by Rod Dreher
So she died and I was left to wonder why I was such a bone in my sister’s throat. Now that I was home I was able to explore what wrong I might have done her, and why things went so wrong between us.
On a Sunday afternoon in early March Abby Temple sat in a leather armchair in my den. I poured her a glass of wine and we talked about her upcoming wedding to Doug Cochran. At a party in Abby’s honor a few weeks before, she had toasted Ruthie’s memory and gotten choked up talking about how much she would miss having at her wedding the best friend who had prayed so faithfully for her to meet someone. When she walked down the aisle later that month in the Methodist church to become Doug’s wife, she would carry in her wedding bouquet the photo of Ruthie and her dancing on the bar at Angelle’s Whiskey River Landing.
I took the chance to ask Abby why Ruthie had such a hard heart toward me. Abby took a deep swallow of her wine, set her glass down on the table between us, folded her hands in her lap, and said that yes, she was quite familiar with the tension between my sister and me. And yes, she said, I was the only person in the world Ruthie had no patience for.
“Remember how you said to me that you believed your dad saw your being so different as a rejection of him?” Abby said. “I think that’s how she felt. She never said that, but if you’d hear her talk, that’s the feeling you’d get.”
Because Ruthie took things so personally she never tried to understand things Julie and I would do that did not make sense to her, Abby explained. When Hannah came to visit us in Philly and we took her to the fancy French restaurant on Rittenhouse Square, Ruthie sniffed to Abby that our gesture to Hannah had been “extravagant.”
“It was extravagant!” I protested. “It was one of the most expensive meals of my life, and the only time in two years in Philly that we went to a really nice restaurant. But we love Hannah and wanted to give her something she’d dreamed of. It was worth the money. I can’t for the life of me understand why Ruthie was against that.”
Abby moved to the edge of her chair and leaned forward.
“Rod, here’s something you probably don’t know about your sister,” Abby said. “Ruthie was the kindest, most accepting person, but she had something against wealth, and people with wealth. Anything having to do with wealth turned her off.”
Ah. That was news to me, and strange, too, because I have never been wealthy. True, I’ve always made more money than Ruthie, but I’ve also lived in far more expensive cities. I traveled for pleasure in Europe a fair bit, but I always did so cheaply, adding a leg onto a business trip, or traveling in the off-season and staying with friends. For Ruthie going to Europe was something rich people did. I could have spent twice as much to vacation in Florida, one of Ruthie’s favorite spots, and she wouldn’t have noticed.
“Ruthie couldn’t see how things could be different,” Abby said. “In her mind there was absolutely a right way and a wrong way. She couldn’t accept that the things you loved and wanted were different but also valid. There was right, and there was wrong. She was a lot like your daddy in that way.”
I had to agree with that. Because Ruthie was a public school teacher she took our decision to homeschool our children as a rejection. I can’t blame her for being naturally skeptical. Over the years, however, I explained to her on several occasions why we chose to do this, given Matthew’s Asperger’s and his intense emotional struggles. She listened politely, but refused to take me seriously, or engage beyond a level I found patronizing. I didn’t expect her to agree with me, necessarily, but I hoped to help her see that our decision was reasonable. She could not, or would not, do it—and judged us harshly.
A few days later I was having a cup of coffee with Mike in his kitchen, and shared Abby’s take with Mike. Did he agree with Abby? He nodded his head yes.
“It hurt Ruthie that you left,” he said. “She just had the sense that family was everything, and we all stay here on the ridge together. Nobody ever leaves. And she never could understand how you could make a living as a writer.” My sister was a math person who hardly ever looked at the newspaper; she had no idea how hard I worked, or why my work was valuable. And she never asked. The fact that I could make a living by writing looked to her like a continuation of a pattern she had seen back in college when I wouldn’t go to class but still did well on a test.
