NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (18 page)

They were heading for a little village a bit inland from St. Tropez; a colleague of Burton’s had spent a week there the summer before and had returned ecstatic, with colored slides of the cobbled, sun-dappled streets and stories of charming little villas for rent. Poring over a Hallweg map, Burton had decided that this would indeed be a cheap and cheerful headquarters for the
year’s Provençal research. It was not a hangout, although there was a congenial little foreign colony, and it was just too far from the sea to make it attractive to tourists. Carefully, Victoria had written ahead to their friend’s inn with the aid of a Cassell’s dictionary, requesting a reservation with full pension until they would be able to lease a suitable small villa.

The taxicab left the seacoast and began to mount, mount, mount, chugging furiously as though its innards were being put to the supreme test, and the driver leaning back hard against the seat cushions as though he were coaxing some recalcitrant beast. They emerged from the small, steep, sunless road, bordered on either hand by grimly shuttered stone houses, to the sudden dust-clouded heat of a high plateau ringed with small shops across whose doorways were suspended fish net or wooden-beaded hangings that reached to the ground and lay limply in the still, surly air. A graying old hound-dog that lay in the dust of the vacant village square lifted his jowls from the dirt as the cab approached, twitched his nostrils, and fell back asleep.

The taxi stammered to a stop at the far end of the square—the Place de Gaulle, it was called—before a red-awninged
bistro
with a potted oleander and four tables, all empty, all surrounded by spavined chairs rosy with rust, and all still bearing sticky wine glasses and empty Perrier bottles.
Chambres à louer
, said a sign painted on the masonry wall next to the wooden shingle announcing the
plat du jour
at 250 francs. There was no question—the cab driver leaned back even further and sighed with satisfaction, as though he had brought them up on his shoulders—this was the place.

Gingerly, they clambered down from the taxi and planted themselves in the dust. Already they were self-consciously aware that they were overdressed for this village, even in their plain summer clothing. But there was no one to see, only the drowsing dog. The cab driver began to unstrap their luggage from the roof, the old green
camionette
made it up the hill at last with its radiator singing like an old soprano and their belongings swaying sadly and shakily from side to side. Burton and Victoria stared with frightened surmise at the canting objects which were to help them make a home out of somebody’s house, then glanced at each
other and burst out laughing. Their laughter roused the square: a bandy-legged boy in a blue smock suddenly trotted out to stare, followed by a towheaded cowboy rolling a hoop with a baton, and small twin sisters with what looked like ballet slippers on their feet and their thumbs in their mouths. Shutters clattered not quite surreptitiously, an old lady shuffled out to the bench under an acacia tree near the taxi, squinting at them from under her straw hat, and finally a snaggle-toothed, smiling man clenching a curved calabash came out in straw slippers from the somnolent restaurant to greet them. They had arrived.

The early days in the village were a little like the sea voyage. With the same pleasurable feeling of unreality was an ambiance so unusual that it
had
to be felt as temporary, like crossing the ocean; and this temporariness was at once so exhilarating and so exhausting that a short trip to St. Tropez to swim or buy a roll of linoleum was enough to send them scuffing home in their
espadrilles
, fit for nothing but an early bedtime.

They had found a little cliffside house that was almost exactly what they wanted, with a whitewashed bedroom and a study for Burton and a dazzling distant view of the Mediterranean.

There were no pressures, no schedules, nothing that had to be done that could not always wait another day. They were very happy in those early weeks. Victoria was unusually ardent, partly because Burton played the guide so well, helped her to learn shopping French and showed off his erudition both amicably and unostentatiously. They awakened early, no longer from necessity but out of a happy assurance that pleasant things were going to happen. Whenever they wanted they could start the day by hopping into their little
quat’ chevaux
(the Rettlers and the Merzes had clubbed together to buy them the car) for an early swim at the chilly, placid beach, from which they always brought back a handful of finely striped pebbles simply to caress with the fingertips these little miracles of artistic perfection.

