The French House: An American Family, a Ruined Maison, and the Village That Restored Them All

by Don Wallace

  As we talked, we tried to match the places we identified with the most transcendent days of our lives to figure out where we did want to end up. They seemed to be either small villages or hidden corners of larger municipalities, beginning with Tonggs, the surf break Mindy grew up on in Honolulu, and Idyllwild, my family’s mountain cabin in California, on up to the Cretan hamlets we passed through on our way to Santorini: Agios Nicholaos, Kritsa, Lato. At this tiny village of Imerovigli, population four, where we hit bottom, we also began to bounce back. We thought of it as a final stop on our European foray, but the month in a whitewashed cave was actually a beginning.

  Crete and Santorini had taught us something: we liked islands. We liked the people drawn to islands, and we liked islanders. We liked remoteness. We didn’t mind storms and harsh conditions if we were out on the edge. It was in Paris that we’d come undone. Civilization seemed to disagree with us. Maybe, like a distracted modern couple in a B-grade disaster movie, we needed to cling to a precipice overlooking a volcano to snap out of it.

  On Christmas Day, Mindy and I were walking through the town square of Thira, the island’s center, when a man ran out of the post office. “You have a phone call!” he pantomimed, shouting. Amazingly, Mindy’s grandfather in Honolulu, Peepaw, had been staying on the line for hours, paying the international rate, in case his favorite grandchild would walk by. He had some news, too. Mindy had passed the bar: she was a lawyer and could set up a practice.

  After talking it over with me, Mindy phoned a professor in whose attic we’d stored a tent and some camping gear to set a date to pick up our stuff for the trip back. We were going home. We’d had our fling. The dream was over. And, you know, we were actually relieved to have finally woken up.

  • • •

  The professor lived in Tours, where Mindy had spent her Stanford undergraduate year abroad. Like many of us who wanted to be writers, Mindy had cultivated a bit of a rough edge in college. We from the West liked our cigarettes hand-rolled or at least unfiltered and our Wild Turkey neat. We had strong opinions: hell, we’d argue over handwriting versus typewriting! Drunk on the lees of the sixties, we had also, on wilder nights, swayed raptly for hours in bare, ruined choirs like the Fillmore and Winterland, listening to the Dead and the Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service.

  Of course we were, underneath it all, good, polite bourgeois youth from educated families, but just the same, in Tours during her year abroad, Mindy had found herself drawn into a much older and more courtly milieu, challenged to master the rules of French life and language as laid down by the formidable Madame Guedel.

  Once Mindy took up that gauntlet, Madame G warmed to Mindy and, after the term ended, invited her to stay on and experience life in a real French home: the bright air of sweet civilization; the crisp routines; the measured hours; the formality of a spade-bearded husband who presided over the dinner table and his wine cave, and sang in a medieval choir on Wednesdays and Sundays; the brooding Truffaut tension of the young teenage son, Daniel, who wanted to be a writer; and Gwened herself, now on a first-name basis, transformed at the threshold from a professor into a symbol of feminine France, the keeper of the flame in terms of cuisine, manners, culture, and especially conversation.

  You could say Gwened stepped into the chaos left behind by Dolly and gave Mindy a mother who acted like a mother, who had much to teach and the patience and firmness with which to do so; a mother who could call on Mindy’s better self—which would be, n’est-il pas, a French self—and who would never, ever raise a hand to her. We’ve said it.

  Calling from the Thira phone box, Mindy broke into tears at the sound of her teacher’s voice. “You sound tired, Mindy,” Gwened said after a tactful silence. “When you come back, I think you should go to my island home to rest and recover your spirits.”

  My island home.

  And where was that? Mindy asked, sniffling. Thinking better than Hawaii, where her mom would probably throw crockery at her.

  Belle Île, where Gwened’s grandfather was from. Kerbordardoué, where Gwened had bought an old farmhouse and slowly, bit by bit, assembled bits of land and outbuildings to make herself a refuge.

