A Place in Normandy (7 page)

The salon, with Frieseke's portrait of Frances, 1937. Photo Claude Giraud

Hovering just beneath the smell of the fireplace were the symphonic strains of plaster dust and damp and sifting particles of wood digested by the worms in the furniture; the varied dirts of woods and pastures, blown in under the doors; smoke; linen; mothballs when closets were opened; and old books. The house contained as great a volume of books as it did of
torchis,
the material used between the timbering. I had mentioned to Julia once, in our continuing argument, that one good reason for us to take on the ownership of all this was to avoid having to answer the question “If we don't, what are we going to do with all those books?”

Aside from the missing tray, everything was as exactly familiar to me as a loose tooth the nerves and tongue have grown accustomed to. I opened the doors and shutters of each room and looked outside, knowing that when I called Julia, the first thing she would ask was, “Is it beautiful?” Then she would want to know what room I was sleeping in, aware that there were six possibilities—or seven, counting the couch in the dining room. And I would answer, as she knew I would, “The library,” because I wanted to be near the telephone in case she called. Anyway, there was no reason to go through the bother of opening the rooms upstairs.

She'd ask how the cloths she'd sent over looked. All but the red-and-white-striped one were still packed.
You know, honey, for someone who's resisting this move, you ought to notice that you're adding to it, not subtracting—making it more to give up if we don't do it,
I mumbled or thought. Since I was alone, it didn't much matter which.

EIGHT

A sound I could not decipher woke me at three in the morning. I struggled into consciousness, thinking how many persons breathe their last at about three
A.M.
I heard random, prolonged knocking and breaking of china, interspersed by equally random, purposeful, and prolonged silences. I was in the library, as planned, with the door closed between me and the dining room. I lay awake listening, trying to understand the sound before confronting its maker. It could be a person moving in the next room—I could attribute human emotions to the brittle, tentative quality of the sounds of tapping, and of china juddering against adjacent crockery—but the lengthy silences seemed wrong for a human.

The darkness in my room was intense, if incomplete. Because we were quite far north—on the same latitude as Montreal—summer made for long daylight and only a few hours of perfect darkness. Mesnil was far from Le Havre, the nearest city that might put a permanent smudge of light on the horizon. I couldn't claim to see anything. As I studied the sounds, I eliminated banging shutters, since I knew the shutters should be secure; or a casement window left open, which would make a regular whack, often accompanied by the release of glass panes that would shatter on the tiles. I'd closed up everything downstairs before going to bed, but I'd never got to the second floor the previous afternoon, instead allowing myself to be distracted by other things. If the noise was caused by something not fastened upstairs, it had been flapping like that all winter—but no, the sounds that had wakened me were nearby, and they said trespass.

The library, with Mrs. Frieseke, 1937. Photo Claude Giraud

Was it rats? The intruder's movement had a rat's feral quality of alien intent, preying on civilized constraints even while taking advantage of them. But the sounds carried too much force for a rat. They had about the right weight for a cat, but with too much clumsy despair for that animal in its element (which a dark house was). Besides, I could not figure out how a cat would have gained access.

I thought about last year's bees and felt my skin prickle while I listened to the thing moving. During the previous summer, when I had been here for some time alone, the library had been visited regularly by honey bees whose hive I never found, though I thought it might be under the slates of the scalloped overhang (or
auvent
) meant to keep rain from trickling down the outside walls under my windows. In the room above the library, the bees had been more plentiful, but that was easily explained by the presence there of a fireplace, in the cool darkness of whose chimney they liked to congregate and gather carbon in the form of soot for their architecture, wax being carbon in a more translucent organization. That, at least, was my theory about the upstairs bees last summer. I'd thought a lot about bees, and learned somehow that one of the forest
métiers
in Normandy in the 1500s and earlier was that of
bigre,
an itinerant bee-man licensed by the owning class to collect wild swarms in the forest and carry them in wicker baskets to sell to settled people who needed them for their hives. The bees in my library were not even descendants but rather clones of those farmed in that way. Still, that did not exactly explain where they came from. In my library bedroom the fireplace had been filled in with cement to provide a draft for the furnace, and the ceiling was a foot thick (made, like the walls, of timbers interspersed with
torchis
) and tiled on the upper surface. It offered no passage for insects. Even on days that were too damp to leave the windows open (which days had been in the majority), the bees last year nevertheless had arrived in dozens during the course of the morning and afternoon, to mourn angrily against the western window glass as evening dwindled to despair.

I did not believe in ghosts—something of a waste since, as Julia had said, the house must be full of them. In my family, on my father's side, everyone saw ghosts. In my position, in this bed that, actually, he used to occupy, my father would have gone back to sleep at this point, satisfied that the noise was nothing more than a wandering soul in the next room doing the supper dishes left unwashed for morning.

What about the
femme de ménage
who had, according to Mme. Joffroy, disappeared into the countryside with the house key? Someone somewhere had that key. Once in the past, also during the blackest part of the night, I had found that one end of the house was being unexpectedly occupied by another person. I had not given advance warning that I was coming. (It was after that incident that we had asked M. Joffroy to manage the property.) If someone else in the house had chosen this moment to make a furtive exit, I thought, I should not interfere. But I was curious, and the noises continued until I finally decided to have a look.

