The Chateau

by William Maxwell

  Mme Straus called for the check, and either misread the amount or absent-mindedly failed to put down enough to pay for the tea and cakes and service. The waitress pointed out the mistake, and while it was being rectified, Harold looked the other way, for fear he would see more than Mme Straus intended them to see.

  They parted from her at dusk. She announced that she was coming to the boat train on Tuesday, to see them off. As they stood on a corner of the boulevard St. Germain, waiting for the bus, she pointed out the Cluny Museum to them, and was shocked that they hadn’t heard of it.

  The bus came and she got on it and went up the curving steps. Waving to them from the top of the bus, she was swept away.

  “Do you think he forgot?” Barbara asked as they started on down the street.

  “I don’t even think he exists,” Harold said. “But does she, is the question. You don’t think she is something we made up?”

  “No, she exists.”

  They crossed over, so that she could look in the window of a shoe shop.

  “So courageous,” he said. “Always taking life at the flood.… But what is she going to do—Who or what can she turn to, now that the flood has become a trickle?”

  THE LAST DAY was very strange. He had hoped that there would be time to go to the Ile St. Louis in the morning, and instead he found himself on the top of a bus going down the rue Bonaparte with another suitcase to leave at the steamship office. The sun was shining, the air was cool, and there was a kind of brilliance over everything. The bus turned left and then right and went over the Pont du Carrousel, and as he looked up and down the river, the sadness that he had managed to hold at arm’s length for the last four days took possession of him.

  The bus went through the south gate of the Louvre and out into the sunshine again and stopped to take on passengers. The whole of the heart of Paris lay before him—the palace, the geometrical flower beds, the long perspective down the gardens, which had been green when he came and were now autumn-colored, the people walking or bicycling, the triumphal arch, the green statues, the white gravel, the grass, the clouds coming over from the Left Bank in a procession. Looking at it now, so hard that it made his eyes burn and ache, he knew in his heart that what he loved was here, and only for the people who lived here; it wasn’t anywhere else. I cannot leave! he cried out silently to the old buildings and the brightness in the air, to the yellow leaves on the trees, and to the shine that was over everything. I cannot bear it that all this will be here and I will not be.… I might as well die.…

  AT NOON they turned into the rue des Canettes for the last time. When Harold had finished ordering, he made a little farewell speech to Pierre and, after the waiter had gone off to the kitchen, thought: How foolish of me.… What does he care whether we love France or not?… But then, though they had asked for Perrier water, Pierre brought three wine glasses and a bottle of Mâcon rouge. First he assured them that the wine would not be on their bill, and then he opened the bottle ceremoniously, filled their two glasses, and poured a little wine into his. They raised their glasses and drank to each other, and to the voyage, and to the future of France. Pierre went on about his work, but from time to time he returned, with their next course or merely to stand a moment talking to them. They dallied over lunch; they had a second and then a third cup of coffee. They were the last clients to leave the restaurant, and the wine had made them half drunk, as usual. They shook hands with Pierre and said good-by. They stopped to shake hands with the other waiter, Louis, and again, in the front room with Monsieur and Madame, who wished them bon voyage. As they stepped out into the street, they heard someone calling to them and turned around. It was Pierre. He had shed his waiter’s coat and he drew them into the restaurant across the street, to have a cognac with him. Then they had another round, on Harold, and before he and Barbara could get away, Louis joined them, as jealous as a younger brother, insisting that they have a cognac with him. Harold said no, saw the look of hurt on both men’s faces, and said: “Why not?”

  Pierre went off, and came back a few minutes later with his wife, who worked in a nearby department store. The two women talked to each other, in English. They had one last round, and shook hands, and said good-by, and the Americans promised to come back soon.

  They got into a taxi and went to the bank. With the floor tilting dangerously under him, Harold stood in line and grinned foolishly at the teller who counted out his money.

  To clear their heads, they rode to the Place Redouté on the top of a bus, and they were able to walk straight by the time they stopped to shake hands with Mme Emile, on their way into the building.

  “Are you all right?” Barbara asked as they stepped into the elevator.

  “Yes. How about you?”

  “I’m all right,” she said. “But we probably smell to high heaven of all that we’ve been drinking.”

  “It can’t be helped,” he said, and pressed the button.

  Alix was just the same, and they were very happy to see her, but the apartment was different. With the shutters thrown back in the drawing room, it was much lighter and brighter and more cheerful.

  Shortly after they arrived, Mme Viénot came in, with Sabine, and took possession of the conversation. While she sat listening, Barbara had a question uppermost in her mind, and it was why didn’t Mme Viénot or Alix or Mme Cestre mention the soap? Didn’t it ever arrive? Or weren’t they as pleased with it as she had thought they would be?

  Harold was telling how they couldn’t find the Simone Martinis in Siena and finally gave up and climbed the bell tower of the very building the paintings were in, without knowing it. When he finishes I’ll ask them, she thought, but she didn’t because by that time she had another worry on her mind: what if Françoise should show Alix the stockings she had given her, which were the same kind that Barbara had presented to Alix and Mme Cestre and Mme Viénot in the country, and that they had been so pleased with. She wished now the stockings had been of a better quality. She had economized on them, but she could not explain this without bringing in the fact that they were to give to the chambermaids in hotels in place of a tip.

