A Place in Normandy

by Nicholas Kilmer

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Also by Nicholas Kilmer

  Copyright

  For my mother, Frances Frieseke Kilmer.

  For Kenton Kilmer, my father, and

  Sarah O’Bryan Frieseke, my grandmother,

  both of dear and blessed memory.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For their encouragement and warning while I worked on this, I thank Ann Fay, Joann Green, Bill Davis, Harriet Yarmolinsky, Dave Sohn, and Beth Chapin. For aid and assistance, for permission to quote, or for invaluable suggestions and assistance, I thank Jacqueline Block, Freeman Foote, Andrew Heiskell, Ben Martinez, Lowry Burgess, Woody Openo, and Bunny Woodard. For permission to use their photographs, my thanks to Walter Chapin, Harriet Griesinger, Susie Holstrom, Bette Noble, Tom and Dana Perrone. A number of the reproduced photographs that were taken in the 1920s are the work of the Russian emigré whom I can identify only by his first name, Georges; I cannot, therefore, give him the credit that is his due. My unyielding thanks to Bill McGurn for his close reading of the text, and for sage advice which I only occasionally defied.

  Special thanks to Mary Norris, my mother-in-law. As her daughter knows all too well, I prefer a fait accompli. I hope that now that it is too late for her to protest, she will forgive my quoting from her letters without asking her permission. My only excuse is that I was sure she would refuse. I wish there were more of her letters. Her enthusiasm and the unfailing pleasure she takes in life have been and are among my family’s greatest treasures.

  Much of this book is the work of my wife, Julia.

  “[The last time I saw the Friesekes they had moved to Normandy. There my wife and I lunched with them in their] damp, moldy, and wholly colorful farmhouse, still reminiscent of an era of tranquility.”

  —Homer Saint-Gaudens, The American Artist and His Times

  ONE

  “We’re asking for trouble, aren’t we?” I admitted. I’d just hung up the phone after a long talk with our daughter, Maizie, who was holding down the West Coast at the moment and who’d exclaimed, “Dad, I hear you’re buying me a farm in Normandy. Great. I’ll quit college and take some people over and become one with the land. Lots of my friends are thinking about farming.”

  It was raining, it was too late in the evening for coherence anyway, and it was also February. Julia and I, at our temporary home of thirty years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were working on the fight that we had begun in around 1968, which Maizie’s call had interrupted. Someone had leaked the status of the fight to Maizie, and, she was making what could be the terminal mistake of taking my side in it—as any sensible person would.

  “Asking for trouble? Maybe you are,” Julia said. Among the failings of mine she has pointed out over the years is my tendency to bite off more than I can see. “An attractive nuisance is what they call it in the law,” Julia continued, seizing the opening. She huffed into the Science section of the morning’s New York Times. I had taken a yellow Hi-liter and marked a paragraph in an article about female circadian rhythms. The author, whom I saw as being on my side of the larger argument, claimed that as the days lengthened into spring, the female, prompted by secretions of melatonin, yearned to fly thousands of miles and then mate. Julia hadn’t mentioned the article.

  “Wherever you are, there’s always an awful lot of extra that nobody knows how to put away,” Julia said. “And now we’re going to start cleaning up after your ancestors? Supposing we buy this farm in France—where are we going to put it all?” It was not bad for a rhetorical question—but neither of us could answer its obverse, either: If we don’t take it on, then what?

  My mother’s mother had always lived with us in America. When she died, she’d surprised everyone with her request that her body be buried in Normandy, near the house in Mesnil, next to the husband she had lost more than a generation before. Aside from some German officers during the war, and refugees as the war ended, and the tenant farmer, the place had been essentially vacant for thirty years. My mother and father, though married in Mesnil, had raised their large family in Virginia, and none of us had set foot on the Normandy property between 1939 and 1966, when my grandmother died. With the disposition of her body according to her instructions, a link was renewed that led the family to begin to use again the house, which my mother had inherited. A number of us began working to make the place habitable—particularly my wife, Julia, and I, with our children. Over the ensuing years we had come to depend on maintaining a foothold in Normandy, and our children had also. Because of its state of ruin and our schedules, we had been able to get to it only during occasional summers. But by the February evening of this discussion, a generation after we’d started working on it, my parents were aging, their children were scattering, and nature was taking its course in Normandy, with less to oppose it every year. Something more definitive had to happen than the status quo, and my solution was to take the place over myself—that is, ourselves—by buying it outright from my mother. This would mean not only that the house would be ours, but also that it would become solely our fault, which had previously been shared among family and humanity, like original sin—which we sometimes referred to as the spirit of the place. Whenever we discussed it, we got closer to acknowledging what it seemed to me we had to do, and that in itself made it progressively harder to get the subject on the table.

