Houseboat on the Seine: A Memoir

by William Wharton

  They sell to an Algerian family. The whole family works in the store. They pile up stock all over the floor, and nobody seems to know where anything is. Also, the person who works at the cashier never heard of public relations and can’t count very well, at least when it comes to the money he is supposed to give in change. Also, the prices often aren’t marked, so it’s something like a street market, too much negotiation. They’ve recently hired a young woman, not in the family, who is very good. People who had stopped using the shop are starting to use it again. But I don’t really know how long they can survive in such a small place. I hope it goes on because a small grocery like that really is a ‘convenience store.’ It’s convenient.

  When we moved into Port Marly, there was another grocery store down the Rue de Paris. This one was really small and called Le trou dans le mur, that is, ‘the hole in the wall.’ And it really was just about that. A middle-aged woman ran it by herself. There were items hanging from any wall space and counters packed so densely one could scarcely move around. Her advantages were that she was open when the other stores were closed, such as Sunday afternoons and Mondays. Also she was open as late as ten o’clock in the evening. She didn’t open until five, so her whole trade was marginal.

  She was a very pleasant woman, and if you could wait, she’d manage to supply almost anything in the line of alimentation you might want. She sold Metro tickets and lottery tickets, also cigarettes and matches, all monopolies of the state. She’d buy them en masse and sell them to people who didn’t have the time to go through the town to the tabac which was the official dispenser of such items. I’d often walk down there, mostly to watch her hustle from five in the afternoon until ten at night. She was a whirlwind, and although the shop was frequently filled with people, one rarely had to wait. She was a blessing for those whose schedules, sleeping or working, were out of sync with the normal diurnal lives most of us lead.

  The door into the shop was narrow and low, so one needed to duck. Sometimes I wondered if the store really existed at all, it was like a hobbit place. She was next door to the routier restaurant and did a fairly brisk trade with those driving trucks and stopping for an evening meal.

  Around ten years ago I went by and the trou had been filled in, plastered over. I don’t know what happened, but for years her painted sign remained, LE TROU DANS LE MUR. I’ve often wondered what the casual visitor to our town thought when they saw the sign and found no trou.

  The Post Office

  Our post office and city hall are up on National 13.1 can get there by going through the little park along the chemin de halage. The city hall is an old château – in fact, it’s the château where James II of England stayed when he was requested to leave his crown to Mary of William and Mary. The people in England felt he had the wrong religion.

  The post office has been replaced and rebuilt since we came. The original was on the corner of National 13 and Jean-Jaures. The new post office is next to the mairie. It’s so great in France to have a post office where they know you, where they’ll sell you the special collection stamps without a fuss and will make recommendations for the least expensive ways to mail a package. It’s almost as good as having a dentist for a friend.

  The old post office up on the corner is now a restaurant. It has a lunchtime menu for about a hundred and twenty francs, way out of our category. However, we have such a selection of fine restaurants, it isn’t missed. There is a great Savoie-style restaurant near us, too. They specialize in various types of fondue, from cheese through different meat fondues. It isn’t very expensive and has a graceful and quiet atmosphere.

  ∨ Houseboat on the Seine ∧

  Twenty-Two

  Finale, I Hope

  So, as one can easily see, all the work on the houseboat has paid off. We have a comfortable, inexpensive place to live surrounded by beauty, the river, the village, other houseboats and natural countryside. All this is within twelve miles of Paris. It’s turning out to be a dream come true after all the nightmare moments trying to put it together.

  It’s difficult to describe a typical day for us, now that Rosemary is retired and I’m flirting with it. It’s very dependent on the weather, especially in the winter with the floods.

  The river rises uncomfortably about one winter in three. Most times the first floods are just after Christmas and sometimes last until the end of April. The winter weather can be quite cold, usually about five degrees Celsius colder than the weather in Paris. So, heating is a major problem for us. We sometimes also have ice on the river, thin layers of windblown ice sliding over each other with a swishing sound and packing around the hull of the boat as if to freeze it in place. But, oddly enough, it isn’t humid, only cold. I think it’s the winds blowing along the river, blowing away the mists.

  Heating the boat can be a big problem. The cost of electricity in France is high, and our prime heating has been with electric, oil-filled radiators. We’ve also used butane catalytic space heaters, but it’s a nuisance driving into Bougival to replace the gas bottles every two weeks or so.

