“You will come out with me tonight? I will show you the beautiful city of Paris to portray in your pictures.”
“No,” said David.
“Bonnie,” counselled Alabama, “if you walk into the trucks, they’ll almost certainly mash your feet, which would be neither ‘chic’ nor ‘élégante’—France, I am told, is full of such fine distinctions.”
The train bore them down through the pink carnival of Normandy, past the delicate tracery of Paris and the high terraces of Lyons, the belfries of Dijon and the white romance of Avignon into the scent of lemon, the rustle of black foilage, clouds of moths whipping the heliotrope dusk—into Provence, where people do not need to see unless they are looking for the nightingale.
II
The deep Greek of the Mediterranean licked its chops over the edges of our febrile civilization. Keeps crumbled on the gray hillsides and sowed the dust of their battlements beneath the olives and the cactus. Ancient moats slept bound in tangled honeysuckle; fragile poppies bled the causeways; vineyards caught on the jagged rocks like bits of worn carpet. The baritone of tired medieval bells proclaimed disinterestedly a holiday from time. Lavender bloomed silently over the rocks. It was hard to see in the vibrancy of the sun.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” said David. “It’s so utterly blue, except when you examine it. Then it’s gray and mauve and if you look closely, it’s harsh and nearly black. Of course, on close inspection, it’s literally an amethyst with opal qualities. What is it, Alabama?”
“I can’t see for the view. Wait a minute.” Alabama pressed her nose against the mossy cracks of the castle wall. “It’s really Chanel, Five,” she said positively, “and it feels like the back of your neck.”
“Not Chanel!” David protested. “I think it’s more robe de style. Get over there, I want to take your picture.”
“Bonnie, too?”
“Yes. I guess we’ll have to let her in.”
“Look at Daddy, privileged infant.”
The child wooed its mother with wide incredulous eyes.
“Alabama, can’t you tilt her a little bit? Her cheeks are wider than her forehead and if you could lean her a little bit forward, she wouldn’t look so much like the entrance to the Acropolis.”
“Boo, Bonnie,” Alabama essayed.
They both toppled over in a clump of heliotrope.
“My God! I’ve scratched its face. You haven’t got any Mercurochrome with you, have you?”
She inspected the sooty whirlpools that formed the baby’s knuckles.
“It doesn’t seem to be serious, but we ought to go home and disinfect, I suppose.”
“Baby home,” Bonnie pronounced ponderously, pushing the words between her teeth like a cook straining a puree.
“Home, home, home,” she chanted tolerantly, bobbing down the hill on David’s arm.
“There it is, my dear. ‘The Grand Hotel of Petronius and the Golden Isles.’ See?”
“I think, David, that maybe we should have gone to the Palace and the Universe. They have more palms in their garden.”
“And pass up a name like ours? Your lack of a historical sense is the biggest flaw in your intelligence, Alabama.”
“I don’t see why I should have to have a chronological mind to appreciate these white-powdered roads. We remind me of a troupe of troubadours, your carrying the baby like that.”
“Exactly. Please don’t pull Daddy’s ear. Have you ever seen such heat?”
“And the flies! I don’t know how people stand it.”
“Maybe we’d better move further up the coast.”
“These cobbles make you feel as if you had a peg leg. I’m going to get some sandals.”
They followed the pavings of the French Republic past the bamboo curtains of Hyères, past strings of felt slippers and booths of women’s underwear, past gutters flush with the lush wastage of the south, past the antics of exotic dummies inspiring brown Provençal faces to dream of the freedom of the Foreign Legion, past scurvy-eaten beggars and bloated clots of bougainvillea, dust and palms, a row of horse cabs, the toothpaste display of the village coiffeur exuding the smell of Chypre, and past the caserne which drew the town together like a family portrait will a vast disordered living room.
“There.”
David deposited Bonnie in the damp cool of the hotel lobby on a pile of last year’s Illustrated London News.
“Where’s Nanny?”
Alabama poked her head into the bilious plush of the lace parlor.
