A Place in Normandy

by Nicholas Kilmer

  The Mesnil graveyard was the somber standard French somnolent flock of huge granite or marble sarcophagus-sized tombstones, on many of which were placed the china flowers or “Regrets éternels…” tablets available in stores everywhere.

  I was touched by the presence of a group of these on my grandparents’ stone—and simultaneously shocked and chagrined to see how disreputable the monument’s cement foundation had become. “A mon neveu” (“To my nephew”), read one of the tablets, decorated with plastic pansies. I could not think, for a moment, what uncle or aunt of my grandparents, here in Mesnil … impossible.…

  “It’s the children,” Thérèse explained. “They move them around at night, for a joke. Children think death has nothing to do with them.”

  Margaret was looking down at the grave with her own desolation. “I suppose whoever takes on the house gets the grave, too?” she volunteered.

  Fresh flowers bloomed at the foot of the Chevaliers’ stone, a pot of geraniums that Thérèse herself must have put there. The stone was shipshape, and the gilding legible—in contrast to that above my grandparents, which was now worn away completely. Anyone who wanted to find them would have to know what he or she was doing.

  “When it gets too bad, the mayor’s office declares the grave abandoned,” Thérèse told me. “Then it’s assigned to other tenants. That would be sad—a loss for the town.”

  I took note that I could no longer put off making arrangements with Sanson et Fils, the pompes funèbres et marbrerie générale (funeral home and monument maker) in Pont l’Evêque. The state of my grandparents’ tomb was a public disgrace, even more shameful than, if similar to, the present condition of their fences.

  “The names you see now are often ones you would have found in the sixteen hundreds as well,” Thérèse told her audience as we strolled together between monuments. “Leconte, Lecouturier, Leproux, Prévost, Lemercier…”

  Ruth walked with Andalouse along a cast-iron ornamental enclosure that paralleled the wall between the churchyard and the kitchen garden kept by the English people in back of their presbytery. They already had lettuce coming into head, and Mme. Vera’s garden next to the douet was not even planted yet. “Is this the unconsecrated ground?” Ruth asked.

  “Just the opposite. It’s for the people from the château,” Thérèse said.

  Since it was raining harder now, Thérèse gave us a ride home.

  THIRTY

  They’d have to lift the stone and start again, the people at Sanson’s pompes funèbres told me. They’d want to redo the housing of the vault, and replace the rotten cement with black granite, didn’t I think, to match the stone? They showed me samples.

  I could hear it echoing out of the Old Testament somewhere in Ben’s voice, a vatic statement perhaps from the lost Book of Julia: You have to raise the stone and start again.

  We’d all driven into Pont l’Evêque after lunch, once we had satisfied ourselves that the plumbers had returned. My guests were going to shop in the mostly closed stores (Tuesday, the day after market day, remember?) or look around or collect schedules at the train station or stand gazing from a bridge into the Yvie, or the Calonne, or the Touques, or consider the (closed) public library (once the Hôtel Montpensier), a seventeenth-century solidity in brick and stone with a graceful double entrance staircase, the erstwhile proud home of the Fresnays, whose basement I happened to know smelled just like mine. I, meanwhile, would make some inquiries concerning repairs to funerary monuments.

  The people at Sanson’s, being in the sympathy business, were more helpful and reassuring than M. Thouroude in the quincaillerie. But as I quickly understood, I was also shopping for something a good deal pricier than a chicken-wire fix to keep owls out of the chimney.

  Nothing could be done, I learned, while the ground was wet, but meanwhile they could certainly look and let me have an estimation. Monsieur was leaving the country when?

  A momentary spasm of rebellion struggled against the inanimate weight of all I was flirting with taking onto my shoulders. I could, if I played my cards right, get out from under it, take the train tomorrow, and have a day or two in Paris before my plane home. I could look at other people’s pictures, be cooked for by my friend Madeleine and talk about family, consider the world with Tom, listen to the entertaining fables my godson Gabriel was preparing for me, worry about nothing, wash my clothes—Merde, I thought (that much of my French, at least, returning), I’ve got all those sheets to deal with.

