“Yes, all ri—yes, of course,” my mother said, perplexed as to what my grandmother could have to do with a property in France—and even more as to how the most loquacious person any of us knew could have failed to mention it before.
“Very good. I’ll have my notaire send along the appropriate documents. Je t’embrasse.” He hung up.
When my mother returned to the table and related the conversation to us, memories of that Sunday with my grandfather flooded over me, and I remembered my deep desire to live in La Roche.
“I know that place,” I told my parents. “That’s where he took me to vote.” I searched for words to describe it to them, feeling slightly panicked as I recounted my day there. What if La Roche really was my home, and what if I never saw it again?
Later my mother sat down in her blue velveteen chair and called my grandmother. “Oh yes,” Grandma said. “I remember I bought that house.”
“Really? Why have I never heard about any of this? He says it’s his.”
“That’s just like him,” my grandmother sighed.
“Well, now he wants to sell it. He says he needs you to sign a power of attorney.” I sat at my mother’s feet, leaning against the arm of the chair, trying to decipher the muffled voice of my grandmother through the mouthpiece, trying to picture how she would react to this information. Would she say yes and make the house go away forever?
“Why would I do that?” Grandma asked.
“Well, I don’t know,” my mother replied. “You tell me! How on earth did you end up with a house in the South of France?”
My grandma emitted one of her peppery rhetorical noises that made it sound like she was picking up a story she’d left off a few seconds ago in another dimension. “I read an article in Combat, or L’Humanité—one of those left-wing newspapers—by some artist, talking about this old village, falling apart, with beautiful houses you could buy and fix up. You know, start an artistic, intellectual utopia, a new life after the war. And I love history.”
When would this have been? My mother searched for a question that would connect this explanation to a fixed point in the space-time continuum, but Grandma wasn’t one to pause and wait for you to catch up. “So I went there—on the way back from Marseille, taking my parents to the boat to Israel, you know.” My mother didn’t, but my grandmother had already taken off down another path. “Your father had a little money saved up from the Trials and thanks God I was there to do something sensible, otherwise … my Godt. You know what he bought with his first paycheck? A silk tie. With a baby at home. Real silk. Yellow. Can you imagine?”
Not for nothing did my mother write her doctoral dissertation on the insanity defense. She pressed on. “When was this?”
“November.”
“November what?”
“November. Your father had already gone to New York. He came back to help us move to America in December but got real sick; he made me call a doctor. You imagine? Me a doctor, and he makes me call another one. He said I was trying to poison him.”
The story about the time my grandfather got the flu and accused my grandmother of trying to poison him was legend in our family, and my mother pounced on it. “So that would have been in 1948?”
My grandmother ignored her in a way that, after a lifetime of interpreting her speech, my mother took as assent. “I was pregnant with your brother, and so sick. The lady in the inn I stayed in was so nice—she could see I was pregnant, she didn’t say anything, kind of just looked me over and gave me a bouillotte”—the term hot-water bottle had never made it into Grandma’s vocabulary—“and of course the only reason I got to sign that day was it turned out the notaire was the cousin of a friend of mine from Hauteville. I had to wait for him to get out of Mass. Then I got back to Montélimar for the train. You just have to talk to people, you know?”
“That’s when you brought me the nougat!” my mother exclaimed, allowing herself to slide down one of Grandma’s tangents. She caught herself, though. “So are you going to sign?”
“Why would I do that?” Grandma asked again. “I’m the one who bought it.”
“Did you ever see it again? Did you ever think about it?”
My grandmother’s high-wire chatter slacked off into silence for a fleeting moment. “What do you think?”
“Honestly? I think you should do whatever you want.”
“I’ll think about it,” Grandma concluded. “ ’Bye.” As always, she hung up immediately, the second she decided the conversation was over. Then she called my mother back.
“No,” she said.
After a few more phone calls with my grandmother, my mother summoned her courage and telephoned my grandfather.
“Of course,” my grandfather fumed, “that woman has been trying to ruin my life from the moment she met me. After the money, I daresay.”
“Well, no. She says she’ll think about selling if you send her a copy of the deed and an appraisal.” My mother took a deep breath before uttering the next sentence, which she knew would send my grandfather into a rage. “She says it’s her house, too, and if it’s going to be sold, she thinks the profits should be divided evenly between the children.” This was meant as a jab from my grandmother to my grandfather, one last attempt to strong-arm a man who had refused to pay child support and disinherited my mother and uncle. But my grandfather was too furious to notice.
“Her house?”
“That’s what she said.”
“Very good. I see she still has no compunctions about lying.”
“Do you have the deed?”
“Of course I do.”
“Well, maybe if you showed it to her, to prove you were the owner, it would solve the whole question.”
Some people manage to write exactly as they talk, but my grandfather is the only man I know who manages to talk exactly as he writes. “I did not spend decades trying to obtain a divorce from that woman to have to prove something is my own. If she would like to reimburse any of the myriad expenses I have undertaken—taxes, the roof, the walls, the windows, electricity, running water; I shudder to think how much money I have put into that house, money thrown away—should she choose to contribute to any of that, I might consider her in some way owner of the house.
“Not to mention, of course,” he added, “that buying it was my idea in the first place—I read about it in Combat.”
“That’s interesting—” my mother started to say, She says she was the one who read about it. She thought better of continuing and closed her mouth.
“What’s interesting? That she wants to steal something that was purchased with my money? It was my money, you know. She may have gone down there, but it was my money. Can’t you do something about this, Angèle? The woman is impossible, you agree?”
My mother was silent. Finally, she conceded, “I’ll phone her again.”
“I knew you’d see reason about this,” my grandfather approved.