TWO

All the east foreshadows night. Day now belongs only to the western sky, still red with sunset. What more I see of France, before I land, will be in this long twilight of late spring. I nose the Spirit of St. Louis lower, while I study the farms and villages—the signs I can’t read, the narrow, shop-lined streets, the walled-in barnyards. Fields are well groomed, fertile and peaceful.…

    People come running out as I skim low over their houses—blue-jeaned peasants, white-aproned wives, children scrambling between them, all bareheaded and looking as though they’d jumped up from the supper table to search for the noise above their roofs.

—Charles Lindbergh, The Spirit of St. Louis

 

On May 21, 1927, at about nine-thirty in the evening, Charles Lindbergh, thirty hours out of New York, after turning southwest at Deauville on the last leg of his flight to Paris, gazed down out of his plane’s cockpit. Playing in the pasture below her house in Mesnil, my mother, Frances Frieseke, looked up briefly before continuing her game, which, since she was all of thirteen years old, was as important to her as anything Lindbergh was doing. Now, more than three generations later, my train from Paris followed, but in reverse, the last stretch of Lindbergh’s route. At first we crossed, frequently, the stately blue meanders of the Seine. Seeing the barges pondering along the river reminded me of a plan hatched by my godson Gabriel, with whose family I had stayed the previous night: he proposed plotting a beeline from Paris to Le Havre, at the Seine’s mouth, and using kayaks to traverse the sewer systems of the towns lying in the river’s embracing loops, a scheme that would cut the length of the trip by two thirds. Gabriel has inherited something of his father’s approach to complex problems, itself modeled on Alexander’s solution to the Gordian knot: it was his father who, at the age of eleven, showed Art Buchwald how to do the Louvre in five minutes.

The organization of the countryside out the train window was the same as it had been for hundreds of years—just as Lindbergh had seen it in the gloaming from his plane, and as Julia and I had first gazed on it in 1968, both surprised and delighted to find colors and patterns of landscape that we had seen described in paintings dating from as far back as the fifteenth century. In the flatlands the fields were broad and separated by pollarded hedges. This was wheat-growing country, only recently planted with American corn, or maize. Occasionally I spotted the startling scarlet flash of a pioneer poppy, or yellow fields of mustardlike rape (colza, raised for canola oil); and sometimes the brilliant low blue flickering pondscape of a field of flax.

The train wanted two hours to reach Pont l’Evêque from Paris. Failing a strike or some other act of God, French trains are efficient, comfortable, and precisely on time. I could rely on the fact that a train scheduled to arrive at Evreux at 10:17 would indeed arrive at 10:17. Passengers were informed by loudspeaker that the train would stop for one minute; at 10:18 we would depart as promised.

After Evreux, when the hills started, so did the orchards, in which were frequently pastured the black-and-white native Norman cows. Suzette, a friend of Julia’s and mine, an old playmate of my mother’s, and a member of our extended almost family in France, had recently moved from Mesnil to the Loiret and now lamented about the white long-horned cattle that looked into the windows of her rented presbytery. “They are strangers,” she said. “I am lonesome for the Norman cows as if they were my sisters.”

Whenever I was in Cambridge, I myself always felt lonesome for the scale of the French landscape, which now offered me a reassuring physical comfort as the train raced through it. This being the end of May, spring was well over. The apple orchards had surrendered their blossoms and settled down to reap the consequences of their profligate display. Only a few fruit trees stood out here and there, still in bloom. The farmhouses were surrounded by fences that protected their flowers and kitchen gardens from the cattle. I saw roses, though in less profusion than in Paris; Paris had been awash in roses. The countryside paid more attention to what might be eaten.

The land we were heading into was steep and wet and, once deprived of its woods, good for no large-scale agriculture or husbandry other than apple trees, cows, and hay. Although Normandy is slowly changing along with most other parts of the world where farming is in serious decline, many Norman towns and villages are still lapped at their edges by fields and orchards. The landscape out my window remained as it had been (minus the devastations of war) when the allied troops moved through it toward Paris in the late summer following D day, the allied Normandy action that made the name of the province a household word.

