A Place in Normandy (10 page)

Mme. Vera's courtyard, 1988. Photo Walter Chapin

Mme. Vera threw her arms around me and we began to exchange kisses. A woman of eighty who had lived a hard life for many years, she had blossomed with old age and widowhood. Today she was wearing a pretty dress printed with pink flowers. I had noticed some of her laundry hanging on the metal clothesline next to my house when I arrived; by the time I looked out in the morning, it had migrated to her own line, further down the hill. Mme. Vera was now bent almost as badly as her husband had been in his time, and her husband's father, M. Braye; but she seemed healthy. Her hands were big and square and twisted, and she still exuded a pleasant smell of cider mixed with milk just on the edge of turning sour.

I hunkered down (mentally) and prepared to converse. In talking with Mme. Vera, the language was not the problem, since she was a fellow foreigner and spoke French more clearly than I had a right to expect (she was also, it was said, fluent in Russian, Polish, and German); rather, it was the content. Mme. Vera was permanently inspired by disaster, and filled with rumor. She had an unyielding memory for catastrophe but with the cruel advance of age had gradually lost her sense of time as a discipline by which to organize phenomena, so that all past events now existed in her conversation, unless this was a function of my own confusion, as if they had happened only the day before yesterday. She and I were tied together by links of mutual gratitude and wariness extending many years into the past. Because I was contemplating becoming of the owning, while she would remain of the renting, class, I could not avoid taking in many of her observations with a guilty sense that it was up to me to set matters right. We swapped good wishes and family information before she started telling me her news, acting it out as she narrated it.

Ah, the things that had happened! There had been terrible storms. Two cows had been struck by lightning and had to be buried—as everyone knew, a cow struck by lightning could not be eaten. The meat perished instantly! The ground had been so wet that nothing could be planted. All the seeds had rotted. Everything had died in the ground. It was a disaster. Because of the drought, everything had withered and died. The cows that lived had got infections and aborted. Bombs had fallen back in the woods, and a piece of the house had been knocked off. There were almost no rabbits. Dead, all dead. Barely a chicken was left. A tourist had fired a rifle at her goats. Unspeakable! Everything was so expensive. How could a person eat? There was no sugar anywhere. Prices for beasts had gone down, and a man had died before the ambulance could reach him. Life was hard. The linden trees had gone, with one falling limb almost killing a child.

I listened sympathetically to these complaints, but without the alarmed surprise I had felt on first hearing them, since many of them dated from before 1968 (including the one about the cows struck by lightning, now the stuff of fable) or, in the case of the bombs in the woods, from much earlier still. But life remained hard.

“It is so sad, cher Monsieur, the way the château”—the
house
I was sleeping in could be called a château only by the most elastic indulgence, but in this instance the honorific was meant as both compliment and accusation, since it accentuated my being on the “owning” side of the fence and Mme. Vera's being on the “renting” (never mind that we were both aware that the spirit of the place was inimical to fencing)—“the way the château is closed all the time,” Mme. Vera said, looking mournful and acting out the part of the shuttered house. “And the linden trees—I remember well how dear Monsieur Frieseke would stroll under those trees in the evenings after dinner”—here she made herself look stout and male, placing her hands behind her back, seeming to be smoking a cigarette, and strutting slowly—“and how I caught him in my own arms when he died.” She did a pantomime of that event, playing both parts: my grandfather, having hurried back from the café in Mesnil with news of the impending war, succumbing to a stroke or a heart attack; and herself, then a brawny girl, catching him as he fell. She had often shown me the spot where it had happened, which corresponded with the place where my parents had first met each other, under my bedroom window; and I recalled my grandmother's recounting how she herself had baptized her husband then, as he had asked her to do, theirs having been, up till that moment, a marriage between a vehement Catholic Democrat and an ambivalent Protestant Republican. I think, however, that he died still true to the Republican party.

