Summer Doorways

by W. S. Merwin

  27

  The fêtes with their lights, music, parties, crises, and hangovers comprised the traditional succession of events on which the summer season was strung. They were close enough together to create an accelerating rhythm of their own. Before one of them, not long after the Fête des Lumières, Alan planned ahead for us more elaborately than he usually did. He arranged to take us all out for the evening to dinner at the Abbaye in St. Paul de Vence. That would include the two boys, Georges Fratacci, Gilles and Françoise, Dorothy and me. We fitted tightly into the station wagon and set out in the summer twilight.

  That was the evening when Alan, at an intersection, pointed to a road north that we were not taking, and mumbled to me that up that way was where he had been dropped by parachute to join the Resistance, and where Jean Prévost had been ambushed and killed. Françoise was sitting in the seat far to the rear and almost certainly did not hear him mention it, but it was not a moment to go on asking about it.

  The Abbaye is a handsome ancient building set into the rocky outcrop and cliff side on which the village had grown during the Middle Ages. Alan and the proprietor greeted each other like old friends. Alan said the place had been a favorite haunt of his family’s. We went on a short walk around the building and its gardens and environs, with Alan pointing out architectural details that he admired, and then settled under a pergola for drinks while our dinner was being prepared. The terrace where we sat overlooked the coastal plain of Provence, all the way to the sea, and as we sat there the lights came on out of histories of their own. Alan was in an expansive mood, in animated conversation with Gilles, by the time we were called to dinner.

  We had trout, as I remember, and excellent wine, white and red, Alan introducing Dorothy and me to local vintages that he knew would not be familiar to us. The dinner was unhurried and festive, at ease, familial, and taking its own way like a ride down a gentle slope with hands off the handlebars. We sat talking around the table, and Alan was in no hurry for the evening to end. When he came back from paying the bill he announced that he had reserved a table for us at Maxim’s in Cannes, and as we bundled into the car I wondered whether it was safe for him to drive.

  Maxim’s turned out to be another place where Alan and his family had been known for years, and the patron, or the presiding figure that evening, greeted him warmly and welcomed him back, and we were shown to a couple of tables at the edge of the dance floor, where the show was due to start in a little while. It seemed to me that the boys might be a little young to be taken to a nightclub, or to be allowed into one, but I consigned my doubts to provincial inexperience, and sat at a table with them and Dorothy. Alan ordered cokes for the boys and champagne for the rest of us. The floor show began.

  There were ballroom dancers: tangos and more tangos. Innocuous family fare. And comedians talking much too fast for me to understand. The boys were not interested. Peter and Andrew were whispering about something else, probably miles away. Alan was getting through the champagne. I saw with concern that the second bottle was almost empty on his table when the others had scarcely finished their first glasses.

  The featured performer of the evening turned out to be a transvestite, apparently a local celebrity, to whom the comedian referred with modulated awe and innuendos that I did not catch but that made the audience laugh. The program built up to his act, or acts, which included singing, dancing, and comic routines of his own. His introduction was set off and punctuated by fanfares from the band. The lights dimmed slightly, and in the beam of a spotlight the star came on, in a ruffled red evening gown, wearing red pumps with high heels, and began a camp, falsetto comic patter interspersed with bits of increasingly suggestive dancing. Alan turned in his chair and called loudly to order more champagne, which the waiter brought, and opened, as discreetly as he could while the act went on, and Alan went on drinking.

