Le Mariage

by Diane Johnson

  “He knows why the FBI wanted that poor woman dead,” Delia explained.

  “What woman?”

  “Mrs. Weaver. At Ruby Ridge. And some of the other things they did, too.”

  Tim was exasperated with Delia’s know-nothing air about Gabriel and the manuscript, and he suspected her. One day shortly after this, he waited till she wandered toward the bathroom and, alone with her in the corridor, he took her arm, twisted it painfully behind her back, pushed her head up against the wall, and hissed at her.

  “Now you’re going to tell me everything you know about Gabriel, and the fucking manuscript, and the murder.”

  She struggled and tried to hit him with her other hand, so he pinned that too, holding both her little wrists behind her back in one of his big hands.

  “Let go, I have, I told Serge.”

  “What. Tell me.” He dragged her into a bedroom, noticing peripherally that this must be Clara’s room. Large bed, somehow solitary-looking, covered in an American quilt, with embroidered white pillows tossed on top, and some silver-framed photographs of what must be her little boy. Delia evidently believed that he would hurt her. So he would, he thought, he would twist her arms to match her hip. She looked scared but didn’t scream.

  “Did Gabriel have the manuscript?” “I don’t know what he had. He had a valuable thing to sell to the man in the flea market.”

  “Which he stole?”

  “No! He sold things. He’s a book dealer, a broker, like he said.”

  “Not too particular about the provenance of his wares?”

  “I don’t know. Let go.”

  “Commission?”

  “Sure, of course.”

  “What’s the commission on five hundred thousand dollars?”

  “How do I know?”

  “Say half. He’s taking some risk. What does he do with the money?”

  “It’s for SuAnn, I suppose, for her group, how should I know? Anyway he didn’t get it, did he? The murderer must have got it; mustn’t he? He killed the man to get the money.” She lunged backward into him and kicked at his shins. He unwound her arms and blocked the door.

  “Come on, Delia. SuAnn. That’s the crazy daughter of Cristal the crazy caregiver?”

  “They aren’t crazy. Well, SuAnn is, technically, I guess. They belong to a group, they aren’t violent or anything, they’re buying land in eastern Oregon for the millennium, or for when the mar shalls bust them, or it’s an ashram—I don’t follow SuAnn’s group.”

  “So what is going on? You’re mixed up with a sophisticated theft here, some kind of international fencing operation, murder, and a bunch of Oregon hippies—what’s the connection among these things?”

  “I don’t know, Tim, so open the door.”

  “Gabriel’s relation to SuAnn?”

  Delia was vulnerable here. She hated the relation of Gabriel and SuAnn. “I think he feels sorry for her,” she said.

  “Okay, Gabriel in Amsterdam. Why is he afraid to be extradited? ”

  “I told you, he’s afraid of the FBI. He knows he’d never make it back there, they’d kill him and say he was trying to escape. They do that all the time.”

  “Why would they want to do that?”

  “I told you. He knows why they killed Mrs. Weaver, and some other things. The FBI is funding some of these groups and they don’t want it known.”

  “So you do know something about it.” He wasn’t sure whether Delia was as delusional as the people she described or whether she was right. Who the hell was Mrs. Weaver?

  “I read the papers, like anyone else. Like Serge. Ask Serge, it was Serge who figured out about why Gabriel would be afraid of the FBI.”

  “You didn’t hear that from Gabriel, or SuAnn or—who? Your friend Sara?”

  “No! Sara and I have a business, we rent space from—I think the owners are Moonies.”

  “Oh Jesus,” said Tim, despairing of making sense of all this.

  “I don’t keep track,” Delia said. “They might be Church of the Remnant. I think they are. It doesn’t matter, they’re all more or less the same, they make the same points. They want to remedy problems in our society. They none of them like the government, or the police. The idea of Russians never bothered them, though. But they hate Planned Parenthood and you name it else. The Triple A. But it’s one thing to be wacko and another thing to be wrong. They could be right, you know.”

