Flyover Lives Read online

  Both of these women were beautiful, I noted, still beautiful women in their sixties, slender and straight, each with a variation of blond hair shading to decorous gray. Obviously they had been assets to their husbands; perhaps it’s indispensable, for becoming a general, to have a beautiful wife. Their slenderness bespoke military self-discipline; both Sally Rolfe and Cynthia Baum had the figures of girls.

  Our friend Simone’s husband, Stuart Ward, was retired with the rank of colonel because of illness before he could go any higher, a lymphoma that he had since been cured of; but because he was charming and clever, he and Simone had remained friendly with all the people they had started out with when the men were lieutenants at West Point, or captains together in France in the Second World War, or perhaps Stuart had served under them, for they were older than he. Also, Simone and Stuart were known by others to have some money, and some property, and some beautiful furniture from Simone’s side of the family—things to sustain them at the social level their eventual rank would have predicted, but for the illness, which could happen to anyone.

  Simone and Stuart had borne with dignity the disappointment of Stuart’s career, perhaps didn’t even feel it, for it was fate that had dealt it to them, and fate sometimes inflicts a merciful freedom from self-blame along with its blows. They didn’t have to bear the harder sting of Stuart’s having made some personal error or having a defect of character.

  * * * * *

  We were led out onto the porches, where the rest of the party was lying by the pool. Out of earshot, Simone rolled her eyes and said to us in a low voice, “Thank God you’re here. Diversion, dilution.” Only then did we notice that she seemed agitated and tense. Simone is a tall, elegant woman but now with this hint of distress. She smiled enormously at her friends, but we sensed a strain at the edge of her teeth, perhaps the normal strain of anyone who has eight houseguests.

  The Lees rose to say hello—tan and lean people a little younger than the others: Lynne and Willard. Willard Lee, like our host, Stuart Ward, was a colonel, or, one should say, only a colonel. Poor Stuart, reddened in the sun, looked wan—he had slowed since we last saw him, and perhaps it was his health that was making Simone tense, or the reminder that if it hadn’t been for his health he too would be a general.

  I have changed the names of these military people. What if someone reads this whose son had served with them, or who had himself served under them, looked up to and been led by them? People believe in generals, after all. Military figures like Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington, or George Washington and Ike, were fathers to their men.

  We were installed in pretty rooms in the guesthouse on the other side of the pool. The place looked like nothing so much as the Hotel Bel Air, and I had to remind myself that things in California are often modeled after Provence, not the other way round. We unpacked only a little, as our stay would be short. “It looks like Willard Lee is wearing tennis shorts,” John said delightedly, for he is like a hunter, predatory about possible tennis players, elated to spot one. We expected a pleasant day.

  Almost immediately, John was taken off to play singles with Willard Lee, and I sat down with the ladies by the pool. I was something of a curiosity—they did not know any writers of fiction, and I became aware that Simone had probably exalted my accomplishments beyond what they deserved. “It’s just incredibly interesting,” said Sally Rolfe. “Wherever do you get your ideas from?” She had a Southern accent, one of the Carolinas. So did the other general’s wife, Mrs. Baum (Cynthia). The aroma of Cynthia’s stew trailed into the garden, seductive and deep in the hot afternoon. Exhaled phrases of satisfaction: dinner would be early, and early to bed—this was the simple, healthy life, how they all would have liked to live in France, as well as in America, God bless it.

  I had to answer any number of questions—whether I use a pen or pencil or computer, and how long it takes to write a novel. Despite myself, despite the banality of the questions and the dozens of times I have answered them, I began to feel fascinating. I saw it was the arts of Mrs. Baum and Mrs. Rolfe that conferred this feeling. Like geishas they worked me, John too, when he got back from tennis, asking him about the health of the world and his role in it. Only Lynne Lee (husband just a colonel) betrayed a little prickle of competitive edge when it came to my writing. “Are you published?” she would say, or “Are your books for adults?” It was the dark side of military strategy I was seeing. Cynthia Baum and Sally Rolfe had excelled at concealing what Lynne Lee more clumsily revealed, the vigilant combativeness, the alert defense; their smooth tactical tact disguising a war machine directed at victory for their husbands.

