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

by Don Wallace

  “I think some grass here would look nice,” says Gwened, pointing.

  We nod in silence. Instinct says not to mention Gwened’s change of heart.

  Flower by flower, beam by beam, we’re going to win this thing.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Parent Trap

  As the house neared completion we’d made plans, schemed, and saved for an entire year to spring ourselves for a full month. Yes, a month off from work: unheard of in America but typical in France. After years of wrangling with bosses, pleading with editors, and bluffing with no cards, we’d vowed it was now or never. We had good reason. The visit would be an exorcism of our initial folly in buying this house, because, for the first time in eight years since we took the plunge and signed away our lives, we would be spending the night under its roof.

  No more staying in Gwened’s cramped attic guest bedroom, no more renting Madame Morgane’s unplumbed migrant-worker shack in the fields. No more cooking on a mountaineer’s Bleuet Campingaz stove, no more bathing Rory in a tin washtub surrounded by clucking chickens. Well, we’d miss that. But now the floor was poured and the staircase to the bedrooms upstairs finished. Eight years after signing away our financial future, we could move in.

  And then my mother called. “We’re coming to visit you this summer,” she announced.

  “You are? Here? New York? Great.”

  “On your island in Provence.”

  Eight years and she still hadn’t gotten it right. My mother, the comparative literature PhD, less one thesis defense. Not an accident. “It’s Brittany, Mom. But what brings you out? One of your golf tours?”

  Other people’s parents travel with airplane tickets in their hands, dress in clothes from their closets, drag their luggage or tip the porter. Mine go in officially coordinated tours of twenty and thirty, all in bright red logoed windbreakers and stretchy nylon pants with matching red shoulder bags, their giant suitcases and golf club cases similarly rouged and stickered, the whole herd manhandled by large former football players in red blazers and security earpieces. They are alpha American golfers, my folks. The Greatest Generation mustered into Arnie’s Army and conquering the world.

  “No,” my mom replied. “Just coming to visit.”

  I wouldn’t have been surprised, really, if they had announced they were golfing Stonehenge, Antarctica, or Guadalcanal. But coming to Belle Île without clubs? Something was fishy. They’d already made their feelings clear about this place.

  When I’d called to break the news that we were buying the house—“A cute little ruin on an island in the Bay of Biscay,” I kept saying, as if repetition would make it sound better—my mother had asked “Where?” while my father listened in stony silence. I’d hoped he’d see the fun, since all through our childhood he’d bought odd-shaped land parcels to hold for resale in some future when Disney needed that exact strip (three feet wide and half a mile long) to build their next Magic Kingdom. (Actually, that deal broke even when the strip was bought for a freeway widening.) I thought that my dad would be tickled. “Chip off the old block! We Wallaces, we’re always buying ruins!” Hoped, evidently, for approval.

  Instead, when I had finished, he was curt: “I know why you’re doing this. It’s so that, when you’re at a Greenwich Village cocktail party and you run out of things to say, you can always talk about your little house in France.”

  Now my dad’s familiar growl came on the line again, but Mom jumped in, “Now, lover, this is exciting. You remember how everyone in the country club is excited? Jimmy Wagg was impressed. You know Jimmy is now a Chevalier du Tastevin, Donny? He wears his burgundy robes at the annual wine tasting society dinner. He says Provence is very chic. The ladies in my bridge club are just going ga-ga about helping me choose the decor…”

  I winced. I winced on so many levels, but just to mention the first, Mom’s taste and ours were diametrically opposed: froufrou and chenille versus jeans and T-shirts, country club Republican versus ultraprogressive, dinner dancing to “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” versus flailing to Talking Heads’s “Psycho Killer.” Qu’est-ce que c’est?

  “Mom. You are not choosing the, um, decor. Any of it.” Not that we had any, but still.

  She ignored me. “Where is it in Provence, again? Everybody’s asking.”

