In the Moon Page 3
Part of Jenny’s proposal to her father was that she would attend a chauffeur school for several months. Jenny was the only woman in the class and enjoyed all the teasing that this entailed. She graduated with honors and was apparently successful in imparting her newfound knowledge to Suzy and her father, who were soon able to drive. Jenny always seemed to know what she wanted and, without delay, did whatever she felt was needed to achieve her goals.
By the time she married my father, Jenny spoke English fairly well and without hesitation. She read books in English and understood the language better than she could speak it. Her pronunciation of most familiar words was close to flawless. If anything, it was almost too good. She articulated her words so well that when she uttered the word “milk,” for instance, the L and K sounds were so distinct that one could almost hear the milk sloshing in the pail.
Jenny did however, have a unique language problem. If she didn’t know the English word for what she wanted to say, she forged, literally invented, a new English word on the assumption that an understandable English word could be hammered out of the French word she wished to translate. And Jenny’s conviction that the rules of French grammar applied equally well to English often contributed to the capricious order of words in her sentences.
During the four years of World War I, when Jenny was a teenager, her formal schooling had come to a halt. However, she was part of a well-to-do French-speaking family who thrived on sophisticated conversation and the reading of good books, so she spoke French correctly and with refinement. But when Jenny spoke English, her sense of sentence decorum often abandoned her.
Impressed by her pronunciation and the verve with which she delivered her sentences, her listeners were often taken aback when she combined several barely related ideas into a single, helter-skelter, breathless sentence (something she never did when speaking French). They found it quaint, entertaining, and often very funny. And because she was good-natured and had a lively sense of humor, they found her very engaging.
By the time I reached adulthood, one of Mother’s favorite pastimes during our visits together was reminiscing. This she did in both English and French, but I always enjoyed it more when she did it in English because it added a new dimension to any story she was telling. I will occasionally, in the coming pages, attempt to portray her comments and reminiscences in English, and to give a fair impression of the way she came across, though I make no claim to complete accuracy in this regard. I must also explain that when my mother’s quoted words sound appropriate and normal in these chapters, it’s because I am translating what she had said in French—correctly.
I also need to mention Mother’s easily excitable nature. She had a tendency to see things at their blackest and most dramatic. Her style of storytelling lent itself well to conveying all the terror, panic, and drama she conjured up in her own mind.
Once, I happened to mention to Mother that one of my earliest memories was of an extremely large marmalade cat, a cat so large that it must have been larger than I was at the time, and that I thought I remembered him purring and dozing beside me.
“Oh yes! I remember that great big orange cat of the neighbors!” Mother said, as she launched into one of her reminiscences. “You were a newborn of two years. I remember him because he made a big brouhaha for us. Everything was going on roller skates until this cat came. Yes! It was that awful—what did you call him—‘apricot jam’ cat? Anyway, that orange cat, who so much deranged our life.
“Nurse Khondakov had put you on a warm, sunny day in the garden in your pram. I was doing gardenage in a far-away corner of the garden and saw that orange cat jumping right next to your pram onto the bench. The pram was hiding nearly all the bench, so I could not see him afterward, and I thought he is just taking a walk on the bench, like cats always do. But when I looked up again, I saw the pram balancing itself backwards and forwards, all alone by itself, rather violently, and you were too small to balance yourself. I was right away suspicious and alarmed myself.
“I knew he was famous for eating rats as big as a milk bottle. The rats lived in the hens’ house and were always eating the hens’ food and also their eggs, and I thought he would devour you. You were not much bigger.” Mother often omitted what she thought was obvious, and in this case I was left wondering whose size I slightly exceeded, the rat, the cat or possibly even the milk bottle?
“I was running to your pram with my heart in my mouth at the far end of the garden. When I arrived there, I found the cat in the pram with you, having one paw around your chest, sleeping and as if he was loving you—you did not seem to mind at all and you were wide-awaked and smiling at me. Then he waked up, seeing that I was being angry with him. He violently jumped out and I was terrified that he had scratched you leaving the pram with an awful scar on your face!
“But you were not scratched at all, thank God. While this is happening, Nurse Khondakov was smoking peacefully a cigarette nearby. I crossly called her to me by saying, ‘Don’t you see this cat with all his fleas in the pram with the baby?’
“And you know what that Khondakov had the nerves of saying to me?” exclaimed Mother. Not waiting for an answer, she continued: “ ‘This cat is always coming nearby and he loves the baby, and he never even hurts him. He is like a guarding dog. When that cat is there, I take a cigarette and my eases not far away, but also not near the baby while not putting smoke on him.’
“Khondakov was saying this to me calmly as if it was nothing at all. Can you imagine an experted nurse doing and saying things like this?
“Then I reminded her that the cat must be having fleas—he was always killing big rats and eating them with the fleas jumping on his furs before he has them inside his mouth. And next the fleas on the cat jumps on the baby, I told her. But Nurse Khondakov was so insolent and answered me that if the baby had catched fleas she will be the first to know that. And besides, there were no fleas in the pram on the baby which I looked in, and saw she was right about that.
