A Place in Normandy (11 page)

I needed to work if I wanted to move if I wanted to live, though, which always seemed to include an aspect of expansion. But even so, while drinking my coffee I made a careful and clear-eyed analysis of past performance and concluded that in spite of my appearing to agree with Julia's opinion, if I did not fabricate my blockade in the chimney at once, I would end up having to dodge the roll of wire for days, or losing it under something, or finding another use for it.

I knew enough about chimneys to take my clothes off first in order to save having to wash them after. I was not going to be here long; if I washed clothes, I would have to try the temperamental washing machine, and anything I washed I would then be obliged to dry by grace of the equally temperamental weather. My task was simple and easily done. After five minutes' work inside the chimney, I thought I might try the new shower, which I had never used since it had been completed only the year before, on the very morning I was leaving. That would also get me upstairs for the first time.

I climbed the grand if decaying staircase past the jam closet. My habit, like that of my forebears, was to hold my breath and speed up when passing the jam closet, like a child skirting a graveyard. It took up the space between me and the salon on the right side as I climbed to the second floor. I imagined the staircase to be an addition of the late sixteenth century, since prior to that no one would have wanted to expend precious interior space on stairs: in Norman country houses, the expected route from first to second floors was via an outside staircase on one end of the building. What had originally been a simple square room in the center of each of the first three floors had thus later been disrupted by these interloping staircases, and by the various uses (such as the jam closet and the bathroom over it) to which the excess space around the stairs had been put. Because the ceilings of the first floor were so low, the staircase crossed the width of the house in one straight run and led through double doors into the corridor upstairs along the west side, onto which all the rooms on that floor opened. I turned south (or left) along the hallway I had lined with bookshelves, hunting for a towel. The architect Mesnier, when he reenvisioned the house in the early nineteenth century, had intended it to be entered, for formal purposes, through a double door at the foot of the stairs, which we never opened. Through this door Mesnier had been able to welcome, directly from the garden, guests who had been obliged to walk around the outside of the house, under the library windows. The front doors, when thrown open to the garden, immediately prohibited lateral inward motion, blocking as they did the jam closet on one side and, on the other, the dining room (which in those days was the kitchen.)

When you turned left at the top of the stairs, the first room you came to was the billiard room. This room, the second in from the south end, connecting to what became my mother's bedroom by a walk-through closet, was paneled in oak that had survived the refugees. Above its fireplace, faced in green marble, was the only date I ever found in the house, inlaid in wood between couchant billiard cues over the mirror: 1836, following the joined family names, Mesnier-Bréard, of the couple responsible for a number of the building's improvements. It was the Mesnier-Bréards who had reoriented the house to face east and tricked the facade into looking like stone; they who had added paneling to many rooms, and clothed the walls of dining room, staircase, and upstairs corridor in plaster meant to mimic (once again) their beloved, dismal stone; they who had painted the woodwork around the doors to resemble marble, and certain of the marble fixtures to resemble wood. It was they who had designed the garden's terraces.

If, like me, you enjoy digging up the root meanings of words (it is another, efficient way to ensure that no flat surface will be without its heap of reference materials), you may be interested to learn that a
mesnier
was originally a man “attached” to a house, a domestic or officer of some kind, perhaps corresponding to an English steward (which itself yields the name Stewart).
Mesnier
has the same root as
Mesnil.
This part of Normandy is known as the Pays d'Auge because an
auge
is a trough or a valley, in this case primarily that of the River Touques. The word
auge
“evokes humidity,” according to my book on the meanings of Norman place names, which now lay open on the dining table downstairs. (A table with room for ten diners could accommodate many works-in-progress, so long as I enjoyed my solitary free run of this place.) Our corner of the Pays d'Auge is filled with towns that include
mesnil
in their names. Usually denoting a location established as the equivalent of a manor prior to the time of Charlemagne, the word appears on the map in a number of variants—
magny, mangny, masnil, many, masny, menus
—all of which suggest our
mansion
(French
maison
) and mean, roughly, “domain.”
Le Mesnil Mauger
thus means “Mauger's domain.” That the nearest settlement to me had been named more than a thousand years before came as no surprise, given that a Roman road passed through Mesnil. What was more, the Roman roads themselves followed existing tracks carved into the land either by game or by the indigenous Gallic tribe whose name their Roman conquerors recorded as Lexovii (after whom Lexovium, or Lieuvin, now Lisieux, where they had a fortified encampment, took
its
name).

The Romans left a legacy of place names, and the Vikings (or Normans) interposed others. You can map the territorial successes of the Viking raiders in the Norman region (as well as their ferocity), after their invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries, by the incidence of the Nordic word
bec,
meaning “stream.” The stream that cut between our hill and Mont Ange (Mount Angel) opposite, from which peak the mule sang in the early morning—I had heard it this very day—was sometimes known as the Virebec, or Vitrebec. The composer Charles Gounod once addressed a poem to it that my neighbor Mme. de Longpré had often promised to show me. Gounod had also selected the organ that continued to pontificate on special occasions in Notre Dame du Mesnil, under the influence of that same neighbor.

I'd heard threats of rain from Mme. Vera, and the clouds were active, but the day outside the billiard room's shutters, when I opened them for light to find a towel by, was still hot and dry.