  I had two Siamese cats once who worked in a pair, attacking marauders. Together they jumped, hissing and screaming, onto the back of a puppy we brought home. Years before, they had jumped onto the naked back of a lover (it was John, but they didn’t know him then), mistaking his embrace for aggression. I thought of those cats because one of them was named Cynthia. These ladies did not claw the handsome John’s back when he and Willard came in from their tennis (Willard having won); they purred delightfully at him.

  Our friend Simone busied herself carrying trays of drinks in and out, stringing the beans, folding the serviettes from the dryer. There was something taciturn and self-sacrificing in her manner, like Martha to the brace of brilliant Marys. Even Cynthia Baum, charged with the dinner—they were taking turns cooking—went at it in the manner of the sprightlier biblical figure, while our poor friend Simone, usually animated, bridge playing, chattering, and fully armed, was now preoccupied, even depressed. I thought she was perhaps worried about Stuart’s health, for he seemed weak. It could not be that the contrast of his pallor with the vigor of the others was newly getting her down, because they were all old friends and saw one another constantly back in Virginia.

  Also, she herself had fully developed general’s-wife killer instincts; it was a pity she hadn’t been able to use them like these other women, real generals’ wives. In Saint-Pantaléon, I could see that Simone’s skills, Frenchwoman though she was—that is to say, full of rigor and wiles—were underdeveloped compared to those of women who had spent decades as the wives of successful generals. Sally Rolfe and Cynthia Baum—even Lynne Lee—could not come up to them; her passionate resentment, the flavor of her disappointment, husband just a colonel, were too palpable.

  “I could never write a book. How marvelous for you,” Lynne was saying. “I’m absolutely too damn stupid and that’s a fact,” which seemed to mean: stupidity is exactly what’s needed for book writing, bitch, and fortunately I’m too smart for that.

  “I see that Willard and your husband are back. It looks like Willard won. I can always tell from the way he walks. I tell him he has to let other people beat him once in a while so they’ll keep playing with him,” she said.

  John and Willard Lee went to shower. We ladies swam, then went with the generals into the village to look at the church. When I came out from showering and changing at dinnertime, Simone was bringing drinks onto the patio—whatever these are called in France, I suppose terrasses. I helped her with the trolley of glasses while she filled the ice bucket. When she came out of the kitchen, where Cynthia Baum was putting the finishing touches on the dinner, she was literally grinding her teeth.

  “The Cuisine Derby” was her only remark.

  Then the interesting cuisine. The food was evolved to an obsessive pitch; luckily, the haricots verts we had brought were harmonious with Cynthia’s perfect navarin. The company was convivial and relaxed by the end of dinner, and sat up late talking or, rather, listening to a discussion of history—all except Stuart, who went to bed before ten.

  The topic of historical memory came up after the excellent dinner, when we’d gathered on the patio and the American army general Rolfe was telling about his French ancestors. His colleague, Bill Baum, was in Europe to look up his roots in Germany. The Baums and Rolfes were both retired and had th
e luxury of time for genealogical research.

  “Some of my forebears were Huguenots from around La Rochelle,” Rolfe was saying, “but some were Catholics fleeing before the Revolution. The French Revolution, I mean. Many people don’t realize the extent of Catholic immigration into America, mostly into Maryland. . . .”

  It was this interesting discourse, well informed and lightly given, on the subject of early immigrants to America that had prompted Simone’s saying that it was unusual for Americans to take an interest in history in any form. “After they mention the Pilgrims or covered wagons, they fall silent, they know nothing.”

  “It’s because we don’t believe that ancestry matters; it’s what you are yourself that counts. It’s an axiom of Americanness to be self-made,” said John, sturdily defensive of our supposed national classlessness and belief in possibilities.

