Provence, 1970

by Luke Barr

  That night, in her room at the Nord-Pinus, M.F. ate a cold sausage roll and a tangerine. She put the fruit outside on the windowsill to chill and warmed the pastry on the radiator. She drank three brandy and waters, and she wrote.

  The next day, she picked up the telephone and asked the operator to connect her to the Hôtel d’Europe in nearby Avignon—another town, like Arles, that she had visited many times before. The Europe was a rather more luxurious hotel than the Nord-Pinus, and she felt ready for some luxury. Did they have a room, she inquired, and more important, was the hotel restaurant open? “Mais oui, madame, nous sommes ouverts toute l’année,” the man said. She made a reservation for the following day, December 22, and would stay there through Christmas.

  She was looking forward to a more hospitable lodging. One with a restaurant.

  “It’s not the weather that stymies me,” she wrote to Gingrich, describing the persistent cold and bitter wind, “but that I’m HUNGRY. Almost every restaurant in Arles is tight shut!” She listed other cold European Christmases past: Nuremburg, 1930; Bern, 1937. “But then I was with people I loved. Now I am alone, and it is RIDIKLUS to be alone and hungry at the same time. So tomorrow I’ll take a cab to Avignon.”

  She felt guilty for leaving, but why should she? In fact, now that she had decided to go, she felt suddenly confident. Her French seemed magically improved, both her accent and her grammar. She felt in control. She was hungrier.

  In her notebook, she wrote about Arles, making a list of things she wanted to remember: The sound of the church bells. The gypsies and their music. The waiter with the bad shoes. The loud traffic in the streets. The mischief and boredom of the young men. The empty hotel, with its white china doorknobs with little flowers painted on them.

  In the lobby at the Nord-Pinus that afternoon, she’d seen a fat older woman drinking coffee. “How does she do that with the kitchen closed?” M.F. wondered, before realizing the woman was the proprietress of the establishment. Indeed, the woman rose to her feet and began questioning M.F. about her stay. Did she like the hotel? How was her room? She complimented M.F.’s French accent and admired her clothes, reaching out to pick up the hem of her coat to see if it was lined with fur, and if it was real leather.

  M.F. backed away, flapping her arms, saying the usual polite things. The old woman cackled and wheezed. She must be the mother of the unhappy, unfriendly man at the front desk. That would explain his hostility. (M.F. was reading far too much Simenon, she reminded herself—imagining the secret lives of strangers. The staff at the hotel, the waiters in the restaurants, the gypsies in the streets, the girl collapsed on the floor of the brasserie—they all resembled characters in a murder mystery.)

  M.F. liked the hotel fine, she said. “But if I’d been warned about the closed restaurant, I’d have come later.” This was probably untrue, but she was being diplomatic.

  “Ah, but one cannot, in this business, maintain a proper kitchen for two or three customers in the dead season!” the woman replied.

  M.F. held her tongue. “Then turn off the neon signs,” she felt like saying, “and notify the Guide Michelin!”

  The old lady continued, telling her about a charming American guest—“Elle était Américaine, mais charmante—charMAN-te!”—who invited Madame everywhere with her, everywhere—and asked her to lunch, even.

  “But how strange,” the old woman said, suddenly, with a baffled look. “She has never written to thank me!”

  M.F. could hardly contain her desire to flee.

  The taxi driver said it was the worst mistral he’d experienced since he came to France from North Africa in 1956. He was a good driver, but had to work to keep the heavy car on the road in the heavy seasonal wind. When he wasn’t concentrating too hard to be able to talk, he rambled on about how much he liked Americans. But M.F. was not in the mood to hear it. “I do find myself bored,” she wrote afterward in her journal, “by the old spiel of how fine the Americans are—about how many of his faithful clients, ‘Même les juifs,’ remember him every year from as far away as Pasadena—about how some Frenchmen have forgotten the American help in 1944 but not this one, etc., etc. Yes, yes. Fine. Good. Joyeux Noël.”