  “Depending on the weather, and in principle, the day after tomorrow,” I said, and gave them my phone number in Mesnil. “Early in the morning.”

  I found everyone in the cider and calvados store, which, since it was designed expressly for tourism, was obliged to be open. Ben, who knew wine, was bemused by this store’s specialization in the Norman vin du pays.

  “They want you to wait until the calvados is twelve years old,” he said, studying a leaflet. Naturally the price increased with the age. The store offered dusty bottles, and dustier bottles, and newer ones that could be put away for future use; and sweet cider called Bréavoine made by the family of a former mayor of Mesnil; and pear cider; and pommeau, a mixture of calvados and cider consumed as an aperitif by persons who did not care that the drink, if not exactly dead, seemed to be living only by galvanic action. There were bottles of something in which the apple was present in its entirety. Growers surrounded the set fruit, at its beginning, with the bottle, which was then tied to the branch while the fruit grew. I liked to think of these trees covered with hanging bottles when the wind blew.

  “The calvados we’ve been drinking from the Intermarché,” Teddy said, his Nordic height threatening the top shelves, “the one you’ve got that rabbit marinating in for tonight—what’s wrong with that? It’s only two years old. And as for cider, if we’re basically talking festered apple juice, what difference…”

  The assistant, a young man with clean hands and an education, in white shirtsleeves and a tie, who had enough English to take umbrage at Teddy’s indifference to his specialization, approached and delivered himself (as if having memorized it in school) of a tract, anointing me as his interpreter: “Believe me, there are growths [crus] of cider as different from each other as growths of wine, and the cider of the Vallée d’Auge is especially appreciated. Already in the seventeenth century, were they not remarking a distinction among the ‘spicy’ [épicé], the ‘sweet’ [doux], le Vesque, and le Guillot Roger? Monsieur, you must understand, the kind of apple trees, the nature of the earth, the care applied to the collection of the fruit and to its crushing—all of these have an enormous influence.”

  He trembled, rose up on his toes, and glowed crimson. Then he gesticulated frantically with both hands, as if he were conducting some independent-minded cygnets in Swan Lake who thought this was only a dress rehearsal.

  “Doré, tirant légèrement sur le rose, le cidre doit pétiller sans mousser, et surtout être d’une parfaite limpidité” (“Golden, but tending slightly toward rose color, cider should effervesce without foaming, and be above all of a perfect clarity”), he pronounced (or quoted). “Le digne accompagnement d’un bon repas sera le cidre du pays, justement célèbre” (“A worthy accompaniment to a good meal will be the region’s cider, justly celebrated”).*

  “In that case, we’ll take two bottles of the Bréavoine,” Ben said, “if you think it will go with rabbit.”

  “You could do nothing better for your rabbit. This I swear.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  On the drive back, my guests persuaded each other that in fairness to the occasion and to the countryside, they ought to do some tourism before they left the next day, though sitting in the house, or marketing, or walking in the rain, or even just watching the strollings of cattle or the activities of birds seemed plenty to justify the term “vacation”—especially if plumbers or Mme. Vera and her rifle added dramatic tension and variety.

  They could drive to Bayeux and see the cathedral and Queen Mathi
lde’s tapestry of triumph and desolation (a copy of it decorated my upstairs bathroom, installed as a frieze by Gabriel); or check Pegasus Bridge, liberated on D day by Britain’s Fifth Parachute Brigade; or take in any of a dozen castles; or drive about the countryside; or visit Deauville, which wouldn’t be cranked up for racing and swimming and the casino life until August, but which still offered a stretch of the long gray Atlantic, shallow and warmed by the Gulf Stream. Or whatever.

