Then one morning, not long before spring break, my mother called, sounding slightly harassed, saying that my grandmother wanted to go to Alba. “What for?” I asked.
“I’m not sure.” She sounded worried. “She’s really, really stirred up about it for some reason. She says she absolutely wants to see the house.”
Not yet comprehending what the whole affair had to do with me, I said, “I guess it’s only fair—she did buy it, after all. She must feel kind of cheated about it, that she never got to see it again. It makes sense to me.”
“Well, your uncle thinks it’s a terrible idea. He says she’s too old to travel, and she shouldn’t go.”
“What do you think?”
“Well, she is eighty-seven, and I certainly think she shouldn’t go alone—you know how hard traveling has gotten for her. And I can’t go with her. But she’s totally set on it.”
“I’ll go,” I volunteered, feeling a rush of excitement. In my mind, I was still fully the child and she the adult. I loved traveling with my grandmother, and I felt nostalgic for the easy camaraderie we had shared when I was younger. I was always on the lookout for ways to reconquer the distance that had settled in between us when I entered adolescence—especially ways that didn’t involve my being a faithful correspondent or spending too much time just sitting and being with her, which would have been the best solutions but were beyond the ken of my nineteen-year-old self. Besides, I wanted to see the house again, too.
“I don’t know,” my mother wavered. “I’m just not sure it’s such a good idea.”
“It’s her choice to make, isn’t it?”
“Yes, of course it is. And she says she really wants to go to France one last time. But I don’t know—even getting down to Asheville is an ordeal for her now.”
“Well, tell her if she wants to go, I’ll go with her, and then she can make up her own mind.”
I had seen changes in her myself, but I had not yet realized it was possible for my grandmother to actually diminish or weaken in any way. The grandmother in my head still did headstands and hung from a chin-up bar. The last time we’d both been in Asheville together, she’d invited me to a topless bar with her friend John, an adjunct professor at the university where my mother taught.
“John? A topless bar?” I’d squeaked.
“That’s what I said, but he told me it’s the fashion for dinner these days. God knows what they’ll serve, but I figure I can brush up on my anatomy. Why not? You should try anything once.”
“Where is it?”
“Downtown somewhere—it’s called Zamba or Saba or something.”
“You mean Zambra? It’s a tapas bar.” I dissolved in giggles.
“Well, that makes more sense,” Grandma reflected. “He didn’t strike me as the type, but you never know.” I couldn’t help thinking she sounded disappointed—she’d already tasted Spanish food, after all. How could I have believed that the strength of such a woman was fading?
If I had, as a child, been saved in my nightmares by my grandmother hustling me out the door, her hurriedness now drove me crazy. She had booked an evening flight to Lyon, and I, wanting to spend at least one night of my spring break hanging out with my friends and my boyfriend, decided to arrive at her house on the morning of our departure. Grandma was hysterical. My uncle, who was supposed to drive us to the airport, excoriated me for making her anxious, for wanting to go to France with her, for getting involved with the house in La Roche. “This house is like a beautiful, poisoned dagger,” he fulminated. “It’s brought nothing but trouble to this family. You shouldn’t have anything to do with it.” He started to say more, but my grandmother surged into the room, and we hustled out the door.
We arrived at the airport with five hours to spare before our flight. With great satisfaction, Grandma settled in for the wait. Traveling must be too much like fleeing, I thought. The waiting calmed her: you know where you are; you know where you’re going; there’s nothing more to be done; and if you’ve forgotten something, too bad, in fact, so much the better, you’ll just have to exercise your ingenuity. I watched her observing a couple of parents fail to make their hyperactive children behave. Any minute now, the river of words would start—I could already see her mind putting a story together, crackling with intelligence and her peculiar sideways logic. She laughed and shook her head. “The children in my ward were always loud. Always running around, screaming, shouting, crying. But when they went into my office—” She grinned and halted the remembered children’s noise with a wave of her hand. “Silence.”