  Now it could be our refuge.

  We had to look at a map to even find Brittany, then the Bay of Biscay. The island itself didn’t qualify as large enough to be identified; it was perhaps one of a scatter of dots in the deep blue sea. But we examined the general area and made educated guesses. Finally, we looked at each other and asked the question: Why, after spending a month on an island as remote as Santorini, would we want to head straight out to another island, one almost as remote, to a village that sounded just as isolated as Imerovigli, in the dead of winter? Why not just pack our bags and go home?

  “So what do you want?” Mindy had asked at our nadir on the island of Santorini. It seemed nothing had changed. Neither of us could answer the question. But we said yes anyway. It was as if we had to search across an entire universe for a particular island and couldn’t stop looking until we found it.

  Chapter Three

  The Third Island

  Three years later, our second winter in New York City was the worst in a decade. Too many times, Mindy and I joined the huddled masses in a bus shelter, feet sunk in a drift of slushy, dirty snow, staring at some travel poster placed there to tempt us. The photos were almost always of islands in the Caribbean or Greece—ironically, often our own Santorini. Along with the other misérables, we stared at the posters unabashed, drunk with longing. We wanted an island like that. Who wouldn’t?

  One winter’s day, as I stood in the hall outside our cramped, illegal sublet apartment, tugging at my snow-soaked shoes, Mindy came to the door holding a sheet of paper folded in thirds: a letter. The moment she began reading it aloud, lightning struck. Suddenly the gods were speaking. They’d chosen a human voice so as not to frighten us off—the voice of a woman with a French accent. A familiar voice. Gwened Guedel was writing “to give a piece of news” as she quaintly put it. We heard it amid thunderclaps—unless that was my heart pounding:

  “A small house, in quite poor repair, has come up for sale in the village.”

  Gwened Guedel wasn’t really a goddess, but she was the first Frenchwoman I’d ever known. And Mindy’s stories had built her up grandly in my mind before I met her in person. The impressions I’d gathered over the years—we’d made a couple of visits to Belle Île since that first winter—had been of a scintillating but stern fairy godmother: love the shoes, fear the wand.

  Because Mindy was always on her toes around Gwened, I was, too. Her mental energy was exhausting. Even in her kitchen she darted and jabbed, light on her feet, as if in a knife fight refereed by Larousse Gastronomique: “Take that, you ham! En garde, mon tête du veau!” Petite and fashionable, more voluptuous than any college professor I’d ever seen, Gwened seemed to invite men to flock around her while maintaining that she only cared about their minds.

  Most of all, Gwened played the teacher. At every opportunity, she tweaked Mindy’s accent and grammar. Similarly, lowering her aim quite a few notches, she would take pains to acquaint me with my educational and cultural shortcomings. Not intentionally, of course. Well, it probably was intentional. With Gwened, intention was everything. All shortcomings were to be recognized as such and dealt with summarily, without delay. Cognizance mattered. And culture. Sans blague, was Gwened ever cultured! But that hadn’t stopped her from setting the hook on us as ruthlessly as a real estate speculator.

  “…quite poor repair…” Mindy repeated, holding the letter in her hand and looking at me. She was smiling. So was I. “Poor repair” could only mean one thing: cheap.

  Were we crazy?

  Maybe enchanted was the better word. Though we joked about it, there was something witchy about Gwened Guedel—in the modern, chic, Updike manner. Yet Gwened hardly needed clairvoyance to guess that this particular island village lingered in ou
r minds.

  Still, her writing out of the blue like this was unprecedented. It had been three years since we’d shown up at her door—and been shown the door the next day with a brisk “Enjoy the island!”

  On the island, a visit meant to last a week or two stretched into a month, then two months. Mindy and I got our mojo back, and then some, before stumbling over a new self-discovery: we couldn’t bear to leave. Our families in the United States, and even Gwened herself, hinted it was time to return and face the music, but like a pair of Peter Pans, we didn’t want to grow up. I’m embarrassed to say that Gwened had to kick us out.

