The Chateau

by William Maxwell

  “C’est votre frère?” the little boy asked, indicating Harold.

  “Non,” she said, smiling, “il est mon mari.”

  His glance shifted to the bag of candy. When she put it into his hands, he said politely that he couldn’t accept it. But he did, with urging. He took it and thanked her and then ran off. They stood watching while a bearded man, the keeper of a roulette wheel, detained him. The little boy listened intently (to what? a joke? a riddle?) and then he suddenly realized what was happening to him and escaped.

  “I think he all but fell in love with you,” Harold said. “If he’d been a little older or a little younger, he would have.”

  “He fell in love with the candy,” Barbara said.

  They made one more circuit of the fair. The carnival people had lost the look of wickedness. Their talent for not putting down roots anywhere, and for not giving the right change, and for sleeping with one eye open, their sexual promiscuity, their tattooed hearts, flowers, mermaids, anchors, and mottoes, their devout belief that all life is meaningless—all this had not been enough to sustain them in the face of too much history. They were discouraged and ill-fed and worried, like everybody else.

  He bought some cotton candy. Barbara took two or three licks and then handed it to him. Pink, oversweet, and hairy, it hadn’t changed; it was just the way he remembered it from his childhood. Wisps clung to his cheeks. He couldn’t finish it. He got out his handkerchief and wiped his chin. “Shall we go?” he asked.

  They started walking toward the exit. The whole failing enterprise was as elegiac as a summer resort out of season. They looked around one last time for the little French boy but he had vanished. As they passed the gypsy fortuneteller’s tent, Harold felt a slight pressure on his coat sleeve. “All right,” he said. “If you want to.”

  “Just this once,” she said apologetically.

  He disliked having his fortune told.

  The gypsy fortuneteller sat darning her stocking by the light of a kerosene lamp. It turned out that she had lived in Chicago and spoke English. She asked Barbara for the date of her birth and then, nodding, said “Virgo.” She looked inquiringly at Harold. “Scorpio,” he said.

  The gypsy fortuneteller looked in her crystal ball and saw that he was lying. He was Leo. Raising her eyes, she saw that he had kept his hands in his pockets.

  She passed her thin brown hand over the crystal ball twice and saw that there was a shadow across their lives but it was not permanent, like the shadows she was used to finding. No blackened chimneys, no years and years of wandering, no loved one vanished forever into a barbed-wire enclosure, no savings stolen, no letters returned unopened and stamped Whereabouts Unknown. Whatever the trouble was, in five or six years it would clear up.

  She took Barbara Rhodes’s hand and opened the fingers (beautiful hand) and in the lines of the palm discovered a sea voyage, a visitor, popularity and entertainment, malice she didn’t expect, and a triumph that was sure to come true.

  Chapter 2

  THE AMERICANS were last in line at the gate, because of their luggage, and as the line moved forward, he picked up a big suitcase in each hand and wondered which of the half-dozen women in black waiting outside the barrier would turn out to be Mme Viénot. And why was there no car?

  The station agent took their tickets gravely from between Harold’s teeth, and as he walked through the gate he saw that the street was empty. He went back for the dufflebag and another suitcase. When the luggage was all outside they stood and waited.

  The sign on the roof of the tiny two-room station said: Brenodville-sur-Euphrone. The station itself had as yet no doors, windows, or clock, and it smelled of damp plaster. The station platform was cluttered with bags of cement and piled yellow bricks. Facing the new station, on the other side of the tracks, was a wooden shelter with a bench and three travel posters: the Côte D’Azur (a sailboat) and Burgundy (a glass of red wine) and Auvergne (a rocky gorge). Back of the shelter a farmyard, with the upper story of the barn full of cordwood and the lower story stuffed with hay, served as a poster for Touraine.

  They waited for five minutes by his wrist watch, and then he went back inside and consulted the station agent, who said that the Château Beaumesnil was only two and a half kilometers outside the village and they could easily walk there. But not with the luggage, Harold pointed out. No, the station agent agreed, not with their luggage.

  There was no telephone in the station and so, leaving the dufflebag and the suitcases on the sidewalk where they could keep an eye on them, they walked across the cobblestone street to the café. He explained their situation to the four men sitting at a table on the café terrace, and learned that there was no telephone here either. One of the men called out to the proprietress, who appeared from within, and said that if Monsieur would walk in to the village, he would find several shops open, and from one of these he could telephone to the château.

  Standing on the sidewalk beside the luggage, Barbara followed Harold with her eyes until the street curved off to the left and he disappeared between two slate-roofed stone houses. He was gone for a long, long time. Just as she was beginning to wonder if she would ever see him again, she heard the rattle of an approaching vehicle—a noisy old truck that wheezed and shook and, to her surprise, turned into the station platform at the last minute and drew to a stop beside her. The cab door swung open and Harold hopped out.

  In the driver’s seat was a middle-aged man who looked like a farmer and had beautiful blue eyes.

  “I was beginning to worry about you,” she said.

  “This is M. Fleury. What a time I’ve had!”

