A Place in Normandy

by Nicholas Kilmer

  I thanked Mme. Sanson and told her I would let them know.

  At twenty of six I was working in the garden, still on the second terrace, feeling pleased at the colors inventing themselves in the water of the pond, when the telephone rang and called me back inside, this time to a male voice, American.

  “Bob Rafferty here. Florence O’Banyon told me if we were ever in the area—she loved it so very much—and we happened, my wife and I, Harriet—we were in Normandy, revisiting the beaches, and I thought, well, as a friend of Florence O’Banyon, she’d never forgive us if we didn’t telephone, in case there was someone home.”

  I was barely at home, but I could hardly deny being here at this point. I made a little conversation, while keeping a weather eye on how the light was moving, as I talked, on the far side of the dining-room door, making everything furious, and wild, and peaceful. Bob Rafferty explained that he’d been one of the bomber pilots deployed to soften up the Normandy defenses prior to D day; having recently married for a second time, he was now touring the country with his new wife, to show her where he’d been. And since Florence O’Banyon had told him if he was in the area …

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “By a curious coincidence, it turns out we’re in Mesnil. I’m calling from the café.”

  Not in recorded history (at least not since 1410) has anyone ever been in Mesnil by a coincidence, curious or otherwise. I told him how to find the place, instructed him to close the gate behind his car so the cows would not escape (a sacrifice I was not yet prepared to make to the spirit of the place, though it did occur to me from time to time), and advised him to be careful on the driveway. Then I went back to work for the ten minutes left me before they arrived.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The Raffertys refused all offers of tea or nourishment. They were staying in Paris, had just come out for the day, and were due back in Paris for dinner. But Florence O’Banyon had told them so much about how wonderful her stay here was. Would I mind very much letting them see the house?

  When Bob Rafferty cracked his head on the lintel going into the salon, because I forgot to warn him, he winked and said, “Oh, yeah, Florence told me you have to do that thirteen times before you remember.” Florence had been so enthusiastic about all the things you could do, they told me: swimming at Deauville, going to the races and the casino; shopping; playing tennis at a court you could reserve nearby; going horseback riding; or just getting in the car and driving, then spending hours cooking in that wonderful Old World kitchen.

  Wonderful Old World kitchen? I thought. The glamorous O’Banyon life sounded nothing like ours here. We tended more to paint, move books, make curtains, or carry accumulated odd things out to the pasture to burn.

  My visitors exclaimed over the toilets with the tanks up against the ceiling, with their pull chains and the china handles that said tirez on them. They loved the catwalk across the Old World bathroom floor; in fact, Harriet Rafferty’s word for it was “Perfect.” Everything about the house was so familiar to me by now that nothing seemed exotic, quixotic, strange, or even particularly troublesome anymore. By the end of dinner the night before, I had been easily back into the routine of cooking simultaneously in two kitchens on two floors, even as I listened for the splintering, muddy crash of a guest’s appearing suddenly through the ceiling of the dining room. I’d got the sheets dry and off the line and folded and put back into the billiard room. I knew exactly where I was. Bob Rafferty cracked his head on the lintel coming out of the salon and said, “Eleven more times and I’ll have it.”

  He and his wife were of about the same age; he must have been quite a young pilot. He was lean and tall and dressed in resort clothes, while his wife, equally lean but small, was in jeans and a sweatshirt, but otherwise they were well matched in temperament.

  “I thought, since we were going to be on a farm,” she said. “I mean, since we might be…”

  And so I gave them an abbreviated tour of the outside as well, as Bob Rafferty told me something of what the D-day action had been like, at least as much of it as he had seen. “And this house,” Harriet Rafferty interjected, “it must have suffered terribly during the war, what with the Germans.”

  “Not so much the Germans, but the refugees,” I said.

  “But then you, your name—that’s German, isn’t it?” Mrs. Rafferty pointed out. In truth, I’d never thought so, since my father’s people had been in the United States long enough to lose their ethnic identity, and my father’s father, well before he left for the front, had abdicated the lapsed German ancestry in favor of a usurped Irish one, announcing, “I’m half Irish and no mathematician.” My mother’s father’s people had spoken German back in Michigan, yes. But we’d never been anything but plain Americans.

  “Amazing,” Bob Rafferty said. “Isn’t it always the way? It’s the French people who did the damage in their own country, whereas the Germans, who were supposed to be the enemy…”

  I pointed out that the Germans hadn’t had any reason to trash the place, believing it would remain theirs by right of conquest, whereas the refugees had been cold and had had very little of anything, including hope. It was the difference between rich and poor. The simplicity of this contrast had not occurred to any of us before, and we looked at it together for a little while before the Raffertys left for dinner in Fontainebleau. I rode down the drive with them to help them get through the cows and deal with the gate, and to retrieve the Sanson brochure from the mailbox.

