A Place in Normandy

by Nicholas Kilmer

  FOUR

  I parked in the deep, wet grass in the shade of the house, which the sun had not yet crossed. (It took it a long time to get over the hill, and longer still to get over the slate roof.) I reminded myself that I was here on business and must consider the property carefully, in the businesslike way suited to any prospective investor in real estate, instead of gaping like a thirteen-year-old freshman boy finding himself alone with a fabled senior girl, a cheerleader, who happens to be sprawled, somewhat disheveled and tiddly, and whispers to him …

  It was not just fifty acres and one big house that I had to think about, but three buildings; not only the pastures, orchards, stream, and crown of woodland, but the ruins, and the potential ruins. Before climbing out of the car, I checked the cottages on either side of the main house. The one we sometimes called the guesthouse, which I had first known as M. Braye’s house and where Great-aunt Janet had lived during her first recovery from marriage, should be empty now, and it actually did seem to be empty this time. A squatter ensconced there once had taken us two years to remove. From the other cottage, Mme. Vera’s, a narrow plume of smoke reached into the warm blue sky, where a few high clouds ambled. This cottage was occupied year-round by Mme. Vera Tonnelier, who had been living on the farm since the thirties, when she came from Poland intending to earn enough to take home as a dowry by working as housemaid for my grandparents, as her elder sister had done before her. Instead, the war intervened, and she married a local farmer and remained in Normandy (a widow now, accompanied by an embarrassment of goats, chickens, ducks, and so on), the property’s most predictable resident. She and her late husband, both ferociously loyal to the Friesekes, had supervised as best they could the protection of the latter’s possessions during the occupation. I did not see Mme. Vera anywhere about at the moment, so I would wait to say hello.

  I got out of the car and was greeted by the tribe of wood doves that made a continual activity of Grecian tragic-choral moaning from their nests in the eaves thirty feet above the driveway. I stretched, looked out over the land, and smelled the grass, and Mme. Vera’s smoke, before I addressed the house that the wood doves were warning me about. I noted the ragged string of goats crossing below the ruin of the cider press fifty feet down the hill, in a sweep of pasture where a few trees bloomed late, their cover of white blossom perhaps indicating that they were about to die. Some of the older apple trees were rotund with a waxy green that was in fact illusory, being mistletoe rather than leaves and set fruit. A pair of hawks wheeled overhead, calling to startle the songbirds sheltering below them in the hawthorn thickets and make them, in panic, break for better cover.

  “How old is the house?” people sometimes asked, and I could never tell them. My mother, who had been known to see things, swore that one summer when masons were doing emergency work on the mortar facing of the southeast corner (that is, the side cut into the hill), she saw the date 1493 carved into a stone, which was subsequently covered in cement. That was the far side of the house, against the garden. This side, above its masonry first floor along the driveway, was faced with slate still damp with the previous night’s dew—and it was anyone’s guess what might be going on under the slate.

  The back of the house with wedding party of Frances Frieseke and Kenton Kilmer, June 2, 1937.

  Whatever the building’s age, the probable logic of its architectural history suggested that originally it had only two floors—one carved into the earth of the hillside, used for stables and storage, and the other, above it, providing living quarters (five rooms end to end, each roughly eighteen feet per side), topped by a thatched roof. Some time later, the first roof was removed, a second floor and attic were built up from the original walls, and a new roof was added, thatched to begin with but later redone in thin black slates.

  The result is large and solid enough to seem to defy structural change. The effect is of a long shoebox set into an orchard-covered slope, with the earth arriving at a level that becomes garden on the side facing the rise, then continuing upward in terraces. Since the earth does not freeze or heave in winter, there is no foundation. The house, all three stories of it plus an attic in which a person can walk upright, simply sits on a terrace of earth. The lower story is stone, with double walls three feet thick—faced with flint but filled with rubble—that support the standard Norman half-timbered construction of the upper floors. Because the house was large and suitable timbers were scarce, the straight trunk lengths were reserved for use as rafters. The colombages that serve as wall studs display the erratic shapes produced by branches and are up to eight inches thick, while the arched wooden ribs supporting the roof were once ships’ timbers. The intervals between colombages are filled with torchis, a mixture of clay and cow manure reinforced by horsehair.

  “That house is made of mud,” Julia liked to point out. And cow shit, she did not need to add. Not even the least practical of the three pigs tried to build with cow shit.

  Inside, the floors are made of the same materials, but with the addition of thick cemented tiles eight inches square and of a warm rose color. Called pavé normand, one of the local cheeses is named after these tiles on account of its no-nonsense shape. In all, the house has twelve habitable rooms in which something can go wrong, as well as the attic, which stretches the full length and width of the house and is big enough to sleep forty to sixty refugees, and the storerooms and furnace room on the first level. These last open onto the west side, along the driveway, while the rooms on the next level all open east, onto the garden.

