A Place in Normandy

by Nicholas Kilmer

  He took a tournevis (screwdriver—I knew the word now, after spending a hard few minutes years before trying to act one out for M. Thouroude, having once again left my dictionary behind at the house) from his pocket and scrabbled at the softened end of oak, which was attempting to slide the rest of the way down the inside of the wall.

  “Here’s your problem,” he reassured me.

  It now seemed to me that instead of just the upstairs-bathroom floor, the entire house was collapsing, and my face must have expressed that hideous conclusion.

  “Ce n’est pas grave,” my fellow burghers kept assuring me, admiring the fit of the noose around my neck. “Half of the beams in the house rested on the walls when it was made, and this one even in the dirt of the garden. Over time, as the ends rot—and oak takes a long time to rot, that’s why they used it to make ships—you can build up new supports inside the rooms, and voilà! she is in business once again,” explained the mason.

  “All we have to do,” M. Toffolon continued, “before we get to the bathroom floor, is raise this beam to where it was and then support it with a new poteau—”

  “Of oak,” M. Joffroy interrupted.

  “But of course, always of oak.” Mr. Toffolon spread his arms in the gesture used by those conveying unlikely innocence or reassurance. “You will have nothing to worry about, Monsieur. Always oak, a beautiful oak post we will place here.” He dusted his hands before patting the stone wall under the errant beam as if it were the flank of that same game but aging aunt he had complimented earlier. “Now we will look upstairs. The plumbers are working here?” He shook his head, climbing in front of me. “As I have often said, water is the mortal enemy of architecture. When you have pipes, you have a river running through your house. Naturally there is trouble. It is like keeping goats in your garden: nobody would do that.”

  Before he left, M. Toffolon stood in the drive looking up at M. Braye’s house, which was surrounded by cattle. It was all on one floor, thirty feet long and ten wide, with a peaked roof covered in newish slate. Since we had put the dormers in ourselves, there was nothing to indicate that it had ever been inhabited by anyone more nunnish than my Great-aunt Janet.

  “That’s your old house,” he said. “You can see it’s where they would have built—there’s a spring right above it, see? that little flat plateau with nettles on it (they like water, nettles), that’s its housing. There’s water in there, a source. I don’t even have to go up the hill to look. For people who kept sheep or cows, maybe while Charlemagne was king—who knows?—it would have been ideal. The way people built didn’t change until they began using steel, which I won’t touch.”

  He showed us how the cottage had grown, one segment at a time, laterally, starting from a thick stone cube about six feet by six (the room I’d made into the kitchen), which he was sure had been the first building on the property—a one-room house with rubble walls, to serve a family of whatever size it had to. “People were poor in those days,” he said. “Whenever ‘those days’ were.”

  They climbed together into M. Joffroy’s car, M. Toffolon having promised to consider the situation and give me an estimation, as well as an idea of whether the work could be done before the August renters arrived. I tried to be jovial, but I was upset, not only because he had discovered so much more wrong than I had expected but also because it was so easy to see. I should have seen it, and the plumbers should have seen it—but I especially, given that I went up and down the basement stairs ten times a day at least.

  It was small consolation to know that one of two things had happened: either the beam had rotted due to ground moisture absorbed over the centuries, and in subsiding had inflicted the large, familiar crack in the right wall of the grand escalier and caused the bathroom floor to sag, thus distressing the joints in the pipes serving the toilet, which eventually sprang a leak that rotted the floor; or, conversely, the toilet’s leaking had rotted the floor, and the water’s downward progress along the wall had slowly destroyed that end of the main beam, leading it to slip its position.…

  However it had begun, it sounded like an awful lot of carpentry to me, and a big chunk of money. I watched M. Joffroy attempt to turn his car in the narrow driveway halfway down the hill—and at once back into, break, and then get stuck on what was left of one of the remaining cement fence posts. I went to help them dislodge from the shards without the loss of their gas tank or oil pan, and, joking with graveyard humor, exclaimed, “And now look, you’ve destroyed my beautiful fence!”

