The Chateau

by William Maxwell

  Perhaps did you guess there was, a few years ago, a sad drama in our family. Since then many things changed, and I lived in one place and then in another—missing baddly that sort of atmosphere I just described. That’s why perhaps I bored you a bit like Mme Straus, in trying to see you often— I am very sorry if I did. But you know: qu’il est encore plus difficile de diriger ses bons mouvements que ses mauvais, car, contrairement à ces derniers on ne peut jamais prévoir exactement leur résultat. En tout cas sachez que vous m’avez fait grand plaisir.…

  It is so curious how, in the history of a family, you have one drastic change after another, all in a period of two or three years, and then for a long long time afterward no change at all. Sabine continued to live now in this place and now in that. The one place where she was always welcome at any time, and for as long as she cared to stay there, the apartment in the rue Malène, she would not make use of. But she turned up fairly often, and stayed just long enough to take her bearings by what she found there. “You will stay and eat with us?” Mme Cestre would say, but she did not urge her. And a few minutes later, Alix would say: “Françoise has set a place for you.… Well, come and sit down with us anyway,” and Françoise waited and when the others were halfway through dinner she brought in a plate of soup, which Sabine allowed to grow cold in front of her, and then absent-mindedly ate. And then she went home—only it wasn’t home she went to but the apartment of a cousin or an uncle or an old school friend of her grandmother’s; and the bed she slept in was only a few feet away from an armoire that was crammed with somebody else’s clothes.

  But the family stood by her. And people were kind; very kind. (“Such a pleasure to have you, dear child”—until the end of the month, when this large room overlooking the avenue Friedland would be required for a granddaughter whose parents were traveling in Italy, and who was therefore coming here for the school holidays.) And Sabine was still invited to the larger parties, but when she went, wearing the one dress she had that was suitable, what she read on the faces of older women—friends of her mother or her grandmother, women she had known all her life—was: “It is a pity that things turned out the way they did, but you do understand, don’t you, that you are no longer a suitable match for any of the young men in our family?”

  And did she mind?

  The way children mind a bruise or a fall. She cried sometimes, afterward, but she did not mind deeply. She did not want the kind of life that a “brilliant” marriage would have opened up to her. And the waters did not close over her head, though there was every reason to think that they would. Or perhaps there wasn’t every reason to think that. It all depends on how you look at things. She did have talent; it was merely slow in revealing itself. And failure—real failure—has a way of passing over slight, pale, idealistic girls with observant eyes and a high domed forehead, in favor of some victim who is too fortunate and whose undoing therefore offers a chance for contrast and irony. You know those marvelous windows in Paris?

  In the Sainte Chapelle, you mean? And the rose windows of Notre Dame?

  No. They’re marvelous too, God knows. But I meant the windows of the shops in the rue St. Honoré and the place Vendôme. She had a talent for designing window displays that were original and had humor and appealed to the Parisian mind. For example, she did a small hospital scene, in which the doctor and the patient in bed and the nurses were all perfume bottles dressed up like people. It created a small stir. She worked very hard, but her work was valued. The hours were long, and sometimes she overtaxed her strength. The family worried about her lungs. But she was well paid. And happy in her work. And she did not have to go to a fortuneteller because Eugène had a way of sardonically announcing the future. It was a gift the family stood in some fear of. “Would you like to know what is going to happen to Sabine?” he demanded one day. “She is going to be introduced to a man without any papers. Of good family, but dispossessed; a refugee. And he will not become a French citizen because he is a patriot and cannot bring himself to renounce his Polish, or Hungarian, or Spanish citizenship, and therefore, even though he speaks without an accent, and is educated, and has a first-class mind, he cannot even get a job teaching school. And Sabine, unequipped as she is, is going to take care of him, and they are going to marry, and her mother will never accept him or forgive her.… ”

  His name was Frédéric. His father was a well-to-do banker in——. In the fall of 1939, when the sky was full of German planes day after day, the house Frédéric grew up in, along with whole blocks of other houses, was destroyed by a bomb. The family was in the country when this happened. The caretaker was killed, but no one else. Then the Russians came, and they were allowed to keep one room in that enormous country place, and Frédéric’s father arranged for him to escape in a Norwegian fishing vessel. Or perhaps it was on foot, across the border, with a handful of other frightened people. His father remained, to avoid the confiscations of his property, and his mother would not leave his father. For a year and a half, Frédéric lived in the Belleville quarter of Paris. Would you like to see him the way he was at that time? He is stretched out on a bed, in an ugly furnished room that he shares with a waiter in a café in the rue de Menilmentant. He is fully dressed, except for his bare feet, which are thin and aristocratic. The bulb in the unshaded ceiling fixture is not strong enough to bother his eyes. The one window is open to the night. The soft rain fills the alleyway outside with small sounds, sounds that are all but musical, and he is quite happy, though the walls are mildewed and the bedclothes need airing and the sheets are not clean and shortly he will have to get up and spend the rest of the night on the stone floor. He turns on his back, and with his hands clasped under his head, he thinks: She is hearing this rain.…

