The Chateau

William Maxwell
THE CHÂTEAU

William Maxwell was born in 1908, in Lincoln, Illinois. When he was fourteen his family moved to Chicago and he continued his education there and at the University of Illinois. After a year of graduate work at Harvard he went back to Urbana and taught freshman composition, and then turned to writing. He has published six novels, three collections of short fiction, an autobiographical memoir, a collection of literary essays and reviews, and a book for children. For forty years he was a fiction editor at
The New Yorker
. From 1969 to 1972 he was president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He has received the Brandeis Creative Arts Award Medal and, for his novel
So Long, See You Tomorrow
, the American Book Award and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives with his wife in New York City.

ALSO BY
W
ILLIAM
M
AXWELL

All the Days and Nights
(1995)
Billie Dyer and Other Stories
(1992)
The Outermost Dream
(1989)
So Long, See You Tomorrow
(1980)
Over by the River and Other Stories
(1977)
Ancestors
(1971)
The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing and Other Tales
(1966)
Stories
(1956)
(with Jean Stafford, John Cheever, and Daniel Fuchs)
Time Will Darken It
(1948)
The Heavenly Tenants
(1946)
The Folded Leaf
(1945)
They Came Like Swallows
(1937)
Bright Center of Heaven
(1934)

T
HE BIG OCEAN LINER
, snow white, with two red and black slanting funnels, lay at anchor, attracting sea gulls. The sea was calm, the lens of the sky was set at infinity. The coastline—low green hills and the dim outlines of stone houses lying in pockets of mist—was in three pale French colors, a brocade borrowed from some museum. The pink was daybreak. So beautiful, and no one to see it.

And on C Deck: Something had happened but what he did not know, and it might be years before he found out, and then it might be too late to do anything about it.… Something was wrong, but it was more than the mechanism of dreaming could cope with. His eyelids opened and he saw that he was on shipboard, and what was wrong was that he was not being lifted by the berth under him or cradled unpleasantly from side to side. He listened. The ship's engines had stopped. The straining and creaking of the plywood walls had given way to an immense silence. He sat up and looked through the porthole and there it was, across the open water, a fact, in plain sight, a real place, a part of him because he could say he had seen it. The pink light was spreading, in the sky and on the water. Cherbourg was hidden behind a long stone breakwater—an abstraction. He put his head clear out into the beautiful morning and smelled land.
His lungs expanding took in the air of creation, of the beginning of everything.

He drew his head back in and turned to look at the other berth. How still she was, in her nest of covers. Lost to the world.

He put his head out again and watched a fishing boat with a red sail come slowly around the end of a rocky promontory. He studied the stone houses. They were more distinct now. The mist was rising. Who lives in those houses, he thought, whose hand is at the tiller of that little boat, I have no way of knowing, now or ever.…

He felt a weight on his heart, he felt like sighing, he felt wide open and vulnerable to the gulls' cree-cree-creeing and the light on the water and the brightness in the air.

The light splintered and the hills and houses were rainbow-edged, as though a prism had been placed in front of his eyes. The prism was tears. Some anonymous ancestor, preserved in his bloodstream or assigned to cramped quarters somewhere in the accumulation of inherited identities that went by his name, had suddenly taken over; somebody looking out of the porthole of a ship on a July morning and recognizing certain characteristic features of his homeland, of a place that is Europe and not America, wept at all he did not know he remembered.