100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  ★

  “AND WHERE’S MR. Campbell?” Charlie asked.

  “Gone to Switzerland. Mr. Campbell’s a pretty sick man, Mr. Wales.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. And George Hardt?” Charlie inquired.

  “Back in America, gone to work.”

  “And where is the snow bird?”

  “He was in here last week. Anyway, his friend, Mr. Schaeffer, is in Paris.”

  Two familiar names from the long list of a year and a half ago. Charlie scribbled an address in his notebook and tore out the page.

  “If you see Mr. Schaeffer, give him this,” he said. “It’s my brother-in-law’s address. I haven’t settled on a hotel yet.”

  He was not really disappointed to find Paris was so empty. But the stillness in the bar was strange, almost portentous.

  It was not an American bar any more—he felt polite in it, and not as if he owned it. It had gone back into France. He felt the stillness from the moment he got out of the taxi and saw the doorman, usually in a frenzy of activity at this hour, gossiping with a chasseur by the servants’ entrance.

  Passing through the corridor, he heard only a single, bored voice in the once-clamorous women’s room. When he turned into the bar he traveled the twenty feet of green carpet with his eyes fixed straight ahead by old habit; and then, with his foot firmly on the rail, he turned and surveyed the room, encountering only a single pair of eyes that fluttered up from a newspaper in the corner. Charlie asked for the head barman, Paul, who in the latter days of the bull market had come to work in his own custom-built car—disembarking, however, with due nicety at the nearest corner. But Paul was at his country house to-day and Alix was giving him his information.

  “No, no more. I’m going slow these days.”

  Alix congratulated him: “Hope you stick to it, Mr. Wales. You were going pretty strong a couple of years ago.”

  “I’ll stick to it all right,” Charlie assured him. “I’ve stuck to it for over a year and a half now.”

  “How do you find conditions in America?”

  “I haven’t been to America for months. I’m in business in Prague, representing a couple of concerns there. They don’t know about me down there.” He smiled faintly. “Remember the night of George Hardt’s bachelor dinner here? . . . By the way, what’s become of Claude Fessenden?”

  Alix lowered his voice confidentially: “He’s in Paris, but he doesn’t come here any more. Paul doesn’t allow it. He ran up a bill of thirty thousand francs, charging all his drinks and his lunches, and usually his dinner, for more than a year. And when Paul finally told him he had to pay, he gave him a bad check.”

  Alix pressed his lips together and shook his head.

  “I don’t understand it, such a dandy fellow. Now he’s all bloated up—” He made a plump apple of his hands.

  A thin world, resting on a common weakness, shredded away now like tissue paper. Turning, Charlie saw a group of effeminate young men installing themselves in a corner.

  “Nothing affects them,” he thought. “Stocks rise and fall, people loaf or work, but they go on forever.” The place oppressed him. He called for the dice and shook with Alix for the drink.

  “Here for long, Mr. Wales?”

  “I’m here for four or five days to see my little girl.”

  “Oh-h! You have a little girl?”

  Outside, the fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs shone smokily through the tranquil rain. It was late afternoon and the streets were in movement; the bistros gleamed. At the corner of the Boulevard des Cap­ucines he took a taxi. The Place de la Concorde moved by in pink majesty; they crossed the logical Seine, and Charlie felt the sudden provincial quality of the left bank.

  “I spoiled this city for myself,” he thought. “I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.”

  He was thirty-five, a handsome man, with the Irish mobility of his face sobered by a deep wrinkle between his eyes. As he rang his brother-in-law’s bell in the Rue Palatine, the wrinkle deepened till it pulled down his brows; he felt a cramping sensation in his belly. From behind the maid who opened the door darted a lovely little girl of nine who shrieked “Daddy!” and flew up, struggling like a fish, into his arms. She pulled his head around by one ear and set her cheek against his.

  “My old pie,” he said.

  “Oh, daddy, daddy, daddy, daddy, dads, dads, dads!”