My train reached Pont l’Evêque shortly before noon. I had planned my arrival for midday, but not too late—that is, before that phenomenon of provincial paralysis called le déjeuner (lunch) began to slam the shutters on all commercial activity. I wanted to shop for essentials before finding out what had happened to the house in my absence. The place in Normandy alone might be responsible for the survival of the future perfect tense in the conditional mood, since I knew from long experience that when I arrived, something might always have gone wrong. The previous year, for example, I had arranged that while I was away, an impossible little bathtub was to be removed from the second-floor salle d’eau (bathroom). Resembling the front end of an old VW sedan turned upside down, the tub had to be entered from the narrow end, a feat best attempted by persons with long legs. Once in, however, one had nowhere to put those legs, except around the ears. I had left directions for this fixture to be replaced by a shower.

When I got to the house that year, I found that the tub indeed had been removed from the bathroom, but rather than having vanished entirely, as I had wished, it now sat forlornly in a bedroom, a cast iron memorial to temps perdu. Where I had expected a shower cabinet, there was instead a low, square china basin set onto the floor, in the place where the tub had been, with bare plaster walls next to it on two sides, and the passage door with its glass pane (which connected to a closet also entered from the billiard room) forming the third side. The project required further elaboration. As Julia might have pointed out, the best directions are not always those administered from afar. As to the offending tub, it remained in the bedroom until one afternoon when I was entertaining a prospective client over tea in the garden, during which collation it was carried away by a small parade of jocular apprentice plumbers.

I was prepared for cold and wet, but when I arrived in Pont l’Evêque, I found that the day was hot and offered a mild, dry wind—unusual for Normandy, especially this early in the season. Fresh from the train, I left my bags with the chef de gare, promising to pick them up once I had my car, and walked through the town.

School would be in session for another two months, and the summer’s tourism had not yet begun to swell the population, which in winter was between three and four thousand souls. A sort of expanded version of a small French country town, Pont l’Evêque is arrayed principally along a main street that points between Rouen and Caen, with outriding elements springing up along two perpendicular cross streets both descended from Roman roads, one on each side of the River Touques. Under its bunting of flags—all the European Union countries’ banners, stretched repeatedly across the main street, as if this were a used-car lot—a few men were fishing from the town’s bridges.

My walk through Pont l’Evêque was really more of a skulk, since I did not want the Citroën garagiste to see me patronizing the rival Renault dealer (the French word for rival is collègue), where, if he had received my fax, M. Fruchon had already arranged to let me have the smallest, cheapest, reddest, and most battered rental available. My parents still kept a car in Normandy, but I wanted no part of driving it. An ancient spherical Citroën familiale purchased used in 1968, it evoked hoots of appreciation whenever it was seen floundering between the hedgerows. The Citroën had problems with both brakes and power, especially while driving (and/or suddenly coasting) downhill, when the ignition cable would occasionally part company with the battery. In spite of its habits, Julia and my mother, up till our last joint stay, ten years before, had never hesitated to drive the car—perhaps because its behavior coincided so well with their worldviews. I myself was scared to death of driving it, probably for the same reason. (My father had no opinion; he did not drive at all, on account of a solemn oath my mother had made to his mother in 1937.)

I had to be quick. Small groups of clean children were already being herded across the streets of the town on their way home for lunch; had I been twenty minutes later, M. Fruchon, too, would have left for his midday meal, and his office would have remained smug for the next hour while I cooled my heels. But I was not twenty minutes later, because I had been riding a French train.

I signed for my car and committed another act of treachery against the old hearth gods by disregarding the purists’ approved manner of shopping, which requires fifteen stops, and negotiations with thirty people, to secure eleven items at the small, specialized shops in town. Instead I bought what I needed all in one lump, at the Intermarché in the zone industrielle tacked on to the Rouen end of Pont l’Evêque. The Intermarché is a large hangar in which one can buy almost anything, using a metal cart rented with a ten-franc piece. I sailed with confidence along the aisles, past fish and fruits and canned goods, hardware and bottles, dodging out-of-breath housewives in need of a last ingredient, and feeling like Art Buchwald in the Louvre. I had my shopping done in the fifteen minutes available before they locked their doors, on which leftover placards from the D-day fiftieth-anniversary celebration proclaimed Welcome Our Liberators.