  The house is, as I’ve said, half-timbered, but one would not know it just by looking at it, the building having succumbed to trompe l’oeil owing to the efforts of a previous owner, an architect mayor of Mesnil, Isidor Mesnier, who made the place over in the early nineteenth century. It was in his wife’s dowry. What Honorine Bréard brought with her to the marriage was a large farmhouse with the protective coloration of the Norman cow. She and her husband covered its weather sides (south and west) with slate, and its less exposed faces with mortar grooved to resemble dressed stone. They would have entered their house from the formal, garden side, the next level up.

  Now, however, of the five garden doors, not one still had a key. When the house was properly closed, only the downstairs kitchen door, opening from the driveway, allowed access. On awkward occasions in the past when, due to my faulty advance communication, M. Joffroy, the manager, had not left a spare key as expected, I had been forced to contemplate breaking in, in rain or darkness or both, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by friends or exhausted family; but something or other had always saved me. I had now learned to carry my own key to the kitchen door. The lock was of so antique a make that the key could not be reproduced locally; when I tried once, the wise old men who lived in the hardware store in Pont l’Evêque looked at my original, shook their heads, shrugged, and said despondently, in words paraphrasing those of every preceding generation of wise old men that ever lived, “Ah, in those days they made things differently; they made things to last. It is not that way now. You will find no one with blanks to make a duplicate. Try M. Patte in the zone industrielle, but he will not be able to help you.” (This prediction proved to be correct, though the attempt made for an interesting day.) But one afternoon, while I was looking for something else, I found a spare key hidden in the attic, and I appropriated it to take with me back and forth across the Atlantic. At the back of my mind was the thought that if I should ever lose the house, I’d at least have the key and be like my friend Saïd, the Moroccan architect who treasures the key to his family’s place in Granada, which was confiscated when the infidels were driven out of Spain in 1492.

  I unloaded the car, stood in the grass, and commended myself that so far things had gone well. I’d arrived in time to shop; there was a good deal of day left; the house was where I had expected to find it; and I had my key. It remained only for me to open as much of the house as I would need. I would use no more than a couple of rooms, so there was
no reason to open all the shutters—a couple dozen pairs of them—or all the rooms. I’d be all right as long as the place had been cleaned: the wilderness of spiderwebs, dust, mold, rats, and dead birds that could accumulate over eight months of autumn and winter could be discouraging on first sight, even to a man in love.

  But clean or not, this place could, I recognized for the first time, really become not generally ours but ours specifically: the fields, the doves, the big wooden Dutch kitchen door, and whatever was waiting inside. I maneuvered the key, and it was either I or the house turning over once, twice, until the door could be shoved inward across cold brick and into darkness fragrant with abandon.

  FIVE

  When I opened the door, the smell of the empty house seemed to tumble out, along with the underground darkness. It was neither exactly derelict nor exactly clean. This downstairs kitchen, along with its annex, the laundry, was the only room on this level that communicated with the upstairs. When my grandparents first took the house, in 1919, these quarters had long been assigned to the making of cheese. Finding it hard to exist upstairs from and upwind of that operation, the Friesekes banished the cheese-making and installed a kitchen here instead. The dormant microbes could still turn any raw milk inadvertently left out: they lay in wait in walls and rafters, and the entering nose sensed their history, as well as that of the years when the house had been lighted only by kerosene. My painter grandfather did not permit electric light. Beyond all this, the prevailing smells inside were underground limestone, wood smoke, and damp.

  Because the kitchen was set into the hill, its back wall was underground. Only a tiny window at the top allowed daylight to enter. Its floor was always forty degrees Fahrenheit, and the ambience was inevitably damp: perfect for cheese molds, as Julia reminded me, adding that we ourselves were pretending to be human life forms. A generation ago, trying to cheer this room up, Julia and I had in the spirit of the sixties painted the walls in a variety of primary colors, which had been slowly crumbling away ever since we decided that a better solution would be to use the room as little as possible.

  The kitchen ceiling, like the ceilings of all the rooms on the next story, was supported on oak beams that had to be propped up by central columns because the cumulative weight of all the fattile floors above had made them sag so badly. When the Friesekes bought the house and stripped the tile just from the attic floors, the old beams sighed and sprang upward. They must have plastered all the ceilings then, an improvement undone by war and weather sometime after 1940: ceilings were among the things the house was missing when we started working on it, in 1968.

  The back of the house, 1919.

  I stood in the downstairs kitchen. It was, if not what it should be, at least what I expected. The damp was only damp, I found, once the open door had allowed enough light in to replace the darkness I had emptied out. There was no grotesque dirt, and nothing dead. Good. The femme de ménage had come. I flipped the main switch and got light: another good sign. I started lugging in my bags and my supplies, setting everything down on the brick kitchen floor.

