I had another cup of coffee and watched the rain some more, wondering how much of it was getting into the Mesnier-Bréards’ masonry through the large opening I had noticed the day before in the wall facing the garden, from which it could easily work through the half-timbering and into the library, though not before rotting out the colombages. My breakfast table had filled with things I’d have to put away. Tonight we’d be five at table.
SEVENTEEN
One summer early in the sequence of our stays, Julia and I were in the house with two little ones, Christopher and Sadie. This was before the place had its first washing machine, which in many ways resembled the Citroën, and was bought used the first year France tested an atomic bomb in the Pacific. After the machine was installed, we listened to it for hours as it ground for forty-nine seconds in one direction, then paused balefully for exactly long enough to let you believe, It’s over, before grinding back in the other. It was like climbing seventeen steps up and then either sixteen or eighteen down, backward. The only way to know for sure was to keep counting. “Perfect to wash Penelope’s weaving in,” Julia said.
Our friend Margaret’s first visit to the house had antedated the arrival of the washing machine, and also our successful calculation of how many Pampers could be imported in one suitcase if they were deboxed and compressed like Wonder Bread. Expecting a homogeneous level of civilization in the West, we’d thought we could buy Pampers anywhere; we were surprised to learn that the only French answer to the disposable diaper was a nasty and instantly prebiodegradeable couche that teetered in an elastic belt. Julia, trained by the Madams of the Sacred Heart, claimed it was a mortification menstrual pad designed for nuns to wear under their hair shirts. An enterprising child such as Sadie could be kept in such a thing for less time than it took to disintegrate.
We were nervous about the bucket boiler, a galvanized percolator that had to be heaved onto the stove in the downstairs kitchen. We had purchased it from M. Thouroude’s predecessor in the quincaillerie, but shied away from it because carrying buckets of boiling water with toddlers underfoot made us uneasy, though it did not faze them. We relied instead on hand-washing, of which I did not do my share.
Outside the house, the drive and pastures teemed with beasts. Twice daily, geese paraded past in a line with their young, the whole family shitting everywhere, in fat grassy greasy curlicues of the sulphurous yellow-green that the American painters used to call merde d’oie. Madeleine tells me the current name for the color in polite company is caca d’oie. At any rate, everything shat copiously outdoors: cows, goats, sheep, dogs, chickens, ducks. What the beasts of the field contributed soon became our problem as well when our own children slid in it.
That summer we were shaken by the loss of Christopher’s large, black, motherly dog Duchesse, who wintered with Mme. Vera but rushed over to greet Christopher whenever we arrived. We were walking one evening along the tiny road at the foot of the property, in the direction of Mesnil, accompanied by Duchesse, when she was killed instantly by a. car traveling at grotesque speed on a road barely wide enough for the passage of one car at a time. We were used to seeing the hedgerows bulge outward when the tankers shoved through in the evenings, after collecting the day’s milk from the farms.
M. Tonnelier, the farmer (Mme. Vera’s husband), buried Duchesse at the far end of the garden’s first terrace. The loss of the dog proved how much danger there could be for our children on the road, and that realization was still fresh and raw among us an evening or two later when Margaret’s daughter Millie arrived, humping a load not much smaller than herself. Millie had just finished high school. She had walked from the train station in Fierville carrying what she felt she needed for a two-month trek in Asia—Normandy being only her first stage. The train still stopped at Fierville then; if we wanted a day in Paris, we would start off at about four-thirty in the morning on the thirty-minute walk to the crossing, where we would flag the train. At the end of a long summer day—there would still be some daylight in the sky at eleven on the Feast of Saint John, the longest day of summer (June 21)—the walk back to the house was all uphill. It delighted us that the entire trip from Cambridge to Mesnil could be made using only public transportation and our legs. The Fierville station incorporated in its upper floor the residence of the stationmaster; the family’s laundry hung from an upstairs window as Papa flagged trains below and Cécile and Pascal clamored at Maman within.
