EIGHTEEN

The jam closet could no longer be avoided. I had houseguests in my immediate future, as well as major construction pending in the upstairs bathroom, the floor of which was the jam closet’s ceiling. The jam closet, like the bathroom, was three feet wide and about nine deep, filling the space between the stairs and the salon. The wastepipe from the leaking toilet ran through it. For years, it had been haunting me like the least examined of bad consciences.

Other than my frightening glimpse through the rotted bathroom floor, and its converse, that brief shuddering glance at the closet’s ceiling, I had not really looked into it yet. Given the amount of dirt and rot that would inevitably accompany the labor as torchis and distressed joists came out, I knew I should clean the closet back to the bare walls—that is, if there were any walls. As long as it was raining, and since my time would soon be taken up by my role as host, I decided to use this morning for the job.

The closet had no door. Its opening next to the foot of the stairs was normally covered by a curtain, hung in such a way as to mask the stored materials as well as the wastepipe. Mercifully, the closet had no light. I had not seen the farthest reaches of the space since 1968, when, as Julia’s mother had recounted in her letter, I retrieved the family’s boxed books from friends, and from the attic, and built shelves everywhere in the house I could think of. What I had been unable to make shelves for had been stored either in the woodbox next to the dining-room fireplace or in the depths of the jam closet, on shelves where my grandmother’s fabled jams had once been kept (blackberry and cherry from the woods; currant, gooseberry, apricot, and elderberry from her kitchen garden; plum from the tree that was still producing next to the house and whose cropped limb would not give up; pear and apple from the espaliered trees against the cider press; and wild strawberry). The more accessible environs of the jam closet had later become a repository for broken furniture and, in front of that, for gardening tools and odds and ends and other things that people like the O’Banyons had no use for. (It was not impossible that my tray would turn up there.)

The Friesekes had collected books seriously. My mother’s mother’s father, John Duross O’Bryan, who became somewhat wealthy from time to time, used to bring portions of his large family (there were eleven children, of whom seven lived) across the Atlantic from Philadelphia for extended stays. When he finally retired to Paris, in the 1890s, he brought his library with him. After he died suddenly of appendicitis in 1904, following an operation performed in the Paris apartment (at 206 Boulevard Raspail), his daughter Sarah, my grandmother, was able to commit her future to the fiscal risk at which he had demurred: she married an American artist. She did so, in fact, while still wearing mourning; my grandmother was a determined individual. In due course many of her father’s books came to the house in Normandy, including his collection of Shakespeare editions and books concerning the life of Napoleon; his Lives of the Lord Chief Justices of England (in twelve volumes), Lives of the Saints (in eighteen), and Lives of the Queens of England (fourteen); works in Greek and Latin; numerous volumes on Irish history and the “Irish problem” (O’Bryan having been a committed partisan); and Bancroft’s Works and History of the Civil War.

Since I depend on books, I was curious to find out what had been consigned to this oubliette so many years ago. I hauled out tools and furniture and stored them in a dry part of the cave, and then, using a lamp on a long extension cord, learned with relief that the ceiling above the books was dry, whole, and free of mushrooms. I began pulling out books and stacking them on the stairs; as I stacked, I plotted the next oubliette, beside the attic stairway. (I had not been up to the attic yet.) Once up to my armpits in these books, I would, I knew, be a lost cause, and would simply disappear until something interrupted.

When we first unpacked the library, one of my goals was to keep its existential character. Those books that I found most curious or appropriate I put into the library: my grandfather Frieseke’s books on fly fishing and bridge, his collection of humorous sketches, his Hazlitt, and his monographs on certain painters whose work he admired; my great-grandmother’s tomes on domestic economy and the diseases of swine and poultry; my grandmother’s volumes on gardening and porcelain, her Trollope and Scott, her W. H. Hudson, Lafcadio Hearn, and James Joyce; and my great-grandfather’s Napoleon collection, which I consulted during the summer when I finally read War and Peace, shamed into it by Julia, who reread it every three years.

Second First Communion of Frances, 1925, at center, left of Frances, l’abbé Quesnel, pastor of Mesnil.

To unpack the jam closet was to entertain a jumble of family history, since in the days in 1968 when I had occupied myself with the obverse of this task, anything I had found sequestered in a book, whatever the thing and whatever the book, I had left exactly where it was, thinking the coincidence of book and thing and place a historical gesture that would be destroyed if those elements were to be separated. A paper tucked into a book, I felt, spoke of or to a person, place, and time we did not want to lose. Therefore, the holy card distributed at the time of my mother’s second First Solemn Communion in 1925, for example, must stay between pages 72 and 73 of Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey, where it would edify, please, or surprise the next reader to come upon it.

As a matter of fact, my mother made three First Solemn Communions in Mesnil, under the direction of three large men in black robes, one spring after another, until she outgrew the dress. It was during the spring after the third that Lindbergh flew over. The theory in the parish was that children should be encouraged to keep participating in the rituals; but another, more important factor may have been that on account of poverty in the village, a girl’s Communion dress might be her first and last real dress until she married. My mother’s first First Holy Communion was commemorated in a photograph (tucked into a Philo Vance) taken after the occasion on the first terrace of the garden, in which were present, reading from right to left, my mother in her solemn dress; my grandmother and grandfather; Gayle and Mahdah Reddin (mother and daughter, Baha’is from Birmingham, Alabama, who stayed with the Friesekes long enough for my grandfather to paint a number of pictures of Mahdah); a woman I could not name; Germaine Pinchon, my mother’s godmother, who rose early that morning with her mother (the next in line) to do the housework at their home in Les Authieux before the neighbors awoke. (M. Pinchon, at far left, enjoyed more success as a fly fisherman than as a painter, and Germaine and her mother were the only help the family could afford.) Next to Mme. Pinchon sat my grandmother’s younger sister Janet, who studied voice all her life. In her youth she had to be accompanied to the singing teacher’s in Paris by her sister Sadie, who acted as chaperon-interpreter and who treasured and often repeated the exasperated exclamation of the impresario: “Why could not God have had the kindness to place both the brain and the voice into one girl!?” Janet outdid even my grandmother when it came to risk in marriage, since the artist she chose to marry (also after her father died) was not only unsuccessful and faithless in matters of the heart, but also French, and Communist to boot.

