La Radinerie des Berhauts

The rear of the building housing Marie-Hélène and Denis's two apartments in Paris 17ième. Marie-Hélène and Pierre lived there too for years, in a different apartment, a rental, with Daphné and Alban. I took this one during my 2010 summer vacation. The graffiti outside the building shouldn't fool you: this is a quality building in a decent area of Paris chic.

For one thing, we seemed to be fairly even in assets. In fact, Marie-Hélène’s independent situation was significantly better than mine. When her mother died in 1991, her property was bequeathed to her and Denis, her brother, with her father retaining a life estate until he died. Translated out of legalese, that meant that Marie-Hélène owned half of two apartments in the 17th arrondissement in Paris, and half of a commercial space in the 9th arrondissement that used to be her father’s photography studio. Rental income on these properties goes to her father during his lifetime, supplementing his State pensions. There was also La Grée in Brittany, itself owned by her family.

The slim justification for including this photo here is that it shows the interior of an apartment in the building, in this case the one that Marie-Hélène and Pierre rented. But the real reason is that Daphné looks so adorable! She was a year old, and her maman must have taken this one.

I had nothing at the time in my name when we moved in together in 1994, but it was understood that Sue (my sister) and I would split mum’s home, life insurance and shares after she died. After that happened in 1996, I guesstimated that Marie-Hélène’s share of her family’s French real estate was about $350K, and my share of mum’s estate turned out to be about $200K, all inclusive. Marie-Hélène also brought some nice furniture to Le Tahu, something which I had little of, and things generally looked okay between us at the beginning. Apparently, it was not going to be a one-way street.

Both grandparents helped us out initially. Our children only had two: my mum and Marie-Hélène’s dad. Missus (that was what she liked us to call her) paid for trips for groups of us to Marlow to visit her, and was constantly helping us out with little (and often big!) gifts. Grand-père hosted us as often as we wanted at La Grée, the country cottage in Brittany he had retired to. No gifts worthy of note, but his hospitality was gratifying.

The Stock family home in Marlow. I took this in around 1973. Dad's Granada is in the driveway, next to what looks like mum's Daf. Sue and I sold our home in late 1996, after mum died.

As for Marie-Hélène’s and my revenue, it was tacitly understood that with four children to look after most of the time, she would not return to work after leaving Paris to move in with me. She had made her own living to some degree during her nine or so years with Pierre, but preferred to look after the children herself. I was fine with that. Young children need as much parental presence as they can get, and I suspect that maternal presence feels better for them.

Here's La Grée, grand-père's home in Brocéliande, and the children's first vacation home. Charlie took this one during his 2010 summer vacation.

My revenue was not great, for a US lawyer in Paris, because I’d never found a firm to replace Jack Kevorkian’s. One of the bigger US firms had been interested, on two different occasions, but each time it didn’t quite work out. That didn’t matter, at least at first, because my clients at Jack’s firm had followed me when I left in 1992, much to his surprise. Until 1996, I earned a comfortable living.

I also had the feeling that money was the key reason that Marie-Hélène had finally left Pierre. Not that I had a whole lot of it, but he remained either very cheap or very poor, and she was clearly beginning to worry about Daphné’s and Alban’s future if they depended on him. One day during the parents’ later period together, the children had wandered off from the café where their parents were chatting over coffee and set up shop as beggars on the local pedestrian street. That must have worried their mother!

Sitting at the reception desk in the Kevorkian & Rawlings office in November 1988. The firm's offices were two elegant family apartments in the 16th, each filling an entire floor of the building. Her office was next to reception, and she would help out upon occasion. She enjoyed her job at the firm.

I should clarify that Marie-Hélène didn’t say that money was a reason for her departure. Her explanation for finally losing patience with Pierre was more convoluted. He had apparently been behaving much better on the fidelity and reliability fronts during 1993, after her dates with me scared him into realizing that he might lose her. Recounting these improvements, Marie-Hélène became agitated. They infuriated her, she explained, because it meant that he could have always behaved better. The improvements demonstrated what he had always been capable of. I understood what she was saying, sort of, but still thought that his financial situation had a lot to do with her decision to move in with me.

