Having convoked my little team, I explained to them that I did not at all admire the French kitchen sink installations as I had seen them pictured in various brochures and in display rooms. I told them that the French kitchen arrangements did not permit the application of the principles of correct dishwashing technique as laid down by Miss Elise E. Kleemeyer, my revered instructor in Domestic Science at Los Gatos High School, Los Gatos, California. I observed that Miss Kleemeyer had always said that good dishwashing practice required, first, a broad surface on the left-hand side of the sink for the stacking of the dishes after scraping. That the first section of a double-partition sink must be reserved for the soaping and the washing of dishes. That the second section must be employed for the rinsing of the dishes in clear water. And that a large surface on the right-hand side of the sink must be devoted to the draining and the drying of the dishes. There was never, I remarked, in the French kitchen displays, sufficient room on either side of the sink to permit the practice of the Kleemeyer procedure.
Although it seemed to me that after my discourse the manner of the architect, the mason, and the plumber was indulgent rather than enthusiastic, the drawing came off the architect’s board showing a kitchen with dishwashing facilities just like those that I’d described, and a copy was delivered not only to me but to the mason and the plumber, too. I was immensely pleased.
Not long afterward I went by the house to see how things were coming along. To my great satisfaction I found the mason hard at work constructing the cement support, later to be covered with tile, for the crucially important sink. Then I noted with horror that although the plan for the installation was tacked efficiently to the wall, the support was so arranged that on the left-hand side of the sink a vast plateau of tile work would extend toward the gas plates of the stove, and that the sink, on its right-hand side, would have, rising from its very lip, like one of the towering cliffs of the Grand Canyon, the kitchen wall.
I was undone. Absolutely undone. I got Pierre over. I got the architect over. I got the plumber over. All as witnesses for the prosecution. I confronted them with the plan. I confronted them with the appalling diversionary tactic of the mason. There was a turgid silence. Then the architect fumed. He sizzled. He exploded. It was his position that the mason was entirely in error. Because from his own point of view the support should have been constructed so as to permit a vast plateau to sweep away from the sink on its right-hand side, thus allowing the left-hand lip of the sink to kiss the gas plates in the most intimate proximity. At once the plumber began his diatribe. In his opinion the mason was grossly at fault. Grossly. The support of the entire unit of sink and plateaus should have been constructed on the exact opposite side of the kitchen, under the window, next to the refrigerator. “But the plan,” I sputtered, “the plan!” And then all went hazy.
As Pierre revived me in the fresh air of the little garden in the rear, it came home to me what, to a Frenchman, the true function of a plan is. What a fool I’d been. Of course a plan is something to be changed. That’s the whole basic idea of a plan: change. Furthermore, it is the keenest possible challenge to Gallic ingenuity to ring in as many changes on it as it can.
But I won my battle in the end. I went over to the house every single day, and sat there all day long, armed with an electric coffee pot, a slab of cheese and a baguette of bread, until the kitchen was executed—according to plan. In a way I was ringing on it the biggest change of all. I followed it.
My next major adventure was with the electrician. When he, the plumbers, and the carpenter had come to join the mason in the house I was thoroughly entrenched in one of the empty rooms so as to forestall and avert any changes in plan which they might have in mind. Also to diminish the number of variations in the ordinary work schedule of the day which, with their resourcefulness, I knew to be potentially unlimited.
That electrician, for example. His lunch hour puzzled me vastly. At five minutes to noon I would do a sort of military checkup on his whereabouts. There he’d be, established cozily in one of the rooms with the Sterno can flaming away under the hot part of his lunch and with his bread and fruit neatly laid out ready for consumption and his wine bottle already one quarter empty. At one o’clock I’d make another inspection and he’d just be putting his orange peels away in the vacant fireplace and preparing, I always assumed, to resume his work. For the next hour he could never be found. He just disappeared. Finally, one day, in an absolute snarl of frustration because the deadline was fast approaching when we’d said we’d leave the apartment and move ourselves and the children into the house, I went on a relentless search of the entire premises for that electrician. I finally found him in front of the house, in the sunshine, having a grand old chat with a neighboring concierge.