“Madame Tussaud’s is deserted. I s’pose she’s out gathering material for her British comparison table so when she gets back to Paris she can say, ‘Yes, but the clouds in Hyères were a touch more battleship gray when I was there with the David Knights.’ ”
“She’ll give Bonnie a sense of tradition. I like her.”
“So do I.”
“Where’s Nanny?” Bonnie rolled her eyes in alarm.
“Darling! She’ll be back. She’s out collecting you some nice opinions.”
Bonnie looked incredulous.
“Buttons,” she said, pointing to her dress. “I want some orange jluice.”
“Oh, all right—but you’ll find opinions will be much more useful when you grow up.”
David rang the bell.
“Can we have a glass of orange juice?”
“Ah, Monsieur, we are completely desolated. There aren’t any oranges in summer. It’s the heat; we had thought of closing the hotel since one can have no oranges because of the weather. Wait a minute, I’ll see.”
The proprietor looked like a Rembrandt physician. He rang the bell. A valet de chambre, who also looked like a Rembrandt physician, responded.
“Are there any oranges?” the proprietor asked.
“Not even one,” the man responded with gloomy emphasis.
“You see, Monsieur,” the proprietor announced in a tone of relief, “there is not even one orange.”
He rubbed his hands contentedly—the presence of oranges in his hotel would certainly have caused him much trouble.
“Orange jluice, orange jluice,” bawled the baby.
“Where in the hell is that woman?” shrieked David.
“Mademoiselle?” the proprietor asked. “But she is in the garden, under an olive that is over one hundred years old. What a splendid tree! I must show you.”
He followed them out of the door.
“Such a pretty little boy,” he said. “He will speak French. I have spoke very good English before.”
Bonnie’s femininity was the most insistent thing about her.
“I’m sure you have,” said David.
Nanny had constructed a boudoir out of the springy iron chairs. Sewing was scattered about, a book, several pairs of glasses, Bonnie’s toys. A spirit lamp burned on the table. The garden was completely inhabited. On the whole, it might have been an English nursery.
“I looked on the menu, Madam, and there was goat again, so I just stopped in at the butcher’s. I’m making Bonnie a little stew. This is the filthiest place, if you’ll pardon me, Madam. I don’t believe we shall be able to stand it.”
“We think it is too hot,” Alabama said apologetically. “Mr. Knight’s going to look for a villa further up the coast if we don’t find a house this afternoon.”
“I’m sure we could be better pleased. I have spent some time in Cannes with the Horterer-Collins, and we found it very comfortable. Of course, in summer, they go to Deauville.”
Alabama felt, somehow, that they, perhaps, should have gone to Deauville—some obligation on their parts to Nanny.
“I might try Cannes,” David said, impressed.
The deserted dining room buzzed with the turbulent glare of midday in the tropics. A decrepit English couple teetered over the rubbery cheese and soggy fruit. The old woman leaned across and distantly rubbed one finger over Bonnie’s flushed cheeks.
“So like my little granddaughter,” she said patronizingly.
Nanny bristled. “Ma
dam, you will please not to stroke the baby.”
“I wasn’t stroking the baby. I was only touching her.”
“This heat has upset her stomach,” concluded Nanny, peremptorily.
“No dinner. I won’t have my dinner,” Bonnie broke the long silence of the English encounter.
“I don’t want mine either. It smells of starch. Let’s get the real estate man now, David.”
Alabama and David stumbled through the seething sun to the main square. An enchantment of lethargy overwhelmed the enclosure. The cabbies slept under whatever shade they could find, the shops were closed, no shadows broke the tenacious, vindictive glare. They found a sprawling carriage and managed to wake the driver by jumping on the step.
“Two o’clock,” the man said irritably. “I am closed till two o’clock!”
“Well, go to this address anyway,” David insisted. “We’ll wait.”
The cabby shrugged his shoulders reluctantly.
“To wait is ten francs an hour,” he argued disgruntled.
“All right. We are American millionaires.”