  That last phrase was a clue to their change of heart, from ridicule to this sudden giddiness. I recalled how, at Christmas, we’d been on the receiving end of an assembly line of copies of A Year in Provence, Peter Mayle’s memoir of food, wine, and no-guilt, no-budget overseas living. It had been on the bestseller lists all year, spawning a fad for bright, pastel Matisse-like wall coverings and drapes, and faux-naive painted armoires and tables. We who suffered in a dark one-bedroom in New York, rueful owners of an uninhabitable ruin in unchic Brittany, felt a trifle put-upon to get even one copy. But as we opened another one, and yet another, the wound grew more raw.

  Now I got it: since A Year in Provence had shot to the top, my mom must’ve been telling everyone “she” had a place there, too. Only, when pumped by her all-a-flutter bridge and book club friends, she’d drawn a complete and embarrassing blank on any details.

  I consoled myself that this visit was a kind of revenge by farce, but the joke was on us. By the time we coordinated our trip with theirs, they’d trimmed our four weeks on Belle Île to two. Because we must meet them at the Paris airport and ferry them and their bags to the hotel. Because then there would be two days of shopping. Because then we would visit the châteaux of the Loire. Because then we would go to the island and, after two weeks, reverse our steps to Paris for more shopping before escorting them back to the airport.

  Still, I was game. It felt like an impending breakthrough, rapprochement between the generations. Mindy was slightly tragic—she’d be making all the arrangements and doing all the translating—but a good sport.

  My parents, on the other hand, turned out to be brats. We’d begged them to come straight to Belle Île, because Paris is notoriously hot and smoggy in August, and many museums would be closed. I mean, that’s why Parisians go to Belle Île. But no, Paris it had to be—Paris in the midst of a searing heat wave. Naturally, they complained about it.

  Dad refused to try to speak any French, even in restaurants. Instead, he used his menu Spanish from El Torito. For breakfast each day he ordered huevos rancheros, always with the same result: bewilderment, embarrassment, a bellicose refusal to eat anything else, a squabble with Mom. He treated every waiter as an adversary, barking in the universal language of the surly tourist. Only the wine pleased him. Another reason to thank God for good Bordeaux!

  Dad had always been the sweetest man, a gentle giant, loving, interested, intelligent, and wise, forgiving of his children and man’s foibles. Was it only France that had set him off, or something else? A downside of the Greatest Generation, I’ve found, is a resistance to speaking about their feelings. All I could get from Dad was: “Huevos rancheros.”

  At least Mom was a happy camper—what woman wouldn’t be in Paris—until we got to Belle Île and Kerbordardoué. “But this isn’t at all like A Year in Provence!” she wailed as we pulled up. (I know: How could she?) But, to give her her due, she’d insisted on spending a day in Vannes buying us fabulous Provençal-parrot-patterned duvets, quilts, sheets, pillowcases, and towels from a Pierre Deux–like boutique. There was no stopping her. She was in a zone.

  What hurt wasn’t her shudder and desire to flee immediately to a hotel, instead of waiting for me to assemble the Trois Suisses mail-order beds. I’m a ham-handed man under the best of circumstances, and my only screwdriver was a Swiss Army knife. No, what hurt was that Mindy and I didn’t get to celebrate finally seeing our house finished after eight years. Instead we got their frowns of disappointment.

  Our little bubble burst, over the next week we drove them around the island (five-minute drive, stop, get out for a photo, get back in car, fi
ve-minute drive, and so on), ate at restaurants for every meal (all of them “terrible,” plus every morning a scene involving huevos rancheros), and browsed the handful of shops (no Gucci, no Louis Vuitton—what did Mom expect from A La Providence, a consignment store with a plywood cutout of a French sailor standing on the sidewalk?). Criticism pitter-pattered down like acid rain: these croissants are too hard, the crêpes are rubbery. Jimmy Wagg at the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin would not approve of this cheap Muscadet… What were we thinking? Belle Île was too small, too rural, common, nothing to do here, no museums, no glamour.

  “President Mitterrand flies in on his helicopter to eat a crêpe here every year,” I said meekly. The look I got in return said I’d just proved her point.

  It all came to a head at the Hôtel du Phare, where the service is so slow it feels existential and can only be survived by getting a prized outdoor terrace table. We’d scored the table—the view of the pretty little harbor of Sauzon was postcard-perfect—when Dad launched into an assessment of our adventure, his voice dripping with sarcasm. Mom sat behind her sunglasses and didn’t deflect or moderate a single remark.

