Love in the Loire Read online

  Mitzi is, in fact, very English. She has a rather fancy accent and gives the impression that she thinks she is slumming visiting her boyfriend’s folks in France. I guess I assumed that Fluffy and she were school friends. Wrong. They met online in some kind of teen chat room. Where probably most of the Kevins and Tiffanys are over fifty. At any rate, they are a couple. Are they in love? I don’t think either of them has any idea of what that means.

  We were clunking and chunking toward Loches in the old Peugeot without much conversation. Although Nina is not a big woman, she doesn’t seem to have any trouble handling this car that cannot even be shifted from one gear to another without a lot of force. She must have strong arms. This trip to Loches seems to be mainly downhill, though that can’t be the case.

  Loches is in Berri, the region immediately south of the Loire Valley. As soon as you cross the Cher River the landscape changes abruptly. Instead of the flat plains of the Loire, small hills and valleys ripple southward. The landscape changed constantly until the Château of Loches, high on a hill in the center of town, appeared over the treetops.

  Nina’s mother didn’t say much on the trip, except to ask me to call her Alicia. “Like Alicia Silverstone,” I said. “Something like,” she said. At least she knew who Alicia Silverstone was. Nina and she resemble each other a lot. Her hair is blondish gray and not colored to look that way. She must be somewhere in her middle sixties at least. Nina is forty or forty-one. Alicia is very much a lady in her beiges and whites and good shoes and expensive purse.

  Fluffy and Mitzi were very quiet, too. I had dinner with Nina’s family last night, and Mitzi had irritated everyone at the table by whispering into Fluffy’s ear, and then Fluffy would say, “Mitzi would like some bread.” And “Mitzi would like some more potatoes,” and “Mitzi doesn’t want dessert.” Finally, Nina said in the most exasperated tone I had ever heard her use, “Why does Mitzi need a translator? Has she suddenly forgotten how to speak English?”

  Fluffy said, flushing, “It’s just that there are so many of us at the table, and it’s noisy, and, you know . . .” None of us did know, but we left it at that.

  I tried to engage Mitzi in conversation and learned that she was a dancer. “We’re both very interested in theater,” Fluffy said. I didn’t think it worthwhile to ask him why he was going to study philosophy when he entered college in the autumn if he was so interested in theater.

  I asked Mitzi where she had studied. “Oh, I don’t study. I practice a lot,” she said. I wondered if her practicing involved some kind of African tribal rites. She lived in London. She wasn’t sure if she was going to go to college in September or if she would start auditioning for musicals.

  Her grandfather was German and had married her grandmother in Tanganyika. The family all now lived in England except for her grandfather, who was now living in Germany. She had been to visit him this summer. The other diners at the table were beginning to regard me with more respect as I managed to wheedle this information from her. It was quite clear that Fluffy didn’t know most of it. They had met online. They had seen each other in New York. They were quite intent on sleeping with each other in the tower bedroom. Or at least Fluffy was. There you have it.

  I love Loches. It is where Joan of Arc spent time with the Dauphin of France. You know that story, I’m sure. The English had invaded France. Joan had heard the spiritual call that she must rescue the Dauphin to place him on the throne and had come through the enemy lines north of Paris and to the Loire to find him. She did so at Chinon, to the south of Loches, and although he had placed someone else on the throne and hidden among the assembled throng, she went directly to him and knelt at his feet. But it was here at Loches that she spent most of her time with him.

  Fairy-tale, fairy-tale, fairy-tale Loches. The royal city is embedded on the top of a central hill behind high stone walls. Entering the gigantic portcullis, a giant gate with a huge wooden grill that can be dropped to keep people out or smash them to smithereens, one enters a street lined with old stone houses. There is no single château but a separate pretty palace where the Dauphin lived with Agnès de Sorel, the first official royal mistress, a large church with a roof that resembles two massive inverted stone funnels and a donjon. To the French, a donjon is a big fortress tower. To us, a dungeon is a jail cell deep in the bowels of a château or jail. This place had both.