  The singing became more sultry and suggestive, and Alan began to heckle the performer, at first muttering in clearly audible disgust, and then beginning to call out insults as the dancing continued. At first the boys appeared to think Alan’s interruptions were funny too, a kind of accepted audience participation perhaps, and then I saw that Peter was disturbed and frightened. The others at Alan’s table, Georges and Gilles and Françoise, looked helpless, and Alan obviously was in a very ugly, drunken frame of mind. The waiter stood watching. Alan’s insults got louder, and it sounded as though the band was trying to drown him out. At what was meant to be a dramatic moment in the dance, as the band built up the climax, Alan suddenly heaved himself onto his feet and, shouting obscenities at the dancer, flung himself onto the dance floor trying to lay hands on him. Instead he fell onto his face and lay there while the waiters leapt forward to help him to his feet, and to restrain him, and Georges and Gilles and I stood up to get him under control. He fought off the waiters and snarled at the rest of us, but then allowed himself to be led toward the entrance desk.

  The patron or maitre d’ calmly took charge. He and Alan managed to settle the bill, and then he and I agreed that Alan would need somewhere to stay, and he called and reserved a room for Alan at the Negresco. He said it was the hotel that Alan’s family had used, over the years, in Cannes. Alan glared furiously at me and at the rest of us. Rather than have us try to get him into the Jeep station wagon, the patron called a taxi, and got Alan into it. I elbowed Georges in with him, and the rest of us got into the station wagon, and I drove after the taxi to the Negresco. Peter was trying to control his tears.

  Outside the hotel we left the boys and Françoise and Dorothy in the car, while Georges, Gilles, and I walked in with Alan, who kept warning us in a kind of low growl to let him alone, swearing at us, mumbling something about having been a boxer in college. He did not want any of us to go up to the room with him and the bellboy, and we watched them advance on the elevator, with Alan trying to walk straight. Georges and I explained to the head clerk what my relation to Alan was, and I asked for, and was given, a second key to Alan’s room. I was assured that it was a particularly quiet room.

  I wanted to get the boys out of the whole thing and back to the villa. Somebody would have to stay there to be around when Alan woke up. Georges said he would come back with me. The others elected to stay there in the lobby. With Georges beside me and the boys silent in the back I drove through Nice to St. Jean Cap-Ferrat and tiptoed into the villa with the boys, then turned and went back.

  By the time we got to Cannes and the hotel, the night was nearly over. Dorothy, Gilles, and Françoise, in the lights of the avenue, had gone across to the beach to lie on towels. But the head clerk told me that after they left there had been what he called a little drama. Alan had rung for room service and ordered champagne. When the bellboy brought it and opened it, Alan asked him to draw him a bath, and when the boy came back from the bathroom Alan had already knocked back a glass or two. He flung his arms around the boy, trying to drag him into bed. The boy had struggled, as tactfully as possible. He had been told that Monsieur was an important guest. He had managed to escape, but he had bolted from the room without turning off the bath. He remembered that, a few minutes later, but did not dare to go back in alone, and he rounded up two others from the night staff to go with him. They found the room empty, the bottle nearly empty, the bath still running and overflowing, and the bathroom floor already an inch under water. They searched along the corridors for Alan and found him wandering half dressed, hopelessly drunk, looking for the bellboy. With some difficulty they herded him back to the room where he collapsed into bed again and fell asleep. There they had left him, not long before we returned.

  We decided to let him sleep for a while, if he would, and to have some breakfast, and then to try to get him home in the course of the morning. Georges stayed in the lobby, stretched out in his linen suit, exhausted. I went across the avenue to the beach and found the others. The stars were fading, to the south, and the first pallor had seeped into the eastern edge of the sky. They sat up one by one, stretched, and we picked
up the towels to go for a walk along the sand.

  Not far from us, along the water’s edge, some fishermen were preparing to haul in the net they had laid out past the breakers at the beginning of the night. We got into conversation with them. They wanted to know where we were from. We asked whether they would like us to help them haul in the net, and after some polite demurring they accepted the offer, warning us about getting wet and fishy. Gilles and I rolled up our trousers, and we left the towels and shoes up past the high water line and all waded in with them to pick up the haul ropes, and in the sound of the small waves curling and breaking around our legs they shouted instructions to us, and when they told us to we began to pull.

