Le Mariage

by Diane Johnson

  Sometimes “calling his people” took the form, Clara knew, of Serge calling lawyers in Los Angeles, who would then call the office in Paris, which would then enact Cray’s wishes, except at the moment it was not a possible time in Los Angeles, he’d have to get Woly out of bed.

  “I don’t know what this is about. Do you know, messieurs?” Clara asked the men. Perhaps they were just process servers, huissiers.

  “It appears to be about theft and desecration of French property, madame. The destruction of a listed building—there are a number of counts.”

  Delia could see Clara had no idea what they were talking about.

  “Can we wait for my husband to come back?”

  “A few minutes, no more. I am afraid you must wear these. It is the same, I know, in your country.”

  Cray came back just as Clara was being led out. She seemed calm enough, but she was in handcuffs. She looked pleadingly at him, trying at the same time to give a reassuring, if ironic, smile. He was stymied for a few seconds, then hurried to his car, scowling and cursing violently. He didn’t suggest that Delia come along.

  25

  Prison

  Clara sat in the back of the little Renault in handcuffs; the magistrats du parquet in front kept craning around to look at her, as if they expected her to try to leap from the car. She wondered why she didn’t feel more frightened, no doubt it was her conviction of innocence, her sense of being a pawn in the hardening hunting standoff, her assurance that Serge (famous, influential) would know what to do, or Woly’s lawyers would, and finally that none of this could be true. One minute in her robe in her kitchen, the next en route to the jail in Versailles in handcuffs.

  It seemed useless to ask these men anything, they wouldn’t tell her or they didn’t know, though they seemed to bear her no malice and the one gave an encouraging smile. She wondered why it was she who had been arrested, not Serge, or why not the both of them?

  She sat back and thought of her little son Lars, as she did innumerable times a day, this time thinking it was just as well he didn’t know about what was happening to her, it would scare him. Or maybe he’d think it was funny and exciting, like a television drama. It was, in a way, funny and exciting.

  They arrived at the jail, a place she passed three times a week on her way to the open market without ever glancing up at its barred and grimy windows behind which prisoners sat, some perhaps as pure of heart as she. She didn’t know the name of this prison. The wooden doors, heavy as granite, opened to allow them to drive into the forecourt, and, more ominously, closed behind them. Clara had not thought before that wood, blackened, ancient oak, patined by the centuries of misery they had seen, could be more final and grim than metal. They conjured centuries of royal power and indifference, brutality, boiling oil. It made her heart begin to quail a little to feel the doors closing like jaws behind them. She was in a foreign land, and did not know her position, her rights, or her chances. She held her head high. She had a position, and rights, nonetheless.

  Now the officers, who had almost been nice, apologizing for the handcuffs, became rough and brusque, pulling her from the car as if she had been resisting them and pushing her with heavy hands on her shoulders toward the building. She imagined eyes watching them, approving the force of their magistrates against the evildoers that threatened France. She shook off the hands, which were immediately withdrawn, and gazed up at the impersonal windows with her own eyes blazing.

  “You will see a representative of the procureur, she will tell you what it is you are charged with and tout cela,” said the smiling man, returning his hand lightly to her elbow. Now she saw that his eyes were indifferent, the smile a mere grimace. They delivered her to a big woman who waited in the hall and took her into a vestibule with a brown linoleum floor. The woman inside began to put her hands all over Clara, searching her. Now Clara began to be really shocked. She had nothing concealed in her underclothes. She surrendered her purse.

  Down another hallway, in an area that looked like an infirmary, another matron waited, carrying a towel. “This way.” The woman led Clara into a bare room. “Prenez une douche, madame.” For an instant Clara heard this in the English sense: douche, the word in English so intimate and intrusive, a kind of rape. But they were talking about a shower. Take a shower?

