The Chateau

by William Maxwell

  And what was her childhood like?

  Well, where to begin is again the question. At the seashore? Or should we take up, one after another, the dogs, the nursemaids? Or the time she broke her arm? She was seven when that happened. Or the period when she cared about nothing but horses? Or that brief, heartbreaking, first falling in love? Or the piles of clothes on the bed, on the chairs in her room, all with name tapes sewed on them, and the suitcases waiting to be filled?

  Or should we open that old exercise book that by some accident has survived? “One day our mother gave the children a party.

  There were fourteen merry girls and boys at the party.

  They played games and raced about the lawn with Rover.

  But John fell from a tree and broke his arm.

  Mother sent a boy to bring the doctor.

  The doctor set the arm and said that it would soon be better.

  Was not John a brave boy to bear the pain as he did.”

  Three times 269 is not 627, of course; and neither does 854 minus 536 equal 316. But it is true that there are seven days in the week, and that all the children must learn their lessons. Also that it is never the raveled sleeve of just one day’s care that sleep knits up. She should have been at home nursing her baby, and instead here they both are in Europe. And every month contains doomed days, such sad sighs, the rain that does not rain, and blood that is the color of bitter disappointment when it finally flows. This is the lesson she is now learning.

  The shadow that showed up in the crystal ball?

  Right. And all the years he was growing up, he would have liked to be somebody else—an athlete, broad-shouldered, blond, unworried, and popular. Even now he avoids his reflection in mirrors and wants to be liked by everybody. Not loved; just liked. On meeting someone who interests him he goes toward that person unhesitatingly, as if this were the one moment they would ever have together, their one chance of knowing each other. He is curious and at the same time he is tactful. He lets the other person know, by the way he listens, by the sympathetic look in his brown eyes, that he wants to know everything; and at the same time the other person has the reassuring suspicion that Harold Rhodes will not ask questions it would be embarrassing to have to answer. He tries to attach people to him, not so that he can use them or so that they will add to his importance but only because he wants them to be a part of his life. The landscape must have figures in it. And it never seems to occur to him that there is a limit to the number of close friendships anyone can decently and faithfully accommodate.

  If wherever you go you are always looking for eyes that meet your eyes, hands that do not avoid touching or being touched by you, then you must have more than two eyes and two hands; you must be a kind of monster. If, on meeting someone who interests you, you go toward them unhesitatingly as if this is the only moment you will ever have for knowing each other, then you must learn to deal with second meetings that aren’t always successful, and third meetings that are even less satisfactory. If on your desk there are too many unanswered letters, the only thing to do is to write to someone who hasn’t written to you lately. And if sometimes, hanging by your knees head down from a swinging trapeze high under the canvas tent, you find too many aerial artists are coming toward you at a given moment and you have to choose one and let the others drop, you can at least try not to see their eyes accusing you of an inhuman betrayal you did not mean and cannot avoid. Harold Rhodes isn’t a monster, he doesn’t try to escape the second meetings, he answers some of the letters, and he spends a great deal of time, patience, and energy inducing performers with hurt feelings to climb the rope ladder again and fling themselves across the intervening void. Some of them do and some of them don’t.

  That’s all very interesting, but just exactly what are these two people doing in Europe?

  They’re tourists.

  Obviously. But it’s too soon after the war. Traveling will be much pleasanter and easier five years from now. The soldiers have not all gone home yet. People are poor and discouraged. Europe isn’t ready for tourists. Couldn’t they wait?

  No, they couldn’t. The nail doesn’t choose the time or the circumstances in which it is drawn to the magnet.

  They would have done better to do a little reading before they came, so they would know what to look for. And they could at least have brushed up on their French.

  They could have, but they didn’t. They just came. They are the first wave. As Mme Viénot perceived, they are unworldly, and inexperienced. But they are not totally so; there are certain areas where they cannot be fooled or taken advantage of. But there is, in their faces, something immature, reluctant—

  You mean they are Americans.