  Walking back up the drive, I realized I’d forgotten lunch. When I got to it, I could have a hell of a final dinner of leftovers. I’d close the shutters and catch the earliest train for Paris in the morning and have a whole day to be a tourist before traveling home light, carrying nothing but my overnight bag.

  At eight twenty-seven, with hours of daylight left, I was painting on the second terrace when the telephone rang.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  “Is it beautiful?” Julia asked. Her voice had in it the hope and fear that accompany a loved one who is insured for air travel but heading home.

  “I’m just leaving,” I said, miffed at how long she’d taken to respond to her cue.

  “Tell me.”

  “I’ve got the upstairs closed and swept, and—”

  “I mean tell me it’s beautiful, stupid,” Julia said. “It’s almost too late, because you’re coming home and then I’ll have to hate all of that mess that follows you everywhere.”

  “As soon as Margaret and Ben left, it stopped raining,” I said. “Those ribbons of wild blue sky—”

  “No, make it rain,” Julia interrupted. “I miss you and I miss the rain. All those troubles of life. Make it rain and give it to me. You’re there all alone and I’m here all alone, so tell me. Make it rain. Start again. And don’t forget that the phone costs money. I ask you, is it beautiful?”

  I looked across the brilliance of the valley and started lying to my wife.

  “It’s a light rain, so slow you don’t know it’s there until you realize that the steady plock you’ve been hearing for the last hour is the drip onto the auvent from the leak in the gutter above the upstairs-kitchen window. The cows are standing facing toward the foot of the driveway, about twenty, thirty feet across the fence, up to their knees in nettles. They look as if they hear something coming, but nothing is coming: everything that was going to come today has already come and gone. But that doesn’t stop them from calling to whatever it is, giving their opinion. The rain doesn’t stop the doves. They’re worse than that old washing machine we had. Everything out the window is green with gray stripes, diagonal, on account of the direction of the rain. There’s no wind. The rain just leans one way to get a rest from leaning the other way, which is what it was doing before.”

  “And so the air is cold and sort of thick—like wet sheets?” Julia said. “But billowing with wind that they feel, even if you can’t.”

  “You mean if the sheets are caught short on the line. Speaking of shee
ts—”

  “Maybe you’d better keep sheets out of this,” Julia warned.

  “What have you been doing?” I asked her.

  “You have a garden here,” Julia said. “A perfectly good one, with the extra added attraction that it comes with me. Never mind. Go on, we were looking down the hill through the orchard.”

  “The pear trees are in flower, only a few of them here and there. Their white blossoms spring back each time the load of water gets to be more than they want. The apple trees are just in leaf now. The rain, gathered into drops big enough to fall, makes a clicking in their leaves. Their trunks are darker where the water runs down them. I have a red car that the rain is rolling down, onto the driveway, which is all grass and that plant you claim is chamomile, but which Thérèse, who sends you her regards, says is something else that I made her write down, but now I’ve lost the piece of paper. It’s been raining for days.”

  Julia, the Grim Reaper, 1988. Photo Harriet Griesinger

  “You go to Normandy on purpose and then complain about the rain?”

  “You’re the one who wanted rain,” I said. “I’m just trying to oblige.”

  “‘Trying to oblige,’ he says, standing on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean and spending all our money on the telephone. How about you oblige me when you’re home? I need a hole for my new rose that’s trying to flower. I’m mud up to the gills.”

  “You’re working in the garden?”

  I heard her take a gulp. She’d come inside from the garden and decided to call me while she was having tea. “Go on,” she said. “It’s raining?”

  I felt I was running down. “Maybe in Germany at night all cows are gray,” I tried, “but here I saw one last night strolling after dark—midnight it was, and raining—and it looked like a white map of the world moving along the pasture snorting and chewing, a warm, hairy universe minding its own business out there.”

  “Not like that,” Julia said. (Haven’t you learned anything?) “Listen, we got caught in a downpour, you and I, walking below the house, so we ran and got under the chestnuts in the driveway, where it’s always wet but the thick leaves keep the rain from falling on us, until we say the hell with it, it’s never going to stop, and we cut down the mud bank to the douet.”

  I interrupted with some news. “There are no fish this year. Thérèse says it’s because Monsieur Terbiault dumped the entire contents of his stable into it upstream in February, and everything turned green, including the fish, which floated and swelled. We missed a big stink, she said. But now it’s clear brown water with wild geraniums drooping toward it, and cress growing, which I had always heard proves there’s no pollution; maybe it doesn’t mind what comes out of a barn.”

  I heard Julia’s fingers tapping with impatience. This was a crucial time, and I was getting it all wrong. “Okay, we’re standing in the flat stretch you like, with our boots sucking mud, and a motorbike splutters along the road toward Fierville with a fat lady on it. I can’t tell who it is, she’s so bundled up. The road’s all purple from the rain, and from here you can’t see the goddamned house, which needs several thousand dollars’ worth of structural work I wasn’t expecting, or the graveyard, which also needs—”

  “I thought you were telling me how beautiful it was,” Julia said. “You go all the way to France and forget how to seduce your wife?”