It was frustrating to hear all this, and to think about how much closer Ruthie and I could have been if she had only been able to approach me, her brother, with the same empathy she relied on to help her understand and embrace the children in her classroom. Mike and Ruthie’s friends wanted me to know, though, that despite this sibling tension, Ruthie loved me fiercely and was proud of me, even though she wouldn’t admit it.
That she loved me I could accept—but that didn’t prove much. Ruthie would not have shirked what she would have seen as her familial duty to love her brother. My concern had to do with whether or not Ruthie thought I was sound; that is, if she believed that beneath all my cosmopolitan vices, I was a man of integrity. Despite her all-too-human flaws, I really believed my sister was a saint, and it kind of broke my heart that I could not share in the uncomplicated love and adoration the whole town felt for her. “It’s a sibling thing,” Abby said, trying to console me. Maybe so, but it stinks being the only guy in town who could tick off a saint.
All I wanted was a sign that even though she didn’t understand me or accept my ways, she at least thought I was good. If I could not be at peace with Ruthie’s memory, could I ever really be reconciled to my home? Ruthie, Paw, and the Land: the years had tangled them thickly together in my imagination, like the ropy old vines that cling inseparably to the trunks of old oak trees deep in the swamp. Again I turned to Benedict, who had encouraged his monks to “not be daunted immediately by fear and run away from the road that leads to salvation. It is bound to be narrow at the outset.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
One’s Destination Is Never a Place
A few years back, feeling the generous uncle, I promised Hannah, “When you finish high school, I’ll take you to Paris.” It took a year past her graduation date, but I finally made good on my vow.
Hannah had never been overseas before. When I broke the news to her after dinner at our place one night that she would have a taste of April in Paris, she could hardly contain her excitement. I was pretty jazzed myself. After spending what should have been a joyous time in her life watching her mother die, Hannah deserved to have a fantastic trip, to have fun, and to be reminded that the world is a good and beautiful place, despite it all.
“One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things,” said Henry Miller, the expatriate American writer who lived in Paris. This is what Paris had long been for me, and what I hoped it would be for Hannah. Maybe I could pass down the love of France to the first generation of our family who never had the chance to know Aunt Lois and Aunt Hilda.
In my mind Paris stood for cosmopolitan beauty—art, the Gothic cathedral, the grand boulevards, the elegant food and wine—lightness, liberty, and imagination. To me Starhill always meant natural beauty—which left me, an avid indoorsman, largely unmoved—everydayness, obligation, and a closed-mindedness that scorned imagination as artifice and the assertion of personal freedom as an abdication of duty. To be sure, that was my interpretation, not Hannah’s. Still I knew that her experience had been close enough to my own that she would gain a certain perspective from seeing Paris.
“Be careful,” Julie warned me. “Remember, Hannah’s Paris is not necessarily going to be your Paris. You don’t want to make her feel like she has to see things your way.” The message was clear: she’s your niece, not your acolyte. True, and important to keep in mind. It would do my young niece no good to cast off the burden of her late mother’s worldview, only to be shackled by her overbearing uncle’s.
We landed at Charles de Gaulle airport on the Saturday morning of Easter weekend, and found our way into the city, and to our little hotel in Saint-Germain-des-
Prés, on the Rue de Lille, one block off the River Seine. I had chosen this neighborhood because it had been in Hemingway’s Paris, and I knew Hannah would recognize some of the place names. On the flight over she said that she wanted to go dancing, and to hear the music that Hemingway did. You really can’t, I said; Cole Porter and Josephine Baker are long dead. She looked disappointed.
“I’m just hoping that I’m a different person in Paris,” she said.
“You won’t be, not at first,” I said. “If you think you’re going to get off the plane and all the things you don’t like about yourself are gone, well, it’s not going to happen. Paris will change you, if you let it, but you’re not going to be able to tell how for a long time.”
