A Place in Normandy (5 page)

As long as I'd had to check baggage anyway, I'd brought rolled canvas and paint as well, those supplies being grievously expensive in France, and hard to find except in large cities. I'd already been relieved of the supplies I'd imported for my friends in Paris. For my godson Gabriel's parents, Madeleine and Tom, I'd brought the best-selling, scandalous biography of Pamela Harriman, our ambassador to France, which was sold out at W. H. Smith's on the Rue de Rivoli, and an industrial-sized jar of Hellmann's real American mayonnaise, which they preferred. For Gabriel himself I had brought Wonder Bread, several compressed loaves of it, to comfort his Parisian exile.

The chores that went with first arriving in the house were so familiar to me that I went at once into my routine. I'd left the place in the hands of tenants the previous summer, people I did not know named O'Banyon—friends of friends who had moved on to Calcutta or São Paulo afterward. Communication between M. Joffroy and my side of the Atlantic was rare, occurring only in emergencies, so I was interested, in fact anxious, to learn what impression the O'Banyons might have made. I plugged in the fridge and checked to make sure that we had spare tanks of propane to fuel the hot-water heater in the downstairs bathroom, but there was nothing else to do down here; I wouldn't use this room. I climbed the kitchen stairs into the weird darkness of the dining room on the first floor.

Since all the shutters were closed, only the dimmest hint of light penetrated the room, even in the midday sun. I picked my way across the tiles, found and recalled the complex of latches on the east side's garden door, and opened the dining room to a ferocious blast of green weed brawling with sunlight, and my first real discouragement.

The garden, looking east from the dining room, 1988: Maizie Kilmer,
foreground;
Kenton and Frances Kilmer. Photo Walter Chapin

I'd tried to ask M. Joffroy, the manager, by letter, to send someone to cut back the remains of the garden, but obviously only goats and cows had heard the call. The brick walls and their white painted gates, which were supposed to demarcate the spiritual boundary between garden and wilderness, were leaning or gaping or frankly giving in. Hot noon light fell on the retaining wall to the first terrace, which was in an advanced state of disrepair and looked more like a heap than a wall. I suspected that a cow had wandered too near the edge. A general jumble of rank weed and nettle mounted upward beside the crumbling paths and stairways by which it had once been possible to stroll to the linden alley, now buried in woods and out of sight along the far boundary of the property, at the crest of the hill. The cypress trees on the first terrace, which my mother had been assured were dwarfs, had grown as frantically as everything else in Normandy and now towered over the roof. The small
crottes
of goats and wide testaments of cattle dotted and splattered all the terraces that might be lawns or flower gardens, where ornamental hedges had disappeared under long thickets of grass. The round pond that formed the visual focus of the first terrace had been sucked dry.

Here, on a more formal day, my mother's pet hen had gone crazy when she saw the offspring she had hatched from beneath her follow their native instinct into the pond, thereby declaring themselves ducks despite their nurture. Here, in these gardens, my grandfather had painted in his Panama hat, and sometimes his suit, under an umbrella to keep the glare of sun from burning out all color in his work, while Stellita Stapleton or Mahdah Reddin or his daughter (my mother), Frances, or my grandmother took the sun. Here had been formal gardens, trimmed hedges, and, the next terrace up, the cutting garden—all well fenced by hawthorn hedges to keep out animals. Here the gardeners had worked under my grandmother's supervision. The yew tree, all asprawl now on the first terrace, had been trimmed in those days, and kept clipped in the shape of a basket. Out of these gardens had come primulas; roses for the house; nasturtiums, whose cool leaves lined baskets of peaches and whose peppery blossoms made their way into salads; lavender for the linen closet; columbine; marguerites.… All that was gone now, but I could still smell the box, marking its territorial boundaries like a randy February tomcat advertising his wares on our evergreens in Julia's Cambridge garden—a good garden, one of which I was very fond, and which my present affection for a derelict threatened to betray.

Frieseke supervising hen and ducklings, 1924.

Frieseke painting Stellita Stapleton on the first garden terrace, 1924.