“Then I told her that the cat is so big he might be choking the baby like a mother pig when she is sleeping on the face of her little pigs. But even this did not make her repenting. She just said I am ridiculous being afraid of choking you under the cat who was perhaps sleeping like a mother pig on your face.
“I was so furious by this insolence that I fired her on the spot!”
At this point, I interrupted Mother’s excited narrative, “But you have always said that Nurse Khondakov was such a good nurse and so devoted to me!”
“She was,” Mother replied. “She was a White Russian nurse and the governess of the countess who was the cousin of the Czar in St. Petersburg. So she must be very good, living even in the Royal Palace with them, being a nurse diplomed, and also nursing the Russian soldiers who were fighting in the war against the Germans, so she must be very knowing about fleas, and had medals to prove it and many good references.
“I hired her when you were a newborn only three months and I was going with Dan for a year to Africa. I don’t know what I would have done if Khondakov had not arrived [on the scene]. Granny and Grandpa in Brussels would never have been managing without Khondakov even if they did have Georgette, Philomène and Matilde. Those three were devoted domestics but they were much too old to be caring of you, still a newborn. It would have been scenes in the kitchen if Khondakov had not been there to do all the things for you that you were needing as a newborn.
“When I came after a year from Africa, you were walking around already and Granny said Nurse Khondakov had been wonderfully doing everything for you. Night and day on every days of the week and singing Russian lullaby songs that were putting you to sleep and rocking you. She was marvelous for Granny and Grandpa having the joys of you little and not having all your dirty nappies too.”
“But then why did you fire her so quickly if she had been so wonderful?” I persisted.
“There was anoth
er time,” Mother continued, “after I came back [from Africa] which also made me mad against her. One day, I came up to her when she was not realizing it, and I was hearing her talking in a baby voice so you would better understand. She was saying, ‘I’m your real mother who really loves you. If Mummy was really loving you, she would not go far away and leaving you like that for so long!’
“Then I came around the door and she was turning red like a beet root, seeing me embarrassed because she knew I was hearing her. I told her she must not be saying things like that to a child, that it is not appropriated, and is being disloyal to me, and she shruggingly just said, ‘Small children do not understand what you are saying to them.’
“I almost fired her on that spot, then. She was completely in the wrong and you being two years old, I know very well you were understanding, especially talking in baby voice which a baby starts to listen when he hears it. That time, she was so good when I was in Africa that I took pity on her, and I said to myself that she must badly desire a little boy like you, and that’s why she is saying these terrible things—but her insolence from the affaire of the orange cat was the last straw!”
In the space of ten minutes, Mother had touched on a wide range of topics: the diet of large rodents, family life in the Czar’s palace, the hazards of life on the Russian front, the migratory rationale of fleas, servant conditions in her mother’s household, sudden piglet death syndrome, the speech comprehension of infants, as well as the details of how I and a large cat enjoyed our naps together. I will now return to a less strenuous form of narration.
Three months after I was born, Mother had departed on a prolonged journey to Africa with Father and had left me with her parents in Brussels for a whole year. Father had been asked to resolve some engineering problems at one of the Kimberley diamond mines near Johannesburg. By then, he was Anglo-French Ltd.’s mining expert. He also specialized in international law and international business negotiations, and after the Kimberley assignment, the company wanted him to travel to several other mines that Anglo-French owned in Central Africa. The trip was expected to take over a year, and my parents would be doing a lot of traveling by car across the veldt or traveling through the wilderness and camping under extremely primitive conditions. It was hardly a suitable journey on which to take a three-month old baby.
Two decades later, Mother reminisced about this journey and told me about her decision to go to Africa. She said she was torn between the duties of a mother and those of a wife, that Dan was still prone to bouts of deep depression, and that she felt it wasn’t good for him to be alone. She even divulged that she felt the marriage was not on sufficiently solid ground for them to be separated so long, and that she had to prove to Dan that she could be as good a wife as Suzy had been. If this sad view of her early marriage were correct, I would say she succeeded in pulling the chestnuts out of the fire. I grew up with the unmistakable conviction that they were a contented and effective team, and that they had no major differences to resolve, except the one about my going to boarding school. Father went to great lengths to make Mother’s life as pleasant and comfortable as possible, and she did the same for him.
Major Dan Holmes, 1919 Suzy (self portrait), 1918
Suzy and Dan enjoying the garden at la Closerie (Ville-d’Avray), 1925
CHAPTER 2
Wild Boars and a German Governess
My sister, Brenda, was born not long after my parents’ return from Africa. Then, less than a year later, Mother fired Nurse Khondakov over the marmalade cat incident. Mother now faced many chores she had previously never had to do. Father insisted that she find a replacement nurse, so Mother spent the next two years searching first for the ideal nurse, and then, as Brenda and I grew older, for the ideal governess. In the meantime, Mother launched into child rearing with gusto. This was her approach to everything.