I caught his eye, and with what I thought was a charming and engaging gesture of appeal, I waved toward the house. He broke off his conversation, followed me into the house and up the staircase into the room where he’d been working. This time, now that I’d got him located and nailed to the spot, I thought that I’d remain awhile until he really got back into the swing and rhythm of his duties. He opened his tool box. He took out a screwdriver. It came crashing across the room and fell with a clank about two feet from where I was standing. He took out a pair of pliers. They, too, described an arc and came to rest a little closer to what I did not yet realize was the target. When he had emptied the entire tool box and the full range of his utensils lay in scattered disarray about my feet, the thought crossed my mind that the man might be upset. At that moment his entrepreneur arrived, and do you know that that electrician quit the job right then and there? He pointed a wild and accusatory finger at me, told his entrepreneur that he would no longer work on the premises, and that a replacement would have to be found, because I had abused him dreadfully. Indeed, he said, “One is never treated comme ça en France!”
Well, I’ve thought the problem over, and maybe it is best not to use the direct, clear, frank American method in every situation which one meets abroad. Maybe, in the conduct of human affairs in a foreign country one should employ a style more pleasing, shall we say, to the native temperament. Next time, with an electrician in circumstances such as those in which I so painfully found myself, I would, I think, do the following: I would take the telephone off the hook. I would go outside. I would say to the electrician with gentle distress and genuine concern that a lady with a very pretty voice had telephoned, asking for him, that I had been hunting everywhere for him for about five minutes, that I hoped she was still on the line, and that if she were not, she would at least call him back, soon. You know, that electrician really would stay on the job after that, and all his tools would stay there, too.
Now we come to the painters. The painters. Excuse me a moment while I take an aspirin. Perhaps I’d better lie down a second, too. Where did I put those smelling salts? Ah, there they are. Steady, now.
Where was I? Oh yes, the painters.
The front of our house had, when we acquired it, what the French had been calling since before the war, the Patina of the Centuries. Things are changing, though, and now we just call it grime. In any case, various experts looked at the material of the façade and decided that the only way to handle it was to paint it. A decorator friend of ours advised us that the façade would be very smart indeed if it were to be painted stone-gray with white shutters. We conferred with the head painter, the paint company, and the painter’s crew. We all agreed that it was true, the façade would be really lovely if painted a muted stone-gray, with fresh white shutters. We shook hands on it, and I went off to the United States to make a film, assured that when I returned the front of the house would be transformed into a thing of beauty with its splendid new make-up.
I made the picture in three months, and during the period received innumerable letters from Pierre saying that he missed me, the family missed me (curious, but he made no mention of the corps de métier missing me), and that work was progressing on the front of the house
. Then, just before I took the plane for Paris, came a jubilant epistle to the effect that the work had been completed on the façade, the scaffolding had been removed, and he could hardly wait for me to see the house with its face cleansed of the Patina of the Centuries and wearing its glorious and gleaming new look.
I arrived at Orly on a cold November day. A clear day. Too clear. We reached the house, I opened my eyes for the grand surprise, and saw the front of the house. A rich lemon-pie yellow with deadly nightshade shutters. I went into deep shock, had to be put to bed, and remained in a coma for forty-eight hours. During this period I came to the subsurface of consciousness only when Pierre thrust a straw between my indigo lips, the other end of which he held in a bowl of clearest bouillon—nothing heavy, or it would have been the end of me.
Just as Pierre was about to call for oxygen, I rallied, raised myself upon my elbow, and spoke. “Pierre,” said I, “we cannot, we simply cannot, accept the front of the house. We all agreed that it was to be stone-gray with white shutters. It must, absolutely must, be painted just exactly that.”
