Gabrielle drew back against the wall until she could go no further. Utterly desperate, she cried out, “Monsignor!”
Monsignor La Roque stood with his arms folded, gazing with disdain on the entire scene. The châtelains had drawn back into a tighter little circle of their own. The monsignor turned to the prefect of police who seemed to be looking himself for a place to hide, and said with mock formality, “Monsieur Moissac, it would seem the damsel is in distress.”
Moissac charged toward Gabrielle. He put his foot to Artur’s backside and sent the dwarf sprawling. He gazed at the girl until she opened her eyes. Then he lowered his, letting the heavy lids fall to where he could not be seen gazing at her breast. For only a moment; he looked then to the bare feet, feet he would have caressed as he had the shoe. When the husband came, Moissac went from the room, by way this time of the parlor, for he wanted no more traffic that night with the aristocracy. Trying to get back to the vestibule, which was where he belonged, where he should have attended to his duty in the first place and then departed, he had to fumble his way through the blasted beads. A strand caught in the buttons of his coat sleeve; he caught it and pulled it from the valance and then from his cuff, taking the button also. He stuffed the lot in his pocket, and went to madame’s desk bell which he rang until she came and unlocked the drawer with the I.D. cards.
Marc, having the valise and the nightgown, and moving into the vestibule with Gabrielle, saw Moissac at the desk. He took Gabrielle upstairs directly.
Moissac had wanted to question Belloir. A number of things had got beyond his control, and now the prefect of agriculture came up and asked for a ride as far as the Granges Vieilles where he was to stay. Moissac put off until the next day the checking of papers.
Marc watched from the small third-floor balcony that bellied out over the street. The smell of charcoal wafted up from the gazogènes awaiting three of the guests. He listened the cars out of hearing and the revelers into their beds. He heard the last clatter of dishes and madame throw the bolt on her vestibule door. All became darkness below which did but make the sky seem brighter. Finally he went indoors.
He knocked softly and opened the door. He was sure that he would find Sister Gabrielle billeted on the floor. It startled him nonetheless to see her prone, face down, her forehead to the bare boards, she still fully clothed and her arms outstretched in the shape of the cross. She did not speak. Nor did he. He turned out the light, removed his shoes and jacket only, and lay down upon the bed. Sleep was sudden and deep.
18
HIS MOTHER WAS WAITING up for Moissac, her head swathed in a nightcap which made him think of a bonnetted infant, its face puckered up to cry. She turned off the radio.
Moissac did not want to talk. “Leave it on, maman. I haven’t heard the news all day.”
“Lies,” she said. “One thing one day, another the next.” She switched on the radio again and took his coat from him.
He went to the sink and while he turned up his cuffs and drew a basin of water, he watched her reflection in the window. She was straightening the coat on the hanger when she discovered the bulge in the pocket, the string of glass beads he had torn from Madame Fontaine’s doorway. She put her hand in the pocket and pulled them out, the loose beads scattering over the floor.
“Put them in a dish, maman. I’ll have to take them back to Madame Fontaine.”
He could not hear what she was saying until he turned off the radio. “Now, what did you say?”
“I said, what else was she wearing?”
Moissac described the curtain of beads in the pension vestibule and how he had caught the strand in the button of his sleeve. He showed her where the button was now missing. It was ridiculous, but the more he explained, the guiltier he felt. “Believe me, maman, if she had been wearing them, I would not have come home with them in my pocket.”
“Did that woman sing again tonight?”
“Everybody sang. I will tell you about it in the morning.”
“I wouldn’t think of asking,” she said. She got the clock from the window-sill and wound it. “Maman, was René here tonight?”
She paused, her hand on the door to her bedroom. She was deciding whether or not to lie to him, Moissac thought. But why would she lie? “No,” she said.
Moissac dried his hands and wiped his face on the towel. “What do you talk about, the two of you?”
She shrugged. “The Michelet gossip.”
“You’d think he would have told you then about Madame Lebel’s daughter marrying old Divenet.”
“I may have forgotten. Don’t try to trick me, Théophile. I am not one of your refugees or black-marketeers.”
“Do you talk about the refugees?”
“We talk about you,” she said impatiently. “You forget that I like to talk about you and the way you’ve come up from the days in Michelet.”
“I came up, maman, because my predecessor was recalled to military service and then preferred de Gaulle’s exile to the prefecture of St. Hilaire. René knows that and so do you.”
“What are you trying to say, Théophile?”
“I am saying that if René pretends to admire me it is only because he wants information about the police.”
“What could I tell him? We are never that serious anyway. He flirts with me. You saw it last night.”
“Yes, I did.”
“I see,” she said. “Why would a man flirt with an old thing like me? Is that it?”
That was it, but even in his present mood he could not say so. “I do not like to be spied upon and I feel that’s what René is doing.”
“I shall tell him not to come any more,” she said and went into the bedroom.
A few minutes later, in bathrobe and pajamas, Moissac took his rosary and went into her room. She was buried deep under the quilt with only her face and the brown, twisted fingers showing. The bed seemed larger even than it had seemed to him as a child when she would take him into it and warm his cold backside against her. “It is ridiculous for us to quarrel about René, maman.”