We’d known that Millie was coming, but not when she would arrive. The house had no telephone; all correspondence with the world was conducted by letter or through telegrams that the facteur brought up the driveway in his car, their wording inevitably having shifted in transit thanks to operators unfamiliar with the English language. These cables often caused us alarm but seldom provided any useful information. DOOM. COMNG. TROOBL. LONE. MURDER.: we would read the message while the facteur stood to one side, waiting for his tip and wondering if we dared send a reply. Three days later, Julia’s mother would appear.
Anyway, Millie had found her way uphill from the train. She leaned against the garden door into the library and fell inside the house with a screech and a thud. Julia was reading to the children, whom we had put into pajamas in an effort to make them disregard the fact that late though it was, the sun had hours left to shine. (If the sun was shining, it is fair to say that diapers were hanging on the line.) Millie fell in a heap onto her knapsack, blurting out the words, “I’m dead,” and then lying as speechless and still as Duchesse had in the road.
We had already enjoyed a flying overnight visit from Millie’s mother, Margaret, and Amos, her husband at the time. The morning that Margaret’s visit ended, the sun shone, and Julia hauled the diapers out of their bucket, rolled up her sleeves, and went to work in the laundry room, which opened onto the driveway. Being adjacent to the kitchen, it was also the room from which the dumbwaiter had once risen to connect the downstairs kitchen to the servants’ pantry above. The laundry room had thus been a main station along the house’s alimentary canal. Anyone falling down the kitchen stairs into the laundry room would be brought up short against the wastepipe from the upstairs (i.e., second-floor) toilet; while waiting for the room to stop spinning, the unlucky tumbler could appreciate the undercarriage of the dumbwaiter, or monte-charge, which for a time we had tried to use, Julia and I, one of us downstairs and one up, calling loudly to each other, having learned to keep the door to the stairs bolted after the children went down them headfirst often enough.
Once the Friesekes started using the property, in 1919, they found, even after they banished the cheese operation, that it was still hard to get help in a house in which the kitchen was on the ground floor and the dining room on the first, the two being linked only by a narrow and treacherous inside staircase. Even for Parisian servants used to long corridors that accentuated the gulf between the classes of served (dining room) and servant (kitchen), this seemed too much. Therefore, the dumbwaiter was installed. It was an efficient contraption and survived the war better than much else in the house. How the imagined patrons of our never-to-happen B&B would have loved to watch Julia and me, their genial hostess and host, quaintly dragging their morning coffee to them on it, along with fresh flowers gathered from the garden while they slept! But Julia and I, as the perennial servants of our young family, had soon discovered that we had less use for the dumbwaiter than did the children who liked to ride it, and I tore it out, replacing its upper terminal in the butler’s pantry with a small half-kitchen. This was the only kitchen we normally used unless there were numerous people in the house.
The laundry room had a cement sink running all the way down one side, designed to accommodate the wet part of the old cheese-making operation. It drained, like the kitchen sink, out a culvert under the driveway and into the fields. It was here that Julia was standing on the last morning of Margaret’s visit, scrubbing diapers in a metal washtub balanced in the sink. The heavy wooden door to the outside was open to allow her to run out now and t
hen into the pasture to test the intentions of the weather.
Margaret had taken Amos up the hill after breakfast to show him the woods and the view of the house from on high. They were about to drive to Paris, to fly to a place filled with romance, sun, comfort, and luxury: Provence, a part of the world where life was gay and carefree and nobody needed diapers. Amos went upstairs to pack while Margaret stood in the driveway to share a last gossip with Julia. Noticing the work-in-progress, she jockeyed under her skirt, did that practiced feminine two-step shimmy, and tossed her underpants into the washpan. This was long before Madonna perfected the routine, a grand gesture of something like noblesse oblige, useful almost anywhere, and at almost any time, if the goal is to stop traffic.
“As long as you’re at it anyway, you don’t mind, do you, lovey?” Margaret said. “It’s the funniest thing, but when I went to pack at home, I couldn’t find a single extra pair.”
