A Place in Normandy (24 page)

TWENTY-SEVEN

“Once upon a time,” I told Margaret and Ruth, “Mesnil was inhabited by a group of sisters, all of my grandmother's generation, and all as devoted to her as she was to them. And they in turn were succeeded by their daughters, all of my mother's generation, and all of them equally devoted to each other. Yes, there were and are men here and there in the family, but it always seemed to be the females we encountered, and certainly the females who endured; and we always thought of them under their family name, Lafontaine, even when they'd been separated from that name for generations.

“Suzette, roughly my mother's age, danced with her in a fairy costume in the garden when they were six and ten. She's the weaver who organized the rug in the salon, and who used to live year-round on the hill on the other side of the valley, in a
chaumière
that I'll show you on our way back. She's moved to the Loiret now and complains that the white cows that look into her windows there are strangers. She once made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to promote friendship between Muslim, Jew, and Christian, walking all the way from Mesnil with her suitcase in a wheelbarrow, each night negotiating a place to sleep in whatever house she came to, where she would deliver her message of peace. She was one of about a dozen in that family. Julia is a genius at this and could tell you all their names, and many of their stories—whom they married, where, and when, and the names of their children.

Frances with Suzette performing in the garden, ca. 1925.

“The remade
pressoir
belongs to Suzette's sister Charlotte, who loves the memory of my grandmother's biscuits and comes every summer from the south with her children, some married and with their own children. The Lafontaines bought as many houses as they could in the
commune,
and kept them in the family.”

This group of three buildings, all vacant at the moment, had been inhabited when we first arrived in 1968; in the one on the right were two friends of the Lafontaine family, Mme. Rohe, a widow who was a painter, and Mlle. Gabry, a retired nurse who, like Mme. Rohe, had been captured, tortured, and incarcerated by the Germans during the war for their part in an underground radio operation in Paris. Eventually they had escaped from the prison where they were being held, and had made their way to freedom. I had never heard the whole story, and never from their own mouths, but they were now both dead. Their
chaumière,
of the half-timbered construction shared by all three buildings, was surrounded by flowers.

During that summer of 1968, we had been overwhelmed by the warmth of the welcome given us by these old friends, and friends of friends, of my mother's family, whose intimate attachment resumed as if there had been no break at all. It was, though, a bewildering lot of people. They spilled out across the countryside and met us unexpectedly at the market—and we wanted desperately to remember which was which. Julia's mother, writing home to a friend after a party at the house shared by Mme. Rohe and Mlle. Gabry, described one afternoon that year:

August 18, night

I think I told you there was an open house Saturday afternoon. This is the first day I wore slacks. Not having time to come back to my hotel and change I ended wearing a dress of Frances'. The party was about 75 people including Xopher
[Christopher, then two].
House is next to Tante Margot's where they
[i.e., the Kilmers, when we first arrived]
lived and
adorable.
Two ladies who have fixed it up. They were both in slacks! Anything you wanted to drink including scotch. Glasses had piece of tape with a number—an idea worth trying at home. There must have been 20 varieties of food passed, from tidbits like cheese, olives, sausages, to four kinds of sandwiches, teeny croissants, I couldn't tell you how many kinds of tarts and cakes.

Hopeless to figure out people but there was a nucleus I knew. Two who spoke English well. One married to an American Colonel who is visiting her mother. Other is maybe going to be my prize for Christy Cleland
[another story].
Thérèse Chevalier who teaches at Oxford but this year will be doing something in Lille two days a week and will have an apt. in Paris. She is simply a dear and so are her father and mother. He is Maurice Chevalier even to his joie de vivre.

Xopher had a field day. I think he will be a playboy. Said he liked the party because all the ladies kissed him.

The real Kilmer touch to me is that yesterday they had a piano delivered but we haul chairs up and down stairs for meals. Very late souper last night of soup, salad, cheese, fruit and bread pudding with framboise, and almost 11:00 before I got back.

Charlotte's place, the redone
pressoir,
was on our left. Having been speculating, on the other side of the Atlantic, about our own
pressoir,
I studied it with a keen eye but could see no way to make our ruin (which was much larger) anything like it. Charlotte's was charming and comfortable and not in the least industrial-looking. Farthest from the road, in the center of the group of buildings, was the cottage of Tante Margot Lafontaine, a
célibataire
(spinster) of my grandparents' generation, which had accommodated the whole batch of us when we first arrived—Julia and I along with Christopher, my parents, five of my much younger siblings, and a nephew-cousin-grandchild.

Julia, writing home earlier that summer in a stage of the campaign that would bring her mother to join us at arm's length, had described our living conditions within the broader context of Mesnil as we waited to get into the house, and then just after we moved in. The pleasures and dismays that are her reward for possessing acute powers of observation have stayed with her and, if anything, increased over the intervening years.

The Lafontaines own the whole area. There are about 100 of them. When Mama
[Frances]
was growing up there was just the main house, big with outhouses etc., but rather ugly, being Victorian. I have just seen it, not been inside. Mama says it is beautiful. Anyway, the family had ten children or so and have continued.

Actually Margot Lafontaine is single. Quite a few of the women around here are; Mama says it is because of the war taking so many men. All the people we meet have been affected directly by the war, the least being that their houses were occupied and everything destroyed. Mme. Sourice had three sons killed. Mme. Gesnier lost her only child, a son (her husband already dead). It's not that they are morbid or sad anymore; it's that I have never encountered this before and nothing is free from it. Also the people's acceptance (it has been over twenty years) is puzzling, or at least it doesn't make it easier for me to take in.