  No, I mean all those acts of imagination by which the cupboard is again and again proved to be not bare. And putting so much faith in fortunetelling. Playing cards, colored stones, bamboo sticks, birthday-cracker mottoes, palmistry, the signs of the zodiac, the first star—she trusts them all, but only with a partial trust. Each new prognostication takes precedence over the former ones, and when the cards are not accommodating, she reshuffles them and tells herself a new fortune. Her right hand lies open now, relaxed on the pillow, her palm ready and waiting for a fortuneteller who can walk through locked doors and see in the dark.

  Unaccustomed to sleeping in separate beds, they toss and turn and are cold and have tiring dreams that they would not have had if their two bodies were touching. But they won’t be here long, or anywhere else. Ten days in Paris after they leave here. A night in Lausanne. Six days in Salzburg. Four days in Venice. Four more days in Florence. Ten days in Rome, a night in Pisa, two days in San Remo … No place can hold them.

  And it is something that they are turned towards each other in their sleep. It means that day in and day out they are companionable and happy with one another; that they have identical (or almost) tastes and pleasures; and that when they diverge it is likely to be in their attitude toward the world outside their marriage. For example, he thinks he does not believe in God, she thinks she does. If she is more cautious about people than he is, conceivably this is because in some final way she needs them more. He needs only her. Parted from her in a crowd he becomes anxious, and in dreams he wanders through huge houses calling her name.

  Chapter 4

  WHAT TIME IS BREAKFAST?” he asked, rising up from his bed. She did not know. They had forgotten to ask about breakfast. They saw that it was a dark, rainy Monday morning.

  They washed in ice-cold water, dressed, and went downstairs. He peered around the folding screen, half expecting the household to be assembled in the drawing room, waiting for them. The beautiful pink and white room was deserted, and the rugs were rolled up, the chairs pushed together. In the dining room, the table was set for five instead of seven, and their new places were pointed out to them by their napkin rings. Talking in subdued tones, they discovered the china pitcher of coffee under a quilted cozy, and, under a large quilted pad, slices of bread that were hard as a rock and burned black around the edges from being toasted over a gas burner. The dining-room windows offered a prospect of wet gravel, long grass bent over by the weight of the rain, and dripping pine branches. The coffee was tepid.

  “I think it would have been better if we hadn’t got her to lower the price,” he said suddenly.

  “Did she say anything about it?”

  He shook his head. “The amount she asked was not exorbitant.”

  “It was high. Muriel said it was high. She lived in France for twenty years. She ought to know.”

  “That was before the war. In the total expenses of the summer, it wouldn’t have made any difference, one way or the other.”

  “She said it was not right, and that it was a matter of principle.”

  “Muriel, you mean? I know, but the first two or three days after we got off the boat, I consistently undertipped people, because I didn’t know what the right amount was, and I didn’t want us to look like rich Americans throwing our money around, and in
every case they were so nice about it.”

  “How do you know you undertipped them?”

  “By the way they acted when I gave them more.”

  “Mme Viénot has a romantic idea of herself,” Barbara said. “The way she flirts with you, for instance …”

  He took the green Michelin guide to the château country from his coat pocket and put it beside his plate. After a week of sight-seeing, any other way of passing the time seemed unnatural.

  “You’re sure she was flirting with me?”

  “Certainly. But it’s a game. She’s attempting to produce, with your help, the person she sees herself as—the worldly, fascinating adventuress, the heroine of Gone with the Wind.”

  He filled their cups again and offered her the burned bread, which she refused. Then he opened the guidebook and began to turn the pages as he ate. Programmes de voyage … Un peu d’histoire … wars and maps … medieval cooking utensils … The fat round towers of Chaumont, and Amboise as it was in the sixteenth century.

  “How old do you think Gagny is?” Barbara said.

  “I don’t know. He varies so. Somewhere between twenty-three and thirty-five.”

