It’s not fair, Mummy, to buy her a farm at this stage; she won’t be able to live on it all by herself and she’ll be almost forced to stay with that Rosie, who may or may not take drugs but seems to be in a chronically abnormal state.
The cat’s going to the bathroom right in back of my portrait. I’m glad he is. I’m glad somebody’s doing something they want to do.
Everything is hidden between hills and olive trees, behind the chipped stones of a railway trestle, behind the rusted iron of a gate. The mas sprawls, it has become part of the landscape, despite the spear-pointed fence, or the crumbling mouth of an outdoor bread oven. Gaëtane asks us to watch for snails as we cross through the yard. Our eyes focus - they are three to a blade of grass, little gray shells dotting the brambles under our feet. We tiptoe through the weeds.
Inside the heavy wooden door, light trickles through tall, narrow windows. The walls are laced with spiderwebs and dust. Extension cords hang from the ceiling, coming together through hooks, fanning back out into the light fixtures. The steps are each worn into smooth valleys from five hundred years of footfalls – Gaëtane’s small feet, her mother’s. I imagine Michael, who I never met, climbing the stairs to his crowded bedroom, or higher, to the dovecote, now taken over by hornets, their nests lining the eaves, their hum filling the air. Up there, pigeonholes look out over the hills, over the highway to Aramon.
Oh, Mother thinks it’s artistic this way, like a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Don’t you love the overgrown Louisiana Bayou look.
I have some very urgent things to have done at the mas…a hot water heater… I wish you could have seen me after the fall struggling up to the bathroom with kettles of boiling water so that I could have a good soak…A gate and bars for the windows and locks etc… a ditch behind the house so that the water doesn’t seep in when it rains… All these are things that I could attend to now, curtains to help keep the wind out. All the pipes repaired - there are buckets everywhere for the drips!
The first time I saw Fiona’s house, I was thirteen. She insisted on meeting us at the gate. When my mother asked to see inside, she refused. The house is a mess, I think she said, or, we’re in a hurry.
Fiona’s house reminds me of my grandmother’s, though it is 450 years older, and on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Both sisters have since died – Fiona outlived Dora by five years – and both left behind houses full of dust, old magazines, broken things and cat shit.
At my grandmother’s house, the basement was always full of cat shit. They started going down there once their litter boxes were full, and their litter boxes stayed full for quite some time. The junk room was piled up to the windows with boxes of jam, which had stopped selling long before the business folded, but would keep for years to come. Every morning when the Gazette arrived, my grandmother would cut out the crossword and file it into a shoebox for later.
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Crossword These boxes lined the dining room walls; she finished only two a week, with my uncle’s help.
When my grandmother was still driving, she used to sway between highway lanes, always taking the shortest path around the curves to save gas. She wrote down gas prices on a flip pad that she stored in the console of her minivan, always recording how much she had spent, at what cost per liter. She ate food long after it went bad - my mother speculated that her taste buds had stopped working before I was born. We did all we could to avoid her cooking. She would serve moldy casserole, stale bread, frostbitten vegetables, limp greens. I once saw her drop an egg on the floor, bend over, and scoop it back into the shell before dropping it into her frying pan.
Dot, her mother, had been a millionaire.
I can’t write about Gaëtane without writing about our family, and I can’t write about our family without thinking about Grey Gardens. In Grey Gardens, Little Edie and her mother Edith are captured living in a decaying estate in the Hamptons. They take care of each other as much as they drive each other mad, scolding each other, reading to each other, replaying the events of their past and imagining the lives they could have lived. They are compelling, sharp-tongued and cheeky, at once resourceful and hopelessly naïve.
In some ways, it’s an unfair comparison, although perhaps if Little Edie had had children, they would have been grounded and capable, as both my mother and Gaëtane grew up to be. The playful, snappy back and forth between the Beale women, the way it went from silly to personal, felt familiar. It may be true that bickering is how we know that we trust each other in our family, or that we are attached to the past, to remembering it, referring to it. But there is no question that ours is a family that has subsisted on delusions of grandeur.