  Church of the Remnant. Tim was beguiled by this name. What could its beliefs be? What was the matter with Delia, that she took all this stuff for granted, and seemed without the faculty of judgment? Nothing seemed strange to her. Was this the normal Oregon state of mind? Normal American state of mind?

  41

  Cécile

  Anne-Sophie had been dedicating her midweeks to the painting being done in their new apartment, neglecting her flea-market inventory. Luckily she had a certain backlog of figurines and hunting prints in her attic, but she needed to buy. On Monday she tended her stall; on Tuesday she and Tim went to Aries to an antiques fair, where she hoped to find some fine old tack, and Tim started a travel piece. It was nice to get away alone together, more normal, things as they had been, with no reference to Oregonians, the Crays, or the wedding. Anne-Sophie had finally conceded that Tim had not informed on the poor young man, not really, and he could put all the Cray matters out of his mind for the moment.

  Certain problems loomed that meant they should not be away too long, however. First, there were the ennuis with the apartment. As far as Tim could see, Anne-Sophie considered it to have been completely defiled by earlier habitation, and she was determined to rid it of all traces of its history—and she an antiquaire! So they were repainting and the rest, but they were far behind schedule with the bathroom, with the moving-in planned for the week before the wedding.

  Then, too, Tim’s mother was to arrive this Thursday, ahead of any of the other guests from America. She intended to go to Brussels to see some of her relatives, cousins too distant to have been invited to the ceremony; and she planned to bask in French-speaking, and to shop, and of course to help Tim and Anne-Sophie, and Anne-Sophie’s mother whom she was looking forward to meeting and had read one or two of the books of, trying not to form any judgment on poor Anne-Sophie, who was doubtless quite different.

  Despite his affection for his mother, Tim had a sense of strain at the prospect of her arrival. His mother was yet another person he was in some way responsible for. He included in this throng Anne-Sophie, and now Cray, Delia, Clara, and even Gabriel Biller, the latter deeply on his conscience. He knew that in the great scheme of things his was a minor set of burdens, but he felt them. He hoped that his mother would have a good time, that she and Anne-Sophie would like each other, that she and Estelle would like each other, that there would be no unpleasantness between his mother and his father, or his mother and stepmother, that somehow he would be absolved of setting up Gabriel, that he would be cured of the crawl of desire in the pit of his stomach when he saw or thought of Clara Holly, that Reliance would take his piece on the growing anti-Americanism of French foreign policy, that Travelling Light would be interested in his observations on Arles, that he would find some time to visit the Spanish monasteries—when, for God’s sake?—and that he would find his father well: emphysema had threatened. In no particular order, these concerns, like balls of bobbing styrofoam from a disintegrating wreck, would break the surface of his ordinary thoughts and float into view, disturbing his sleep at night and his concentration by day.

  Estelle had invited them to dinner the first night of his mother’s visit, to dine early on account of Cécile’s probable jet lag, and Tim and Anne-Sophie had accepted, recognizing that the meeting of their mothers was a hurdle that must be got over, and agreeing that the two mothers would probably hate each other, even if they were both French-speaking—the one so scornful of America with its moralism and obesity, the other so conventional, golf-playing, and someone who had in Estelle’s eyes had the unforgiveable
bad sense not to come back to Europe once released from matrimony. What could account for that? Estelle had never quite said out loud, the woman must be an idiot, but the tenor of her questions had implied it: “Will your mother be unhappy if we can’t find a member of a golf course near Paris? In Normandy of course I know people—Jacky Borde would know....”

  Another strike against Cécile Barzun Nolinger was that after the divorce, she had chosen to remain in Bay City, Michigan, while Tim’s father and stepmother Terry lived in Grosse Pointe, a suburb of Detroit. Both Anne-Sophie and Estelle had found it natural that a person would prefer to live in a city distinguished by a French name, and so had obscurely concluded that Tim’s father, even if not French-speaking, was likely to be the more intelligent of the two unknown parents. Grosse Pointe and Detroit they pronounced in the French way, Daytwah, and Grosse Pwahn, which Tim found irritating.