Then the house was quite fixed for their year’s occupancy, and the weather began to turn a bit, and there was no longer any reason for Burton not to get on with his research. For a while Victoria
accompanied him; but after a few weeks of prowling about musty churches, she began to tire of sitting and waiting in damp and gloomy pews, purse, paper and
Michelin
in hand, while Burton focused his flashlight and took notes. It was no better waiting out of doors or in the foyer of a museum or library while Burt pulled out catalogue cards or squinted over Provençal manuscripts and paintings of medieval tortures. For one thing, it made her uncomfortable to watch her husband in operation. He was not deliberately patronizing, or even impolite; but his American briskness, his obvious impatience to set about his work in preference to lingering, perhaps just over the weather, with someone who was for him not in authority but simply in attendance, marked him as an interloper, a special type of tourist to be tolerated out of common courtesy and nothing more. Besides he had a way of looking at
her
as he emerged, zipping up his briefcase, that seemed to say,
What, you still here?
and made her wish for a while that the things she had studied in college had some relevance to his special world.

Partly in self-defense, partly from boredom, Victoria began to look more carefully at the objects which absorbed her husband. Observed with any care, the religious paintings of southern France simply did not appear to her to be superior works of art. Of course she was no judge, she kept saying to herself, but even Burton’s books acknowledged implicitly that the language, too, and the literature which had been created from it, were—with one or two extraordinary exceptions—far from the front rank of European culture. The suspicion gradually hardened into certainty that her husband was devoting his professional life to the exploration of what was at best a minor tributary in the broad stream of Western art. But why was he so immersed in a field that was of minimal interest even to cultured people?

The impulse was irresistible to attribute his ambition not to disinterested speculation, but to a shrewd calculation of his chances in a relatively uncrowded field. If only she could be convinced that Burton was mad about his work—how much more fun it would be to be married to a happy, dedicated crank!

If only he had more humility! A man had to set a reasonable value on his own work, not too much, not too little, if he wanted others to respect him. From her earliest childhood Victoria had
read her father’s trade journals, pored over the hieroglyphics in his fat volume of the
U.S. Pharmacopoeia
, studied the sentimentalized painting of the sturdy family druggist which had hung on their living room wall ever since she could remember; and she had grown up truly believing that he was a dedicated servant of humanity, a trusted adviser to bearded medicos who relied on his unerring hands to safely compound their crabbed Latin prescriptions. It had come as a painful disillusionment to discover that by far the greater portion of her daddy’s income was from hamburger patties filled out with cereal, hot chocolate made with water instead of milk, girlie magazines and tabloid newspapers, and, in the biologicals department where she was not allowed to wait on customers, contraceptives for the students’ Saturday nights. Without his knowing it, for she had tried hard to conceal it from him, Victor Merz had shrunk terribly in his daughter’s estimation. There was nothing wrong in running a general store and luncheonette—not if you were frank about what you were doing.

Now the same thing was happening with Burton. Victoria found it difficult to conceal the consternation which overcame her when he would say, “Once this monograph appears in the
Journal
, I’ll be a made man.” Made for whom and for what? she wanted to ask, but dared not, feeling guilty for even allowing the questions to spring to her mind. After all, she was his wife, and she had committed herself. But how much easier it would be if only he would laugh, just once, about what he was doing! Or, barring that, if he would attempt, just once, to infect her with his own enthusiasm not for the academic goal (of which her promised share was comfort and babies), but for the studies themselves—even if a little simulation would be necessary. Instead, he took it for granted that she was content to be an auxiliary to his dogged task, established in his home like a motor installed in a sailing craft, to move him along when he was becalmed, to aid him in routine navigational problems of daily life, but otherwise to remain silent and passive and waiting.

“I don’t think I’ll go with you tomorrow, Burt,” she said one evening, her fingers on the knob of the little radio. A fanfare was being played over and over while Paris-Inter waited for the Lamoureux concert to begin.

Burton looked up in some surprise from a book he was annotating. His heavy eyebrows came together in a frown over his sharply arched nose. “What will you do with yourself all day?”

Victoria laughed a little nervously. As she squirmed on the couch the announcers cut in, first French, then German, then Italian. She turned down the volume and said, “Oh, don’t worry about me. I’ll find plenty to keep me occupied right here in the village.”

“Well, if you’re sure….”

