Come on. You know what I mean. Have there been any items, gossip columns, rumors that got to you, about Priscilla?
Does she want you to become president?
Is she willing to put aside her own interests to help you in your career?
What is your financial worth?
“A couple of hundred thousand”? Plus real estate?
And Priscilla’s?
You say, “Twice that.” On account of Miss America?
“And an inheritance,” you say. So together, for both of you, it’s about a million dollars or around that?
Thanks very much, Senator. One day maybe you’ll be sailing up and down the Potomac. Maybe quite a few times. Say hello to your Miss Susan.
CHAPTER 18
Boulder, December 1987
“Mom! What have you done to yourself? Is that the way you looked when you married my dad?”
“Well, darling, that was eighteen years ago. Obviously I’ve changed in some ways.”
“But how come you can make yourself look, well, the way you must have looked back then?”
She didn’t try to disguise her pleasure. Justin left the room to get a Coke, and Henrietta turned her head to look into the hallway mirror. It had been a full minute since she had last looked at herself, in the bathroom mirror. Her hair was curled over her forehead, coming down around her ears, glistening behind her long young neck. On her shoulders she wore the yellow tulle her father had given her when Justin was born, and around her neck she wore her mother’s pearls. The lipstick, pink and moist, she had had to go out to buy, at Jacki Goodman’s. She hadn’t used lipstick for all those years.
She wondered, did she look too much like a vamp on the prowl? What would they have thought of her at the university in Paris, got up that way, in the light of her reputation for resolute drabness? Her father had once upbraided her for her neglected appearance, but her aunt Josephine, who was naturally austere, defended her. “It is perfectly right,” she had told her brother, “that Henrietta should continue in mourning for her husband.”
Amy had been forthright in her invitation to come for drinks and dinner. “I’m not telling you,” she said over the phone, “that you have to tart yourself up. I am telling you that it wouldn’t make any sense to arrive with your natural attractions in disguise, the way they’ve been since you came to Boulder. Jean-Paul may not notice if you dress up, but he would certainly notice if you came in looking like a nun.”
“Jean-Paul? Have I met him?”
“Probably not, unless you’ve attended meetings of the French faculty. I’ve never encountered him in the stacks, where you and I hang out.”
“Why did you invite him?”
“Because he’s attractive. And a widower.”
“When did his wife die?”
“You remember the Air India flight that went down?”
“Oh mon Dieu, yes!—I won’t tell any jokes about airplanes.”
“You are coming to life, dear Henrietta.”
Also invited were Halston Rauschig and his wife, Helen. Halston was the soul of the Democratic Party in Boulder. He was pleased when Amy, in introducing him to Henrietta, took pains to point out that it had been Halston who had put together the Democratic rally the previous semester, “where Reuben Castle wowed everybody.”
“Were you there?” Halston asked Henrietta.
“Yes, I was.”
“What was your impression?”
“Impression of what?”
“Well, of the speaker. Senator Castle.”
They were standing in the glassed-in garden room, which looked out over the mountains, still faintly visible against the early December dusk. Amy suddenly remembered: “Hey, Henri! Weren’t you at the University of North Dakota, before going to Paris? Castle was also at the University of North Dakota! Did your paths cross?”
“I don’t remember.”
The doorbell rang and Amy went to answer it as Halston broke in: “Reuben Castle was a big shot on campus—chairman of the Student Council and editor of the student newspaper. If you were there at the same time, he’d have been hard to miss.”
“My mind was on other things. I had some extracurricular activities of my own.”
“Like what?” Amy Parrish asked, returning with Jean-Paul Lafayette.
“Like duck hunting.”
Jean-Paul was extending his hand. “Enchanté,” he said.
Henri murmured a reply, and Amy told her how lovely she looked. Helen agreed. “You’re hardly dressed to go duck hunting, Henri.”
“I don’t know, Helen. Maybe I am.”