  “No problem,” M. Joffroy said, giving M. Toffolon a good nudge. “Il est maçon” (“He’s a mason”). “He is an expert in cement.”

  They drove away, laughing.

  I was just pulling on my boots so I could go up the pasture to M. Braye’s and have a look around when I heard a car in the drive and thought it meant it was time to put the rabbit in. But it wasn’t my guests, nor any car I knew. Someone for Mme. Vera, I concluded, and I opened the gate that kept cattle out of the space immediately around the house (though only so long as they consented to use a gate, and only when I was in residence).

  The car sputtered to a halt, and a charming young woman got out—robust and graceful, red-cheeked, with her hair in a close red curl, and wearing a pink raincoat, I noticed as she came around the car.

  “Monsieur Quilmère?” she asked. She spoke the name as if she had worked hard to get the pronunciation close to the one I use.

  I admitted it.

  “They told me at Sanson’s that you had come.”

  “For a few days,” I said. I realized I was being slow to show common courtesy, and shook the hand she held out.

  “You are with Sanson’s?” I asked. It had taken me a moment first to recall what Sanson’s was (the pompes funèbres et marbrerie générale) and then to imagine that this wholesome and happy-looking person could be fresh from standing in a rainy graveyard calculating the cost of repairs to my grandparents’ grave. She must be arriving with Sanson’s estimation.

  “Will you come inside?” I asked her, noticing the drops of drizzle beginning to accumulate in her hair. “You’ve been very quick.”

  She followed me into the kitchen, looking puzzled. “No,” she said. She looked at the rabbit I had taken out when I heard the car coming up the driveway. “It smells very good. You should put on plenty of black pepper. You are yourself the cook?” I nodded. “And make sure the oven is very hot before you put it inside, so the outer integument will receive a shock. Then the flavor will stay inside.”

  “Thank you,” I said. So far this apparition seemed as strange, as unheralded, as perfect, and as likely to be a myth, or obs. and poet., as had my morning’s nightingale.

  “I am Mme. Turquétil,” she said, and then waited. We already knew that I was M. Quilmère. “And no, I am not with Sanson’s, but we have known each other, Mme. Sanson and I—young Mme. Sanson—since school, and she told me you had arrived.” She waited for me to say something. I had always objected to that lazy and ubiquitous line used to bring new characters onto the TV screen—“What are you doing here?”—and I started trying to think of alternatives that would achieve the same result.

  “My name was not Turquétil before,” my visitor volunteered. “It was Perrossier. Yvette.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “I married Hervé Turquétil last October,” she said. She smiled and blushed and looked still more charming.

  I thought, And so her garter is even now fluttering from the aerial of Hervé Turquétil’s car.

  Because I was the third generation of my family in Mesnil, and there were still godchildren or children of old friends of my mother’s or grandparents’ in the neighborhood, I now began to fear, as I often did, that I knew this person but had simply (and completely) forgotten her—and I had been so frank in greeting her at the beginning that I could not now easily say, Who are you? Why are you here? If Julia had been with me, she would have remembered Yvette Perrossier, and known how she was related to the
Lafontaine family—or whether it was in fact Hervé Turquétil who was the link to that great chain of being.

  “And Madame O’Banyon, she is well?” Madame Turquétil, née Perrossier, asked.

  A small light gleamed at the end of the tunnel. If the connection was to the previous summer’s renters, then perhaps I could be forgiven for not knowing this person. I replied that Madame O’Banyon had been well the last I’d heard, and that all her family was also well, but they would not be coming back this year. Mme. Perrossier and I began to get along quite well, though I still had no idea why she was here. At last she said with regret that she must be going since Hervé expected his dinner. She smiled at me proudly and went back to her car as I turned to my rabbit. When she appeared in the doorway again, she was holding, balanced against a cocked and comely hip, my wicker tray, piled high with folded laundry.