  She drew him into the salon, where the family waited, a boy and girl his daughter’s age, his sister-in-law and her husband. He greeted Marion with his voice pitched carefully to avoid either feigned enthusiasm or dislike, but her response was more frankly tepid, and she minimized her expression of unalterable distrust by directing her regard toward his child. The two men clasped hands in a friendly way and Lincoln Peters rested his for a moment on Charlie’s shoulder.

  The room was warm and comfortably American. The three children moved intimately about, playing through the yellow oblongs that led to other rooms; the cheer of six o’clock spoke in the eager smacks of the fire and the sounds of French activity in the kitchen. But Charlie did not relax; his heart sat up rigidly in his body and he drew confidence from his daughter, who from time to time came close to him, holding in her arms the doll he had brought.

  “Really extremely well,” he declared in answer to Lincoln’s question. “There’s a lot of business there that isn’t moving at all, but we’re doing even better than ever. In fact, damn well. I’m bringing my sister over from America next month to keep house for me. My income last year was bigger than it was when I had money. You see, the Czechs—”

  His boasting was for a specific purpose; but after a moment, seeing a faint restiveness in Lincoln’s eye, he changed the subject:

  “Those are fine children of yours, well brought up, good manners.”

  “We think Honoria’s a great little girl too.”

  Marion Peters came back into the little salon. She was a tall woman with worried eyes, who had once possessed a fresh American loveliness. Charlie had never been sensitive to it and was always surprised when people spoke of how pretty she had been. From the first there had been an instinctive antipathy between them.

  “Well, how do you find Honoria?” she asked.

  “Wonderful. I was astonished how much she’s grown in ten months. All the children are looking well.”

  “We haven’t had a doctor for a year. How do you like being back in Paris?”

  “It seems very funny to see so few Americans around.”

  “I’m delighted,” Marion said vehemently. “Now at least you can go into a store without their assuming you’re a millionaire. We’ve suffered like everybody, but on the whole it’s a good deal pleasanter.”

  “But it was nice while it lasted,” Charlie said. “We were a sort of royalty, almost infallible, with a sort of magic around us. In the bar this afternoon”—he stumbled, seeing his mistake—“there wasn’t a man I knew.”

  She looked at him keenly. “I should think you’d have had enough of bars.”

  “I only stayed a minute. I take one drink every afternoon, and no more.”

  “Don’t you want a cocktail before dinner?” Lincoln asked.

  “I take only one drink every afternoon, and I’ve had that.”

  “I hope you keep to it,” said Marion.

  Her dislike was evident in the coldness with which she spoke, but Charlie only smiled; he had larger plans. Her very aggressiveness gave him an advantage, and he knew enough to wait. He wanted them to initiate the discussion of what they knew had brought him to Paris.

  Honoria was to spend the following afternoon with him. At dinner he couldn’t decide whether she was most like him or her mother. Fortunate if she didn’t combine the traits of both that had brought them to disaster. A great wave of protectiveness went over him. He thought he knew what to do for her. He believed in character; he wanted to jump back a whole generation and tru
st in character again as the eternally valuable element. Everything wore out now. Parents expected genius, or at least brilliance, and both the forcing of children and the fear of forcing them, the fear of warping natural abilities, were poor substitutes for that long, careful watchfulness, that checking and balancing and reckoning of accounts, the end of which was that there should be no slipping below a certain level of duty and integrity.

  That was what the elders had been unable to teach plausibly since the break between the generations ten or twelve years ago.

  He left soon after dinner, but not to go home. He was curious to see Paris by night with clearer and more judicious eyes. He bought a strapontin for the Casino and watched Josephine Baker go through her chocolate arabesques.