“That’s not what’s ridiculous,” she said. “It’s the way you always bring him up when there is something else that you don’t want to talk about.”
He got her rosary from the bedside table and handed it to her. He made one more effort to placate her. “I will tell you about the harvest feast in the morning. The monsignor sent you his blessing, by the way.”
“The monsignor sent me his blessing,” she repeated, weighing the words. “Did I raise you to be so crooked, so sly, my son? Or is it because you’re a policeman?”
“You’re criticizing me for your own faults, maman.”
“Am I? Maybe I am. It is better than criticizing you for your father’s. It is strange to see a son grow older than his father. He would have looked just like you, Théophile.” She gave a dry little laugh. “It’s no wonder I get my generations mixed up.”
“Goodnight, maman.”
“We haven’t said our prayers yet.”
“I think I’ll say mine in bed tonight.”
She held her arms up to him. He bent and kissed her cheek. He could smell the age of her through the lavender. She touched his nose with her finger. “Just like his,” she said.
19
SHE HAD DREAMED DURING the night of her father, and it was a dream of waking: he had come into her cell and covered her with a quilt and he had touched her cheek with his fingers so that, waking within the dream, she had caught his hand and kissed it, but never looked up at him, even as the child awakening to the presence of love sinks back toward sleep holding fast that love until it too becomes a part of sleep and sleep itself but love’s prolonging. The first few seconds of real awakening that morning were a kind of ecstasy to Gabrielle, the dream so sweet and vividly remembered, and its having seemed in no way strange that her father should have entered the convent cell.
Then within the compass of her gaze, the silver-buckled shoes, the bedpost, the chamber pot, the woolly field of dust beneath th
e bed brought back reality far stranger than the dream. There was a blanket warm upon her back. She sat up and gathered it around her. Her whole body ached and the prayer it prompted was from childhood…Oh, Jesus, through the immaculate heart of Mary, I offer Thee all my prayers, works and sufferings of this day…
She was alone in the room; the bed had been straightened: she knew he had slept on it, having heard the creaking of the springs when he lay down last night. He had left his watch on the dresser. It was half-past seven. She listened to see if the watch was running; she could not remember ever having slept into that hour in the morning. At home—the word seemed not quite right now, having a diffuse feeling, neither farm nor convent—oh, but yes, the convent: she was able to summon its presence almost instantly—she would have finished in the scullery and answered the matins bell: Venite, exultemus…“Come, let us praise the Lord with joy…” With joy, with joy, with joy. She repeated the words again and again, for her own sense of joy at the moment was not diminished.
On the washstand she found a square of soap and, by the cup of fresh water, Marc’s tube of toothpaste where he had left it. She squeezed some on the corner of the towel and rubbed her teeth and gums. She put the latch on the door and washed thoroughly, even her head. Marc had put out all Rachel’s things on the chair, one change only, except for two sweaters. Gabrielle chose the one that seemed likely to cover the most of her, a dark blue with a turtleneck collar; when she put it on, however, and especially because she wore Rachel’s brassiere which was tight on her, her breasts stood out like bishops’ miters. No amount of stretching seemed to remedy the situation. Finally, she took off the brassiere and bound herself round with the second of Rachel’s scarves. Throughout she was aware of the mirror over the dresser, but avoided it steadfastly, catching only the glimpse of her arm motion as she passed to and fro.
Marc knocked on the door and identified himself: Jean. She opened it and for a moment he stood, his eyes wide as though he were seeing a stranger—or perhaps Rachel, she thought, turning immediately away.
“I have brought you breakfast,” he said. “It is real coffee.”
“Thank you…Jean.”
He set the tray with the bread and preserve and coffee on the dresser. “You slept well?”
“Yes.”
“And you had good dreams.” He watched her in the mirror.
“How did you know that?”
“You smiled.”
“You must not look at me,” she said. Then realizing he had covered her, she added, “But I thank you for the blanket.”
“It was nothing,” he said, but time and again since dawn when he had awakened and covered her with the blanket he had gone over in his mind the way she looked, the little smile and the pursing of her lips. He had lain awake himself then, wondering what the tenderness meant that it evoked in him. He had turned his thoughts to Rachel, but he had turned them, they had not flown there, and he had remembered chiding Gabrielle in the early hours of their vigil together: Is that what it’s like, being a nun, to always think of something else?
He went to the door and looked into the hallway, for he had come upstairs to discover the dwarf trying to see through the keyhole. He did not tell Gabrielle, he just made sure the small one had not returned.
“Please have your breakfast while the coffee is hot. I shall not watch you.”
“It’s all right. I ate among the others, and I drank wine last night.”
“Was that a sin? I forced you to it if it was. Therefore the sin was mine.”
“I don’t know. So much is new.”
“Only the wine is old,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know exactly, but I was thinking that if there is such a thing as sin, we have found new ways of doing it in our time.”
“Do you not believe in sin?” Gabrielle sipped her coffee.
“I do not believe in rewards for good deeds and punishment for bad, let’s put it that way. I see no scale of balance in this world, and nothing in it argues for me for another world just to sum things up. Is it wrong of me to talk this way to you?”