Afterward, with the war closing over Europe, my grandmother had offered to find passage for them both and to bring Vera with her to the States, but Vera, no longer able to take her dowry back to Poland, instead invested in a local love. She and M. Tonnelier, remaining on the property during the German occupation, had interceded as best they could on behalf of what my grandmother had left behind, and farmed out her possessions for safekeeping; one vivid tale had M. Tonnelier climbing into the woods carrying a large nude of Frieseke's. It always seemed a grotesque ingratitude to complain about the fences: it was only on account of the Tonneliers that we had anything left at all.

The mimed death of my blood relation was a standard part of Mme. Vera's repertory, reminding me of the queasy feeling that had come over me when, at the age of twelve or so, I first watched the movie
The Fighting 69th,
in which my other grandfather, my father's father, the poet Joyce Kilmer, played by Jeffrey Lynn, is shot, and mourned over by Pat O'Brien in the role of Fighting Father Duffy. He was buried (not Jeffrey Lynn, but Joyce Kilmer) in the American military cemetery in Fère-en-Tardenois. Leaving a wife and children in New Jersey, he had signed up and come to France in 1918 on a troop ship to serve with the Fighting 69th, and been killed in action later that year. Three of my four grandparents, therefore, were buried in France.

While Mme. Vera talked and my mind wandered, the courtyard in front of her house seethed with her animals: the chickens and ducks, and the cats, and an old dog so lame it rolled more than it could be said to walk. Her rabbits chewed in their hutches behind a propped-up wooden picnic table decorated with plastic geraniums and dahlias. A sudden barrage of rifle fire from downhill that startled me back into war for a minute proved to be nothing more than the young kids dancing on the rusty corrugated iron roof that covered part of the cider press: Mme. Vera's goats were taking the sun there, and the little ones were impatient with the elders' nap.

I had known the pair of linden trees that Mme. Vera had referred to, under which she claimed Frieseke had once strolled after dinner. They used to stand at the end of the house closest to her, casting permanent shade across it and filling, in June, with sweet flowers and bees, scenting the humming rooms beneath them with honey, mildew, and vanilla. The lindens had succumbed one after the other about ten years previously, but not before Mme. Vera had advised me one summer to slip an armload of their blooms secretly into Julia's mother's bath, should she give me any trouble. Linden flowers had a pacifying effect, Mme. Vera assured me.

Julia's mother had joined us that first summer. She was always ready to participate in a good time, and France had long been one of her favored stamping grounds. In the bloom of youth, sent off to be “finished” by way of a European tour, after the chaperon gave up and died during the ocean voyage, she had spent her entire travel allowance immediately upon her arrival in Paris, buying herself handmade underwear. When Julia and I were preparing to make our first trip to Normandy, she offered us a few travel tips. Christopher was just two years old then, and we were availing ourselves of the cheapest possible travel, a propeller-driven Icelandic Airways flight via Reykjavík to Luxembourg, where we were to find a train to Paris, change stations, and locate another train. Our country, having just lost Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, was in upheaval, and heading into the political turmoil of a hard campaign summer. During that spring of 1968, our student friends in Cambridge had reminded us excitedly that the revolution then in progress in the States was full-blown in Paris, complete with posters and flying cobblestones and riot police. The students in France's cities were trying to establish common cause with indifferent working people whom they categorized as
ouvriers
and
paysans.
Julia and I could be part of all that, our friends said enviously.

As we left loaded with our ignorance and baggage, Julia's mother's parting advice was, “Naturally, you cannot afford even a cup of tea at the Paris Ritz, but if you put on your best clothes (those
aren't
your best clothes, are they?), you can go in and use the ladies' room there, Julia, while Nick holds the baby in the lobby or, better, in the street outside. Just the ladies' room will give you the whole idea and is well worth a detour. You can tell Nick all about it afterward.”

So Julia's mother still loved a good time, and came to swell the house party. Julia's father, a more sedate and cautious individual who liked his comfort, used the flimsy excuse of having to remain available to patients needing surgery to justify staying home in Illinois.

