A Place in Normandy (22 page)

Why did Ruth, like every other American who came to visit, look over our potential predicament and immediately think of institutionalizing it as a bed-and-breakfast?

“You women hang together, don't you?” I complained to Ruth as I beat the bejesus out of a blackberry cane. Ruth fell silent, studying all the ways I could ruin my life and hopes and marriage in one fell swoop. From across the green Atlantic (gray on this coast and at this latitude) I heard Julia talking in firm, if negative, solidarity with her sisters,
Not to mention the things I can't stand to think about, like flying and plumbing, how do we make it nice? I don't know what to do with that house to break it up. It's three squat railroad trains going nowhere, one on top of another, and a roof, and the bottom one half -buried; and how are we going to get light into the place with those beautiful paneled solid doors to the garden that let no light in but plenty of wind? How can we work on it faster than physics and neglect are working against us? And then there're the two cottages, and what do we do with the ruin of the cider press? And everywhere on the place the piles of rusting machinery, and bottles, and the rest; we don't even know what everything is, or where it is. And the garden—the garden …

“The main thing is a dishwasher,” Ruth said, her mind at peace. “People nowadays want that. But I don't see where you'd put it. The upstairs kitchen is impossible, and the one downstairs is worse.”

TWENTY-FIVE

“Are you painting?” Ben asked. He'd noticed my canvas and supplies heaped in the library, waiting to be put away. He was sympathetic; his own hands were itching because they had been too long away from clay.

“Not this trip,” I said. “I only have a couple of days, and besides—”

“I like seeing your paintings all around the house,” Ben said. “There's a lot of wall left … and I know you. You're like me; we have to work.”

“Yes, but to make more art one has to be a criminal optimist. And at the moment…”

Talking later over Margaret's turkey osso buco in the rain (but the rain outside, and we inside, and the plumbers long gone), we darted around a variety of subjects in a postmodern frame of reference (which frame Julia was always trying to explain to me and I kept failing to understand).

“We have to see the town of Mesnil,” Margaret said. “And I have to say something to Mrs. Frieseke. Your grandmother. Something that's between the two of us.”

Margaret had known that lady well, and part of the draw of the house for her, as for me, was the continued presence in it of my grandmother, whom she had never called anything other than Mrs. Frieseke.

“She once told me,” Margaret confided, “speaking of you, Nick, and I quote: ‘The woman he marries is going to have to love him an awful lot.'”

“I guess what you should really do is restore the whole thing to the way it was,” Ruth suggested, opening a bottle of red-with-a-label that Ben had selected in Pont l'Evêque.

Teddy coughed. “You'd have to know not just construction but theater to make
that
happen. Besides, if you look at it from here, it never was what it was. Memory creates, just like history. Unless you have a really good fossil record.”

We listened to the rain and tried collectively to imagine the establishment as it would have been seventy years before, when the Friesekes were living here. I pulled out a letter begun but neither completed nor sent back to Owosso, Michigan, by a visitor in 1925, which I had left within reach, together with the book it was hidden in—a prize awarded to Aunt Janet for stocking darning—after clearing out the jam closet two days before.

July 23

… to Lisieux, where Mrs. Frieseke met us. She was all in white, with lavender velvet ribbon,
[illeg.]
a wicker
[illeg.], [“Has anyone noticed a large wicker tray, while wandering through the house?” I asked. All shook their heads]
and wore smoked amber beads. She is tall with fine brown eyes and so vivacious and welcomed us so warmly saying Fred F. was so excited for two months that we were coming … a drive six and a half miles to their farm in the country … has barns,
[illeg.; carriage house?],
springhouse and dairy,
[illeg.]
and picturesque studio are the buildings scattered around. It is hilly like Sadie's Pennsylvania hills, and wooded like Mr. F.'s Michigan woods. Little Frances F. is ten, a sweet, winsome child, with blue eyes, two braids of brown hair. She is fair with turned-up nose. She has a little friend from Paris, Marcelle Joli, spending the summer with her. She has a tutor each morning
[“The schoolteacher from Mesnil,” I explained. “He would have been available during the summer”]
and practices her piano. Fred has just finished a large picture of his daughter seated at her own piano in her bedroom by her open window. She has so many rabbits—and a white spitz dog
[this was Wicky, who came before Chipette the poodle].
Their house is old, with scenic paper on walls—a library, dining room (was the kitchen) with its open fireplace and copper kettles—dresser, charcoal stove and china closet (like wardrobe) oak dining table—timbered—every floor red tile—dumb elevator from kitchen downstairs, next living room with scenic paper very old, old piano, vases … lunch served by two maids in pleated white aprons and black dresses. Their own cider like champagne, and Bordeaux wine—tomato salad and egg; egg soufflé and sliced ham;
[illeg.]
lamb, potatoes, carrots, beets, beans, peas (garnished) and
[illeg.]
vegetable dish; Romaine salad and pressed
[illeg.]
in loaf and sliced; fancy French sweets, fruit etc.; coffee in the library. Afterwards we walked about the place taking pictures—the cider mill was interesting, also the springhouse and pool—and the studio most of all.… We drove to Deauville, a famous watering place, and
[illeg.]
Back 11:30.
*

F. C. Frieseke,
The Practice Hour,
oil on canvas, 26 × 32 inches, 1926. Private collection.

Excursion to Deauville, 1919.
(Left to right,
Dr. and Mrs. Hally-Smith, Frances, Suzanne Hally-Smith, the Friesekes
.)

