“I don’t know.”
“I liked him.”
“So did I.”
“It’s very sad.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, meaning something quite different —meaning that there was nothing either of them could do about it now.
He called out who they were as they passed through the foyer of the apartment building. They went up in the elevator, and the hall light went out just as he thrust his key at the keyhole. He stepped into the dark apartment and felt around until he found the light switch. The study door was closed and so was the door of Mme Cestre’s bedroom.
Lying in bed in the dark, looking through the open window at the one lighted room in the building across the street, he said: “What it amounts to is that you cannot be friends with somebody, no matter how much you like them, if it turns out that you don’t really understand one another.”
“Also—” he began, five minutes later, and was stopped by the sound of Barbara’s soft, regular breathing. He turned over and as he lay staring at the lighted room he felt a sudden first wave of homesickness come over him.
Chapter 15
THE FIRST DAYLIGHT, whitening the sky and making the windows shine, revealed that the three Berliners had spent the night in Mme Cestre’s bedroom. Their threadbare, unpressed, spotty coats and trousers, neatly folded, were on three chairs. Also, their shirts and socks and underwear, which had been washed without soap. Two of them slept in the narrow bed, with their mouths open like dead people and their breathing so quiet they might have been dead. The third slept on the floor, with a rug under him, his head on the leather brief case, his pink-tinted glasses beside him, and Mme Cestre’s spare comforter keeping him from catching pneumonia. So pale they were, in the gray light. So unaggressive, so intellectual, so polite even in their sleep. Oh heartbreaking—what happens to children, said the fruitwood armoire, vast and maternal, bound in brass, with brass handles on the drawers, brass knobs on the two carved doors. The dressing table, modern, with its triple way of viewing things, said: It is their own doing and redoing and undoing.
“BONJOUR, monsieur-dame,” said the tall, full-bosomed woman with carrot-colored hair and a beautiful carriage. She raised the front wheels of the teacart and then the back, so that they did not touch the telephone cord. When she had gone back to the kitchen, Harold said: “There are plates and cups for three, which can only mean that he is having breakfast with us.”
“You think?” Barbara said.
“By his own choice,” Harold said, “since there is now someone to bring him a tray in his room.”
They sat and waited. In due time, Eugène appeared and drew the armchair up to the teacart.
It was a beautiful day. The window was wide open and the sunlight was streaming in from the balcony. Eugène inquired about their evening with Sabine, and the telephone, like a spoiled child that cannot endure the conversation of the grownups, started ringing. Eugène left the room. When he came back, he said: “It is possible that I may be going down to the country on Friday. A cousin of Alix is marrying. And if I do go—as I should, since it is a family affair—it will be early in the morning, before you are up. And I may stay down for the week end.”
They tried not to look pleased.
He accepted a second cup of coffee and then asked what they had done about getting gasoline coupons. “But we don’t need them,” Harold said, and so, innocently, obliged Eugène to admit that he did. “I seldom enjoy the use of my car,” he said plaintively, “and it would be pleasant to have the gasoline for short trips into the country now and then.”
He reached into his bathrobe pocket and brought out a slip of paper on which he had written the address of the place they were to go to for gasoline coupons.
“How can we ask for gasoline coupons if we don’t have a car?” Harold said.
“As Americans traveling in France you are entitled to the coupons whether you use them or not,” Eugène said. “And the amount of gasoline that tourists are allowed is quite considerable.”
Harold put the slip of paper on the teacart and said: “Could you tell us— But there is no reason you should know, I guess. We have to get a United States Army visa to enter Austria.”
“I will call a friend who works at the American Embassy,” Eugène said, rising. “He will know.”
Five minutes later, he was back with the information Harold had asked for.
Walking past the open door of the dressing room, Harold saw the Germans for the first time that morning. They were crowded around Eugène, and pressing on him their latest thoughts about their predicament. He avoided looking at whoever was speaking to him, and his attention seemed to be entirely on the arrangement of his shirt tails inside his trousers.
Later he stopped to complain about them, standing in the center of the Americans’ room, with the door open, so that there was a good chance that he might be overheard. It was already too late for the Germans to get to the conference in Rome in time to present their credentials, he said. Their places would be taken by alternates.
“What will they do?” Harold asked. “Turn around and go home?”
“There are other conferences scheduled for other Italian cities,” Eugène said, “and they hope to be allowed to attend one of these. Unfortunately, there isn’t the slightest chance of their getting the visas they need to cross the Italian border. The whole thing is a nuisance—the kind of silliness only Germans are capable of.”
Though Eugène was bored with the Germans’ dilemma and despised them personally for having got themselves into it, they had thrown themselves on his kindness, and it appeared that he had no choice but to go on trying to help them.
