BOOK REVIEW : A Romance in the Autumnal Years
Walk With the Sickle Moon by Helen Norris (Birch Lane Press: $15.95; 170 pages)
After outlining a plot that could support a solid suspense thriller, Norris inexplicably abandons it to present an autumnal romance. Her heroine, Laura Kendall, is a 45-year-old widow, the mother of a son who has been killed in a tragic accident during his military service in France. What year is this? We’re never told.
Laura has taken a standard continental tour, leaving the group to go to Montreuil, France, where she believes she may have a grandchild fathered by her dead son. This Montreuil is an actual town with a population of 3,000, known for a charming country inn long favored by English visitors, though the coastal climate tends to be windy and wet. Perhaps that’s why the English like it--it’s simultaneously home and abroad. Among the the other September guests is the gruff but kindly Mrs. Carstairs, relict of an army major, who befriends Laura, making the sum of major characters a scant half-dozen.
The morning after her arrival, Laura Kendall rents a car to drive to the Cistercian Abbey, where she knows there is an orphanage. Because her dead son’s personal effects have included a letter from a girl named Michele, postmarked Montreuil, informing him that she’s pregnant, Mrs. Kendall has convinced herself that the child might have been left there. Never mind that seven years have passed and the mother might be married and living anywhere in the world.
On the way to the Abbey, Laura Kendall’s car skids on squashed sugar beets and lands in a ditch. Walking to the nearest farmhouse, she’s met by Duriez, who volunteers to lead her to the Abbey, where he’s due to make a house call. Happily, he has a modicum of English, because Laura has no French whatsoever, curious for an apparently well-educated woman who has come to Europe on so complex an errand, but there are lots of curious circumstances in the novel. Laura inquires at the orphanage, but is told that their records are secret.
Discouraged, she returns to the hotel where she takes tea with Mrs. Carstairs, who is giving an English lesson to a small boy about 7 years old, the grandson of Dr. Duriez. The search for the still hypothetical grandchild is over before it begins. Jean Duriez is Jamie Kendall’s son, a fact that Dr. Duriez readily admits when Laura asks him if his records might possibly reveal a child born out of wedlock to a girl named Michele. She is his daughter, now living in Paris. The entire plot is disposed of in a few sentences.
From this point on, “Walk With the Sickle Moon” is the delicate flowering of the relationship between Laura and Marc Duriez, a love expressed with great difficulty in the anguished language of the heart. Laura is a restrained and exceedingly proper lady; he’s a man with a tragic past. The romance progresses slowly. For pages on end, they debate the dilemma posed by their common grandchild, whom Laura would like to take back to Washington for a job. Amazingly, the errant mother, Michele, readily agrees to this proposal, because she plans to marry an older man who is not eager to accept the responsibility of her son. Laura, by now convinced of Duriez’s profound love for the boy, selflessly decides not to accept the generous offer.
The debate continues, in tender, lyrical language that sounds disconcertingly like the speech of the Spanish partisans in “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” perhaps an unavoidable hazard of trying to convey great emotion in a second language.
Eventually, Duriez and Laura find a solution calculated to delight, if not surprise, the romantics among us. “It is possible that I could learn to speak French,” she says. Says he: “It is of no exact importance. It is not necessary to speak.” A lovely ending, but why didn’t Laura at least pack a dictionary? If she’s 45 now and her son has been dead for seven years, she was a grandmother at 38. I suppose it’s just barely possible, and it would explain why she’d never had French 101-102 in college.