Having found someone who understood their ambiguous situation, and did not blame them for getting into it, they found that it could now be dismissed, and it took its place, for the first time, in the general scheme of things; they could see that it was not after all very serious. Mme Straus was so patient and encouraging that they both spoke better than they ever had before, and she was so eager to hear all they had to tell her and so delighted with their remarks about Paris that she made them feel like children on a spree with an indulgent aunt who was ready to grant every wish that might occur to them, and whose only pleasure while she was with them was in making life happy and full of surprises. This after living under the same roof with kindness that was not kind, consideration that had no reason or explanation, a friend who behaved like an enemy or vice versa—it would be hard to say which. And she herself spoke so distinctly, in a vocabulary that offered no difficulty and that at moments made it seem as if they were all three speaking English.
Mme Straus was dissatisfied with the consommé and sent it back to the kitchen. The rest of the dinner was excellent and so was the wine. As Harold sat watching her, utterly charmed by her conversation and by her, he thought: She’s a child and she isn’t a child. She knows things a child doesn’t know, and yet every day is Bastille Day, and at seventy she is still saying Ah! as the fountains rise higher and higher and skyrockets explode.
While they were waiting for their dessert, Mme Straus’s goddaughter came over to the table, with her husband. They were introduced to Harold and Barbara, and shook hands and spoke a few words in English. The man shook hands again and left. Mme Straus’s goddaughter was in her late thirties, and looked as if she must at some time have worked in a beauty parlor. Harold found himself wondering on what basis godparents are chosen in France. It also struck him that there was something patronizing—or at least distant—in the way she spoke to Mme Straus. Though Mme Straus appeared to rejoice in seeing her goddaughter again, was full of praise for the food, for the service, and delighted that the restaurant was so crowded with patrons, the blonde woman had, actually, nothing to say to her.
When they had finished their coffee, Mme Straus summoned the waiter, was horrified at the sight of Harold’s billfold, and insisted on paying the sizable check. She hurried them out of the restaurant and into a taxi, and they arrived, by a series of narrow, confusing back streets, at the theater, which was in an alley. Mme Straus inquired at the box office for their tickets. There was a wait of some duration and just as Harold was beginning to grow alarmed for her the tickets were found. They went in and took their seats, far back under the balcony of a small shabby theater, with twelve or fifteen rows of empty seats between them and the stage.
Mme Straus took off her coat and her fur, and gave them to Barbara to hold for her. Then she gave Harold a small pasteboard box tied with yellow string and Barbara her umbrella, and sat back ready to enjoy the play. With this performance, she explained, the theater was closing for the month of August, so that the company could present the same play in Deauville. Pointing to the package in Harold’s lap, she said that she had bought some beautiful peaches to present to her friend when they went backstage; Mme Mailly was passionately fond of fruit. He held the carton carefully. Peaches were expensive in France that summer.
Only a few of the empty seats had been claimed by the time the house lights dimmed and went out. Mme Straus leaned toward Barbara in the dark and whispered: “When you are presented to Mme Mailly, remember to ask for her autograph.”
The curtain rose upon a flimsy comedy of backstage bickering and intrigue. The star, a Junoesque and very handsome woman, entered to applause, halfway through the first scene. She played herself—Mme Marguerite Mailly, who in the play as in life had been induced to leave the Comédie Française in order to act in something outside the classic repertory. The playwright had also written a part for himself into the play—the actress’s husband, from whom she was estranged. Their domestic difficulties were too complicated and epigrammatic for Harold to follow, and the seats were very hard, but in the third act Mme Mailly was given a chance to deliver—on an offstage stage—one of the great passionate soliloquies of Racine. An actor held the greenroom curtain back, and the entire cast of the play listened devoutly. So did the audience. The voice offstage was evidence enough of the pleasure the Americans had been deprived of when Mme Mailly decided to forsake the classics. It was magnificent—full of color, variety, and pathos. The single long speech rose up out of its mediocre setting as a tidal wave might emerge from a duck pond, flooding the flat landscape, sweeping pigsties, chicken coops, barns, houses, trees, and people to destruction.
The play never recovered from this offstage effect, but the actress’s son was allowed to marry the ingénue and there was a reconciliation between the playwright and Mme Mailly, who, Harold realized as she advanced to the apron and took a series of solo curtain calls, was simply too large for the stage she acted on. The effect was like a puppet show when you have unconsciously adjusted your sense of scale to conform with small mechanical actors and at the end a giant head emerges from the wings, the head of the human manipulator, producing a momentary surprise.
The lights went on. Mme Straus, delighted with the comedy, gathered up her fur, her umbrella, her coat, and the present of fruit. She spoke to an usher, who pointed out the little door through which they must go to find themselves backstage. They went to it, and then through a corridor and up a flight of stairs to a hallway with four or five doors opening off it and one very bright light bulb dangling by its cord from the ceiling. Mme Straus whispered to Harold: “Don’t forget to tell her you admire her poetry. You can tell her in English. She speaks your language beautifully.”
Four people had followed them up the stairs. Mme Straus knocked on the door of the star’s dressing room, and the remarkable voice answered peremptorily: “Don’t come in!”