He was relieved. It hurt her to acknowledge it, but obviously all that worried him was the minor fear that she might be at loose ends right here in the village, a lost little soul, unable to make her way through the streets unaided, alone and lonely with nothing to do but struggle with French cookbooks and French vegetables, twiddle the dials of the radio, and work weepily through the crossword puzzle in the Paris
Herald
.

She stayed home. In the hushed and glistening morning air she heard first the fish lady, with her little wooden cart and her scaly apron:
“Opay, opay, les belles sar-diiines!”
her voice rising excitedly on the penultimate syllable like the mating call of a beautiful bird; and then the egg-beater motor of her husband’s
quat’ chevaux
(she no longer thought of it as theirs, since he was afraid to let her drive it on these steep and narrow roads) churning into life beneath the church steeple at the highest part of town and then fading away down the hill.

Victoria went to the doorway and stood on the step with her arms folded, the morning sun striking her breast, awaiting the fish lady. They would have
dorade
that evening, with hand-whipped mayonnaise; and although the fish lady’s prices were far higher than those of the fish stand in the
marché couvert
, Victoria was determined to try to make conversation with her, French or no. When she came, grunting behind the cart that thumped heavily over the cobbles, she opened her mouth to show all the gaps between her teeth and began picking up fish by their tails to display them in the morning light, the flies moving slowly out of the way as the shining fish swung through the air.

“Fresh caught,” she seemed to be saying, “fine and fresh this morning.”

Haltingly, Victoria began to talk to her. The woman was not particularly likeable, she was too shrewd and business-conscious for that, but she was willing to talk. After the fish there was necessarily a piece of ice to be bought for it from the truck that stopped mornings at the
bistro
on the Place de Gaulle. There Victoria met their former landlady, setting out leftovers for the dog, and while they were chatting (painfully, but chatting) Ellen Rumford came along. She was a desiccated but chirpy Englishwoman who sold bad pottery in a shop that reeked from the constant fumes of her Gauloises Bleues, and she insisted on buying Victoria a
café filtre
.

While they sat in the sunshine and waited for the coffee, bad as it was, to drip down into their little cups, they smoked and talked of England, Lake Superior and men; and when they were down to the dregs they walked companionably to the
tabac
for table matches and to the bakery for
baguettes
and the morning paper. There they met Françoise Roy, a tall, bony, grave alcoholic who had worked for de Gaulle in London during the Second World War and was (fortunately for Victoria) rather proud of her English. Françoise insisted on accompanying Victoria to the vegetable stall and then to the butcher’s (to buy seven cents’ worth of meat for the cat), where, when they pushed through the wooden-beaded hanging, they were greeted by the butcher’s hoarse parrot,
“Bonjour, messieurs et ’dames!”

They took their filets filled with the morning’s purchases first to Victoria’s and then to the tiny house of Françoise, who insisted upon Victoria’s staying to lunch. When they came indoors from the terrace because the sun had dropped behind the cactuses they were astonished to see that it was nearly four o’clock.

“I must get home at once,” Victoria said. “I have to clean up and get supper, or Burton’ll think I’ve been off on a tear.”

“Please bring him at Christmas for wine punch and to see my roses. They’ll surely be in bloom then, and they’re the finest in the village.”

But Burton did not particularly want to meet any of Victoria’s new friends. In the weeks that passed, as he arose every morning and left for Antibes or Grasse or Nice with his portfolio under his arm, and as he returned in the evening with the Paris
Herald
and
a kiss for Victoria’s cheek, she came to realize why he preferred to be unaccompanied on his daily expeditions. He was playing a game with himself—a game of never-left-home—and he was winning it. Yet he was “making the most” of his European year, dutifully filling out his three-by-five cards and filing them in his carefully labeled shoe boxes for future shipment home. These fetal lecture notes were the only evidence to Victoria that he had ever come so far, for he found the peasants either amusing or exasperating, the shopkeepers frigid or obsequious, the bureaucracy simply intolerable. He took his friends from among the Americans of his own generation, invariably on fellowships; occasionally he also brought home older countrymen who were paying their own way abroad—bankruptcy lawyers traveling around the world with their wives and sleeping until noon at the Carlton in Cannes because they knew of nothing better to do, pump manufacturers in Europe on business, successful second-generation Americans returning to show off the new Pontiac to the old folks.