  In Avignon, enveloped in the luxurious comfort of the Hôtel d’Europe, M.F. began to relax. Her room was small and had a large window overlooking a pretty courtyard; just below the window was a small fountain with a series of three basins and water flowing down from one to the next.

  She liked that beautiful sound.

  The hotel was expensive and historic. The building, originally the residence of the Marquis de Graveson, was from the sixteenth century and had been a hotel since 1799. The decor was discreet; unlike in Arles, there were no fake Provençal chandeliers or Camarguais tridents to be seen. The walls were hung with tapestries. The hotel restaurant was indeed open.

  M.F. was glad to be there. By the second evening the barman knew her name and room number, and that she didn’t want any ice in her half-gin, half-vermouth cocktail. “Somebody like me needs a good small hotel-bar,” she thought contemplatively. A place to sit for a change of pace after a day of looking at Roman carvings and shop windows, and before a night of reading and sleeping.

  These days, though, she was writing rather than sightseeing. It was too cold to do anything else. She wrote about Arles, mostly, how closed and wary it seemed, and about her own reactions to feeling shut out, shunned. She had felt more American than ever, she realized, alone in a foreign land, on guard in a way she’d never been before in France.

  “To hell with Noël,” M.F. thought to herself, a few days before Christmas.

  She didn’t much like the holiday. She was not a religious person, for one thing, and she found the hopped-up commercialism of the season unpleasant. Churches could be beautiful, of course, but as she walked through the bitter cold in Avignon one morning, she found them tired and dark. Saint-Agricol, Saint-Pierre, and the Notre-Dame des Doms cathedral all seemed worn out. Crowds were sparse, and there was no feeling of holiday or excitement.

  In Saint-Pierre there was a crèche, a nativity scene with old painted wooden santons—the traditional Provençal figurines—and little houses with blinking lights. She kept noticing ugly crèches: the previous week in Cannes she had seen a coin-operated mechanical crèche with a sign saying it was out of order. Once repairs were made, she realized, the lights would beam in the stable and in the houses, and the fisher by the little lake of real water would dip his rod in and out, and the wise men would hold out their gifts and then draw them back again. The very notion of a mechanical crèche, let alone a broken one, was disheartening.

  This was the second year running that M.F. had spent Christmas alone. She had gone to New York last year and stayed at a friend’s beach house in Bridgehampton. She’d been all alone, writing. It had been cold there, too, she now remembered.

  Why did she leave again? For years she had been the impresario of the family holidays, directing everything from the menus and the decorations to when to leave for midnight Mass and when to let the children open their presents. They were grown now, with children of their own. And she was feeling the strain of trying to do so much, when she needed time for herself. This was at least in part why she had sold the house in St. Helena. “All I did was cook and care for a constant stream of people, and mop up their tears, and wait for more,” she explained in a letter to a friend. “I could not finish a single thing. And not only do I earn a living with what I write, but it is the only thing that fulfills my creative nature, now that I have finished child-bearing and, apparently, sexual life. I was turning into a vegetable.”

  Now, however, she missed her family. After the cold walk past the churches, she stopped at a bar and ordered a drink. One or two men came in and stood at the counter. A young couple kissed in a corner. The waiters and barmen were joking quietly about their girls, their children, their hangovers. M.F. sipped her vermouth and gin and felt her hands and face get warmer.

  She missed Norah
and she missed her daughters. She missed being near the people she loved.

  That night, M.F. listened to the little fountain underneath her window, and at some point she realized the music had changed. Strange, it had snuck up on her. There was a soft occasional dripping sound now, not the lively fall from basin to basin of the previous nights. She looked out her window through the bare branches of the plane trees and saw that the basins were hung with long, beautiful icicles, with fresh water barely moving down them.

  Tonight, she thought with some excitement, she would listen to a fountain freeze! And so she did, not trying to stay awake for it, but aware much of the time of the diminishing music.

  By about five o’clock, there was no sound. As soon as it was light enough, after seven, she looked down and saw that the basins were now linked by rows of icicles that were like solid white columns between them. Later, a little boy stood for several minutes looking at the silenced water. He tossed a small rock toward the glass columns, but nothing broke, and he went shivering into the hotel.