  But our reluctance to leave must’ve made an impression, because her letter was written as if it were yesterday. Which for us it practically was. Captives of our New York daily grind, we looked backward to “island time” as if it were a window through which we might one day stroll again into a greener, saner world.

  We thought of Belle Île on dark nights when we needed to restore ourselves after some setback, such as my being invited to a second job interview at the New Yorker only to have the editor pick up the phone and arrange for “a better fit” at something called MotorBoating & Sailing. Or Mindy’s agent calling to say he’d accidentally mislaid the manuscript of her novel for an entire year, calling her “Penny” the whole time. Or just a little thing like finding a drowned and boiled cockroach in the tea strainer after we’d finished our cups of Earl Grey.

  After these New York moments, we would console ourselves with village scenes, treasures to be taken out and shaken to lifelike images in a crystal paperweight. On sunnier days, when we felt brave enough to make plans, one of us might pop the question—as in, “My dream would be a little house in a place like Kerbordardoué. What’s yours?”

  “The same.”

  So of course we were flattered to be approached, as Gwened no doubt intended. But that didn’t change the fact that the notion was lunacy. When you’re living on $17,000 a year, buying island cottages isn’t in your Top Ten priorities.

  Besides, we’d already settled on an island—that big one called Manhattan—although I must say it was doing its best to shake us off, the way a dog does fleas. Mindy and I were barely hanging on, working entry-level jobs at age thirty. And then there was Hawaii, where Mindy was born and raised. If we needed some island R & R, we could always stay with her mom in the graceful, old termite-ridden house on Diamond Head. We could squeeze in with her four brothers and fend off Mom’s boyfriends, eat Korean leftovers, and surf practically off her doorstep.

  And yet here came Gwened, eyes burning bright, bringing us the news that we needed another island—a third island—three thousand miles away. And here’s what I don’t understand even now, so many years later: we listened.

  “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to ask how much,” I said.

  Mindy nodded, thinking the same thing: cheap. “I’ll write her back.”

  “A house in Kerbordardoué. I wonder which one it is?”

  “I’ll call her.”

  Mindy put her hand on the black Bakelite wall phone, one of the apartment’s 1940s relics that contributed to the musty air of a time capsule. It was, of course, a dare. Were we still crazy? Still reckless? Still unembarrassed? Did we really think there was any point or sense to pursuing this blind alley, other than to reinforce previous bad decisions and to nurture the reveries that had led to us living underground on the black housing market and in a state of constant vigilance about keeping a low profile, like fugitives from the law?

  Were we, in other words, still us?

  • • •

  A month, two months, three months went by. We kept talking. Gwened’s preferred mode of communication was a handwritten letter in proud English, the composing of which undoubtedly added time to the process. Each letter had to cross the Atlantic, be read and discussed, then replied to by Mindy in carefully crafted French, dictionary at her elbow. The process became attenuated like a nineteenth-century epistolary novel. But eventually Gwened obtained a key to check out the interior. She wrote back: I regret to report that the house is in not-good shape.

  What upset her most, however, was the lack of a garden. Not to have even a terrace, where one could sit out in the afternoon, or a place to plant flowers—this was unthinkable. No wonder the house had been on the market for so long. In good faith I cannot advise you to buy it, Gwened wrote, until I have looked around at property in other villages.

  We were disappointed. Already we’d grown accustomed to thinking about our house in our village on our island. We’d begun to save money, just in case.

  For a long time Gwened didn’t write. We understood. She had her teaching and her family in Tours, the pressure of being a representative of La France Féminin, tending to her husband and his wine cave and the teenager who threw typewriters. We knew she could only visit Belle Île during school vacations. After a couple of months, though, we wrote. Her reply came a month later, saying she would canvass the island in the summer. Months went by.

  By the time she got back to us, almost a year had passed.

