Love in the Loire Read online

  Love in the Loire

  David Leddick

  White Lake Press

  This is a work of fiction. The mention of any real person is completely fictionalized. Any similarity between the names and characters in this book and any other real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover Design by Ethan Winslow

  FIRST EDITION

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced ortransmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storageand retrieval system without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

  Copyright © 2011 by White Lake Press

  Manufactured by The BookMasters® Group

  30 Amberwood Parkway, Ashland, Ohio 44805

  ISBN: 978-0-615-44808-4

  Printed in the United States of America.

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For My Sister

  Joan Leddick Winslow

  Chapters

  Cornichons

  The Artists

  Toca Sacar

  The Loire Valley

  Toca States His Case

  Mary, Queen of Scots

  Cass

  The Season

  Why I Like the Theater

  The Six Questions

  Toca Remembers the Evening

  The Comte Remembers the Evening

  Nina Remembers the Evening

  The Trojan Women

  Estelle Tells It Like It Is

  Brigitte Balnéaire

  All About Steve

  Estelle and Kitty

  The Graf Spee

  Fluffy Isn’t Talking

  The Red Mill

  I Don’t Want to Act

  Nina Talks to Evangelique LeBrun

  Nina Reflects

  A Conversation

  La Piège

  Nina Goes into Production

  Nina Talks to Toca

  The Red Mill Turns

  Nina’s Bedroom

  Letters, Calls, and E-mails

  A Visit to Chenonceaux

  Iris and Glenn Elliott Arrive

  More Red Mill Rehearsals

  Fluffy and Mitzi

  The Escape Scene

  Graham Checks In

  A Visit to Amboise and Blois

  What Do Women Want?

  Kitty Bids Adieu

  The Deed

  The First Hint of Autumn

  Nina Thinks About It

  A Visit to Chambord

  So Now, What Next?

  Cornichons

  The Comtesse entered and said, “What a relief it must be to live with nothing of value.” Her English was pretty good. My host and hostess registered nothing. I thought their salon looked pretty good actually. I wouldn’t have said that early nineteenth-century fruitwood furniture: nice curvy-legged desk, a largish settee upholstered in purple velvet, a small bookcase, assorted sideboards and chairs, in a room with the walls painted lavender and covered with paintings of flowers, were nothing of value. But what did I know? I had just arrived in this small French village and had just been introduced to the Comtesse. The Comtesse Emilienne Soutien-Gorge. It was actually Soutien-George. It was a joke we made about her later. Soutien-gorge means “brassiere.”

  I was introduced. “This is Hugo Bianchi.”

  “Are you Italian?” she asked.

  “My parents were Italian and Brazilian,” I said. “I use my mother’s name.”

  “Why?” the Comtesse asked.

  “Because I like her better,” I said.

  My host and hostess looked at me appreciatively. This was obviously not the first Comtesse I had met in my life, and I wanted them to understand that. They seemed to be nice people. As for the Comtesse, I couldn’t have cared less whether she thought I was unappreciative of her or not.

  My host and hostess were Graham and Nina, two Americans like myself. I was staying with them while I was part of the Festival du Theatre that took place every summer in Cornichons at the ancient Abbey of Cornichons. I had graduated two years ago from the Yale drama school and had been noodling around ever since. I made a couple of commercials in which I admired girls who were about ten years younger than I was and who were put together to look like sex-mad women of thirty. Also, an independent movie in which I worked very hard at the role of a young English undertaker in the English countryside in the mid-Victorian period. I didn’t think it was very original of them to take Six Feet Under to England a hundred and fifty years ago, but who was I to say? Actors are there to be moulded like putty by the director. In this case, a fool from Buffalo who kept trying to slap the make on everybody, regardless of race, creed, or place of national origin. That movie never even got to the editing stage, which wasn’t surprising as we shot it in Rochester, which didn’t look a lot like England. I was thrilled when someone saw me in an Off-Off-Broadway tryout for a musical called Spleen and recommended me to Cranston Muller, who produced this festival. And voilà, here I was.

  “It isn’t as though she’s French,” Nina said after the Comtesse left. “She’s Greek. Her family is one of those shipping fortunes. She married the Comte. Although I must say that I think she’s a fine-looking woman and basically kind. She just doesn’t think what she’s saying.”

  “She seemed to know what she was saying,” I said. “She must live in great splendor if she doesn’t think your living room looks lovely.”

  “The painters did not want to paint this room lavender,” Nina said. “They resisted strongly. They pointed out to me that one does not have lavender salons in France. I said that they do in Russia, and that even shocked them more. When Graham and I first came here, they were mystified as to why Americans would come to live here. I told them I thought it was beautiful and I loved it here, and that even mystified them more. This was all well before Cranston came here and made us all international and glamorous with the theater festival.”

