A Place in Normandy

by Nicholas Kilmer

  Aside from the missing tray, everything was as exactly familiar to me as a loose tooth the nerves and tongue have grown accustomed to. I opened the doors and shutters of each room and looked outside, knowing that when I called Julia, the first thing she would ask was, “Is it beautiful?” Then she would want to know what room I was sleeping in, aware that there were six possibilities—or seven, counting the couch in the dining room. And I would answer, as she knew I would, “The library,” because I wanted to be near the telephone in case she called. Anyway, there was no reason to go through the bother of opening the rooms upstairs.

  She’d ask how the cloths she’d sent over looked. All but the red-and-white-striped one were still packed. You know, honey, for someone who’s resisting this move, you ought to notice that you’re adding to it, not subtracting—making it more to give up if we don’t do it, I mumbled or thought. Since I was alone, it didn’t much matter which.

  EIGHT

  A sound I could not decipher woke me at three in the morning. I struggled into consciousness, thinking how many persons breathe their last at about three A.M. I heard random, prolonged knocking and breaking of china, interspersed by equally random, purposeful, and prolonged silences. I was in the library, as planned, with the door closed between me and the dining room. I lay awake listening, trying to understand the sound before confronting its maker. It could be a person moving in the next room—I could attribute human emotions to the brittle, tentative quality of the sounds of tapping, and of china juddering against adjacent crockery—but the lengthy silences seemed wrong for a human.

  The darkness in my room was intense, if incomplete. Because we were quite far north—on the same latitude as Montreal—summer made for long daylight and only a few hours of perfect darkness. Mesnil was far from Le Havre, the nearest city that might put a permanent smudge of light on the horizon. I couldn’t claim to see anything. As I studied the sounds, I eliminated banging shutters, since I knew the shutters should be secure; or a casement window left open, which would make a regular whack, often accompanied by the release of glass panes that would shatter on the tiles. I’d closed up everything downstairs before going to bed, but I’d never got to the second floor the previous afternoon, instead allowing myself to be distracted by other things. If the noise was caused by something not fastened upstairs, it had been flapping like that all winter—but no, the sounds that had wakened me were nearby, and they said trespass.

  The library, with Mrs. Frieseke, 1937. Photo Claude Giraud

  Was it rats? The intruder’s movement had a rat’s feral quality of alien intent, preying on civilized constraints even while taking advantage of them. But the sounds carried too much force for a rat. They had about the right weight for a cat, but with too much clumsy despair for that animal in its element (which a dark house was). Besides, I could not figure out how a cat would have gained access.

  I thought about last year’s bees and felt my skin prickle while I listened to the thing moving. During the previous summer, when I had been here for some time alone, the library had been visited regularly by honey bees whose hive I never found, though I thought it might be under the slates of the scalloped overhang (or auvent) meant to keep rain from trickling down the outside walls under my windows. In the room above the library, the bees had been more plentiful, but that was easily explained by the presence there of a fireplace, in the cool darkness of whose chimney they liked to congregate and gather carbon in the form of soot for their architecture, wax being carbon in a more translucent organization. That, at least, was my theory about the upstairs bees last summer. I’d thought a lot about bees, and learned somehow that one of the forest métiers in Normandy in the 1500s and earlier was that of bigre, an itinerant bee-man licensed by the owning class to collect wild swarms in the forest and carry them in wicker baskets to sell to settled people who needed them for their hives. The bees in my library were not even descendants but rather clones of those farmed in that way. Still, that did not exactly explain where they came from. In my library bedroom the fireplace had been filled in with cement to provide a draft for the furnace, and the ceiling was a foot thick (made, like the walls, of timbers interspersed with torchis) and tiled on the upper surface. It offered no passage for insects. Even on days that were too damp to leave the windows open (which days had been in the majority), the bees last year nevertheless had arrived in dozens during the course of the morning and afternoon, to mourn angrily against the western window glass as evening dwindled to despair.

  I did not believe in ghosts—something of a waste since, as Julia had said, the house must be full of them. In my family, on my father’s side, everyone saw ghosts. In my position, in this bed that, actually, he used to occupy, my father would have gone back to sleep at this point, satisfied that the noise was nothing more than a wandering soul in the next room doing the supper dishes left unwashed for morning.

  What about the femme de ménage who had, according to Mme. Joffroy, disappeared into the countryside with the house key? Someone somewhere had that key. Once in the past, also during the blackest part of the night, I had found that one end of the house was being unexpectedly occupied by another person. I had not given advance warning that I was coming. (It was after that incident that we had asked M. Joffroy to manage the property.) If someone else in the house had chosen this moment to make a furtive exit, I thought, I should not interfere. But I was curious, and the noises continued until I finally decided to have a look.

  I knew the house well enough to move through it barefoot in the dark, taking my direction from the promptings of sense memory and a certain dent in my skull. Most of the doorways in the house did not anticipate my height, but I wore my dent with Lamarckian pride since my rangy grandmother had had one just like it. In the passage between dining room and salon, the less-than-six-foot-tall doorway was further articulated by a step that coincided with the opening. The simultaneous step up and an insufficient last-minute bob were what had caused the transverse dent in the top of my grandmother’s head, and then later in mine. I might be a slow study, but now almost the first thing I did when I arrived in France was duck.