After storing our suitcases in our rooms, we ambled around the corner and up the street to Le Voltaire, a homey Parisian café directly across the Seine from the Louvre. It was lunchtime, and we took a booth near the door. The sound of tinkling glasses, clattering silverware, and lilting French voices sounded like a cantata for flute and wind chime. In my halting French I ordered two glasses of red wine, a bottle of water, and a plat de fromage. The server brought the cheese, and Hannah took a bite of raw-milk Camembert. Her face lit up.
“Oh my God, Uncle Rod, this is so good!” she said. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I’m finally in Paris!”
After lunch we crossed the Pont Royal and wandered past the Louvre. We walked to the Marais and met an old Parisian friend and her family for tea at Mariage Fréres. Then we walked over to the Place des Vosges, Henri IV’s seventeenth-century garden, and standing under the linden trees, waited for my friends Philippe and Beatrice Delansay to drive by to pick us up.
My friendship with the Delansays is the happy fruit of my long loneliness as a teenager in St. Francisville. I wrote to a pen-pal agency, which matched me with Beatrice’s sister Miriam, from Valkenswaard, a small town in the southern part of the Netherlands. We struck up a terrific epistolary friendship, and on my first trip to Europe, at seventeen, I visited Miriam and her family. In the years that followed I came to know the family and others in the Netherlands well, and visited many times. In 1996 I took Mam and Paw to Holland, and we all had a great time. When I became engaged to Julie it was important for the people I had come to think of as my Dutch family to meet her before we married, which occasioned another trip. In 1998 Beatrice and her fiancé, Philippe, a native Parisian, invited Julie and me to their wedding in the Loire Valley, which turned into one of the great adventures of our married life. I counted it a privilege to share these dear friends with Hannah.
Bea and Philippe gave us a car tour of the Champs-Élysées, which ended at a nearby restaurant that had been recommended to me by a maître d’ in New Orleans. Hannah and I were so waylaid by jet lag that we could hardly pay attention to the meal. The Delansays dropped us at our hotel and promised to meet us in front of Notre Dame cathedral the next morning for Easter high mass.
Hannah and I met downstairs in time to get breakfast before mass. Walking along Boulevard Saint-Germain, the first open café we came to was none other than the Café de Flore, famed hangout of Parisian writers and intellectuals, including Hemingway, who is said to have written part of A Moveable Feast there. We took a table at one of the red leather banquettes and had croissants, butter, and café au lait, then hurried through the Latin Quarter and across the river to the cathedral.
As we stood with Philippe and Bea under the great arches of Notre Dame, listening to the Latin chants fill the vault, I wondered if the stones spoke to Hannah’s soul as the stones of Chartres had spoken to mine. I asked her what she was thinking about, and she smiled nervously, but said nothing.
Oh look, you’re doing just what you swore you wouldn’t, I reproached myself. You can’t just leave the moment alone, can you? You have to pin the butterfly to the desk. Let it fly!
After the mass we beavered through the throng in front of the cathedral, crossed the Petit Pont back to the Latin Quarter, and landed at Le Petit Pontoise, a tiny restaurant specializing in French country cuisine de grand-mère. We walked off the repast in the Luxembourg Gardens, where Bea and Hannah spoke privately, and Philippe and I talked about what it means to move home for the sake of family. A decade earlier Philippe helped found a software company in Silicon Valley and had been quite successful. But after years of living the fabled American dream, he and Beatrice had moved with their children to the Netherlands. Bea’s mother had died, and her family needed them.
“When y’all moved back,” I told my friend, “I was secretly happy. Even though it means we probably won’t get to see y’all as often; for some reason I wanted Leon and Sophie to grow up knowing their European heritage, not as Californians.”
“It was the right thing to do, no doubt about it,” Philippe told me. “But it’s hard. You know, we lived in Tokyo for a while before we married, and then we had all those years in California. It’s tough when you go home, though, because if you’ve lived all those other places, and had all those different experiences, it’s hard to relate to the people you grew up with. It’s not your fault, and it’s not their fault. But all our friends who have done what we’ve done have the same experience.”
