The End of the Beginning

My mother has always spoken of the time after her mother's death  as being in a fog for months.  Everyone was very worried, particularly because of the lingering effects of the meningitis. It had cut short her first semester at Khâgne, and obliterated her second, she would have to start over again in the Fall.  

Her mother's presence had been essential to rounding her father's sharp, orderly edges, and without it the tensions between him and my mother were laid bare. She'd already replaced Jeanne domestically during so much of the war, and the brief taste of having her own life and her own friends had been intoxicating. Over the summer she proposed to Roger that she would shift her studies to Montpellier, a city 2 hours away with a large and prestigious university.  She could take the train back on the weekend and during the week stay in a Foyer des Jeunes Filles.

She knew her father would resist any such independence for Simone for fear that she might change her last name to de Beauvoir and take a series of lovers. (I jest only slightly,) Roger convinced him that Simone had earned his trust and respect, that she was serious student who would do well academically, and of course, he would maintain a brotherly eye on her. To the surprise of them both, he consented.

Almost thirty years later I would be sent by my mother to spend my last year of high school in Montpellier.  Like her, I fell in love with the city.  Like her, I was intoxicated by my independence.  Like her, I was learning a second language that would define much of my future.  As you can imagine, this is the part of her story with which I identify quite viscerally.

In the 80s, I was the only sibling who lived close to my parents, and came up to Mount Vernon from Manhattan once a week or so for some of my mother's amazing cooking and just to visit.  After my father went to bed, we'd have long talks, and she could always tell if I was blue. Often enough, I was having romantic woes, and on top of it, I was embarrassed to tell her that, no, it wasn't over the same man I'd been heartbroken over a few months ago. After one such confession my mother said: "Oh my dear. You remind me so much of me. I was falling in love and heartbroken constantly at your age as well.  Constantly." It was something to hear this from a woman who hadn't so much as flirted with a man other than my father since she'd been married, who couldn't imagine herself bothering to get remarried or even date if she was widowed. It also showed  unconditional understanding of her son as first her son and then her gay son: here she was just sharing the undeniable link between us of a propensity in our 20s toward intense infatuation,  (which, thank God, faded in me just as it did in her.)

 

This reads: "I will wait for you at 2:00 on Tuesday the 3rd of August at the Lyon-Parrage station underneath the great clock in the center.  I want to see you. Don't be a coward."
I don't know to whom this was addressed or even the year. But it attests to her dramatic flair, n'est-ce pas?

While suffering love's highs and lows and a great many crushes, (les drames amoureux as Francoise calls them) she was a marvelous student and the friend Monique, Gaby, and Claudine would each call their closest. Claudine was the one most likely to pull her into an adventure she would have never thought of doing on her own.  Somehow or another she convinced my mother to go hitch-hiking through Ireland in the summer of 1947.  I'm sure they had but two changes of clothes and only enough for the cheapest youth hostels. Lord knows what my mother told her father about it -- probably that is was some kind of chaperoned group tour. (Although everyone who knew my mother as an adult would list "honesty" as one of her most salient traits, that definitely wasn't always the case. I think the grief over her mother manifested in all kinds of ways, and one of them was a willingness to lie to her father in order to have some freedom. She had every intention of getting married one day, but she was going to see a little bit of the world first, unlike her mother, who'd never even seen Paris.)

After the death of my brother Luke in 1991, I went to England that Christmas to visit Claudine with my mother, and the story of the Irish trip came out. Just days after their arrival, two middle-aged gentlemen, Frank and George, picked them up hitch-hiking and turned into traveling companions and tour guides. They explained that they were teachers during the year, and every summer they left their wives and children behind to make some extra money determining which historical sites around the country should be added to the National Registry.  Erudite men both, they were delighted to have along these delightful French girls, whose rooms were magically paid for each night in low-budget but thoroughly charming Irish Bed and Breakfasts.  Off they would all go the next morning, stopping at this church and that battle site, knowing everything about everything, while treating them to delightful lunches. "For an entire month?" I asked incredulously. "Presque. Trois semaines peut-etre," Claudine answered. My mother winked at me: "Tu veux la v.h. ou la v.s.?"  A few years before, when she had started to read Claudine's letters out loud, I had noticed "V.S." on top of some pages and "V.H." on top of others. She explained to me that whenever one of them told a story that seemed hard to believe, but really happened exactly as they described, "verité historique"(v.h.) would alert the other to it being "historical truth."  On the other hand, when a story needed a little jazzing up, one could embellish it as long as it was qualified as "verité subjective" subjective truth. So my mother was asking if I wanted to know the way it really happened or the way it made for the best story. (Likewise I am no doubt mixing in a few "v.s." details to some of these stories.)  In any case, the part that was hard for me to believe was that these two married men on their own for a month had never made so much as a pass at either of them. "V.H!" proclaimed Claudine. At that point I  realized what they had not. "But you know they must have been gay, then."