  Something crashed. I opened the heavy paneled door from the library into the dining room and saw a white blur tilting at a corner shelf almost at ceiling level, near the stairs, from which my father’s part-of-a-brass-Cape-Cod-firelighter had just fallen (I’d moved it to give pride of place to my own beanpot) and where something else now chattered in a breakable way. Above it, the blur was resolving itself into feathers and a large owl’s frantic puzzlement. The bird was trying to perch on a pair of glass candlesticks, its exposed underside glowing like dusty moonlight. I realized that my eyes were accommodating to the darkness, which must be, after all, less than absolute. Pale moonlight, interrupted by heavy cloud when I woke, was now entering the windows. The owl shoved off from its perch, thereby also shoving off the perch itself, which shattered on the floor as the bird careened from the dining room into the salon.

  The salon into which my avian visitor had flown had, in its day, been filled with music, and I was pleased that the friends who were to rent the place later in the summer were musicians. The house had once boasted two pianos: my mother’s, in her bedroom over the library (where the bees gathered sometimes), and another here. Everyone in the family had music. My grandfather was a disappointed tenor whose maturing into the range of baritone had forced him to renounce his hopes for the operatic stage and take up painting. My grandmother Sadie, at the time she met him in Paris, was studying the cello, and she played the piano as well. My mother, Frances, was for her part a serious student of the latter instrument, a pupil of Albert Levêque in Paris.

  In September of 1897 Freddy, at twenty-three, had played the guitar and sung during his first Atlantic crossing, on the S.S. Massachusetts, a cattle ship with a cargo of “three hundred and eighty cattle, two hundred and sixty four horses and twenty three missionaries; and the missionaries are quite as quiet as the cattle, and the cattle fully as
quiet as the missionaries.” He was on his way to fame and fortune, or at least Paris, in the company of Will Howe Foote, another aspiring painter from Michigan, who recorded the voyage in his diary. Another entry read:

  The evening was grand. Officers played their mandolins and Frieseke, Baxter [another passenger] and the “can’t-lose-me” girl in the white slippers and I sang all the songs we knew and then we three boys drew our steamer chairs to the rail and watched the moon and dreamed.*

  Frieseke sang in Paris at the studio gatherings of friends; and he sang at the easel in the Académie Julian in the early days; and he sang at his easel in Mesnil (so long as things were going well).

  The salon was, in a way, still filled with music, though its piano was gone. (Two keyboards were gradually giving up their ivory and their ebony in the cave downstairs, a project begun by one of my children; the rest of the instruments had no doubt been consumed in the course of the terrible cold that drove the refugees to burn much of the furniture while they crowded here during the war.) But there were still, in the salon, heaps of sheet music, from hymns to be used in the church of Notre Dame du Mesnil, to Bach or Schubert duets, to Chopin polonaises, to the newest and hottest popular best-sellers of the 1920s: “The Cootie Tickle (Over Here It’s the Shimmie Dance)”; “The Gum Chewer’s Song”; “Mon Petit” (“Sonny Boy” translated into French); “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise”; “A Kiss in the Dark”; “Lover Come Back to Me.” Someone played and sang all those songs in this room.

  The salon, 1995. Photo by author

  The owl was too terrified to make music, or even its usual utterance. I did not follow it into the salon, not wanting to worry it more. The door to the stairs was closed, which meant that the owl must have stooped through the chimney and been unable to negotiate the return trip. Hearing decorative breakables start to teeter and topple in the salon, I opened the window over the dining table; through it the freedom of the chill night air beckoned. Then I opened the door to the garden on the opposite side, flooding the room with night wilderness and as much damp as had blown off during the afternoon.

  Rather than trying to herd the owl from the salon into the dining room again, I stepped back into the library, closed the door, and waited, sitting at my desk by the window and looking out at the fields and orchards in their thin wash of moonlight. I listened for what should be the soundless passage of the bird once it found its way clear into the open fields, which glowed now with a cold skin of dew. For the first time it occurred to me that I was alone. As much as I enjoyed solitude, I was inclined to wreck it by filling it with work, forgetting that solitude was supposed to lead to the consolation of philosophy. Moonlight and solitude together should inspire at least reverie—but I could not get past that gnawing feeling of contentment that took up the space discomfort would otherwise have filled with productiveness or at least noticeable musing.

  Some places are innately beautiful, and this was one of them. Its beauty had nothing to do with its history, or my own genetic attachment to it, or the work it made for me—which I enjoyed, since work, like solitude, gave me pleasure. It was not nostalgia (a certain rosy lie of fiction masquerading as history, which is its own kind of lie), nor the “happy valley” motif that invariably leads to blood feuds lasting for generations. It was simply that this was a place on Earth where the land appeared to be going about its work at almost the same rate as the resident humans were going about theirs; where the resident beasts, such as the owl, were right on the fence between wild and tame (if that fence was like most of my fences), morally wakeful without being fazed by consequences, like Eve and Adam with the fresh juice of the apple alive on their tongues, its flesh filling their cheeks, as they looked at each other with pleasure before that voice came out of the sky to tell them what they already knew as soon as they shared the thing.

