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

by Don Wallace

  To calm our frazzled nerves, Hector took us aside for a dry run and safety tips. As Rory loaded his bag for a return to Port Scheul, Hector smiled at me. “He will find out how hard it is to shoot underwater, to track the fish, the angle of deflection, everything,” he said in his perfect Touraine French, so clear it sounded like English. “But he’s so passionate he deserves real equipment.”

  We drove back to Port Scheul. I was still laying out our towels when Rory waded in, spear gun pointed straight ahead. Several mothers with small children near him turned to stare disapprovingly. “Be careful of the children!” I shouted to him. He kept on wading, like some kind of merboy in his mask, snorkel, and fins, gun cradled against his chest, tip pointed in the air as he’d been instructed.

  The women rushed to their children—who were on dry land, let it be noted—and hustled them away from the water’s edge with accusatory glances at me. Rory submerged. He began to cover the sea bottom in a methodical grid, snorkel spouting every twenty seconds or so. He moved a bit farther away, where the bottom dropped off, and switched from sand to rock.

  I was so absorbed in watching Rory, worrying about him shooting himself, that at first I missed the arrival down the fjord’s dirt road of a white horse with a yellow mane, ridden bareback by a long-haired gypsy-looking man wearing nothing but, I swear, a Speedo.

  He rode the horse straight into the water. I started to rise, to shout—but what? I didn’t have the French but also, it felt foolish; surely Rory wouldn’t shoot a horse. At least, not one with a Speedo-wearing gypsy riding bareback.

  Rory was now fifty yards offshore anyway. Maybe the horse would go away soon. But no, the gypsy rode out until the water was up to midthigh, then slid off and began splashing and rubbing the horse’s back. His long black hair trailed down like his own mane. The scene felt magical, yet creepy, like an encounter with a troll.

  Now Rory was heading back, facedown, snorkel spouting, fins slowly fluttering. Everyone watching from the beach was enthralled by the scene: the gypsy, the white horse, the converging unaware merboy with his spear.

  Suddenly the horse clenched and dropped a half-dozen green turds, each with a splash. The reaction on the beach was international and audible: “Eeeeuuuuu…” I sensed a shift in sympathy. This guy was gross.

  Blithely quartering the sandy grid, Rory headed off to the far side of the fjord. He stopped kicking. Floated without expelling water from his snorkel. There was a flash, a splash; he twisted his torso violently, then launched himself forward, feet churning. I started to run toward him.

  A moment later he was standing up, a shining bloody mullet in his hands. “Dad!”

  The mothers on the beach were now looking on with admiration. But the gypsy in the Speedo just kept splashing water on the horse’s back.

  • • •

  One day, we treated ourselves to the island’s acknowledged citadel of cuisine, the cozy Contre Quai. As Rory blithely speared and ate a lagniappe of raw sea snails called bigorneaux, our boy informed us that he had been thinking about how to improve our dining experience. No longer would Dad order the 215-franc menu as in the past, leaving Rory the child’s portion of sole.

  When the waiter arrived, we listened in growing consternation as Rory asked for the fresh sardines on a bed of steamed potatoes, roast garlic, and fennel, followed by two grilled sole fillets in lemon butter. He wanted tastes of Mindy’s braised sea bass and my grilled dorade. He also chose all our desserts and sampled them all.

  What could we do? He’d done his best to speak French, pass out napkins and snacks at our cocktail parties, and tolerate too many pats on the head and being told he was a un petit joli homme. We let him order.

  • • •

  The following summer, hoping to divert Rory’s attention from le menu du jour, I brought a Wiffle ball to Kerbordardoué.

  It is said that baseball doesn’t travel well, except to Japan and the Americas. Certainly this was true for our Wiffle bat. It had to be hand-carried, over Mindy’s objections. (The morning we left, she hid it in the closet, where I chanced upon it while searching for a sack of American fishing lures I wanted to try off the Côte Sauvage.) The French security force at our charter’s terminal didn’t blink at the garish, big-eyed, scarily hooked poppers. But they studied the plastic tube judiciously.

