A Place in Normandy (2 page)

I filled bottles with cider and set them on the drainboard. We'd been married long enough that our silences and diversionary actions could not help but be part of the discussion. I plinked bottles, and Julia turned the pages of the newspaper. We listened to the rain and did not mention either the circadian rhythms or the roof.

“And every time you used to add on to
this
house to give us elbow room,” Julia continued, picking up a line of argument offered to her by the rain, or the article, and building on it, “in case you've forgotten, I'd immediately get pregnant! Every time!”

I checked the boiling bottle caps.

“If we're going to be forever fated with that equation,” Julia persisted, “and I have to carry enough infants to fill up all those rooms―well, I'm going to need help. I'll kill you if you even look at me like I'm some youngster with high breasts! Are you ready for the cooperative-nursery-school routine again?”

“It's just an old damned farm,” I said, “not midlife off-track sex.”

“That place in Normandy is full of ghosts,” Julia said. “I don't want to go on about it, but all of them are your relatives. And nice as they may be, not one of them picks up after himself.”

Our heads, when we lay in our usual bed in the Normandy house, whether listening for the phone or (when they were younger) for the children, or just hearing the night moving, were used to resting in the corner of my grandparents' library, at the southwest end of the house, on the first floor. Six feet from our bed, outdoors, on the shallow brick staircase running alongside the house between the driveway and what had been the formal garden, was the spot where my mother and my father, who had established a friendship by correspondence, had first met in the flesh. Beyond that spot lay declining orchard pastures, the ruins of the stable, and the drive, heading precipitously downhill until it disappeared into an unkempt arch of lindens and chestnuts, after which it crossed the brick bridge spanning the stream or
douet
(sometimes called the Douet Margot, and sometimes the Virebec) and met the road linking Mesnil and Fierville. Along this road were people who had been friends and acquaintances and second family of my family for three generations. It wasn't just ghosts; these people were as alive as Julia and I, and we had a place among them if we wanted it.

Walkway outside the library window, 1995. Photo by author

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that adding our money to our (or at least my) spiritual yearning was not unlike willfully becoming a compulsive gambler, another way to toss time, energy, and treasure—hope and regret—into the welcoming pit of an illusion. Might we not in fairness claim that we could always save ourselves—stop anytime we liked—since all the bewilderment, beauty, and fury we needed to offset the seduction of romance were amply available within these fifty acres of old Norman farm?

“We'll make it practical,” I promised. I started capping bottles, looking practical.

“The damn thing's falling apart,” Julia said.
Like an old whore who doesn't know when to get in off the street,
she did not say,
but keeps on flagging johns, because she's good at it and there's always a new one coming along. Like you,
she did not say.

I did not mention the allure that lay in maintaining this portion of my family's history. Given that I had nine siblings, who, with their progeny, were all potential visitors to the old place, this was an argument pointed in forty-some directions and all too ready to backfire. I could argue that the past would lose its value if it had no present physical manifestation, and that neither of us would be able to bear to refer to the place only in the past tense. Or I could argue …

“I hate to fly,” Julia said.

Three holes in the tender place between the tendons on the inside of my right wrist, drilled in by her nails during flights I had taken with her, kept me from forgetting this fact.

By now it was after ten o'clock at night. Jacob's bull fiddle had stopped; the other three children, long out of the house, were now fending for themselves elsewhere. Meanwhile, in the darkness under our library-bedroom window in Normandy, the cows were at this very moment chewing grass soaked with night dew. In another hour, dawn would visit the sky over the hill with cold light, and the birds would stir outdoors and make much of themselves in the hawthorns near the house or in the cover of the apple trees. We'd hear the donkey bray from the next hill to waken Mme. Vera's rooster, and later, as we began our day, the bell for the morning Angelus, rung from the church in Mesnil. Once it was rung by an old friend, now buried within the sound of its voice.

“The problem with you is that you're in love,” Julia said. “Suppose it's too much? Suppose this breaks your heart? Hell, who cares if it breaks
your
heart; what if it breaks
mine?
”

Nevertheless—and I truly do not know how this happened—we agreed that I'd go over for several days starting at the end of May, to get a realistic idea of how the land lay. The place had been rented to friends for the end of the summer, and I might as well take this opportunity, so I said, to be sure things would be reasonably safe for our tenants. Since Jacob was in high school still, Julia would stay home with him. That would also keep her honest, she pointed out: she would be tied to the mast while I flirted with the sirens, their subtle bodies glinting through diaphanous garments made of nothing more substantial than windblown sheets of mist, their seductive songs tempting us all onto the rocks of ruin with their promises of green pastures, rushing clouds, and cuckoos.

“You take a look,” Julia said. “See what those girls have to say. Meanwhile, maybe I'll steer this boat.”

TWO

All the east foreshadows night. Day now belongs only to the western sky, still red with sunset. What more I see of France, before I land, will be in this long twilight of late spring. I nose the
Spirit of St. Louis
lower, while I study the farms and villages—the signs I can't read, the narrow, shop-lined streets, the walled-in barnyards. Fields are well groomed, fertile and peaceful.…

    People come running out as I skim low over their houses—blue-jeaned peasants, white-aproned wives, children scrambling between them, all bareheaded and looking as though they'd jumped up from the supper table to search for the noise above their roofs.