  “You must excuse me,” Alix said. “I am going to get the tea things.”

  “Can I help?” Barbara asked, but Alix did not hear her, and so she sat back in her chair. The thing she had hoped was that she would have one last look at the kitchen. It was very queer, having to act like a guest in a place where they were so much at home. Neither Alix nor Mme Cestre made any reference to the fact that she and Harold had spent ten days in this apartment. One would almost have thought that they didn’t know it. Or that it hadn’t really happened.

  Speaking very distinctly, Harold said to Mme Cestre: “In Italy I saw with my own eyes how fast the earth is turning. We went to hear Traviata. It was out of doors—it was in the Baths of Caracalla—and during the second act the moon came up so fast that it was almost alarming to watch. Within five minutes from the time it appeared above the ruins it was high up in the sky.”

  “You saw St. Peter’s? And the Vatican?” Mme Viénot asked.

  Right after she had finished her tea, she rose and shook hands with her sister, and then with Barbara and Harold. In the hall she presented her cheek to Alix to be kissed, and said: “Good-by, my dear. I’ll call you tomorrow afternoon, before I leave for the country.… I won’t say good-by now, M. Rhodes. I am seeing someone off on the boat train tomorrow—a cousin who is going to America on the Mauretania with you.”

  “You think the boat train will be running?” he asked.

  “For your sake, I hope it is,” Mme Viénot said. “You must be quite anxious.”

  “I have a present for you,” Sabine said as she was shaking hands with them. “I am making you a drawing, but it isn’t quite finished.”

  “We’d love to have one of your drawings,” Barbara said.

  “Maman will bring it to the train tomorrow.”

  When she and Mme Viénot had left, the others sat down again, and the Ameri
cans waited until a polite interval had passed before they too got up to go.

  Mme Cestre told them that she had been at Le Bourget when Lindbergh’s plane appeared out of the sky.

  “You were in that vast crowd?” Harold said.

  “Yes. It was very thrilling,” she said. “I will never forget it. I was quite close to him as they carried him from the field.”

  Harold thought he heard someone moving around in the study, and looked at Alix, to see if she too had heard it. She said: “I also have a present for you.” She opened a door of the secretary and took out a small flat package wrapped in tissue paper and tied with a white ribbon. This present gave Barbara a chance to ask about the soap.

  “I should have thanked you,” Alix said. “Oh dear, you will think we are not very grateful. We thought it might be from you. But there are also some other people, cousins who are now traveling in America, who could have sent it, and so I was afraid to speak about it.… Mummy, you were right. It was Barbara—that is, it was Barbara’s mother who sent us the beautiful package of soap!”

  On their way out of the building, they shook hands one last time with Mme Emile, who wished them bon voyage, and when they were outside in the street, Barbara opened the little package. It was a book—a charming little edition of Flaubert’s Un Coeur Simple with hand-colored illustrations. On the flyleaf, Alix had written their names and her name and the date and the words: “Really with all my love.”

  “Wasn’t that nice of her,” Barbara said. And then, as they were crossing the square: “What about dinner?”

  “Are you hungry?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “There was somebody in the study.”

  “I know,” he said. “Eugène.”

  “You think?”

  “Who else.”

  “Françoise, maybe.”

  “What would she be doing in there?”

  “I don’t know. Do you feel like walking?” she asked.

  “All right.… He gave me four Swiss francs, to buy sugar for him in Switzerland. I didn’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It would have been a lot of trouble, and it turned out that we didn’t have much time. Also, I didn’t feel like doing it.”

  “Do you still have the money?” she asked.

  “Yes. It’s not very much. About a dollar. I guess we can forget about it.”

  They turned and took one last look at the granite monument.

  “Do you think there was something going on that we didn’t know about?” he said. “Like what?”

  “That’s just it, I have no idea what.”

  “If you mean the ‘drama’ that—”

  “I don’t mean the ‘drama.’ That was two or three years ago. I mean right now, this summer.”

  “There would be no reason for them to tell us if there was,” she said thoughtfully.

  “No,” he agreed.

  “You think they’re all right? You don’t think they’re in any kind of serious trouble, all of them?”

  “Maybe not all of them. Maybe just Alix and Eugène. It would explain a lot of things. The way he was with us. And why they stayed in the country so long. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know what it was.”

  “Then you think there was something?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “So do I.”

  “Even when we thought we were on the inside,” he said, “we weren’t really. Inside, outside, it’s nothing but a state of mind, I guess.… Except that if you love people, you can’t help wanting to—”

  “Alix is having another baby.”

  He took her hand as they walked along but said nothing. He was not sure at this moment what her feelings were, and he did not want to say something that would make her cry in the street.

  They skipped dinner entirely and instead took the Métro halfway across Paris to a movie theater that was showing Le Diable au Corps. Harold wanted to see it, and they had missed it when they were here in the summer, and it had not been showing anywhere since they got back. In America it would be cut.

