The Memory of Place

I don't know why I pushed-on that first day, but I ended up tied off to a little public quay near Caudebec-en-Caux just as the sun set, and I walked into the village and sat in the first place that looked good and had some wine and cheese, then some oysters and duck. The evening was amazing, and with each passing moment I felt as though I was reaching up out of the darkness, finding my way home for the very first time. Then the thought hit me: were my roots really so shallow? Wasn't I an American, weren't my roots in the American West? I didn't really have any answers to those questions -- as I sat in candlelight staring at the flesh of my hands. Whose skin was this? Mine? Or the expression of genes stretching back to antiquity?

After dinner I walked out into the night and looked up at the night sky, feeling lost and humble once again, then I stood in a phone booth as a cold fog rolled in and called my mother in Colorado. We exchanged cool pleasantries, then I asked her if she still kept in touch with Jean Paul, with her family in France.

Quite often, she said, as it turned out. I listened as she rumbled on about our old house in the shadow of the San Juan mountains -- cussing and muttering as she looked out the window at a passing herd of elk -- and she rambled on breathlessly about her life. Then she paused, reported what she knew about this good nephew and that good-for-nothing cousin, and I wrote as she dictated names and addresses and telephone numbers of family all over northern France. She offered to call Jean Paul the next day, and I gave her my sat-phone number to pass along. I rarely used the thing, the cost per call was exorbitant at the time, but I thought the situation warranted. I caught her up on my trip across the Atlantic, and she told me Liz had been calling two times a day for the past three weeks.

Then Mom said Liz was upset about something.

That seemed odd, until I remembered the letters.

After I finished talking with Mom I fished out the letters from Liz and Lisa. I hadn't opened them, and frankly, after all this time I still didn't want to.

I opened Liz's letter first. Call me! she wrote, and her words were underlined insistently.

Then I opened Lisa's first letter.

She loved me, she wrote in two pages of parsed legalese. And then: 'Oh, by the way, I'm pregnant.'

Then her second letter. 'Please come back to me!'

Well, fuck-a-doodle-doo.

◊◊◊◊◊

I didn't know what to think. Would you, I wonder?

I looked at my watch. Almost midnight here in the chilly coastal fog; that would make it early evening back in Carolina. I could hear cicada buzzing away in pecan trees when the thought of Charleston rolled over me, and soon the brooding, brackish air of the Ashley River filled my senses. I just as quickly thought of Lisa and her pulsing need, and in an instant we were on the boat again, making frenzied love after she had fixed bacon and eggs that first fated night. I could see her face, her inextinguishable need for connection, her fine breasts heaving as she thrashed away in the clutches of her vast abandoned need.

Pregnant?

I called the restaurant's number, asked for Liz, and waited impatiently while she came to the phone.

"Tom? Tom, is that you?"

"None other, kiddo. What's up?"

"Where are you? No one has the slightest idea!?"

"I'm on the French coast, in Normandy. I picked up your letter today, and I've just talked to Mom. What's on your mind?"

"Oh, Tom! I don't know where to begin! Dad's got prostrate cancer, it's advanced, has moved up into his spine."

"Oh? Sorry to hear that, Liz. Really. How's your mom taking it?"

"And Tom, that lawyer of yours is pregnant. She's been telling people you're the father, and that you skipped town when you found out. Also, I heard from someone who knows her that someone else might be the father. Someone named Drew."

Well, what can I tell you? That's life in the big city. Just when you get your hands up to defend yourself, someone kicks you in the nuts.

"OK Liz, thanks for the heads-up. How are you doing?"

"Tom? I miss you terribly. I want us to be together again, and I don't care what it takes. I love you more than anything in the world."

What was this? The second act of her never ending drama? I couldn't think of anything to say, so I remained quiet for a while -- while the fog wrapped it's arms around me. Such was my need to hurt her, I guess you'd say.

"Tom? You still there?"

"I am indeed."

"Well?"

"Well, what?"

"I see. OK, Tom. I wish you the best." Her voice was breaking up, I could hear tears welling up, then the line went dead.

I hung up the phone, stood in enveloping fog for quite a while. My eyes were burning from the dingy fluorescent light in the booth, and between the light and the fog I couldn't make out anything around me. It was like I was floating in milky space -- I could hear the river in the distance, but there was no way I could pinpoint the direction.