  It was the morning of Christmas Eve.

  Later that morning, M.F. walked on the sunny sides of the icy streets. The mistral was over. She noticed a corner stand selling coquillages (the first shellfish she’d seen in some time) and a small café next door where one could order them, according to a sign in the window. She would eat lunch here, she decided.

  It was not a fancy place at all, but it looked pleasant, with high, bright windows and bunches of balloons and streamers for the holiday dinner that night. She decided to eat mussels. They could be ordered raw or marinière. She would have liked the latter, but the plat du jour was rabbit, and she wanted that, too. Wouldn’t both be too heavy? she asked the waiter. He gave her a quick but warm smile and agreed that it would, so she ordered the mussels raw. She ate about thirty of them—they were very small moules de Bouzigues, almost crisp from the cold, and delicious. The bread was the best she’d had in ages. And the rabbit was very good, too. It tasted like rabbit, with only a little juice, no batter, a sprinkle of herbs. It was served with excellent, simple macaroni, moistened only with the rabbit sauce and some grated Gruyère.

  She ate more for lunch than she had for the past several days, reading and watching the customers enjoy Christmas feasts—children, lovers, old men playing cards. Sitting here in this simple restaurant in Avignon, M.F. knew that it was the civilized meal that made her human. A meal with crusty bread and butter and wine at lunchtime. She had eaten in a hundred restaurants like this one over the years. There was an uncanny familiarity to the gruff waiters, the old men, the girls drinking espressos, the sounds and smells.

  She counted on meals like this one to sustain her: the impersonal embrace of the room, the routines and traditions that surrounded the ordering, cooking, presenting, and then eating of her lunch. It could be in France or America, it didn’t matter. When she returned to the hotel she meant to read a while, but she took a nap instead. She was sated and happy.

  M.F. dressed with special care for dinner and felt quite dashing in her invisible way. She ordered a bottle of Veuve Clicquot Brut 1964 at the hotel bar and had a glass before dinner. “What voluptuous treatment I can give myself!” she thought. Well, it was Christmas Eve, after all, and she was alone. To hell with it.

  The champagne followed her into the dining room, where she ate fresh foie gras, a sole à la normande, and a dutiful slice of bûche de Noël. The food was pleasant, but the mussels in the rich Normandy sauce were nothing like the raw, exquisitely fresh ones she’d had at lunch.

  In her room after dinner, she could hear the fountain again, trickling outside her window, and she was glad she hadn’t forced herself to go to Mass at Saint-Agricol or anywhere else. She had another glass of champagne. “It is necessary to impose a certain amount of discipline on oneself, I find, in order to stay human,” she wrote in her journal. “But why force things? Why lacerate, rub salt, twist knives, in the name of personal courage? Why try too hard to stand up straight all the time? Rubbish!”

  And so she sat in her pajamas and peignoir, drinking champagne and writing.

  More and more, her thoughts turned to home.

  She had come looking for France and she had found it—cold, hard, and real—but it was not home. It was not hers, not really. She was American. And this trip, which had begun months ago as a kind of sentimental immersion in the pleasures of France past, had turned into something quite different. Instead of the past, she had found the future. Hers. She had found a new way of seeing, a way past nostalgia. She was looking forward to California, and to writing about California, too. She had ideas already—about the Italian, Mexican, Japanese, Hawaiian, and Cuban fishermen on the West Coast, and the fish they caught and cooked. About chilies and enchiladas, about Sonoma County wines.

  Was it any wonder this all struck her in some deeply existential way? France had for so long been her inspiration. She was, indeed, one of the modern inventors of American Francophilia, articulating its tone and ethic, its codes and allusions and seductive sophistication. France was at the very center of M.F.’s emotional and intellectual life. It was the emblem of glamour and good living, the repository of dreams, a place, both in the world and in her own interior landscape, where she had found beauty and solace.

