by Don Wallace
• • •
We arrive alone and we leave alone. With an hour to spare after dropping our bags in Theophile’s office by the quai, we walk back up the boat basins under the overgrown ramparts of the walled town. One of the yellow granite towers is now part of a rest home. As we are heading up the ramp with a bouquet of village flowers, a woman passing says, “She will love them.”
We find out that her prescience wasn’t all that great: Madame Morgane is the only patient on the second floor. Tiny and wrinkled, shaking quietly in her bedclothes, she lies with eyes closed and lips parted. We assume that what we’ve heard is true, that she can no longer speak or understand speech or recognize people.
I’m for leaving the flowers and leaving, but when Mindy says her name, Madame Morgane’s eyes open, blink slowly. She stares into Mindy’s face as we gently remind her who we are. Then she knows us. “Les Américains.” Yes, that’s us, all right. We discuss the old familiar village sights, how dry the summer was, how grand the gardens.
She listens. Then she slowly opens her mouth. “The village is not the same,” she says. “Everything has changed.”
Mindy gently agrees that it must seem so and says she knows Madame Morgane must miss Suzanne. This draws out a beautiful smile. So does mention of Mindy’s chocolate football, which she pressed into the hands of Madame’s daughter as we were about to drive away under Kerbordardoué’s tunnel of trees. We have a couple of slices with us, in our packs. We will eat them on the train, knowing that the rest of the cake will not be eaten by the intended. It is an offering, as at Kala Goañv.
Mindy finds a nurse, the only one on duty, who digs up an empty jar for the flowers. Madame Morgane’s room is all white and doesn’t have a TV or even a painting on the walls. But it has a view of the harbor’s backwaters and several old wooden boats hauled up on the muddy banks, some to rot, others under restoration. Behind them are the dark green, furrowed hills of the other side.
After we say good-bye, we stand in the parking lot for a moment, overcome.
Back in America we will get the news. But as we climb up the steel gangway into the black hold of the Guerveur, it’s already over. Now it’s just us, and the next generation, and the ones after that.
• • •
“You know, when you visited our house in Tours that first time, Don, how the household seemed dérangée? I was acting a little crazy?”
Mindy smiled. “You mean when you threw the typewriter out the window?”
Daniel Guedel looked surprised, his wife delighted. Really? her look said.
This was in the early winter back in New York City. We hadn’t seen Daniel since his mother died. Hadn’t seen him at all for a few years. But we’d kept in touch. We cheered his job and marriage and baby and his wife’s writing career. He’s family. When he called to say he was in New York, we knew it would be emotional. We just had no idea how much.
We settled on the sofa in our apartment after dinner. Our wind-rattled old casement windows looked out over a New York City sunset as it settled scores of doomed battles between light and shadow.
“Very Freudian of me,” he said, “seeing as I wanted to be a writer. Well”—the breath he took should have put us on notice that this would be no ordinary story—“what had happened, about a week before you arrived, was that my mother told me I was not my father’s son.”
Mindy and I just stared. Daniel nodded.
“I had just turned sixteen, you see. She said she thought that I was now old enough to know. She said she couldn’t live with the falsehood any longer anyway.”
“Did he know? Your father?” I meant the one we knew.
Daniel shook his head. We sat stunned, frozen in place, wineglasses almost touching our lips, hands hovering above the cheese, the chips, the chèvre and guacamole.
“Daniel?” But Mindy didn’t know what she wanted to ask.
He smiled. “Sorry.”
There was of course nothing to apologize for, but in a sense, Daniel understood what a shock this was to us. He’d felt it at sixteen. The perfect woman who is your mother is an illusion.
“But,” he continued, implacable, as if it had to be told in one go or he’d lose his courage. “She asked me not to tell my father. It would be our little secret. This I could not believe. She and I were fighting a lot. A lot. You know how controlling my mother could be? It was worse than you could believe. A war. And then this. Why?”
“Why?” echoed Mindy.
“I think she resented my closeness to my father.”
“Oh, that poor man,” I said, thinking of how Gwened had sold us the story of her upright, bearded husband having taken a mistress.
“Who?” asked Mindy. “I mean, how? I don’t mean to pry, but—damn!”
“He was a student, a fellow student in Budapest where she had gone to study. There was a family connection to the Magyars; we are part Hungarian.” He smiled as if that explained something. “She was absolutely controlled by her parents and terrified in particular of disappointing her father. But of course she already had, by not being the son he’d always wanted. Right? And when she got to Budapest, well, she went a little wild.”
The comparison to Mindy’s mother at college, away from Hawaii for the first time in her life, must’ve popped into Mindy’s and my minds simultaneously. I felt an electric surge rewiring the circuitry of my memories: no, not that way, this way. Away for the first time from the adults who’d made her, designed her from the ground up to be a proper little prodigy—that was Dolly. Gwened was the daughter of a prodigy—a dutiful daughter afflicted with insecurity and a sense of not measuring up. This was what she’d told us about her grandfather and father, both university professors, men with serious black mustaches.
We flailed at understanding by making small noises, waving hands, gulping drinks. After regaining our wits, we waited, not wishing to pry but intent on hearing it all, or as much as Daniel was comfortable telling us.