For help, Mother still had Eglantine, the cook and housekeeper who had originally worked for Dan and Suzy, and who had temporarily left Dan’s empty house while he was a widower. Eglantine had a teenage daughter, Sabine, who lived with her mother at every place she worked. Sabine’s father had been killed in the last days of World War I, before he had a chance to marry Eglantine, and before Sabine was born. Sabine attended the village school and in the evenings she helped her mother in the kitchen.
One of Mother’s stories that involved Eglantine was of an event that happened before I was old enough to be aware of it. Eglantine had prepared a bouillabaisse for lunch, and among the many ingredients of this traditional fish stew were some mussels. Upon tasting her completed dish, Eglantine decided the bouillabaisse tasted funny; a closer examination revealed that none of the mussels had opened during cooking, a sure sign that they had not been alive and fresh when they were put to cook. She was short tempered and, in what must have been a momentary fit of rage or disgust, she threw the whole kettle of fish stew out of the kitchen door. Eglantine’ intention that morning may have been to let the chickens benefit from the numerous ingredients of the stew—other than the mussels. The yard outside the kitchen, like those of many country houses in France, was populated with chickens which spent the day scratching about for the minute morsels that chickens apparently like. Food scraps were routinely thrown out into these yards to supplement the chikens’ diet, if not constitute the mainstay thereof.
For lunch that day, Eglantine served an omelet in place of the bouillabaisse. Later that afternoon, she looked out of the kitchen window and noticed that two of the chickens were lying lifeless on the ground. She wasn’t sure why the birds had died, but decided to salvage what she could of this calamity by plucking one of the birds and serving it for dinner. Eglantine had almost finished plucking the chicken when she thought she felt it move under her hands. Then she heard a squawk from the now featherless bird. She dropped it in horror and ran to Mother, who was in the drawing room writing a letter.
“A dead chicken has come back to haunt me!” Eglantine wailed. “Oh please, Madame! Please come to the kitchen and save me from this apparition! I’m too frightened to go back in there alone!”
Under questioning, Eglantine gave Mother a confusing summary of events leading to the present crisis and explained that she thought chickens could distinguish between what was edible and what was not safe to eat. She pointed out, quite astutely, that chickens peck their way around a yard and never seem to consume anything that makes them sick, so they should have been able to avoid eating the tainted mussels.
Based on Eglantine’s garbled tale, Mother didn’t know quite what to expect as they walked to the scene of the mystery. In a state of trepidation, the two women entered the kitchen to find the chicken strutting around naked and squawking indignantly. They continued out into the yard, and in the trash bin where Eglantine had tossed the other lifeless bird, they discovered a groggy hen looking as though she were awakening from a night on the town.
The two hens recovered and returned to their assigned chores of eating scraps and converting them to eggs. But late in the fall, Eglantine felt sorry for the naked chicken and kept it in the warmth of the kitchen for a few days until she had finished knitting a turtleneck sweater specially fitted to the bird. The garment was bright blue, had sleeves for the chicken’s legs, but none for the wings. Eglantine had knitted into the chicken sweater a special bulge, or bustle, for the “Pope’s nose,” and a vital lower opening was also included for inserting the chicken into its sweater, and through which it might lay eggs, if so inclined.
This fashionably attired bird never grew its feathers back and continued to lay excellent eggs. On warm days its sweater was laundered, on which occasion the chicken was allowed to disport itself naked. She grew to a ripe old age and, like all elderly hens, was eventually relegated to the pot.
By the time I was three, Mother, still without a governess, decided I was old enough to be watched over by Sabine, who was by then about fifteen years old. My first memories of bein
g left in Sabine’s care are of occasions when Mother dropped us off at Hardelot Beach, leaving the two of us there while she went to play a round of golf. Hardelot is a seaside resort on the north coast of France. On these occasions, Eglantine always packed a small picnic basket for our afternoon tea snack, or gouté, which Sabine and I enjoyed on the beach. Eglantine stayed home to look after Brenda, who was barely walking and, in Mother’s eyes, too young to be left on the beach with Sabine.
In preparation for our gouté, Sabine would coax me into building a flat-topped sand castle to use as a table for our picnic. She then set a tea towel on the horizontal surface to serve as a tablecloth. The sand was very fine and, as it was slightly damp, I could cut vertical surfaces with my toy spade in this “castle,” so that we could kneel right beside it to eat our tartines (bread and jam sandwiches). We had to be careful not to set anything too close to the edge of this table, which crumbled easily at the slightest touch.
For me, the best part of the day was riding home on a quaint, pale yellow trolley car, which saved Mother the trouble of picking us up. I was thrilled and fascinated by this little tramway, which was like a small train because the main trolley pulled two additional passenger cars. The first car, the “trolley,” was fully enclosed, but its sliding windows were left open to keep the tram cool. It was usually devoid of riders because they preferred the second or third cars, that were completely open on the sides so the passengers could enjoy the breeze.