"Please don't talk to my family. And if you do, tell them I’m dead.”
It had always seemed extreme. The estrangement between my husband and his family in France was such that I’d had to promise never to try to mend fences. So I’d ignored Facebook requests from his family, while he flat out refused to join social media at all.
What could have happened that he wouldn’t speak to any of them? My curiosity both flattered and irritated him. In either case, he would end up angry in the space of a few minutes, so I got my information in bits and pieces. It was maddening. But his fragmented anecdotes put together a pathetic story.
He’d been little more than an indentured servant; mucking pig, poultry, sheep, and rabbit pens before school, running the lock (and almost drowning in it), taking summer jobs only to turn over his entire pay to his mother. He rejoiced in a hospital stay for appendicitis at 10 years old because it meant for a brief time that he didn’t have to work.
His stories seemed incredible to me, having come from a family where my parents gave too much to their kids instead of the reverse. I asked what his father had said about his mother’s behavior.
“Nothing,” my husband told me. “My father and I didn’t talk.”
With an eye on a career in engineering, he worked summers to pay for his classes. His family took his paychecks, absorbed them into the household expenses, and paid the tuition later, but with a pittance for living expenses. He could see a movie or have a meal but not both. He estimated his mother kept about half of what he’d earned during the summer.
He moved to Paris on his own steam yet continued to send money to the family. The situation came to a head on a visit home when he confronted his brother and mother about the amount of money being spent on VCRs and other luxuries, and about the fact that his older brother wasn’t even employed, much less contributing. In the ensuing argument, my husband was turned out of the house (but not his brother), in the countryside, in the middle of the night, miles from any type of transportation.
He never went back.
His sisters rallied behind his mother, calling to berate him for his behavior. He finally cut off communication entirely.
When his father died, years later, my husband was contacted in Paris, but only so that he could turn over his legal share of the house they’d bought near the lock, which under French law went to the children before the spouse. He didn’t care about the house and was willing to give up his portion of it. He almost did, just to be done.
But then at the signing in the lawyer’s office, his mother had to ask one last question. “Will I ever have to return it? Like when I die, does he get it back?”
“You see, I told you how she is,” he said to the lawyer. “Forget it. Now they can buy my part from me.”
When the certified letter from a French legal firm came to my dad’s house in Ft. Myers, Florida in 2016, we knew it couldn’t be for anything good. The person serving it declared that they had been looking for my husband and me for a decade, and that we’d finally been tracked to that address. Ridiculous, I told my dad over the phone. Any simple search would have turned up the purchase of our house, and we'd never lived in Florida. I was mortified that someone was bothering my dad.
My father couldn’t read French, of course, much less French legalese, so he said he would mail the letter it to me. The suspense was killing me. But then, bless his heart, my dad, who to this day refuses to own a smartphone, nevertheless managed to email me a scan.
My husband’s mother was dead.
However, that wasn’t why we were getting the letter.
Annie K. had actually died in 2005, 11 years earlier. According to the documents she’d remarried after the death of her first husband, and her new spouse became part owner of the family home. Now that the second husband had also died, his siblings wanted to sell it, but were obliged under French law to obtain agreement from all of her offspring, which of course included my husband. They wanted him to come to France.
“Out of the question,” he said. “Don’t answer.”
I was incredulous. “It’s your inheritance,” I replied. “You could give it to your kids.”
He scoffed. “It’s hardly worth the effort, especially after dividing by five. At any rate, even if it were a mansion, I wouldn’t go.”
I knew the money wouldn’t matter to him. He was overgenerous with a horror of splitting checks, using coupons, or the hint of any bartering. When I balked at bills I thought were unjust, he wouldn’t budge. “Just pay,” he would say.
In hindsight, it was a remarkable reaction to being fleeced by his own family. But he refused to answer the letter, even if it meant stalling the whole process. Especially if it meant stalling it. He was amused to see how long and how ineptly they’d been looking for him, he told me, and he didn’t care how long they had to wait. Now we knew that those friendship requests I’d received from his nieces and nephews had been fishing attempts on behalf of their parents.
The only “good guys” for him were his little brother, who was also MIA per the law firm, a brother-in-law who had refused to play along, and his cousin, with whom he’d had a close relationship, but ended up cutting off when she became the target of harassment.
Now, in the midst of my genealogy work on his family, and having been reunited with his cousin, I am discovering a pattern of exploitation and emotional disconnection that apparently goes back a long way.
"You're lucky to have your family," he said when we first met.
Am I ever.