  Mindy began to tremble. I tried to change the subject: Rory was sitting here, reading his little book with a stormy brow. I said: “Dad, Dad…” Then, when he wouldn’t stop, “You don’t sound like yourself here.”

  “How dare you speak to your father like that!” snapped Mom.

  Oh boy, here it comes now, I thought. But at that moment Rory glanced up. “Grandma,” he said, in a calm little voice, “you and Grandpa are not treating Mom and Dad very nice. They planned this trip and drive you around and speak French for you and order food like lotte and sole at restaurants, which is very good for you, and very fresh, and they showed you the Grotto of the Apothecary and the Trou du Vazen and where the German gun emplacements are”—he gave a suppressed shudder of excitement at this—“and all you can say are mean things about them.

  “The service is slow at the Hôtel du Phare,” he continued, “but we can have langoustines and oysters and read our books and Huna can read his Herald Tribune that Dad makes a special trip into Le Palais to buy every morning. Do you know that when you’re at your hotel, my parents are always talking about how to make you happy? But you don’t even care.” He looked at his grandfather, whose nickname he’d bestowed. “Huna, you should behave better.”

  The benefits of a progressive preschool education.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Sole of Solitude

  Serene and focused, Rory was a writing parent’s dream from age five on—at least for the first few hours of the weekend or vacation day. But at some point, usually around lunchtime, he’d look up from his toys or book and glance around impatiently for a friend. On Belle Île, a look of disappointment would come next. For the rest of the day, no matter what else we were doing, our main hope was to find someone to keep him occupied, with the fate of the vacation—and our careers—hanging in the balance.

  And finding playmates was a chore. What’s easy at home is difficult to impossible on an island where you aren’t a native speaker and a lonely cove or epic stretch of beach is a typical unsupervised playground. Yet we had to try. It’s obviously important to the child and a game changer for the parents, who otherwise will be pressed into service to do endless vulture voices and Monty Python imitations with action figures.

  For a portion of the first two summers Rory had Leo, son of our doubles, Bruno and Valerie, but after the second year they didn’t come back (although we continued to see them in Paris). Just as the weather seemed a lot colder back then, the island more raw, the pickings for playdates underwhelmed to the point of seeming grim.

  I remember three or four years of hopeful hangouts with other expats, British mostly, in other half-completed houses in other villages. These followed a pattern: cups of cocoa for the kids and tea with hidden hits of Scotch for the parents, stilted conversation, heavy sighs over the cost of finishing the renovation “next year,” and the whole thing coming to an end with a brutal attack on somebody’s favorite stuffed animal or Star Wars figurine.

  In many respects the hunt for a friend for Rory paralleled the search for a food he would eat. In New York City he was single-minded and phlegmatic. Early days, give him his Gerbers and “mup” (milk) and you’d never hear a peep. But in France during his first visit, at eighteen months, our increasingly desperate question every single day was, “Avez-vous du baby food?” In the early years the answer from Madame at Les Quatre Saisons was a bewildered gesture at her four walls of canned mushrooms and asparagus, tête de veau and boudin noir (that unctuous pudding of blood), cheeses and wines.

  Bretons seemed politely incredulous at the idea that children might require a different cuisine. We asked for applesauce. (Try Normandy, three aisles and a hundred miles to the north.) For a couple of years, meals were nerve-racking. When he hit four and a half, the next new must-eat arrived: “Avez-vous du peanut butter?” We learned it was called beurre de cacahuètes, and that nobody carried it.

  So we tried crushing peanuts in an improvised pestle. We tried Nutella. (How he could turn down chocolate-laced hazelnut butter is beyond me, but he did.) What saved us was not applesauce, but apple cider. In our exhaustion one afternoon, we forgot to pack Rory’s box of juice before leaving on a drive to one of Belle Île’s wilder coves. He sat in his car seat growling away until Mindy spied a village grocery, hopped out, and returned with a familiar dark glass bottle. ‘‘It’s doux, the nonalcoholic kind,’’ she said. Rory was in a famous mood the rest of the day, napped eagerly, and ate his picnic lunch without the usual imprecations.