  And now she was saying goodbye. To the past. To France. To her dreams of France.

  She was choosing family, and a new chapter, a new house. In her journal, she wrote:

  Always before, in France, I have fought a hard battle within, to return to America happily. I have wanted to stay here. But by now I have decided to end my life in California, as far as one can decide such things. My two children are American (and that was almost certainly my own choice and I shall never know how right or wrong I was), and I have decided to stay as near them as they wish to be, instead of establishing myself in southern France, as I once dreamed of.

  She had made up her mind. “I do know that I have, apparently, turned my back on the old vague dreams of living in Europe.”

  But even in Sonoma, France would be with her, always: “I hope I’ll still hear the fountain below, with the slowing water in the icicles at night.”

  Christmas Day: a milky sky. There were still long, thick icicles and beautiful white ice on the mossy sides of the fountain basins, but the pools of water were clear and limpid from above.

  That morning, she walked through the gardens at the Notre-Dame des Doms cathedral to the sundial, where she had often gone with her children, and once with Norah’s sons, the Barr boys.

  Before she left, she drank the last of the champagne—it was just right, just cold enough, still very lively.

  14

  CHRISTMAS AND RÉVEILLON

  JAMES BEARD LEFT JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS. He’d been staying in the guest room at La Pitchoune after leaving Dr. Pathé’s clinic. He and Julia and Paul cooked and talked and read and relaxed; it was a low-key few days. Beard stuck to his diet, more or less, although he did not seem to be losing any weight at all. Well, these things took time. He felt weak, but he was happy to be with friends.

  For the Childs, this was the calm before the storm. They had said to everyone they knew, “Do come!”—and quite a number, including siblings and nieces and old friends from England, had decided they would indeed come visit. So the Childs were shopping and planning for the many large dinners they would be hosting for the new arrivals.

  In the meantime, they gossiped some more about Claiborne and who ought to replace him at the Times. This was an endlessly enjoyable parlor game, and one for which there were no right answers, only conjecture—at least until Beard got back to New York to ferret out the latest. What about Jon Winroth, Child wondered—he wrote about wine and food for the International Herald Tribune in Paris. Might he be grooming himself?

  Who knew?

  It was indeed a “gossipy profession,” Child declared, “which is part of its charm. But thank heaven we love and trust each other!”

  Beard had a difficult tri
p home: Gatti drove him to the airport, and he could already feel a slight sniffle in his left nostril. Before the plane reached Barcelona that slight sniffle had turned into a bad cold, and after they left Lisbon, the charming stewardess, a fan, was squeezing glass after glass of orange juice for him.

  He described the scene most amusingly in a letter to the Childs.

  He was a most unattractive passenger, that much he knew, between his running nose and the increased swelling of his foot. “I am certain Pan Am was happy to toss me off the plane,” he noted. “They even arrived 40 minutes ahead of time so anxious were they to get me away.”

  Once he got back to New York, Beard was relegated to a chair that kept his foot elevated—he referred to it as his “red gout chair”—and used the enforced immobility to attempt to catch up on all the correspondence and other business that had piled up on his desk.

  “Some progress has been made nasally, footwise and deskwise,” he wrote to the Childs. “I trust no germ was left lurking in my room.” The fevered discussions continued, he reported, about who was to be Claiborne’s successor—Michael Field’s name seemed to be mentioned more than any other. “Otherwise, life around New York seems calm and collected,” he wrote. He hadn’t heard much gossip: “I haven’t circulated enough to collect any choice items.”

  He looked forward to a necessarily quiet Christmas. He would be sticking to his diet.

  At La Pitchoune, meanwhile, the “Soupe Barbue” Beard had made the previous week survived like an old Madeira—Child added various ingredients as the days went by: more chard, a couple of tomatoes, some mushroom stems, leeks and potatoes, and Provençal pistou garnish for a bit of zest. The soup lasted many days. It had become a true “Soupe de l’enfant Barbue,” she wrote in a letter to Beard—a “Child” of the “Bearded” soup. This was another of their running jokes.