  We’ve made some interesting arrangements with EDF, Electricite de France. First, because there is less domestic use of electric power after eleven o’clock in the evening and before six o’clock in the morning, they encourage the installation of a separate meter, called a compteur bleu, for night usage. It allows for half price on electric power used during those hours. This means we run our washer or dryer, dishwasher, heaters – anything pulling brute electricity – only during the night.

  Then, because of the heavy winter drain on the need for power, the EDF will make another deal with the consumer. If, during the twenty-one coldest days in the year, we are willing to pay ten times the usual day rate, all other electricity used will be at the night rate, whether used day or night. We signed up for this system called un jour de point. The EDF decides which twenty-one days will be expensive. We’ve installed, at their suggestion, and our expense, a signal light that tells us by ten o’clock in the evening when the next day will be one of these high-price days. Those days, we use no electricity except reading lights and the refrigerator, and it’s so cold the refrigerator hardly runs at all. We run our Franklin open wood stove and a few butane heaters full blast during these days.

  In winter, our usual life pattern is something like this. We do not heat the boat at all during the night. With all that Styrofoam I’ve installed, in the walls, floors, ceiling, even under the rugs, the boat is almost like an ice cream box.

  I wake naturally at six in the morning. It gets to be more naturally as I grow older. Forces of nature. I go peek at the indicator to see if this is one of the high-price days. If not, I come back to the living room, turn on all the heaters, turn on some jazz, then do my yoga and calisthenics. By eight o’clock the boat is warm. I’ve laid out breakfast dishes, gone to the bakery for bread, and Rosemary has taken her shower. While she fixes breakfast, I luxuriate in my shower. I’m usually pretty sweaty from the workout. Then we have breakfast together. At nine, I bundle up and go to the post office to pick up mail and send out our own mail. Sometimes the boat is up with the flood and my trip down the icy, slanted gangplank is a challenge, but nothing too frightening.

  After this, Rosemary and I share the newspaper, the International Herald Tribune, and listen to music, mostly classical. We’ve heated up our offices, so by ten we go to work. I’m down at the big desk in the metal hull, Rosemary is in her ex-aviary. She’s my bird in a gilded cage.

  At eleven-thirty, weather permitting, and we go out in most weather, we go for our daily walk, usually about five miles. Most times we drive to one of the nearby parks, or forests, in Marly-le-Roi, St.-Germain-en-Laye, Maisons-Lafitte, or even the park of Saint-Cloud, which is near the school where Rosemary worked for so many years. We try to stop at the library of the school so Rosemary can find new books to read. She’s sort of emeritus to the library.

  At home, we lunch lightly, chat, read for an hour or so, then, by two-thirty, it’s bac
k to work. I have my wristwatch alarm set for five o’clock, and that’s the famous five o’clock whistle. I shut down my computer, or finish the final touches on a painting, or at least find a good place to stop.

  Also, during the workday down in my office, I regulate myself by a wall clock I have hanging over my desk. It’s a windup clock, a seven-day clock, with Westminster chimes. It gongs on the quarter hour each time. I take a big stretch, take a deep breath, sometimes even stand to loosen my back and neck muscles, while looking out at the river flow by. I go back to work refreshed.

  It’s now before dinner when we often take a walk along the chemin de halage, looking at the river and the other boats, in the winter feeding the seagulls, in the spring, summer or fall, feeding the fish, ducks, geese, loons, coots or any other wildlife that camps on our bank. Rosemary says it’s most pleasant and unique having a barnyard just outside the window of one’s boat. We have bird feeders and also feed the ends of our daily baguette to the geese and ducks. Recently, we’ve been having visitations by blue herons. We started with one and are now up to three. They have a difficult time finding places where they can live and breed. Apparently they’ve found a place on our bras mort of the Seine. We’re looking forward to having baby herons visit. We don’t feed them; they live by catching fish in the shallows near the bank.

  We have fun cooking, nothing extraordinary, or too much work, things we enjoy and can afford. We usually dine by candlelight with the Franklin stove fire burning. It’s one of those more modern versions with doors, so it’s like an open fireplace. After dinner and kitchen cleanup, there’s more listening to music and reading time, or, once in a while, a friend will stop by, or we’ll phone our children or friends with whom we keep in contact. It’s a very quiet and peaceful existence.