First First Communion of Frances, 1924.

Janet’s marital selection made his living, from time to time, as the representative of a yogurt manufacturer. Speaking of help: one of my grandmother’s tales, set in the period before Janet and Tonton improved their domestic arrangements by separating, had them throwing tomatoes at each other until the tomato supply was exhausted, at which point Janet gestured imperiously with a sweep of the arm that included the mess as well as the petrified servant girl, and commanded in a voice trained for the opera, “Clean that up.”

Next to Aunt Janet in the late morning sunshine (I knew it was late morning because after noon the terrace would be shadowed by the house) sat another mother and daughter, also from Alabama, during whose visit the Friesekes thought it prudent to hide their copy of Ulysses (newly printed in Paris, and a cause célèbre) in the grandfather clock—which timepiece was among the furnishings of the house that never reappeared after the war.

So the books were filled with information. They were distributed all over the house, and interleafed in them were letters, memoranda, bills from a seller of musical instruments in Las Vegas, New Mexico (in 1888), and a menu for a day’s meals in my grandmother’s hand (I used to recite it to myself on hungry days: potatoes served at all three meals; trout at breakfast; and for the evening meal, fried chicken, followed by coffee and greengage pie). In training Vera to wait at table, my grandmother had been unable to break her of one habit, whereby she kept a thumb on the second joint while offering the platter of fried chicken: “Non, ça, c’est pour Monsieur,” Vera would reprove any guest who tried to pry away that piece before M. Frieseke had his chance. She knew it was his favorite part.

There were bridge scores, instructions from doctors, and a printed menu from a feast held on a transatlantic liner that made one wonder how the ship could have stayed afloat; notes from one of my grandparents to the other; shopping lists; letters written by my mother after she married, first to both of her parents, describing her new life and the birth of my brother Hugh, then later only to my widowed grandmother; announcements of deaths and marriages; annotated clippings from newspapers relating to the authors of or the ideas contained in the books, many evidently the product of the busy scissors of my grandmother’s mother, Sarah Ann McCullough O’Bryan.…

All of these things I had carefully left where I found them. It seemed a way to acknowledge the house and its contents as a living being. The problem with my approach was that the collection numbered more than six thousand volumes in all, some of which I had not laid eyes on since 1968. So on this rainy morning, I brought books out of the jam closet, brushed them off, and stacked them on the stairs or on the table in the dining room, looking into them only when I could not resist, and knowing that one day I must search, in an organized fashion, through every book in the house, to see what I had buried. Out of the jam closet came my great-grandfather O’Bryan’s rhetoric textbooks, in Latin, from his time at Georgetown College; my mother’s catechism texts; works by Hugh Miller and John Boyle O’Reilly; a vein of geology books from the 1860s; a 1949 (what stranger had left this here?) special issue of Science et vie on aviation, with breathless illustrated articles about the new generation of bombers and fighter planes; a set of Alpine guidebooks wrapped in a 1928 Paris newspaper filled with accounts of car accidents. (In 1928, the name of the day’s saint was published in the paper’s banner, next to the date.) I looked into one of O’Bryan’s college texts and found its flyleaf decorated with a scurrilous little drawing accompanied by a brief lyric, describing “Brynie” standing at third base with his whiskers blowing in the wind, at what must have been almost the dawn of college baseball.

Further along, in a heavy volume by an American archbishop fulminating against the threat posed to the one true faith by public education, a slim white pamphlet caught my eye. A program for the 124th annual banquet of the Hibernian Society of Philadelphia, held at Doolan’s Hotel on March 18, 1895, for the benefit of the Relief of Immigrants from Ireland, it provided the banquet’s seating plan, a list of the society’s honorable members, and the program of toasts. One of the presenters was John Duross O’Bryan, the text of whose “Ireland” was printed in the pamphlet. As to the gradual and unremitting incursion of the English into Ireland, he remarked (his words clearly balanced according to principles introduced by the Latin rhetorician at Georgetown),

The usual became the lawful; and so the industries of Ireland, instead of flowing in channels that nature and economy alike, laid out for her peculiar interest, were, by legislation diverted into ways that drained her wealth into other coffers.

The dinner menu was also recorded: bluepoint oysters with celery (accompanied by sauternes); green turtle clear; Penobscot salmon, cucumbers, shrimp sauce, and potatoes château (accompanied by sherry); lobster cutlets; tendreté of venison, purée of fresh mushrooms, new potatoes, tomatoes farci, green peas (accompanied by champagne); terrapin comtesse; punch cruiskeen lawn; English snipe with lettuce; glaces, fruits, nuts, and cakes (accompanied by claret), and café noir and cognac.

*   *   *

If these people are coming tonight, I suppose I had better shop for groceries eventually, I told myself as I went into the jam closet to get another load of books.