A Place in Normandy (14 page)

I stood corrected.

SIXTEEN

I woke to thin rain falling against the slates and realized that I was to have four guests by evening: Margaret and Ben and their friends from Amsterdam. My situation could be funny only in a movie. Aside from stumbling onto big problems, I had got nothing done, and I had only a couple of days left here. The place was a shambles. Margaret had encountered the medieval comforts of the house when she visited many years before, so she knew basically what to expect—though the medieval quality of the comfort had increased dramatically with the recent collapse of the heating system and disappearance of the bathroom floor, the fact that running water was available only on demand, and my temporary bachelorhood.

The weather had changed: it was now as cold and wet outside as it was inside the house.

I must manufacture a speedy masquerade. Living alone, I had been camping, a concession both to my own inclination and to the state of the plumbing; I walked around wearing as many sweaters as I needed and did not care that it was cold. But now this had to seem like a house. I lay in bed, listening to the donkey singing from Mount Angel, and watching white clouds of condensation issue from my mouth as I breathed. I'd have to try to make them comfortable. The impending guests deserved meals that could be distinguished one from another, as well as sheets. Four guests would mean an aftermath of six to eight sheets in addition to mine, and four pillowcases, and four towels—all of which must be washed and persuaded to become dry before I would be free to go back to Paris. For the past several years in a row, I had been bringing quick-drying cotton sheets with me from home, since they were too expensive to buy in France. It came to me now that during my brief inventory of the linen closet the day before, in a quest driven from my mind since then by the state of the bathroom floor, I had noticed that these cotton sheets were the ones that had gone scarce or missing. I must therefore fall back on linen.

In 1968, and for a few years afterward, once we started returning regularly to the house, people from the countryside would appear at the door from time to time carrying household goods that they, or their parents, had removed from the house
pour la chère Madame Frieseke,
in order to preserve them during the war. We might be busy, say, putting glass into an attic window when there came a ring on the bell we'd hung outside the downstairs-kitchen door, announcing the arrival of a middle-aged man (sometimes with family), whom my mother (quickly snatching off her apron and putting on a kettle in the same motion) slowly recalled (with mutual tears) from a catechism class she had taught in 1935 to children in the village. He might have with him a china pitcher, or a teapot, or a long-handled copper saucepan.

It is always sort of hectic,
Julia's mother wrote,
as friends keep dropping in and everyone has to go up to the salon and “causer” [chat].

The memories brought back by these visits, mixed with gratitude, joy, concern, and the social burden of having to drop whatever was being repaired in order to respond to the bell—and to the news of deaths and marriages and births—could be quite wearing on my mother, the only one of us with any intimate emotional involvement with the callers. Plans for the day inevitably had to be jettisoned on such occasions, but there were ample compensations: among the treasures that reappeared this way were my grandmother's linen sheets, which for years remained the only ones in the house. They wore like wet iron, having been made to last the ages by my grandmother, who, when preparing her trousseau, had embroidered her maiden initials, S.O.B., into the pillowcases and roof-sized double-bed sheets, under the orders of the implacable nuns of the Visitation convent in Wheeling, West Virginia. The monogram branded the user.

Linen, like the bread of Paris, holds moisture well and is reluctant to part with it. Rain on a morning when guests loomed therefore caused me to recall, as I listened to the Angelus bells and delayed getting up, the bone-harrowing slide into chilled damp linen, as well as the nightmare battles waged in the name of getting the sheets dry.

For years the house had had no washing machine, and we still had no dryer. That was supposed to be the sun's job (or fault). Where my grandparents had employed people to beat the linen in the pond below the cider press and spread it on the grass to bleach and dry before they ironed it, our laundry days required the cooperation of at least three of our
own
number: one to wash, one to watch the weather, and one to rush out to the line in time to haul the sheets down before a spate of rain, and hang them up again to wrest the most from any sun that appeared. The person who watched the weather—usually a child who had other business outside, like chasing chickens—also had to keep guard over the line, since hopeful calves would suck holes into the wet laundry.

Mme. Vera's as seen from the house (with laundry), 1995. Photo by author

Thus I started this day thinking dark housewifely thoughts. It was cold, dark, and familiar in the house. I put on sweaters and looked at the rain, which seemed impermanent somehow, a series of curtains spun of gauze or spiderweb filling the valley, showing no rifts. It could be like this for days. I listened awhile to the doves affirming bad news to each other in the eaves, then made coffee and sat in the dining room and let the BBC newscaster echo the doves while I looked out the window at the string of cattle ambling across the green slope between the cider press and the house, indifferent to the rain, eating as they walked. This was the Norman weather I'd expected. It, not the inside of a decaying house, was my real reason for being here—because, perversely enough, I loved this weather. It made the air active and the colors of the world defiant, and eliminated horizon lines right up to the windowsills. It forced plants to grow in a way that seemed preternatural. I'd found, for example, a limb cut off last summer by the O'Banyons from the plum tree that grew outside the guest room—a log thick as my thigh, just lying on the ground under the vanished lindens—putting out fresh new shoots and leaves this spring, even though, when I lifted it, there was no sign of its having bothered to send out roots. It was just continuing to do what it had always done, prompted by a climate that imposed life.

I had another cup of coffee and watched the rain some more, wondering how much of it was getting into the Mesnier-Bréards' masonry through the large opening I had noticed the day before in the wall facing the garden, from which it could easily work through the half-timbering and into the library, though not before rotting out the
colombages.
My breakfast table had filled with things I'd have to put away. Tonight we'd be five at table.

