Matters of Honor (28 page)

XXVII

M
ADAME
B
ERNARD
and her illustrious teacher, Dr. Otto Abend, believed in imposing a time limit on analysis; she announced early on that we would finish within eighteen months. Having spent many inconclusive, though I sometimes thought indispensable, years with Drs. Reiner and Kalman, I took this at first to be another example of the appalling psychoanalyst sense of humor, an unpleasant joke intended to jolt the patient into heightened self-awareness and fuller cooperation. It turned out that she was dead serious. Shortly before we reached the deadline she had set, she announced that we had gone as far as she considered appropriate. The analyses of her other patients were ending as well. She had accepted a teaching position at the University of Geneva and was moving there.

You are leaving me in the lurch, I told her. You knew about this university appointment when you took me and decided on the length of my treatment to fit your personal plans. I think that you’ve behaved unprofessionally.

I should have known by then that I wasn’t capable of ruffling even one of her blond feathers.

You have it wrong, she said. I assessed your case and came to the conclusion that you could be treated within the available time. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have accepted you.

Before I was thus cast adrift, with only an untested lifeline to Madame Bernard’s own training analyst, a man with a white goatee who received patients at his apartment near the metro station Gobelins, a destination marginally easier for me to reach than rue de la Faisanderie, I attended Margot’s wedding, which had been postponed for a month by reason of the events of May 1968. The first part, the civil marriage, took place at the
mairie
of the Eighth Arrondissement, within the jurisdiction of which lay the Hornungs’ pied-à-terre. Du Roc apparently could claim no domicile. Ever since leaving his wife he had been squatting in apartments lent to him by friends going on vacation and in temporarily vacant maids’ rooms. I suspected that his sleek Lancia, the backseat of which was cluttered with disparate objects one would have hardly looked for in a car, had also been his occasional shelter. There was no church ceremony. Later in the day, however, the Hornungs gave a reception at the Ritz, where they were staying. They had abandoned their apartment to Margot until such time as she and Jean moved into a place of their own. That won’t be anytime soon, Mr. Hornung told me. Monsieur Jean has strong opinions about how things should be. He missed his true calling. He should have been a contractor. No matter what kind of place they decide I should buy for them he will want to tear out every wall and move every piece of plumbing. It will take years; I guarantee it.

Mr. Hornung may not have taken his son-in-law into his heart. However, the reception made me think of the peaceable kingdom, the lamb lying down with the wolf, the leopard with the kid, and the child leading forth the young lion and the fatling. As there was no custom dictating that witnesses for the bride in the civil marriage must be women, Margot had asked Henry and me to fill the role. I was perhaps the more startling choice, and I wondered whether I owed my place to the connection with Henry—with Archie dead, I was surely his closest friend—or to my renown as a novelist, thus a counterweight to du Roc and the two sexagenarian academicians, of the French and Goncourt Academies respectively, who stood up for him. I suggested Etienne for my place or added as the third witness. She gave me a glacial stare, leading me to think that perhaps she had considered such a move and decided against it, fearing that Henry, whose sense of humor was unreliable, would take it hard. Etienne, however, was present at the
mairie
and at the Ritz, with his glamorous wife and his mother, to both of whom he introduced me. I supposed that I would be able to identify Jean’s pharmacist father, Monsieur Lebon, and his mother, if not at the
mairie,
then in the cream-and-gold salons of the Ritz, but there was no one there who fit the description I had invented. Taking advantage of a brief conversation with my publisher, who was there with the editor who looked after du Roc’s books, I asked whether he could introduce me. His parents aren’t here, he told me. They’re
insortables.
Jean doesn’t show them off. He just puts them in his novels.

We had a late dinner afterward, Henry and I, at a brasserie in the Halles. How bizarre, he said. Why didn’t that idiot girl want me? Tell me why she took him and not me.

She’s peculiar, I replied.

