A Place in Normandy

by Nicholas Kilmer

  Tea in the garden, 1928. (Left to right, Agnes Walsh O’Bryan, Mrs. Frieseke, Frances, Mr. Frieseke.) Photo Grattan O’Bryan

  In spite of the fact that the door opening onto the corridor had a glass panel that allowed light to enter from that side as well, our daughter Maizie always claimed that the only reason the room did not fill up with witches at night was that witches were afraid of spiders. Although it was too late to improve the room’s ambience for the children, I had recently installed a mural in segments occupying panels all around the room; taking advantage of the windows and mirrors, it adapted the circular pond in the garden, so that when you stood in the center of the room, you felt you were also in the midst of the pond, which had somehow lifted itself out of the garden and into the house. Should the house become mine, it was my seditious intent sacrilegiously to violate this somber chamber by painting the wood panels white.

  The billiard room’s main purpose now was to hold the linen closet. I pulled out a towel for my delayed shower and noticed that the volume of sheets and towels seemed much diminished this year. I am not good at sheets, but I do have a memory for bulk, and the bulk of cloth was considerably less. If linens were missing, as well as the wicker tray … how easily might the other furnishings of this house I thought to take over wander out into the countryside?

  Now that I had opened the room’s windows to the unusual hot breeze and sunlight, I was obliged to sweep up the hordes of dead flies and bees that had collected at the end of the corridor next to my mother’s bedroom, under the southwest window, where they invariably gathered when the house was closed. Then I went for my reward.

  The second-floor bathroom occupied the same centrally located corner as the jam closet and entrance hall beneath it. It was narrow and L-shaped, and when you stood in the corridor at the top of the grand stairway, facing down, with the bathroom door on your left (once painted a hideous fake faux-oak and more recently desecrated by me with a couche of plain “French” gray semi-gloss house paint), you could look across the stairwell at a wall into which were set two little windows that provided an unobstructed view of the bathroom’s activities—unless, that is, the occupant had thought to draw the curtains inside. The intention behind this arrangement was to allow daylight from the bathroom’s garden window to reach the stairwell, but unwitting or unwarned visitors sometimes found things getting rather informal when they or someone in the family who wished to shower crossed the gauntlet of those two windows.

  This bathroom could also be entered from the bedroom adjacent to it on the side that was not a stairwell, by means of a low doorway into which a step had been inserted. This could give the early riser a rude awakening if it didn’t knock him out, but it picked up one of the architectural themes of the floor below. With the advent of the new shower, the third entrance that the bathroom once enjoyed—via the passage closet into the billiard room—had been suppressed.

  I walked in to take my maiden joy of the shower and learned that the bathroom could now also be entered through the floor.

  I stood agape. The plumber’s gars the day before had tactfully refrained from mentioning that the floor of the salle d’eau had essentially rotted out. Or had he assumed I knew and, being an American, simply accepted the fact that I could stare down through openings between the tiles into the darkness of the jam closet below? The toilet, repaired the previous year by the same large men who had installed the shower in this little room, was evidently still leaking. It was impossible to guess how much support, if any, might remain under the tiles. I tiptoed out of the room, distributing my weight as broadly as I could.

  If bathing was my primary concern, I had an alternative to the new shower: the six-foot tub in the first floor salle d’eau, off the salon and connecting to the guest bedroom. This bathroom, because it was at the far end of the house from the furnace room, had been provided with its own hot-water heater, a geyser that ran on propane tanks, which I would have to drag out of the downstairs kitchen and hook up myself outside. Once the geyser’s pilot was lighted, the force of the cold water running through the thermostat was supposed to cause a plume of fire to heat the flow to tub or basin. As with my parents’ Citroën familiale, I hated the heater as much as I distrusted it. It was fine when it worked, but the flame liked to blow itself out just as its victim attained the point of no return, and I worried that I was endangering my soul whenever I tried to light the pilot.

  With a spirit that M. Thouroude would have recognized I determined to make the upstairs bathroom safe enough to let me damn well take my shower. Was I not the potential master of this house, and monarch of all I surveyed? I was certainly dressed for it, if I’d learned nothing else from the story of the emperor’s new suit. I put on a pair of pants and went to have a look in the cave for some planks with which to rig a temporary emergency floor.

  The cave was the ground-floor storeroom where we tried to keep tools and lumber. The room next to it, under the first-floor bathroom, was used to house firewood, though there were signs that the spirit of the place had also moved Mme. Vera’s goats to shelter here during the winter. To reach the cave I first had to go outdoors. Along the west side of the house, next to the driveway, on the level that, because it was below the first one acknowledged to be habitable, was called the sous-sol, were five rooms. Only two of these, the downstairs kitchen and the laundry room at the center, connected either to each other or to the rez-de-chaussée—which I, being American, insisted on calling the first floor, while what I called the second floor was what the Mesnier-Bréards would have termed the first.

  The cave, directly below the salon, could be entered only from the driveway, though it could be seen into from the laundry room through a small window called a meurtrière, through which an early defender of the house could have shot arrows at any besieger misguided enough to break in via the cave. This was the only one of the auxiliary rooms that had a functioning lock, the single existing antique key to which hung from a supporting post in the kitchen—unless, of course, it had been mislaid.