Well, if you ask Marie-Hélène she will tell you that I didn’t earn enough in 1996, which is true. As a result, I started spending my inheritance on our new family. Missus passed away in July, and pieces of the inheritance were available with alacrity.

Was that really necessary? Maybe not. We could have cut back in the face of reduction in income by not living in La Bellanderie, for example. Denis, Marie-Hélène’s brother, and his family had lived rent-free in the larger family apartment in Paris for a year or more after they had run into financial adversity. Denis’s son spent years living in the smaller apartment in the same building before he died. Perhaps those apartments could have been a possibility for us, just to tide us over, if I had asked Marie-Hélène to pursue them.

Me in almost the same place in around 1991. This was taken inside Marie-Hélène's office, I think by her! Reception was right behind me. The firm was by then called Kevorkian & Partners. Boynton Rawlings had moved on.

But I didn’t. The children were still in a maelstrom outside our home, where Sunshine and Pierre continued inflicting their distress on them and us without any respite, and I wanted to make things as easy for the seven of us (Charlie arrived in 1995) as possible. Mum had been the biggest fan of our new family, and I knew that she would not object to my spending a portion of what she left for me on easing life for the seven of us.

I was fine with spending and spending my separate property until our wedding and its aftermath, which abruptly gave me pause. This was late spring in 1997. For one thing, neither grand-père nor his brothers gave us a wedding present. Marie-Hélène had never been married, even if she did have children and an ex, and so her father had never been asked before to help her on her way. Here was their opportunity, and the four brothers did absolutely nothing on the present front for their daughter and niece.

Good Catholics all, the Berhaut brothers couldn’t simply wash their hands of family duties. No, they satisfied their undemanding consciences by jointly sharing the costs of the food served at the reception. Of course, the reception was held in the house that we were renting, and we paid for everything other than the food (such as clothes for us and the children) ourselves. Again, you’d think that the sole surviving parent could have done something more substantial for his only daughter’s only wedding. But no, he managed to avoid paying for any child’s wedding at any time in his life. Having covered one quarter of the food served at a reception for maybe 35 people, he was done.

The Berhauts also arranged for a cousin's husband, a Baron no less, to chauffeur Marie-Hélène from the Mairie to La Bellanderie (a few hundred yards) for the reception. The car was a lovely white Corvette: a nice gesture, and much appreciated. Of course, coincidentally, nobody had to pay for a car!

I didn’t make much of that omission at the time because doing so would have focused on something that was obviously very hurtful to Marie-Hélène. I didn’t want to rub it in. What daughter wants to be all but abandoned for her own wedding? M. Jacques Berhaut, photographe à la retraite, you should be ashamed of yourself!

Beginning with our wedding, we never received anything of substance from any Berhaut, and this after my mum had been very kind to us all. In fact, one of Marie-Hélène’s explanations for her father’s cheapness, which at times obviously embarrassed her, was that her mother was no longer with us. That must have been true on some level, but the explanation didn’t help me as I began to realize how stingy her father was.

He never sent birthday or Christmas presents to his grandchildren or his daughter. “I don’t do presents,” he would say, as if this callous and selfish statement was itself some kind of explanation. It wasn’t. I didn’t get it.

I still don’t. Sixteen years of no birthday or Christmas presents for any of our children from their good Catholic grandfather!

In retrospect, these pages of the family diary seem sad. On the left, the short list of what we did on the wedding day. On the right, longer lists of the costs. The top list was covered by the brothers Berhaut, and the bottom by us. Marie-Hélène must have felt more than a twinge of sadness examining these pages. What had she done to be treated so badly by her own father? Remember, she received no present from her father or his three brothers apart from their respective shares of the costs of the reception.

What’s the point in playing the organ in the parish church for Sunday mass, as grand-père did for years and perhaps still does intermittently, if Christian charity escapes you, even when the beneficiaries would be your own children and grandchildren?

Even if there was some vestige of a problem between you and your own children, as there often is post-adolescence, what’s the point in getting old in good health and a comfortable financial situation if not to spoil your grandchildren? Jacques was the youngest of the four brothers, and had been spoilt by his mother, but his narcissism really shouldn’t have trumped the most basic grandfatherly (and fatherly) impulses.