She sat down next to Jean-Paul. His thick dark hair was cut short and curled close to his head. His gentle eyes and wry smile caught her, and his voice was light but warm. His native French was flawless, of course, but also colorful, and he insisted on using it. That was perfectly agreeable to Henri, less so to the other guests, but they all enjoyed themselves, talked politics for a bit, and ate and drank with relish, keeping John Parrish busy tending bar and pouring wine. He did manage to say to the Rauschigs—first to Halston, then separately to Helen—that the new line of Buicks, which his dealership was currently displaying, could be outfitted with a collapsible bar, “if you want one.”
Halston said that if he was getting a new car he might well want one. “It would be handy to have for celebrating the Democratic victory next November!”
John poured Halston’s glass full.
CHAPTER 19
Boulder, December 1987
Jean-Paul Lafayette called Henrietta’s number the next morning, speaking French as usual. It was Justin who answered the phone. He was taken aback for a moment at being addressed in his native tongue. Finally: “Vous voulez parler avec Madame Durban?”
Jean-Paul answered gratefully, “Justement.”
Justin bounded into the kitchen. “Mom, some frog wants you on the phone.”
“Justin! Do…not…use…that…word.”
“Okay.” He sat down at the breakfast table, pulled up his glasses, and began to read the sports page.
It has to be Jean-Paul, Henri said to herself, walking to the phone.
He greeted her.
He had much enjoyed the dinner…. “Amy is a darling…. I have been talked into test-driving a Buick car. Do you know anything about Buicks, apart from what you’ve heard from John?”
They rattled on in French for a few enjoyable minutes.
Was Henri free to have lunch with him that day? “I am lecturing at two. Perhaps the Faculty Club at twelve-thirty?”
She questioned herself rapidly. She had never even been inside the Faculty Club. “Um, yes. That would be very nice. I would attend the lecture except that I have to be back at the library.”
“I will give you the lecture at your convenience. And that way I can deliver it in French!”
The telephone rang again within minutes. It was Amy. Henri could picture her, petite and tidy, with the broad smile that reconfigured her whole face.
“Darling, you were a big hit last night. With everybody, but especially JP. ‘Jean-Paul’ sounds so formal. Sounds like a French opera.”
“He doesn’t object to ‘JP’?”
“Oh, no. By the end of dinner, he was telling Halston and Helen to call him Zhay Pee.”
“Listen, Amy, he called me just now. Wants me to have lunch with him at the Faculty Club.”
“That’s my Henrietta! You can ask him to call you Henri.”
“I like him. He told me he’s lecturing on Daumier this afternoon. I won’t be there, but I like the way he sort of half treats me as a French student, half as a lover.”
“Well, what do you know! You’ll have to travel to France some day and reacquaint yourself with how those—”
“Don’t say ‘those frogs.’”
Amy laughed. “I wasn’t going to. Never would use the word, let alone when talking to someone whose father was French. No, I like him too, and Professor Gauthier, the head of the French department, I kn
ow likes him. Gauthier struggled hard to persuade him to stay at the university last year.”
“He wanted to quit?”
“When Stephanie died, that left him pretty wasted. He just wanted to do something else. But I think he’s over that. I’m so pleased you’ve taken a shine to each other.”
“Amy, I have to go. Justin’s finished his breakfast and I need to take him to school. I’ll report for duty at the library by nine.”
“I’ll be a half hour late. John insists I go by his dealership and see the new Buicks.”
“You can drink from the bar in the backseat.”
“Oh. You heard his line last night—”
“Got to go. See you later.”
How would she dress? She’d be going to the Faculty Club right from the library. She had to act quickly. Justin mustn’t be late. Anything other than her work slacks and blouse! If she wore the silk shantung skirt she’d bought last Christmas, would that be a little flashy as office wear? The hell with it. She found it deep in the closet and put it on. She put her pearls in her pocket; she’d keep them there until she left for the Faculty Club.