And tell me why he hasn’t knocked her up yet, to get a chokehold on the money. I’ve made inquiries about him. He has one kid from his first marriage and two from the second, so we know that he can do it. It’s nonsense that he hasn’t any money because he spends it on them. He doesn’t contribute a cent, never mind paying any attention to them, so having a fourth kid with Margot would hardly cramp his style. What’s going on? Don’t tell me it’s a matter of principle, the struggle against overpopulation.

The Pill, I told him. Not available to the previous Mesdames du Roc, so they took their chances and got unlucky.

He didn’t laugh. I’d gotten used to his not laughing at much of anything. He had come to Paris because the graybeards at Wiggins & O’Reilly in the end made their wishes sufficiently clear, and at every moment he knew that the clock in the mahogany-paneled office down on Wall Street was ticking. So many months, days, and hours until the dreaded date, when the decision about him and some other poor bastards—George Standish probably included—would be made. No doubt there was a clock in the place de la Concorde office as well, and local bosses watching it too. How much of my suspicion about Jim Hershey was right? If I was right, how much had Henry figured out? These were imponderables. Certainly, I couldn’t ask him. But when he said that Hershey had told him to trust the firm he obviously took it as important advice that he should follow. How clear an idea he had of his own worth to the firm was uncertain as well; he could swing wildly between pride verging on conceit and excessive self-deprecation. George had told me often enough that partners at Wiggins who really counted thought Henry walked on water, and I supposed he would have also said it to Henry. But Henry had seen other prizes snatched from him, and the prospect of being beached in Paris, while nearby the one prize he wanted above all others was possessed and enjoyed by another, was insufferable and terrifying.

I had told him my analyst’s plan to move to Geneva by the summer, and that, consequently, I would have less reason to remain in Paris, though I didn’t know what I would do next if indeed I left. Tom Peabody was urging me to consider Rome. As Henry and I talked, I was forced to realize the extent to which he had counted on my continued presence in Paris, imagining a resumption of our old intimacy, with daily unscheduled contacts built into it subject only to unavoidable obstacles. Now that had proved to be a mirage. He did not attempt to conceal his disappointment. There wasn’t much I could do to buck him up beyond saying once again that I had not yet made a decision to leave and certainly would return to celebrate when his partnership was announced.

Oh that, he said, it’s a crapshoot with loaded dice. I’d rather not think about it, but I do.

It was very late, even for this restaurant that claimed to remain open until four in the morning. I paid the check. The radio taxi arrived. I told the driver to go first to Trinité, where Henry was living in an apartment he had not wanted to show me, claiming that the owner had furnished it to look like a concierge’s loge, down to a large radio covered with a lace doily that was the chief ornament of the living room. If I stay in Paris, he said, I will stop living like a clerk, but so long as I am a clerk and I’m paid like a clerk, I don’t see why I should put on airs. This was a new development in Henry’s outlook. Perhaps it betokened a decision to devote less time and energy to trying to be first in everything—without regard to whether he needed to win.

M
ADAME
B
ERNARD
left for Geneva. The bouquet of flaming-red roses I had brought to our last session had probably been deposited in a trash can or given to her concierge. She had seemed pleased to receive them, thanked me without sticking in the interpretative knife, and asked whether I ever went to Geneva. If you do come, she continued, my husband and I would be pleased to have you at our home for dinner. She gave me her card. I thanked her in turn and, emboldened by her initiative, asked whether her husband would also be teaching at the university. Oh no, she said, he is a poet—rather well known but his name is not the same as mine.

An onset of shyness prevented me from asking his name, and some similar emotion probably impelled Madame Bernard to explain that in Geneva she intended to do only training analyses. She wouldn’t treat patients. I sensed that the existence of the line separating the analyst and patient had been drawn anew, and that if I made my visit I wouldn’t be crossing it.