“Let’s sit on the robe,” said Alabama, “the cab looks full of fleas.”
They folded the brown army-issue blanket under their soaking thighs.
“Tiens! There is the Monsieur!” The cabby pointed indolently at a handsome meridional with a patch over one eye who was engrossed in removing the handle from his shop door directly across the way.
“We want to see a villa, the ‘Blue Lotus,’ which I understand is for rent,” David began politely.
“Impossible. For nothing in the world is it barely possible. I have not had my lunch.”
“Of course, Monsieur will allow me to pay for his free time——”
“That is different,” the agent beamed expansively. “Monsieur understands that since the war things are different and one must eat.”
“Of course.”
The rickety cab rolled along past fields of artichoke blue as spots of the hour’s intensity, through long stretches of vegetation shimmering in the heat like submarine growths. A parasol pine rose here and there in the flat landscape, the road wound hot and blinding ahead to the sea. The water, chipped by the sun, spread like a floor of luminous shavings in a workshop of light.
“There she is!” the man cackled proudly.
The “Blue Lotus” parched in a treeless expanse of red clay. They opened the door and stepped into the coolness of the shuttered hall.
“This is the master’s bedroom.”
On the huge bed lay a pair of batik pajamas and a chartreuse pleated nightgown.
“The casualness of life in this country amazes me,” Alabama said. “They obviously just spent the night and went off.”
“I wish we could live like that, without premeditation.”
“Let’s see the plumbing.”
“But, Madame, the plumbing is a perfection. You see?”
A massive carved door swung open on a Copenhagen toilet bowl with blue chrysanthemums climbing over the edge in a wild Chinese delirium. The walls were tiled with many-colored fishing scenes of Normandy. Alabama tentatively tested the brass rod designed to operate these pictorial fantasies.
“It doesn’t work,” she said.
The man raised his eyebrows Buddhistically.
“But! It must be because we have had no rain! Sometimes when it doesn’t rain, there is no water.”
“What do you do if it doesn’t rain again all summer?” David asked, fascinated.
“But then, Monsieur, it is sure to rain,” the agent smiled cheerfully.
“And in the meantime?”
“Monsieur is unnatural.”
“Well, we’ve got to have something more civilized than this.”
“We ought to go to Cannes,” Alabama said.
“I’ll take the first train when we get back.”
David telephoned her from St-Raphaël.
“Just the place,” he said, “for sixty dollars a month—garden, waterworks, kitchen stove, wonderful composition from the cupola—metal roofing of an aviation field, I understand—I’ll be over for you tomorrow morning. We can move right in.”
The day enveloped them in an armor of sunshine. They hired a limousine stuffy with reminiscences of state occasions. Paper nasturtiums fading in the cubism of a cut glass triangle obscured the view along the coast.
“Drive, drive, why can’t I drive?” Bonnie screamed.
“Because the golf sticks have to go there, and, David, you can get your easel back here.”
“Um—um—um,” the baby droned, content with the motion. “Nice, nice, nice.”
The summer ate its way into their hearts and crooned along the shaggy road. Tabulating the past, Alabama could find no real upheavals in spite of the fact that its tempo created the illusion that she lived in madcap abandon. Feeling so wonderful, she wondered why they had ever left home.
Three o’clock in July, and Nanny gently thinking of England from hilltops and rented motorcars and under all unusual circumstances, white roads and pines—life quietly humming a lullaby. Anyway, it was fun being alive.
“Les Rossignols” was back from the sea. The smell of tobacco flowers permeated the faded blue satin of the Louis XV parlor; a wooden cuckoo protested the gloom of the oak dining room; pine needles carpeted the blue and white tiles of the balcony; petunias fawned on the balustrade. The gravel drive wound round the trunk of a giant palm sprouting geraniums in its crevices and lost itself in the perspective of a red-rose arbor. The cream calcimined walls of the villa with its painted windows stretched and yawned in the golden shower of late sun.
“There’s a summerhouse,” said David proprietorily, “built of bamboo. It looks as if Gauguin had put his hand to landscape gardening.”