  I tell you, it’s too much, I heard Julia’s voice whispering. But the cave’s key was in its place. You see? Don’t be such a pessimist, I answered. The doves groaned above me as I stood barefoot in the driveway and opened the cave door to the loud sound of rushing water. A freshet poured through a big hole in a joint of one of the lead pipes that carried cold water along the ceiling, in the direction of the downstairs bathroom. The leak was so exuberant that I would have noticed it the day before had I not been bemused by jet lag and my pleasure at being here—and, maybe, by the ridiculous size of the house, Julia whispered. Gallons a minute were gushing out, soaking the walls and floor and, worse, the supporting (?) beams and rafters. Tracing the pipes into the wood room and back again through the laundry and the kitchen, I found numerous other small leaks, some in joints and others in the pipes themselves. The worst of these played musically onto the stored lumber, as it must have done for most of the previous summer—the O’Banyons’ summer, I realized I was calling it. I now understood the feeling of terminal damp I had encountered on first entering the house the day before, which no amount of hot air from the outside over the past two days had been able to alleviate. The place was a springhouse on at least two floors, one right above, and the other just below, the salon.

  Tell me again how we’re going to manage this? Julia’s voice worried while I unfolded a plastic tarp and, using clothespins and wire, rigged a sluice to channel the main flow out of the cave and into the driveway before I carried boards upstairs to make a catwalk across the tiles. My plan was to distribute my weight evenly between any joists that might still exist, though a furtive glance at the ceiling of the jam closet suggested that such working joists were in the minority. What I could see of the jam closet’s packed contents comprised mainly fallen mud and rotted wood, with a spray of mushrooms—blind, inedible, albino versions of the Hypholoma capnoides, my mushroom book seemed to confirm—growing from the wall and ceiling below the toilet.

>   I took my shower.

  There, I told Julia, shining with cleanliness. A child could do it. Nothing to it. See? I’ve been here only two days, and I’ve already managed to wash.

  I turned off the water and the electricity and called Mme. Le Planquay.

  THIRTEEN

  The clatter of the doorbell in the downstairs kitchen that evening announced company: Thérèse Chevalier. She’d seen my light the night before from her house across the hill from Mme. Vera’s, and since she was off to her apartment in Paris the next morning, she had come up to say hello.

  Black clouds had frisked across the sun and stayed there late in the afternoon and, after deliberating and waning, had spread to deliver a steady drizzle. Thérèse wore boots and a yellow slicker and carried an umbrella, having walked across the fields between her house and mine.

  Thérèse was of the generation poised between mine and my parents’, just as her own parents fell squarely between my parents and grandparents. She had spent much of her childhood in Mesnil. She and her mother (her father was then at sea) had been among those who walked from Paris into the countryside under a rain of German bullets as the French capitulated to the Germans in June of 1940. They were in Caen when it was bombed by the allies in June of 1944, and they walked from the flaming ruins of that city to Mesnil while the D-day invasion was in progress. On her mother’s side, Thérèse was a member of the extensive Lafontaine family, which descended on Mesnil every August from its varied winter quarters elsewhere in France and North Africa, historically making up half the town’s summer population. She was unmarried, funny, charming, and intelligent; a former teacher of history at a French university, she spoke perfect English. For several years she had been what she called retired, but I had never known anyone more in love with her profession. She had turned history into her hobby now that she was no longer teaching—but she hadn’t really stopped teaching, either, since she was always on the lookout for a new student. Thérèse, like the ancient mariner, loved nothing better than to hold you with her glittering eye and reveal to you her most recent cache of research. I knew what was coming.

  Thérèse left her wet things in the downstairs kitchen and followed me upstairs for a cup of tea next to the fire. We sometimes went years without seeing each other, though we had the familiarity common to siblings widely separated by age. She looked around approvingly at my informal arrangements in the dining room, particularly the books that were piling up on every available surface.

  “Good to see you settling in,” Thérèse said. She was not one of those visitors who muttered, shook their heads, and said something along the lines of O, what a noble house is here o’erthrown, though she had known it when my grandparents lived here, at which time it had indeed been more finished, furnished, and coherent. For one thing, it had not yet been vandalized for heat then: the refugees had burned bookshelves, paneling, and closet doors, as well as furniture. But nonetheless, even in my grandparents’ day, the effect had been threadbare and eclectic (or as Saint-Gaudens more tactfully put it, “completely colorful”). My grandfather, always a domestic painter, had preferred to work in the house, and many of the paintings he did after 1920 showed furnishings we could still point to. My grandmother would rush about the house second-guessing and sweeping surfaces before him as he roamed in search of a subject or vantage point; she hoped to prevent him from recording as still-life what to her eyes (and, she believed, to anyone else’s) looked like clutter that would shame her as a housekeeper when the resulting paintings were hung at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris, or at Macbeth’s gallery in New York.