The origin of this grandeur is real. A sugar refinery, a real estate empire, a senate appointment and a knighthood preceded Dot and her children. But by Dot’s generation, the money that remained was in trust, no longer accumulating, but funding a privileged life for Dot, and a sheltered one for her children. We are a family in decline, my uncle once said to me, and measured in wealth and social standing, he is right.
While she didn’t need to work, Dot spent her life studying, earning a bachelor’s degree the same year as her eldest daughter, then a master’s in French literature. She audited medical courses at Dartmouth, despite the school not admitting women as medical students until many years later. Once her children left home, she took over the management of St Margaret’s Home for the Incurables, established, in part by her own grandfather, in the late 19th century.
Doctors increasingly concurred that some combination of nature and nurture generated a fatal flaw in the chronically ill…By emphasizing that most people brought incurability upon themselves, an increasingly insecure group of elites could insist that a program of individual self-improvement (or selective breeding), rather than the overturn of industrial capitalism, held the key to a brighter, healthier future (9).
St. Margaret’s Home
My mother just calls it St. Margaret’s Home. The word incurable had long been removed from the name. It had fallen out of common use, too absolute to contain hope for the future of anyone saddled with such a bleak diagnosis. The word was replaced by more specific language denoting chronic illness and palliative care, accounting for an increasingly precise medical landscape. The term incurable, I learn, had at a time been conflated with a sense of morality. An incurable was at once medically and morally so.
The facility, which by Dot’s era was a home for women alone, was administered by the Sisterhood of Saint Margaret, and Dot was the president of the board. In her position, she introduced a medical advisor for the residents, as well as a regular physician. She modernized the building, arranged for the installation of an elevator, the construction of a proper kitchen and dining room.
The Sisterhood of Saint Margaret, a nursing order, solicited funds for the home, employed the floor staff, and tended to the residents spiritual needs. Over the years, the nuns faded into the background, until the home was secularized in 1975. A picture of the interior of the facility from 1933 shows them standing in the corners, heads bowed, faces shielded by their habits. To me, they look sinister, although they are in good company; each resident stares into the camera, unsmiling.
While St Margaret’s Home was more assisted living facility than hospital, so too was it a product of the philosophies of its time, charged with the care of those who were excluded, by reason of poverty or medical need, from other facilities or from the possibility of living independently. Poverty and disability are, even today, are often disparaged as the result of personal failures, of weak-wills and defeatism. I have to imagine that these judgements, too, crept into the ethos of St Margaret’s Home, although to what degree, I can’t say.
I can see myself casting about for a narrative here. I want a sense of my great-grandmother, of her motivations and beliefs. The Dot my mother remembers was fastidious, scientifically-minded, and emotionally distant. Her grandmother was a doctor, her grandfather, a baptist minister, and the two vocations seem to have shaped her equally. She had a rigid sense of propriety, clear on the roles of men and women, despite her own, arguably radical medical interests. Her service at St Margaret’s home was informed by a commitment to medical advancements, and a commitment to religious service. I can only speculate from here: Did this idea of the incurable, the morally compromised, shape her scientific curiosity? Did her commitment to science contradict, or complement her religious conviction?
Everybody is terribly sensitive. And other people don’t understand how sensitive a human being is. They don’t understand it. So they run roughshod over everybody.
See, I never really did feel loved as a child, not to my memory anyway. I understand mother and father tried hard, but they just didn’t have it in them to take care of me, when they, at least mother, needed parents themselves.
There is a painting in the family of Dot’s oldest three children, in winter coats, toques and mittens, in the snow. They look serene, my grandmother’s arms are around her sister and brother, looking every bit the attentive eldest. If we can assume love in a family, I see it there, in that painting, perhaps even in the fact of that painting, which my great-grandmother commissioned, as something to mark this moment in her children’s lives. It was something concrete that she could offer them, in place of a tenderness that challenged, maybe evaded her. They look like ghost children, the three of them, emerging in soft colors, an indistinct forest in the background.
The painting is by Charles de Belle, a Hungarian-Canadian painter who gravitated toward portraits of children, looking serious, pink-cheeked and wispy. In the family, there is a later portrait of my grandmother alone, and another of Dot’s home, red-roofed, on the bank of the St-Laurent. This evidence of privilege is sprinkled throughout our family homes - paintings, furs, silverware. What it amounts to is unclear - my aunt, married into the family, calls us secret aristocrats, with some sarcasm. On the phone, my uncle tells me: It was unrealistic, it wasn’t anchored in reality, we were able to perpetuate this fantasy that we were the Kennedys.
