The Chateau

by William Maxwell

  “ ‘… I was so sad not to say good-by to you at the station on Sunday. But I love writing to you now. It was delightful to know you both, and I wish you to go on in life loving more and more, being happier and happier, and making all those you meet feel happy themselves, as you did here—’ ”

  “Oh God!” Harold exclaimed.

  Barbara stopped reading and looked at him.

  “Read on,” he said.

  “ ‘We miss you a lot. Do write and give some of your impressions of Paris or Italy. And I hope we shall see one another very often in September. I should like to be in Paris with you and Eugène now. I hope you have at least nice breakfasts. I suppose you are a little too warm—but I will know all that on Friday as Mummy and I will join Eugène in the train for Tours. Good-by, dear you two, and my most friendly thoughts. Alix.’ ”

  He put the four-leaf clover in his financial diary, and then said: “It’s a nice letter, isn’t it? So affectionate. It makes me feel better about our staying here. At least her part wasn’t something we dreamed.”

  “If she were here, it would be entirely different,” Barbara said.

  “Do you think he will tell her how he has acted?”

  “No, do you?… On the other hand, she may not need to be told. That may be the reason she waited so long to speak about our staying here.”

  “But the letter doesn’t read as if she had any idea.”

  “I don’t think she has.”

  They went and stood in the kitchen door, talking to Françoise, who was delighted with the nylon stockings that Barbara presented to her. Holding up a wine bottle, she showed them how much less than a full liter of milk (at twenty-four times the price of milk before the war) they had allowed her for the little one, who fortunately was now in the country, where milk was plentiful. They told her about their life in America, and she told them about her childhood in a village in the Dordogne. They asked if the Germans had gone, and she said no. She had given them their dinner the night before, in their room.

  “What a queer household we are!” she exclaimed, rolling her eyes in the direction of Mme Cestre’s room. “Nobody speaks anybody else’s language and none of us belong here.” But they noticed that she was pleasant and kind to the Germans, and apparently it did not occur to them that she might have any reason to hate them. They did not hate anyone.

  The door to Mme Cestre’s room was open, and the sounds that came from it this morning were cheerful; those mice, too, were enjoying the fact that the cat was away. The Americans left their door open also, and were aware of jokes and giggling down the hall.

  “When we need butter, speak to Mme Emile,” Eugène had said, and so Harold went downstairs and found her having a cup of coffee at her big round table. She rose and shook hands with him and he took out his wallet and explained what he had come for. While she was in the next room he looked at the copy of Paris Soir spread out on the dining table. The police had at last tracked down the gangster Pierrot-le-Fou. He had been surprised in the bed of his mistress, Catherine. The dim photograph showed a young man with a beard. Reading on, Harold was reminded of the fire in Pontorson. No doubt the preparations had been just as extensive and thorough, and it was a mere detail that the gangster had got away. Mme Emile returned with a pound of black-market butter, which she wrapped in the very page he had been reading, and since her conscience seemed perfectly clear, his did not bother him, though he supposed they could both have been put in jail for this transaction.

  Shortly afterward, he went off to pick up their passports and the military permit to enter Austria, and when he returned at two o’clock, he found Barbara half frantic over a telephone call from Mme Straus-Muguet. “I didn’t want to answer,” she said, “but I was afraid it might be you. I thought you might be trying to reach me, for some reason. I tried to persuade her to call back, but she said she was going out, and she made me take the message!”

  What Barbara thought Mme Straus had said was that they were to meet her on the steps of the Madeleine at five.

  They left the apartment at four, and took a taxi to the bank, where they picked up their mail from home. Then they wandered through the neighborhood, going in and out of shops, and at a quarter of five they took up their stand at the top of the flight of stone steps that led up to the great open door of the church. For the next twenty minutes they looked expectantly at everybody who went in or out and at every figure that might turn out to be Mme Straus-Muguet approaching through the bicycle traffic. The more they looked for her, the less certain they were of what she looked like. Suddenly Barbara let out a cry; her umbrella was no longer on her arm. She distinctly remembered starting out with it, from the apartment, and she was fairly certain she had felt the weight of the umbrella on her arm as she stepped out of the taxi. She could not remember for sure but she thought she had laid it down in the china shop, in order to examine a piece of porcelain.

