Tidings. William Wharton

a TV, a phone or a radio. We’ve given Madame Le Moine’s phone number exclusively to our kids and a few friends. I know it has to be one of ten people when Madame Le Moine stutters out – ‘Tell-ey-phon.’

      I invite her in. Loretta skims along the dam to Madame Le Moine’s house. It almost has to be Nicole just as Nicole knows it’s Lor who will answer. I could go into my aversion to answering phones here, but I won’t. I think it has to do with voices from anywhere out of nowhere.

      I seat Madame Le Moine in the rocker before the fireplace beside our miniature tree. I give her a cup of tea with two lumps of sugar, whip out my cuff and take her blood pressure. Madame Le Moine is rocking and smiling.

      Lor introduced tea into this village. Before we arrived, it was coffee, strong, or, un canon, a glass of wine, also strong, or naöle, super-strong one-hundred-proof alcohol made from fallen fruit; a regional version of marc de Bourgogne.

      When the villagers did get hooked on tea, only the women, I should say: that is, Madame Calvet, Madame Le Moine and Madame Rousseau; Lor was shocked to find they were pouring her Christmas gifts of Twining’s Earl Grey breakfast tea into the bottom of a teakettle, and boiling it. They’d all be dead in a few years from tannic acid poisoning.

      After that, Lor initiated the village women into the entire routine: start with cold water, stop just as it comes to boil, rinse out pot with hot water, dry pot, the correct amount of tea, three minutes steeping. She’s even got them drinking it straight, without sugar or cream, something she hasn’t even seduced me to, a very seductive woman in many ways, but not that seductive. Next thing she’ll have them knitting tea cozies.

      My contribution to the village, besides toilets and septic tanks, has been ‘blood pressure’. Every day, whenever we’re here, I have informal morning clinic, taking blood pressure, pulse, listening to old hearts rattling along behind shriveled titties. Once in a while, one of the men, Pierre Rousseau, Claude or Philippe, will sit for me. I think they feel it’s good for them, healing; therapeutic blood-pressure measuring.

      Madame Le Moine is convinced she wouldn’t have had her stroke if I’d been around that summer instead of off in America. I do feel somewhat guilty.

      Whenever she’d be more than eighteen over ten (the French measure in centimeters not millimeters) I’d pop her with a fivemilligram Valium and a diuretic. It’d usually bring things around in a day or two. It’d also bring around other things: eggs, a fresh-killed rabbit, lettuce, potatoes, tomatoes, string beans. It’s hardly worth our running a garden. Pumping a rubber blood pressure machine bulb’s a hell of a lot easier than hoeing hard earth and hauling water.

      I roll down Madame Le Moine’s sleeve, give her the good news – dix-sept sur huit, 170 over 80 (maybe the stroke helped), look up and see Lor come smiling through the door, humming and singing.

      Anyone who didn’t know Lor would assume she is the bearer of good tidings. After years of experience I’m reserving judgment. Loretta could interrupt a little song to announce the fall of Rome, the death of the president, the onset of terminal cancer or the end of a marriage. She tends to sing when she’s scared, depressed or confused, to buck up flagging emotions. The trouble is, she also sings, hums, skips when she’s happy about something. It can be very disconcerting. It’s skipping which gives the real clue; she came down those stairs rather light-footedly for a woman in her late forties, so I’m not expecting the worst.

      ‘It was Nicole. They’re all fine. But Nicole’s luggage got lost in the transfer at Frankfurt so they won’t be down until tomorrow morning.’

      I’m sorry they won’t be here for Ben’s birthday but perhaps it’s better this way. We can give all our attention to him.

      Actually, at the functional level, Ben is an only child; he has practically no remembrance of the other kids living at home. They’re more in the order of distant aunts or uncles.

      It’s tough for Ben having his birthday jammed up so hard against Christmas, especially with our anniversary the day after.

      Also, it’s good they’ll be late because I want to varnish; I feel a strong varnish mania coming on. I varnish the way some people clean out garages or attics, wash cars or windows, shine shoes or silverware. It’s a way to smooth life, straighten raging emotions out when I’m mixed up.

      And I know I’m really confused. Right up to lately, I thought I was handling things okay, that it was going to be all right, but now I’m not so sure.

      I keep telling myself it’s only because I don’t want to hurt Lor. But it’s more than that. I don’t even want to think what my life would be like without her.

      At bottom, I’m very selfish. I’m afraid of the words, the words that will be said. I know they can never be taken back. I’m not sure I can trust myself and I don’t really know what Lor has on her mind, what she’s thinking.

      Something in me just doesn’t want to close in on the reality of what’s happening. I hate to think of myself as a coward but I guess I am. Lor seems to be taking all this so much more easily than I; I’m sure she’s suffering, it’s more than I can bear, just watching her. It would be so much better if she’d bring it out, talk about things with me. That’s more the way she usually is. I’m the one who’s usually evasive, who can’t bite the bullet, or whatever you’re supposed to do.

      I pry open the lid on the varnish can. The thick, virtually clear varnish is like concentrated glass. I’ll be spreading it, making the surfaces seem permanently wet, as if it were all new, not old and crumbling.

      I sweep and clear out the area by our beds and the wash table. I begin brushing away. The varnish sinks into the dull, dry, roughened wood and brings out the warm colors, the natural grain. My soul glows again; I stroke with the length of the boards, long even sweeps.

      I’ll only be doing a portion of the floor at a time. This is a fast-drying varnish; I might finish in one day.

      As I carefully brush varnish into the corners, I realize varnishing is much like my personal ethic and aesthetic. It’s a way of taking what’s there, or seems to be there, and making it more visible. I don’t know how this fits into the Camus theme of ‘cherish your illusions’, but somehow I feel it does, in an American sort of way. I’m protecting the surface of things, preserving; at the same time making things look better than they really are. That can’t be all bad, can it?

      I work my way around the room in bliss. I varnish the ragged dish cupboard I built a dozen years ago from wood salvaged while tearing down an old shed beside the mill. I varnish our bread holder, the barometer, the millstone boom. Long ago it was used to lift and move the millstones, and is now supporting a suspended five-light chandelier.

      I do the mantel over our fireplace. I varnish the huge table we built across the original millstones, still in place. I varnish our food cabinet; the door to the upper grange and, of course, all the floor; putting down planks so we can go from one part of the room to the other. I’m varnishing one of the supporting beams when Ben taps me on the shoulder.

      ‘Hey, Dad, look here, you forgot the firewood.’

      That does it. The knot in my psyche is loosened up a little; also I’ve run out of varnish. We’ll have one half-shiny beam for Christmas.

      Now, the mill smells like one of the ateliers around our place in Paris, where they fake original Louis Quinze and Louis Seize furniture.

      After we eat lunch we give Ben his airplane. He’s thrilled. Together, we get it constructed by three o’clock. He says he wants his birthday dinner at Madame Le Page’s, the local restaurant up on the hill, but his dessert must be a real mother-baked cake down here in the mill. His preference for the main dish, if it’s possible, is pintade, French guinea hen. Lor goes across to Madame Le Moine’s to phone and see if it’s possible. She comes back smiling, humming, singing and skipping so I don’t even ask.

      ‘They’re also going to have french fries and jambon du Morvan for him. Madame Le Page is so considerate.’