  I heard something fall, but it boinged rather than smashed, and was joined by a fluttering that told me the owl had found the dining room again. While I listened for the bird’s wings to find their way into the open, I saw a dark square form break out and move downhill from behind the guesthouse, M. Braye’s deserted cottage. I had never seen wild boar here before, though they were always said to inhabit the woods—sangliers, named after their habit of solitude (the Latin adjective singularis). This was a sow, or laie, as I knew because she was followed by six little ones, marcassins, all dew-covered and glowing as if with phosphorescence. The native color of the young boar should be fawn dappled with white, in stripes that would disappear with adolescence, but I could not see that because of the light they carried. The pigs cast black shadows that they dragged along with them to walk in, without which they would have seemed to float on moonstruck dew. When they reached the driveway, they turned to their left and trotted down the track with an assurance uncontaminated by stealth. I realized I had been holding my breath.

  NINE

  I had planned, after tea on that first day, to look over the second floor and get up to M. Braye’s house. But as the afternoon elapsed, I’d been distracted by the plumber, and then, pleased at arriving and enjoying the flood of warm weather, I’d muttered, “The essence of civilization is denial,” and taken the new imported hedge clippers out to the garden, hacked at the hedges awhile, and grabbed the opportunity to stroll around the property. I put on boots and walked down to the farthest fields above the de Longprés’ house to see that the new apple trees (new, that is, twenty years ago) were surviving, and even preparing to bear fruit this year; to inspect the ruin of the cider press and determine whether it was more advanced (because a project for the future might be to roof it, then later to make something of it); to survey the ghost of my grandmother’s walled kitchen garden, next to the old bakehouse, which was long gone, and the pumphouse, no longer in use; and finally to check the depth and population of the douet, the condition of the poplars alongside it, and the state of Mme. Vera’s vegetable garden (as yet unplanted) next to the stream. From this last, I could look up at the house and see the attic windows blazing with the reflection of the late setting sun, and the second-story windows reproaching me with their closed shutters.

  Beware nostalgia, something whispered, as if what I wanted here—disguised by the diaphanous garments of romance—was what had never been and never would be again. There was no way I could take this on and make it right, not if making it right meant making it what it might have been: that would be like trying to “restore” New Jersey. What was now a dwindling, rundown farm had once been a thriving settlement. The cider press, still worked in my grandparents’ day, had been a thatched building larger than the house, its grenier filled in October with the farm’s apples until it was time for the old horse, walking in circles, like Samson, around the now vanished circular trough, to grind them into juice that would ferment in the likewise vanished wooden tuns. The building was a ruin beyond repair, probably beyond any kind of rethinking: roofless and without openings for windows, it was still bigger than the house.

  The cider press, 1928.

  Recovering espaliered apple and pear trees towered against the cider press’s naked brick and flint walls, whose warmth they still depended on. These were the fancy dessert trees my grandmother had planted, as Mme. Vera often bragged to me when I encountered her near the ruin, she perhaps climbing uphill with a basket of greens for her rabbits. Seeing the espaliered pear tree in flower, I realized that the other trees I had noticed blooming in the orchards might be pears in good health rather than apples uttering their last hurrah.

  Near the cider press had stood a bakehouse where all the farm’s bread was once made; now it was a dangerous pit masked by nettles and wild roses. The barn and all traces of it, meanwhile, had disappeared entirely, and the horse pond was a morass of impenetrable silt and marsh. It was here that the laundry of the Frieseke household had been scrubbed and beaten before being laid out on the grass to bleach. Within the walled kitchen garden that M. Braye had kept well into the sixties were two contiguous deep water tanks, made of brick
and topped with floating scum, which I noticed had now been provided with some measure of protection from drowning large animals, in the form of a camouflage of rotting boards. I had never quite understood the tanks’ purpose; they were part of the farm’s old water supply, I knew, but beyond that I did not follow the plan. The stables where my grandmother had kept the cart she used to drive to market once a week in Pont l’Evêque, before they bought the Ford, and before Georges the White Russian refugee chauffeur, an ex-cossack, joined the household (Georges would later, in a fabled romance, marry Eugénie the cook, a native of Mesnil, and live with her after the war in Paris, where he found work at the Soviet embassy)—those stables had been pulled down twenty years before, in hopeless ruin, the summer that a younger sister of mine had elected to be married in Mesnil. Following local custom, the whole town had been invited to the wedding.

  The thatch on Mme. Vera’s house was going faster than I had thought; its peak had already lost the iris that held the clay that in turn held the apex of the thatch. Most of the cement fence posts along the unkempt drive had been destroyed, and the old barbed wire strung between them dragged on the ground. Dead apple trees tipped over and loomed gaunt, and the pastures pullulated with thistles, nettles, dock, brambles, bracken, and other weeds deserving of no names. The farm I was in love with looked as if it were inhabited by Snopeses—who would be me if I became the proprietor of this place.