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

  “But the gardens were something else,” Thérèse said. “There was nothing neglected about your grandmother’s gardens. Oh, the stories she would tell. Mae West, and Buffalo Bill, and bandits in New Mexico; and how she would dress everyone in costume for a birthday or a fête. She was so much fun. Such a shame your grandfather never learned French. I followed him in the field while he was painting, and he never said a word.”

  In fact, my grandfather knew French perfectly well, but as it was explained to me, he did not speak if he had nothing to say. My grandmother, in contrast, like Julia, was a gregarious, compelling, adept, and entertaining talker who was sometimes obliged on social occasions to make do for the two of them.

  Thérèse and I sat on either side of the fireplace and listened to the rain splash against the slates and occasionally find its way down the chimney in drops large enough to hiss on the embers. We ran through recent family news as the tea steeped, covering the necessary groundwork while Thérèse clearly itched to include me in her present obsession—or obsessions (plural), it turned out.

  The following day, she must rush off to Paris for her regular session with the life models whom the government made available to the citizens of Paris. She was drawing and painting seriously now. Then she must hurry back as soon as she could to Normandy to continue gathering bits of research that would connect Mesnil and its environs to the larger picture.

  She dropped three lumps of sugar into her tea and stirred—paused—and let the full joy of her project start to unfold.

  “My idea is a history of Mesnil, starting in the Cretaceous period, when we were all underwater here where we are sitting, and the animals were laying down their chalk shells to make this hill. Then I’ll move slowly forward to the present day, always with Mesnil as the focus—but I don’t know, what do you think? Does it matter that there are only about thirty people at any given time in Mesnil who might be able to read it, or want to? But it could be great. Some interesting people have been here. Charles Gounod, of course, the composer who wrote the ‘Ave Maria’; everyone knows he was an important character around here. You’ve probably heard a thousand times how he met the Count of Mesnil while walking on the beach in Trouville in 1846, and they became friends for life. Gounod had almost drowned—he was older; the count was just a kid at the time, twelve, at the beach with the priest who was also his tutor. So there’s Gounod. But there were others, too.

  “You know Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet? Right on the first day of the First World War, he was so near your house you could have thrown a rock and hit him.” Thérèse seemed to be looking into the fireplace for a rock of the right size; one of the fossilized clamshells from the hill would be about right. “He’d been in Deauville with a friend and because of the mobilization they had to drive back to Paris to enlist, which they did via the road that goes through Pont l’Evêque and Lisieux. He had a flat tire near here, which he made famous in a poem he wrote in the shape of a little car—look, I’ll show you—with a driver and two passengers.”

  She pulled a Xeroxed page out of her bag.

  “August first 1914,” Thérèse said. “The day France declared general mobilization against Germany.”

  If it was history she was after, I had something to toss in. I told her how my mother had also responded to the mobilization call as best she could, though she was a day late: she was born in Paris on August 2, 1914.

  We talked of how the illustrated newspapers from the period just before that war read as if everyone believed that all the armaments and uniforms were being prepared for a parade of limited and specified duration and direction. Although many of the Americans residing in France left just before or during the onset of the war, the Friesekes had remained, in Paris and in Giverny, where the sounds of cannon fire had interrupted my grandfather’s painting by making his models jump.

  The Friesekes with the Ford.

  The Friesekes had no car then, and would not until the Ford and Georges the chauffeur. My grandfather did attempt some patriotic driving for the Red Cross ambulance service during the hostilities, but it wasn’t long before everyone acknowledged that he endangered more than just the wounded whenever he got behind the wheel: always drawn by landscape, he tended to follow his eye. He was transferred to bedpan duty and rather quickly went back to paintin
g.

  * * *

  The evening darkened outside, and the rain intensified. I had always wanted to ask Thérèse about some of her father’s stories. During the first years of our visits, Alain Chevalier had been generous with his time, driving us here and there and telling us stories.

  During the Second World War, after he came back from the sea, Alain had told us, when the house Thérèse and I now sat in was occupied by the Germans, he had kept a clandestine radio at his house in Mesnil, using, for an aerial, a metal clothesline. What did Thérèse remember of this?

  Thérèse looked blank and slightly uncomfortable, as if the specifics of her father’s tale had some negative impact on her view of the big picture. She dodged. There was so much war, she said, in the region’s history. After the Romans, and following several centuries of something like peace (albeit a chaotic and dangerous one), Viking river boats of shallow draft, like the flatboats or gabarres used by local traders, had penetrated the land of the Pays d’Auge by way of the River Touques, which meandered northward through broad marshes and welcomed the raiders at its mouth, emptying into what English-speakers called the English Channel at what was now Deauville. In 1944 the German forces of occupation had manned a large gun emplacement in the same spot, overlooking what French maps used to refer to as Le Canal de France but now termed La Manche (the sleeve). That battery had been part of the defense of the Seine estuary, across from Le Havre.

  “But your father?” I pressed her.

  As far as what her father had done during the war … Thérèse could not recall anything about a secret radio in Mesnil.

  “During the war,” I continued, “at the time of the D-day invasion, when the bombing was widespread—I’ve heard that forty bombs fell just in this commune—the citizens of Mesnil, with their cows, according to your father, took refuge in a cave in the hill across the valley.…”