Mme Straus turned to Harold and Barbara and smiled, as if this were exactly the effect she had intended to produce.
More people, friends of the cast, came up the stairway. The little hall grew crowded and hot. The playwright came out, wearing a silk dressing gown, his face still covered with grease paint, and was surrounded and congratulated on his double accomplishment. Mme Straus knocked once more, timidly, and this time the voice said: “Who is it?”
“It’s me,” Mme Straus said.
“Who?” the voice demanded, in a tone of mounting irritation.
“It’s your friend, chérie.”
“Who?”
“Straus-Muguet.”
“Will you please wait.… ” The voice this time was shocking.
Harold looked at Mme Straus, who was no longer confident and happy, and then at Barbara, who avoided his glance. All he wanted was to push past the crowd and sneak down the stairs while there was still time. But Mme Straus-Muguet waited and they had no choice but to wait with her until the door opened and the actress, large as Gulliver, bore down upon them. She nodded coldly to Mme Straus and looked around for other friends who had come backstage to congratulate her. There were none. Barbara and Harold were presented to her, and she acknowledged the introduction with enough politeness for Barbara to feel that she could offer her program and Mme Straus’s fountain pen. The actress signed her name with a flourish, under her silhouette on the first page. When Harold told her that they had read her poems, she smiled for the first time, quite cordially.
Mme Straus tore the string off the pasteboard carton and presented it open to her friend, so that Mme Mailly could see what it contained.
“No, thank you,” Mme Mailly said. And when Mme Straus like a blind suppliant continued to show her peaches, the actress said impatiently: “I do not care for any fruit.” Her manner was that of a person cornered by some nuisance of an old woman with whom she had had, in the past and through no fault of her own, a slight acquaintance, under circumstances that in no way justified this intrusion and imposition on her good nature. All this Harold could have understood a
nd perhaps accepted, since it took place in France, if it hadn’t been for one thing: in his raincoat pocket at that moment were two volumes of sonnets, and on the flyleaf of one of them the actress had written: “To my dear friend, Mme Straus-Muguet, whose sublime character and patient fortitude, as we walked side by side in the kingdom of Death, I shall never cease to remember and be grateful for.… ”
In the end, Mme Mailly was prevailed upon to hold the pasteboard box, though nothing could induce her to realize that it was a present. The stairs were spiral and treacherous, requiring all their attention as they made their way down them cautiously. The passageway at the foot of the stairs was now pitch dark. By the time they found an outer door and emerged into the summer night, Mme Straus had had time to rally her forces. She took Barbara’s arm and the three of them walked to the corner and up the avenue de Wagram, in search of a taxi. No one mentioned the incident backstage. Instead, they spoke of how clever and amusing the play had been. As they parted at the taxi stand, Harold gave Mme Straus the two books that were in his coat pocket, and she said: “I’m glad you remembered to ask for her autograph. You must preserve it carefully.”
ON SUNDAY MORNING, Eugène showed his membership card at the gate in the stockade around the swimming pool in the Bois de Boulogne. Turning to Harold, he asked for their passports.
“You have to have a passport to go swimming?” Harold asked in amazement.
“I cannot get you into the Club without them,” Eugène said patiently.
“I don’t have them. I’m so sorry, but it never occurred to me to bring them. In America …”
With the same persistence that he had employed when he was trying to arrange for food and lodging for the Berliners, Eugène now applied himself to persuading the woman attendant that it was all right to let his American guests past the gate. The attendant believed that rules are not made to be broken, and the rule of the Racing Club was that no foreigner was to be admitted without proof of his foreignness. There are dozens of ways of saying no in French and she went through the list with visible satisfaction. Eugène, discouraged, turned to Harold and said: “It appears that we will have to drive home and get your passports.”
“But the gasoline— Couldn’t we just wait here while you go in and have a swim?” Harold asked, and then he started to apologize all over again for causing so much trouble.
“I will try one last time,” Eugène said, and, leaving them outside the gate, he went in and was gone for a quarter of an hour. When he came back he brought with him an official of the Club, who told the attendant that it was all right to admit M. de Boisgaillard’s guests.
Harold and Barbara followed Eugène into a pavilion where the dressing rooms were. There they separated, to meet again outside by the pools, in their bathing suits. Though he had seen French bathing slips at Dinard, Harold was astonished all over again. They concealed far less than a fig leaf would have, and the only possible conclusion you could draw was that in France it is all right to have sexual organs; people are supposed to have them. Even so, the result was not what one might have expected. The men and women around him, standing or lying on canvas mats and big towels or swimming in the two pools, were not lightened and made happier by their nakedness, the way people are when they walk around their bedroom without any clothes on, or the way children or lovers are. Standing by herself at the shallow end of one of the pools was a woman with a body like a statue by Praxiteles, but the two young men who were standing near her looked straight past her, discontented with everything but what they themselves exposed. It was very dreamlike.
Having argued energetically for half an hour to get Harold and Barbara into the Club, Eugène stretched out in a reclining chair, closed his eyes, and ignored them. Sitting on the edge of the pool with his feet in the water, Harold thought: So this is where he comes every afternoon.… What does he come here for? The weather was not really hot. And what about his job? And what about Alix? Did she know that this was how he spent his free hours?