The Americans spent the morning getting to know parts of Paris that are not mentioned in guidebooks. The address on Eugène’s slip of paper turned out to be incorrect; there was no such number. Harold was relieved; he had dreaded exposure. The information about where to go to get the Austrian visa was also wrong. They talked to the concierge of the building, who gave them new and explicit directions, and in a few minutes they found themselves peering through locked doors at the marble foyer of an unused public building. Eventually, by asking a gendarme, they arrived at the Military Permit Office. There they stood in line in a large room crowded with people whom no country wanted and whom France could not think what to do with. When Harold produced their American passports, the man next to him turned and looked at him reproachfully. All around them, people were arguing tirelessly with clerks who pretended (sometimes humorously) not to understand what they wanted, not to speak German or Italian, not to know that right there on the counter in front of them was the rubber stamp that would make further argument unnecessary. As Harold and Barbara went from clerk to clerk, from the large room on the first floor to a smaller office on the third floor, and finally outdoors with a new address to find, they began to feel less and less different from the homeless people around them, even though they had a perfectly good home and were only trying to get to a music festival. At the right place at last, they were told that they had to leave their passports with the application for their visas, which would be ready the next day.
After lunch, they walked through the looking glass, leaving the homeless on the other side, and spent the afternoon sight-seeing. They took the Métro to the Place du Trocadéro, descended the monumental stairs of the Palais de Chaillot, went through the aquarium, and then strolled across the Pont d’Ièna in the sunshine.
At the top of the Tour Eiffel there was a strong wind and they could not bear to look straight down. All that they remembered afterward of what they saw was the colored awnings all over Paris. They took a taxi home, and as they went down the hall to their own room they could hear the Germans talking to each other, behind the closed door of theirs.
Meeting Herr Rothenberg in the hall, they learned that he and his friends had spent the day going the rounds of the embassies and consulates.
“But you ought to be seeing Paris,” Harold said. “It’s so beautiful.�
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“We will come back and see the museums another time,” Herr Rothenberg said, smiling and quite pleased with the Paris they had seen.
Shortly afterward, he appeared at their door and said that Françoise had gone home and could they please have some bread and butter and coffee?
Harold followed Barbara into the kitchen and as she was putting the kettle on he said: “Do you suppose they don’t realize that all those things are rationed?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but let’s not tell them.”
“All right. I wasn’t going to. It just occurred to me that maybe the national characteristics were asserting themselves.”
“I’m so in love with this kitchen,” Barbara said. “If it were up to me, I’d never leave.”
The two Americans and the three Germans had coffee together in Mme Cestre’s drawing room, with the shutters open and the light pouring in. The Germans showed Barbara snapshots of their wives, and Harold wrote their names and addresses in his financial diary, and then they all went out on the balcony so that Barbara could take the Berliners’ pictures. They stood in a row before her, three pale scarecrows stiffly composed in attitudes that would be acceptable to posterity.
Still in a glow from the success of the tea party, Harold went down into the Place Redouté and found the orange peddler and bought a bag of oranges from him, which he then presented to Herr Rothenberg at the door of their room, with a carefully prepared little speech and three thousand-franc notes, in case the Germans found themselves in need of money on the next lap of their journey. The effect of this act of generosity was partly spoiled because, out of a kind of Anglo-Saxon politeness they were unfamiliar with, he didn’t give them a chance to finish their speeches of gratitude. But at all events the money got from his wallet into theirs, where it very much needed to be.
At twenty-five minutes after six, he walked into the study with a calling card in his hand and stood by Eugène’s desk, waiting until his wrist watch and the clock on the mantelpiece agreed that it was half-past six. On the back of the card Mme Straus-Muguet had scrawled the telephone number of the convent in Auteuil, and “coup de fil a 6h½.” During the three and a half weeks that they had been in France he had managed, through the kindness of one person and another, not to have to talk over the telephone. He would just as soon not have done it now.
A woman’s voice answered. He asked to speak to Mme Straus-Muguet and the voice implored him not to hang up. He started to say that he had no intention of hanging up, and then realized by the silence that if he did speak no one would hear him. It was a long, long discouraging silence that extended itself until he wondered why he continued to hold the telephone to his ear. At last a familiar voice said his name and he was enveloped in affectionate inquiries and elaborate arrangements. Mme Straus’s voice came through strong and clear and he had no trouble understanding her. They were to meet her on Saturday evening at eight thirty sharp, she said, on the corner of the rue de Berry and the avenue des Champs Elysées. They would dine at the restaurant of her goddaughter and afterward go to the theater to see Mme Marguerite Mailly.
“At the Comédie Française?” he asked. They had not yet crossed that off their list.
Mme. Mailly had had a disagreement with the Comédie Française, Mme Straus said, and had left it to act in a modern comedy. The play had had an enormous success, and tickets were impossible to obtain, but knowing that they were arriving in Paris this week, she had written to her friend, and three places for the Saturday performance would be waiting at the box office.
“I don’t know that we should do that,” Barbara said doubtfully, when he told her about the arrangements. “It sounds so expensive, and she may not be able to afford it.”
“I don’t know that I’m up to dissuading her,” he said. “Tactfully, I mean, over the telephone, and in French. Besides, it is no longer 6h½, and if I called her back I probably wouldn’t reach her. Do you want to call her?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Maybe she’ll let us pay for the dinner,” he said.
