damn about the money!” His face quivered with indignation.
We were silent. His face had that washed-out, shipwrecked look again. A year spent scuffing his carpets and dropping crumbs under the dining room table had not made me any less frightened of incurring his wrath. I waited. Finally, he spoke. His voice had lost its anger, and he delivered each word in a strange, even tone.
“You know, she was the reason I had to stop coming to your house.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I could smell her, you know. I could smell her in the bed. I couldn’t bear sleeping with her there.”
I didn’t know how to tell him that my grandmother had never once slept in the guest room of my mother’s house.
When I returned home to Asheville, I got out my mother’s old photos and thumbed through them again, past my great-aunts and -uncles and my beautiful young grandparents. There were only two pictures of Armand and Anna together in the whole album. In both, they were standing on a ledge at the top of a building. In the first picture, my grandfather was posed behind my grandmother, his hand resting on her shoulder. Her black hair was combed back into a neat bun, and she wore a fitted blouse and a dark skirt. She gazed directly at the camera, smiling. He, in a shirt and tie, was looking sternly at the sky. I was rather taken aback by this photo, not because it showed them together but rather because I had never seen my grandparents look so ordinary.
In the second picture, my grandparents appeared to have been blown apart by a strong wind. They leaned as far away from each other as was possible in that narrow space, he up against the wall, she against the railing. My grandfather’s hair, smooth just a moment before, now stood on end; my grandmother’s, too, had escaped from its bun and frizzed away from her head in unruly tendrils. Their smiles had turned tiny and grim. I looked back and forth between the two pictures: tidy and pulled together in the first, messy and blown apart in the second. Or was it messy and blown apart in the first, and tidy and pulled together in the second?
Anna and Armand in Geneva, 1944.
A loose photo fell into my lap. It showed my grandmother on another balcony leaning on an iron railing, her head tilted toward her shoulder. A single curl had escaped from her bun. Her dark dress with its lace collar hung from her body, still thin from starvation, making her look like a child playing dress-up. Her eyes looked terribly tired, but the expression in them hovered somewhere between shy and girlish and intensely passionate, so intimate that I felt slightly embarrassed meeting her gaze or looking at the picture at all. In the bottom left-hand corner was a blur, the photographer’s finger—my grandfather’s finger, I surmised. As if he could not bear to keep all of himself behind the camera, separated from her. There was an inscription scrawled across the back of the photograph in my grandmother’s spiky handwriting: “Geneva 1944. Cours de Rive, where Angèle was conceived.” Angèle is my mother.
At first, no one could figure out why my grandfather wouldn’t send her the deed. This made my grandmother furious. Now it was she who phoned my mother: “Do something, Angèle.” My mother consulted a family friend with a law firm in town. He referred her to a lawyer in Atlanta who specialized in family property law. The lawyer in Atlanta referred her to a lawyer in Paris, who specialized in international property disputes. The words swam around the family: power of attorney, deed of sale, joint ownership, sole proprietor, communal property, pre-nup, a sea of solutions and laws and stipulations. Marriage license, divorce papers, property deeds—all of it secret, locked away, hidden, lost. Storms of phone calls and opinions flared up and died away as various legal professionals faded in and out of the picture, their advice ignored, their ideas dismissed, their letters unanswered, their requests unheeded.
Time passed. And the question became, why are they holding on?
CHAPTER SIX
MY GRANDPARENTS WERE SO MASTERFUL AT stymieing each other from afar that any possibility of actually selling the house in La Roche quickly foundered and was lost in the deeps of their inscrutable silence. Life went on. To no one’s surprise, my grandfat
her did not attend my high school graduation.
I left for college, which was a revelation: I wasn’t bored, and I didn’t feel like a misfit, though I probably was the only person on campus who wore an Uzbek silk tea cozy and a feather boa instead of a hat and scarf. Martha Beck describes the Harvard experience as “heady, exciting, even thrilling, but … laced with heavy doses of fear and misery … like having lunch with a brilliant, learned, witty celebrity who liked to lean across the table at unpredictable intervals and slap me in the mouth—hard.” And since that is an excellent description of life with most members of my family, I thrived there. I adored it. For the first time in my life, I felt as if I had emerged from the all-too-interesting shadows of my quirky relations and could become my own person.
The house in La Roche faded from my mind in the tumult and excitement of my new life, but it lay in wait in a corner of my memory. One clear winter day I was standing in front of Hilles Library with my friend Helen and chatting about our bluestocking daydream of creating a sort of artists’ colony somewhere, and a vision of the house, the stones and the sunlight and the castle on the hill above it, surged back to me. Perhaps if I occupied it with a group of friends all working on various academic or creative projects, my grandparents would see its utility, and they would decide conclusively not to sell.
My feeling of removal from the labyrinthine complications of my grandparents’ relationship must have been pretty complete, or else my coup de foudre for the house had deprived me of my reason, because during my sophomore year in college, I wrote to both of them to ask whether my friends and I could spend the summer in Alba. My grandmother, who was always enthusiastic about any project I embarked on, said yes right away. “But I think you should go there alone,” she cautioned. “Get to know people. You don’t want the villagers to get the wrong idea about you.” My grandfather took longer about it, but he, too, assented. “Just don’t go there by yourself,” he warned. “The people there are all drunkards and thieves.” I set about applying for a summer grant from the Harvard College Fund to study village life in medieval France and turned my attention to other things, lulled into a temporary belief that things could ever be so simple in my family.
A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France Page 5