From time to time, Eugène swam, or Harold and Barbara dived into the deeper pool and swam. But though they were sometimes in the water at the same time, Eugène didn’t swim with them or even exchange remarks with them. Nothing in the world, it seemed—no power of earth, air, or water—could make up to him for the fact that he had had to go to the Allégrets’ dressy party in a tweed jacket.
The sun came and went, behind a thin veil of clouds. Harold was not quite warm. He offered Barbara his towel and she wouldn’t take it, so he sat with it around his shoulders and looked at the people around him and thought that this was a place that, left to himself, he would never have succeeded in imagining, and that the world must be full of such surprises.
Barbara went into the pool once more, and this time Harold stayed behind. Instinct had told him that something was trying to break through Eugène’s studied indifference. Instinct was wrong, apparently. Eugène’s eyes stayed closed, in spite of all there was to stare at, and he said nothing. Barbara came back from the pool, and Harold saw that she was cold and suggested that she go in and dress. “In a minute,” she said. He tried to make her take his bath towel and again she refused. He looked at Eugène and thought: He’s waiting for someone or something.…
Suddenly the eyelids opened. Eugène looked around him mildly and asked: “How well do you know George Ireland?”
“I know his parents very well, George hardly at all,” Harold said. “Why?”
“I thought you might be friends.”
“There is a considerable difference in our ages.”
“Oh?” Eugène said. And then: “Have you had enough swimming, or would you like to stay a little longer? I do not think the sun is coming out any more.”
“It’s up to you,” Harold said. “If you want to stay, we’ll go in and get dressed and wait for you.”
“I am quite ready,” Eugène said.
They drove home to the apartment, and Barbara made lunch for them. They ate sitting around the teacart in the bedroom. Eugène congratulated Barbara on her mastery of the French omelet, and she flushed with pleasure. “It’s the stove,” she said. “They don’t have stoves like that in America.”
The swimming and the food made them drowsy and relaxed. The silences were no longer uncomfortable. Without any animation in his voice, almost as if he were talking about people they didn’t know, Eugène began to talk about Beaumesnil and how important it was that the château remain in the family, at whatever cost. When his daughter came of age and was ready to be introduced to society, the property at Brenodville must be there, a visible part of her background. Seeing it now, he said, they could have no idea of what it was like before the war. He himself had not seen it then, but he had seen other houses like it, and knew, from stories Alix had told him, what it used to be like in her childhood.
The Americans had the feeling, as they excused themselves to dress and keep an appointment with Mme Straus, that Eugène was reluctant to let them go, and would have spent the rest of the day in their company. The last two days he had been quite easy with them, most of the time, but they couldn’t stop thinking that they shouldn’t be here in the apartment at all, feeling the way they did about him. Against their better judgment, they had come here when they knew that they ought to have gone to a hotel. Tempted by the convenience and the space, and by the game of pretending that they were living in Paris, not just tourists, they had stayed on—paying a certain price, naturally. During those times when they were with Eugène, they avoided meeting his eyes, or when they did look directly at him, it was with a carefully prepared caution that demonstrated, alas, how easily he could have got through to them if he had only tried.
AT FIVE O’CLOCK THAT AFTERNOON, while Barbara waited in a taxi, Harold went into the convent in Auteuil and explained to the nun who sat in the concierge’s glass cage that Mme Straus-Muguet was expecting them. He assumed that men were not permitted any farther, and that they would all three go out for tea. The nun got up from her desk and led
him down a corridor and into a large room with crimson plush draperies, a black and white marble floor, too many mirrors, and very ugly furniture. There she left him. He stood in the middle of the room and looked all around without finding a single object that suggested Mme Straus’s taste or personality. Surprised, he sat down on a little gilt ballroom chair and waited for her to appear. He felt relieved in one respect; the room was so large that in all probability they didn’t need to worry for fear Mme Straus couldn’t afford to entertain them at an expensive restaurant.
It was at least five minutes before she appeared. She greeted him warmly and, as he started to sit down again, explained that they were going to take tea upstairs in her chamber; this room was the public reception room of the convent. He picked up his hat, went outside, paid the taxi driver, and brought Barbara back in with him. The rest of the building turned out to be bare, underfurnished, and institutional. Mme Straus led them up so many flights of stairs that she had to stop once or twice, gasping, to regain her breath. Harold stopped worrying about her financial condition and began to worry about her heart. It couldn’t be good for a woman of her age to climb so much every day.
“I am very near to heaven,” she said with a wan smile, as they arrived on the top floor of the building. They went down a long corridor to her room, which was barely large enough to accommodate a bed, a desk, a small round table and, crowded in together, three small straight chairs. The window overlooked the convent garden, and opening off the room there was a cabinet de toilette, the walls of which were covered with photographs. Mme Straus opened the door of her clothes closet and brought out a box of pastries. Then she went into the cabinet de toilette and came out with goblets and a bottle of champagne. There being no ice buckets in the convent, she had tried to chill the champagne by setting it in a washbasin of cold water.
The Chateau Page 29