“It’s heavenly. Do you suppose there really is a rossignol?”
“Undoubtedly—every night on toast for supper.”
“Comme ça, Monsieur, comme ça,” Bonnie sang exultantly.
“Look! She can speak French already.”
“It’s a marvelous, marvelous place, this France. Isn’t it, Nanny?”
“I’ve lived here for twenty years, Mr. Knight, and I’ve never got to understand these people. Of course, I haven’t had much opportunity to learn French, being always with the better class of family.”
“Quite,” said David emphatically. Whatever Nanny said sounded like an elaborate recipe for making fudge.
“The ones in the kitchen,” said Alabama, “are a present from the house agent, I suppose.”
“They are—three magnificent sisters. Perhaps the Three Fates, who knows?”
Bonnie’s babbling rose to an exultant yell through the dense foliage.
“Swim! Now swim!” she cried.
“She’s thrown her doll in the goldfish pool,” observed Nanny excitedly. “Bad Bonnie! To treat little Goldilocks that way.”
“Her name’s Comme Ça,” Bonnie expostulated. “Did you see her swimming?”
The doll was just visible at the bottom of the sleek green water.
“Oh, we are going to be so happy away from all the things that almost got us but couldn’t quite because we were too smart for them!” David grabbed his wife about the waist and shoved her through the wide windows onto the tile floors of their new home. Alabama inspected the painted ceiling. Pastel cupids frolicked amidst the morning glories and roses in garlands swelled like goiters or some malignant disease.
“Do you think it will be as nice at it seems?” she said skeptically.
“We are now in Paradise—as nearly as we’ll ever get—there’s the pictorial evidence of the fact,” he said, following her eyes.
“You know, I can never think of a rossignol without thinking of the Decameron. Dixie used to hide it in her top drawer. It’s funny how associations envelop our lives.”
“Isn’t it? People can’t really jump from one thing to another, I don’t suppose—there’s always something carried over.”
“I hope it
’s not our restlessness, this time.”
“We’ll have to have a car to get to the beach.”
“Sure. But tomorrow we’ll go in a taxi.”
Tomorrow was already bright and hot. The sound of a ProvenҪal gardener carrying on his passive resistance to effort woke them. The rake trailed lazily over the gravel; the maid put their breakfast on the balcony.
“Order us a cab, will you, daughter of this flowery republic?”
David was jubilant. It was unnecessary to be anything so dynamic before breakfast, commented Alabama privately with matinal cynicism.
“And so, Alabama, we have never known in our times the touch of so strong and sure a genius as we have before us in the last canvases of one David Knight! He begins work after a swim every day, and he continues until another swim at four o’clock refreshes his self-satisfaction.”
“And I luxuriate in this voluptuous air and grow fat on bananas and Chablis while David Knight grows clever.”
“Sure. A woman’s place is with the wine,” David approved emphatically. “There is art to be undone in the world.”
“But you’re not going to work all the time, are you?”
“I hope so.”
“It’s a man’s world,” Alabama sighed, measuring herself on a sunbeam. “This air has the most lascivious feel——”
The machinery of the Knights’ existence, tended by the three women in the kitchen, moved without protest through the balmy world while the summer puffed itself slowly to pompous exposition. Flowers bloomed sticky and sweet under the salon; the stars at night caught in the net of the pine tops. The garden trees said, “Whip—poor—will,” the warm black shadows said, “Whoo—oo.” From the windows of “Les Rossignols” the Roman arena at Fréjus swam in the light from the moon bulging low over the land like a full wineskin.
David worked on his frescoes; Alabama was much alone.
“What’ll we do, David,” she asked, “with ourselves?”
David said she couldn’t always be a child and have things provided for her to do.
A broken-down carryall transported them every day to the beach. The maid referred to the thing as la voiture and announced its arrival in the mornings with much ceremony during their brioche and honey. There was always a family argument about how soon it was safe to swim after a meal.
Save Me the Waltz: A Novel Page 9