  Heading for the Breton coast on the TGV—the Train à Grande Vitesse, or high-speed train—that bat was eyed, discussed, and analyzed by our seatmates, young and old. I finally stashed it overhead so we could get some sleep. By the time we had settled ourselves on the ferry for the last leg of the trip, the bat had assumed totemic status, as if it knew it would be keeping company with the monumental Druid menhirs and dolmens.

  • • •

  The game began shortly after we arrived. The village was full of children from rental houses that summer. They peeked out at Rory and vice versa, exchanging shy bonjours and pantomimed invitations to go bicycle riding or lizard hunting. Like Rory, they were in Kerbordardoué all summer, and their days were of their own making.

  One lazy afternoon Rory picked up the bat and ball and started chopping line drives down the road. The news traveled fast: the American boy was doing something unusual. At first the children were content to chase respectfully after the ball and return it, cupped in their hands as if it were one of Madame Morgane’s hen’s eggs. Then one or two dared to throw it, gently, underhand, a few feet. Next Rory and I decided to put on an exhibition. Halfway through, they were lining up for batting practice. At this point the season began.

  It startled me, the delight with which everybody took to the sport. Villagers watched from dormer windows, from vegetable gardens, on trips to the garbage Dumpster at the edge of town. Suzanne paused in her magical flower propagation and brought her knitting over to watch. Even Kerbordardoué’s center of gravity, Madame Morgane, altered her customary evening stroll to take in the later innings.

  Rory couldn’t get enough, which caused me an equal measure of wonder, because in the spring he had again refused to join Little League. To stir up some enthusiasm we had gone to a classmate’s game. Fathers and mothers with clenched smiles barked orders and networked avidly with each other or over cell phones. I gleaned that “our team” had been assembled through insider trading and organized to win—which they did. Rory didn’t take to this approach at all.

  Baseball in Kerbordardoué, on the other hand, offered Rory an endless variety of angles from which to appreciate our national pastime. For both of us, baseball proved to be a fine way to practice our French, requiring endless choices for exploring argot and slang. For example, in my attempt to explain the pitch (le jet), I demonstrated la fourchette, or forkball, and le tire-bouchon, or corkscrew, a name substitution for the “scroogie” that referred to the joltingly slow train from Auray to Quiberon. For the fastball, a natural choice was La Boule à Grande Vitesse, or BGV, after the French TGV train.

  Of course, the children ignored me and my flashy offerings. That was another thing to savor about baseball in Kerbordardoué—it belonged to the players, not the owners. These boys and girls of summer needed no contracts in order to play, nor were there owners to lock up the field. Night and day, the Wiffle ball and bat were left out by a drystone wall that enclosed a garden of herbs and annuals. If you were in the mood to play, you played.

  At first Rory and I struggled to explain the rules, then gave up and watched a system evolve that took into account Kerbordardoué’s peculiar stadium, French dining habits, and each player’s personal style.

  In the village square, “square” was a misnomer and every hit an adventure in following the bouncing ball. Often, watching children pursue a hit ricocheting among the rooftops, I was reminded of the time I first saw, as a child Rory’s age, the movie The Red Balloon. Our left field was a downhill-running dirt road that led to a ruin. Center ended abruptly in “our” stone well in the shape of a beehive. Right went
deep but was interrupted by a low drystone wall that served as second base and bleachers. Our house was the left foul line, and third base a sack of potting soil that gave a satisfying thud when kicked (prompting Mindy’s Franco-Bronx cheer from inside the house: “Arrêt! Ne touche pas le sac!”). Home base was a tuft of grass between big-headed hydrangea blooms.

  Another reason for baseball’s popularity became apparent to me the time I asked six-year-old Juliet what she’d had for lunch. “Fresh tomato soup, grilled fresh sardines, pork cutlets, beets, salad, cheese, tart, espresso,” she reeled off crisply. Adults need to doze off these meals; not so children. Baseball gave them something to do while waiting for the parents to rise from their comas.

  All these, I realized, were the old virtues of the game. Without the siren cacophony of Nintendo or hypnotic vacuum of cable television, the possibilities in a bat and ball become endless. Direct observation leads me to suggest that true baseball expands to fill the time left in a day. Only the television version of the game worries about “going over” its allotted period. We had all the time in the world.