  Nina and I chose to sit in the gardens in front of the small palace while her mother and the lovebirds visited it. We had both seen it before. It was worth visiting for the tomb of Agnès de Sorel, which had been moved there from the church. From the effigy atop the tomb it was clear that Agnès had been pretty.

  “Your opinion of Mitzi?” Nina asked as soon as we settled on a bench looking off for miles and miles across the countryside. In France, you can see where the artists of children’s storybooks got their inspiration. The landscape was here before they painted it.

  “I was hoping she would be taller,” I said.

  “No one is short by chance,” Nina said.

  “I’ll bet you got that from Edwina,” I said.

  “Exactly. But have you noticed that short people seem to want to remain children? And then they feel guilty about it and want to inflict themselves on others.”

  “Napoleon,” I said. “Obviously. But I think it’s different for men and women. Women can make themselves into adorable baby dolls that men want to take care of.”

  Nina said, “That is no adorable baby doll, our friend from London. And there are fewer and fewer men who want to take care of an adorable baby doll.”

  I said, “Some gay men do.”

  “They’ve got money. But an adorable baby doll of either sex does not have an enviable destiny,” Nina said.

  “It must be horrible when you consider yourself a liberal person of good principles, and then are not happy when your son has a black girlfriend,” I said.

  “You read my mind. I didn’t mind a black girlfriend. I mind the prissy little English miss. At least, I think I do. Why can’t she be rowdy and fun?” Nina said.

  “Like black people are supposed to be?” I said. “Danny Fandome isn’t rowdy and fun, either. But he did do a very good job in The Red Mill. I just hope that Mitzi can dance like a dream. Then I will forgive her anything.”

  “I don’t think that her dancing like a dream is why Freddy is interested in her,” Nina said. “I think he’s just trying to grow up.”

  “They don’t seem to be passionately interested in each another. Physically, I mean. There’s a big gap between them and my generation. Which isn’t really even a generation. Or a decade even. When I was in love at sixteen, I knew it. I knew what I wanted. And I think my friends did.”

  Nina said, “But you were from Miami. The tropics. Where passions run amok.”

  “At best,” I said.

  Mitzi and Fluffy came down the steps from the palace. Mitzi was miffed. “I’ve already seen all that stuff in Germany,” she said.

  “Well, then, we can just go home, and we don’t have to see any more châteaux,” Nina said. And she turned and started toward the entrance gate.

  Her mother came up and said, “I’m not going to leave until I see the torture dungeons. I love torture.” Mitzi and Fluffy agreed that they would take a look at the dungeons.

  It was quite a good walk from the palace and church complex along the ridge of the hill to the fortress. Many very well-taken-care-of homes lined this walk. They must have beautiful views from their gardens, and in the village below were good restaurants and shops. These were probably second homes for Lochois who had made it big in Paris.

  I walked with Alicia, and we fell a little behind Fluffy and Mitzi, who were walking with Nina.

  “Mitzi is bored,” I ventured.

  “I think it’s a bit more that she’s overwhelmed,” Alicia said. “It is overwhelming, all this. I’ve never been to this part of France, although my husband and I visited Paris a number of times. Think of the drama and the building
and the beauty. People really lived in those days. They weren’t all barricaded in behind television and celebrities and fast food. Life was much more real even in my youth in Michigan.”

  “Michigan?” I said.

  “Are you surprised? It isn’t all whores and hockey players. I was a teenager during World War II. That’s the last time I think that people in the United States interfaced with reality. Men were being killed. The world was in danger.

  “The Vietnam War and the war we’re having now in Iraq, for the bulk of the population are just more images on the television. You can even see the difference between Vietnam and Iraq. Students rose up in anger about Vietnam. Now the entire country is stunned and dozing.” Alicia fell silent.

  “It’s all too real for Mitzi? History? Other countries? Things she’s not used to?” I said.

  “She’s a very young girl. She’s black. She doesn’t really come from any country she can call her own. When you’re that age, you can only behave the way you’ve seen others behave. And I’m sure her parents aren’t particularly taken with the white culture in England. It’s the snobbiest country in the world. Everything hangs on your pronunciation. To move up financially, you have to start speaking differently from your parents. Imagine,” she said.