I knew the house well enough to move through it barefoot in the dark, taking my direction from the promptings of sense memory and a certain dent in my skull. Most of the doorways in the house did not anticipate my height, but I wore my dent with Lamarckian pride since my rangy grandmother had had one just like it. In the passage between dining room and salon, the less-than-six-foot-tall doorway was further articulated by a step that coincided with the opening. The simultaneous step up and an insufficient last-minute bob were what had caused the transverse dent in the top of my grandmother's head, and then later in mine. I might be a slow study, but now almost the first thing I did when I arrived in France was duck.

Something crashed. I opened the heavy paneled door from the library into the dining room and saw a white blur tilting at a corner shelf almost at ceiling level, near the stairs, from which my father's part-of-a-brass-Cape-Cod-firelighter had just fallen (I'd moved it to give pride of place to my own beanpot) and where something else now chattered in a breakable way. Above it, the blur was resolving itself into feathers and a large owl's frantic puzzlement. The bird was trying to perch on a pair of glass candlesticks, its exposed underside glowing like dusty moonlight. I realized that my eyes were accommodating to the darkness, which must be, after all, less than absolute. Pale moonlight, interrupted by heavy cloud when I woke, was now entering the windows. The owl shoved off from its perch, thereby also shoving off the perch itself, which shattered on the floor as the bird careened from the dining room into the salon.

The salon into which my avian visitor had flown had, in its day, been filled with music, and I was pleased that the friends who were to rent the place later in the summer were musicians. The house had once boasted two pianos: my mother's, in her bedroom over the library (where the bees gathered sometimes), and another here. Everyone in the family had music. My grandfather was a disappointed tenor whose maturing into the range of baritone had forced him to renounce his hopes for the operatic stage and take up painting. My grandmother Sadie, at the time she met him in Paris, was studying the cello, and she played the piano as well. My mother, Frances, was for her part a serious student of the latter instrument, a pupil of Albert Levêque in Paris.

In September of 1897 Freddy, at twenty-three, had played the guitar and sung during his first Atlantic crossing, on the S.S.
Massachusetts,
a cattle ship with a cargo of “three hundred and eighty cattle, two hundred and sixty four horses and twenty three missionaries; and the missionaries are quite as quiet as the cattle, and the cattle fully as quiet as the missionaries.” He was on his way to fame and fortune, or at least Paris, in the company of Will Howe Foote, another aspiring painter from Michigan, who recorded the voyage in his diary. Another entry read:

The evening was grand. Officers played their mandolins and Frieseke, Baxter [another passenger] and the “can't-lose-me” girl in the white slippers and I sang all the songs we knew and then we three boys drew our steamer chairs to the rail and watched the moon and dreamed.
*

Frieseke sang in Paris at the studio gatherings of friends; and he sang at the easel in the Académie Julian in the early days; and he sang at his easel in Mesnil (so long as things were going well).

The salon was, in a way, still filled with music, though its piano was gone. (Two keyboards were gradually giving up their ivory and their ebony in the
cave
downstairs, a project begun by one of my children; the rest of the instruments had no doubt been consumed in the course of the terrible cold that drove the refugees to burn much of the furniture while they crowded here during the war.) But there were still, in the salon, heaps of sheet music, from hymns to be used in the church of Notre Dame du Mesnil, to Bach or Schubert duets, to Chopin polonaises, to the newest and hottest popular best-sellers of the 1920s: “The Cootie Tickle (Over Here It's the Shimmie Dance)”; “The Gum Chewer's Song”; “Mon Petit” (“Sonny Boy” translated into French); “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise”; “A Kiss in the Dark”; “Lover Come Back to Me.” Someone played and sang all those songs in this room.

The salon, 1995. Photo by author

The owl was too terrified to make music, or even its usual utterance. I did not follow it into the salon, not wanting to worry it more. The door to the stairs was closed, which meant that the owl must have stooped through the chimney and been unable to negotiate the return trip. Hearing decorative breakables start to teeter and topple in the salon, I opened the window over the dining table; through it the freedom of the chill night air beckoned. Then I opened the door to the garden on the opposite side, flooding the room with night wilderness and as much damp as had blown off during the afternoon.

Rather than trying to herd the owl from the salon into the dining room again, I stepped back into the library, closed the door, and waited, sitting at my desk by the window and looking out at the fields and orchards in their thin wash of moonlight. I listened for what should be the soundless passage of the bird once it found its way clear into the open fields, which glowed now with a cold skin of dew. For the first time it occurred to me that I was alone. As much as I enjoyed solitude, I was inclined to wreck it by filling it with work, forgetting that solitude was supposed to lead to the consolation of philosophy. Moonlight and solitude together should inspire at least reverie—but I could not get past that gnawing feeling of contentment that took up the space discomfort would otherwise have filled with productiveness or at least noticeable musing.