• • •
To go back to everyday life in postwar Europe after the giddy VE celebrations was an anticlimax, to say the least. Everyone wandered a sepia-tinted, dust-covered civilization: the gray walls; the bombed-out buildings still prominent; the poor food, still rationed; the seemingly continual cold; nobody able to afford heat or take a bath because the plumbing and gas lines were barely functional. For college students in Budapest, the only place to find a little warmth was the café, of course. Poverty was the real source of that romantic café culture we Americans dream about replicating here in Portland and Brooklyn and Peoria.
Gwened had a group of friends. She was giddy and semi-starved, made bold, she said, by at last escaping the great gloomy men whose portraits had glared out of smoky oil paintings on the walls of her dining room. She allowed herself to be seduced by a flamboyant Hungarian music student whose genius was already aflame. Everyone knew Rakel would make it and become one of the imperious, be-caped presences of the international opera houses and symphonies. He represented art to Gwened, art and rebellion and escape. Going to bed with Rakel, a known playboy, in those dangerous days before the pill, was Gwened’s refusal to play the hand life had dealt her. She rolled the dice.
Within a couple weeks she knew she’d lost. And with that knowledge came the return of her senses, and the prospect of grim futility and eternal familial disapproval—the very weight of seething wrath that Mindy’s mother had incurred from her proper Korean parents.
Pregnant, unmarried, and living with her parents? A recipe for hell. Gwened began to plot. She cast her eye around the group of impoverished students, judging their prospects for the first time by the same bourgeois standards her parents would’ve employed. Lowering her sights, she chose. They came together as if by chance. The indiscretion seemed all his fault, the bad boy. And now look what a mess he’d landed her in…
Daniel’s composure was surreal. But then, we found out, he’
d stopped keeping the secret some time ago. As in years ago. We were literally the last to know. Everyone? we asked. Daniel nodded. But why leave us in the dark? He smiled. Because she asked.
We got it. All Gwened asked—of life, and in the end, of death and the village—was for somebody’s illusions about her to stay intact until she had time to exit stage left, head held high. That somebody was us.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Village Elders
In the late summer of 2010, we go back. We no longer live anywhere except, tenuously, in Mindy’s childhood home in Hawaii, which her brothers are trying to sell out from under us. If anything we are less secure financially, yet we’ve hit the road again, traveling light, confident something will turn up. Still us.
If Hawaii sells us out, Belle Île will be our home. We’ve already considered moving here if things get much worse. Maybe that’s what the house has been waiting for. But our main concern, this year and every year, is still our son. A new Rory has risen from the ashes of a bridge-burning adolescent. He’s settled himself in New York with a girlfriend. And has boldly announced that he’s coming to the island for the first time in seven years.
As we wait to see if Rory really will show, we wonder at the changes in our now-subdued village. We don’t know what will be done with Madame Morgane’s house and farm, but her family is very visible, working on a new wall, waving hello, and even—good heavens—chatting with us. Our new next-door neighbor, the nice lawyer and his judge wife, have reversed last year’s decision to sell and buy a larger place. Kerbordardoué is just too friendly and there are so many children for their two girls to play with.
A nephew who inherited Suzanne’s ruin is restoring it into a very proper Breton house, we’re happy to see. The stonemason with the German shepherd tattoo has nearly finished his renovation, too. After ten years, he moans, what will I do with myself? One thing he won’t do, we’re fairly sure, is talk to the dentist across the lane, who hasn’t spoken to any of us since the village shot down his plan for a McMansion. (Fifteen years and counting. We’d hate to see that streak broken.)
But now the cell phone is ringing. It’s Rory at the quai, wondering in a cranky voice why we aren’t there to pick him up. “Is Kaitlin with you?” we ask.
“Yes, and a couple of others.”
We recognize that tone of voice.
“How many others?” we ask, trying not to sound anxious. Don’t want to scare him off, after all. Even if there are only four beds in the house.
“Ten,” he says.
We try not to gasp. If Rory is bringing a village with him, this village will make room for them all—as it did for us.
• • •
In storytelling, the teller of the tale sets the rules, chalks the lines of the game. This is the way we go—down this path, not that one.
Thus we have always made this story about us, about our impulsive decision that seemed like idiocy, but which over time increasingly was spun as daring, rash romanticism. (Oh those kids!) And why not? It’s all true.
But it’s our truth. There are other truths. There is Suzanne’s and Madame Morgane’s. I think we’re all grown-up enough to admit to the notion of other people’s truths.
But there is even another truth, a nonhuman truth, from the point of view of what historians call the longue durée, or long cycle of history.
Taking the longue durée in this case would be to look at things from the point of view of the house and the village, exactly as if they were characters. Because the house is not us, and its place is where it was born—in the village. We can’t take it with us, the way we can a child or a souvenir or a suntan, can we?
So what is the village story? That the house was crumbling away, returning to the earth. We bought it. We never had the money to renovate it, so we never went down that path. Our goal was pragmatic—not changing it would cost the least. Since we didn’t have the talent, time, or inclination to do the restoration ourselves, we paid others, local artisans, many of them older or near retirement or even newly retired.