“You mean at Rockland State?” For years she’d run the Female Adolescent Unit at the large state mental hospital near her home in Pearl River.
She ignored me. “The nurses were always asking, ‘Dr. Munster, Dr. Munster, how do you make them be quiet?’ So I looked at them, and I’d say, ‘I strangle them.’ ” She cackled. So did I.
“What did you really do?”
“The children would come into my office, blubbering and crying.” Here she gave the mocking imitation of babyish sobs I remembered from my own childhood—still, to this day, the only person I have ever met who could sob with an accent. “So I looked at them, and I would say, ‘If you want to be loud, you can go and sit over there in the loud chair.’ I had a little child-size chair in front of a little table, with crayons and paper and what. And then I would say, ‘But if you want to be quiet, you’re welcome to sit in this big chair next to me. But don’t do me any favors. If you want to scream, go ahead and sit in the loud chair.’ ”
“What did they do?”
“Oh, children are very symbolic. They always stayed next to me.”
I wondered whether her chair technique would have worked without the special sort of sorcery she exercised on children, and I squeezed her hand. “You’re such an extraordinary person. I’m so glad to be going on a trip with you.”
“My Godt.” She pulled her hand away. “Go walk around or something.”
Somewhere in the dim roar of our nighttime flight to Lyon, I realized I had no idea what Grandma and I were going to do once we landed. We had no hotel reservations, no contacts, and no idea of how to get to Alba. Despite my passionate feelings for La Roche, I couldn’t have located it on a map, even if it had been big enough to show up on one. I looked at my grandmother, who didn’t seem at all bothered by these trifles. She was probably the only adult on the plane tiny enough to find the seats comfortable, and she was sleeping peacefully. I tried to settle down and get some rest, too, but I couldn’t. I was beginning to suspect that this trip might be a bit more complicated than I had anticipated.
When it was time to land, Grandma awoke refreshed, drank two cups of airplane coffee, and gathered her things around her, impatient to be on the move. When we got to the gate, she strode down the gangway and brushed aside the wheelchair we had ordered to meet her. Suddenly she tripped and went sprawling onto the floor, wincing like a tiny boxer with the breath knocked out of her, as the wheelchair attendant and I rushed to pick her up. She refused a doctor but grudgingly sat down in the wheelchair.
“Take us to the bus stop,” she commanded.
The wheelchair attendant set off, and I hurried along next to her.
We had been traveling for twenty-four hours. While we waited for the bus, Grandma pulled an elderly bandage out of her purse and laid one end of it on top of her injured wrist, which had begun to swell. “What do you know about wrapping a bandage?” she snapped when I offered to help. Her face was pale and drawn from the pain, and her age suddenly showed. So did mine. I was beginning to feel extremely young and slightly panicked.
The subsequent hours were a blur of worry and exhaustion. We made it to Lyon, and the next thing I remember clearly was standing at the ticket counter in the Lyon Part Dieu train station asking for two tickets to Alba-la-Romaine. The ticket agent clicked the keys on her computer keyboard, then leaned down, opened a drawer, and pulled out a book that looked like an outlandishly thick and yellowed
parody of a bygone era. She thumbed through it for a while, then looked up at me. “Mademoiselle, there hasn’t been a train to Alba since 1913.”
“Nineteen thirteen?” I had already been feeling queasy and ashamed of the stupidity of our quest. Now an irrational fear gripped me. What if Alba didn’t even exist?
The woman jabbed a finger at the yellowed page, and I stood on tiptoe, trying to get a look at it, but the print was too small.
“What did the lady say?” Grandma asked. “I can’t hear her.” I relayed what the ticket agent had told me, and Grandma shook her head, no. “That’s not true.”
“What do you suggest we do?” I asked the ticket agent, ignoring Grandma’s last statement.
“The farthest I can get you is Montélimar. Then you’ll have to take a bus, or maybe a taxi. I don’t know. I’ve never heard of the place.”