I don’t agree, that it was a fantasy. Maybe our influence was inflated, but often privilege belongs to those who are perceived to have it, and who perceive themselves to deserve it. We had it in spades – we looked the part; we felt the part – regardless of the particulars of our finances. My grandmother sold jams at craft fairs from her minivan, raised chinchillas for fur in her basement, hounded us to buy into her multi-level marketing schemes, her house full of old papers, empty bottles and cat shit.
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Jam Nana
Yet there was something she imparted, a fantasy of our worth, that was not so easily spent as Dot’s fortune.
It feels insensitive to consider the ways that this privilege may have hurt us. By all accounts, it embarrassed Dot, who drove a sensible car while her sister drove a Jaguar. But her shame about money, or maybe a societal precedent that permits the privileged to look away demurely when identified, seemed only to obscure reality for her daughters, who moved through life with the sense that there was an endless source of money somewhere, if only they could find their way to it. Dot herself, while capable in many ways, left the finances to the men in her life, her father, then husband, then, after their divorce, the bankers. Her three daughters, perhaps, learned from her that money was not theirs to understand.
Gaëtane: C’était un peu comme la sexualité quoi. On l’as parlé pas.
Gaëtane: It was a bit like sexuality. We didn’t talk about it.
Hélène: Mal élevé de parler de l’argent.
Hélène: It’s rude to talk about money.
Gaëtane: Oui, très mal élevé. Parce que grand mère avait un peu honte d’avoir tant d’argent.
Gaëtane: Yes, very badly brought up. Because grandma was a bit ashamed of having so much money.
Elle avait vraiment beaucoup et d’ailleurs tout a disparu.
She really had a lot, and besides everything disappeared.
Mais il y a un petit morceau qui est dans le mas ici quand même.
But there is a small piece which is in the farmhouse here anyway.
In the painting, the siblings look more unified than I ever remember. During my lifetime, they all lived thousands of kilometers apart; Dora stayed in Montreal, Huntley moved to Texas, all but cut himself off from the family. Nell moved out West, tended to people’s horses, Fiona moved to France and married an artist. I wonder if they corresponded with one another, or if they kept up through their children. When Nell died, my grandmother didn’t remember ever having known her very well.
Dear Mummy, I haven’t written to you for so long because I’ve been absolutely seething about this whole business. Your last letter is full of the advice that people have been giving and I know that you always need somebody to tell you what to do so I’ll tell you what I think.
But you see in dealing with me, the relatives didn’t know that they were dealing with a staunch character and I tell you if there’s anything worse than dealing with a staunch woman… S-T-A-U-N-C-H. There’s nothing worse, I’m telling you. They don’t weaken, no matter what.
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historic site description
Gaëtane does not speak ill of her mother. She tells me about her childhood in a kind of passive voice, that she had gone to this school, then that one, that even while she acted out in hopes of being home again, she ended up here and there, boarded with a woman in Aramon, a Steiner school in England, a lycée in Montpellier, living with Nell in Montreal, then a school in Western Canada.
By all accounts, Fiona was a chaotic woman - intelligent, fearless, a little lost, maybe. She lived in the Mas for years after her children left, let things deteriorate. Her relationship with her daughter was increasingly tense, unpredictable. In a letter to Dot, Gaëtane’s father writes: Elles ne resteraient pas huit jours ensemble sans que cela se termine par un drame. They won’t stay together for eight days without it ending in tragedy. For a year, inexplicably, Fiona would call Gaëtane at one in the morning to insult her.
“Homosexuality was not accepted by any member of the family,” Hélène tells me. I wonder - did it start with Fiona? Did she learn it from Dot, or from the world? Was the subject simply a soft target, a button that she knew she could push? In a letter to Dot, Gaëtane asks, Have you heard from mother? Since she wrote me that perfectly horrible letter, I haven’t heard from her. Maybe she needs somebody to feel hostile towards. I wish she’d pick somebody else.