  Now, on this particular evening of cold February rain, the subject lay (unetherized) upon the kitchen table as Julia kept me company and pointedly ignored the article I’d marked. Jacob, our last child at home, was cornering Issues of the Twentieth Century elsewhere in the house by thumping at it on his bull fiddle, imparting fear and trembling to the rest of the building as well; and I, meanwhile, was bottling the apple cider I’d been meaning to transfer from its fermenting carboy since shortly before Christmas. I was up to my ears in froth and empty bottles cadged from friends and brought in earlier this evening from storage in the backyard. Our kitchen smelled like certain aspects of Normandy.

  We’d been discussing and avoiding the Normandy undertaking for so many years now that I’d begun to feel I might lose this fight, which I wanted to win if only to resolve the question of whet
her or not to invest in the new roof we needed for the house in Cambridge. (Obviously not—we’ve got the farm in Normandy to pay for.) We were talking about it but still not getting very far. Julia, like the cat in Shakespeare’s adage, can seldom bring herself to the point of “I will” or “I do” unless there’s a churchful of witnesses behind her, a monsignor flanked by priests in front, and no side exits. I pointed this out.

  “I normally get by just fine on ‘We’ll see.’ And if your aim is to break bottles, wouldn’t it be faster with a hammer?” she volunteered. She shuddered. “I keep thinking of all those empty bottles stacked up behind M. Braye’s. How many empty bottles do we need?”

  “The time is coming when we’ll have to shift from ‘we’ll see’ into either yes or no,” I insisted, foiling this attempt at a diversion and tasting the cider. It was thin and sour. My version of the Normans’ national drink would still have to sit, its residual colony of yeasts devouring the bottling sugar and exchanging it for gas, for three months in the basement before it might be drinkable (or buvable, as the French would say; imbuvable is a term used by some in France to characterize persons whom no one can stand to be around).

  “Just when I’m thinking that this rain might stop, and let me out into my garden, you want us to head for Normandy again,” Julia pleaded. We had long since come to realize that we could not argue sensibly about the issue of the place in Normandy, any more than the Pompeians could about Vesuvius. There it smoked, outside the window: a pleasure to the senses, fertile, and threatening to blow. Maybe. But maybe not for hundreds of years more. And meanwhile there was so much to be said for living in Pompeii.…

  It would have been one thing to start fresh with an old house. But the task we would face if we bought the Normandy property was worse than that. The old house was hardly new to us. Here, as we knew from long experience, the moment you glanced away from a chimney that needed fixing, something else unexpected would occupy your full attention—a broken crock in the downstairs kitchen, maybe, whose other part you’d seen the day before, in the attic; or an old letter; or Great-aunt Janet’s prize for stocking darning. Was that gas you smelled, leaking from the downstairs kitchen, or merely a stopped-up septic tank? Perhaps the worst part was the weight of familial baggage the place contained, even worse than the amount of general decay already completed and the additional ruin well under way. The line of demarcation between septic tank and precious family history was not always easy to distinguish in the shadows.

  The thing was, I loved this property, and I therefore wanted to make decisions regarding it that I could not if it remained in its present limbo. Even apart from the question of whether we could afford it (we could not), my project was beset by enemies, some of them, like Maizie, disguised as friends. Julia and I were not people with a large or often even noticeable disposable income. If our Cambridge house could use a new roof, perhaps nothing about the structure of the house in Normandy except the roof was dependable. (But a roof was, I kept reassuring myself, the most important element of a house. As long as your roof was sound, you were all right.) Our normal life (our real life, Julia called it) was in Massachusetts. France, therefore, was the wrong country. The language over there was someone else’s. Furthermore, Normandy was dour, as well known within France for its variety of damp as for its apples, cheeses, calvados, or cream. It was cold much of the time, and it rained even more of the time. We did not have to say any of these things aloud, since they’d already been said. So the fight brooded awhile on a plateau of silence.

  In the meantime, But I’m in love, I could not plead, because I knew Julia was also. If I won this fight, she would lose, in spite of the fact that she had her own real affection for the place. That fondness got confused with her versions of the scars that come from loving any old thing—such as, for example, me—for a long time. We had been married even longer than we had been maintaining our long-distance affair with the house. If we bought into it, I would be expected to take the blame. Both of us knew that was part of the deal.

  I filled bottles with cider and set them on the drainboard. We’d been married long enough that our silences and diversionary actions could not help but be part of the discussion. I plinked bottles, and Julia turned the pages of the newspaper. We listened to the rain and did not mention either the circadian rhythms or the roof.

  “And every time you used to add on to this house to give us elbow room,” Julia continued, picking up a line of argument offered to her by the rain, or the article, and building on it, “in case you’ve forgotten, I’d immediately get pregnant! Every time!”