  “But,” Clara began, indignant. She’d just had a shower at home. She’d just got up. Did she smell? Did they think she might have lice? What had been irritation verged on panic. With the arrival of the deepening flush of panic came the simultaneous realization that panic was useless. She tried to stifle the pounding of her throat, and the impulse, as they pulled her forward into the shower room, to scream and struggle. The woman nodded again toward the shower in a cement-floored room beyond and thrust the thin towel at her.

  The shower room was cold. The floor was cold and vaguely slimy, or maybe that was imagination, the corollary of her revulsion. The walls were peeled and scabbed with blistering paint and scratches like primitive first writings. Someone had had time to scratch “Jacq-” in the paint. Clara took off her jacket and unbuttoned her blouse, and when the matron went out, she turned on the tepid water. Could anyone see her? She ran the water but didn’t stand under it.

  You had to hold the water on. Her arm was getting wet as she held herself away from the stream of water. All the horrible associations of showers came to her mind—death camps, Psycho. When would the woman come back? When she thought the length of her shower was convincing, she let go the button, dried her arm, and waited. In seconds the woman came back, smirking as if she knew well that Clara had not subjected her body to the prison water.

  A few steps farther, to a cell. A cell! A tiny room, a bunk, a rough table, a toilet in full view. Cigarette butts on the floor, and the stink of cold tobacco. She sat in shock through the long morning, unable to think straight about what to do about anything. It was hard to bring the mind to bear, it tended in the boredom of waiting to drift into strange, contentless lethargy, from which she would sternly recall herself, only to drift again. An hour passed, hours and hours it seemed. They had not taken her watch.

  She had been put in here at nine. At one-thirty they led her down an interminable corridor, her footsteps ringing as in a Kafka film, reverberations hollow and portentous. She realized she could not just turn and say enough of this and leave. Each time this reality penetrated a little deeper into her numbed comprehension, it became more difficult to keep her self-possession. In an office, a slender, even chic woman with a dossier sat at a table, as if this were a job interview, and motioned Clara to sit down facing her on a folding chair. Clara felt herself hoping to make a good impression, as if her life depended on her eager expression of complicity.

  “You know why you are here? ”

  “Not at all,” Clara said, smiling tentatively.

  “You are charged with theft,” the woman said. “For stealing the property of France, and of the Commune of Val-Lanval. There is a list—nine fireplaces, nine mirrors, the boiseries of the salon, and parquets. There are some other charges, to do with the desecration of a national monument. When you removed the fireplaces and the rest.”

  For an instant Clara had no idea what the woman could be talking of, but of course it was the house. “But there were no fireplaces when we bought it,” she protested. “No mirrors or anything.”

  “These are very serious charges, punishable with prison. But I believe the charges could be reduced for restitution, the état would discuss you restoring the original pieces to the château.”

  “But I don’t have them! I—there wasn’t anything there!” cried Clara.

  The official did not seem surprised at this. She rattled the papers briskly and glanced at the officer who stood by the door. “Détention provisoire. You will be incarcerated pending the hearing. Would you like to speak to a lawyer now? He will advise you of your rights and how to proceed. Please sign these papers at the bottom there.”

  Clara sat staring. “Do I have t
he right to call my husband? Can I get my own lawyer?”

  “No doubt, in time. These are the procedures after arrest, and you must follow them like everyone else.” Her voice was stern but not unkind, as if she were instructing a mutinous pupil. Clara stared at the papers. Seeing no alternative, she signed them. The woman waited, seeming irritated at Clara’s slowness in rising to her feet, in backing toward the door, looking around for someone to show her what to do. Then the big woman was back and took her arm.

  26

  Have You Heard What Happened to Clara?

  Delia watched the car depart with Clara, then went back inside. She stood in the kitchen, more bemused than alarmed by this new turn of events, events not unexpected in an unreliable country lacking in due process, a country of which she herself had been a victim: Clara Holly dragged off by French authorities. Obviously this was a country with no civil rights whatever, and she felt bad about it more for Gabriel’s sake than for Clara’s. She believed Clara’s arrest must have something to do with the events surrounding Gabriel, or maybe her own hotel bill, or the FBI men both named Frank, from whom she’d heard nothing since the day they came to the hotel. She felt the sense of duty she had in Gabriel’s case; it was now more incumbent upon her than ever not to get caught, but to remain detached somehow, to testify and bear witness, to rescue the others, honest Americans under the paw of France.