  In the event that I opted out of their excursion to Honfleur, I could commend to them its wooden church built by ship’s carpenters; its active fishing harbor; its museum dedicated to Boudin (the painter, not the sausage—though the variety to be found between one sample and another of either commodity, I warned them …). They’d have tea and come back late, they said, unless I needed help with the rabbit.

  I didn’t have long. I didn’t have long to be here, or to think. I’d done nothing but work since I arrived, and none of the work had brought me closer to knowing anything more exact than that I could not bear not to have that work to do. If the decision had been mine, or only mine—but it was not, and in any case, taking over the house was not like a decision, but more like a common-law marriage that a couple of goodwill has backed into, and keeps working on, making thousands of small decisions all the time, if never that big one spoken in the defining moment of “I do.” As to the implications … “I’ll be all right,” I told them. “You go ahead.”

  I saw them off and had tea on my own, in the dining room, where the blossoms on the digitalis were tumbling one by one with wan damp thumps off their tall stems and onto the table—on their way downhill, like everything else. I put beside me a yellow pad on which to start listing the chores that had to be done just to keep the place from sliding further backward; others that would pull it slightly ahead; and still more that were just a matter of housekeeping before I left.

  Find wicker tray, I wrote. I hadn’t yet been to the guesthouse, M. Braye’s. Someone could have taken the tray over there last summer for some reason. I hadn’t been to the attic yet, either. One of its window panes, it had seemed to me when I looked up at the house that first night from Mme. Vera’s vegetable garden by the stream, did not glare back at sunset as it should, and was probably broken out; but if I confirmed that this was true, it would mean my having to measure the opening, or rather (because nothing was square anywhere in this house, whether door, window, ceiling, or floor), draw the missing pane, and then carry the template into Pont l’Evêque the following day, when the droguerie would be open again, to have a new pane cut. And if I was going to do all that, I might as well continue a project for which I had brought down a few picture frames from the attic the previous year, with the idea that I could have mirrors cut for them to brighten up the rooms that needed it. They were still leaning against a bookshelf in the library, next to three quarters of my grandfather’s portable landscape easel.

  If I went up to the attic to look for the tray—why it would be there I did not need to ask—I’d have to know rather than suspect about the window pane.

  By the time we returned from town, the plumbers had left, though the afternoon was not over. I saw their tools still in the downstairs kitchen, so I knew they’d gone to get something or were responding to someone else’s emergency and would finish here the next day or at some other appropriate time in the future. The latter seemed more likely, since whatever they’d jerry-rigged at least provided me with water, even hot water upstairs in the new shower—which was not, after all, a bad shower. In fact, it was a good shower, and a real improvement. We’d come a long way since 1968. For the time being, it was just worth your life to get into and out of that new shower: a hitch, but one that could be fixed.

  The rain stopped and the sun shone in a pure blue sky, slanting in through the dining-room window. It hovered and was greeted by a hoarse barking that I knew to be that of the fox, Mme. Vera’s enemy, teasing from the foot of the hill near her garden; the bark sounded curiously like her own bark of rage that morning when she missed him, failing in her quest to nail him on the door of the garage. The slates of the auvent under my window began to steam as vigorously as my cup of tea, and then the rain started again.

  Frieseke’s painting of the building, now Mme. Vera’s, in which he kept his studio. Oil on canvas, 20 × 24 inches, ca. 1924. Collection Montclair, New Jersey, Museum of Art.

  At six o’clock I was still looking at my yellow pad. It was all too much to keep track of. After the entry Find wicker tray, my invention had quailed at the number of things a person could and should do every day if any of this were to make sense. It all seemed stupid and impossible, but nothing could correct my basic condition of hopeless affection: not to take on the house was simply to lose it forever. “First raise the stone” was as useful a nugget of platitudinous advice to me as it would have been to Lazarus once he was underground; in my present mood, it seemed as taunting an injunction as Find wicker tray. Obviously, like Lazarus, I needed help.