  “Americans seem to think we French are pathetic for knowing and caring so much about our background,” Simone went on.

  “It’s easier for you because French history took place on such a small stage,” said John, unfairly, I thought, since French history had bled all across Europe and even to Russia. I recognized a belligerent edge to his tone; he was evidently stung by the knowledge that though he had a covered wagon in his family tree—his own grandmother went to California in one in the 1880s—that’s about as much as he knew.

  Simone asked John and me about our ancestors, and was triumphant when we gave vague answers. Most Americans she’d met had no idea about anything before their own grandfathers, if that. Neither of us had thought much about them beyond a mention of Scotch-Irishness, whatever that was.

  “Indifference to history,” Simone sniffed. “That’s why Americans seem so naïve and always invade the wrong countries.”

  How American we suddenly felt. It’s when you’re in a foreign land and someone criticizes the United States that you come to feel most American, and in my case, most midwestern, because California, where I’ve lived for fifty years, has never felt as much like America as Illinois does.

  “Well, now, that’s why we’ve all come to France,” said General Rolfe, smoothly diplomatic, “to find out more about history and avoid the mistakes of the past.” I thought I also detected a note of sarcasm pointedly meant to remind Simone of American involvement in two wars to save France. It was during the Second World War that she had met Stuart, a young American officer come to save her. I also thought, but did not say, about how both our fathers, John’s and mine, had fought in the First World War to save France, in 1918.

  We were on our way to Italy, as I said, to a foundation where we would work on our books. I was writing up certain travel experiences I’d had on trips with John having to do with tuberculosis and AIDS in distant places. I could have included in my book this visit with the generals that ended so embarrassingly, but I didn’t; it was too soon to digest, really.

  * * * * *

  Since Simone’s generals, William Baum and Francis Rolfe, were both retired, they had the luxury of time for genealogical research, but they had once been famous fighting men, involved in wars and peacetime cleanups and the training of other soldiers. The older of the two, General Rolfe, was, apparently, a legend in his day, called “Big Cat,” or some such bellicose epithet.

  The wives of the generals, Sally Rolfe and Cynthia Baum, were also talking of the war campaigns and genealogical research. Roots are so arbitrary, anyway, that both of the generals’ ladies had adopted, perhaps in deference to the superior rank of their husbands, their husbands’ ancestry. They were familiar with the names of ships sailing out from La Rochelle in the seventeenth century, and of villages in Holland where Huguenots had sheltered, and of places in Germany, which was called something else then, where the sturdy Mennonite pig farmers and potato diggers packed their painted travel trunks for the New World.

  The ladies themselves could have been any old American mélange like the rest of us there listening, except for our French friend, Simone. She was an American citizen, but not very American. Though female lineage is apt to be surrendered with the last name, in confrontations with Americanness, Frenchness somehow prevails, as water puts out fire, fire burns paper, and paper soaks up water, and so Simone had not surrendered Frenchness to her American husband, she’d added Americanness on. Are roots arbitrary after all, or adopted?

  II

  FLYOVER COUNTRY

  2

  Moline, Pop. 34,000

  It was quite a while after this visit before I realized that my French friend Simone Ward had done me a favor by challenging my lack of historical consciousness. The impulse to learn about your personal background is almost universal when you come to a certain age, and so maybe I would have come to feel it eventually. But it was our visit to the generals that set me to thinking about midwestern folk, and feeling sorry I didn’t know more of those stories my aunts, all dead now, could have told me—all those secrets that go to the grave.

  I had always had a slightly uneasy relation to my midwestern origins, conscious of the scorn that people in more fashionable places felt for the plump, bespectacled, respectable folks whom television interviewers like to goad into conservative expostulations about the perfidies of the outside world.