I thought about Liz for a moment, and her father. I remembered our wedding day, when her father and mine, both more than three sheets to the wind, had danced together while our mothers egged them on. My father. Lung cancer. And now her father, and that link to the past would be gone. Another sentinel gone, another memory to fade away to place. Directionless, lost in the fog.

What Liz said about Lisa seemed simply incredible; something in my gut told me if Lisa was pregnant, it had to be mine. And I couldn't believe Lisa would spread a rumor so vile -- about me, or anyone else, for that matter. I just didn't think she had that kind of meanness in her.

So, I stood there in the fog wondering if I should call Lisa. I looked at my watch. Again. Ran a couple of fingers through my damp hair, looked at water on my fingers glistening in the light.

I picked up the phone, punched in the interminable string of international calling codes, credit card numbers, then telephone numbers. The first ring caught me off-guard. I thought about hanging up. Second ring. I was about to hang up when someone on the other end picked up the phone.

"Hello?"

"Lisa?"

"Tom?"

"I got your letter."

Now it was someone else's turn to be quiet, to keep someone else guessing.

"I'm sorry, Tom. I guess I should have been more careful."

"Well, it takes two to tango, darlin'. By the way. Who's Drew?"

A long silence followed that question.

Then the line went dead.

◊◊◊◊◊

I called Mom the next morning. Turned out a whole herd of relatives still lived on the coast near Deaville, in the little village of Hennequeville, which is just down the beach a bit from Le Havre, on the other side of the creek. As she talked I thought once again about Mom's journey from the Norman coast to Southwest Colorado. It was the stuff of legend around these parts.

It's a long story, but not uninteresting, so let me digress.

Dad's B-17 got shot up over Germany in early 1944, and he almost managed to get the bird back to the English Channel before the plane came apart on him. The crew bailed-out all over northern France, and he jumped ship just before fire engulfed the plane. He came down in thick forest just a few hundred yards from the beach, breaking his ankle in a tree as he did. A farmer -- and I might add his future father-in-law -- pulled him from that tree before a German patrol could find him, and well, the rest is, as they say, History -- with a big, fat capital H.

Oh, by the way...you couldn't tell a farmer's daughter joke around my father without risking a serious pop in the mouth. He worshipped Mom -- and her family -- and he did so until the day he died.

"You know, Tom," I heard her saying, "if you're going to see family, I'd love to come. I haven't seen Jean and Marie for years, and I'd love to see them again."

Hmm, this was beginning to take on hues of a major family get together.

"Mom, do you feel up to the trip?"

"Oh, of course I do. How is the weather there now?"

I was sitting in the cockpit, talking on my hideously expensive sat-phone, and I looked around at the lush trees and ancient buildings all around me. It was so beautiful outside it took my breath away.

"Oh, mom, it looks like Hell here. Trees in full bloom, not a cloud in the sky, and the air smells sweet, kind of like heaven, I reckon. I think you should come, in fact, I insist on it. I can book you a flight right now if you'd like me to."

"Oh, Tommy! It would be so nice to see my family again. Yes! Let's do it!"

"OK, Mom. I'll call you in a bit. Start packing, and would you call Jean Paul? Tell him I'm tied up at the quay in Caudebec-en-Caux."

"I did, Tom. He said you should go see the little cathedral there, up the hill."

"I will Mom. Talk to you in a little while, so start packing!"

◊◊◊◊◊

Later that afternoon I was working down below, in the galley as I recall, when I heard someone calling my name and a knocking on the side of the boat.

"Tom! Tom! Are you in there, Tom!"

I knew that voice, that unmistakably cultured physician's voice. It had to be Jean-Paul. My cousin, Jean-Paul Dumas. I hadn't seen him in ten years, since Dad's funeral; while he had always been a rascal, he was also my idea of a wonderful human being. He was brilliant and commanded attention when he came into a room -- he had eyes that seemed to be express pure empathy -- and at parties everyone -- I mean everyone -- seemed to gravitate to him. We had, all of us -- Liz included -- come over for his wedding in the early nineties. He had married an American woman -- irony of ironies -- the insufferably intelligent and unbelievably gorgeous Marie-Suzanne Sommers. She was a career diplomat at the U S Embassy in Paris, and a lawyer by training. Of course, she had to be.