  “I’m probably less of a snob than my own daughter,” she went on. “Nina was brought up in Connecticut. She went to Vassar. I’m more like Edwina, whom I like very much. We have come from more humble backgrounds, and although I was never really more than a housewife, I’m something of a creation. I’m nothing like my mother, who was a lady but of pioneer stock and would have never been interested in clothes and theater and luxury. She would have thought such things a waste of time and not a worthy subject of interest for a serious person.”

  “You rather like Mitzi? A girl on the way up?”

  “I love my grandson, who is a smart, serious boy. I spend a lot of time with him. He’s trying to find out who he is. It’s not at all that different than Nina and her relationship with Graham, you know. And I’m all for that. I’m very fond of Graham.

  “And I love Freddy. I will always be there to back him up in whatever he does. Children need that, Hugo.” She turned to me. “You’re rather young to understand all this. And to be receiving all these confidences. Oh, look, the formidable fortress. This is going to be fun!”

  To my surprise Alicia did like the donjon and its dungeons. In one large room hung a sizeable wooden cage suspended from a very large iron chain. Something like a birdcage for humans. Alicia loved the fact that in the guidebook she found that the man who invented it was the first person incarcerated in it. “Serves him so very right,” she said. And then I pointed out from the guidebook that not only did he spend seven years in his cage, but he was then freed and made the governor of the entire region by Louis the Thirteenth. “He must have spent a lot of time out of his cage playing pinochle with the jailers,” Alicia said.

  She was also very pleased with the dungeons carved out of the living rock below the fortress where messages and images of the virgin had been carved in the walls by the inmates. One poor nobleman had been confined in one fairly commodious cave for twenty years. And when they released him and he saw daylight, he dropped dead of shock. Alicia relished these stories. As did our guide, who laughed heartily as he recounted the misfortunes of the early jailees. He smiled as he explained that Loches had remained a prison until the mid-1930s. “I was already born and running around when there were still prisons here,” Alicia said.

  The guide was still smiling as he held out his hand for a tip at the end of the tour, which came out of a tunnel at the foot of the walls. We walked down to the Peugeot in a jollier mood. Mitzi could let herself be impressed because we were all impressed.

  Nina and her mother sang old songs together as we drove back to Cornichons. We were serenaded with “Blue Moon,” “I’m in the Mood for Love,” “Green Eyes,” “I Thought about You,” “The Chattanooga Choo Choo” and many others. I was surprised that Nina knew all these old songs and said so.

  “They’re songs from World War II. Mother and I used to sing them when we drove about Connecticut when I was young. She taught them to me. She has a good singing voice.”

  Alicia said, “It was my dream to be a band singer. Dinah Shore was my idol. Doris Day started out as a band singer. I wanted to be the girl in the pink tulle dress with sequins sewn all over it who stood in front of the band. Blonde. Unfortunately, by the time I got old enough, the big bands had all disappeared. Stan Kenton was the last one. June Christy was his singer. All those girls had careers that evaporated right under them.”

  Mitzi and Fluffy had their arms around each other and were staring out the window. The car windows were open, and everyone’s hair was flowing. The sun was falling sideways across the fields, which had already been harvested and were only yellow stubble now. There is something about the Loire Valley that casts a charming spell.

  When we got back, Fluffy and I went to the store to get things for dinner. I decided I wasn’t going to call him Fluffy anymore. If he had a girlfriend, he could be Freddy. Or even Fred. He had to be the only Fluffy in New York who was straight. It was time to graduate to Fred.

  As we came out of the store with our shopping basket and sundry other plastic bags and baguettes of bread, Freddy said to me, “I’m not sleeping with Mitzi, you know. Having sex. Not yet.”

  “How is that?” I said. “Isn’t it quite uncomfortable? Being there right beside her with a big hard-on all night? You can get blue balls.”