CHAPTER 20
Boulder, December 1987
It was Christmas Eve. Justin would leave the apartment at five o’clock to spend a happy few hours with three friends, Sarah and Paul Robbins (twins), and Hector Block. They would go to the Roxy Theater and catch the double feature. Three solid hours of moviegoing. Then Alice Robbins, the twins’ mother, would pick them up, and they would have Christmas Eve supper at the Robbinses’ house. At twenty minutes to twelve, Henrietta would drive over and take Justin to the midnight Mass at Saint Martin de Porres.
Meanwhile, Jean-Paul would come for her at six, and they would go for dinner at the country club.
It had been a diligent courtship. Since meeting at Amy’s they had lunched or dined together a half dozen times, though never with Justin present. JP was pressing Henri hard, and she sensed that she would have to make a strategic decision tonight. She sensed it and so did he, and when he emerged from his car, in a perfectly tailored herringbone overcoat, she watched him from the window. She thought she could discern a special bounce in his step, but maybe it was the bounce in her own spirits that she was feeling.
She had chilled champagne for him.
“Show me a picture of Justin,” he said.
That was easy for Henri to do. She pulled over an album. JP could examine Justin at age three, playing in the Parc Monceau; at age six, entering the Ecole Belles Feuilles; and so on. There were random snapshots with his grandfather and Nadine at the apartment on Avenue Foch, and one with Nadine setting out a cake for his twelfth birthday. The photo at the airport when they were leaving for Colorado was marked in a childish hand, “Juin, 1985. On part pour l’Amérique.”
“He is a very handsome boy.”
“He is my love.”
“I too am your love. Isn’t that so?”
She took his hand, pressed it, and refilled his glass. “I’ll relieve you of Justin,” she said, withdrawing the album.
“Henri, Justin is away until you pick him up for the service. May I take you to bed? Express the love I feel for you?”
Henri drew breath. She looked down at her champagne glass. “Well,” she said. “Yes, JP, if you…want.”
“I must, Henri, I must.”
She got up and pointed to the room on her left. “That’s Justin’s room. You can undress there. I’ll wait for you in my room.” She signaled to the right.
In Boulder in December it is dark outside at six-thirty. It had been dark in the duck blind too that night, but there had been the little candle that showed her the whole of Reuben as he slid into the bedroll beside her.
She went to her dressing table, loosened two of the bulbs, left the third one lighted, and started to disrobe. Still too much light. She dimmed the little bulb by draping her slip over it.
Then she opened her bedroom door and left it open. Through the opening she called out, “Viens, Jean-Paul.”
She covered herself with a single bedsheet, and closed her eyes. He made his way onto the bed, and told her how beautiful she was, and how happy she was making him. “I will try all my life to make you happy, like me.”
“You sound like Daumier.”
That brought a salvific laugh, and a deep and earnest kiss.
CHAPTER 21
Boulder, December 1987
At the country club there was much festivity, including three live Santa Clauses. The first two hours were given over to pleasing the children. At approximately eight-thirty the kids left, and the adults were seated in the dining room. Used as a ballroom in the club’s richer days, the large hall had now been partitioned into two smaller spaces. Jean-Paul and Henri’s table was far from the incongruous wall, which stood out bare and obvious alongside the crown moldings and rich baseboards of the others. Electric sconces dotted the papered walls, and the floor, once polished crisp wood for dancing, was now carpeted. Two dozen round tables were arranged in what remained of the grand old room; they were draped in white—spare, but elegantly set. The club was no richer than its patrons, who, mostly hailing from the university, were pleased simply to have someplace to relax in a little style.
Henri wondered whether she herself looked as starry-eyed as Jean-Paul did. She enjoyed probing her memory on the act of love, in which she had just now, with surprising pleasure, engaged. She had read that men, mostly younger men to be sure, exchanged information—when meeting in locker rooms or clubs or around the bar—on whom they had bedded, and how. She thought such conversations vulgar and certainly intrusive…. But what kind of thing might be said in these exchanges interested her. She was, simply, curious.