  I was arranging my rabbit in a roasting pan in the downstairs kitchen when I heard M. Joffroy’s car. I had the upper half of the Dutch door to the driveway open to give me light. The rain had slowed to a clear drizzle. The butcher had tied the rabbit and wrapped it in a caul, so that it looked less like a specific beast, though its legs still emerged, bound in against the body. I wouldn’t start cooking it until my guests returned; while it was in the stove, I’d have time enough to trim the green beans and do the rest of it.

  M. Joffroy pried himself out of his car and called into the kitchen, “Voici le maçon!”—as pleased to have landed a mason so quickly as he had been to discover the snails breeding on my wall.

  Normans are either tall and fair or short and dark, and the mason, M. Toffolon, was as emphatically of the latter persuasion as M. Joffroy was of the former. A square man on the mature side of fifty, he brushed his hands on his dusty white canvas pants, and we all shook.

  “Belle maison,” M. Toffolon growled, looking up at the streaming expanse of slate wall before I led them inside. “Mais on dit qu’elle travaille un peu” (“Lovely house, but they say she’s working”—or moving—“a bit”). He spoke affectionately, as one would of a beloved elderly aunt heading into her thirteenth marriage.

  “It’s the floor of the salle d’eau,” M. Joffroy said. “Two flights up. Be careful; all day I have been having nightmares about it.” Again he did his imitation of Rodin’s Thinker plunging three stories into the hearty soup of the enfer.

  The two men sniffed my rabbit marinade appreciatively—calvados, garlic, mace, and tarragon were hard to pass by without comment—and M. Joffroy gave me the high compliment of repeating the gesture he had used that morning when thinking of escargots de Bourgogne presented on the table.

  I put my rabbit in the fridge to protect it from flies and covered it to keep it from drying out, and we went upstairs. Monsieurs Joffroy and Toffolon had to stand in the dining room waiting while I arranged extension cords and lamps to get some light into the jam closet. I wanted first to show them the problem from below.

  “Belle maison,” M. Toffolon repeated. “What is its date?”

  I had to confess I did not know, adding that my mother claimed to have seen the date 1493 under the cement outside, to the left of the step into the library.

  “Ça se peut,” M. Toffolon said, shrugging. “It may have been a convent, with all the dormers it has in the attic—they used to do that so the nuns could sleep up there.”

  I noticed him surreptitiously shifting his weight on the dining room’s tiles, testing for loose ones. “A house like this,” he said, “she’s always getting into some kind of trouble or another, isn’t she? But it will take her a long, long time to fall down completely.”

  That must be a common concept in Europe, I thought, since Teddy used very similar words.

  M. Toffolon followed me across the vestibule at the foot of the grand staircase, and I pointed up at the worrying bathroom floor.

  “
Ooh, trouble,” M. Toffolon said, looking down and motioning us back.

  “No, it’s up there,” M. Joffroy and I told him, both of us pointing upward together.

  M. Toffolon bounced delicately on his broad boots and stared down at the floor, shaking his head. “Let’s go downstairs,” he insisted.

  THIRTY-TWO

  At the bottom of the cellar steps, three feet from the wastepipe from the upstairs toilet, in the laundry room where cheeses had once been made and where the next day I would determine, after my guests had gone, whether or not the washing machine still functioned (that is, if the plumbers were finished with their work by then), the three of us stood together like—to continue the metaphor from Rodin’s canon of sculpture—the burghers of Calais about to step out of the besieged town to greet their English conquerors.

  M. Toffolon was feeling better. “There, I knew it,” he said, pointing up at the beam that was supposed to be supporting that side of the grand staircase as well as the jam-closet floor and everything above it. The end of the beam was resting on a curled piece of lead pipe that the plumber’s gars had not got to yet. “I could feel the floor was soft [molle],” M. Toffolon said. “As you see, the end of the beam is rotted away.”