In 40 some-odd years the idea had not even crossed their mind. "For heaven's sake," I argued, "do you really thing two straight men would voluntarily drive around Ireland with each other every summer to register historic places, pick up two hot French girls, and be interested in nothing but their conversation?" Claudine looked at my mother, who looked back at her, and they simultaneously burst out laughing. "But of course, you're right," conceded Claudine, who then enjoyed my invented lists of tip-offs they'd missed, like the Edith Piaf singalongs, or matching napkin rings for their the roadside picnics. I would later refer to this as her and Claudine's famous Brokeback Ireland trip.

But as sophisticated as she was when it came to French History or Latin Philology, Simone, indeed, would never lose her slightly naive streak.  I think she trusted some men too much in those days. It's not that they were liars, as much as she thought she could take their sincerity to the bank. As we know, just because men mean it at the moment doesn't really mean they mean it in a way they can back up.  Out of her many romances of the late '40s there were at least two that led to engagements. I know at least one she was so sure of that it seemed a technicality to wait until marriage in order to make love, and that engagement was broken off.  (Funny how she couldn't remember why -- some sort of family objection, perhaps because he was Protestant and she was Catholic.) His name was Tony, and she'd probably met him when she was teaching in Birmingham in 1949, or maybe in London where Claudine had married an erudite Czech named Joska whom she'd met at the British Museum, no less.
Tony was particularly dashing, and their break-up devastated my mother.

 I pick it up from my memoir:

One day, (in 1951) on a bulletin board at the Faculté de Lettres where she was getting her Maîtrise in English, my mother saw a posting for a student camping trip to Austria. It seemed like as good a way as any to mend a broken heart, and as her sister Françoise was now in a clinic in the mountains for an extended treatment of her scoliosis, she could actually leave Avignon.
In July of 1951, Simone hiked the mountains near Innsbruck with an international group of students. Among them was 22-year-old Steve Olmsted, freshly out of the U.S. Navy and tramping through Europe on a shoestring. 

My mother was unimpressed with him. He was handsome enough, but immature. More interesting was a tall American with the rakish name of Rip. At least interesting enough for her to spend a night in a tent with him.
After the Austrian vacation, my mother returned to Marseille, where she taught at a school for disadvantaged children that had been opened by two of her former private high school teachers, Janine and Cecile. After missing her period, she went to the doctor, and discovered the news that somehow surprised her.
Years later, I would ask her why she had unprotected sex with a man she barely knew and was certainly not in love with. Because she was on the rebound? She said she’d thought about that long and hard, and had come to the conclusion that on some level, she was searching for a way to create a rupture with her father, whose emotional yoke she could never throw off until she did something that would cause him to push her away.
For a decade she had been at the mercy of forces over which she had no control: her father, the war, her mother’s illness and death, her own sickness, and a fiancé who took her virginity without taking her hand in marriage. Each event must have reinforced in her a sense of powerlessness. Here was a chance for her to exert control over her life with her body, even if it meant sleeping with someone she had little actual desire to sleep with. (Even my mother describes it as nothing more than a one-night stand. Of course the irony is that her attempt to assert control resulted in a consequence that would itself determine the course of the rest of her life.)
My mother left the doctor’s office in shock, wandering through the streets of Marseille. Abortion was unimaginable, but no more so than the idea of actually raising an illegitimate child. In a daze, she eventually found herself at the local marché aux puces, or flea market. There, my future father, Steve, was enjoying the street scene. He spied and greeted the French girl he had climbed mountains with just a month or two before. She recalls “falling into his arms” and bursting into tears.