  More maps. Visit rapide … Visite du Château …

  “Why isn’t he married?”

  “People don’t have to get married,” he said. “Sometimes they just—”

  Rain blew against the windowpanes, so hard that they both turned and looked.

  “Besides, he’s in the diplomatic service,” Harold said. “He can’t just marry any pretty girl he feels like marrying. He needs a countess or somebody like that, and I suppose they won’t have him because he isn’t rich.”

  “How do you know he isn’t rich?”

  “If he were rich he wouldn’t be here. He’d be somewhere where the sun is shining.”

  Behind his back a voice said: “Good morning!” and Mme Viénot swept into the dining room, wearing a dark-red housecoat, with her head tied up in a red and green Liberty scarf. She sat down at the head of the table. “You slept well?… I’m so glad. You must have been very tired after your journey.” She placed her box of sugar directly in front of her, so there could be no possible misunderstanding, and then said: “What a pity it is raining again! M. Gagny is very discouraged about the weather, which I must say is not what we are accustomed to in July.”

  “Is it bad for the grain?” Harold asked.

  Mme Viénot lifted the quilted pad and considered the burned bread with a grimace of disapproval. “Not at this time of year. But my gardener is worried about the hay.” She peered into the china pitcher and her eyebrows rose in disbelief. “Perhaps it is only a shower. I hope so.” She picked up the plate of toast and pushed her chair back. “The cook, poor dear, forgot to moisten the bread. I don’t care for it when it is hard like this. Taking the pitcher also with her, she went out to the kitchen.

  “We shouldn’t have had a second cup,” Barbara whispered.

  “I think it was all right,” he said.

  “But she looked—”

  “I know. I saw it. Coffee is rationed, but surely that wasn’t coffee.… There wasn’t enough for the others, in any case.”

  “You won’t forget to speak to her about the beds, will you?” Barbara said. “I wrote her that we wanted a room with a grand lit, and if she didn’t have anything but twin beds, it was up to her to tell us. And she didn’t.”

  “No,” he agreed, shifting in his chair, the uneasy male caught between two females.

  “And the bicycles … You don’t think she overheard what we were saying?”

  “It wouldn’t matter, unless she was standing out in the hall the whole time.”

  “She could have been.”

  They sat in wary silence until the pantry door opened.

  “We must plan some excursions for you,” Mme Viénot said. “You are in the center of one of the most interesting parts of France. The king used to come here with the court, for the hunting. They each had their own château and it was marvelous.”

  “We want to see Azay-le-Rideau,” he said, “and Chinon, and Chenonceau—”

  “Chinon is a ruin,” Mme Viénot said disapprovingly. “Unless you have some particular reason for going there—” She surveyed the table and then got up again and pried open the door of the sideboard with her table knife. They heard a faint exclamation and then: “Within twenty-four hours after I open a jar of confitures it is half gone.

  “Do have some,” she said as she sat down again. “It is plum.”

  They both refused.

  “Chenonceau is ravishing,” Mme Viénot said, and helped herself sparingly to the jam. “It belonged to Diane de Poitiers. She was the king’s mistress. She adored Chenonceau, and Catherine de Médicis took it away from her and gave her Chaumont instead.”

  He asked the reason for this exchange.

  “She was jealous,” Mme Viénot explained, with a shrug.

  “But couldn’t the king stop her?”

  “He was killed in a tournament.”

  “Are the châteaux within walking distance?” Barbara asked.

  “Alas, no,” Mme Viénot said.

  “But we can bicycle to some of them?” he asked.

  In one of the two polite letters that arrived before they left New York, Mme Viénot had assured them that bicycles would be waiting for them when they arrived. Now she filled their cups and then her own and said plaintively: “I inquired about bicycles for you in the village, and it appears there aren’t any. Perhaps you can arrange to rent them in Blois. Or in Tours. Tours is a dear old city—you know it?”

  “We were there overnight,” Barbara said.