  Dear Friends,

  I am enclosing the list of the available houses in Belle Île. As you can see, the house next door is the cheapest. I went to see another one at 120,000 F but it is a ruin, damp with no sun. Sun is really the big advantage of the house in Kerbordardoué. Of course, I insist that it is not pleasant in July and August, since everyone is parking there.

  The price is now 300,000 F. I do not think there is any possibility of having it lower. Taxes should be added (+12, 15%) and at least 200,000 F for living in the house. The roof is full of holes and should be remade. There is one tap of cold water in the house, but no sink.

  …So having considered everything, I am convinced that the house is not a bad bargain. I went inside, and I was surprised to see that it is rather dry and healthy. Upstairs you can have two or three bedrooms, downstairs a nice, big kitchen about the size of my middle room, a bathroom, and a small room. For about 550,000 F on the whole, you could have a nice house. Of course everything has to be restored from the beginning.

  …I would love to have you as neighbors. I would help as much as I can for counseling the good enterprises in Belle Île. Good for you, one dollar is now worth 10 francs…

  Love to you both,

  Gwened

  We were right back where we started. The house still didn’t have any land for a garden, there seemed to be something unpleasant going on with parking in summertime, and the roof had holes. You’d think any or all of these might give us pause.

  But still the idea would not die. What kept us writing letters and on the phone that second winter, listening to Gwened Guedel? We had neither the time nor the money for this, no business thinking about islands, villages, houses. Even now, I really don’t understand it—or us. I only know that we both wanted out so badly. Out of this world, our lives, the jobs we held, the times we lived in.

  The longer Gwened spoke, the more we opened our minds. Maybe thinking of her as a bit of a witch wasn’t very polite of us, given her past generosity, proper manners, and stern professorial bearing. But it wasn’t altogether wrong.

  Because when Gwened spoke, we could see.

  Because it would be ours.

  Or so the gods whispered.

  We heard. We saw. Now, when we closed our eyes at night, when we woke in the morning, when we swayed to the rhythm of the subway rocketing around a curve and grimaced at its horrific shrieking brakes, we saw the island.

  When we wandered north of Hell’s Kitchen in the West Fifties and found ourselves in a tiny, rundown neighborhood of French Pressing dry cleaners and grimy storefront restaurants with Escargots à la Bourguignonne and Crêpes Suzette on the menu, we saw the island. When we went to see a foreign movie at the old Thalia and it turned out to be Local Hero, a whimsically devastating tale of a tiny village in the north of Scotland, we saw the island. It
might be said that we saw the island everywhere in everything.

  In actuality, we were seeing through the prism of unreliable memory. On our first visit, we had been like castaways straggling up onto the shore and trying to make sense of a strange place whose language and habits were incomprehensible. We were dazed, awkward, and uncertain, but most of all grateful to be alive and in awe of the place that had saved us. So each thing that we encountered there—every seashell, shady lane, stone cottage, and village character—had felt like the first of its kind and the archetype for all others.

  Three years later, the island we dreamed of, that Gwened conjured up for us, was mostly a shape-shifting reflection of our personal mythology. In terms of hard knowledge, all that we knew about it could just about fit on a single page of paper. But we felt we’d embarked on the next phase of our journey. It was out of our hands.

  To stop now, we’d have to live with the bitterness of our stillborn dreams, knowing we’d flunked some kind of test—Gwened’s test. Yes, in a way it all came down to Gwened. Who else would’ve had the gall to write two floundering Americans, to call us up and grab us by the figurative scruffs of our necks and state a not-so-obvious truth with the implacability of a seer:

  You. Need. This. Island.

  Chapter Four

  At First Sight

  The exterior was a blotchy gray, the white paint having long faded, with stains under the eaves and scabs of broken plaster. The cracked and gapped roof slumped like a broken-down swaybacked mare. Peeling window shutters hung aslant on their pins, missing slats. The windowpanes were cracked or absent altogether; cobwebs stretched across the gaps, dense with dust and the carcasses from repeated and massive insect attacks.