  Graham said, from the lavender plaid easy chair where he had his feet up on a large, square ottoman footrest covered with petit-point lavender lilies, “Finally Mme. Chaiseroulant, next to the bakery, enlightened me. She liked me for some reason and told me at first everyone thought we were spies, but after they decided we weren’t they still couldn’t understand why foreigners came to Cornichons. Particularly when foreigners moved here in the past and it was obvious that the village was directly in the path of where the Russians would sweep through when they invaded south toward Bordeaux. I didn’t bother to tell her that I didn’t think Bordeaux was a big destination during the Cold War for the Russians.”

  I was having no trouble understanding why Mme. Chaiseroulant cottoned to Graham. He was quite a handsome honey. He was tall, blond, a profile of the type Bruce Weber admires so much, and what seemed to be a rather wonderful body under his loose-fitting pants and pullover. He was the gorgeous Greek god type, if that’s the type you like. I suppose there are some people somewhere who don’t.

  “There was a lot of talk about spies when other Americans started coming here,” Nina said. She was sprawled out on the purple velvet settee in a long white cotton dress with heavy lace along the hem. She was pregnant. Which I thought was rather daring of her since she had to be in her early forties, though with that look that never changes from eighteen to eighty. Blondish, thinnish, not beautiful but mostly because her intelligence kept her from it. If she had been stupider she probably would have been considered a raging beauty. Her intelligence must have picked up some of my thoughts. She patted her stomach and digressed. “I know I am quite elderly to be having another baby, but I didn’t want Theo to be an only child.” Their son Theo was upstairs snoozing in his pink bedroom. Evidently he wanted pink, e
ven if it was for girls and considering that at three his blond beauty even eclipsed his father’s, he probably knew he’d look great in pink, for girls or not. Nina went on, “In case I leave Graham someday I don’t want Theo to be an only child.”

  “She says stuff like that all the time,” Graham said as he picked up the current New Yorker from a table and leafed through it. I had brought it over on the plane with me.

  Nina went on. “And what’s weird is that after we poo-pooed all the spy adventure talk that was going on around here and convinced everyone that Cornichons was not the most important air target in France, suddenly we find out that some of the new Americans are spies. We have these families where the father is some vague kind of businessman or filmmaker and is always away in Central Asia or Moscow or Poland or something. And when you talk to them, they know absolutely nothing about filmmaking or business or much of anything else.”

  “Nina never talks to them anymore after she picked up on that because she says she doesn’t want to play any part in the make-believe lives they lead,” Graham said.

  “To get back to Emilienne and her valuables,” Nina said, “when I see her at the château, I don’t see anything particularly of value there. I wonder what she is referring to. Perhaps she has Greek gold buried under the floors or something. You know she insists that there be someone at the château at all times.”

  “The château?” I said.

  “Oh, sorry. Don’t you hate it when people speak familiarly of their friends or places when they know very well you can’t have the foggiest idea about whom or what they’re speaking? It’s the worst manners. Excuse me. Emilienne lives at the Château Doublefolle out beyond the edge of town. It dates way back but not with her. I think the Soutien-Georges bought it about ten years ago, before we were here but not long before. A lot of it must go back to the twelfth century. This house dates to about 1600, which means nothing here. I wonder what she thinks is so valuable out there? Friends of ours came out to be caretakers a few years ago, and she wouldn’t let them leave to go to parties together in the evening. One of them always had to be on the property.”

  “I noticed that all of the cane seats were broken in the chairs in her drawing room the last time I was there,” Graham said.

  “We’ve never been upstairs. Perhaps it is awash in Louis the Fifteenth furniture. Perhaps Emilienne has fabulous jewels we’ve never seen. Oh, please, let’s stop talking about the neighbors. It’s so provincial. And you know I don’t give a damn about what they’re doing with their lives. I only care about you and Theo and Freddy. And my mother, I guess,” Nina said.

  “Who’s Freddy?” I asked.

  “My son from my first marriage. He’ll be over visiting while you’re here. Where are we going to put him? You’ll like him. He’s just eighteen and still in that rueful, ‘life is such a disappointment’ phase. Why he wants to be a philosopher is beyond me. I wanted him to be a doctor so he could take care of me when I’m old. Now I’ll probably just eat myself to death. And I care about you, too, Hugo, now that you’re under our roof.”

  “Really under our roof,” Graham said.

  Cranston Muller had placed the staff for the Festival in private homes about the town of Cornichons. That’s how I had wound up staying with Nina and Graham in a little third-floor bedroom that you reached after wandering through a huge attic. I had arrived yesterday at Charles de Gaulle Airport and per the instructions given to me, taken a taxi to the Gare d’Austerlitz and from that train station had descended into the Loire Valley to the city of Blois. There, Nina and Graham had met me with their ancient 1959 Peugeot, which seemed to still be in tip-top condition. Nina had said, “But you’re blond! We’re all going to get along so well. You could be my son!”

  “I’m twenty-five,” I said.

  Graham had said as he hauled my bag to the trunk of the big black old car, which was parked directly in a nonparking area in front of the large stone train station, “Don’t get overexcited, Nina. You’re not that old.”

  “Well, Hugo could be your brother, then,” Nina said.

  “That only makes it worse. That only means I’m a lot younger than you are or Hugo is a lot older than he looks.”