  “Sorry.”

  “What are we wearing?” Julia prompted.

  “You can have that old brown raincoat of my mother’s, since you never pack a raincoat because you like to travel light. We’re exactly alike. I’ve got my red coat that’s too short, so I’m wet from my waist to my boot tops, but not for long since there’s no place for all that water to go but down, into the boots. You won’t wear anything on your head, because you are that way, so it looks as if you’re wearing a wreath of mist, with your nose and cheeks all pink. Even though I’m supposed to be seducing you, I admit you look very pretty. I have my hood up, with the visor, to cause water to fall down the front of my face and double the appearance of rain. It’s raining.”

  “That’s what I want.”

  “I mean it’s really raining. Let me run out and bring in my stuff. Don’t go away,” I said.

  “Hurry.”

  The paintings from earlier that afternoon were already pinned upstairs in the hallway. It was only the last one, with water trailing from its oil as if off a duck’s back, that I had to bring in, along with the knapsack I used to carry paint, and my collapsible easel.

  I picked up the phone again and Julia said, “I’m wet enough. We’re going in now. When it rains like this, we might as well be at sea. We just got in and left our boots inside the dining-room door from the garden. Leave the door open. I want to see out. It’s cold everywhere, and the good thing is there’s a fire I can stand in front of to give me a career, to warm my front until my backside can’t stand the cold, and then turn around until my front can’t stand it. Everything in the garden is crusted with lichen and crumbling apart. I love the cypress trees you hate, that even the goats can’t hurt. You’re wrong about those trees. You’re wrong about a lot, Nick.”

  “It’s so much work. It’s going to be so much work,” I said.

  “Don’t interrupt me,” Julia said. “I am raining. It looks, this rain we’re having, as if it’s come out of Deauville, out of that ocean they have there—which is cloudy, almost milky, and which you walk out into forever and can’t get up to your waist, where the grannies and children wade together, the children naked, the old ladies with their black dresses tucked up into the leg elastics of their underpants. I’m in front of the fire and I can’t stand how cold it’s going to be, getting from the fireplace into the cold bed and those horrible linen sheets.”

  “No, no,” I broke in. “I got the good sheets back. We have the wash-and-wear cotton now. Yvette Turquétil brought them.”

  “Who’s Yvette Turkeywhateveryousaid?”

  “A lady who came,” I said. “Very nice. Very pretty. What can I say? She turned up, bringing sheets. I had to let her in. I wanted to kiss her all over.”

  “I thought you were seducing me?”

  “Don’t you want sheets?”

  Julia coughed. “According to an article I read, about now, what with the days getting longer, one of us is supposed to be developing a restless urge to fly thousands of miles and mate. It isn’t me.”

  “It must be me, then,” I said.

  “Good. Because when you get back, some noises from the basement sound like your cider starting to explode. I’m not going down to look; you’ll be here soon enough. Oh, and I mentioned to my mother we were thinking of buying the place in Normandy, and she said, ‘Oh, good night!’”

  I said, “I have to tell you—”

  “Everyone says you’re crazy,” Julia went on. “Except the men. Then everyone says, ‘When can we visit? How can we help?’”

  “I did start a responsible list of responsible points to consider responsibly,” I said. “But I think I’d better leave it here.”

  “While we’re thinking about it,” Julia said, “why don’t you bring those shabby, flimsy curtains from the dining room that I always hated, and that ruffle thing off the mantelpiece to keep the dining room from blackening as fast as it wants to with smoke. I’ll wash them and see if there’s a way to fix them or replace them—I don’t know which is worse.… Do you still have that duffel bag, the one you used to carry the rugs and bedspreads and tablecloths to France?”

  “I thought I’d travel light, coming home,” I said.

  Frances and Stellita Stapleton amongst the flock, 1924.

  “You may never travel light again. And as long as you’re packing the curtains from the dining room, bring those big lined ones from your mother’s bedroom upstairs, the pink ones; they’re impossible, but I might as well see what I can do—while we’re thinking over this idea of yours.…”

  Also by Nicholas Kilmer

  Man with a Squirrel

&n
bsp; Harmony in Flesh and Black

  Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

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  Copyright © 1997 by Nicholas Kilmer

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  ISBN 0-8050-3930-9

  ISBN 0-8050-5532-0 (An Owl Book: pbk.)

  First Owl Book Edition—1997

  eISBN 9781466871991

  First eBook edition: April 2014

  * From the diary of Will Howe Foote, in the collection of his son, Freeman Foote.

  * Adapted from the diary of Mrs. Fred B. Woodard of Owosso, Michigan.

  * Reminiscence of Morgan Heiskell, quoted in a letter from his son Andrew Heiskell to Norman Hirschl, April 26, 1965.

  * He may well have been reading, in Le Pays d’Auge for November 1955, “La Table en Pays d’Auge,” by MM. Patrice Boussel and Georges Poisson.