Saturna Island Free School
In Western Canada, Gaëtane was enrolled in the Saturna Island Free School. The product of an education reform movement of the era, the school was attended by students who had struggled with traditional school structures. A 1968 article describes it: “At Saturna Island Free School, children choose for themselves what they want to do. In this way they discover their own potentialities and explore a variety of possibilities while seeking out their own directions. We believe it is, by nature, the function of the child to learn from all he experiences.” Gaëtane, by then a staunch environmentalist, an animal-lover, and a determined adventurer, found a place she could be herself.
While she was there, she fell in love again.
Gaëtane: Et je me suis dit non, ça recommence. Et j’étais. J’étais très très furieuse contre moi même. Mais je pouvais rien. C’était comme ça.
Gaëtane: And I said to myself no, it’s starting again. And I was… I was very very furious with myself. But I couldn’t do anything. That’s how it was.
Et je me suis dit c’est pas possible, je peux pas continuer comme ça. Alors je me souviens, je m’étais promené sur les falaises.
And I said to myself it’s not possible, I can’t go on like this. So I remember, I had walked on the cliffs.
Il y avait des falaises à Saturna où on regardait la mer. Et je me disais Non, c’est… c’est pas possible. Mais j’ai pas sauté.
There were cliffs on Saturna where we looked at the sea. And I said to myself No, it’s… it’s not possible. But I didn’t jump.
Et c’est là que je me suis mise à faire des… Tous les soirs, vers 6, 7 h du soir,
And that’s when I started doing… Every night, around 6, 7 o’clock at night,
j’allais exploser. Alors il fallait que je fasse quelque chose. Soit je cassais le chaise, soit je me promenais à poil en chantant la Marseillaise à tue tête, soit je déroulait du papier toilette dans les escaliers.
I was going to explode. So I had to do something. Either I broke a chair, or I walked around naked singing the Marseillaise at the top of my lungs, or I unrolled toilet paper down the stairs.
Tous les soirs. Il fallait que je fasse et ils ont eu la patience de supporter.
Every night. I had to do it and they had the patience to put up with it.
Gaëtane: Hum. Au niveau de mon homosexualité, c’est moi qui l’acceptait pas. Moi je l’acceptais pas.
Gaëtane: Hum. As for my homosexuality, I was the one who didn’t accept it. I didn’t accept it.
Between school placements, Gaëtane returned home to France from Canada. She went out to visit a friend and came home to find Fiona in a rage. Right away, she bought a plane ticket. She said, ‘It’s not possible, it’s not possible that you stay here.’ And that was it. I understood that I was also being chased from my home. Tout de suite, elle a pris un billet d’avion. Elle a dit “C’est pas possible, Ce n’est pas possible que tu restes ici.” Et voilà. J’ai compris que j’étais moi aussi chassé de ma maison. As she tells me her stories, she seems self-effacing – she laughs at her antics, at the way her childhood was marked by a cycle of exile and return.
Gaëtane: Je veux dire que je ne le rentiens pas rigueur. Je leur en veux pas, je leur en veux pas.
Gaëtane: I mean I don’t hold it against them. I don’t blame them, I don’t blame them.
Même ma mère… J’ai pas, J’ai pas de… D’amertume ou de rancœur vis à vis de ma mère.
Even my mother… I don’t, I don’t have any… Any bitterness or rancor towards my mother.
Ma mère, elle a fait ce qu’elle a pu, selon les limites de qu’elle avait. Et Nell, c’est pareil.
My mother, she did what she could, within the limits of what she had. And Nell, it’s the same.
As we walk through the Mas, Gaëtane points to her small windowless room, at the heart of the house, amid the piles of old books – among them, A Lost Lady, a novel about declining fortunes, and a woman who seeks “life on any terms”. We look through a pile of letters.
Elle a laissé beaucoup de papiers, parce qu’elle a collectionné tous ces papiers depuis soixante-dix ans, Gaëtane tells me of Fiona. Alors on a bruler beaucoup. She left a lot of papers, because she collected everything for seventy years. So we burned a lot. I think of my grandmother’s crosswords.
As we leave, Gaëtane rinses our water glasses under the cloudy water from the kitchen faucet, and sets them on the rack to dry. Again, she tiptoes around the snails in the grass, and pulls the heavy iron gate shut, locking it gently.