no one has been able to tell us.
What Michael first noticed was the brand-new waste pipe that had been installed in the landing. ‘That will make putting in a bathroom easy,’ he said with a laugh.
In all there were fifteen rooms in the house, though the two dilapidated ones were not in the architect’s drawings that the owner had given us. Evidently if the rooms didn’t appear on the architect’s drawings then they wouldn’t be included in the tax assessment.
What with all the rooms and all the closets in the rooms and on the landings there were, it seemed, hundreds of doors in the house. They were gorgeous and some of them, as the owner had explained to us, were very old and valuable. I remember her pointing to one and saying it dated back to 1750. Many had tiny metal plaques with the letters ND on them, which I was sure stood for Notre Dame – Our Lady. All had large, old-fashioned keys in the locks, and I knew that one of my first jobs would be to label them. I could just see Joe, who was almost three, having a field day taking out the keys and mixing them up.
Michael was eager to get to work. Before he could, however, the place needed to be cleaned out, for there was a great deal of junk and rubble in it. ‘The realtor offered to bring a dump truck over and clean out the house,’ I said. ‘I think we should have him do it.’
Michael looked at me as if I were crazy. ‘There’s got to be something of value here or he would never have offered,’ he said. ‘That statue, for instance.’ We rushed around to the back of the house where we’d seen a plaster statue of an angel holding a child by the hand. She was still there. We hastily moved her inside. Then we walked down the stone steps into the cave, and turned on a powerful flashlight. The dusty bottles we’d noticed were all there. We brought several upstairs into the light. Each was a different hue, from celadon green to a wispy blue, and all were hand blown. ‘These are what he wanted,’ Michael said. ‘These bottles will put Joe through college.’
The following day we moved ourselves into the tiny house in Le Vaudreuil. It was ideal; Florence and her husband Edouard and their two children – Marine, a girl of about eight, and Quentin, twelve – the perfect landlords. Florence insisted that Joe use the swing set and sand box in her garden, as well as the toy room that took up an entire floor in her house and which Marine used only very occasionally. She seemed delighted to have us living in her back garden. The only cloud was her dog, Diva. A golden Labrador, she was as vicious as a pit bull. Florence kept her in the house, but if ever she forgot and left her outside, the minute we showed ourselves in the garden she hurled herself in our direction, hackles up, teeth bared. She was terrifying, and the only ones who could control her were Florence and Edouard.
The dog aside, those first months were idyllic. Michael went to Louviers each day to work on the house. I stayed in Le Vaudreuil and worked on my book. We had arranged for our favourite babysitter from Maine to join us for several months and she amused Joe, taking him on walks and bicycle rides. Michael was in a stage of discovery about the house that left him excited, full of plans. I reveled in the beginning stages of my book, living in Le Vaudreuil, seeing Edith all the time, being part of village fabric on a daily basis.
Le Vaudreuil is a charming, well-to-do village of 5000 people whose government is generally centrist. The river Eure runs through it, and its main street ends in a small square with a café on each side, a pharmacy and a boulangerie, a tiny épicene with basic supplies and fresh vegetables, and two small restaurants offering simple country fare, from steack frites to various preparations ‘à la crème’, in true Norman fashion. Tiny streets lined with quaint stone houses wind away from the square, and there is a church at either end of town, with parishioners staunchly devoted to one or the other.
Before Joseph was born, when I visited Edith and Bernard in Le Vaudreuil, friends and villagers who greeted me looked at my stomach before looking in my eyes. ‘Not pregnant yet?’ they would ask. To them it was unthinkable that a married woman would wait so long to have a child. I got used to it. Like most Americans, Michael and I worked around the clock. We wanted children and felt we had time, though I did occasionally fear I would be like the woman in the cartoon who, at about age forty, put her hand to her forehead in great surprise and said, ‘Oh my God! I forgot to have children.’ I used to look at my French friends, most of whom had at least three children and were my age or a few years older, and marvel at them. Through them I realized what a different culture we lived in. To them, having children was what one did – there was no weighing of advantages or disadvantages, no sense as in America that they needed to develop a career first, no hesitation about how a child would fit into life. Instead they simply had them, one after the other, and managed their personal and professional lives around them.
Admittedly, France is set up for small children. Working mothers get a lot of time off to have children, and a good deal of financial support from the state as well. There are many options for their babies when they do go back to work – either a state-run crèche, which is like a day care centre but more personal and set up for tiny babies and very young children, or a nounou, babysitter, who generally works at her home and takes no more than three children at a time. At age three children start school, and they can stay there from 8.30 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. each day if parents desire, as lunch, snacks and nap time are provided.
When I, aged thirty-five, finally had Joe the news was greeted with great joy by our friends in France. When I first brought him to visit, at eight months, Edith’s brother Christian the architect, who has four children, said, ‘Now that you’ve started you have to continue.’
When we moved to France in 1993 Joe immediately became the chou-chou, or pet, of every gathering we attended, since our friends all had much older children. With his head of curly red hair and his round apple cheeks, he was a novelty.
As we settled into living in Le Vaudreuil I realized how different our child-rearing was from that of our French friends. No one could understand why we didn’t immediately put Joe in day care, a thought that never crossed our minds. How could we? He didn’t understand a word of French, for one thing. For another, we’d just moved and he was unsure of everything.
Edith couldn’t believe how much time we spent with him. ‘Why do you do that?’ she would ask. ‘It’s not good for him. He’s going to get too used to having you around. Put him in day care. Of course he’ll cry, but crying is necessary. It will make him stronger.’
I looked at her. I looked at Joe. We did spend a lot of time with him, and he was upset right now, which meant we spent even more time with him. He occasionally woke at night crying inconsolably, and during the day his face would suddenly fall as he asked, bewildered, ‘Where is my house with all my coats?’ He didn’t like being the centre of attention wherever we went. He didn’t like the French custom of kissing. He was happy at home with us or with the babysitter, and he liked going to Edith’s, but he became shy and worried whenever we went to a new place. All those friends back home who’d said that as long as we were happy he’d be happy were, I realized, talking through their hats.
I walked into his room one day and he was babbling to himself. ‘What are you saying?’ I asked him.
He looked at me, startled. ‘I’m speakin’ French,’ he responded. That was when I understood. Much of what he heard was senseless babble, so of course he felt confused. We realized he needed to learn the language, then he could relax. Maybe Edith had a point.
I went to the local public (state) nursery school in Le Vaudreuil, which had a very good reputation, to see about getting him in. I met with the principal, Annie Grodent, a lively young woman who listened to my story then agreed to take Joe, even though he wasn’t propre, or potty trained. He had been, but moving to France had made him revert to his baby ways. It was highly irregular to take a child who wasn’t potty trained, but she didn’t care