  They left the steps of the Madeleine, crossed through the traffic to the shop, and went in. The clerk Barbara spoke to was not the one Harold had wanted her to ask. No umbrella had been found; also, the clerk was not interested in lost umbrellas. As they left the shop, he said: “Don’t worry about it. You can buy another umbrella.”

  “Not like this one,” she said. The umbrella was for traveling, folded compactly into a third the usual length, and could be tucked away in a suitcase. “If only we’d gone to the Rodin Museum this afternoon, as we were intending to,” she said. “I’d never have lost it there.”

  He went back to the Madeleine and waited another quarter of an hour while she walked the length of the rue Royale, looking mournfully in shop windows and trying to remember a place, a moment, when she had put her umbrella down, meaning to pick it up right away.…

  “I’m sure I left it in the china shop,” she said, when she rejoined him.

  “It’s probably in that little room at the back, hidden away, this very minute.… ”

  He led her through the bicycle traffic to a table on the sidewalk in front of Larue’s and there, keeping one eye on the steps of the church, they had a Tom Collins. It was possible, they agreed, that Barbara had misunderstood and that Mme Straus might have been waiting (poor old thing!) on the steps of some other public monument. Or it could have been another day that they were supposed to meet her.

  “But if it turns out that I did get it right and that she’s stood us up, then let’s not bother any more with her,” Barbara said. “We have so little time in Paris, and there is so much that we want to do and see, and I have a feeling that she will engulf us.”

  “We’ve already said we’d have dinner with her and go to the theater, tomorrow night.”

  “If she knows so many people, why does she bother with two Americans? She may be making a play for us because we’re foreigners and don’t know any better.”

  “To what end?”

  “Oh, I don’t know!” Barbara exclaimed. “I don’t like it here! Should we go?”

  She was always depressed and irritated with herself when she lost something—as if the lost object had abandoned her deliberately, for a very good reason.

  The waiter brought the check, and while they were waiting for change, Harold said: “She may call this evening.”

  They crossed the street one last time, to make sure that their eyes hadn’t played tricks on them. There were several middle-aged and elderly women waiting on the steps of the Madeleine, any one of whom could have explained the true meaning of resignation, but Mme Straus-Muguet was not among them.

  That night, when they walked into the apartment at about a quarter of eleven, after dinner and another movie and a very pleasant walk home, the first thing they saw was that the mail on the hall table was gone. The study door was closed.

  “Oh why couldn’t he have stayed!” Barbara whispered, behind the closed door of their room. “It was so nice here without him. We were all so happy.”

  Chapter 16

  ALIX SENT YOU HER LOVE,” Eugène said when he joined them a
t breakfast.