At last, after much wrangling, the painters admitted that, of course, it had been agreed that the front of the house would be stone-gray with white shutters, and the work would be done without charge. I stayed in during those crucial days when the work was being redone as I had not yet regained my strength from the initial shock. Finally, the work was completed, the scaffolding was removed, and leaning somewhat on Pierre because of my weakened condition, I walked slowly out to the sidewalk, turned, and looked up at the house. I saw a fresh, gleaming white façade, with stone-gray shutters.
You would like to feel that I kept those Stars and Stripes flying, wouldn’t you? And that I went after them again and again and said, “Non, non, non, Messieurs, stone-gray with white shutters, until you get it right!” You’d like to think that, wouldn’t you? I didn’t do that, I’m ashamed to say. Showing the lemon-pie yellow streak in me, I said to Pierre, “At least it’s pretty. Let’s keep it that way.” And so we did.
But not for long. Three months later the whole thing began to peel off like a bad case of sunburn. Great ribbons of paint began to strip off and either flap in the wind or fall to the pavement leaving behind on the face of the house a hideous, scabrous pockmark.
Again we had conferences. A series, I mean. With the head painter, with the paint company, with the painter’s crew. Eventually they agreed that they’d have to paint the front of the house all over again. The color? I thought, “This time let’s be clever, let’s say white with stone-gray shutters, and then they’ll paint it just the opposite and we’ll get just what we asked for in the first place.”
It is now three years exactly since the first job was done. The scaffoldings are up again on the front of the house and workmen are once more busily engaged on the façade. But what has happened is this: when they removed the white paint, and the yellow paint underneath, a great deal of that undercoating of the Patina of the Centuries came away with it too. We found, underneath, the most lovely, creamy white stone you ever saw. So we’ve sent the painters away and some stone polishers have taken their place. The shutters will remain as they are. I suppose the painters really have won this round, though, because what we’ll have is not a stone-gray façade with white shutters, after all, but a stone-white stone façade with stone-gray shutters, exactly what they had in mind for us last time.
Not so long ago, however, pleased with my victory over the mason, and one or two others I’m too modest to mention, I went to Alexandre’s, to have the paint and plaster washed from my hair. There I saw Fleur Cowles, who had just flown over from London to have the same thing done to hers. She, being a very remarkable woman, had just completed the installation of a magnificent London apartment and a sixteenth-century country house both at the same time and in three months flat. When she asked how I was progressing with my housing problem, I said, recalling with satisfaction my Kleemeyer kitchen and other American innovations, “Fleur, I’m redoing France.”
“That’s nothing,” replied she, “I’ve just redone England.”
When my French teacher, Mademoiselle Henriette Guyot, had finally implanted upon my brain and upon my tongue at least a rudimentary form of French, she felt that the time had come to instruct me in some of the niceties of the practice of the language, and in the precise meaning of certain phrases in common use. It was during one of these sessions that I learned to my surprise that among the small supply of French expressions—such as savoir faire, comme ci, comme ça, and au revoir—which we Americans so habitually employ in ordinary English conversation that we seldom exercise an English substitute, there was one term which means not at all what I thought it meant. The phrase is that familiar pair of words faux pas. It appears that what I thought I had so often committed back home—and what, indeed, I have continued to commit over here—was not a faux pas at all, but was, instead, a gaffe. In response to my startled expression of disbelief, Mademoiselle Guyot carefully explained that a girl had committed a faux pas if, for example, she had allowed a man to go just that one step too far before marriage. What I have been limiting myself to over here, as I say, is the committing of gaffes. See that you do the same.
Some of my more monumental gaffes have been occasioned by the assumption that the holidays at home and their counterparts in France have an identical nuance of meaning and the same manner of celebration.