Grandma was whacking my arm with her good hand, so I turned to her and repeated what the lady had said.
“Montélimar … Montélimar. I think that’s where I took the bus from last time.”
This was cold comfort to me, given that the last time had been in 1948, but I bought the tickets to Montélimar, since that seemed better than staying in Lyon.
Once we were on the train, Grandma unwrapped her bandage and inspected her arm.
“I don’t think it’s broken,” she announced.
“Great,” I said, though I knew sarcasm was on the list of failings she ascribed to American teenagers. “You don’t think? Shouldn’t we call a doctor?”
“Doctor?” She brushed me off. “What doctor? I am a doctor.” She winced as she rewrapped her bandage, and I felt even more frightened as I realized I had never seen her betray any sign of physical pain or suffering. Scared we’d miss our stop, I struggled to stay awake while Grandma dozed. I watched the cherry blossoms and vineyards and the view of the Rhône River out the window and wondered how they could seem so beautiful in the midst of my terrible anxiety. When the conductor with his warm southern accent called out, “Montélimar, ici Montélimar,” Grandma snapped into action and rushed me off the train like a drill sergeant.
When we walked out of the train station, Grandma looked around her, and her eyes widened. She inhaled sharply and took a step back, reeling as if someone had knocked the wind out of her.
“My Godt,” she said softly, as if speaking to herself. “It looks so different.”
I took in the louche-looking young men with puffy jackets and slicked-back hair loitering in the plastic chairs outside the station café, the cars, the park with its fountain, the nougat factory. “What do you mean?” I asked. To me, Montélimar looked timeless and old, a nineteenth-century resort town gone to seed.
“It was all bombed out,” she went on, sucking her breath in through her teeth and shaking her head. “All black and broken.”
“Where?”
She gestured with her uninjured hand to take in the whole town. “Everywhere.” She straightened up. “The cherry trees are the same, though. Come on, let’s go.” She started walking toward the taxi stand.
“Grandma,” I protested, “Alba is miles from here.”
She waved her good hand and kept walking.
Despite my fluster and enervation, as the taxi drew up to Alba, I thrilled at the sight of the little stone village, the castle peering shyly off its hill over the rows of green vineyards. We drove through the village and down the hill, and then the driver waited for us in the parking lot of La Roche while we walked under the low arch into the shady street. My grandmother’s movements were slower and more painful with every step, but we finally made it to the house. We didn’t have a key, so there wasn’t much to see: the dark stones, the weathered shutters closed tight, the dim street, and the stone passageway.
I was lost in a tired reverie, thinking how extraordinary it was that we were here, standing in this particular spot on earth, in this tiny, far-off, and extremely old place, when I heard my grandmother say, “Well, I don’t think I’ll go back.”
I plunged into panic again. Grandma’s English always got a little erratic when she was tired or unhappy, and seeing her defeated and diminished and visibly suffering was so inimical to anything I had ever associated with her that I interpreted her words as meaning she was going to die on the spot.
I tried to arrange the thoughts racing through my head. How would I explain to the taxi driver? What would I do with the body? The funeral? The tickets home? Was there a special body ticket? I felt overcome with guilt for having accompanied her.
“Miranda?” Grandma’s voice interrupted my flow of macabre thoughts.
“What? What can I do?”
She looked at me oddly and beckoned with her good arm. “Come on. I think we can do everything we need to do up in the village. There’s no reason to come back down here to the house.”
I felt ridiculous and relieved as we slid into the taxi and drove back to Montélimar. The driver deposited us at the Hôtel Dauphiné Provence, traded a few jokes with the owner, checked us in, carried our bags up to the room, and charged us a preposterously small amount of money for the three hours he’d just spent with us.
“You take good care of your grandmother,” he told me as he left. I wanted to cry.
