A Place in Normandy (15 page)

Once the Friesekes started using the property, in 1919, they found, even after they banished the cheese operation, that it was still hard to get help in a house in which the kitchen was on the ground floor and the dining room on the first, the two being linked only by a narrow and treacherous inside staircase. Even for Parisian servants used to long corridors that accentuated the gulf between the classes of served (dining room) and servant (kitchen), this seemed too much. Therefore, the dumbwaiter was installed. It was an efficient contraption and survived the war better than much else in the house. How the imagined patrons of our never-to-happen B&B would have loved to watch Julia and me, their genial hostess and host, quaintly dragging their morning coffee to them on it, along with fresh flowers gathered from the garden while they slept! But Julia and I, as the perennial servants of our young family, had soon discovered that we had less use for the dumbwaiter than did the children who liked to ride it, and I tore it out, replacing its upper terminal in the butler's pantry with a small half-kitchen. This was the only kitchen we normally used unless there were numerous people in the house.

The laundry room had a cement sink running all the way down one side, designed to accommodate the wet part of the old cheese-making operation. It drained, like the kitchen sink, out a culvert under the driveway and into the fields. It was here that Julia was standing on the last morning of Margaret's visit, scrubbing diapers in a metal washtub balanced in the sink. The heavy wooden door to the outside was open to allow her to run out now and then into the pasture to test the intentions of the weather.

Margaret had taken Amos up the hill after breakfast to show him the woods and the view of the house from on high. They were about to drive to Paris, to fly to a place filled with romance, sun, comfort, and luxury: Provence, a part of the world where life was gay and carefree and nobody needed diapers. Amos went upstairs to pack while Margaret stood in the driveway to share a last gossip with Julia. Noticing the work-in-progress, she jockeyed under her skirt, did that practiced feminine two-step shimmy, and tossed her underpants into the washpan. This was long before Madonna perfected the routine, a grand gesture of something like noblesse oblige, useful almost anywhere, and at almost any time, if the goal is to stop traffic.

“As long as you're at it anyway, you don't mind, do you, lovey?” Margaret said. “It's the funniest thing, but when I went to pack at home, I couldn't find a single extra pair.”

As she and Amos drove away, Margaret rolled the elastic of her underpants up in the car window to hold them, fluttering, to dry
en volant.
Amos and Margaret looked a gallant, very on-the-road-to-Paris parade disappearing down the drive toward their eventual divorce.

Now, a week or so later, with the shadow of Duchesse's passing weighing heavy on us, Margaret's daughter Millie arrived and had to be revived while the children, their faces white, were assured that the young woman was only indulging in a bit of self-expression and had not really died like their beloved dog.

Millie's trek was to take her through India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. She was convinced that though she planned to stay with friends, hardship and privation lay before her, and she must be self-sufficient. Her person-sized backpack was not large enough for everything she imagined she would need, so she was also festooned with baskets, valises, purses, and bags. We noted a square black wicker suitcase the size of a ham, with stiff round wooden oversized handles, which anyone who had ever traveled a block from home would have known could only be trouble. During the second day of Millie's visit, Julia began dropping hints about efficiency in packing, pointing out that if Millie intended to hike the mountains of Afghanistan, she should remember how she had felt after the two-mile climb from Fierville, and maybe carry less. “For instance,” Julia asked, pointing out this most uselessly encumbering of Millie's containers, “what on earth is that black thing good for?”

“Underpants,” Millie said. She was provisioned with seventeen pair she'd scavenged at home in the States. It was too late for the information to do her mother much good: the overflow joined the trunk of emergency clothes in the house. The black wicker object, too small for a picnic basket, too dumb for a suitcase, kicked around for the next dozen years until one day I had to award a prize to one of Margaret's visiting grandsons (Millie's nephew), who lugged it back to New York, a useful reminder never to win prizes.

EIGHTEEN

The jam closet could no longer be avoided. I had houseguests in my immediate future, as well as major construction pending in the upstairs bathroom, the floor of which was the jam closet's ceiling. The jam closet, like the bathroom, was three feet wide and about nine deep, filling the space between the stairs and the salon. The wastepipe from the leaking toilet ran through it. For years, it had been haunting me like the least examined of bad consciences.

Other than my frightening glimpse through the rotted bathroom floor, and its converse, that brief shuddering glance at the closet's ceiling, I had not really looked into it yet. Given the amount of dirt and rot that would inevitably accompany the labor as
torchis
and distressed joists came out, I knew I should clean the closet back to the bare walls—that is, if there
were
any walls. As long as it was raining, and since my time would soon be taken up by my role as host, I decided to use this morning for the job.