  • • •

  Around this time, we were encouraged to hear that a new family had moved in. They’d bought a parcel on the edge of the vallon the year before and built a house. Rumor had it there were three children, two close to Rory’s age. Hearing this, he looked at me and we nodded sagely: more ballplayers.

  Bumping into them accidentally on purpose on the main blackberrying lane, we did a double take upon making introductions. Yes, it was the young couple of Paris. The same family that once wrote at Gwened’s instigation and offered to buy our house. The twin psychiatrists Gwened had chosen to take our place.

  And this is how we became friends with Celeste and Henry. It was as natural a friendship as could be: talking and walking, we discovered Celeste and Henry were kids of the sixties, like ourselves. In them we quickly envisioned coconspirators. The older boys, Marc and Michel, were smart and their funny-sarcastic Paris wisecracks made a New York City street kid like Rory feel right at home. The young one, Auguste, was by some peculiar genius already speaking phrases in BBC English and had us all wrapped around his petit doigt. With them, village life often veered into a deadpan comedy of manners.

  As far as we were concerned, the rest was gravy—and of an excellent kind. But it didn’t hurt that the family had friends and that, most considerately, all these fine people had children. And the children had bicycles, as did Rory. Soon they were on the loose, shooting across the moors, pedaling madly from village to village, just for the joy of it. Our constellation of five hamlets was like a solar system, with villages as planets and kids slingshotting around them like comets.

  Celeste and Henry’s friends included an almost shockingly large contingent of summering psychiatrists, not to mention spouses who were attendant art curators, ad men, lawyers, and even a journalist. All seemed to be in the process of buying or building homes in the adjoining villages. We, who had never been analyzed, couldn’t help but feel a little baffled. We also sensed a turning point for the Côte Sauvage—could the rest of chic Paris be far behind? Searching for their shrinks on the beach?

  The island was changing. Who knew where it was all headed. At least, in the meantime, we had plenty of playmates for Rory. And if it sometimes seemed that they’d all had found one spot to congregate—in Kerbordardoué, in the square in front of our house, directly under Mindy’s window as she was trying to write—it was because it was true and because of me and my gosh-darn American ideas of fun.

  • • •

  Baseball Kerbordardouénnaise opened the eyes to smaller pleasures. To watch a pop fly land on a slate roof, travel down a rain gutter, bounce off a well, and land amid a profusion of honeysuckle blossoms is to taste what Gwened’s Zen poets would call be-here-nowness. Such surprises drew out a quartet of shy little girls, who emerged one day from behind their house’s impenetrable hedge and sat primly in their blue-and-white frocks on a stone wall, giggling and picking favorites among the boys. Although we were on an island painted by Monet, I’d have to say that this was more of a Norman Rockwell moment.

  The idyll continued until early September, when the time came to say good-bye to our teammates, who had to leave on la rentrée, the return. One by one they left. We would stay on a little longer, hoping to snatch one more week of sun. At least, after so much activity, Rory didn’t seem to mind being left alone.

  Then came one morning toward the end of our stay. A rising sun cut slowly through the salt-laden haze. I stood in the doorway watching the gray dissolve to blue, the dull walls turn to white, the many-petaled hydrangeas shift to brighter hues, like a black-and-white photograph being hand-tinted. Even the dirt of the square, lately our diamond, became richer, a faint reddish-orange.

  Suzanne strolled out, hands clasped behind her back, inspecting her hydrangeas, the fuchsias, the square. She looked at me sidelong, asking in her robust Breton way, “C’est tranquil, sans les enfants, oui?”

  For a moment I could almost swear we saw them: gap-toothed Pierre, a lefty flamethrower from Perpignan; our psychiatrist kids, Marc and Michel, the one large, the other lean, who didn’t shrink from a fastball and were capable of blasting towering home runs (coups de maison); Laure of the long blond pigtail and infield cartwheels and ripping speed on the base paths. Then, really hearing Suzanne’s words, I was suddenly stricken with a terrible doubt: I had been too dense to notice that baseball had become an all-American nuisance, disturbing the peace of the village.