My curiosity had been aroused, and I might have found a reason to pass through Geneva in the fall, if a letter from my mother had not caused me to go instead to Lenox. She wrote that she and Greg had grown tired both of Berkshire winters—the ski slopes were more and more crowded, and neither of them cared for skiing all that much—and Berkshire summers with their hordes of Tanglewood tourists. That left the spring mud, about which the less said the better, and the fall, which was glorious if you could disregard the busloads of old ladies in search of foliage and maple syrup, but that was impossible. She was also tired of the cattiness of her friends. They had decided to move to Hawaii—not Oahu, which Greg found too commercial and too American, but to Maui, which was as Hawaii used to be. I would no doubt see that keeping the house in Lenox, a big financial drain despite its excellent condition, didn’t make sense for her and Greg. She thought that I should buy it. The house had been in the family since it was built—while Cousin Jack’s house in Stockbridge had only been given to him and May as a wedding present from May’s father. I wouldn’t regret it, she assured me. Values in the Berkshires were rising; a historic house owned by a famous writer would command a premium.

I answered that I would think about her proposal, and if it seemed that I could go along with it I would come to the Berkshires in early October. I’d stay with George and Edie, in the stable that the Standish parents had turned into an independent cottage for them to use. Then I telephoned Mr. Hibble, to sound him out about the transaction. It was a steal, he told me, with or without the family furniture, but he couldn’t understand why my mother wouldn’t just give the house to me. With the pension the bank paid her, plus the Richardson money, she shouldn’t need the cash. Of course the cash by all rights should go to you anyway on her death.

But can I afford it? I asked. Yes, he said, even if you never earn another dollar. Besides, she’s right about Berkshire real estate; there are few better bets.

Dealing with my mother had always been pleasant if she was getting her way in every detail. I went over to the house the day after I arrived at George’s and found out that she meant to let me have all the pieces that had come from the Standish side except a desk I considered too small to be useful. In that case, I said, it’s a deal, subject only to inspection for termites. I can assure you that we have no termites, she informed me haughtily. I replied that I was sure she was right, but I wanted to check anyway. Someone in Mr. Hibble’s office would have my power of attorney so that the closing could go ahead after I had returned to Europe. It’s all right, honey, Greg said, it’s what’s always done. All right, she replied, I’ll go along, but I think my own son ought to be able to trust me.

I
RETURNED TO
P
ARIS
at the end of November, having shown my editor an early draft of a long study of Hawthorne. He encouraged me to work on it, but suggested some changes in approach. Thinking them through and revising the manuscript accordingly would be time-consuming. In early December, Wiggins & O’Reilly announced its decisions. Henry and George had both become partners. When Henry called with the news, I invited him to dinner at Maxim’s that night. To my surprise, he arrived with Margot.

Jean is in Marseille, she told me, at a book signing. Isn’t it nice, having just the three of us?

She and Henry seemed to be on the floor each time the band played a fox-trot, and I couldn’t help noticing the way she clung to him. By midnight we’d become very sentimental. Henry said he wished we could call Archie. Instead we went down to the telephone cabin and placed a call to George. He was at a meeting from which he was going directly to the theater to meet Edie. We gave up. Since I had not brought my car and Margot had hers, they drove me home.

Henry also invited Margot, this time with Jean, to the ponderous official celebration of his partnership. It too was held at Maxim’s. The Wiggins resident senior partner, Derek de Rham, a spidery man, all thin arms and thin legs, in an ancient dinner jacket that miraculously fit his strange frame, had taken over the narrow section of the restaurant known, because of its shape, as the omnibus, the only place where an habitué would agree to be seated at lunch, but less desirable in the evening because of the distance from the dancing. To be away from the band, however, made it particularly suitable for toasts, of which there would be a considerable number. George and Edie had come from New York, he in his double capacity of Henry’s best friend at the firm and representative of the class of new partners, as had old Mr. Allen, Henry’s mentor and the strong man of Wiggins & O’Reilly, as well as a couple of other partners and their wives and a platoon of clients. De Rham’s little brother and one of his cousins had been at school with me. After I mentioned that to him, and Edie had explained who I was, he found it was worth his while to speak to me. In fact he beckoned to his wife, a stern bony woman, to join us. I asked how Henry had adapted to practice in the French outpost of the firm.