The only way that Marie-Hélène and I could convince him to offer gifts to his grandchildren was with a delicate campaign of persuasion, identifying the recipient and the need and helping him choose the gift in person. We did do that every once in a while (he bought Charlie and Alex bicycles at La Grée one year, for example) just so that we could tell the children that their grandfather was looking after them.

But it was barely true. And we didn’t have the energy to mount such a campaign more than two or three times during our 16 years together.

During our summer visit to La Grée in 2007, here is Alex on the bike that grand-pére actually bought for him. Wow!!

As we moved to the US soon after the wedding, I would ask myself if maybe his daughter’s absence and distance caused grand-père the kind of pain that led him to withdraw financial support. That’s what happened with my dad after I left England to go to school in the US.

But in grand-père’s case, as far as I could tell, he had never taken care of his daughter in any meaningful manner. He did react coldly, according to Marie-Hélène, to news of our impending marriage, but whatever he felt about me (or about her choosing someone who was not French or whatever it was that bothered him, assuming that there was such a thing) should never have come between him and his own blood.

Ultimately, I felt bad for Marie-Hélène, having such a self-centered and unkind father as her only remaining parent.

He even managed to give a nice piece of her mother’s jewelry, which she herself had personally asked him to give to Marie-Hélène, to a good Catholic cousin whom he liked and Marie-Hélène didn’t.

There was nothing that I could do about that paternal meanness (and grand-père essentially stole those jewels from his own daughter) except shield her from the consequences by picking up the slack. So I did. But it rankled as my inheritance was frittered away.

It might all have been different if Mamie Régine, Marie-Hélène's maman, was still alive. She died in 1991, and was already ill (as you can see from the expression on grand-père's face) when this photo was taken at Alban's first birthday celebration in 1990. I never knew her. Chantal, then still with Denis, sits with her oldest, Cédric, on her lap, Marie-Hélène has Alban on her lap, and Mamie is holding Daphné, her first grandchild.

All the Berhauts knew that Pierre Brun was doing very little if anything for his children, and hopefully that they (and my children) thus needed support, emotional and financial. Marie-Hélène’s side of the family buried its collective head in the sand. Again, the children rarely received a letter, a card or even a fax. Eight birthdays every year, Christmas every year, passed by with no gifts for any of the children. Only Tante Lucette showed us spontaneous kindness on a regular basis.

By the time the frittering stopped, I had used the balance of my inheritance as a down-payment on our new home in Santa Cruz. Missus would have been delighted to help us get settled here.

I had hoped to have a down-payment on a vacation rental too, up in the Sierra Nevada. Russ and I had gone looking up there a few months before the family moved to Santa Cruz, but there was nothing left, literally, after covering the costs of the move and settling in.

“So be it,” I thought to myself, “at least there was enough to enable us to move to California.”

One of the real bonuses of spending too much of my inheritance was the train trip we took across the entire US. It would have been a lot cheaper to fly direct, but then we wouldn't have had our days in New York or three and a half days in a sleeping car on a train across a continent! Here's Charlie asleep on the train with his new "nounours" somewhere in the midwest.

Don’t get me wrong. I spent some of the money on special treats for me and the family, treats like the stay we had in New York City on our way from St Hilarion to Santa Cruz, and the Amtrak ride across the entire continent.

But the absence of any reciprocal gestures from Marie-Hélène or her family made me begin to resent what I did spend out of my modest inheritance on the day-to-day expenses of our blended family.

My earnings improved as we settled into Santa Cruz, over the hill from Silicon Valley, which was in a boom phase until 2000. I basically forgot the way that the Berhauts had treated us at the wedding, and the way grand-père continued without pause to treat the children.

What was the point? If this was how they were made, there was no point in stressing the injustice and meanness when the children might pick up on it. Perhaps they wouldn’t notice if we didn’t make an issue out of it.

Somewhere inside, I was sure that Marie-Hélène would do the same thing that I had done if the need ever arose. Fortunately, it didn’t. Less fortunately, when I did ask her to contribute, I met with a stubborn refusal. Never mind: I survived Silicon Valley busts and even a lay-off without another dramatic reduction in revenue. Life continued on.