  “I saw it all,” she assured Cray. “They treated her roughly.”

  “I want you to remember everything you saw,” he said.

  In the afternoon, Mayor Briac came to Cray, who had spent the morning on the phone. Briac was dressed in a business suit, and was accompanied by a secretary, a young man with a notebook. Cray took him into the little book-lined room off the salon. It had a globe, leather chairs, the fittings of official consultation.

  “It is most unfortunate about Madame Cray,” the mayor had the effrontery to say. He would not sit down.

  “Hypocrites,” snarled Cray. “What do you want?”

  “The law is indifferent in the operation of its just provisions. They must be enforced, that is all. You have defied the Loi Verdeille in excluding hunters from your hectares, for example, but the commune has strictly enforced its provisions about monuments historiques, c‘est’tout. There is not one law for Americans and another for everyone else, monsieur, despite what you appear to believe.”

  “Are you telling me there’s a connection between the so-called law and this thing with Clara?”

  “Indeed.”

  The mayor assured Cray that the commune would be prepared to reconsider the charges against Clara if Cray would reconsider his attitude to hunting. Cray’s enraged roaring could be heard throughout the house. In the kitchen, Delia and Senhora Alvares looked at each other.

  “There will be no hunting on my land, monsieur,” Cray shouted. “Cowards who would persecute a woman!” and much more in that vein.

  A dark woman brought a meager dinner, announced as purée de pommes de terre avec cornichons, the taste watery, inedible, and a few lumps of mucilaginous meat. She was made to eat in solitude, but later she was led to a corridor, with a few other women there talking among themselves. Was it exercise time, a privilege? They were all white women, without notable marks of life’s hardships. They were combed, and dressed in pants or shapeless dresses. They stared at Clara, one or two smiled and Clara smiled back but stood to herself. Even in jails, the French were so French, she thought, reserved and polite. These didn’t look like wild hookers or con women—she couldn’t tell what they were.

  “Tu es Amiricaine, toi,” one remarked, smiling with satisfaction. Even foreigners do not lie outside the purview of our mighty institutions. Then the women ignored her and went on talking among themselves.

  She had imagined from prison movies that inmates were always flaunting their guilt, using it as a way of intimidating the other menacing people with whom they had been thrown. In a prison movie, each man strove to look more hardened and bitter than the others. But here the women were all innocent, as they loudly protested to the directrice and each other. A haggard woman of a certain age turned to Clara to tell a story the others had apparently heard too often, of the indignity of being so rudely treated by store personnel when they suggested she was trying to leave without paying for some items “which were not, after all, valuable, I told them, madame, just personal, feminine necessaries.”

  “And how could they think I was a pute, moi?” another, fat and hennaed, said, laughing. “No prostitute has my sort of shape.”

  Clara didn’t know how to explain her presence without revealing that she lived in a splendid château, which didn’t seem sisterly. “They think I stole the woodwork from an historic monument,” she said. “But I am innocent.” This was not an interesting crime, she didn’t interest them. At eight-thirty a matron led her back to her cell.

  In the night, lying trying to think of subjects to think about, she thought of Edmond Dantès and the Château d‘If, and The Prisoner of Zenda, Soul on Ice, The Man in the Iron Mask. She thought of Serge, wondering what he was doing to get her out of here; and she thought of Monsieur de Persand, imagining him to be a kind of lawyer or powerful judge who would come and rescue her. Her thoughts dwelt longest on this theme. Serge’s activity she took for granted. She tried not to reflect on how Serge had made her owner of the house for tax reasons, or else it would be him in jail. Eventually her thoughts melted into incoherent fatigue and she slept, but only for an hour or so, and then waked, disbelieving, remembering that she was in prison.