  I’d traveled heavy even though I would be here for only a few days. I needed little clothing since I kept a working supply in the house. However, I was carrying fabrics that Julia had been setting aside, as well as a selection of odds and ends either not available at all in France or available only at exorbitant cost. The manual hedge trimmer, for instance, cost only half as much at my hardware store in Cambridge as it would at a quincaillerie in Pont l’Evêque. In terms of weight, the prize in this year’s luggage went to a cast iron Cape Cod firelighter that a Cambridge friend had bought at a yard sale: she remembered Julia’s mentioning once that my father (who lived in Virginia and had not been to Mesnil for several years) was always looking for one to put in the house in Normandy. The standard Cape Cod firelighter is a vertical brass pot with a hinged top meant to hold kerosene, in which an asbestos knob on a brass wand is soaked; this can be kindled to take the place of brushwood in starting a fire. My father, years ago, had found such a brass pot, but it was minus its asbestos knob-on-wand; the vacant pot had been sitting on the mantelpiece of the horse-sized fireplace upstairs for a dozen years, a sacrificial offering-in-progress to the patron of projects half completed. My firelighter, if complete, was far from chic. It looked more like a beanpot.

  As long as I’d had to check baggage anyway, I’d brought rolled canvas and paint as well, those supplies being grievously expensive in France, and hard to find except in large cities. I’d already been relieved of the supplies I’d imported for my friends in Paris. For my godson Gabriel’s parents, Madeleine and Tom, I’d brought the best-selling, scandalous biography of Pamela Harriman, our ambassador to France, which was sold out at W. H. Smith’s on the Rue de Rivoli, and an industrial-sized jar of Hellmann’s real American mayonnaise, which they preferred. For Gabriel himself I had brought Wonder Bread, several compressed loaves of it, to comfort his Parisian exile.

  The chores that went with first arriving in the house were so familiar to me that I went at once into my routine. I’d left the place in the hands of tenants the previous summer, people I did not know named O’Banyon—friends of friends who had moved on to Calcutta or São Paulo afterward. Communication between M. Joffroy and my side of the Atlantic was rare, occurring only in emergencies, so I was interested, in fact anxious, to learn what impression the O’Banyons might have made. I plugged in the fridge and checked to make sure that we had spare tanks of propane to fuel the hot-water heater in the downstairs bathroom, but there was nothing else to do down here; I wouldn’t use this room. I climbed the kitchen stairs into the weird darkness of the dining room on the first floor.

  Since all the shutters were closed, only the dimmest hint of light penetrated the room, even in the midday sun. I picked my way across the tiles, found and recalled the complex of latches on the east side’s garden door, and opened the dining room to a ferocious blast of green weed brawling with sunlight, and my first real discouragement.

  The garden, looking east from the dining room, 1988: Maizie Kilmer, foreground; Kenton and Frances Kilmer. Photo Walter Chapin

  I’d tried to ask M. Joffroy, the manager, by letter, to send someone to cut back the remains of the garden, but obviously only goats and cows had heard the call. The brick walls and their white painted gates, which were supposed to demarcate the spiritual boundary between garden and wilderness, were leaning or gaping or frankly giving in. Hot noon light fell on the retaining wall to the first terrace, which was in an advanced state of disrepair and looked more like a heap than a wall. I suspected that a cow had wandered too near the edge. A general jumble of rank weed and nettle mounted upward beside the crumbling paths and stairways by which it had once been possible to stroll to the linden alley, now buried in woods and out of sight along the far boundary of the property, at the crest of the hill. The cypress trees on the first terrace, which my mother had been assured were dwarfs, had grown as frantically as everything else in Normandy and now towered over the roof. The small crottes of goats and wide testaments of cattle dotted and splattered all the terraces that might be lawns or flower gardens, where ornamental hedges had disappeared under long thickets of grass. The round pond that formed the visual focus of the first terrace had been sucked dry.

  Here, on a more formal day, my mother’s pet hen had gone crazy when she saw the offspring she had hatched from beneath her follow their native instinct into the pond, thereby declaring themselves ducks despite their nurture. Here, in these gardens, my grandfather had painted in his Panama hat, and sometimes his suit, under an umbrella to keep the glare of sun from burning out all color in his work, while Stellita Stapleton or Mahdah Reddin or his daughter (my mother), Frances, or my grandmother took the sun. Here had been formal gardens, trimmed hedges, and, the next terrace up, the cutting garden—all well fenced by hawthorn hedges to keep out animals. Here the gardeners had worked under my grandmother’s supervision. The yew tree, all asprawl now on the first terrace, had b
een trimmed in those days, and kept clipped in the shape of a basket. Out of these gardens had come primulas; roses for the house; nasturtiums, whose cool leaves lined baskets of peaches and whose peppery blossoms made their way into salads; lavender for the linen closet; columbine; marguerites.… All that was gone now, but I could still smell the box, marking its territorial boundaries like a randy February tomcat advertising his wares on our evergreens in Julia’s Cambridge garden—a good garden, one of which I was very fond, and which my present affection for a derelict threatened to betray.