  They were half an hour early, and walked up and down, rather than go in and sit in an empty theater. Over the ticket booth there was an electric bell that rang insistently and continuously; the whole street was filled with the sound. They looked at all the shop windows on both sides of the street. He glanced at his wrist watch. It was still twenty minutes before it would be time to go inside, and at the thought of twenty minutes more of that dreadful ringing, and then the hocus-pocus and the delay that always went on in French movie theaters, and people passing through the aisles selling candy, while they waited and waited for the picture to begin, he suddenly stopped, swallowed hard, and, taking Barbara’s arm, said: “Let’s go home. I can’t stand that sound.… And even if we do wait, I won’t be able to enjoy the movie. I’ve had all I can manage. I’m through. I can’t take in any more.”

  THEY ARRIVED at the Gare St. Lazare, with their hand luggage, an hour early. The boat train was running. It was due to leave at eleven ten, and they would get to Cherbourg about five. They walked down the platform, looking for their carriage and compartment, and found it. Barbara waited in the train, while Harold walked up and down outside. Magazine and fruit vendors had come to see them off, and a flower girl whose pushcart was covered with bouquets of violets, but there was no sign of Mme Straus. Minute after minute passed. The platform grew crowded. There was a sense of growing excitement. Harold wandered in and out among the porters and the passengers, who, standing in little groups along the track, were nearly all Americans. For the first time in four months it didn’t require any effort on his part to overhear scraps of conversation. He didn’t like what he heard. The voices of his compatriots were loud, and what they said seemed silly beyond endurance. It was like having home thrown at him.

  At three minutes of eleven, he gave up all hope of finding Mme Straus in the crowd that was milling around on the platform and started back to their coach, telling himself that it didn’t matter that she had failed to come. It wasn’t so much that she was insincere as that she loved to arouse expectations it wasn’t always convenient or even possible to satisfy, when the time came.… Only it did matter, he thought, still searching for her among the faces. Now that they were leaving, he wanted some one person out of a whole country that they had loved on first sight and never stopped loving—he wanted somebody to be aware of the fact that they were leaving, and come to say good-by.

  At the steps of their carriage he took one last look around and saw her, talking agitatedly to one of the train guards. He was close enough that he could hear her asking the guard to point out the carriage of M. and Mme Rhodes. The guard shrugged. Harold went up to her and took hold of her elbow, and she cried: “Ah, chéri!” and kissed him.

  She had been delayed. She thought that she would never find them in the crowd.

  Barbara saw Mme Straus from the train window and came out onto the platform. Mme Straus kissed her and then presented her with a farewell gift, a pasteboard box containing palmiers. “They’re to eat on the train,” she said.

  Edouard’s mother had been taken ill on Sunday afternoon and he couldn’t leave her. He was sorry to have missed them.

  She wanted to see their compartment, so they mounted the steps and went down the corridor and showed her their reserved seats and their luggage, safely stowed away on the overhead rack.

  “By the window,” she said approvingly. “Now that I have it firmly in mind, I can go with you.” She squeezed their hands in both of hers.

  They went outside again and stood talking together on the platform. Mme Viénot appeared out of the crowd, with a boutonniere for Barbara. “From the garden at Beaumesnil,” she said. She and Mme Straus greeted each other with the comic cordiality of two women who understand the full extent of their mutual dislike and are not concerned about it. Then, turning to Barbara and Harold, she said: “Sabine had something that she wanted me to bring you—a drawing. But she didn’t get it finished in time
. She said to tell you that she would be mailing it to you. I saw it. It is quite charming. It is of the old houses on the Ile St. Louis.… Au revoir, my dears. Have a good trip home.”

  She went off to rejoin her cousin.

  The train guards called out a warning, and Mme Straus embraced them both one last time and urged them back on the train. When they sat down, she was at the window, dabbing her eyes with a tiny white handkerchief. They tried to carry on a conversation in pantomime.

  She said something but they couldn’t hear what it was. Harold said something back and she shook her head, to show that she didn’t understand. They got up and went down the corridor to the end of the car. The door was still open. Mme Straus was there waiting, with the tears running down her cheeks. They leaned down and touched her hands, as the train began to move. For reasons that there was now no chance of their knowing, she clung to them, hurrying along beside the slowly moving train, waving to them, calling good-by. When she could no longer find them among the other heads and waving arms they could see her, still waving her crumpled handkerchief, old, forsaken, left in her own sad city, where the people she knew did not know her, and her stories were not believed even when they were true.

  Part II

  SOME EXPLANATIONS

  Chapter 19

  IS THAT ALL?

  Yes, that’s all.

  But what about the mysteries?

  You mean the “drama” that Mme Viénot didn’t tell Harold Rhodes about?

  And where M. Viénot was.

  Oh, that.

  And why Hector Gagny didn’t go up to Paris with the Americans. And why Alix didn’t say good-by to them at the station. And why the actress was so harsh with poor Mme Straus-Muguet, when they went backstage. And why that woman who kept the fruit and vegetable shop—Mme Michot—was so curious about what was going on at the château.

  I don’t know that any of those things very much matters. They are details. You don’t enjoy drawing your own conclusions about them?