  I checked the boiling bottle caps.

  “If we’re going to be forever fated with that equation,” Julia persisted, “and I have to carry enough infants to fill up all those rooms―well, I’m going to need help. I’ll kill you if you even look at me like I’m some youngster with high breasts! Are you ready for the cooperative-nursery-school routine again?”

  “It’s just an old damned farm,” I said, “not midlife off-track sex.”

  “That place in Normandy is full of ghosts,” Julia said. “I don’t want to go on about it, but all of them are your relatives. And nice as they may be, not one of them picks up after himself.”

  Our heads, when we lay in our usual bed in the Normandy house, whether listening for the phone or (when they were younger) for the children, or just hearing the night moving, were used to resting in the corner of my grandparents’ library, at the southwest end of the house, on the first floor. Six feet from our bed, outdoors, on the shallow brick staircase running alongside the house between the driveway and what had been the formal garden, was the spot where my mother and my father, who had established a friendship by correspondence, had first met in the flesh. Beyond that spot lay declining orchard pastures, the ruins of the stable, and the drive, heading precipitously downhill until it disappeared into an unkempt arch of lindens and chestnuts, after which it crossed the brick bridge spanning the stream or douet (sometimes called the Douet Margot, and sometimes the Virebec) and met the road linking Mesnil and Fierville. Along this road were people who had been friends and acquaintances and second family of my family for three generations. It wasn’t just ghosts; these people were as alive as Julia and I, and we had a place among them if we wanted it.

  Walkway outside the library window, 1995. Photo by author

  Suppose, for the sake of argument, that adding our money to our (or at least my) spiritual yearning was not unlike willfully becoming a compulsive gambler, another way to toss time, energy, and treasure—hope and regret—into the welcoming pit of an illusion. Might we not in fairness claim that we could always save ourselves—stop anytime we liked—since all the bewilderment, beauty, and fury we needed to offset the seduction of romance were amply available within these fifty acres of old Norman farm?

  “We’ll make it practical,” I promised. I started capping bottles, looking practical.

  “The damn thing’s falling apart,” Julia said. Like an old whore who doesn’t know when to get in off the street, she did not say, but keeps on flagging johns, because she’s good at it and there’s always a new one coming along. Like you, she did not say.

  I did not mention the allure that lay in maintaining this portion of my family’s history. Given that I had nine siblings, who, with their progeny, were all potential visitors to the old place, this was an argument pointed in forty-some directions and all too ready to backfire. I could argue that the past would lose its value if it had no present physical manifestation, and that neither of us would be able to bear to refer to the place only in the past tense. Or I could argue …

  “I hate to fly,” Julia said.

  Three holes in the tender place between the tendons on the inside of my right wrist, drilled in by her nails during flights I had taken with her, kept me from forgetting this fact.

  By now it was after ten o’clock at night. Jacob’s bull fiddle had stopped; the other three children, long out of the house, were now fending f
or themselves elsewhere. Meanwhile, in the darkness under our library-bedroom window in Normandy, the cows were at this very moment chewing grass soaked with night dew. In another hour, dawn would visit the sky over the hill with cold light, and the birds would stir outdoors and make much of themselves in the hawthorns near the house or in the cover of the apple trees. We’d hear the donkey bray from the next hill to waken Mme. Vera’s rooster, and later, as we began our day, the bell for the morning Angelus, rung from the church in Mesnil. Once it was rung by an old friend, now buried within the sound of its voice.

  “The problem with you is that you’re in love,” Julia said. “Suppose it’s too much? Suppose this breaks your heart? Hell, who cares if it breaks your heart; what if it breaks mine?”

  Nevertheless—and I truly do not know how this happened—we agreed that I’d go over for several days starting at the end of May, to get a realistic idea of how the land lay. The place had been rented to friends for the end of the summer, and I might as well take this opportunity, so I said, to be sure things would be reasonably safe for our tenants. Since Jacob was in high school still, Julia would stay home with him. That would also keep her honest, she pointed out: she would be tied to the mast while I flirted with the sirens, their subtle bodies glinting through diaphanous garments made of nothing more substantial than windblown sheets of mist, their seductive songs tempting us all onto the rocks of ruin with their promises of green pastures, rushing clouds, and cuckoos.

  “You take a look,” Julia said. “See what those girls have to say. Meanwhile, maybe I’ll steer this boat.”

  TWO

  All the east foreshadows night. Day now belongs only to the western sky, still red with sunset. What more I see of France, before I land, will be in this long twilight of late spring. I nose the Spirit of St. Louis lower, while I study the farms and villages—the signs I can’t read, the narrow, shop-lined streets, the walled-in barnyards. Fields are well groomed, fertile and peaceful.…