  The exception is the boat itself. A houseboat, like housework, is never done. There’s the usual maintenance one would expect, such as repairs to damage done by flooding, replacement of broken boards, much painting, varnishing the wood of the upper boat, and, every other year, a scraping of the hull and repainting of the lower metal hull. It’s also the time we clean windows down there. I’m in the dinghy outside maneuvering by ropes hanging from the deck, washing away. I need to pull myself back after each good rub on the window; the old physical rule of ‘for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction’ can be a pain in the neck when washing windows in a small boat. It’s the same problem with the painting of the hull. Rosemary goes along on the inside of the windows, catching the spots I miss and cleaning her side. It’s good sunny-weather work.

  I still can’t believe how user-friendly this boat is now, after all the blood and sweat I, Sam, Matt, Tom, M. Teurnier and Gaston had putting it together. If one squints, one can’t even tell it’s two boats anymore. At least I can’t. They look as if they’ve been married all their lives.

  Speaking of marriages, Rosemary and I have been married forty-six years now. We look forward to celebrating our golden anniversary on this boat with our friends and children. It will bring back so many memories of good times had.

  Each of the seasons has its beauty. In spring there are the candle blossoms of chestnuts all along the riverbanks, then their snowlike dropping of the petals when the wind blows. There’s the growing of a ground cover by wild cucumber, the yellow blossoming of the willows overhanging the boat and the quick, sharp smells of the maples as they leaf out.

  For the last few years we’ve had little tits, called mesanges, literally translated ‘my angels,’ who build their nest in a birdhouse I’ve constructed and hung on the side of the wooden boat. We watch them from the gathering of the nesting materials through the first peepings, the wild gathering of insects to satisfy the young as they grow and then the almost mysterious, instantaneous departure from the nest, as if on a signal. For a few weeks we watch the young clumsily chasing their parents through the trees to be fed one last ‘beakful.’

  Also, in spring there is the hatching of wild ducklings. This year the mother duck built her nest in a cranny on our upper deck, and we watched as she encouraged each of the thirteen in her brood to make the big jump into the river. They’re mallard ducks, wild and free.

  Fall is beautiful in its own way, the turning of the leaves, the speeding up of the river with the fresh rains, the frantic restlessness of the songbirds as they gather for their flight to warmer weather in the south. The first arrival of the seagulls who’ve hitched rides inland on the barges that pass on the other side of the island and stayed for the winter. The leaves fall into the river and float like small boats with the current.

  And now winter again. Rosemary wants me to install central heating. I’ve figured how I can do it by using the front ballast tanks for storing the oil and having gravity feed to the heater. I could install two radiators in the downstairs and two in the upstairs using flexible copper tubing and olive joints for the plumbing. But I can see already that I’m not going to do it this year. There must be an end somewhere to the demands of this boat.

  But I know I’ll do it sooner or later. When I’m older, I might not be so eager to jump out of bed at six o’clock of a morning in the bitter cold. We’ll wait and see.

  So, finally I end this saga of a boat, of a good part of our lives, our private saga. I can’t imagine what we’d be like now if this boat hadn’t happened to our family, but I’m sure our friend Jo Lancaster was right. We’re all better for it, not just in the comforts and joys of the present, but with the knowledge that, even without many skills, we did it. Our boat floats!

  ∨ Houseboat on the Seine ∧

  About the Author

  William Wharton is the pseudonym for the author of eight novels: Birdy, Dad, A Midnight Clear, Scumbler, Pride, Tidings, Franky Furbo, and Last Lovers. He has also written the memoir Ever After. Birdy won the American Book Award for best first novel when it was published in 1978, became a national bestseller, and was made into an award-winning film. Dad was a National Book Award nominee. A native of Philadelphia, Wharton fought in World War II, where he was part of the Army Specialized Training Program. In 1960, he received a Ph.D. in psychology from UCLA and moved to France. There Wharton made his living as a painter while raising his two daughters and two sons. The tragic death of his daughter Kate, her husband, and two infant daughters was the subject of Ever After. He now lives with his wife, Rosemary, outside of Paris on a houseboat on the Seine.

  EOF