  I’d also been stung by the French disdain for our American weak grasp of history. Before Simone’s remark about our lack of historical memory, I had simply enjoyed the pleasurable fact that I was in France, on my way to Italy. I’d been thinking of myself as a worldly traveler, someone who felt at home in England or Samoa, a citizen of the world. But now, beside my curiosity about the past, a feeling stole in, a stab of disloyalty, an illicit and even fraudulent feeling. Was it possible I was only pretending to be comfortable in Europe when I am really an Illinois hayseed whose core of naïveté cannot be effaced?

  Eventually, when we’d gone back to California, other aspects of this weekend stayed with me too, especially Simone’s observation that besides our lack of historical self-confidence, Americans also have delusions of grand origins. Did I? Did the other people in my small Illinois birthplace of Moline, or my mother’s little town of Watseka? Or the Iowans of the Hacklebarney region, where my father came from? I was not about to incur Simone’s gleeful scorn by admitting I had been told by my aunt Henrietta that our family was descended from the Capetian kings of France, confirming her assertion that we all believe ourselves royal.

  Who were our families? I had supposed they had always been in Illinois or Iowa, but of course that couldn’t be literally true. There must have been the scourges or droughts, ambitions, failures, or promises long ago that took the people to small Illinois towns—reasons that were now vanished beyond recollection, just like the beautiful elms that once shaded their streets, then gave up and died of Dutch elm disease, so that no one could imagine them now. It was too late, I thought, to learn very much about our particular history; my parents and all their siblings were dead and I had no one to ask.

  * * * * *

  On our visit to Simone and Stuart, a violent fire had recently swept through the south of France, driven by the mistrals, burning houses and vineyards and the shrubbery of the low hills, lending to the properties an aspect of forlorn defeat and an acrid odor people said would take months to dispel, as after a war. Maybe it was this burned and ruined smell that blighted our visit, which was to end in chagrin, but it had invoked too a pleasant nostalgia: the smoky air of Provence had put me in mind of the burning of the shocks in Illinois cornfields.

  Every year, from 1907 until 1992, the Chicago Tribune, the once mighty organ and arbiter of midwestern belief and manners, saluted Indian summer with a pair of drawings and a little story by John T. McCutcheon. A boy and his grandfather sit by a bonfire on the edge of a field at sundown, looking at the corn shocks gathered in the fields. As they gaze in the lowering dark at the smoke from the fires, the shapes of the stacks seem to be tepees, and gradually the two observers come to see the ghosts
of Indian braves dancing around them.

  The old man says, “Lots o’ people say it’s just leaves burnin’, but it ain’t. It’s the campfires, an’ th’ Injuns are hoppin’ ’round ’em t’beat the old Harry. You jest come out here tonight when the moon is hangin’ over the hill off yonder an’ the harvest fields is all swimmin’ in the moonlight, an’ you can see the Injuns and the tepees jest as plain as kin be.”

  I’m not sure why the Trib dropped this traditional feature—maybe people lost patience with the folksy tone of the grandfather, or resented McCutcheon’s rendition of the local Illinois accent, or considered it politically incorrect to mention Injuns.

  I partly resented Simone’s scorn for our American genealogical ignorance, our national feeling that human history started in 1776, because there was some truth to it that we ignore everything that came earlier. But up to a point I did know where I was from—Moline, Illinois. A pleasant place, surrounded by cornfields, I had always longed to get out of.

  A child born in the Midwest, especially in the days before television, is bound to feel herself and everyone around her to be marooned in those waving fields of corn, stranded far from any ocean or shore, far from other continents, far from the hungry Chinese children we could dig down to. Growing up along the Mississippi River in Moline, I was a child who felt that the great world was somewhere else. In towns like Moline, or Bloomfield, or Chenoa and Watseka, where my aunts and uncles lived, or in many another midwestern town, you sense yourself to be, and are, landlocked in the center of an immense continent, a thousand or more miles in any direction from any ocean, and I thought I wasn’t likely ever to see an ocean.