  He did not explain why he had not stayed in the country, or describe the wedding. They were all three more silent than usual. The armchair, creaking and creaking, carried the whole burden of conversation. It had come down to Eugène from his great-great-grandfather. In a formal age that admired orators, military strategists, devout politicians, and worldly ecclesiastics, Jean-Marie Philippe Raucourt, fourth Count de Boisgaillard, had been merely a sensible, taciturn, unambitious man. He lived in a dangerous time, but, having bought his way into the King’s army, he quickly bought his way out again and put up with the King’s displeasure. He avoided houses where people were dying of smallpox and let no doctor into his own. He made a politic marriage and was impatient with those people who prided themselves on their understanding of the passions. He had children both in and out of wedlock, escaped the guillotine, noticed that there were ways of flattering the First Consul, and died at the age of fifty-two, in secure possession of his estates. His son, Eugène’s great-grandfather, was a Peer and Marshal of France under the Restoration. Eugène’s grandfather was an aesthete, and his taste was the taste of his time. He collected grandiose allegorical paintings and houses to hang them in, married late in life, and corresponded with Liszt and Clara Schumann. His oldest son, Eugène’s uncle, had a taste for litigation. The once valuable family estates were now heavily mortgaged and no good to anyone, and the house at Mamers stood empty. But scattered over the whole of France were the possessions of the fourth Count de Boisgaillard—beds and tables and armchairs (including this one), brocades, paintings, diaries, letters, books, firearms—and through these objects he continued, though so long dead, to exert an influence in the direction of order, restraint, the middle ground, the golden mean. But even he had to give way and became merely a name, a genealogical link, one of thousands, when the telephone started ringing. Seeing Eugène in his study, with his hat on the back of his head and the call going on and on in spite of his impatience and the air of distraction that increased each time he glanced over his shoulder at the clock, one would have said that there was no end to it; that it was a species of blackmail. The telephone seemed to know when he left the apartment. Once he was out the front door, it never rang again all day.

  At nine o’clock, Mme Emile brought up the morning’s mail, and Eugène, leafing through it, took out a letter and handed it to Harold, who ripped the envelope open and read the letter standing in the hall:

  Petite Barbara Chérie

  Petit Harold Chéri

  I am a shabby friend for failing to keep my word yesterday evening, and not coming to the rendezvous! But a violent storm prevented me, and no taxi in the rain. I was obliged to mingle my tears with those of the sky. Forgive me, then, petits amis chéris.… Yes, I say “chéris,” for a long long chain of tenderness will unite me to you always! It is with a mother’s heart that I love you both! My white hairs didn’t frighten you when we met at “Beaumesnil,” and at once I felt that a very sincere sympathy was about to be established between us. This has happened by the grace of God, for your dear presence has given back to me my twentieth year and the sweetness of my youth, during which I was so happy!… but after!… so unhappy! May these lines bring you the assurance of my great and warm tenderness, mes enfants chéris. Je vous embrasse tous deux. Votre vieille amie qui vous aime tant—

  Straus-Muguet

  This evening on the stroke of 8h½ if possible.

  He put the letter in the envelope and the envelope in his pocket, and said: “Did you ever hear of a restaurant called L’Etoile du Nord?”

  “Yes,” Eugène said.

  “What is it like?”

  “It’s a rather night-clubby place. Why do you ask?”

  “We’re having dinner there this evening, with Mme Straus-Muguet.”

  Eugène let out a low whistle of surprise.

  “Is it expensive?”

  “Very.”

  “Then perhaps we shouldn’t go,” Harold said.

  “If she couldn’t afford it, she wouldn’t have invited you,” Eugène said. “I have been making inquiries about her, and it seems that the people she says she knows definitely do not know her.”

  Harold hesitated, and then said: “But why? Why should she pretend that she knows people she doesn’t know?”

  Eugène shrugged.

  “Is she a social climber?” Harold asked.

  “It is more a matter of psychology.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Elle est un peu maniaque,” Eugène said.

  He went into the study to read his mail, and Harold was left with an uncomfortable choice: he could believe someone he did not like but who had probably no reason to lie, or someone he liked very much, whose behavior in the present instance … He took her letter out and read it again carefully. Mme Straus’s hair was not white but mouse-colored, and though the sky had been gray yesterday afternoon, it was no grayer than usual, and not a drop of rain had fallen on the steps of the Madeleine.

  When he and Barbara went out to do some errands, they saw that a lot more of the rolling metal shutters that were always pulled down over the store fronts at night had not been raised this morning, and in each case there was a note tacked up on the door frame or the door of the shop explaining that it would be closed for the “vacances.” Every day for the last three days it had been like this. Paris seemed to be withdrawing piecemeal from the world. At first it didn’t matter, except that it made the streets look shabby. But then suddenly it did matter. There were certain shops they had come to know and to enjoy using. And they could not leave Harold’s flannel trousers at the cleaners, though it was open this morning, because it would be closed by Monday. The fruit and vegetable store where they had gone every day, for a melon or lettuce or tomatoes, closed without warning. Half the shops in the neighborhood were closed, and they had to wander far afield to get what they needed.