In 2000, I gave her a small bequest (around $7,000) from my Great-aunt Alice to be deposited in her account in Paris, expecting to spend it in Europe. When I asked after it about a year later, she told me that it had all been spent. Another warning.

I was already unhappy about frittering away my inheritance by August of 1997. These diary pages show us having an active and enjoyable life already in Santa Cruz, but relate a fight about money. I apparently asked Marie-Hélène to contribute 300 MF (about $60K) to the community as soon as she could. "Gross déprime," she wrote, "really depressing." I have no idea why such a thought was so depressing when she knew how much of my inheritance I was contributing to our little community.

Finally, during the summer of 2002, all hell broke loose on the financial front. Well, okay, let’s not exaggerate. All hell didn’t really break loose, because I pretty much controlled myself. The events were not really that significant, I suppose, compared to love and death. But what happened finally made me feel awful.

The first event was completely unexpected. We had decided that we would visit Oncle Alain Berhaut, Marie-Hélène’s doctor uncle in Autun, during our summer vacation that year. When we moved to California, Oncle Alain had been kind enough to offer to store the ten cubic meters of furniture and personal effects that we were not taking with us. This is explained on the page about our furniture move.

Most of this furniture was stuff that I had brought into the relationship and that Marie-Hélène didn’t like. A Ligne Roset sofabed comes to mind: she just doesn’t like modern furniture. Also included were many appliances that would not be usable in the US, like the nice Bosch washer and drier, the GE fridge freezer (in the American side-by-side style), and the Sony TV and multi-system VCR (for playing cassettes from the UK, US and France. The GE fridge freezer was particularly close to my heart, because it was the last gift that mum had made to us before she died, and a very expensive gift at that. All of these appliances came from my side of the family.

The miraculous Dr. Alain Berhaut, one of grand-père's older brothers, during our wedding reception. Great bow-tie! This distinguished gentleman miraculously made a whole bunch of my furniture and appliances disappear while stored on his property.

Oncle Alain warmly welcomed us to his home, but when we looked in the grange where these ten cubic meters of furniture were being stored for us, they were not there!

Only the GE fridge freezer was there, and it had a dent on the side and had clearly been used for years. The deal was supposed to be that our things were in storage for us, and not to be used. In any event, there was nothing else in the grange that I recognized.

It was the first night of our summer vacation, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Or my ears. When I complained to Marie-Hélène and asked her where everything was, she told me that there was nothing there! I still have the shipper’s invoices for this ten cubic meters, which were delivered to Oncle Alain in June of 1997.

I still have correspondence from Oncle Alain (or perhaps grand-père, his kid brother) complaining that he had to pay for the shipment. He didn’t, of course, as we had already paid in advance, but our crooked moving company saw an opportunity to steal a little more and had Oncle Alain pay a second time.

The way that she was backing up her uncle, who looked like a common or garden thief to me at this point, scared me.

She had warned me about his miserly tendencies before. According to her, he turned his cash into gold and stored his gold at the local branch of the Banque de France. He had complained bitterly, she had said, giggling, when the Autun branch was closed permanently, because it meant that he had a trip each way to deposit and visit his personal hoard of gold.

M. le Docteur Alain Berhaut gives generously of his time to the Catholic church in Lourdes, where my Aunty Margaret used to go regularly in a futile search for cure for her cataracts. His role there was as a Doctor checking for miracles. Don’t know if he ever found one, but I found one in his grange. M. le Docteur Alain Berhaut a fait disparaître dix mètres cubes de meubles, électroménager et effets personnels !

The Tison delivery receipt in which Tison claimed that we had not paid to ship our 10 cubic meters of furniture to Oncle Alain. He duly paid it again. Perhaps that's why he used or sold my things, because he felt mistreated and a need to be compensated. He never brought that theory to us, and we still have the proof that we paid that invoice before he did.

We next visited Tante Lucette, Marie-Hélène’s adorable aunt down in Six-Fours on the Mediterranean coast. The incredible scenes at Oncle Alain’s prompted me to ask, finally, for signature authority on Marie-Hélène’s bank accounts in France. Logically enough, I had not had this before we were married, and we moved to the US right after. But Marie-Hélène had signing authority on every account that I or we opened in California, and I figured that after five years of sharing everything, my separate and our community property, there it was time for a little reciprocity here.