  Suzanne scuffed her toe in the dirt. She placed the fist of one hand atop the fist of the other hand, cocked her head, raised her shoulders. A pause. She took a cut with an imaginary bat. Checking out my response, she let loose with a gust of a laugh.

  Baseball had come to Kerbordardoué.

  Chapter Nineteen

  La Chienne

  Happiness is almost always best appreciated after the fact—recollected the morning after or while dozing on the plane home or, even better, years later as the two of you are standing side by side in a cramped New York City apartment kitchen, one measuring coffee, the other slicing a baguette, and the senses awaken with memories of Belle Île.

  An exception to the rule is to observe happiness not your own, and that secretly from concealment. Like the time when we were lying in bed with the lights out and Mindy heard a sound. We held our breath, listening hard. Mindy reached out for my hand in the dark. Because it was our boy and his cousin, lying in their beds in the next chamber, singing Sly Stone songs. Not just one or two. An entire Greatest Hits collection. “Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah…”

  The best concert ever. But—Sly Stone songs! The pioneer of funk from the sixties, the best cruisin’-with-the-top-down-and-radio-blasting music of my high school years? However did that happen?

  Well, a random cassette came to the office as part of a promo. I threw it in the bag marked for France that is kept open all year until it’s time to go. Forgot about it, until it came time for the first ride down the bumpy road to Port Scheul for the morning spearfishing excursion. The instant I slapped it in the cassette player, the tape became a soundtrack. Soon the boys, bare-chested in bathing suits, were hanging out the window and calling out to all the cows and funky chickens in the dusty village by-lanes, “Boom-shaka-laka-boom!”

  Years of trips have followed, always to the same tape on the same bumpy road, the boys getting bigger, but never too big not to sing: “IIIIIIII love everyday people!”

  More than once on that bumpy road I think we all sensed that we’d gone through some mystic portal and entered a golden age, but we also had the sense to not “mouth it up,” as Ernest Hemingway once said. “Isn’t this great!” is one sign that decline has already set in.

  So we pretended we weren’t there yet. Wherever we were, though, it sure was good.

  • • •

  When we arrived that second year after the house was
completed, the whole village was talking about our witch. She’d always been a flamboyant enigma, Sterenn—a woman of a certain age, face painted and rouged like a Kabuki’s, swathed in pastel scarves. Usually we saw her at twilight floating and flapping like a golden ring-necked pheasant around the 3,500-year-old standing stones, cousins of those at Stonehenge and Carnac, on the road that linked Sauzon and Le Palais. But this summer she defied convention, common sense, and even reality by popping up miles away on the most remote dirt tracks, barefoot and twirling. Everyone wondered if Sterenn had finally gone mad.

  “La femme de Marlon Brando,” Le Vicomte had confirmed when, having disbelieved the rumors, we asked if he knew anything about her. Brando’s lover! We had to accept Le Vic’s word. He’d seen it all—war, love, and celebritydom—and was honest as an anvil. Still, it was a stretch: Marlon Brando, here? When we’d first seen Kerbordardoué, the village had seemed tired and forgotten, not to mention rude and muddy.

  Early one morning, we headed out to the morning market at Le Palais with the night fog still clinging to the ground. Sterenn came out of the mist, holding up a hand palm out, blocking the single-lane road. She walked to the passenger door and opened it. “Hello, my American neighbors,” she said in arch BBC English. “Could I trouble you for a lift to town?”

  By the time we let her off, we’d formed an entirely new opinion of her. We also had an invitation to dinner. Sandwiched between another house and a stone barn, her cottage was low-ceilinged, little more than a pair of whitewashed rooms. Like us, she had no yard. Unlike us, she’d filled the right-of-way with a mosaic of shells and colored pebbles from the island beaches. The designs were intricate but not unfamiliar. As we stepped over them, I made out the Celtic knot and cross, the Assyrian solar disk, the universal labyrinth, and the inverted Tibetan Buddhist cross that resembles a swastika. All familiar but not surprising to one who’d grown up in the psychedelic sixties.