  Tim Nolinger learned of the arrest of Clara Holly from Ames Everett, whom he happened to talk to at the American Library. He hadn’t planned to go out to the Crays’ today, had work to do in town, and she said again she didn’t like him borrowing the car all the time. A few times when she had asked for it, and he had argued his superior need of it, she had seemed seriously irritated. It was her car, after all, and he’d been using it every day. She had always given in. He had not really heard her underlying complaint, the amount of time he was spending out in Etang-la-Reine with the Crays.

  Among Serge’s phone calls was one to the American ambassador, Charlie Nolan. The news of Clara’s arrest thus spread through the embassy staff and then to others. Dorothy Sternholz heard it from Ames Everett and immediately called her friend Vivian Gibbs.

  “You’ve heard about Clara Holly?”

  “No, what?”

  “Arrested! Supposedly for defacing a French national monument. That is, their château. It’s apparently a move to try to get them to relax their opposition to hunting.”

  “I didn’t know they were opposed to hunting.”

  “Violently opposed. My dear, she’s in jail!”

  Everyone agreed the idea of Clara despoiling a national monument was ridiculous on the face of it. The American community drew together, via the political clubs, Democrats in Paris and Republicans Abroad, united in excited indignation. Everyone knew the place had been sitting in rack and ruin, and that Serge Cray had saved it, and that Clara Holly had showered it with virtuous and tasteful attention, restoring the gardens and so forth. But for the Crays, the place would have been torn down, for all the attention the Ministry of National Monuments had paid it. Committees were formed in emergency sessions on the principle of the thing where the rights of foreign residents were concerned.

  Of course, there were some reservations.

  “However, I always did think they were a little high-handed with their travaux, not even going to the Monuments people,” Dorothy Sternholz confided to Ames.

  “I never thought it was wise just to slap a coat of white paint on it,” Ames said. “All wrong for the period.”

  “Clara tends to think that everything she does is perfect....”

  Other Americans rallied. Though Serge Cray was not someone you could take casseroles to, both Alena Coe, in her capacity as program chairman of Democrats in Paris, and Maydie Bailey of the Union Interallié called the business
office of Monday Brothers Films to ask that messages of solidarity be relayed. What was particularly interesting and disquieting to everybody was that if such a thing could happen to the Crays, which of them might not be the next to be dragged off in the night for having put a nail in some wall that Chateaubriand had peed against?

  All the bellowing of Cray, however much it might shake the earth in California, had no power to speed up the processes of French justice. All agreed he had made a mistake in having gone through Biggs, Rigby, Denby, Fox, the California legal team relied on by the Monday Brothers studio, who, even though they had a French branch, lost hours every day because of the time difference. Only by the heroic maneuver of beginning the workday at 8 A.M. in Los Angeles (meaning overtime pay for an attorney willing to come in that early) could the lawyers achieve a maximum of two hours of overlap with the French office, assuming these latter stayed until seven at night. Also, it didn’t help that the Paris branch of the venerable old law firm had taken on a French sense of time, stately and historical, and the French certainty that events will unfold in their preordained way.

  27

  The Prisoner

  Three days passed and, to Clara’s astonishment and mounting fury, no one came to rescue her. Her initial disbelief had been replaced with the anger that set in the next day. She paced, she grimaced, she shook at the bars of her cell like prisoners in films. She shouted, which brought people running, who then threatened her. She must not shout, she would be put in a tiny cellule isolée, un mis- érable cachot. She stopped shouting.

  The hours stopped being interminable, became merely thick and dull, she stopped feeling them. She was in here forever and might as well stop feeling it. She knew she had succumbed already to the diabolical forces that were using her, she was inferior stuff. When you thought of Edmond Dantès learning Latin and other languages, of prisoners who learn whole grammars of unknown languages, and recite the periodic tables stored somewhere in their minds! She had nothing in her mind, no store at all of rote memories.