SEVENTEEN

One summer early in the sequence of our stays, Julia and I were in the house with two little ones, Christopher and Sadie. This was before the place had its first washing machine, which in many ways resembled the Citroën, and was bought used the first year France tested an atomic bomb in the Pacific. After the machine was installed, we listened to it for hours as it ground for forty-nine seconds in one direction, then paused balefully for exactly long enough to let you believe,
It's over,
before grinding back in the other. It was like climbing seventeen steps up and then either sixteen or eighteen down, backward. The only way to know for sure was to keep counting. “Perfect to wash Penelope's weaving in,” Julia said.

Our friend Margaret's first visit to the house had antedated the arrival of the washing machine, and also our successful calculation of how many Pampers could be imported in one suitcase if they were deboxed and compressed like Wonder Bread. Expecting a homogeneous level of civilization in the West, we'd thought we could buy Pampers anywhere; we were surprised to learn that the only French answer to the disposable diaper was a nasty and instantly prebiodegradeable
couche
that teetered in an elastic belt. Julia, trained by the Madams of the Sacred Heart, claimed it was a mortification menstrual pad designed for nuns to wear under their hair shirts. An enterprising child such as Sadie could be kept in such a thing for less time than it took to disintegrate.

We were nervous about the bucket boiler, a galvanized percolator that had to be heaved onto the stove in the downstairs kitchen. We had purchased it from M. Thouroude's predecessor in the
quincaillerie,
but shied away from it because carrying buckets of boiling water with toddlers underfoot made us uneasy, though it did not faze them. We relied instead on hand-washing, of which I did not do my share.

Outside the house, the drive and pastures teemed with beasts. Twice daily, geese paraded past in a line with their young, the whole family shitting everywhere, in fat grassy greasy curlicues of the sulphurous yellow-green that the American painters used to call
merde d'oie.
Madeleine tells me the current name for the color in polite company is
caca d'oie.
At any rate, everything shat copiously outdoors: cows, goats, sheep, dogs, chickens, ducks. What the beasts of the field contributed soon became our problem as well when our own children slid in it.

That summer we were shaken by the loss of Christopher's large, black, motherly dog Duchesse, who wintered with Mme. Vera but rushed over to greet Christopher whenever we arrived. We were walking one evening along the tiny road at the foot of the property, in the direction of Mesnil, accompanied by Duchesse, when she was killed instantly by a. car traveling at grotesque speed on a road barely wide enough for the passage of one car at a time. We were used to seeing the hedgerows bulge outward when the tankers shoved through in the evenings, after collecting the day's milk from the farms.

M. Tonnelier, the farmer (Mme. Vera's husband), buried Duchesse at the far end of the garden's first terrace. The loss of the dog proved how much danger there could be for our children on the road, and that realization was still fresh and raw among us an evening or two later when Margaret's daughter Millie arrived, humping a load not much smaller than herself. Millie had just finished high school. She had walked from the train station in Fierville carrying what she felt she needed for a two-month trek in Asia—Normandy being only her first stage. The train still stopped at Fierville then; if we wanted a day in Paris, we would start off at about four-thirty in the morning on the thirty-minute walk to the crossing, where we would flag the train. At the end of a long summer day—there would still be some daylight in the sky at eleven on the Feast of Saint John, the longest day of summer (June 21)—the walk back to the house was all uphill. It delighted us that the entire trip from Cambridge to Mesnil could be made using only public transportation and our legs. The Fierville station incorporated in its upper floor the residence of the stationmaster; the family's laundry hung from an upstairs window as Papa flagged trains below and Cécile and Pascal clamored at Maman within.

We'd known that Millie was coming, but not when she would arrive. The house had no telephone; all correspondence with the world was conducted by letter or through telegrams that the
facteur
brought up the driveway in his car, their wording inevitably having shifted in transit thanks to operators unfamiliar with the English language. These cables often caused us alarm but seldom provided any useful information.
DOOM. COMNG. TROOBL. LONE. MURDER.
: we would read the message while the
facteur
stood to one side, waiting for his tip and wondering if we dared send a reply. Three days later, Julia's mother would appear.

Anyway, Millie had found her way uphill from the train. She leaned against the garden door into the library and fell inside the house with a screech and a thud. Julia was reading to the children, whom we had put into pajamas in an effort to make them disregard the fact that late though it was, the sun had hours left to shine. (If the sun was shining, it is fair to say that diapers were hanging on the line.) Millie fell in a heap onto her knapsack, blurting out the words, “I'm dead,” and then lying as speechless and still as Duchesse had in the road.

We had already enjoyed a flying overnight visit from Millie's mother, Margaret, and Amos, her husband at the time. The morning that Margaret's visit ended, the sun shone, and Julia hauled the diapers out of their bucket, rolled up her sleeves, and went to work in the laundry room, which opened onto the driveway. Being adjacent to the kitchen, it was also the room from which the dumbwaiter had once risen to connect the downstairs kitchen to the servants' pantry above. The laundry room had thus been a main station along the house's alimentary canal. Anyone falling down the kitchen stairs into the laundry room would be brought up short against the wastepipe from the upstairs (i.e., second-floor) toilet; while waiting for the room to stop spinning, the unlucky tumbler could appreciate the undercarriage of the dumbwaiter, or
monte-charge,
which for a time we had tried to use, Julia and I, one of us downstairs and one up, calling loudly to each other, having learned to keep the door to the stairs bolted after the children went down them headfirst often enough.