  Shortly after they got home, there was a knock on their door, and when Barbara opened it, there stood the three Berliners in a row. They had come to say good-by. Herr Rothenberg and the one whose ears stuck out were going home. The one with the pink glasses had managed to get himself sent to a conference in Switzerland. There was something chilling in their manner that had not been there before; now that they were on the point of returning to Germany, they seemed to have become much more German. When they had finished thanking the Americans for their kindness, they took advantage of this opportunity to register with these two citizens of one of the countries that were now occupying the Fatherland their annoyance at being made a political football between the United States and the U.S.S.R.

  And the war? Harold asked silently as they shook hands. And the Jews?

  And then he was ashamed of himself, because what did he really know about them or what the last ten years had been like for them? Herr Doerffer and Herr Rothenberg and Herr Darmstadt were in all probability the merest shadow of true Prussian aggressiveness, and its reflection in them was undoubtedly something they were not aware of and couldn’t help, any more than he could help disliking them for being German. And feeling as he did, it would have been better—more honest—if he had not acted as if his feelings toward them were wholly kind. They carried away a false impression of what Americans were like, and he was left with a feeling of his own falseness.

  AS THEY STEPPED OUT OF THE TAXI at eight thirty Saturday evening, they saw a frail ardent figure in a tailored suit, waiting on a street corner with an air of intense conspiratorial expectancy. She’s missed her calling, Harold thought as he was paying the driver; we should be spies meeting in Lisbon, and recognizing each other by the seersucker suit and the little heart encrusted with diamonds.

  Mme Straus embraced Barbara and then Harold, and taking each of them by the arm, she guided them anxiously through traffic and up a narrow street. With little asides, endearments, irrelevancies, smiling and squeezing their hands, she caught them up in her own excitement. The restaurant was air-conditioned, the décor was nautical; the
whole look of the place was familiar but not French; it belonged in New York, in the West Fifties.

  They were shown to a table and the waiter offered a huge menu, which Mme Straus waved away. From her purse she extracted a scrap of paper on which she had written the dinner that—with their approval—she would order for them: a consommé, broiled chicken, dessert and coffee. They agreed that before the theater one doesn’t want to stuff.

  When the matter of the wine had been disposed of, she made them change seats so that Barbara was sitting beside her (“close to me”) and Harold was across the table (“where I can see you”). She demanded that they tell her everything they had seen and done in Paris, all that had happened at the château after her departure.

  Barbara described—but cautiously—their pleasure in staying in Mme Cestre’s apartment, and added that they had grown fond of Mme de Boisgaillard.

  “An angel!” Mme Straus-Muguet agreed. “And Monsieur also. But I do not care for her. She is not gentille.…” They understood that she meant Mme Viénot.

  “Do you know anything about M. Viénot?” Harold asked. “Is he dead? Why is his name never mentioned?”

  Mme Straus did not know for sure, but she thought it was—She tapped her forehead with her forefinger.

  “Maniaque?” Harold asked.

  She nodded, and complimented them both on the great strides they had made in speaking and understanding French.

  Under her close questioning, he began to tell her, hesitantly at first and then detail by detail, the curious situation they had let themselves in for by accepting the invitation to stay in Mme Cestre’s apartment. No one could have been more sane in her comments than Mme Straus, or more sympathetic and understanding, as he described Eugène’s moods and how they themselves were of two minds about everything. A few words and it was all clear to her. She had found herself, at some time or another, in just such a dilemma, and there was, in her opinion, nothing more trying, or more difficult to feel one’s way through. But what a pity that things should have turned out for them in this fashion, when it needn’t have been like that at all!