My lack of sleep had given the whole world nightmarish proportions. It’s bad enough to have made it possible for your grandmother to fly across the ocean and injure herself, but I can assure you that arriving in a hotel room covered in wall-to-wall carpeting makes everything feel worse. It was everywhere: the floor, certainly, but also the walls, the headboards of the bed, the toilet seat, the little alcove sheltering the sink. In the twilight, it gave the room, and me, a feeling of tawdry, muffled desolation.
My grandmother was breathing laboriously and having trouble walking. The mute relief with which she lay down on the bed was almost immediately dispelled by the sharp pain that creased her normally smooth face. I felt terrified, haunted by the thought of her dying in this creepy hotel.
It was the first time I had ever cared for an adult. Grandma sat up again, and gingerly, I pulled down her socks, unlaced her shoes, took her hearing aids out of her ears, slid her blouse over her head. For a second, as I undressed her, I leaned my head against her good shoulder and breathed in her scent of roses and iron, wishing I were still a little girl and could have my invincible grandmother back, with her hot milk and strong opinions.
Then I pulled myself together and ventured out to buy dinner for the two of us, since we hadn’t eaten all day. It was Sunday, and Montélimar was conclusively shut. The city had sucked itself up behind shutters and rolled-up awnings and gave away nothing but chipped paint and stone buildings whose stucco was grayed from years of grime or bleached off-white by the sun. All I found were crepes, warm and savory, a comforting weight in the stomach, but too much food, too greasy. After we had eaten what we could, Grandma wrapped the scraps in napkins. “Maybe we can use these later … No refrigerator … They won’t be very good after … Maybe we should throw them … No, I’ll just put them in my bag for tomorrow.”
When she was in the bathroom, I threw the crepes away, hiding them under the other debris in the wastebasket, hoping that she was tired enough that she could forget them tonight and that she’d feel better enough to keep forgetting them in the morning.
Once we were both in bed, I lay listening for each of her breaths, reminding myself of her resilience, her bravado, watching the Hôtel Dauphiné Provence’s green neon light flash on and off, on and off, bright and dark through the slats of the shutters. How could I have been so naïve? How could I have believed that any of this would be easy? Difficulty was my family’s reality: fights and bitterness, illness and injury, trauma, bad memories, and crazy grudges. Restful trips to beautiful houses in the countryside were not our stock-in-trade.
My grandmother awoke the next morning feeling much better and agreed to let me send breakfast up to her in bed. After some strong coffee, we both felt reinvigorated, and I resumed trying
to take care of her.
“I’m going to the pharmacy,” I announced. “I’m getting you a new bandage and some cream for the swelling.”
“No!” Grandma exclaimed. She sounded as if I had offered to stab her in the leg.
“You know the bandage you have isn’t big enough for you.”
She shook her head. “It’s fine. It’s a good wool bandage. I’ve had it since the camps. They don’t make them like this anymore.”
She undid the bandage awkwardly and held out her wrist. It was shiny and puffy, the normally wrinkled sags pushed out by the pressure under the skin. “I’m going to the pharmacy,” I said again, slowly and clearly, “and I’m getting you the cream and a better bandage.”
“I’m going with you. It’s dangerous.”
“Grandma, Montélimar is tiny. It’s safe. Don’t worry.”
“Listen,” she said fiercely, as she rewound the bandage. “I read about it in a magazine. There are North Africans here. It’s very dangerous. They could try to kill you.”
This announcement silenced me completely. It startled, even frightened, me. It was akin to her telling me that Montélimar was full of Martians, or anthrax, or Elvis impersonators. She’d been all over the world. She’d been to Russia with one of the first groups of American doctors ever to see the inside of a Russian mental hospital, back when Russia was Communist and its mental hospitals were sinister, scary places. She’d been to Japan. She’d been to Mexico. Come to think of it, she’d been to North Africa and enjoyed herself immensely. Her sudden fear of North African murderers was completely out of character.
A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France Page 6
