Au Revoir, Dutchess!
by Paul J. Schaefer

I don’t know why my 76th birthday compelled me to start reading obituaries. Seventy-six is less significant an anniversary than 75 or, if I’m lucky, the 80th to come. And, I have known for some time that I’m not immortal. Prostate cancer 12 years ago, though hopefully cured, destroyed any lingering youthful denial.

I rarely recognized any of the dead listed on those fateful pages, but as I read I began to think about those thin columns crowned with capitals of iconic pictures as a pathetic remnant of what were long, struggle-fraught lives. Passionate, loving and ambitious men and women were announced as Dead for a Day and then forgotten and buried by other iconic columns on the morrow. I found it unsettling to think of how generic they appeared to the casual reader. Their life summary read like an anthology of ghost stories parading daily through the local newspapers with the same black and white rap sheet: father of Amy and William, mother of Louise and Melissa, brother or sister of Arnold and Mark, child of Samuel and Sarah. It seemed that their only accomplishment was to be the descendant or progenitor of a Biblical line. The only major change from Genesis is that women’s names are now justly included. I wanted to read about someone who was in a chapter and verse that had plot and action: a Moses or a Noah or bless her, a Salome. So, I began to read the obituaries in the New York Times.

Here the ghosts were more colorful. They wore the red, white and blue of politicians and generals, the progressive green of inventors and educators, or the next-to-nothing-at-all-purple of entertainers like Gypsy Rose Lee. I was forced to recognize that I was worrying about my own thin black and white column, my own obituary. I wanted one with as much color as I could muster. If I were not a general and thus didn’t shape history, or the inventor of the camcorder, or a movie star like Johnny Weismuller who swung from trees, I still had to find a recipe that gave a dash of panache to my final printed word.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines panache as: “A tuft or plume of feathers esp. as used for a head-dress or an ornament for a helmet.” It comes of course from the French and you find the ideal symbol of the word in Cyrano de Bergerac, a fictional character from French theater who embodied all the qualities the word implies: élan, verve, courage, all topped by the chic feather he always wore in his hat.

When I came East 52 years ago, I came with the idea that I had left rural life forever. From then on I would only enjoy the sophistication of the urban landscape. New York City was my first destination, but Paris, the City of Light, was my eventual goal. My hope was to live there for at least a year or two. But once in New York I ran through my $200 army discharge pay after two weeks and had to settle for a job in Dutchess County. It was temporary, I thought; I never gave up my hope of reaching Paris. That’s why I had taken French from an Irish professor named Jeannie O’Leary at a university in Milwaukee.

Needless to say, my French has remained so tentative I could barely blurt out “Deux croissants, s’il vous plait,” when I finally reached Paris last September, 50 years after coming East. Despite the language barrier, the city was even more beautiful than I had imagined. I walked where Hemingway walked in the Luxembourg Gardens and sipped a martini with Fitzgerald’s ghost in the Ritz bar. I stood on the Pont Neuf at midnight under a full moon and watched the searchlight on the Tour Eiffel circle in the star-strewn darkness. The Louvre with Napoleon’s looted treasures was dutifully toured, and in small bites it was genuinely pleasurable. But two weeks was barely enough time to catch a ripple, much less a wave in this aesthetic ocean.

I have to ask myself these questions: Do I want to die in this accidentally adopted County-on-the-Hudson that I grew to love 50 years ago, or should I fulfill that old quest? Do I have a few healthy years left to behave like an American ex-pat and if not write a novel, at least be the subject of one by some more talented writer than I am? Would right now be my last chance to give my obituary some panache?

Some of the very reasons I decided to stay in Dutchess County have disappeared. Among them are the River Aristocrats with their quirky habit of pretending to be just like us but doing it in a way that draws our attention: Eleanor Roosevelt wearing bright red knee-socks under a denim jumper while shopping in the local supermarket in Hyde Park; Chanler Chapman coming to Rhinebeck or Red Hook in cow-manure spattered bib overalls and shooting off his pistol in the ceiling of the Beekman Arms; Deborah Dows patching her goose-down jacket with masking tape and teaching young riders to balance eggs on a spoon as they trot. They are almost all gone now and their estates have been donated to public use or owned by newly-rich Wall Street financiers.