Based on this telling, our role is minimal, close to being caretakers. We handed money to the real artists. We did enter into the spirit of the place, the village, Belle Île; I am proud of us for that. Absentee owners often deserve scorn.
A couple of people did inform us we were depriving someone else—a French person, to be exact, someone like themselves—of their right to our house in our village. Sometimes we found ourselves on the defensive, almost agreeing, although never openly, with the criticism. Long ago we’d asked for a saine house, and Denis LeReveur put those characteristics into the devis; but did we also have a moral house? Did we have a right to be here? Who could say?
As time has gone by, the question ceased to be an idle or self-indulgent one. In both our Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan and in Mindy’s old-timey Hawaiian neighborhood where her mother lived, the new money is scouring away all traces of the past, including washing away the people who made both places unique, functional, more than decorative, more than districts where the global rich or hard-bargaining time-sharer who bought a place would spend exactly two weeks out of each year. How were we any different? Did our four weeks a year really make us so superior?
Whether we were preservers or destroyers was the question we put to ourselves and couldn’t answer. There are sterile villages on Belle Île, places where foreign buyers swooped in and snatched up properties and installed colonies of Germans, Belgians, English. Not that there is anything wrong with these nationalities in the singular, but en masse they upset the balance. (As do, it should go without saying, too many Americans.) You drive through these villages and feel nothing. The renters are there for sun and beach and sausages, and because it is cheap—they probably resent not being able to afford Provence.
But I think most who come here and buy a place do so because, heaven forfend, they visited and loved the island to distraction. In them we see ourselves, even if they point at our skylight and ask: Vas-ist-das?
Our doubts about a moral house probably seem overdone. Yeah, conservatives have it easy: liberal guilt is hell. But we can’t change who we are.
• • •
What vanquished our guilt about taking a house out of circulation for eleven months of every year was the way Suzanne’s cat kept jumping in the window. We kept tossing him out, until one day we capitulated and invited Grizzou to join us for a saucer of milk. He acted like he owned the place. Which, we realized suddenly, he did.
Now we knew why Suzanne knitted lace for all the windows. Not for us—but so she and Madame Morgane, childhood friends, could sit in the kitchen of Tante Jeannie as it was when they were little girls. There they could look out the window through the lace, the lace framing the Belle Île view, their view, of village life going on its slow way, uninterrupted. For years they’d had this place to themselves, only surrendering it at the end of August when we arrived.
Silly us. We thought it was our house when it was theirs.
Still, a few people, in France and America, have since tried to take us down a peg for “wasting” it. Americans especially wonder why we haven’t turned it into a rental and made it pay for itself like a beast of burden. But that would have meant tricking it out to tourist expectations: TV, phone, Internet, frilly curtains, bright colors, cute lamps, and generic paintings. Perhaps even painting the salle de cuisine.
Most of all, it also would have meant finishing it. It’s taken us twenty-nine years, but we’ve finally got our answer down pat:
What’s the rush?
• • •
And when it is our turn, at the end of our time here, I hope there will be those who stop and point. Oh look! It’s so beautiful! And then they will see us and make up stories about us. Yes, here they are in their dotage, strolling the village lanes, pockets full of flowers and clippings, brown, shaky, age-spotted hands busily transplanting cuttings into the
chinks in the village walls. Seeing our cracked smiles and missing teeth, they will think: La femme sauvage! L’homme sauvage!
And then, if this should be you, I hope that you’ll go on and pretend not to recognize us. Just turn and go on your way to your own village, wherever it is, and there tend to any ruins that you think are in need of a wise villager’s benign neglect.
Leave us to putter and to delude ourselves that our work will one day be done. Because, of course, it never will be.
Author’s Note
And if you see him, pick up a tool, not a weapon. A shovel, a plow, a spinning wheel. Ankou only fears honest work by patient men and women.
I picked up a pen.
It’s said that we don’t know what we are thinking until we put it down in writing, and this is certainly true for this book. My original intention wasn’t to bring our old Kerbordardoué back to life one more time. But beginning the writing, I soon realized that if I didn’t hurry, Kerbordardoué would be gone and I’d never finish it. That was twenty years ago. So much for deadlines.
To my friends and family who have lived portions of this book and appear here: Thank you. You know I’ve only borrowed your memories. They’re still your own.
When it comes to my memories, I ask that you extend the courtesy of suspending your disbelief. Yes, it’s possible to feel simultaneous absurdity and tragedy and, if you’re us, to make a joke about it that grows over thirty years into a deeply grooved routine. Yes, you can love your mother and somehow end up living 2,500 miles away from her, with a summer place 5,000 miles away—or, in Mindy’s case, 7,500 miles away.
So, yes, I’m saying this happened, more or less as I tell it. Back in the predigital age, there were these things called notebooks, which both Mindy and I carried with us at all times. By some miracle, a box of them and various postcards, documents, letters, and photographs survived our many moves and misfortunes. The famous “Instructions” also surfaced. Finally, decades ago Mindy and I had made a first joint attempt to tell our story chronologically. Although this was certainly premature, it was very helpful.