  He had not seen his mother for two years, and was surprised at how glad he was to see her. Living in Michigan, she had kept the lineaments of Frenchness—was slender, with short-cropped, blonded hair. Though she no longer smoked, she retained a smoker’s voice, and her strong French accent, though she never spoke French now.

  “Do you know, four years since I was here!” She kept exclaiming in the taxi. She was excited and kept patting Tim’s hand. “At last I will meet darling Anne-Sophie!”

  The Nolinger family had reacted without surprise to his choice of a French wife. With a Belgian mother, and since he had stayed in Europe, it followed, in that you tend to marry a person you’ve met. But it was not until the wedding plans were announced that they had really focused on the individuality of this Frenchwoman, Anne-Sophie. Cécile planned to love Anne-Sophie. Tim’s choosing of a francophone bride she had taken as a compliment to herself, and even as a reproach to his father, and also as natural. “I hope I can go to the marché aux puces with her—she must know so much about it.”

  It was true that she was obsessed with golf—her game, her handicap—but assured Tim she would have no time to play on this busy trip. Tim took her straight to her hotel, with the suggestion that she have a nap before going to Anne-Sophie’s and on to Estelle‘s, so as to be able to stay up until at least ten that first night.

  “Whatever you think, sweetheart, I am in your hands,” she said, and Tim realized again that she was, indeed, for two weeks.

  Anne-Sophie waited at home while Tim picked up his mother at six in Anne-Sophie’s car. Cécile embraced her directly and looked at her, and raved enthusiastically. She was ravie, Anne-Sophie was ravissante. They spoke in French.

  “Just as beautiful and charming as I expected!” Though it was against the nature of a French mother-in-law, Cécile said, to take instantly to her son’s choice of a wife, so she had. It was true. Cécile and Anne-Sophie looked at each other, trim, blond, and sportive, and each saw herself. The resemblance of Anne-Sophie to his mother gave Tim pause—were things so heavily determined after all?

  “The apartment is adorable. Let me see the dress!” cried Cécile. “Let me see everything!”

  Instant rapport did not describe the meeting between Estelle and Cécile. Far from being bonded by their mutual francophonie, their common tongue seemed to render more irritating their differences. The small Estelle, smartly dressed in black pants and turtle-neck, with silver slippers, appraised the tweedy Cécile, who may have sewn the violet velvet blazer she was wearing. This in itself was alarming, because it perhaps indicated the meanness of Anglo-Saxon men, even colossally rich ones like Monsieur Nolinger, when it came to their ex-wives, something that boded rather ill for Anne-Sophie if the son took after the father, and if things did not go as harmoniously as one hoped and as the novelist in Estelle assumed they would not.

  “So brave of you to carry on in America, are you not ever tempted to come back to France, that is, Belgium?”

  “Oh, I’ve lived in the U.S. a long time now, my friends are there,” said Cécile mildly.

  “I have always wanted to visit America. Some day I shall. New York, at least,” said Estelle.

  “Few French people come to Michigan, it seems,” Cécile agreed wistfully. “Do you play bridge?”

  “Bridge? No!” said Estelle. “Regrettably,” she added in an insincere voice.

  Cécile abandoned that subject. “I want you to call on me for any help with anything—with the wedding in two weeks, you must be frantic. You must be sure to call on me.”

  Tim and Anne-Sophie exchanged glances of dawning discomfort. Estelle was far from frantic, had not even concerned herself with the details.

  “I shall certainly ask much of you as the day comes near,” Anne-Sophie assured Cécile. “I want you to see the liste de mariage, and the gifts that have come so far.”

  “Tom’s father’s family has some beautiful china, Limoges, which I hope they’ll give you,” said Cécile. “I didn’t keep anything, I gave it all back. The silver too, but I always said Tom’s wife should have it.”

  “Dad’s coming to the wedding, you know. Dad and Terry,” Tim said, suddenly fearing she might not know. He could not tell from the fleeting change of expression whether she did know.

  “I would hope so!” she cried gaily.