  “You saw the cathedral?”

  Barbara shook her head.

  “You must see the cathedral,” Mme Viénot said. “The old part of the city was badly damaged during the war. Whole blocks went down between the center of town and the river. So shocking, isn’t it?”

  The servant girl appeared with a plate of fresh toast that had not been burned and the china pitcher, now full of steaming hot coffee. Mme Viénot remarked in French to the surrounding air that someone in the house was extremely fond of confitures, and with a sullen look Thérèse withdrew to the kitchen.

  “Now, with the rubble cleared away,” Mme Viénot said cheerfully: “you can have no idea what it was like.… The planes were American.”

  For a whole minute nobody said anything. Then Harold said: “Riding on the train we saw a great deal of rebuilding. Everywhere, in fact.”

  “Our own people raised the money for the new bridge at Tours,” Mme Viénot said. “Naturally we are very proud of it. They are of stone, the new buildings?”

  He nodded. “There’s one thing, though, I kept noticing, and that is that the openings—the windows and doors—were all the same size. Do they have to do that? The new buildings look like barracks.”

  “In Tours all the new buildings are of stone. It would have been cheaper to use wood, but that would have meant sacrificing the style of the locality, which is very beautiful,” Mme Viénot said firmly, and so prevented him from pursuing a subject that, he now perceived, might well be painful to her. Probably it wasn’t possible to rebuild, exactly as they were before, houses that had been built hundreds of years ago, and added onto and changed continually ever since.

  He said: “Is there a taxi in the village?”

  “There is one,” Mme Viénot said. “A woman has it, and I’m afraid you will find her expensive. I’m sorry we haven’t a car to offer you. We sold our Citroën after the war, thinking we could get a new one immediately, and it was a dreadful mistake. You can take the train, you know.”

  “From Brenodville?”

  She nodded. Rearranging her sleeves so they wouldn’t trail across her plate, she said: “I used to go to parties at Chaumont before the war. The Princesse de Broglie owned it then. She married the Infant Louis-Ferdinand, of Spain, and he was not always nice to her.” She looked expectantly at them and seemed to be waiting
for some response, some comment or anecdote about a royal person they knew who was also inconsiderate. “The Princesse was a very beautiful woman, and immensely rich. She was of the Say family—they manufacture sugar—and she wanted a title. So she married the Prince de Broglie, and he died. And then in her old age she married the Infant, and mothered him, and gave parties to which everyone went, and kept an elephant. The bridge at Chaumont is still down, but there is a ferry, I am told. I must find out for you how often it goes back and forth.… The Germans blew up all the bridges across the Loire, and for a while it was most inconvenient.”

  “How do we get to Chenonceau?” Harold asked.

  “You take a train to Amboise, and from there you take a taxi. It’s about twelve kilometers.”

  “And there are lots of trains?”

  “There are two,” Mme Viénot said. “One in the morning and one at night. I’ll get a schedule for you. Before the war, the mayor of Brenodville was a member of the Chamber of Deputies and we had excellent service; all the fast trains between Paris and Nantes stopped here.… Amboise is also worth seeing. Léonard de Vinci is buried there. And during the seventeenth century, there was an uprising—it was the time of the Huguenot wars—and a great many men were put to death. They say that Marie Stuart and the young king used to dine out on the battlements at Amboise, in order to watch the hangings.”

  “What about buses?”

  “I don’t think you’ll find the bus at all convenient,” Mme Viénot said. “You have to walk a mile and a half to the highway where it passes, and usually it is quite crowded.” Then as the silence in the dining room became prolonged: “I’ve been meaning to ask you about young George Ireland. We grew very fond of him while he was here, and he was a great favorite in the village. What is he doing now?”

  “George is in school,” Harold said.

  “But now, this summer?”

  “He’s working. He’s selling little dolls. He showed them to us the last time we were at the Irelands’ for dinner. A man and a woman this high … You wind them up and they dance around and around.”