  After an hour he left and strolled toward Montmartre, up the Rue Pigalle into the Place Blanche. The rain had stopped and there were a few people in evening clothes disembarking from taxis in front of cabarets, and cocottes prowling singly or in pairs, and many Negroes. He passed a lighted door from which issued music, and stopped with the sense of familiarity; it was Bricktop’s, where he had parted with so many hours and so much money. A few doors farther on he found another ancient rendezvous and incautiously put his head inside. Immediately an eager orchestra burst into sound, a pair of professional dancers leaped to their feet and a maître d’hôtel swooped toward him, crying, “Crowd just arriving, sir!” But he withdrew quickly.

  “You have to be damn drunk,” he thought.

  Zelli’s was closed, the bleak and sinister cheap hotels surrounding it were dark; up in the Rue Blanche there was more light and a local, colloquial French crowd. The Poet’s Cave had disappeared, but the two great mouths of the Café of Heaven and the Café of Hell still yawned—even devoured, as he watched, the meager contents of a tourist bus—a German, a Japanese, and an American couple who glanced at him with frightened eyes.

  So much for the effort and ingenuity of Montmartre. All the catering to vice and waste was on an utterly childish scale, and he suddenly realized the meaning of the word “dissipate”—to dissipate into thin air; to make nothing out of something. In the little hours of the night every move from place to place was an enormous human jump, an increase of paying for the privilege of slower and slower motion.

  He remembered thousand-franc notes given to an orchestra for playing a single number, hundred-franc notes tossed to a doorman for calling a cab.

  But it hadn’t been given for nothing.

  It had been given, even the most wildly squandered sum, as an offering to destiny that he might not remember the things most worth remembering, the things that now he would always remember—his child taken from his control, his wife escaped to a grave in Vermont.

  In the glare of a brasserie a woman spoke to him. He bought her some eggs and coffee, and then, eluding her encouraging stare, gave her a twenty-franc note and took a taxi to his hotel.

  II

  He woke upon a fine fall day—football weather. The depression of yesterday was gone and he liked the people on the streets. At noon he sat opposite Honoria at the Grand Vatel, the only restaurant he could think of not reminiscent of champagne dinners and long luncheons that began at two and ended in a blurred and vague twilight.

  “Now, how about vegetables? Oughtn’t you to have some vegetables?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Here’s épinards and chou-fleur and carrots and haricots.”

  “I’d like choux-fleurs.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to have two vegetables?”

  “I usually only have one at lunch.”

  The waiter was pretending to be inordinately fond of children. “Qu’elle est mignonne la petite? Elle parle exactement comme une française.”

  “How about dessert? Shall we wait and see?”

  The waiter disappeared. Honoria looked at him expectantly.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “First we’re going to that toy store in the Rue Saint-Honoré and buy you anything you like. And then we’re going to the vaudeville at the Empire.”

  She hesitated. “I like it about the vaudeville, but not the toy store.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, you brought me this doll.” She had it with her. “And I’ve got lots of things. And we’re not rich any more, are we?”

  “We never were. But to-day you are to have anything you want.”

  “All right,” she agreed resignedly.

  He had always been fond of her, but when there had been her mother and a French nurse he had been inclined to be strict; now he extended himself, reached out for a new tolerance; he must be both parents to her and not shut any of her out of communication.

  “I want to get to know you,” he said gravely. “First let me introduce myself. My name is Charles J. Wales, of Prague.”

  “Oh, daddy!” her voice cracked with laughter.

  “And who are you, please?” he persisted, and she accepted a rôle immediately: “Honoria Wales, Rue Palatine, Paris.”

  “Married or single?”

  “No, not married. Single.”

  He indicated the doll. “But I see you have a child, madame.”

  Unwilling to disinherit it, she took it to her heart and thought quickly: “Yes, I’ve been married, but I’m not married now. My husband is dead.”

  He went on quickly, “And the child’s name?”

  “Simone. That’s after my best friend at school.”

  “I’m very pleased that you’re doing so well at school.”

  “I’m third this month,” she boasted. “Elsie”—that was her cousin—“is only about eighteenth, and Richard is about at the bottom.”