  “I did these for Madame O’Banyon after she left,” said Mme. Turquétil (Turketil was the name of one of the pirate Rollo’s foremost henchmen) as she put my no-longer-missing sheets and towels on the kitchen table next to the rabbit, on my no-longer-missing tray.

  “Let me pay you,” I said quickly. I was so pleased to have my tray back that I would have been a soft touch for anyone.

  “No, no,” she said. Mrs. O’Banyon had paid her in advance; all that was taken care of. Fortunately Sanson’s had told her I was back, since she had not wanted to come into the house when it was empty to deliver the clean laundry.

  She pulled my missing key from her coat pocket and put it in my hand, then waited while I shifted it to the other hand so I could shake hers good-bye—though at that moment I would have gladly kissed it instead, not to mention the entire rest of her, so clumsily pleased was I at having everything restored to the way it should be.

  You have been too long away from your loving wife, I said to myself in the tone of voice that mature men far from home hate to hear when they are idly thinking of covering strange young Frenchwomen with kisses.

  THIRTY-THREE

  The car taking Margaret, Ben, Teddy, Ruth, and Andalouse down my driveway the next morning, and then northward toward Amsterdam, dragged the rain away with it as if it were attached to its rear end with a tow chain, leaving the early morning steaming under a sun that seemed as flagrant, bright, and dependable as any eighth-grade girl. Although I felt I’d barely arrived, it was already time for me to start closing the house—but not in the drastic, final way that prepared it for the storms and solitude of winter, because it was to be lived in throughout August, and there would be masons and (I had to hope) plumbers here in the meantime.

  I put in the first load of sheets, wondering at the native frame of mind that let me feel both exultant and justified because sunshine would allow me to hang out two loads of laundry. Why had I not pursued the acquaintance of Mme. Turquétil? Because I liked the work, which emphasized the dependence of the house on me.

  This solitary place resisted solitude. My brief time had filled the fridge with more than I could eat or drink now that I was alone again; I’d give the overflow to Mme. Vera when I left. Ben had, of course, found things to buy in Honfleur while they were touring, and they had returned with the satisfied anticipation of the seduced.

  “We just brought samples,” Ben and Margaret promised, as they led the way into the kitchen with plastic bags. “To have while the rabbit cooks, you know. The people in the stores were very helpful.”

  They pulled out a bottle of Ricard, the clear liquor that turns cloudy with water and is a replacement for Pernod, tasting of liquorice; and a Sancerre to have with the rabbit if the cider proved insufficient; and otherwise, Ben said, “We can try this Bordeaux—two bottles just in case. You can always use it.” Pâtés made from game, or salmon, or dreams, or the livers of geese; celeriac and pickled eggplants; stuffed eggs, quails in aspic, and herring eating themselves from the tail end; cooked artichokes; fresh peaches; seven or eight cheeses and an assortment of breads, as well as the tarts that always (like children dressed for an accordion concert) are better only to look at. It made for a gay and colorful spread, everything scattered across the tablecloth under the weeping foxgloves.

  The dining room, 1988. (Left to right, Beth Chapin, Kenton Kilmer, the author, Julia, Moira Chapin, Thomas, Gillian, Dana Perrone, Jacob Kilmer, Jen and Lachlan Youngs, Craig Adams, Maizie Kilmer.) Photo Walter Chapin

  While we assaulted the aperitifs, Ruth made salad and Teddy did battle with green beans that were so thin and tender and stringless they would have cooked in response to the mere threat of heat. The free range of the guests made up for a certain lack of imagination in their sedentary host, who hadn’t been able to get much further than meat and potatoes after all (though the meat was rabbit).

  “What were those pesky birds carrying on this morning in the rain?” Margaret asked while I was dismembering the roasted rabbit. “That’s what we should be eating. Serve them right, birds that won’t let you sleep.” By now it was quite late; we’d been taking our time, all of us, including the rabbit.

  I had forgotten the predawn nightingales, whose presence Margaret was substantiating. Teddy had not heard them, nor had Ben or Ruth.