Reuben had told her at the duck blind that he had never “done it” before. She trusted him to be telling her the truth, although, lacking any experience by which to judge, she could not be entirely sure at the time whether his conduct that night gainsaid what he had told her. All that had distilled in her memory was that the very first time, in September 1969, his handling of himself—and of her—was clumsy by comparison with the finesse of their final copulation four months later.
This had taken place at the motel in Minneapolis. He had driven her there, on the first leg of her long voyage to Paris, in order to “do it one last time.” After the baby was born, after Reuben had graduated from UND, they would be reunited and would do it—every night! She had hoped so, most fervently; and tonight, after an eighteen-year hiatus, she allowed herself to think about the differences in technique between Reuben, the twenty-one-year-old undergraduate, and Jean-Paul, the widower Frenchman of polish and God knows how much experience gained during his youth in France, and then during his marriage to Stephanie.
He knew, certainly, how to engage her physically, how to bring on the transformation. But was she—Henri—an important component of his elation? A critical component of it? Or could a doxy, French or American, have done as much for him? To him? She resolved to assume that she was—herself—in some way unique. Looking over at him now as he looked down at the menu, she found it easy to think of him as unique.
He did not mention their lovemaking; nor did she expect that he would. But after the dessert and brandy, and with only a half hour left before she would set out to pick up Justin, he said he wanted to talk with her about plans for the future.
“At some point, of course, when we’re married, you will move in with me, or I’ll move in with you. Between now and then we will need to make suitable arrangements.” He was glad that the conversation, in French, permitted him to speak of “affaires de convenance,” which was easier to handle than “matters of convenience.” “I’ll cooperate in any way you wish, but I do think that early in the new year we should give out the happy news that we intend to be married.”
She put down her coffee. “Darling JP. I cannot marry you.”
He was stupefied. He fumbled for the right words and finally said, merely, “Why?”
“Because
I am already married.”
He couldn’t make that out. He said, “Your husband was killed in Vietnam.”
“That’s the story I give out. That’s the story I’ve always told Justin.”
“In fact—he wasn’t killed? He left you?”
“Yes.”
“How is that possible?”
She paused. “We’re not going to discuss that aspect of it, surely—why he left me.”
“I assume he has remarried? Surely that dissolves your marriage.”
“Actually, no. If one partner commits bigamy, the marriage is not annulled.”
“I decline to take this matter seriously. You are talking, dear Henri, about a marriage that has not been active for—what?—eighteen years?”
“Yes.”
“A civil marriage? That should make things relatively easy.”
“Our marriage was, I assume, both civil and religious.—Speaking of which, JP, I must pick up my son and take him to church.” She stood up. “I’m not going to kiss you, Jean-Paul, in a public room. Know that I love you truly. I will pray tonight for guidance.”
He led her out the door to where she had parked her car.
CHAPTER 22
Washington/Boulder, January 1988
Harrison Ledyard had foreseen, from very early days, that his friendship with Jean-Paul would turn out to be time-consuming. The friendship was nurtured when the two young men, whose wives were first cousins, lived in Washington, both studying at Georgetown, Jean-Paul at the graduate school, Harrison at the law school. Jean-Paul was, after all, a Frenchman. Frenchmen are always troublesome, Ledyard thought resignedly. And Jean-Paul’s being a Frenchman living and working in America naturally augmented the problems.
But the friendship between the two young couples had been strong, and heartily endorsed by all four parties to it: Harrison and Melissa Ledyard, and Jean-Paul and Stephanie Lafayette. For one thing, Harrison was temperamentally that kind of friend, the kind that works at friendship. For another, JP and Stephanie, when they were living in France, had shown the Ledyards the ultimate kindness: they took into their home the Ledyard daughter, Teresa. They gave her a room in their house in Neuilly when, at age sixteen, she said she would like to do a year’s schooling in Paris and would most happily do this in the company of the Lafayettes, the couple she had known so well in Washington.
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