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Sometimes the metaphorical significance of a random event startles with its application to your life.
Lorna Mott was thinking this when she asked Monsieur Jasse to stop his taxi so she could walk a little way along the road above the graveyard of Pont-les-Puits. The whole village was talking this morning about how, in the darkness during last night’s heavy rains, the cemetery had dislodged itself and with the stealth of a nocturnal predator slid five hundred meters downhill, where the astonished citizens this morning had discovered a huge, sticky hillock of treacherous clay, burst coffins, broken stones, corpses, and bones. Only the oldest gravestones remained standing with unseeing dignity above the sacrilegious chaos.
It was Lorna’s last day in Pont-les-Puits, and she would leave with this ominous sight in mind as a kind of cautionary reminder of consequences unforeseen. Her departure—escape, as she was thinking of it now—was both impulsive and planned. Once she was safely on the train to Lyon, she could admit that subconsciously she had been planning awhile for a future in California without her husband, Armand-Loup.
They needed some time apart, and things she’d been doing could be construed as unconscious strategies to accomplish this, for instance recently publishing her collected art lectures and accepting a lecture appearance in Bakersfield, California, where she was headed now. Bakersfield was hardly at the level of places she’d lectured before her marriage, but going there was a toe in the water of her return to professional life. She had been thrilled with the invitation, out of the blue, from Bakersfield, and it had been the impetus she had needed to take up her professional life again, revive, expand. These were gestures toward autonomy, surely, even if she hadn’t thought of them that way.
In these her middle years, as people called the late fifties, early sixties, she was too old to cry about leaving. Armand-Loup was her second husband; she had been through marital difficulties before—why did she feel so near to a well of sobs as she neared the station? There are times you feel you’ve made a mess of your life, that was the sum of it, the harder to bear when you think of yourself as a basically competent person, even an accomplished one. Two failed marriages, and so late in the day, argued the opposite: incompetence. But, she told herself, marriage does not define your life.
The first to discover the upended condition of the cemetery had been children crossing through it on their way to school. They had burst into the classrooms with excited descriptions: “Squelettes! Skeletons! Bones sticking up, I saw teeth . . .” Skeptical teachers had gone to look for themselves, then alerted the mayor and members of the city council. The children had not exaggerated: dozens if not hundreds of graves stirred together in the muddy batter as if at the last trumpet; the righteous and sinners alike had burst their tombs. Among the villagers who came along to look, though most were revolted, horrified, some believed it to be a sign of the truth of the Resurrection. Or maybe a curse on the village. The mayor and several members of the village council of Pont-les-Puits, a village in the French Drôme Provençale, were meeting to discuss which and what to do.
The two events—grisly mudslide and Lorna Dumas’s departure—tended afterward to become linked in people’s minds in a cause-and-effect way and became part of the mythology of the village. Lorna Mott Dumas throwing suitcases into a taxi and driving off, Monsieur Dumas just standing there bemused while other citizens started looking for the bones of their ancestors.
. . .
Monsieur Armand-Loup Dumas (not descended from the writer) was one of the council members summoned to discuss the cemetery problem. Some younger citizens of Pont-les-Puits might have dismissed him as a raddled, amiable old raconteur who hung around the bar-buffet in Hôtel La Périchole, but he was reputed to have once been a noted museum curator; he had views on most things and, occasionally, useful knowledge. You could see he had been handsome, but now he was also stout, and his curly black hair had receded and was gray at the sides.
It was to Monsieur Dumas people turned now. No one discounted his opinions—he had published a book on the philosopher Jürgen Habermas and other members of the Frankfurt School—though his anecdotes were sometimes doubted because of the name-dropping: How could someone from Pont-les-Puits have met Catherine Deneuve or Archbishop Tutu?
People had liked his American wife, Madame Lorna Dumas, the small, pretty, high-strung woman who had publicly left that morning. Everyone had seen trouble coming; in the last few months, their house had abruptly been leased to an English family and was also for sale, and Monsieur Dumas was negotiating pleasant temporary rooms over the boulangerie. Some said that before this final fracas, young Madame Trebon, wife of the baker, had been seen delivering brioches to Monsieur Dumas in the late afternoons when Madame Lorna was out. Next to the voluptuous Madame Trebon, Madame Lorna looked like a slightly desiccated sprite, seeming young until you looked more closely; then you thought, Young for her age.
Lorna and Armand-Loup had been married twenty years. It was unclear when during the preceding months her recent frequent absences, away doing her lectures, had become the status quo, but something in her manner made everybody predict that this time she wouldn’t be back, and who could blame her? Everyone liked Monsieur Dumas, but he was a notorious tombeur—that is, skirt chaser, often with inexplicable success.
. . .
The problem facing the village council was how to clean up the mess in the cemetery while respecting the distress of people whose loved ones, in whatever state of putrefaction or petrification, now lay entangled and anonymous in literally a potter’s field of the same clay the village used for making its famous sauceboats. Among the exhumed bodies in the cemetery were several whose disorderly reappearance might get noticed in the newspapers. These were Saint Brigitte Fauxbois, whose grave, according to local legend, sometimes manifested an aura of light, generally in summer; Russell Woods, the noted American painter, whose posthumous enormous prices at auction were making him a household name in the U.S.; and Roland Bussy de Larimont, a former mayor from a prominent local family.
“Woods, the American painter,” Monsieur Dumas reminded the other members of the council, “the old fellow always up there daubing—hundreds of views of the church in the changing light? Alone, forgotten when he died, except by Lorna. He and my wife were good friends—the two Americans in town. She’s an art historian, you remember. She thought highly of his work.”