My grandparents had used the billiard room as their bedroom. Fred enjoyed the game, which he played with fellow members of the American Artist Club in Paris, but he kept no table in Normandy. Julia and I had expected our children to sleep in this room when they were young, since we occupied the adjacent chamber and so could get to them easily through the passage closet during the night. Because of its scabbed oak paneling, however, they found the room gloomy, despite its view of the garden's pond and topiary yew tree. (The latter was recovering even more triumphantly than my grandmother's espaliered fruit trees; there was no sign now of its former basket shape.) I looked down at what had been hawthorn and box hedges, now outrageously overgrown into sagging walls of green. The hawthorn was in bloom.

Tea in the garden, 1928.
(Left to right,
Agnes Walsh O'Bryan, Mrs. Frieseke, Frances, Mr. Frieseke.) Photo Grattan O'Bryan

In spite of the fact that the door opening onto the corridor had a glass panel that allowed light to enter from that side as well, our daughter Maizie always claimed that the only reason the room did not fill up with witches at night was that witches were afraid of spiders. Although it was too late to improve the room's ambience for the children, I had recently installed a mural in segments occupying panels all around the room; taking advantage of the windows and mirrors, it adapted the circular pond in the garden, so that when you stood in the center of the room, you felt you were also in the midst of the pond, which had somehow lifted itself out of the garden and into the house. Should the house become mine, it was my seditious intent sacrilegiously to violate this somber chamber by painting the wood panels white.

The billiard room's main purpose now was to hold the linen closet. I pulled out a towel for my delayed shower and noticed that the volume of sheets and towels seemed much diminished this year. I am not good at sheets, but I do have a memory for bulk, and the bulk of cloth was considerably less. If linens were missing, as well as the wicker tray … how easily might the other furnishings of this house I thought to take over wander out into the countryside?

Now that I had opened the room's windows to the unusual hot breeze and sunlight, I was obliged to sweep up the hordes of dead flies and bees that had collected at the end of the corridor next to my mother's bedroom, under the southwest window, where they invariably gathered when the house was closed. Then I went for my reward.

The second-floor bathroom occupied the same centrally located corner as the jam closet and entrance hall beneath it. It was narrow and L-shaped, and when you stood in the corridor at the top of the grand stairway, facing down, with the bathroom door on your left (once painted a hideous fake faux-oak and more recently desecrated by me with a
couche
of plain “French” gray semi-gloss house paint), you could look across the stairwell at a wall into which were set two little windows that provided an unobstructed view of the bathroom's activities—unless, that is, the occupant had thought to draw the curtains inside. The intention behind this arrangement was to allow daylight from the bathroom's garden window to reach the stairwell, but unwitting or unwarned visitors sometimes found things getting rather informal when they or someone in the family who wished to shower crossed the gauntlet of those two windows.

This bathroom could also be entered from the bedroom adjacent to it on the side that was not a stairwell, by means of a low doorway into which a step had been inserted. This could give the early riser a rude awakening if it didn't knock him out, but it picked up one of the architectural themes of the floor below. With the advent of the new shower, the third entrance that the bathroom once enjoyed—via the passage closet into the billiard room—had been suppressed.

I walked in to take my maiden joy of the shower and learned that the bathroom could now also be entered through the floor.

I stood agape. The plumber's
gars
the day before had tactfully refrained from mentioning that the floor of the
salle d'eau
had essentially rotted out. Or had he assumed I knew and, being an American, simply accepted the fact that I could stare down through openings between the tiles into the darkness of the jam closet below? The toilet, repaired the previous year by the same large men who had installed the shower in this little room, was evidently still leaking. It was impossible to guess how much support, if any, might remain under the tiles. I tiptoed out of the room, distributing my weight as broadly as I could.

If bathing was my primary concern, I had an alternative to the new shower: the six-foot tub in the first floor
salle d'eau,
off the salon and connecting to the guest bedroom. This bathroom, because it was at the far end of the house from the furnace room, had been provided with its own hot-water heater, a geyser that ran on propane tanks, which I would have to drag out of the downstairs kitchen and hook up myself outside. Once the geyser's pilot was lighted, the force of the cold water running through the thermostat was supposed to cause a plume of fire to heat the flow to tub or basin. As with my parents' Citroën
familiale,
I hated the heater as much as I distrusted it. It was fine when it worked, but the flame liked to blow itself out just as its victim attained the point of no return, and I worried that I was endangering my soul whenever I tried to light the pilot.

With a spirit that M. Thouroude would have recognized I determined to make the upstairs bathroom safe enough to let me damn well take my shower. Was I not the potential master of this house, and monarch of all I surveyed? I was certainly dressed for it, if I'd learned nothing else from the story of the emperor's new suit. I put on a pair of pants and went to have a look in the
cave
for some planks with which to rig a temporary emergency floor.

The
cave
was the ground-floor storeroom where we tried to keep tools and lumber. The room next to it, under the first-floor bathroom, was used to house firewood, though there were signs that the spirit of the place had also moved Mme. Vera's goats to shelter here during the winter. To reach the
cave
I first had to go outdoors. Along the west side of the house, next to the driveway, on the level that, because it was below the first one acknowledged to be habitable, was called the
sous-sol,
were five rooms. Only two of these, the downstairs kitchen and the laundry room at the center, connected either to each other or to the
rez-de-chaussée
—which I, being American, insisted on calling the first floor, while what I called the second floor was what the Mesnier-Bréards would have termed the first.