  “I’m only trying to be welcoming, Graham. It was a disappointment to me that Freddy wasn’t blond but dark-haired like his father. My mother was a blonde, too, you know.”

  “The world of blonds,” I said. “It’s true when you’re with other blonds it is a shared world that brunets will never experience. Particularly if you’re not Swedish.”

  Nina looked at me. “You’re all right, Hugo. And you’ve got brown eyes, too. Like Graham. The most beautiful combination.”

  “In your opinion, Nina. Now please get in the car before we get arrested for illegal parking and spend the night in the pokey in Blois,” Graham said.

  We wheeled neatly out of the station parking lot and down a hill lined with houses tall and stony with red roofs. Once across the Loire River I could look back at the city of Blois and see it stacked up on the opposite bank. Tier after tier of those stony houses, all gray and all with those red tile roofs, a couple of churches protruding here and there, and the great mass of the Château of Blois heaped at the very top.

  I had done my homework and knew about the Château of Blois. A place full of drama, and all in a rather short period of time actually. King Charles IX had his crowd of pretty boys kill the Duke de Guise here when the Duke came to call one morning. Marie de Medici was kept under custody in Blois because she was plotting against her own son. She preferred his younger brother.

  Marie escaped by being lowered off the battlements by a rope. Rubens immortalized all these escapades in a great room of paintings, now in the Louvre. And then the history of Blois kind of ground to a close. All that stuff only covered a period of less than a hundred years. And then the Château of Blois was left there to hover like a big stone cloud, century after century, over Blois.

  Louis XIII was evidently very gay, and the whole story that he fathered Louis XIV when he got caught in a storm passing through Paris and spent the night with the incumbent queen was probably trumped up. Those French kings. Thank God they didn’t have blood testing in those days to find out who was the real father of some of those heirs to the throne.

  I thought of all this stuff as we bumbled across the countryside toward Cornichons. Down some hills, through some little forests, around corners through small towns that were just two facing rows of stone houses, shoulder to shoulder. It only took about twenty minutes to reach Cornichons, whose tall water tower indicated that we were approaching.

  Large stone houses surrounded by their gardens lined the road as we entered Cornichons. Then side by side, small stone houses led to an intersection where the Hôtel de Ville stood. It looked something like the train station we had just left. They were probably contemporaries. Built in a big nineteenth-century boom when France meant so much to the world. Beside the town hall a narrow street of shops led off to the left. Our big black Peugeot worked its way down the little shopping street, forcing ladies with shopping baskets to press themselves against the walls and men on bicycles to dart into little side alleys.

  It was really kind of over-the-top French. The ladies in their housedresses and their baskets. The men actually had on berets, some of them, and lots of them were wearing espadrilles. You can imagine an American blue-collar worker wearing a small pair of rope-soled espadrilles. Even in navy blue. And these weren’t all in blue. One guy even had on pink. No American man would ever wear pink espadrilles.

  And we pulled up in front of Nina and Graham’s house. Another one of those big gray chunks, this one decorated with ancient shutters that were kind of dark bluish green. Or would you say greenish blue?

  Facing their house, large iron gates opened toward a partially finished chapel. But big. Sizeable black birds were circling around and through the flying buttresses that were holding the chapel up. Beside it, more big gray stone buildings spread out in a numb
er of directions. Nina gestured toward the chapel as Graham pulled my bag from the trunk. “Our Lady of the Snows.” She said: “Notre Dame de la Neige.”

  “That is a beautiful name,” I said.

  “Evidently the Abbey’s founder was in a great storm on the Mediterranean returning from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and when he prayed to the Virgin she appeared in a snowstorm and saved the ship.”

  “A snowstorm over the Mediterranean?” I said.

  Graham was unlocking the front door with a large key that went “chunk,” and then again “chunk.”

  “I know,” said Nina. “The beauty and the improbability.”

  “That’s France, baby,” Graham said, and we went inside.

  The Artists

  I was discovering that Cornichons was full of artists.

  “It’s kind of a colony,” Nina said.

  “Like an ant colony,” Graham said.

  We were sitting at their kitchen table having breakfast before I went across the street to start my first day at work with the Festival.

  “The Festival is a kind of outgrowth of the artists being here. Cranston Muller is a friend of Berenice Boon. I think they went to school together. And she’s pretty big in the United States. She only paints pigs. I like that actually,” Nina said.

  “My favorite is the Austrian,” Graham said.

  “The Austrian?” I said. “How’d he get here among all the Americans? And how do the French feel about that? Having been occupied and all.”

  Graham said, “A. They bear no ill will toward the Germans for having occupied their country. Or they don’t seem to. This was occupied territory so the Germans were actually here. They lived in the Abbey. No one seems to have objected. The only person who was in the French Underground was the plumber, Monsieur Poniard. And nobody likes him. And B. Mr. Burkhardt is Austrian, not German. Austria was occupied, too.”

  Nina was quiet over her Fruit et Fibre cereal. “He says. He says he’s Austrian. But he told me the other day he was amazed at how much open space there was around here.”