AT BREAKFAST the next morning, Eugène surprised them by saying, as he passed his coffee cup across the tray to Barbara: “I am having a little dinner party this evening. You are free?… Good. I have asked Edouard Doria. He is Alix’s favorite cousin. I think you will like him.”
From the way he spoke, they realized that he was giving the dinner party for them. But why? Had Alix asked him to? And were the Berliners invited?
Meeting them in the hall, a few minutes later, Harold stepped aside to let them pass. They greeted him cheerfully, and when he inquired about their situation, they assured him that progress was being made, in the only way that it could be made; their story was being heard, their reasons considered. What they wanted was in no way unreasonable, and so in time some action, positive or negative, surely must result from their efforts. Meanwhile, there were several embassies they did not get to yesterday and that they planned to go to today.…
Harold stood outside the dining-room door and listened while Eugène consulted with Françoise about the linen, the china, the menu. They reached an agreement on the fish and the vegetable. There would be oysters, then soup. He left the soup to her discretion. For dessert there would be an ice, which he would pick up himself on the way home.
The Americans left the apartment in the middle of the morning, and crossed over to the Left Bank. They walked along the river as far as Notre Dame, and had lunch under an awning, in the rain. In the window of a shop on the Quai de la Mégisserie they saw a big glass bird cage, but how to get it home was the question. Also, it was expensive, and the little financial diary kept pointing out that, even though they had no hotel bill to pay, they were spending quite a lot of money on taxis, flowers, books, movies, and food.
As they came through the Place Redouté, they picked up the kodak films they had left to be developed. They were as surprised by what came out as if they had had no hand in it. Some of the pictures were taken on shipboard, and some in Pontorson and Mont-Saint-Michel. But there was nothing after that until the one of Beaumesnil, with the old trees rising twice as high as the roofs, and a cloud castle in the sky above the real one. The best snapshot of all was a family picture, taken on the lawn, their last morning at the château. This picture was mysterious in that, though the focus was sharp enough, there was so much that you couldn’t see. Alix’s shadow fell across Mme Bonenfant’s face. There was only her beautiful white hair, and her hand stretched out to steady herself against the fall all old people live in dread of. Alix’s hair blacked out the lower part of Harold’s face, and what you could see of him looked more like his brother. Barbara had taken the picture and so she wasn’t in it at all. A shadow from a branch overhead fell across the upper part of Mme Cestre’s face, leaving only her smile in bright sunlight and the rest in doubt. The two small children they had hardly set eyes on were nevertheless in the picture, and Mme Viénot was wearing the green silk dress with the New Look. Beside her was a broad expanse of white that could have been a castle wall but was actually Eugène’s shirt, with his massive face above it looking strangely like Ludwig van Beethoven’s. And Sabine, on the extreme right, standing in a diagonal shaft of light that didn’t come from the sun but from an inadvertent exposure as the film was being taken from the camera.
“I don’t see how we could not have taken more than one roll in all this time,” Barbara said.
“We were too busy looking.”
“We have no picture of Nils Jensen. Or of Mme Straus-Muguet.”
“With or without a picture, I will never forget either of them.”
“That’s not the point. You think you remember and you don’t.”
When they got home, she made him go straight out on the balcony where, even though it was late in the afternoon and the light was poor, she took a picture of him in his seersucker suit and scuffed white shoes, peering down into the rue Malène, and he took one of her in her favorite dress of black and lavender-blue, w
ith the buildings on the far side of the Place Redouté showing in the distance and in the foreground a sharply receding perspective of iron railing and rolled-up awnings.
There were no sounds from behind the closed door of Mme Cestre’s room. Nothing but a kind of anxious silence. Were they gone? Had somebody at last reached for a rubber stamp?
The Germans were not at the dinner party, and Eugène did not mention them all evening. The dinner party was not a success. The food was very good and so was the wine, and Alix’s cousin was young and likable, but when he spoke to the Americans in English, Eugène fidgeted. Barbara never came out from behind the shy, well-bred young woman whom nobody could ever have any reason to say anything unkind to, and Harold did not want to repeat the mistake they had made with Jean-Claude Lahovary, and so he did not proceed as if this was the one moment he and Edouard Doria would ever have for knowing each other (though as a matter of fact it was). He did not ask personal questions; he tried to speak grammatically when he spoke French; he waited to see what course the evening would take. In short, he was not himself. Edouard Doria sat smiling pleasantly and replied to the remarks that were addressed to him. Eugène did not explain to his three guests why he had thought they would like one another, and neither did he take the conversation into his own hands and make tears of amusement run down their cheeks with the outrageous things he said. As the evening wore on, the conversation was more and more in French, between the two Frenchmen.
IN THE MORNING, the study door was open and the room itself neat and empty. All through breakfast the Americans breathed the agreeable air of Eugène’s absence from the apartment, and they kept assuring each other that he would not possibly return that night; it was a long hard journey even one way.
When Harold took the mail from Mme Emile there were several letters for M. Soulès de Boisgaillard, which he put on the table in the front hall, by the study door, and one for M. et Mme Harold Rhodes. It was from Alix, and when Barbara drew it out of the envelope, they saw that she had put a four-leaf clover in it.
The Chateau Page 27