“The photograph of the group at Deauville, then—that's these visitors from the Midwest?”

“No, that's the dentist, Hally-Smith, and his family. I gather the Deauville run was a regular part of the routine for visitors. Marcelle, the girl who was here to play with Frances, was a Fresh Air kid from Paris. There were Americans visiting all the time. The painter George Biddle and his wife, Jane Belo, were in at the beginning, before the days of plumbing, even. When the Friesekes first bought this place of medieval comfort but more-than-Victorian splendor, they had to make use of the fields when nature called, and Jane Belo later said, ‘I've known that house from the thistle to the pull chain.' William Glackens and his wife and children came, and family or friends of the family from the States who were making the tour. Then, too, since they were so far out in the country, if Frieseke was painting someone on commission—a child's portrait, for example—my grandmother had to put the family up for the duration. So Stellita Stapleton, when she was standing in the garden holding her head still as she tried to blow gnats off her nose, had a mother not far off needing tea and sheets and lunch and her turn in a bathtub she could get to without balancing across a catwalk. The William Preston Harrisons of Los Angeles came with their little boy, who borrowed one of Frances's multitude of rabbits to hold while he was having his portrait done in the salon. They needed those two maids, and the cook, and Georges the Russian chauffeur—”

“That's what I was saying,” Ruth chimed in, gathering plates. “It's exactly the perfect situation for a bed-and-breakfast.”

The rain poured down; there was just enough wind to rattle the slates and shutters. We broached the calvados, and something brought the conversation around to the theme of ruination. We argued about the wreckage of war in terms of cost: the billions of dollars' worth of junk abandoned in the deserts of Iraq and Kuwait; the “amphibious” tanks still rusting in the gray salt water off Omaha and Sword, Utah and Juno beaches, their canvas skirts long melted away; the floating cement harbors (code-named Mulberries) that were uniquely designed and made and towed and positioned as part of the invasion's supply line—at what enormous expense!—and one of them was instantly destroyed by a freak storm. Thinking of the abandoned hulks of cars left to disintegrate at the bottom of our pasture, of the roofless cider press, and of the vanished and vanishing outbuildings, I found it easy to extrapolate to those other fortunes lost through war, the monuments to private industry quickly depreciated from the credit to the debit column.

The argument tried to veer toward the sentimental, toward a gauzy nostalgia for the good old days of chivalry—until I recalled Thérèse's telling me that in the days of William the Bastard's conquest of England (he sailed from Dives, a harbor only thirty miles from Mesnil, with 880 troop ships carrying sixty thousand soldiers, and other transport), a good suit of mail (with the rings welded) was worth as much as a small farm, and that the full equipment cost of the average armed knight, complete with horse, was equivalent to about three big expensive cars today. In terms of national treasure lost, then, and individual fortunes blasted away forever, not to mention dead people, the wreckage left behind the Conqueror's successful action could fairly be compared to the smoking ruin made of Normandy's cities in 1944, or, more recently, the destruction wrought in Bosnia or Kuwait.

“And yet it all looks so friendly on the Bayeux tapestry,” Margaret said. “So friendly and so—so
doable.
”

*   *   *

“Do you remember Christopher on my shoulders, when we walked after dinner that first summer and he talked with the owls?” I asked Julia when she telephoned in the middle of our late calvados. I figured she must be lonesome for the place and the occasion. She should be part of this.

On those lambent evenings, with their varying press of slow diners left in the house, Julia and I had often escaped to walk outdoors in the dusk, reaffirming the start of our own family. Dusk fell late in July and August; unless you were in deep woods, you could still see your way at ten-thirty. The moment we stepped out of the house, we'd see the bats swooping in swags out of the attic to hunt the moths that battered against windows lighted with kerosene lanterns, or Normandy's pallid and impotent mosquitoes. Owls hooted, and Christopher hooted back in a wistful, earnest, and amazingly skilled response that brought the real birds closer for a silent, circling look. The cows kept eating wherever they stood or ambled, in pastures that sprouted heavy dew as soon as the sun got low enough to let that happen; or else it was gently raining.

“Never mind the
petitio ad feminam
—in other words, can the sentiment,” Julia said, hearing me coming a mile away. “These phone calls are expensive. I'm just making sure Margaret and Ben got there safely, and that they're comfortable. I am their hostess, after all. And as far as Christopher goes, your son's been after me all day. He's on your side and wants to do you a favor by persuading me we have to buy. He took me to lunch to lay out his new plan for how to turn a Norman farm to fun and profit.”

I braced myself to hear again the reasons for us not to run a bed-and-breakfast. Teddy selected a log from the woodbox and put it on the fire. It hissed, since he'd cut it in the rain during the late afternoon, feeling impatient with the wait inside for dinner. Andalouse, lying next to the fire, groaned with pleasure.

“Did he feed you Chinese?” I asked Julia in as speedily noncommittal a change of subject as I could come up with on such short notice.

“A fish farm,” Julia said. “He wants to flood my one piece of flatland—that marshy place between the
douet
and the road where we noticed the poplars were down last year, and where the cows always find mud to roll in—and raise trout there. He's drawing up plans for interconnecting pools and dams and wants you to make him a map.”