SIX

I could not face the wreck of the Norman garden, not first thing, and not this trip. I had only a few days, and my main task at the moment was to make sure the house was habitable. I stumbled out of the garden into the darkness of the house again and crossed the dining room to the west side, prepared to hang on to the casement when I opened those shutters—because on that side of the house, the sky sucks at you, and you'll go flying if you don't watch out. It is the continually disorienting genius of this floor to assault you with burgeoning, rampant green where the rooms open on the garden to the east, whereas the windows on the west want to drag you right out over the valley. That window had a hot blue sky in it today. I left the window open, like the garden door, because the house was cold. Then, too, the damp seemed greater than usual, and I hoped it might burn off if enough of the day outside washed through. Once the doors and shutters were open, the dining room became visible. I knew it well, but it felt odd—not so much clean as smeared. It was now, and must always have been, the most used room in the house, originally the big farm kitchen where meat was roasted on a spit and pots were kept boiling over a constant fire in the fireplace that took up most of the wall between this room and what was now the library. Something was wrong in here that I could not put my finger on. I realized that I was tired, discouraged by the state of the garden, gritty from travel, and disoriented by the change of time as well as by hearing someone
not
saying, in a voice resembling Julia's,
How can we take on this place if you can't even manage to get the garden trimmed?

Julia had driven me to the plane and seen me off, loquacious with the combined hopes and anxieties that accompany a loved one on a transatlantic flight—a loved one, that is, who has been instructed to buy three hundred thousand dollars' worth of flight insurance. Because of the time difference, it was still too early for me to call and let her know that I'd arrived safe, and to hear her disappointed exclamation of relief that doom this time was coming in an as yet unimagined form. But I did pick up the telephone to make sure there was a dial tone.

Her first words to me in the past, when I was here without her, had always been, “Is it beautiful?” Because, of course, it was—and that was true rain or shine, and whether or not the garden looked like Jacob's room and my studio at their worst, combined, and tramped through by extinct and flightless birds of prey. Outside the west window, over the dining table, the blue air wavered with the sound of birds—not just the relentless chorus of doves, which had already so merged with my expectation that I no longer heard it; but songbirds I could not name darting in the orchard, and a cuckoo, and Mme. Vera's ducks and chickens. Across the road (two hundred feet below, and invisible from here because of the intervening vegetation and the ruin of the cider press), on my level on the opposing hill, half a dozen cows wandered, nosing the edges of a patch of bracken. I heard metal knocking somewhere, sounding like cowbells, but probably only Mme. Vera careening a tin basin; and a tractor trimming the nettles, thistles, and brambles out of a field nearby. This should be done to my fields also—and would be, I told myself, if I were here often enough to cause the farmer renting them to make the place look cared for.

The dining room, looking west across the valley, 1986. Photo Dana Perrone

In spite of the garden, I'm still ahead,
I thought.
I'll have a cup of tea and then see to the house.
I found the teakettle where the O'Banyons had hidden it in the upstairs kitchen. Unless we were overwhelmed with guests or family, this was the only kitchen we normally used. It had once been a butler's pantry and was connected to the dining room by a window opening as well as a door. Julia and I found it easier to get by on two propane burners than to run upstairs and down to use the big, dark, cold, and damp downstairs kitchen—so long as we were neither ambitious in our cooking nor too numerous in our eating.

I took the kettle to the sink to rinse it out and found there was no water. The plumber had not come to get it started. Now I understood the persistent smearing I had noticed in the cleaning job. A
femme de ménage
had come, seen, but not conquered, though she'd done the best she could without water.

I did not try to turn the water on myself. The piping in this big house was a palimpsest and mystery of interconnected pipes, sluices, conduits, valves, and siphons going back to the Cenozoic, and far beyond my comprehension. When, on a mistaken occasion in the past, I once fell back on my American self-reliance, I succeeded only (working by flashlight) in opening the connection to the town supply, underground in the pasture on the far side of the driveway, as well as the main valve in the downstairs kitchen: water began pouring not only from all the faucets that had been opened to drain the system the previous winter, but also from stopcocks located here and there on walls and ceilings throughout the house. I had to turn the whole thing off and spend a wet night of drought before I could make contact with a plumber.

It occurred to me that the electricity had been running long enough to burn out the empty hot-water tank. I went downstairs, shut off the main switch, and was instantly back in 1493
A.D.

I checked my watch. Everyone else in the civilized world (i.e., France) should now be on the waning edge of lunch, replete and somnolent and therefore at my mercy. I telephoned M. Joffroy's, four miles down the road, and apologized to Mme. Joffroy for the interruption.