  “You like Richard and Elsie, don’t you?”

  “Oh, yes. I like Richard quite well and I like her all right.”

  Cautiously and casually he asked: “And Aunt Marion and Uncle Lincoln—which do you like best?”

  “Oh, Uncle Lincoln, I guess.”

  He was increasingly aware of her presence. As they came in, a murmur of “What an adorable child” followed them, and now the people at the next table bent all their silences upon her, staring as if she were something no more conscious than a flower.

  “Why don’t I live with you?” she asked suddenly. “Because mamma’s dead?”

  “You must stay here and learn more French. It would have been hard for daddy to take care of you so well.”

  “I don’t really need much taking care of any more. I do everything for myself.”

  Going out of the restaurant, a man and a woman unexpectedly hailed him.

  “Well, the old Wales!”

  “Hello there, Lorraine . . . Dunc.”

  Sudden ghosts out of the past: Duncan Schaeffer, a friend from college. Lorraine Quarrles, a lovely, pale blond of thirty; one of a crowd who had helped them make months into days in the lavish times of two years ago.

  “My husband couldn’t come this year,” she said, in answer to his question. “We’re poor as hell. So he gave me two hundred a month and told me I could do my worst on that . . . This your little girl?”

  “What about sitting down?” Duncan asked.

  “Can’t do it.” He was glad for an excuse. As always, he felt Lorraine’s passionate, provocative attraction, but his own rhythm was different now.

  “Well, how about dinner?” she asked.

  “I’m not free. Give me your address and let me call you.”

  “Charlie, I believe you’re sober,” she said judicially. “I honestly believe he’s sober, Dunc. Pinch him and see if he’s sober.”

  Charlie indicated Honoria with his head. They both laughed.

  “What’s your address?” said Duncan skeptically.

  He hesitated, unwilling to give the name of his hotel.

  “I’m not settled yet. I’d better call you. We’re going to see the vaudeville at the Empire.”

  “There! That’s what I want to do,” Lorraine said. “I want to see some clowns and acrobats and jugglers. That’
s just what we’ll do, Dunc.”

  “We’ve got to do an errand first,” said Charlie. “Perhaps we’ll see you there.”

  “All right, you snob . . . Good-by, beautiful little girl.”

  “Good-by.” Honoria bobbed politely.

  Somehow, an unwelcome encounter, Charlie thought. They liked him because he was functioning, because he was serious; they wanted to see him, because he was stronger than they were now, because they wanted to draw a certain sustenance from his strength.

  At the Empire, Honoria proudly refused to sit upon her father’s folded coat. She was already an individual with a code of her own, and Charlie was more and more absorbed by the desire of putting a little of himself into her before she crystallized utterly. It was hopeless to try to know her in so short a time.

  Between the acts they came upon Duncan and Lorraine in the lobby where the band was playing.

  “Have a drink?”

  “All right, but not up at the bar. We’ll take a table.”

  “The perfect father.”

  Listening abstractedly to Lorraine, Charlie watched Honoria’s eyes leave them all, and he followed them wistfully about the room, wondering what they saw. He met them and she smiled.

  “I liked that lemonade,” she said.

  What had she said? What had he expected? Going home in a taxi afterward, he pulled her over until her head rested against his chest.

  “Darling, do you ever think about your mother?”

  “Yes, sometimes,” she answered vaguely.

  “I don’t want you to forget her. Have you got a picture of her?”

  “Yes, I think so. Anyhow, Aunt Marion has. Why don’t you want me to forget her?”

  “She loved you very much.”

  “I loved her too.”

  They were silent for a moment.

  “Daddy, I want to come and live with you,” she said suddenly.

  His heart leaped; he had wanted it to come like this.

  “Aren’t you perfectly happy?”

  “Yes, but I love you better than anybody. And you love me better than anybody, don’t you, now that mummy’s dead?”