The names of dozens of others would have to be divined from the cemetery records, which would take time, but these were the few the council could remember off the tops of their heads. They foresaw that DNA expertise would be required, and other expensive technical assistance that in former days people would not have expected. Where they had the names of families whose loved ones or ancestors were likely among the jumble of bones, they would assume that such people, once contacted, would be responsible for picking up an appropriate proportion of the cost.
In the train, Lorna knew from experience, her spirits would rise, they always did, but right now she felt like she had forgotten something in the oven and would eventually have to deal with a charred, smelly mess, the remains of a fragrant, delicious concoction she’d slaved over. For a moment she felt failed, depressed, sad, slightly panicked, daunted by the practical problems she was facing, of supporting herself, reviving a career almost dormant for twenty years, and explaining to her adult children her second marriage wreck. Where had twenty years gone? What had she been doing all that time? Visiting the sick, volunteering at the village library, giving art lectures to the American cooking groups that came to Pont-les-Puits for courses in mushroom picking or knife skills. Paltry pastimes. She had been happy, though.
People generally would have said that Lorna Mott was the epitome of a successful woman: lovely offspring, grandchildren, health, a French husband, a delightful house, and an independent career involving travel and public appearances—public appearances requiring expensive clothes (or clothes that appeared expensive)—an uncomplicated, sociable nature, and an intellectual life. She would say this herself, she was always grateful for her luck, except for now, perhaps heading to a second divorce—she was not going to think that far ahead—which she knew officially counted against your happiness score. And, of course, not so young anymore. Of a certain age. Or, face it, a bit older than the French meant when they spoke of une femme d’un certain âge.
Her plan was to take the train to Clermont-Ferrand, then the TGV to Lyon, and, from there, Air France to New York. She’d recover in New York for a couple of days, network a little, and get in touch with the publisher of her book in hopes of lining up some readings or publicity. From New York she’d contact her children—but how to tell them why she was there? Lorna had three children with her previous husband, Randall Mott: Peggy, Curt, and Hams. They probably had no suspicion of her difficulties.
Then to San Francisco, her hometown, soon to be her home base again, then overnight to Bakersfield to give her lecture. She had some cash in dollars in her purse, and her credit cards, and a small bank account in the U.S., where she had been stashing fees and royalties, unconsciously preparing her escape.
The French village of Pont-les-Puits had been her home for twenty years, or, rather, eighteen: when she and Armand-Loup first married they lived in Paris, and he was still at the Musée d’Orsay. But she’d loved Armand-Loup’s ancestral village and was happy to move there when he retired to write his book on post-Impressionism in the delicate period before Abstractionism set in. Guidebooks said of Pont-les-Puits that it was “favorably situated at a convenient driving distance from the sea, benefiting from an elevated position in the foothills of the Massif Central range.” It had the usual number of historical monuments, including Roman ruins, a tower from the thirteenth century, a doorway—the Portail de Fernande—from the fourteenth; ritual Jewish bains; the summer châteaux of the counts of Toulouse; chapels; fountains; and walls and so on. Now tears did come to her eyes as she glimpsed the shadowy ramparts of the château of the counts receding from the train window. Her dreams receding into the mists of the disappearing view.
Lorna loved Pont-les-Puits, even though by some standards it was a slightly run-down little backwater. In its heyday, the manufacture of a certain local form of earthenware double sauceboat, adapted to skimming fat from the gravy (a puitière), had brought prosperity, but recently its use had fallen off, and the town’s young people had left for business schools or jobs as au pair girls and tutors of French in Scandinavia, where they propagated on their uncritical patrons the rough local accent, with its heavily rolled r’s so derided by Parisians.
The future held some promise for Pont even so—there was now a growing group of British expatriates drawn to the cheap and potentially charming run-down real estate. They in turn expanded the prosperity of the village by bringing an enthusiastic group of American cookery writers who didn’t speak French, and also chefs enamored of a species of local onion, the Allium tanisium, related to the Japanese allium. Now there were numberless cooking residencies and classes, sometimes combined with French conversation tutorials, to the great delight of the people who kept the inns and restaurants. Lorna occasionally was asked to give an art lecture about the local monuments to the American foodies who subscribed so expensively to these courses. She was always glad to do it, and in that way kept her hand in. She was especially good on certain nineteenth-century neglected painters like Meissonier and Fantin-Latour, and she hoped to help her painter friend, the late Russell Woods, get his proper place in art history.
How could she leave this beloved place? But she had to, unless Armand-Loup would really change his ways. There was also the tragedy of having to sell their house, the sense of a beautiful idyll—twenty years long—over, finished, done. But on the upside, in California she could be of help to her grown children, and, really, it would be nice to be in America again. She had a rosy view of it. No matter where you are, you don’t stop being American.
On the train, she stole another look at the words she’d downloaded from the French consulate website:
It should be noted that a spouse who leaves the family domicile without a court authorization may be deemed under French law to have committed a “fault” giving rise to significant financial consequences. Thus a spouse should avoid doing so until it has been possible to consult with French counsel.
Tant pis—too bad, so much for that—she was doing it. And now it was time to think of the future. She would prove, to herself if to no one else, that you can make a new life at any age.
As she was climbing into the train, Armand-Loup telephoned her cell and said in a cold voice, “Chérie, tu as oublié ton argenterie.” She’d left the sterling silverware she’d taken with her from California when she married him and moved to France. He must have realized she might not be coming back for a while.
Tant pis.
Copyright © 2021 by Diane Johnson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