Again, Margot Lafontaine—I have not met her. She is sixty, a nurse, and lives in Paris. Her house is very lovely but rather small for eleven people. It is an old farmhouse, quite modest originally, and is being fixed up in a rustic manner quite slowly or … from year to year. It has six rooms, two of which we don't use as bedrooms (the dining-sitting room and the kitchen). All the rooms are small for a large family. Anyway there is electricity. The running water cannot be used for drinking, just washing etc. There is a spring nearby. No hot water—has to be heated on gas burners.

We spent four nights there. Everyone but us has had a bit of
turista
but all are fine now.

Mama's house needs a lot of work.
[We were putting ceilings into at least half the rooms.]
The kitchen, which was never civilized—being just for servants to work in and on the bottom floor, with dumbwaiters etc.… anyway it was a farmhouse with low ceilings and all, but a gentleman farmer—not like Margot Lafontaine's place—it is quite large with huge rooms, and done by the Friesekes in an elegant manner. This looks a little sad and silly in the form of wallpaper hanging in strips from the wall, of cupids of course, and a lid here and there of dear china. The terraced garden is very rich with cows and sheep.

Nick and I are now in our bedroom (Mama's room when she was a little girl). By firelight, candlelight and gas lantern light it looks fine, but … tomorrow as the sun rises I will once again see the dirt and feel the dirt. It is late. Somehow none of this is what it is like here—it is more of an outline.

In the same mail (demonstrating that their daughter had married an incorrigible optimist who showed more promise in advertising than he did in real estate), I had put my own letter to Julia's parents:

July 22, 1968

This is a lovely country; it rains all day and the sun shines all day and geese walk up and down the lawn
[sic].
Christopher wears his birthday raincoat all the time, as well as some French boots we got him. Someone goes shopping every day. There is so much needed for the house, as well as for the survival of its customers. Since there is as yet no electricity (they are putting it in now and then, when reminded) we have no fridge; so shopping has to be done almost this morning for this evening. But we are in process of arranging for gas stove, hot water,
chauffage central;
we've got glass in the windows; and we've painted the kitchen; the toilets work when you pour water into them, which we get from the pump out back. We've got beds. We are moving right along.

The last roll of film, if it comes out, should give you a good idea of the outside of the house and the grounds. The little peasant-looking houses are on either side of the main house and are both inhabited. The road, or lane, goes down to the main road by means of a steep hill and there is a fairly constant stream of animal traffic: goats, chickens, sheep, cows, ducks, turkeys.… The ruins of the cider press are halfway down the hill in front of the house, as you look over the valley; the ruins of the stable to the left.

You can still guess at what the house was once. Some of the furniture is left, a couple of the rugs terribly battered. No paintings, of course. We can't think in terms of restoring it. It would be difficult and the result would be most uncomfortable without a slew of servants. What is making me most impatient right now is the wait for the stuff I've ordered so that I can put up bookshelves, so that we can get all the books out of closets, cupboards and attic, and look into them.

We're off this morning to Honfleur, or Caen, or a castle to look at Delacroix paintings and a moat—depending on the weather in half an hour.

Now. The room in which I am sitting is the world's perfect guest room.…

“There were eight in Tante Margot's generation that Julia could tell you of,” I said to Margaret and Ruth. “One male, who got the house, and seven females, including Suzette and Charlotte's mother, who lived the next town over, and Thérèse's mother. The Lafontaines' house”—I pointed to it; we'd been walking along the road, uphill, in the direction of the town, between steeply rising fields bordered with fern, thistles, nettles, or horsetail, under the dripping trees that lined the road, Andalouse always keeping to the middle, as indifferent to the rain as if it were mere chickens—“there, on the left, the funny-looking brick one with the steep roof and the hundred chimneys and enough windows to qualify as a château—we thought of it as Victorian, but it's really late sixteenth-century and has a tennis court somewhere. It gets called either La Maison Mère or Le Château Lafontaine.”

“It's younger than yours,” Ruth said.

“Depending on whom you believe,” I warned. “But it was built to be splendid, unlike ours, which had its splendor thrust upon it.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

We continued uphill, our rubber boots clunking on the pavement or squelching in the mud beside it, and crossed the spring from which we had drawn our drinking water that first summer, in three-foot-tall plastic pitchers that we hauled back to Tante Margot's
chaumière.
Off to our right, from a vantage point in the road high enough that we could see straight across the valley as far as my house, the swirl of caked mud in a drive showed the industry of the Bouquerels' farm. Year-round residents of the town, they did dairy, the whole business, as it used to be done on my land—or rather, the land that I realized I was accidentally thinking of as mine. We drank in the scents of dairy, and grass, and earth, and rain, with woodsmoke wreathing through it.

“There's your house,” Margaret said, rubbing it in. She pointed back at the black cube shining in the rain; Ben's smoke wiggled upward from the chimney on the far end from us, crows wheeling around it as if it carried something edible. “It just takes your heart and gives it a good jerk, doesn't it?”

I nodded.

“And from here, the prospect pleases. It looks perfect from this spot,” Margaret said. “There's nothing like it in Cambridge. Not even in Brooklyn.”