During my first Parisian fall, as the merry fete approached which is known to readers of the Herald Tribune comic page as the Eve of the Great Pumpkin and having already realized that the appellation Halloween, under which it had annually enlivened my California childhood, must mean in uncontracted, older English, All Hallows’ Eve, I assumed that the coming holiday, Toussaint, or All Holy, meant exactly the same thing. I was aware that the day itself was of sufficient significance in France to excuse the children from attending school, an indulgence designed, so I presumed, to let them rest after the giddy exertions of the night before. I did not know that it was in order to permit them, garbed not in sheets but in their ceremonial best, to visit in broad daylight rather than by the light of the moon, the family graveyard; and there to lay upon the monuments of the departed, not the eerie relics of mirthful daring, but respectful bouquets of traditional flowers. I did not know that Toussaint is, in France, the very most solemn Holy Day of all.
Thus oblivious to the pitfalls of the season, I accepted without a tremor the pre-Toussaint invitation of Carmen Tessier, whose column, “Les Potins de la Commère,” appears daily on the front page of France Soir and whose power and prestige as a lady journalist are unequaled in all of Europe. She had asked us to a “pendaison de la crémaillère”—literally, a “hanging of the pothook,” a housewarming—at her new apartment in the Street of the Acacias, and, as an innovation in Parisian entertaining, a buffet dinner. Alas, some minor but fateful occurrence delayed Pierre and me, and when we arrived at Carmen’s door, not only had the pothook definitely been hung but the house had been warmed to maximum heat. Furthermore, the buffet had already been half consumed and, although you may have heard it said that the French are not unduly punctual, the one occasion for which they are always two minutes before the dot is any event having to do with the partaking of food. Out of respect for the cook.
Now, if there is anything I dislike to do, it is to show a lack of consideration toward a hostess, and my dislike is compounded where there might be implied a lack of reverence toward a cook. My exalted regard of the latter may be attributed, I suppose, to my having been the only girl in Domestic Science II to produce in a single lesson three omelets so unacceptable that Miss Kleemeyer advised me to pour them down the sink. In any case, as the Parisian season drew to a climax, so, too, did my remorseful brooding over my having been late at the hanging of Carmen’s pothook. Finally, in a convulsion of wholesome readjustment, I threw off my cloak of guilt and dispatched to my erstwhile hostess, in a magnificent gesture of atonement and with the hope that her cook would appr
eciate same, a superb bouquet of finest florist flowers. The fact that they had so depleted my purse that I was faced with several days of forced fasting seemed to me all the more appropriate to the situation.
When evening came I explained to Pierre between hunger pangs that although the body might suffer, my spirit was light, for I had that very morning sent off to Carmen as an expiatory offering no less than three dozen of the very most glorious mauve chrysanthemums ever seen. Pierre promptly turned puce and cried, “Mon Dieu—and on Toussaint, too! You don’t send them to her while she’s alive—you send them to her when she’s dead!”
In France, it seems, the chrysanthemum is the most highly cherished blossom of them all—for cemetery use. Since then, Carmen’s been decent to me, but distant.
As the gray mists of November blurred the outlines of the city, they softened, too, the painful recollection of my first Toussaint, and rallying at last, I approached Noël with renewed confidence.
We had been bereft of Pierre’s mother some months before, and since, therefore, we wanted this Christmas to be a particularly warm and comforting one for Pierre’s father, we made plans for the children, the nurse, and ourselves to take the train for Nice, the family seat. Once there, we established ourselves at the Hotel Ruhl, so as to keep the younger generation out from under Grandpère’s feet, and yet corralled and available for visits to the little apartment in the Avenue Desambrois just often enough and long enough to cheer an old man’s heart.
The traditional duties of planning the Christmas feast had now fallen to me, and I presently realized that Josephine, the family cook for thirty-five years and twice that span in age, now had six members of the household to deal with at the family table instead of the once customary three. And so I decided that I ought to arrange for caterers to deliver, ready to be served, the festive bird and the festive pie on the festive day. Thereupon, I located a caterer for the turkey, and I instructed the Scotch Tea House to provide the mince pie.
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