What Julia's mother found in Mesnil was eleven people in a house with an undependable roof, no running water, and no electricity, and so she took the precaution of spending her nights in a hotel nearby. Joining us during the day, she used to look around her as she sat in the salon playing solitaire, always eager to participate in the next event, whether a baptism or a marketing expedition or a
goûter
(high tea) with one of the ancient ladies in the neighborhood. One of us would come tracking through the room with materials intended to shore up some act of temporary rehabilitation, and she would exclaim, “Good night!” before quoting the mantra of her own midwestern mother (who had lived in brick in Beardstown, Illinois): “A house is greedy.”

Writing home to a friend at the end of one such day, Julia's mother preserved (though not, she thought, for publication) some of the flavor of her perception of that summer of '68.

August 19th, night

Such a glorious day. This morning I met Frances in the Pont l'Evêque
marché. En verité
she did this for me because you can buy most everything anyway and not have such big crowds. Anyhoo—I arrived at the
marché
hunting for her and I felt I was at the local IGA. First I met Mme. Després, then Mlle. Gabry and Mme. Rohe, and Mme. Lafontaine and Mlle. Margot Lafontaine, then finally Frances. It was such a glorious day we decided on a picnic so we bought cheese and lettuce and and and—Put in car. Then we bought
paté
and
jambon
and
cornichons
and ? and put in car. Then we bought bread and cakes etc. and put in car and took it all home, filled our
paniers
and off for a picnic on a hill. It was lovely and we loved it.

Then because it was such a clear day six of us went to Honfleur. This included a charming fourteen-year-old English boy who is visiting someone near and arrived as we were leaving.

Went first to little church high on Côte de Grace with the panorama where because of clear day we felt Le Havre to be only a spit away. Then down into town to see the bell tower and English church and the Boudins in the
musée.
Loved it and thought of you. Julia and Nick think it is a little Rockportish but I am less jaded and loved it. All around the harbor then and back for dinner—tongue with an interesting sauce of shallots, vinegar, capers, ?, potatoes and carrots from garden, and string-bean salad. This done by J. and N. who stayed home. Nick is working soooo madly to finish bookshelves so they can unbury the collection in cupboards and with friends. (Tell you right now there are not
ever
going to be enough bookcases.)

These women sure talk a convincing line of doom,
I told myself, exchanging more kisses with Mme. Vera before pulling myself away from something she was saying about a flood. Noah's, maybe—but still, worth a worry.

TWELVE

I brought my roll of wire into the dining room and propped it next to the fireplace, poured oil and vinegar over the remains of last night's supper, pulled out a book of birds, and looked for my owl. Among the nocturnal raptors listed, I figured it might be either the
petit duc
(this was, after all, supposed to be a château) or the
effraie
(a barn or screech owl), which favored ruins. The latter was said to pluck its prey messily, to favor a regular eating place, and to keep a larder, its diet consisting in: birds, 1 percent; mammals (bats, mice, field mice, voles, shrews), 95 percent; frogs and toads, 2 percent; and insects, 1 percent. Any and all of these culinary delights could be living somewhere in the building where I was eating my own solitary lunch. There was always a supply of bats in the attic, and I vividly recalled a large toad's having set up shop one year in the hole that accommodated the sluggish drainpipe from the downstairs kitchen sink, through which water was carried out into the fields.

Another failing of mine that Julia frequently pointed out was that I didn't always put my marbles away before I started playing with my blocks and train set. Looking around now, I realized I was already halfway into about seven projects of revision and rearrangement and unpacking and exploring, none of which I could remember starting but the sum of which already threatened to swamp this room. The night before, I'd reached for a fork to eat my supper with and had to chase around the room until I found where the O'Banyons had preferred to keep the tableware; then and there I'd started putting it back where I wanted it by laying it out first on the table. Julia's cloths were spread across the couch; I'd had to pull out a number of books to settle on the best choice to describe my owl—and so on. It was true that even in a state of solitude I tended to proliferate.
Like a sea urchin,
Julia said,
that just keeps shooting seeds into the ocean. No wonder you want a big house; you're going to fill it up, too, wherever it isn't already filled with everyone else's stuff. The ocean's only so big, as we're finding out, you know, these days.