  The thing is not to start again, exactly, I thought, but to be in a new context, where what you expect to do or be is influenced by a naïveté born of insurmountable ignorance. You have to learn it all with your senses, like a two-year-old—like Christopher years ago pulling the snails off his great-grandparents’ tombstone and trying to eat them.

  It would not be a bad place to have my grandchildren visit, if that should develop, I thought.

  Meanwhile, all I need to do is learn to hear that racket of birdsong, know it’s a nuisance, and be prepared to eat the creatures that make it. And I might as well cook them using a French recipe. Therefore (to adapt a suitable recipe from Dumas):

  Pluck, but do not eviscerate, your nightingales; then singe, truss, and cover with slices of bacon and buttered paper, and roast. Into a pot put a little gravy and coulis, one glass of white wine. Bring to a boil. Add the juice of one lemon and twelve juniper berries previously blanched. When your nightingales are done, take off the paper and bacon, simmer in the coulis, arrange on the platter, skim the fat from the sauce, and serve hot.

  “Your nemesis was nightingales,” I told Margaret.

  “Nightingales or not, they woke me,” Margaret said. “I don’t carry on like that when I get up at night. But I shall tell everyone in Brooklyn that I heard the singing of the nightingales and was elevated with enchantment to a state bordering upon hyperbole.”

  * * *

  Closing the house after they left meant struggling against sentiment, because it always felt as though it might be the last time. And if our decision was not to take this on …

  By ten o’clock I had one load of sheets hung out and the second load grinding, and the upstairs rooms looked over. The house had its own inertia, I realized, considering it now that I was alone again; and more so since it was an old house. When it had been empty, it took some time for it to become acclimatized to human inhabitants; but once it had been inhabited awhile, it would relinquish the human spirit only with reluctance. It was not so many years before that my daughter Sadie, who always championed the cause of the afflicted, had sung lullabies to spiders in the billiard room; and not so long before that (though it was long before I knew her) that her great-grandmother, also Sadie, and herself the daughter of another Sadie, had listened to the racket of the nightingales while lying in the same room, her cheek branded by the monogram of her wedding sheet.

  The sun shone as if it had never heard of rain. I had no need to go to town today, or to step off the property at all. I could catch an evening train to Paris, or go in the morning, or perhaps—I had a whole day with no obligations, and all that new canvas I had brought: why not start making my own mess?

  At three-thirty, painting on the first terrace of the garden, I heard the phone and reached it in time to get M. Joffroy’s message, interpreting M.
Toffolon’s estimation: almost as accurate as if he had read my mind. It was not as bad as I had feared, but then again it was as much as I could stretch to spare. There was no question that it had to be done, but nonetheless I told M. Joffroy that I must think about it and call him back; meanwhile, could he thank M. Toffolon for his speedy attention, and for his promise to have the work done before the summer tenants came?

  At four-forty-five I was working on the second terrace of the garden. The light was moving fast; the hawks were working overhead, the rainwater working, fresh out of the sky, in the cement pond, the waterbugs working on its surface, the doves working in the eaves of the house around the other side, the chickens working in the dirt—and Mme. Vera was sprawled on her back in the sun of her courtyard, catching the rays, the sunlight glancing off the flowered print of her pink dress. I could see her from my vantage point in the deep grass that had once been my grandmother’s cutting garden, overlooking the First Communion party. I could hear the rattle of the young goats on the steaming corrugated iron above the cider press, which I began to imagine I could roof instead with corrugated translucent plastic and use as a studio, though there would be no way to heat it and nothing to see from inside it unless windows were put in. The phone rang and took me inside again, wiping the paint off my hands.

  The author gardening, 1986. Photo Bette Noble

  Mme. Sanson the elder told me that M. Sanson was just now returned from Mesnil, having looked at my grave, and had left in my mailbox at the foot of the driveway a catalog illustrating my options, which she would now describe to me. I could let them know what I had decided in due course. If I understood her suggestions correctly, it appeared that the minimum response to the situation in the churchyard would be an investment almost exactly equivalent to the mason’s estimate—again, the limit of what I could make available right now.