From the vantage point of two generations later, this chance encounter seems rather more like the hand of destiny at work.
If my father was nothing else, he was the kind of man you wanted around in a crisis. He immediately took my mother to a cafe in the vieux port, and listened intently to the details of her predicament, without judgment. Just as she couldn’t imagine having an abortion, neither could she imagine giving a child up for adoption. She would keep the child, and raise it herself. For a single woman in still conservative France in 1951, it was perhaps the bravest decision of the three she could make.
In the ensuing week, my mother told her older brother, Roger. He had argued so forcefully for more freedom for my mother, and now had to tell their father that his worst fear of what would happen if he did was in fact, justified. (Or at least so it must have seemed to my grandfather.)  Marcel was at first devastated, then angry. He immediately forbade any contact between my mother and her sister Francoise, now a teenager, who was living full time in a special orthopedic rehabilitation center in Lyon. For the next eight months, my mother wrote to her younger sister—on her back in a plaster cast—through her friend Claudine in London, pretending to be teaching abroad. Claudine would forward the letters to Francoise, who would then write back the same way. In fact, the entire time she was only hours away.
After some months, Grandpère calmed down enough to insist on one thing; the baby could not carry the last name of its mother. He urged that my mother and Rip be married at the time of the birth, if only on paper. To that end, my father, who was back in the United States, contacted Rip, who had returned to rural Vermont.
The correspondence between Rip, my mother, and my father could make up an epistolary novel worthy of Choderlos de Laclos. My father asks Rip to marry my mother, with a divorce will follow as soon as legally possible. The sole purpose will be to make the child legitimate, as well as save my mother from the legal consequences of being an unwed mother. (In France, at the time, it could have barred her from teaching on the grounds of moral turpitude.) Rip wants to do the right thing, but is clearly reluctant to jeopardize the relationship with his fiancée in Vermont, who knows nothing of his Austrian adventure.
My mother reassures Rip that she will make no claim on him, nor ask for any support for the child. In fact, she wants a promise from him to never pursue custody, which is so clearly the last thing on Rip’s mind that I wonder if the hormones were making her a little crazy. Through it all, my father is the coolest of cucumbers. He tells my mother she is doing the right thing, the brave thing, insisting her life is not over even as she somewhat melodramatically insists that no man will ever have her. In fact, their romance has already begun. He is the white knight, she is the damsel in distress, and they are falling in love.
Eventually Rip discovers that Vermont doesn’t recognize proxy marriages—he claims his hands are tied. My father finds a loophole: the marriage can take place if Rip comes to the French embassy in Washington. (The research and shoe leather on my father’s part is truly astonishing, all by snail mail, not to mention a $200 legal bill that probably came out of his own pocket.)  When Rip vacillates, my father threatens to intervene with a Vermont Senator--a bluff perhaps, but one that works. In early May 1952, with my father standing in for my mother, Simone and Rip are technically married at the French Embassy in Washington, D.C.

Years later, when my mother and I first discuss my homosexuality, she will note that, “years before gay liberation, your father married another man.”
The papers are mailed immediately to France, but do not arrive until six days after the birth of baby Stephane. For that reason, my brother’s baptismal certificate—which in France at the time, served as the birth certificate—is dated a week late.
For the first twenty years or so of his life, we celebrated Steve’s birthday on May 12, six days late. Steve said he didn’t care, but he did. Of course he did.

Everyone kept their promises; a divorce was filed as soon legally possible. All the misery my mother suffered during her pregnancy was forgotten; she adored her new baby. She left him in the care of France’s excellent crèche system while she taught, living in a large boarding house with other single people who all enjoyed being aunts and uncles to the toddler. (My mother now realizes some were no doubt gay—even though this certainly never occurred to her at the time. Homosexuals were a dark, shadowy race then that lurked in doorways in bad neighborhoods—certainly no one you’d live with, even if you were an outcast yourself.) Eventually her father agreed to meet his grandchild, and immediately turned into the doting grandfather (he had remarried, Marraine, to the left.) My mother was allowed to see her sister again.

Still on the other side of the Atlantic, my father moved south, to Panama, working in the shipping business and enjoying the life of young American expatriate. My mother taught English in Marseille, at the school run by Cecile and Janine. From them, there was no judgment.
Meanwhile, my parents carried on a transatlantic correspondence that became increasingly passionate. (This whole love story is my next project, a memoir.)
Eventually, my father returned to France and spent the summer of 1954 with my mother and little “Fa-fane,” ending it with a marriage proposal. She assented. He returned to South America, where he had another position with a shipping company in Santiago, Chile, and she and my brother joined him there in 1955. My parents were married on September 12, my mother in a brown wedding dress we’d periodically find in a basement closet growing up. It took years before I understood why it wasn’t white.

My father adopted Stephen as his own. In Chile, a year apart, were born Luke and Sandra. 

The job in Chile ended and my mother went to France for the summer with the three youngest, while my father chose Denver to start their American lives. I would be born there and Erica, later, in New Jersey. My mother's saga as a French expatriate finding a life in American suburbia had begun. (Thank God for her teaching.)
There was one event that feels like it belongs in the story of Simone Chabal though.  In February of 1960, her brother Roger, who was a full professor of anthropology at the University of Montpellier, got up from dinner and said he needed to lie down.  Soon after, his wife, Annie went to check on him. He had died quite suddenly from an acute nephritic attack. He left 5 children behind. He was 38. (This obituary is in French, but one of the most laudatory I have every read.)

It's hard to understate how bereft my mother was. She cried every day for a year.
I'm not a Catholic anymore, (my once devout mother lapsed into agnosticism) but I do think we get to reunite with those who preceded us in death when we pass.  This gives me great comfort. Mom is seeing her son Luke again, (he died in 1991), my Dad (1996), my brother Steve (2009) but most of all, her mother and Roger. And I don't believe in angels, but I somehow do think they are watching us.
MCO 2015