I popped up the companionway to see Jean Paul rubbing his hands along the deck's teak cap-rail.

"Tom. She's beautiful. I read your book, but I had no idea."

"You read my book?" Brilliant choice of words, don't you think?

He stopped rubbing the wood long enough to look up at me, then spoke.

"Yes. Not bad, considering."

"Uh, well, how are you, JP?"

He shrugged. "Not so good, really. Marie and I are, I think you say, in Splitsville. Getting a divorce."

I think that was my cue to be empathetic.

"I can't believe it, Jean Paul. What happened?" I wonder...is there a dedicated facial expression for irony?

"Oh, all this mess in the Middle East, and all the terrorism. It has caused us much tension here. Both here in France, and in our house."

Yes, I could see that. Being a physician, Jean Paul was about as liberal as one could get, anywhere, whereas Marie had always been more than a bit of a hawk -- if you scratched beneath her Radcliffe exterior a little too sharply. Perhaps all this strife had been inevitable; politicians sure seemed to be counting on it. But this ISIS mess, as JP called it, had taken it's toll on relationships in very unpredictable ways.

"Sorry to hear that, Jean Paul. Anything I can do?"

"You? No, dear Tom! But have you been to the chapel yet, up the hill?"

"No, not yet."

"Well, put some shoes on. Let's go!"

We walked through the little village for a few minutes, then stood looking up at the entry to a beautiful -- though small -- gothic church. Jean Paul told me all about the building, its origins and significance, and as we walked inside he crossed himself and said a quiet prayer. I had forgotten this about him, this piety so remote from the America I grew up in, and the simple act startled me with it's significance, then we walked into a world of shattering light.

The light in this part of the world is so pure, yet so pink; it suffuses the stone buildings of the region with an otherworldly quality that really must be seen to be appreciated, and all this came together in a blinding moment of insight as I took in the beauty of this gothic interior. I was, in a very real way, a part of this land -- just as much as I was an American, and in that instant I felt again just what had suddenly intruded only two days ago. This sense of being "home", of -- in the truest sense of the word -- a homecoming. This part of France was, unlike so many of the places Liz and I had visited during the last five years of our marriage, a part of me in startlingly intimate ways. My mother was, as I've mentioned, from the region, and her family could trace their lives along this coast back at least 800 years. They had lived in the region for as long as records had been kept in the village halls and churches; chapels and cathedrals around the region recorded dates of marriages and baptisms of family members back to the twelfth century, and that history was a part of -- me. Jean Paul was a part of -- me! These limestone cliffs and the soil from which all life sprang, all were a tangible part of that which had created -- me -- and the resonance of that insight penetrated my soul as we walked inside that church.

It was a pure moment, to have roamed so far and to realize I had -- at least in part -- found what I had been searching for, and for so long. All these feeling were a part of the world I had conscientiously ignored almost my entire life.

Jean Paul and I walked back to the quay, and there we looked out on the Seine and the barge traffic that made its way to and from Paris -- traffic moving out into the world -- just as it had for hundreds of years. We had a coffee, talked about Syria and the Sudan, and of Jean Paul's recent decision to rejoin Médecins Sans Frontières and return to the world of volunteer medicine in Africa.

"You should come to the house tonight," he told me. "Some physicians that are just returning from six months in Darfur will be talking with us, sharing insights on new security procedures and facilities. It might be boring, but you might learn something, too. It will only take an hour to make the drive, and I can bring you back later tonight."

We asked about leaving the boat tied up for the night, and the once surly harbormaster said he would look after the boat. He, of course, knew Jean Paul, and now knowing my relationship to him I was, well, suddenly a member of the family, so to speak, and in more ways than one. I told him when I would be back, and he told me not to worry about the boat. C'est la vie, Paco. Take your time.

We crossed the Seine in Jean Paul's little silver Citroen and drove along winding country lanes overgrown with riotously verdant trees until we arrived at my mom's ancestral home. It wasn't a huge chateau, but neither was it a farmer's shack, and there was that mesmerizing view down to the English Channel through trees and gardens that I remembered from childhood visits. We arrived in time for dinner in the village, then walked back to the house. Cars full of chattering physicians began arriving not a half hour later.