He was right, of course. You can’t unsee what you have seen, unlearn what you have learned. The only way to live entirely at ease with one’s hometown is never to have left, never to have seen how life is elsewhere, right? Or maybe not. Ruthie’s nature was not my nature. For me the only reason I was able to return to St. Francisville in the middle of my life was because I left it so long ago and satisfied my curiosity about the world beyond. Had I chosen Ruthie’s path when I was young, my way through life would likely have been bitter, filled with regret about the roads not taken.
Could the Simmons sisters be my role models? They had lived all over, but returned to Starhill, the place of their birth, to live out their last years in a tin-roofed cabin under a Chinese rain tree. Despite their poverty and great distance from the grand boulevards of the cultural capitals, Lois and Hilda created a salon for themselves. And Paris would always be within them—the city’s mythic allure was still strong enough in them at the end of their lives to pass Paris onto a boy in diapers.
Later I tried to talk to my niece about her experience at Notre Dame, but she deflected my questions. As we walked around the city and I would ask her what she thought of a building, she would demur. On the evening of our last full day in Paris, I told Hannah I was going to take the train in the morning from Gare Montparnasse to Chartres, to pray in the cathedral.
“Uncle Rod, if it’s okay with you, I’d like to stay in the city and go to the Musée d’Orsay instead,” she said.
I was crestfallen. How could a teenager mourning her dead mother prefer to open herself to the lightness, color, and gaiety of the world of the French Impressionists when she could be tromping around a gray Gothic pile with her flying butthead of an uncle, contemplating God, medievalism, and the meaning of life?
The question is ridiculous, of course. Remember, Hannah’s Paris is not necessarily going to be your Paris. Maybe this is for the best, I thought. That girl has had a lot more religion in her life than I had at her age, and a lot less art.
“That’s fine,” I said. “Just be careful.”
“I will. Thank you, Uncle Rod.”
The next morning I took a taxi to Gare Montparnasse and took a train to the southwest of Paris, to Chartres. Two hours later I found myself standing at the heart of the medieval labyrinth on the cathedral floor, gazing at the rose window on the west portal, trying to recapture the shock of awe that captivated my imagination at seventeen. It would not come. You can meet your true love for the first time only once.
But then, I, a believing pilgrim, did not need that awe now as I needed it then. It was enough to stand here, in the presence of God, and in this incomparable house built to His glory, and in honor of the Virgin Mary, and to be grateful. With the noonday sun streaming pale on my face through the image of Christ the J
udge, I prayed for Ruthie’s soul and for our family back home, and I grieved for how cracked and broken we all are. Love is the only thing that can fill in the cracks and make us whole and strong again.
There is a side altar in the cathedral where pilgrims can light candles and kneel in prayer. I said a rosary there for my family. As I walked away I saw a plaque on a pillar, honoring the poet Charles Péguy, who walked from Paris to Chartres in 1912 to pray for his sick child. Péguy, shot dead in the war two years later, revived the medieval custom of the Paris-to-Chartres pilgrimage. In The Portal of the Mystery of Hope, his book-length poem to the Virgin Mary, Péguy said there are two kinds of saints: those who come from the armies of the righteous, and those who come from the ranks of sinners: “Those who have never caused any worry, any serious dread, and those who have almost caused despair.” Two paths diverging in the wood, but both leading home to heaven. Péguy continues:
Thus God did not want
It wouldn’t have pleased him
To have only one voice in the concert.
I spoke to my sister in prayer, asking her to help me find my way home, and in so doing I felt again the distance between us. Then I asked her to pray for me, to help me be at peace with her memory.
And then I said good-bye to Chartres, where I first learned to delight in God.
Walking up Boulevard Saint-Germain to our last dinner in Paris, Hannah gushed about her day in the museum, and how she bought a bottle of wine, some cheese and some bread, and had a picnic on a quai by the river. Yes, it had been the right thing to let my niece have this day on her own, to guide herself by her own desires. As we waited in front of Les Deux Magots to cross the boulevard, she said something startling.