  Sitting in the back of the truck, on the two largest suitcases, they were driven through the village and out into open country. The grain was turning yellow in the fields, and they saw poppies growing along the roadside. The dirt road was rough and full of potholes, and they had to keep turning their faces away to keep from breathing in the dust.

  “This is too far to walk even without the luggage,” he said.

  “I’ll have to wash my hair,” she said. “But it’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  Before long they had a glimpse of the château, across the fields. The trees hid it from view. Then they turned in, between two gate posts, and drove up a long curving cinder drive, and saw the house again, much closer now. It was of white limestone, with tall French windows and a steep slate roof. Across the front was a raised terrace with a low box hedge and a stone balustrade. To the right of the house there was an enormous Lebanon cedar, whose branches fell like dark-green waves, and a high brick wall with ornamental iron gates. To their eyes, accustomed to foundation planting and wisteria or rose trellises, the façade looked a little bare and new. The truck went through the gate and into a courtyard and stopped. For a moment they were aware of how much racket the engine made, and then M. Fleury turned the ignition off to save gasoline, and after that it was the silence they heard. They sat waiting with their eyes on the house and finally a door burst open and a small, thin, black-haired woman came hurrying out. She stopped a few feet from the truck and nodded bleakly to M. Fleury, who touched his beret but said nothing. We must look very strange sitting in the back of the truck with our luggage crammed in around us, Harold thought. But on the other hand, it was rather strange that there was no one at the station to meet them.

  They had no way of knowing who the woman was, but she must know who they were, and so they waited uneasily for her to speak. Her eyes moved from them to the fresh Cunard Line stickers on their suitcases. “Yes?” she said coldly in English. “You wanted something?”

  “Mme Viénot?” Barbara asked timidly.

  The woman clapped her hand to her forehead. “Mme Rhodes! Do forgive me! I thought— Oh how extraordinary! I thought you were middle-aged!”

  This idea fortunately struck all three of them as comical. Harold jumped down from the truck and then turned and helped Barbara down. Mme Viénot shook hands with them and, still amazed, still amused at he
r extraordinary mistake, said: “I cannot imagine what you must think of me.… We were just starting to go to the station to meet you. M. Carrère very kindly offered his car. The Bentley would have been more comfortable, perhaps, but you seem to have managed very well by yourselves.” She smiled at the camion.

  “We thought of telephoning,” Barbara said, “but there was no telephone in the station, and at the Café de la Gare they told us—”

  “We can’t use the telephone after eleven o’clock on Sundays,” Mme Viénot interrupted. “The service is cut off. So even if you had tried to reach us by telephone, you couldn’t have.” She was still smiling, but they saw that she was taking them in—their faces, their American clothes, the gray dust they were powdered with as a result of their ride in the open truck.

  “The Stationmaster said we could walk,” Barbara said, “but we had the suitcases, so I stayed with them, at the station, and my husband walked into the village and found a store that was open, a fruit and vegetable store. And a very nice woman—”

  “Mme Michot. She’s a great gossip and takes a keen interest in my guests. I cannot imagine why.”

  “—told us that M. Fleury had a truck,” Barbara finished.

  Mme Viénot turned and called out to a servant girl who was watching them from a first-floor window to come and take the suitcases that the two men were lifting from the back of the truck. “So you found M. Fleury and he brought you here.… M. Fleury is an old friend of our family. You couldn’t have come under better auspices.”

  Harold tried to prevent the servant girl from carrying the two heaviest suitcases, but she resisted so stubbornly that he let go of the handles and stepped back and with a troubled expression on his face watched her stagger off to the house. They were much too heavy for her, but probably in an old country like France, with its own ideas of chivalry and of the physical strength and usefulness of women, that didn’t matter as much as who should and who shouldn’t be carrying suitcases.

  “You are tired from your journey?” Mme Viénot asked.

  “Oh, no,” Barbara said. “It was beautiful all the way.”

  She looked around at the courtyard and then through the open gateway at the patchwork of small green and yellow fields in the distance. Taking her courage in both hands, she murmured: “Si jolie!”

  “You think so?” Mme Viénot murmured politely, but in English. A man might perhaps not have noticed it. Barbara’s next remark was in English. When Harold started to pay M. Fleury, Mme Viénot exclaimed: “Oh dear, I’m afraid you don’t understand our currency, M. Rhodes. That’s much too much. You will embarrass M. Fleury. Here, let me do it.” She took the bank notes out of his hands and settled with M. Fleury herself.

  M. Fleury shook hands all around, and smiled at the Americans with his gentian-blue eyes as they tried to convey their gratitude. They were reluctant to let him go. In a country where, contrary to what they had been told, no one seemed to speak English, he had understood their French. He had been their friend, for nearly an hour. Instinct told them they were not going to manage half so well without him.

  The engine had to be cranked five or six times before it caught, and M. Fleury ran around to the driver’s seat and adjusted the spark.

  “I never hear the sound of a motor in the courtyard without feeling afraid,” Mme Viénot said.

  They looked at her inquiringly.

  “I think the Germans have come back.”

  “They were here in this house?” Barbara asked.

  “We had them all through the war.”