  It must have taken us longer to bring the net in than it seemed. The last stars faded as we hauled together. One of the fishermen began to sing and the others joined him. We pulled to the singing and to the shush of the waves crumpling and sliding out from under us. The net broke the surface, and the bright loom before sunrise glinted on the flipping silver curves caught in it as the long weight inched upward out of the water. Then it was up at the waterline, out of reach of the ebbing waves, and we saw the whole struggling catch quivering and gasping as the rays of the first edge of the sun, startling us with their warmth, touched it with light.

  We all let down the ropes, and the fishermen began to open the net, peeling it back as we watched. They started to take the fish out one by one, sorting them into big baskets. They offered us our pick of them, but we thanked them and said we had nowhere to cook them. “Take some home,” they said with the sun red on their faces by then, as they hurried to lay out the fish for the morning market. We stood there in the sunrise with them for a moment and then said good-bye and walked back along the sand.

  Georges was asleep in his chair in the lobby. He said Alan had called to order more champagne but the hotel had made excuses and had not sent him any. As far as anyone knew he had gone back to sleep.

  We all had coffee and croissants there in the lobby, and then ordered another pot of coffee to be taken up to Alan’s room, and Georges and Gilles and I accompanied the waiter. There was no answer to the knock on the door. I tried the key and the door opened and we all went in. Alan was in bed, half asleep, groggy and in a rank mood, not wanting to see any of us, then or ever. Georges and I, in both languages, told him that we had brought him some coffee, and that it was time for him to get up and get dressed and go home. At last he managed to push himself up into a sitting position and take a cup of coffee and begin to drink it, saying nothing. Georges poured him a second cup, and he drank some and mumbled something to Georges about having a shower and getting dressed, and for Gilles and me to wait downstairs until he was ready.

  Gilles and I went back down to wait, and eventually the elevator doors opened and Georges and Alan emerged, Alan looking as though he had been carved out of soap, and they walked to the desk. The bill was ready and Alan settled it. I brought the car around to the front of the hotel and we got in. Alan rode beside me in front, saying practically nothing all the way to the villa, where André met us, hovering around Alan to help if necessary, but as Alan started up the red tile stairs in the main hall he turned and snapped at André, “I’m perfectly well, thank you,” and went on up alone.

  In the evening a taxi came to take him to Nice and the night train to Paris.

  28

  Gilles and Françoise left a couple of days later, and the villa was very quiet that evening. André and Josephine spoke with concern, and undisguised curiosity, about what had happened that night. Peter had told them that Alan had suddenly become sick and we left it at that, but it was not a convincing tale, especially in view of the atmosphere of embarrassment that lingered around it, and Alan’s immediate departure after he got back. In the next few days, while other events took precedence, both André and Josephine found moments to extract some of the real story.

  The day after Alan left, Georges Fratacci, Dorothy, and the boys and I went into Nice, and Georges showed us bits of the town that we had not seen, and we had lunch, scarcely referring to what had happened. The trip to town had been thought of partly as a way of distracting the boys. Peter and Andrew said almost nothing. When we got back, André met us with an ashen face. While we had been in town that morning and both girls were out of the house, Mme. Fratacci had tried to kill herself. She had taken sleeping pills, and when the girls came home they had found her unconscious and hardly breathing. They had called the ambulance, which had taken her to the American Hospital in Nice. It seemed very likely that she would not live. The girls had gone with her.

  I drove to the hospital with Georges. He rushed to the entrance desk and told them who he was. His wife was in a cool, green room, the shades drawn, in an oxygen tent, white and waxen, but she was breathing, although one had to watch closely to be sure. The girls were sitting by the bed, as they had been since they had got there. They were distraught, and Georges sat down with them, stunned and wordless. I stayed with them for a while and then talked with the nurses outside the room, who were guarded with all details, including her chances of survival. Not a word from anyone by way of explanation.