  The girl who hid out from the Gestapo in Mme Cestre’s apartment had brought him to a party where Sabine was, and he saw her home from the party, but she could not, of course, ask him in. One of the ways by which Ferdinand and Miranda are to be distinguished from all commonplace lovers is that, along with Prospero, Ariel, and Calaban, they have no island. It has sunk beneath the sea. Sometimes Frédéric and Sabine meet in an English tea room that is one flight up and rather exposed to the street, but there is one table that is private, behind a huge chart of the human hand showing the lines of the head and the heart, and the mountains of Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, the Sun, Mercury, and Mars. Also the swellings of the palmar faces of the five fingers, indicative of (beginning with the thumb) the logical faculty and the will; materialism, law and order, idealism; humanity, system, intelligence; truth, economy, energy; goodness, prudence, reflectiveness. When the weather permits, the lovers meet on the terrace in front of the Jeu de Paume.

  This time, she arrives first. She goes up that little flight of marble steps and crosses the packed dirt to where there are two empty iron chairs. It is a beautiful evening. There are pink clouds against a nearly white sky. Shortly afterward he comes. There is a greenish pallor to his skin. His hands are beautiful and expressive. And he is just her height and just her age, and he speaks French without an accent. His suit is threadbare, but so are most people’s suits in France at this time. The part of the terrace they are sitting in now is like the prow of a ship. They look down at the bicycles and motorcars and taxis that come over the bridge and disappear into the delta of wide and narrow streets that flows into the Place de la Concorde. He says: “You are looking at the hole in my shoe?”

  “I was looking at your ankle,” she says.

  “You don’t like it?” he says anxiously. “It is the wrong kind of ankle?”

  “I was thinking I would like to draw it.”

  “I was afraid you thought it looked Polish,” he says. (Or Hungarian. Or Spanish. I forget which he was.)

  They see that the old woman who collects rent for the chairs is coming toward them. He digs down in his coat pocket and produces a five-franc note. Wrinkled and dirty and sad, the old woman gives him his change and moves on.

  “You have never thought of
committing suicide?” he asks after a time.

  She shakes her head.

  “I think I used to be in love with death,” he says. “I sat in a cold room on an unmade bed with the barrel of a loaded revolver in my mouth, counting to … the number varied. Sometimes it was three, sometimes it was seven, and sometimes it was ten.”

  Farther along the balustrade, the old woman has got into an altercation with a middle-aged couple, and the altercation is being carried on in two languages.

  “I was not in any particular trouble, and one is supposed to want to live.… What are they saying? They speak too fast for me.”

  “The man is saying that in America it does not cost anything to sit down in a public park.”

  “And is he indignant?”

  “Very.”

  “Good,” Frédéric says, nodding. “I have hated that old woman for a year and a half. And is she giving him as good as she is taking?”

  “Yes, but he does not speak French, and she does not understand English.”

  “Too bad, too bad. Shall we go and translate for him? With a little help from us, it may become an international incident—the start of the war between the United States and the U.S.S.R.” He starts to rise, and she puts a hand on his wrist, restraining him.

  A few minutes later, he turns to her and says: “You are going to your aunt’s?”

  She nods. “You could come too. She has told me to bring you. And you would like them.”

  “I’m sure I would.”

  And then, after an interval, in a toneless voice, he says: “I must not keep you.”

  She gets up from her chair and walks with him to the head of the stairs. In the sky the two colors are now reversed. The clouds are white, and the sky they float in is pink. As they shake hands he does not say: “Will you marry me?” but this question hangs in the air between them, and is why she looks troubled and why he steps out into the traffic like a sleepwalker. Oblivious of the horns and shouts of angry drivers, he arrives safely at the other side. She stands watching him until he passes the Crillon and is hidden by a crowd of people who are waiting in a circle around the red carpet, hoping to see the King of Persia.

  Would you like to know about the King of Persia?

  Not particularly. What I would like to know is the name of that white château with the green lawn in front of it that Barbara Rhodes was always looking for.

  One time when Eugène and Sabine were going down to the country together, there was a picture, behind glass, in their compartment. Eugène was furious at her because she had given her seat to an old woman who was sitting on her suitcase in the corridor, and so had made him sit next to a stranger. Or perhaps it was because the old woman was large and crowded him in his corner. Or it might not have been that at all, but something that had nothing to do with her that was making him cold and abstracted. Ultimately the cause of his black moods declared itself, but first you had the mood in its pure state, without any explanation. She stood in the corridor for a while, looking at the landscape that unreeled itself alongside the train, and when the old woman got off at Orléans, she went back into the compartment. She was eager for the trip to be over. The compartment was airless and cramped. With her head against the seat back she sat watching the sunset and noting the signs that meant she was nearing the country of her childhood. She found herself staring at the photograph opposite her. It was of a white château that looked like a castle in a fairy tale. Was it Sully, she wondered. Or Luynes? Or Chantilly? There was a metal tag on the frame, but it was tarnished and could not be read.

  You don’t know what château it was?

  There is every reason to be grateful that these losses do occur, that every once in a while something that is listed in the inventory turns up missing. Otherwise people couldn’t move for the clutter that they make around themselves.