  42

  Principles

  Clara was in effect waiting by the telephone and thinking over and over about the moment in the clearing on Sunday with Antoine de Persand. Had they gone a few steps farther, deeper into the woods, had they had another moment, they might have kissed. She had moved toward him, he toward her, was just reaching for her, both caught by some involuntary, powerful need that precluded discussion and was now directing their bodies. Then the low growl of the animal, a snapping twig, the quick sense of other people near, and of the lawless nature of their impulses, and that it could be Serge or Trudi behind them. They had darted around the rock as guiltily as if they had been caught en flagrant délit.

  “I’ll telephone. May I telephone?” he had said miserably.

  “Yes,” she had whispered. “Yes,” and they hurried in opposite directions through the shrubs.

  But when the phone did ring, on Monday, it was a reporter from Le Monde calling to ask Madame Cray when the Lady Godiva solution was actually to be put in place. Clara gasped; how could they have heard about that ugly scene?

  “You have not seen Paris-Match madame?”

  Clara flew to look at it. There was her picture (rather good) on the steps of the Etang-la-Reine post office being menaced by a throng of what appeared to be Tyrolean peasants. In color.

  Cray was enraged, far more enraged after seeing it in a major weekly magazine than after Clara’s account of it. The American community saw it and was newly enraged: it appeared that Americans were no longer safe even at the post office. Segments of the French community were enraged as well on Clara’s behalf. The Crays hadn’t realized there would be people on their side, but with the publicity over the incident, the press had ignited in some quarters the high feeling against hunting, as well as for it, and the Crays were duly visited by the Saint Hubert Society and the Saint Eu stache Society, by the Ligue des Opposants à la Chasse and the Association pour la Protection des Animaux Sauvages, people opposed to the shooting of birds “prenuptially,” people defending the rights of private property, people petitioning the European Parliament, people advocating no hunting on Wednesdays when schoolchildren were out or on Sunday afternoons or when drunk. Touched, Clara and Serge invited all their partisans in and gave them tea, and Clara took all the brochures, to send donations. The LOC left big signs for them to post:

  REFUGE, CHASSE INTERDITE

  Nul n‘a le droit de chasser sur la propriété d’autrui sans le

  consentement du propriétaire ou de ses ayants droit.

  ICI COMMENCENT LE RESPECT DE LA VIE ET

  L‘AMOUR DE LA NATURE

  The mayor of Etang-la-Reine quickly moved against these anti-hunters too—and some of them were proprietors of large domains—by interdicting the gathering of mushrooms on c
ommunity-owned lands consecrated to hunting. “And in the spring, we will see about flower cutting,” he announced in a menacing tone.

  Time magazine, European edition, published an account of the affair, and found some old studio photographs of Clara. When she saw how she had changed from then to now, she was dizzy with dismay at how fast her life was fleeting by. She could not expect that Monsieur de Persand would be attracted to her, how could he be? She knew it was crazy to be sick with love when you ought to be worrying about prison, or your child in England, or the destiny of innocent forest creatures.

  At the same time, it was not unpleasant to be the heroine and poster child of a just cause. At Dorothy Sternholz’s instigation, Americans were organizing a fund-raiser for the American Freedoms Defense Fund.

  “Arthur Pearlberg has explained that there are issues here, more’s at stake than this one case,” said Dorothy Sternholz née Minor to Ames Everett. “If Americans can be persecuted so unjustly, then they will be. It’s the reflex of the unofficial French foreign policy. Arthur says it’s important that the French remember from time to time that we do put a lot into the French economy here, to say nothing of buying their exports.”

  “I know there will be plenty of French people who feel as we do,” Martha Jacobs, the librarian at the American Library agreed.

  “Not that Serge Cray can’t afford her defense, but nobody can afford a really irrational persecution by an entire nation. Everyone knows the Crays moved into a shell, a hulk, a ruin.”

  “Isn’t it true that the boiseries issue is trumped up, to pressure them about their stand on hunting?”

  “Probably. Yet the boiseries were removed by somebody and sold. The commune and French history are the poorer, and somebody must pay. You can’t entirely blame them.”

  “I’m wondering if we can put Tim Nolinger down tentatively for ten thousand—he sees a lot of the Crays.”