The closet had no door. Its opening next to the foot of the stairs was normally covered by a curtain, hung in such a way as to mask the stored materials as well as the wastepipe. Mercifully, the closet had no light. I had not seen the farthest reaches of the space since 1968, when, as Julia's mother had recounted in her letter, I retrieved the family's boxed books from friends, and from the attic, and built shelves everywhere in the house I could think of. What I had been unable to make shelves for had been stored either in the woodbox next to the dining-room fireplace or in the depths of the jam closet, on shelves where my grandmother's fabled jams had once been kept (blackberry and cherry from the woods; currant, gooseberry, apricot, and elderberry from her kitchen garden; plum from the tree that was still producing next to the house and whose cropped limb would not give up; pear and apple from the espaliered trees against the cider press; and wild strawberry). The more accessible environs of the jam closet had later become a repository for broken furniture and, in front of that, for gardening tools and odds and ends and other things that people like the O'Banyons had no use for. (It was not impossible that my tray would turn up there.)

The Friesekes had collected books seriously. My mother's mother's father, John Duross O'Bryan, who became somewhat wealthy from time to time, used to bring portions of his large family (there were eleven children, of whom seven lived) across the Atlantic from Philadelphia for extended stays. When he finally retired to Paris, in the 1890s, he brought his library with him. After he died suddenly of appendicitis in 1904, following an operation performed in the Paris apartment (at 206 Boulevard Raspail), his daughter Sarah, my grandmother, was able to commit her future to the fiscal risk at which he had demurred: she married an American artist. She did so, in fact, while still wearing mourning; my grandmother was a determined individual. In due course many of her father's books came to the house in Normandy, including his collection of Shakespeare editions and books concerning the life of Napoleon; his
Lives of the Lord Chief Justices of England
(in twelve volumes),
Lives of the Saints
(in eighteen), and
Lives of the Queens of England
(fourteen); works in Greek and Latin; numerous volumes on Irish history and the “Irish problem” (O'Bryan having been a committed partisan); and Bancroft's
Works
and
History of the Civil War.

Since I depend on books, I was curious to find out what had been consigned to this oubliette so many years ago. I hauled out tools and furniture and stored them in a dry part of the
cave,
and then, using a lamp on a long extension cord, learned with relief that the ceiling above the books was dry, whole, and free of mushrooms. I began pulling out books and stacking them on the stairs; as I stacked, I plotted the next oubliette, beside the attic stairway. (I had not been up to the attic yet.) Once up to my armpits in these books, I would, I knew, be a lost cause, and would simply disappear until something interrupted.

When we first unpacked the library, one of my goals was to keep its existential character. Those books that I found most curious or appropriate I put into the library: my grandfather Frieseke's books on fly fishing and bridge, his collection of humorous sketches, his Hazlitt, and his monographs on certain painters whose work he admired; my great-grandmother's tomes on domestic economy and the diseases of swine and poultry; my grandmother's volumes on gardening and porcelain, her Trollope and Scott, her W. H. Hudson, Lafcadio Hearn, and James Joyce; and my great-grandfather's Napoleon collection, which I consulted during the summer when I finally read
War and Peace,
shamed into it by Julia, who reread it every three years.

Second First Communion of Frances, 1925,
at center, left of Frances,
l'abbé Quesnel, pastor of Mesnil.

To unpack the jam closet was to entertain a jumble of family history, since in the days in 1968 when I had occupied myself with the obverse of this task, anything I had found sequestered in a book, whatever the thing and whatever the book, I had left exactly where it was, thinking the coincidence of book and thing and place a historical gesture that would be destroyed if those elements were to be separated. A paper tucked into a book, I felt, spoke of or to a person, place, and time we did not want to lose. Therefore, the holy card distributed at the time of my mother's second First Solemn Communion in 1925, for example, must stay between pages 72 and 73 of Stevenson's
Travels with a Donkey,
where it would edify, please, or surprise the next reader to come upon it.

As a matter of fact, my mother made three First Solemn Communions in Mesnil, under the direction of three large men in black robes, one spring after another, until she outgrew the dress. It was during the spring after the
third
that Lindbergh flew over. The theory in the parish was that children should be encouraged to keep participating in the rituals; but another, more important factor may have been that on account of poverty in the village, a girl's Communion dress might be her first and last real dress until she married. My mother's
first
First Holy Communion was commemorated in a photograph (tucked into a Philo Vance) taken after the occasion on the first terrace of the garden, in which were present, reading from right to left, my mother in her solemn dress; my grandmother and grandfather; Gayle and Mahdah Reddin (mother and daughter, Baha'is from Birmingham, Alabama, who stayed with the Friesekes long enough for my grandfather to paint a number of pictures of Mahdah); a woman I could not name; Germaine Pinchon, my mother's godmother, who rose early that morning with her mother (the next in line) to do the housework at their home in Les Authieux before the neighbors awoke. (M. Pinchon, at far left, enjoyed more success as a fly fisherman than as a painter, and Germaine and her mother were the only help the family could afford.) Next to Mme. Pinchon sat my grandmother's younger sister Janet, who studied voice all her life. In her youth she had to be accompanied to the singing teacher's in Paris by her sister Sadie, who acted as chaperon-interpreter and who treasured and often repeated the exasperated exclamation of the impresario: “Why could not God have had the kindness to place both the brain and the voice into one girl!?” Janet outdid even my grandmother when it came to risk in marriage, since the artist she chose to marry (also after her father died) was not only unsuccessful and faithless in matters of the heart, but also French, and Communist to boot.