  I do not take such a charitable view of Eugène’s behavior as you seem to. Many people have had to live with disappointment and still not—

  He was also capable of acts of renunciation and of generosity that were saintlike. We all have these contradictions in our natures.… In the family they were accustomed to his moods and did not take them seriously. There was a time when Alix thought that their life might go differently (though not necessarily better)—that he had reached a turning point of some kind. His dark mood had lasted longer than usual, and one morning she sat up in bed and looked at him, and was frightened. What he looked like was a drowned man.

  It was a Saturday, so he did not go to his office. And suddenly, in the middle of the morning, she missed him. She went through the apartment, glancing in the baby’s room, then in their bedroom, then in the dressing room. The bathroom door was open. She turned and went back down the hall. He must have gone out. But why did he go out without telling her where he was going? And how could he have done it so quietly, so that she didn’t hear either the study door open or the front door close. Unless he didn’t want her to know that he was going out. She had a sudden vision of him ill, having fainted in the toilet. She opened the door of that little room. It was empty.

  “Eugène?” she said anxiously, and at that moment the front door closed. She turned around in surprise.

  There was still time to stop him, to ask where he was going. When she opened the front door, she heard the sound of feet descending the stairs and, leaning far over the banister, caught a glimpse of his head and shoulders, which were hidden immediately afterward by a turn in the staircase.

  “Eugène!” she called, and, loud and frightened though her voice sounded in her own ears, he still did not stop. The footsteps reiterated his firm intention never to stop until he had arrived at a place where she could not reach him. When they changed from the muffled sound made by the stair carpet to the harsh clatter of heels on a marble floor, she turned and hurried back into the apartment, through the hall, through the drawing room, and out onto the balcony, where she was just in time to see him emerge from the building and start up the sidewalk. She tried to pitch her voice so that only he would hear her calling him, and a man on the other side of the street looked up and Eugène did not. He went right on walking.

  Step by step, with him, she hurried along the balcony to the corner of the building, where she could look down on the granite monument and the cobblestone square. Hidden by trees briefly, Eugène was now visible again, crossing a street. There was a taxi waiting, but he did not step into it. He kept on walking, past the café, past the entrance to the Métro, past the barbershop, past the trousered legs standing publicly in the midst of the odor that used to make her feel sick as a child. Again he was hidden by trees. Again she saw him, as he skirted a sidewalk meeting of two old friends. He crossed another ray of the star, and then changed his direction slightly, and she perceived that the church steps was his destination. There, in the gray morning light, one of the priests (Father Quinot, or Father Ferron?) stood with his hands behind his back, benevolently nodding and answering the parting remarks of a woman in black.

  The image that Alix now saw before her eyes—of Eugène on his knees in the confessional—was only the beginning, she knew. More was required. Much more. The heart that was now ready to surrender itself was not simple. There would be intellectual doubts, arguments with Father Quinot, with Father Ferron, appointments with the bishop, a period of retreat from her and from the world, in some religious house, where no one could reach him, while he examined his faith for flaws. Proof would be submitted to him from the writings of St. Thomas, St. Gregory, St. Bonaventure. And when he returned to her, with the saints shielding him so that each time she put out her hand she touched the garment of a saint, his mind would be full of new knowledge of how men know, how the angels know, how God in his infinite being becomes all knowledge and all knowledge is a knowledge of Him.

  This being true, clear, and obvious even to a slow mind like hers, a person given to looking apprehensively at mirrors and clocks, and there being also no way of joining him on his knees (though there were two sta
lls in the mahagony confessional, the most that was given to Father Quinot or Father Ferron to accomplish would be to listen to their alternating confession, not their joint one)—this being true, she would not go down and wait for him in the street, as she longed to do, even though it be hours from now, past midnight, or morning, before he reappeared. She would stay where she was, and when he came home she would try not to distract him, or to seem to lay the slightest claim upon his attention or his feelings, in order that …

  Each of the woman’s parting remarks seemed to give rise to another, and as Eugène drew closer, Alix thought: What if she doesn’t stop talking in time? For Eugène would not wait. He was much too proud to stand publicly waiting, even to speak to the priest. “Oh, please,” she said, under her breath. The woman turned her head, as if this supplication had been heard. But then she remembered something else that she wanted to say, and Eugène kept on going, and disappeared down the steps of the Métro.

  Shortly after this, he went to see M. Carrère, who was exceedingly kind. Eugène outlined his situation to him, and M. Carrère asked if Eugène had any objection to working for an American firm that he was connected with through his son. “The job would be over there?” Eugène asked, and M. Carrère said: “No, here. I assume that Mme de Boisgaillard would not want to live so far from her mother. Suppose I arrange for an interview?”

  The interview went well, and after an hour’s talk, Eugène was asked to come back the next day, which he did. They made him an offer, and he accepted it.

  A few nights later, when Mme Viénot went in to say good night to her mother, Mme Bonenfant said: “I wonder if Eugène will be happy working for an American firm. He doesn’t speak any English.”

  “If it is like other foreign firms that have a branch in Paris, the personnel will be largely French,” Mme Viénot said. “I have heard of this one, as it happens. In America they make frigidaires. Sewing machines. Typewriters. That sort of thing.”