—Charles Lindbergh,
The Spirit of St. Louis

 

On May 21, 1927, at about nine-thirty in the evening, Charles Lindbergh, thirty hours out of New York, after turning southwest at Deauville on the last leg of his flight to Paris, gazed down out of his plane's cockpit. Playing in the pasture below her house in Mesnil, my mother, Frances Frieseke, looked up briefly before continuing her game, which, since she was all of thirteen years old, was as important to her as anything Lindbergh was doing. Now, more than three generations later, my train from Paris followed, but in reverse, the last stretch of Lindbergh's route. At first we crossed, frequently, the stately blue meanders of the Seine. Seeing the barges pondering along the river reminded me of a plan hatched by my godson Gabriel, with whose family I had stayed the previous night: he proposed plotting a beeline from Paris to Le Havre, at the Seine's mouth, and using kayaks to traverse the sewer systems of the towns lying in the river's embracing loops, a scheme that would cut the length of the trip by two thirds. Gabriel has inherited something of his father's approach to complex problems, itself modeled on Alexander's solution to the Gordian knot: it was his father who, at the age of eleven, showed Art Buchwald how to
do
the Louvre in five minutes.

The organization of the countryside out the train window was the same as it had been for hundreds of years—just as Lindbergh had seen it in the gloaming from his plane, and as Julia and I had first gazed on it in 1968, both surprised and delighted to find colors and patterns of landscape that we had seen described in paintings dating from as far back as the fifteenth century. In the flatlands the fields were broad and separated by pollarded hedges. This was wheat-growing country, only recently planted with American corn, or maize. Occasionally I spotted the startling scarlet flash of a pioneer poppy, or yellow fields of mustardlike rape (colza, raised for canola oil); and sometimes the brilliant low blue flickering pondscape of a field of flax.

The train wanted two hours to reach Pont l'Evêque from Paris. Failing a strike or some other act of God, French trains are efficient, comfortable, and precisely on time. I could rely on the fact that a train scheduled to arrive at Evreux at 10:17 would indeed arrive at 10:17. Passengers were informed by loudspeaker that the train would stop for one minute; at 10:18 we would depart as promised.

After Evreux, when the hills started, so did the orchards, in which were frequently pastured the black-and-white native Norman cows. Suzette, a friend of Julia's and mine, an old playmate of my mother's, and a member of our extended almost family in France, had recently moved from Mesnil to the Loiret and now lamented about the white long-horned cattle that looked into the windows of her rented presbytery. “They are strangers,” she said. “I am lonesome for the Norman cows as if they were my sisters.”

Whenever I was in Cambridge, I myself always felt lonesome for the scale of the French landscape, which now offered me a reassuring physical comfort as the train raced through it. This being the end of May, spring was well over. The apple orchards had surrendered their blossoms and settled down to reap the consequences of their profligate display. Only a few fruit trees stood out here and there, still in bloom. The farmhouses were surrounded by fences that protected their flowers and kitchen gardens from the cattle. I saw roses, though in less profusion than in Paris; Paris had been awash in roses. The countryside paid more attention to what might be eaten.

The land we were heading into was steep and wet and, once deprived of its woods, good for no large-scale agriculture or husbandry other than apple trees, cows, and hay. Although Normandy is slowly changing along with most other parts of the world where farming is in serious decline, many Norman towns and villages are still lapped at their edges by fields and orchards. The landscape out my window remained as it had been (minus the devastations of war) when the allied troops moved through it toward Paris in the late summer following D day, the allied Normandy action that made the name of the province a household word.

My train reached Pont l'Evêque shortly before noon. I had planned my arrival for midday, but not too late—that is, before that phenomenon of provincial paralysis called
le déjeuner
(lunch) began to slam the shutters on all commercial activity. I wanted to shop for essentials before finding out what had happened to the house in my absence. The place in Normandy alone might be responsible for the survival of the future perfect tense in the conditional mood, since I knew from long experience that when I arrived, something might always have gone wrong. The previous year, for example, I had arranged that while I was away, an impossible little bathtub was to be removed from the second-floor
salle d'eau
(bathroom). Resembling the front end of an old VW sedan turned upside down, the tub had to be entered from the narrow end, a feat best attempted by persons with long legs. Once in, however, one had nowhere to put those legs, except around the ears. I had left directions for this fixture to be replaced by a shower.

When I got to the house that year, I found that the tub indeed had been removed from the bathroom, but rather than having vanished entirely, as I had wished, it now sat forlornly in a bedroom, a cast iron memorial to
temps perdu.
Where I had expected a shower cabinet, there was instead a low, square china basin set onto the floor, in the place where the tub had been, with bare plaster walls next to it on two sides, and the passage door with its glass pane (which connected to a closet also entered from the billiard room) forming the third side. The project required further elaboration. As Julia might have pointed out, the best directions are not always those administered from afar. As to the offending tub, it remained in the bedroom until one afternoon when I was entertaining a prospective client over tea in the garden, during which collation it was carried away by a small parade of jocular apprentice plumbers.

I was prepared for cold and wet, but when I arrived in Pont l'Evêque, I found that the day was hot and offered a mild, dry wind—unusual for Normandy, especially this early in the season. Fresh from the train, I left my bags with the
chef de gare,
promising to pick them up once I had my car, and walked through the town.

School would be in session for another two months, and the summer's tourism had not yet begun to swell the population, which in winter was between three and four thousand souls. A sort of expanded version of a small French country town, Pont l'Evêque is arrayed principally along a main street that points between Rouen and Caen, with outriding elements springing up along two perpendicular cross streets both descended from Roman roads, one on each side of the River Touques. Under its bunting of flags—all the European Union countries' banners, stretched repeatedly across the main street, as if this were a used-car lot—a few men were fishing from the town's bridges.