  Freddy looked at me curiously. “I don’t have an erection all night. Mitzi and I are good friends. If she doesn’t feel that she’s ready to have sex with me yet, that’s OK with me. And what are blue balls?”

  “It wouldn’t be okay with lots of people,” I said.

  “Do you think it means that I’m gay?” Freddy said.

  “No. I think it means that you are kind of a slow developer, Freddy de Rochement,” I said. “People develop at slower or faster speeds. I was sure that I was gay when I was sixteen. Even before. One day soon, your body chemistry is going to click in and you’re going to want to jump her bones. Do you think Mitzi is a virgin?”

  Freddy looked shocked. “I haven’t asked her. I never would. That’s a very personal question.”

  I said, “Look, Freddy. Sleep with Mitzi or don’t. You’re going to college this year. You’ll meet a lot of new people. There will be gay guys on your case. You’re good-looking. So experiment and find out what you want to do. Or maybe you’ll fall madly in love with someone, and then there won’t be any questions at all. Just go with the flow.”

  “I knew I could discuss it with you, Hugo,” Freddy said. “You’ve seen it all.”

  “I’m only twenty-five,” I said.

  “But you’re very mature. That’s what Mom and Graham say. And they’re right.”

  The Escape Scene

  So finally, here’s what happened. The weather cleared up and just the day before The Red Mill opened we were able to get the set in place and practice the scene.

  The sails on the mill had been built and were in place. The sails didn’t really turn. They had tried but having a motor on the back would have made noise, and Cranston thought it was distracting if they turned during the show before the escape scene.

  “This is supposed to be a hotel. Kip and Con are working here because they didn’t have the money to pay their bill. So the sails can be silent. It will be more dramatic when the sails start to turn just as the boys help Gretchen escape.”

  Cass Brewster had figured out a way to rig rope to the top of one of the sails so that the crew could pull down on it on one side and hoist Steve and I up on the other side.

  Kitty had convinced Cranston Muller that the leading lady should emerge from a window at the top of the mill, and then the three of us could jump off the wall beside the mill onto a platform, behind the wall. She told Cranston, “You know, I left the original show because I was afraid of
this scene. We never did the boys being pulled up on the windmill sail at all. At least let your leading lady come out of the window the way I did.”

  Cranston agreed.

  The rehearsal went pretty well. The crew had put handles on the bottom edge of the sail so we had something strong to hang onto. And when they pulled, the sail went up, high, high, high. Very high. The wall had been the wall of the Abbey and was at least twenty feet up. When you’re up more than three times your height it feels high! The crew had built a scaffold on the other side of the wall with mattresses on it. It was only the pull up on the windmill that was dangerous.

  So we practiced. Steve and I crouched behind the hedge at the foot of the wall. As the sail passed, we grabbed the handles and went flying up. The sail had to stay there at the top of its movement. The crew could only pull it so far, and then it had to stop. It was just above the wall and we had to jump down to get to the wall. But it was possible.

  When we did it we could hear the crew cheering and applauding down below. Leslie came running out from her window, and we took her hands and jumped off onto the mattresses on the scaffolding. It wasn’t that difficult. But this wasn’t going to be all there was to it. Of that I was sure.

  Cranston was waiting when we came down the ladder from the scaffolding behind the wall. “It’s going to be great! The audience will love it. If there’s any chance for this old piece of crap to go to Broadway, this scene will do it.”

  Leslie, who is quite an adult young lady, said to Steve and I as we left rehearsal, “I saw something very strange this afternoon. I came over to look at the steps in the tower earlier today. I wanted to go up and down a couple of times, and I wanted to bring my own flashlight, just in case the crew didn’t think of it.”

  “Those stone steps don’t have any railing either,” Steve said. “Don’t ever run up them without plenty of light. Good girl.”

  “It wasn’t that so much that bothered me. But I went up and down twice before I realized that there was someone else there. I shone the flashlight down, and it was Cass. You know, the head of the crew. And he said, ‘Thank you for shining the light down here. I was about to pee in this gentleman’s face.’ And he laughed and laughed. And I think the other man was Mr. Muller. Is that possible?”