As she and Amos drove away, Margaret rolled the elastic of her underpants up in the car window to hold them, fluttering, to dry en volant. Amos and Margaret looked a gallant, very on-the-road-to-Paris parade disappearing down the drive toward their eventual divorce.
Now, a week or so later, with the shadow of Duchesse’s passing weighing heavy on us, Margaret’s daughter Millie arrived and had to be revived while the children, their faces white, were assured that the young woman was only indulging in a bit of self-expression and had not really died like their beloved dog.
Millie’s trek was to take her through India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. She was convinced that though she planned to stay with friends, hardship and privation lay before her, and she must be self-sufficient. Her person-sized backpack was not large enough for everything she imagined she would need, so she was also festooned with baskets, valises, purses, and bags. We noted a square black wicker suitcase the size of a ham, with stiff round wooden oversized handles, which anyone who had ever traveled a block from home would have known could only be trouble. During the second day of Millie’s visit, Julia began dropping hints about efficiency in packing, pointing out that if Millie intended to hike the mountains of Afghanistan, she should remember how she had felt after the two-mile climb from Fierville, and maybe carry less. “For instance,” Julia asked, pointing out this most uselessly encumbering of Millie’s containers, “what on earth is that black thing good for?”
“Underpants,” Millie said. She was provisioned with seventeen pair she’d scavenged at home in the States. It was too late for the information to do her mother much good: the overflow joined the trunk of emergency clothes in the house. The black wicker object, too small for a picnic basket, too dumb for a suitcase, kicked around for the next dozen years until one day I had to award a prize to one of Margaret’s visiting grandsons (Millie’s nephew), who lugged it back to New York, a useful reminder never to win prizes.
EIGHTEEN
The jam closet could no longer be avoided. I had houseguests in my immediate future, as well as major construction pending in the upstairs bathroom, the floor of which was the jam closet’s ceiling. The jam closet, like the bathroom, was three feet wide and about nine deep, filling the space between the stairs and the salon. The wastepipe from the leaking toilet ran through it. For years, it had been haunting me like the least examined of bad consciences.
Other than my frightening glimpse through the rotted bathroom floor, and its converse, that brief shuddering glance at the closet’s ceiling, I had not really looked into it yet. Given the amount of dirt and rot that would inevitably accompany the labor as torchis and distressed joists came out, I knew I should clean the closet back to the bare walls—that is, if there were any walls. As long as it was raining, and since my time would soon be taken up by my role as host, I decided to use this morning for the job.
The closet had no door. Its opening next to the foot of the stairs was normally covered by a curtain, hung in such a way as to mask the stored materials as well as the wastepipe. Mercifully, the closet had no light. I had not seen the farthest reaches of the space since 1968, when, as Julia’s mother had recounted in her letter, I retrieved the family’s boxed books from friends, and from the attic, and built shelves everywhere in the house I could think of. What I had been unable to make shelves for had been stored either in the woodbox next to the dining-room fireplace or in the depths of the jam closet, on shelves where my grandmother’s fabled jams had once been kept (blackberry and cherry from the woods; currant, gooseberry, apricot, and elderberry from her kitchen garden; plum from the tree that was still producing next to the house and whose cropped limb would not give up; pear and apple from the espaliered trees against the cider press; and wild strawberry). The more accessible environs of the jam closet had later become a repository for broken furniture and, in front of that, for gardening tools and odds and ends and other things that people like the O’Banyons had no use for. (It was not impossible that my tray would turn up there.)
The Friesekes had collected books seriously. My mother’s mother’s father, John Duross O’Bryan, who became somewhat wealthy from time to time, used to bring portions of his large family (there were eleven children, of whom seven lived) across the Atlantic from Philadelphia for extended stays. When he finally retired to Paris, in the 1890s, he brought his library with him. After he died suddenly of appendicitis in 1904, following an operation performed in the Paris apartment (at 206 Boulevard Raspail), his daughter Sarah, my grandmother, was able to commit her future to the fiscal risk at which he had demurred: she married an American artist. She did so, in fact, while still wearing mourning; my grandmother was a determined individual. In due course many of her father’s books came to the house in Normandy, including his collection of Shakespeare editions and books concerning the life of Napoleon; his Lives of the Lord Chief Justices of England (in twelve volumes), Lives of the Saints (in eighteen), and Lives of the Queens of England (fourteen); works in Greek and Latin; numerous volumes on Irish history and the “Irish problem” (O’Bryan having been a committed partisan); and Bancroft’s Works and History of the Civil War.