  The Americans turned and looked up at the blank windows. The war had left no trace that a stranger could see. The courtyard and the white château were at that moment as peaceful and still as a landscape in a mirror.

  “It looks as if it had never been any other way than the way it is now,” Harold said.

  “The officers were quartered in the house, and the soldiers in the outbuildings. I cannot say that we enjoyed them, but they were correct. ‘Kein Barbar,’ they kept telling us—‘We are not barbarians.’ And fancy, they expected my girls to dance with them!”

  Mme Viénot waited rather longer than necessary for the irony to be appreciated, and then with a hissing intake of breath she said: “It’s exciting to be in the clutches of the tiger … and to know that you are quite helpless.”

  The truck started up with a roar, and shot through the gateway. They stood watching until it disappeared from sight. The silence flooded back into the courtyard.

  “So delicious, your arriving with M. Fleury,” Mme Viénot said.

  He searched through his coat pockets for a pencil and the little notebook, wherein the crises were all recorded: “Rennes départ 7h50 Le Mans 10h20, départ 11h02,” etc. Also the money paid out for laundry, hotel rooms, meals in restaurants, and conducted tours. This was a mistake, he thought. We shouldn’t have come here.… He wrote: “100 fr transportation Brenodville-sur-Euphrone to chateau” and put the pencil and notebook back in his breast pocket.

  Mme Viénot was looking at him with her head cocked to one side, frankly amused. “I wonder what it was that made me decide you were middle-aged,” she said. “Why, you’re babies!”

  He started to shoulder the dufflebag and she said: “Don’t bother with the luggage. Thérèse will see to it.” Linking her arm cozily through Barbara’s, she led them into the house by the back door and along a passageway to the stairs.

  When they reached the second-floor landing, the Americans glanced expectantly down a long hallway that went right through the center of the house, and then saw that Mme Viénot had continued on up the stairs. She threw open the door on the left in the square hall at the head of the stairs and said: “My daughter’s room. I think you’ll find it comfortable.”

  Harold waited for Barbara to exclaim “How lovely!” and instead she drew off her black suede gloves. He went to the window and looked out. Their room was on the front of the château and overlooked the park. The ceiling sloped down on that side, because of the roof. The wallpaper was black and white on a particularly beautiful shade of dark red, and not like any wallpaper he had ever seen.

  “Sabine is in Paris now,” Mme Viénot said. “She’s an artist. She does fashion drawings for the magazine La Femme Elégante. You are familiar with it? … It’s like your Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, I believe.… We dine at one thirty on Sunday. That won’t hurry you?”

  Barbara shook her head.

  “If you want anything, call me,” Mme Viénot said, and closed the door behind her.

  There was a light knock almost immediately, and thinking that Mme Viénot had come back to tell them something, Barbara called “Come in,” but it was not Mme Viénot, it was the blond servant girl with the two heaviest suitcases. As she set them down in the middle of the room, Barbara said “Merci,” and the girl smiled at her. She came back three more times, with the rest of the luggage, and the last time, just before she turned away, she allowed her gaze to linger on the two Americans for a second. She seemed to be expecting them to understand something, and to be slightly at a loss when they didn’t.

  “Should we have tipped her?” Barbara asked, when they were alone again.

  “I don’t think so. The service is probably compris,” Harold said, partly because he was never willing to believe that the simplest explanation is the right one, and partly because he was confused in his mind about the ethics of tipping and felt that, fundamentally, it was impolite. If he were a servant, he would resent it; and refuse the tip to show that he was not a servant. So he alternated: he didn’t tip when he should have and then, worried by this, he overtipped the next time.

  “I should have told her that we have some nylon stockings for her,” Barbara said.

  “Or if it isn’t, I’ll do something about it when we leave,” he said. “It’s too bad, though, about M. Fleury. After those robbers in Cherbourg it would have been a pleasure to overtip him—if four hundred francs was overtipping, which I doubt. She was probably worry
ing about herself, not us.” Trying one key after another from Barbara’s key ring with the rabbit’s foot attached to it, he found the one that opened the big brown suitcase. “What about the others?” he asked, snapping the catches.

  “Maybe we’ll run into him in the village,” Barbara said. “Just that one and the dufflebag.” She took the combs out of her hair, which then fell to her shoulders. “The rest can wait.”

  He carried the dufflebag into the bathroom, and she changed from her suit into a wool dressing gown, and then began transferring the contents of the large brown suitcase, a pile at a time, to the beds, the round table in the center of the room, and the armoire. She was pleased with their room. After the violent curtains and queer shapes of the hotel rooms of the past week, here was a place they could settle down in peacefully and happily. An infallible taste had been at work, and the result was like a wax impression of one of those days when she woke lighthearted, knowing that this was going to be a good day all day long—that whatever she had to do would be done quickly and easily; that the telephone wouldn’t ring and ring; that dishes wouldn’t slip through her nerveless hands and break; that it wouldn’t be necessary to search through the accumulation of unanswered letters for some reassurance that wasn’t there, or to ask Harold if he loved her.

  Standing in the bathroom door, with his shirt unbuttoned and his necktie trailing from one hand, he surveyed the red room and then said: “It couldn’t be handsomer.”