“What is ‘wrong’ to you, monsieur?”
He smiled. “Jean. You must remember! It is a good question, Marie. Dishonesty with oneself: I guess that’s the best way of putting it.”
“So,” she said, with a kind of belligerence that delighted him, “dishonesty with others does not matter.”
“I did not say that. I only say that unless one is honest entirely with oneself, there can be no honesty with others either. One’s first obligation is to oneself.”
“Of course. One must save one’s own soul. We believe in the same thing.”
“Perhaps we do. Now. Marie, Marie, Marie. We must find a way to get you out of here quickly.” He gave her their work papers on which his and Rachel’s photographs appeared side by side, and her I.D. card which he had insisted Madame Fontaine return so that his wife could go out to do some necessary shopping. “Do not smile for the photographer. Try to look as serious as Rachel was on the day that likeness was taken.”
Gabrielle licked her fingers and turned the card to where she could see it better. “What do you think was on her mind when it was taken?”
Marc was slow to answer. “Actually, she was very happy, I think.” He returned to the issue at hand. “The machinery will go out first. They say now we’ll be here till noon, but I’m sure we’ll have a processing of some sort, either the Germans or the police. I will try to make friends while you’re gone.”
“Just do not make enemies,” she said, remembering René.
Marc grinned. There was in every woman something of the wife even if she were the bride of Christ. “I’ll remember that.”
Gabrielle’s face was on fire. “Forgive me, monsieur. It was wrong of me to have spoken so.”
He wanted to take her by the elbows and shake her. Instead he delivered a short lecture: “It was right. You spoke the truth of my nature, and therefore for my own good. It was right…Marie.”
“Yes…Jean.”
“Now you must be prepared if you are questioned about visiting a photographer’s shop: you will say that your twenty-first birthday is a few weeks off—it says so on your I.D. card—and you want to have a likeness to send to your parents in Marseille. It is believable, don’t you think?”
She nodded. “And I have a sister living in Marseille.” “And there is something you must purchase while you’re in the neighborhood of shops, something you would call decent in which to sleep.”
“I will wear my same clothes at night,” she said.
“No, that will not do.” He gave her money and the clothes ration book that René had given him. “Something less than a tent that will nonetheless satisfy your modesty.” He turned from her and stared out the window. “I don’t know how to say this to you, gentle friend, but if you find yourself in deeper trouble than you can manage, surrender to the police and tell them who you are. Then say nothing more until they bring you to the Reverend Mother of your convent.” “It is possible she would not accept me now.” “She would be a great fool not to, and I do not think that of her,” Marc said.
Gabrielle slipped out of the pension a few minutes later. The only attention paid her came from Jacques, who was propped against a tree in the sun, his beret over his eyes but not so far over them as to shut out that which he wished to see. He whistled softly as she passed which in turn brought the policeman at the gate to attention. The policeman saluted, bending to be closer to la petite mariée, the little bride, as she had been spoken of that morning, and would probably be called henceforth among the workers.
She walked with an air of confidence as Marc had bade her, and with Rachel’s pouch handbag swinging from her wrist she became aware of giving pleasure to those who saw her. Men made way for her to pass. Shopkeepers called out greetings. The giving of such pleasure might not be a sin, but the awareness of giving it was a lack of discipline to say the least. Thi
s sunniness, as it was called when she was a child, was a part of her from birth, and the nuns had carefully nurtured the joy while tamping down the exuberance. It troubled her also that she was no longer so much afraid of being in the street alone and unprotected by the religious habit, but what that was really was the relief of being away from Marc and the pretense of an intimacy she tried not to think about, while at the same time knowing that the very purpose for which she was there would succeed only if she made the pretend-life seem real to the others. Now, alone, no matter what she wore, she was herself in God, and by some act of mortification she could atone for vanity, for pride, and perhaps lay up a little strength against temptation. She walked imagining herself in the boned stays of the convent corset, in the chafing coarseness of its linens, and in the concentrated heat of the serge habit. She could almost feel the starched binder around her head, and as in the days when she had suffered headaches from it, she wondered again if it was not intended to suggest to those who followed Christ the thorns with which His head was crowned.
Her world was all so terribly upside down: here she was conjuring a headache whereas the true act of piety would be to accept the headache one could not avoid, and seek through it some small understanding of Christ’s sufferings and their meaning. But she had not achieved this piety. The trouble had always been that the worse the headache, the less the understanding. But that was because she had not advanced very far in the religious experience yet.
She went by way of the railway station and followed Marc’s directions from there. But when she reached Number 12, Rue de Michelet, the shop was closed, the shades drawn. The confidence that had brought her boldly to the door fell off at once. She tapped on the window most tentatively, not wanting to call the attention of the passers-by. All the benevolence she had felt in the people she had met seemed to have vanished: now they were hostile strangers. Her suffering was brief but a grave lesson. Almost as soon as she knocked René came to the door and opened it to her. Then he raised the shade.
“You are late, madame, but it did not matter. There were no other customers.”
God Speed the Night Page 13