Since I depend on books, I was curious to find out what had been consigned to this oubliette so many years ago. I hauled out tools and furniture and stored them in a dry part of the cave, and then, using a lamp on a long extension cord, learned with relief that the ceiling above the books was dry, whole, and free of mushrooms. I began pulling out books and stacking them on the stairs; as I stacked, I plotted the next oubliette, beside the attic stairway. (I had not been up to the attic yet.) Once up to my armpits in these books, I would, I knew, be a lost cause, and would simply disappear until something interrupted.
When we first unpacked the library, one of my goals was to keep its existential character. Those books that I found most curious or appropriate I put into the library: my grandfather Frieseke’s books on fly fishing and bridge, his collection of humorous sketches, his Hazlitt, and his monographs on certain painters whose work he admired; my great-grandmother’s tomes on domestic economy and the diseases of swine and poultry; my grandmother’s volumes on gardening and porcelain, her Trollope and Scott, her W. H. Hudson, Lafcadio Hearn, and James Joyce; and my great-grandfather’s Napoleon collection, which I consulted during the summer when I finally read War and Peace, shamed into it by Julia, who reread it every three years.
Second First Communion of Frances, 1925, at center, left of Frances, l’abbé Quesnel, pastor of Mesnil.
To unpack the jam closet was to entertain a jumble of family history, since in the days in 1968 when I had occupied myself with the obverse of this task, anything I had found sequestered in a book, whatever the thing and whatever the book, I had left exactly where it was, thinking the coincidence of book and thing and place a historical gesture that would be destroyed if those elements were to be separated. A paper tucked into a book, I felt, spoke of or to a person, place, and time we did not want to lose. Therefore, the holy card distributed at the time of my mother’s second First Solemn Communion in 1925, for example, mu
st stay between pages 72 and 73 of Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey, where it would edify, please, or surprise the next reader to come upon it.
As a matter of fact, my mother made three First Solemn Communions in Mesnil, under the direction of three large men in black robes, one spring after another, until she outgrew the dress. It was during the spring after the third that Lindbergh flew over. The theory in the parish was that children should be encouraged to keep participating in the rituals; but another, more important factor may have been that on account of poverty in the village, a girl’s Communion dress might be her first and last real dress until she married. My mother’s first First Holy Communion was commemorated in a photograph (tucked into a Philo Vance) taken after the occasion on the first terrace of the garden, in which were present, reading from right to left, my mother in her solemn dress; my grandmother and grandfather; Gayle and Mahdah Reddin (mother and daughter, Baha’is from Birmingham, Alabama, who stayed with the Friesekes long enough for my grandfather to paint a number of pictures of Mahdah); a woman I could not name; Germaine Pinchon, my mother’s godmother, who rose early that morning with her mother (the next in line) to do the housework at their home in Les Authieux before the neighbors awoke. (M. Pinchon, at far left, enjoyed more success as a fly fisherman than as a painter, and Germaine and her mother were the only help the family could afford.) Next to Mme. Pinchon sat my grandmother’s younger sister Janet, who studied voice all her life. In her youth she had to be accompanied to the singing teacher’s in Paris by her sister Sadie, who acted as chaperon-interpreter and who treasured and often repeated the exasperated exclamation of the impresario: “Why could not God have had the kindness to place both the brain and the voice into one girl!?” Janet outdid even my grandmother when it came to risk in marriage, since the artist she chose to marry (also after her father died) was not only unsuccessful and faithless in matters of the heart, but also French, and Communist to boot.
A Place in Normandy Page 10