I do speak a little French -- my mother insisted that I speak at least enough to get by here -- but my medical vocabulary was woefully inadequate to the animated discussions that filled the house that night. I was, however, pleasantly surprised to run into a couple Liz and I had encountered in Moorea. Small world, indeed. Luc and Claire Menton were amazing sailors, having ventured from Deauville to Tahiti -- via Cape Horn -- in an engine-less 28-foot sailboat. We caught up with each other's progress -- including my divorce, to which they expressed sorrow -- and they were more than interested in my plans to travel through the canals down to Marseilles.

"We have never done this journey," Luc told me during one of the breaks in the medical presentations. "Would you mind some company, perhaps, for part of the trip?" I knew the portion on the Rhone -- from Lyon south, would be a monotonous river journey, but the segments between Paris and Lyon were arduous, with many locks to be negotiated, and extra hands are always needed negotiating locks. So yes, a couple of extra willing hands would be appreciated, and I told them so. Luc looked at Claire, gave her a knowing nod, and we exchanged phone numbers, then he looked at mine suspiciously.

"Is this an American number, or a satellite number?" he asked.

"Satellite," I advised.

"You must get a local number. Coverage is excellent and cheap through our organization. I can arrange this for you in Paris."

I thanked Luc, said I'd take him up on the offer and he smiled, satisfied now that he had returned a favor.

I laid eyes on Madeleine Lebeq for the first time in my life not an hour later.

Actually, Luc introduced me to her, and I suppose fate hinged that evening on my meeting Luc and Claire almost three years earlier in a lagoon in the South Pacific. When I think back on the circumstances, the idea really is breathtaking.

And to be exact, she was introduced to me as Doctor Madeleine Lebeq. She was a physician, a specialist in infectious diseases who had vast experience in tropical medicine accumulated over fifteen years of volunteer work with Médecins Sans Frontières, and I could not have conjured a more opposite number to Liz if I had worked on it for years.

Where Liz was willowy and tall, Madeleine was tiny and looked purpose built to work in small, confined spaces. While Liz was known best for her almost obtuse loquaciousness, Madeleine was studious, quiet to the point of being regarded as snobby, and rarely spoke unless addressed first -- unless she was giving a lecture on medicine. Liz, athletic, a great swimmer; Madeleine intellectually dexterous, and had never been swimming in her life, at least not until she met me, and then not under the best of circumstances.

Anyway, Madeleine had made her way over to talk to Claire, and Luc introduced us. I had been talking to Jean Paul when Luc first tried to get my attention; it was Jean Paul who tugged on my elbow and asked me to turn around.

I turned to Luc, caught on that he was trying to make an introduction, but I almost didn't see Madeleine. She was caught in the ebb and flow of the meeting, and it just has to repeated here that she is not at all tall, and that she does not stand out in a crowd. Indeed, I'd have said when I first laid eyes on her that she had gone out of her way to be as unobtrusive as possible. And I'd have been wrong. Madeleine simply didn't give a damn what she wore, never had, and probably never would. To this day, when I see her in my mind's eye she's in pale green surgical scrubs, her hair tied in a severe bun.

Anyway, that night she was wearing a teal colored turtleneck and taupe gabardine slacks; her hair auburn, a little to the reddish side of auburn, really. No makeup whatsoever. And she had the most stunning eyes I'd ever seen in my life. Penetrating, intelligent eyes, the deepest blue-green I've ever seen. I was a good foot taller than she, and I looked down at her while Luc tried to cover for my less than gracious attentiveness. After a minute she moved off to join another conversation, and I watched as she walked away with a lump in my throat.

I rejoined Jean Paul and our conversation about Mom's arrival two days hence, and we confirmed plans to drive together to De Gaulle to pick her up and take her to lunch at Le Grand Vefour. We continued to talk about Marie and the problem of divorce in general when I felt a tug on my shirt-sleeve and turned to see -- Madeleine Lebeq.

"I understand that you are a sailor, like Luc. I would like to learn, but have never had the time. Could you teach me?"

"Madeleine! Do you know this is the world famous sailor Thomas Deaton? Of course he can't teach you -- he's always much too busy!"

"Oh, knock it off, would you, JP?!"

"So, you are a famous sailor, Thomas?"

"No, not in the least. Jean Paul likes to make me look like an idiot sometimes, if you know what I mean."

"Now, now, Tom. Why would I do that when you are so accomplished at doing that all on your own?" I threw a pointed glance at Jean Paul, then turned to Madeleine.