  Evening came on, mealtime approached. None of them wanted to leave. Georges said they would be all right. He would take care of them at the hospital. I asked him whether there was anything he wanted me to do at the house. Then I told him that I would be back the next day, and left.

  She was at the hospital for another two days, gradually reviving, and finally Georges brought her and the girls home in a taxi, and they helped her inside. Still nothing was said about why it had happened, except for Georges murmuring once, absentmindedly, “I was not paying enough attention.”

  That was the situation Alan returned to a day later. He was carefully shaved and dressed and looked as though he had just been discharged from somewhere. It was impossible to say how the sequence of events since the dinner at St. Paul de Vence had worked on him. He was quiet. He seemed neither surprised nor particularly disturbed by Mme. Fratacci’s suicide attempt. He did not seem to attach much importance to it, besides making sure that she had whatever medicines and care she needed. He asked Georges about her medical situation and left it more or less at that. He said he was sure she would not want visitors, and Georges agreed. At meals he was distant and polite, but it was impossible not to be aware that his demeanor was covering a depth of barely contained anger.

  One morning Peter and I took the small, inflatable yellow life raft out onto the bay and managed, after many attempts, to rig the mast and sail so that it would actually move with the wind. The breeze was from the villa side at that hour, and the shallow craft, with no keel or leeboard, slipped sideways as it went, taking us offshore toward Beaulieu. We dropped the sail, and as we started to paddle back I saw Alan, up at the wall of the villa’s garden, waving angrily, and realized that he was summoning us to come back. I was reminded instantly of the times in my childhood when I had managed to escape for a moment and play with other children, only to look up and see my father waving to me to stop it and come to him to be scolded. When we got back Alan was furious with me. The air might have escaped from the inflatable boat. We could have been drowned. Peter’s face darkened and he walked into the house, while Alan continued to upbraid me for taking such a risk. We should have been wearing life preservers, although there weren’t any. Mrs. McCormick and Muriel were coming for lunch and Alan managed to produce smiles for the occasion, but she could not have failed to notice a certain awkwardness. Mrs. McCormick said she had heard about the troubles with “your tenants”—she meant Mme. Fratacci, and directed a passing inquiry in that direction.

  In the next days Dorothy and I were moved across the road into the smaller villa where the Frataccis lived. The beautiful big room overlooking the garden and the bay toward Beaulieu was one of the main bedrooms of the villa, and Alan explained that Maria Antonia would be coming before long and it would be needed for her. He kept his own rooms in the tower because they had been his
rooms in his youth, and because they were on a floor by themselves.

  The quarters in the other villa lacked the elegance, space, and views of that first opulent room, but they were quiet and off by themselves, and there were in fact several rooms that became ours, including one that I could use for reading and writing. I had with me my pocket editions of Villon and Nerval, my Hill and Bergin anthology of the troubadours, and the six small Temple bilingual volumes of Dante. I was immersed in reading back through the Purgatorio just then. Dante compared the crags of Mt. Purgatory to those at La Turbia—La Turbie, which I could see towering behind Beaulieu—and when I looked across I imagined him seeing those cliffs from some point along the coast, and noticing them clearly, so that he remembered them later. Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, which I had read just before we left for Europe, echoed in my head all through that summer. Two or three of the poems that would go into my first book had been written, and I was trying to hear something new, on my own. The upper rooms in the small villa were a place where Dorothy and I each had a place in which we could settle and read, when Peter and Andrew were occupied with something on their own.

  One afternoon Alan said he would like to go to Monte Carlo that evening, with me. It gave him a chance to disparage my clothes, which was easy. I certainly possessed nothing that could pass for evening dress. I do not remember whether his invitation included Dorothy. Anyway, she did not come. She did not have evening clothes either, and she had been afflicted by asthma ever since our arrival, the symptoms not acute but recurrent, and so had spent much of the time there in bed reading. She would probably not have wanted to go to Monte Carlo, and Alan would not have pressed her to.