  Attributing our son’s instant conversion to some mystical affinity for Brittany, we lay on the sand imagining a more vacationlike groove. At last, we could have an occasional undisturbed afternoon. Rory burbled along, quenching his thirst with an occasional pull at the stuff he called ‘‘bubby.’’ Just like a good Breton boy.

  That evening, when Franck and Ines stopped by, they observed Rory’s glass of fizzing cider and asked us if it was an American practice to get our children drunk. Cidre doux did not mean soft, as in nonalcoholic; it meant ‘‘sweet,’’ as opposed to dry. Ah! The (unlabeled) bottles we’d been giving Rory ranged from 1.5 to 4.5 percent alcohol. Oops.

  • • •

  And yet I date the education of Rory’s palate from that fateful first sip. For whatever reason, perhaps because it made him a little loopy, after that he didn’t complain about the lack of peanut butter (or our pathetic alternatives). It’s also true that the following year we took him out to dinner with one goal: to procure a plate of edible french fries. This might seem like an easy quest to fulfill in France, but Brittany, after all, is land of the galette and the crêpe, and a french fry from a crêperie tends to flop about on the plate like, well, a crêpe.

  We arrived at the Hôtel du Phare and girded ourselves for the usual three-hour marathon dinner. That frite had better be good. We worried. Would a French french fry meet his standards? Or would he drive a stake through our hearts and say, “I want McDonald’s”?

  At the last second I had a brainstorm and, before offering him a frite, fed one to the officious seagull standing like an avian maître’ d on the far end of our table. Rory was delighted by bird and fry.

  Our table on the terrace overlooked the tiny port of Sauzon. The gull edged even closer on the balustrade as Rory tried his first bite of a golden-brown fish that lay, head to tail, across his plate. Rory eyed the bird warily; this was his dinner. “What’s this called?” he asked, chewing, a frown of concentration creasing his forehead.

  “Sole…” we said and held our breath, waiting for the tirade.

  “It’s great. From now on”—his knife and fork were sawing furiously away—“I want sole. Lots of sole.”

  Mindy and I leaned back and raised our glasses of Muscadet. “Le breakthrough,” she sighed.

&
nbsp; Forgetting that you must be careful of what you wish for, I nodded. “What if he grows up to be a child gourmet? Wouldn’t that be something?”

  Rory’s ringing voice pierced our happy haze: “Dad, don’t eat all your sole. I’m going to need more.”

  “I didn’t order the sole. I ordered the lotte.”

  “What? Are you crazy? You must always order the sole!”

  We sighed. I had a feeling this wasn’t going to end well.

  The following year, Rory took a marine biology class in school that not only turned him on to the world of fishes, but convinced him that it was his duty as top predator to eat his way down the marine food chain. In our first weeks back on Belle Île, his appetite for seafood was satisfied by sorties in a neighbor’s boat for mackerel, bass, vieille (grouper), aiguilles (needlefish), and lieu, as well as low-tide expeditions to collect mussels and those siren pousse-pieds, whose white beaks, extruding from wrinkled black necks, protect a succulent morsel of flesh. It was the barnacles that told me that things were getting obsessional. The sight of Rory scrambling over a cliff with a butter knife in one fist and a lust for pousse-pieds—goose barnacles, for heavens’ sake!—in his eye will always stay with me.

  Rory’s sea hunt caught the eye of an acquaintance of Gwened’s, the sporty father of a very proper famille en bonne forme who had rented her house for a couple of weeks. I’d whittled a spear at Rory’s request so he could go after the fish he’d seen in a small fjord. The father, Hector, came up to us after our unsuccessful expedition and without a word handed Rory—age nine—a spear gun. “This will work better, I think,” said Hector.

  Of course Mindy and certain other parents (okay, myself included) were rather nervous at the gift. We debated returning it. But that felt so…so…wimpish. What would a real man of Belle Île, a Denis LeReveur or M. Borlagadec, think?