Further east, the Millbrook Hilltoppers have been replaced by television and movie stars. In the 60s, the news from London that Queen Victoria had died had not yet traveled to the old landed gentry in this horsey country enclave. Gentlemen dressed in black tie and ladies appeared in long gowns at Saturday night dinner parties. Male guests retired to the billiard room for brandy and off-color jokes, while the females traded genteel gossip over coffee and the uniformed maid cleared the silverware and china. Fox hunting and beagling were the sports of choice.

The terribly poor but stoic farmers of Clinton Hollow have also disappeared with their yes-yes language... as in “Yes, yes, it’s the driest year since ‘42” answered by, “Yes, yes, it’s those damn jets flyin’ overhead that’s stoppin’ the rain.” Also gone is their generous custom of always helping a neighbor who has fallen into a snowy, winter ditch or is stuck in springtime muck on a mired dirt road. And these farmers no longer block traffic as they stop their trucks in twos and threes to “pass the time of day” when they meet. Not that there was any traffic to stop back then. Now, tree-canopied, windingly beautiful Hollow Road is straightened and blacktopped and anyone who stops to chat is likely to be cut down, straightened out, flattened and forever gone as well. And when I drive north from New York City on the Taconic Parkway and descend from Putnam County into Dutchess, I am no longer elated to see cattle grazing in a verdant, agricultural valley—once my signal that I was almost home from the commercial strife of the city. Route 84 has bulldozed its way through an idyllic dairy farm that welcomed travelers as they crossed the county line to sweet, peaceful Dutchess. Only an abandoned silo and a derelict barn remain—a needling reminder of what was destroyed pinned cruelly next to the roaring truck traffic.

It might be time to fulfill that old dream about the city-on-the-Seine. Perhaps my wife Gale would agree to try it for a year or two. I know that she’ll be certain I’ll come to my senses and return to Dutchess within a few months. So, with a sigh, she’ll say: “I would rather go with you then remain at home alone.” And I will promise to come home “some day.”

So how would my obituary read if I moved to Paris? I can imagine it unfolding this way: “Mr. Paul Schaefer died last week in Paris, where he spent the last __ (fill in) years of his life. He occupied his days learning to read French so he could recite Rimbaud by heart as if he were still 18. He had his choice every evening of concerts featuring Mozart or Poulenc or Stravinsky at historic venues around the city: the Madeleine, Sainte Chapelle, l’église St.-Roch. In season, he sat high in the galleries of the Opera Garnier to see the dancers of the Paris Ballet; after the last bravo he descended with the chattering crowd down the winding grand staircase with its glittering chandeliers. He spent every Saturday morning in one of the many open-air food markets buying fresh petis pois, aubergine, and epinards directly from red-faced, mustachioed French farmers and spying on matronly French mesdames while looking for clues about what was in perfect ripeness. He stood in line on the Île St.-Louis so he could savor les glaces Berthillon, the premier ice cream in France and thus the world. Just once, after laughingly saying that like Faust he had mortgaged his soul to the devil, he dined at the Tour d’Argent and relished the view of Notre Dame’s flying buttresses as he ate his pressed canard. He spent spring, summer, and fall in the parks and gardens alternating between the geometric Tuileries, the color-splashed Luxembourg and the parc Monceau with its Sunday runners, children and nursemaids. But he was especially fond of the rose garden behind the 18th-century, grey stone mansion that was once Rodin’s studio. Here he fell asleep one June afternoon with the gold-leafed dome of the Invalides shining just beyond the bordering green hedge. He could not be awakened by his wife Gale who was at his side.

“Mr. Schaefer’s ashes were flown back to Dutchess County, fulfilling his promise to return home. Mrs. Schaefer with their daughters Sarah and Emily and their grandchildren Abbie, Sophie and Franny, stood on Franklin Roosevelt’s WPA bridge over the Little Wappingers Creek in Clinton Hollow, just below the broken mill dam and in front of what was once Alice B. Rikert’s General Store. There, they gently tipped the funerary urn beyond the cement railing and his ashes poured over the side. They fell like a feathery, white plume, then floated on the quiet waters below.”