I asked in front of Tante Lucette, because I was already worried that Marie-Hélène was going to somehow justify a refusal, and wanted a benevolent older relative there just in case. Marie-Hélène gave me a flat no. And, of course, it was all my fault. I had frittered my money away, she asserted, and she did not want to risk my frittering her money away too. How could she act this way?

Of course, I pointed out in the ensuing “discussion” (I was obviously furious) that she had signing authority in any event in the US, on everything, whatever her personality flaws. To my mind, that was the nature of marriage. She had had signing authority on my separate property in our bank accounts in 1997, and she used it and spent my separate property. She was a big help in frittering away my inheritance! Even if later she blamed me alone for its disappearance, on the ground that I should have been earning more.

Marriage is a partnership, and both parties contribute. By refusing me signing authority on her accounts in France, Marie-Hélène refused to make any contribution herself after having accepted a six figure contribution from me. Tante Lucette was horrified: I could see it in her eyes. But she could or would not do anything to talk her niece out of her position. Or if she did so out of my sight, her intervention made no difference.

With Tantes Camille and Lucette that summer near Six-Fours on the Mediterranean. The latter put us all up in her apartment on the beach (almost), and stayed with the former so as not to disturb us. Very kind. Not at all like Oncle Alain, to whom she has no blood relation.

Needless to say, Marie-Hélène had budged not an inch before the end of the marriage. Flexibility, compromise and sharing are not her forte. She continued to have access to all of my money from whatever source derived, and I continued to beg for crumbs from her, symbolic gestures, anything to demonstrate a real partnership.

But I didn’t really believe in the partnership after 2002. She was in denial, first that her uncle had stolen my furniture, appliances and personal affairs, and then that she was justified in refusing me access to her own funds. Most distressing was her holding me responsible for her inability to share as I had done. It was so obviously a rationalization, and yet she was so convinced of its truth. I had a tendency to fritter money away, she explained. So now helping our family out in its hour of need justified treating me so badly: I might fritter her money away on our family! You have to admire her sheer gall!

So with little change over the following years in our respective approaches to money, we came to the end of the road and I moved out. Then it was time to do the accounts. Divorce in the US is principally an accounting matter. Feelings of betrayal and disappointment, of anger and pain, are reduced to a protracted debate about money and property.

Maybe that’s what this entire post is, my side of our dispute about money. Maybe.

It was in divorce mediation that I discovered the most adverse consequence of helping out our family with my inheritance all those years ago. California law was not on my side. The house had doubled in value since I used $75,000 of mum’s estate to pay the down payment. But California law denied me any corresponding return on my investment. So when the house is sold I will receive the first $75,000 after the mortgage is paid off. The balance of the equity in our home is community property, which will be split between the two of us.

Needless to say, Marie-Hélène does well out of this split, because her separate property had appreciated to the same extent as our home, to the same extent as the vacation rental in the Sierra Nevada that I would have bought if mum’s inheritance hadn’t been frittered away. And I have no claim to this appreciation in her property, although she takes half of the appreciation in mine in our home, which is a good illustration of why stingy misers laugh all the way to the bank!

In sum, during the course of our relationship, my separate property depleted from around $200,000 to $75,000, and Marie-Hélène’s appreciated from $350-400,000 to $700-800,000 (I’m less aware of French real estate values nowadays, but this seems to be the ballpark). From Charlie and Alex’s point of view, that relative change made no difference. Whichever of their parents has the separate property will not affect their entitlements. But Nick and Tom now have an expectancy of $18,750 each out of my separate property, and Daphné and Alban now have an expectancy of maybe $175-200,000 from their mother’s.

Our marriage has served to transfer money and property from my children to hers: another good illustration of why stingy misers laugh all the way to the bank.

Those who assert that money is one of the most pressing causes of breakdowns in relationships are on to something. Our money squabbles sapped me, and her stingy family’s cheapness and stealing slapped me, and looking back I feel like such a fool.