The Chateau (24 page)

“That's what he seems like to me,” Harold said. “Like a wonderful older brother, though actually he is younger than I am.”

“Do you have any brothers and sisters?”

“One brother,” he said. “When we were growing up, we couldn't be left together in the back seat of the car, because we always ended up fighting. But now we get along all right.”

“It never occurred to me that Eugène would want me to love him,” she said. “When he asked me to marry him, I was surprised. I was not sure I would marry. I don't know why, exactly. It just didn't seem like something that would happen to me.… As a child I always played by myself.”

“So did I,” Harold said.

“I lived in a world of my own imagination.… When I grew older I began to notice the people around me. I saw that there were two kinds—the bright and the stupid—and I decided that I would choose the bright ones for my friends. Later on, I was disappointed in them. Clever people are not always kind. Sometimes they are quite cruel. And the stupid ones very often are kind.”

“Then what did you do?”

“I had to choose my friends all over again.… I have a sister. The two small children we brought with us are hers. She is two years younger than I, and for a long time I was hardly aware of her. One day she asked me who is my best friend, and I named some girl, and she began to cry. She said: ‘
You
are
my
best friend.' I felt very bad. After that we became very close to each other.”

Mme Viénot addressed a question to her, and Alix turned her head to answer. If I only had a tape recording of the way she says “father,” “brother,” and “other,” Harold thought, smiling to himself. When she turned back to him, he said: “It must have been very difficult—the Occupation, I mean.”

“We lived on turnips for weeks at a time. I cannot endure the sight of one now.”

She saw that her grandmother was watching them and said in French: “I have been telling Harold how we lived on turnips during the Occupation.” It was the first time she had used his Christian name, and he was pleased.

Mme Bonenfant had an interesting observation to make: perpetual hunger makes the middle-aged and the elderly grow thinner,
as one would expect, but the young become quite plump.

Was that why she thought she would never marry, he wondered.

“The greatest hardship was not being allowed to write letters,” Alix said.

“The Germans didn't allow it?”

“Only postcards. Printed postcards with blanks that you filled in. Five or six sentences. You could say that so-and-so had died, or was sick. That kind of thing. We used to make up names of people that didn't exist, and we managed to convey all sorts of information that the Germans didn't recognize, just by filling in the blanks.”

“Did my niece tell you that during the Occupation she and my sister hid a girl in their apartment in Paris?” Mme Viénot said. “The Gestapo was looking for her.”

“She was a school friend,” Alix explained. “I knew she was in the Résistance, and one day she telephoned me and asked if she could spend the night with me. I told her that it wasn't convenient—that I had asked another girl to stay with me that night. And after she had hung up, I realized what she was trying to tell me.”

“How did you manage to reach her again?”

“I sent word, through a little boy in the house where she lived. She came the next night, and stayed four months with us.”

“I was in and out of the apartment all the time,” Mme Viénot said, “and never suspected anything. I saw the girl occasionally and thought she had come to see Alix.”

“We didn't dare tell anyone,” Alix said, “for her sake.”

“After the war was over, my sister told me what had been going on right under my nose,” Mme Viénot said. “But it was very dangerous for them, you know. It might have cost them their lives.”

Mme Cestre raised her hearing aid to her ear, and Alix leaned toward her mother and explained what they were talking about.

“She was rather imprudent,” Mme Cestre said mildly.

“She went out at night sometimes,” Alix said. “And she told several people where she was hiding. She enjoyed the danger of their knowing.”

“Were many people you know involved in the Résistance?” Harold asked.

“In almost every French family something like that was going on,” Mme Viénot said.

A silence fell over the room. When the conversation was resumed, Harold said: “There is something I have been wanting to ask you: when people do something kind, what do you say to them?”

“ ‘Merci,' ” Alix said.

“I know, but I don't mean that. I mean when you are really grateful.”

“ ‘Merci beaucoup.' Or ‘Merci bien.' ”

“But if it is something really kind, and you want them to know that you—”

“It is the same.”

“There are no other words?”

“No.”

“In English there are different ways of saying that you are deeply grateful.”

“In French we use the same words.”

“How do people know, then, that you appreciate what they have done for you?”

“By the way you say it—by your expression, the intonation of your voice.”

“But that makes it so much more difficult!” he exclaimed.

“It is a question of sincerity,” she said, smiling at him as if she had just offered him the passkey to all those gates he kept trying to see over.

O
N
M
ONDAY MORNING
the Bentley appeared in front of the château for the last time. The chauffeur carried the luggage out, and then a huge bouquet of delphiniums wrapped in damp newspaper, which he placed on the floor of the back seat. Mme Viénot, Mme Bonenfant, Harold, Barbara, and Alix accompanied M. and Mme Carrère out to the car. Harold watched carefully while Mme Carrère was thanking Mme Viénot for the flowers and the quart of country cream she held in her hand. They did not embrace each other, but then Mme Carrère was not given to effusiveness. The fact that she didn't speak of seeing Mme Viénot again in Paris might mean merely that it wasn't necessary to speak of it. One thing he felt sure of—there was not one stalk of delphinium left in the garden.

The necessary handshaking was accomplished, and Mme Carrère got into the back seat of the car. M. Carrère put his hand in his pocket and drew out his card, which he handed Harold. It was a business card, but on the back he had written the address and telephone number of the apartment in the rue du faubourg St. Honoré. As Harold tucked the card in his wallet, he felt stripped and exposed, a small boy in the presence of his benign, all-knowing father. If they found themselves in any kind of difficulty, M. Carrère said, they were to feel free
to call on him for help. What he seemed to be saying (so kind was the expression in the expert old clown's eyes, so comprehending and tolerant his smile) was that human thought is by no means as private as it seems, and all you need in order to read somebody else's mind is the willingness to read your own. With his legend intact and his lilac-colored shawl around his shoulders, he leaned forward one last time and waved, through the car window.

Waving, Harold said: “I hope the drive isn't too much for him.”

“They are going to stop somewhere for lunch and a rest,” Mme Viénot said. Already, though the car had not yet turned into the public road, she seemed different, less conventional, lighter, happier. “They are both very dear people,” she said, but he could not see that she was sorry to have them go.

“We are thinking of going to Chaumont this afternoon,” he said.

“And you'd like me to arrange about the taxi? Good. I'll tell her to come at two.”

“Alix is coming with us,” he went on, and then, spurred by his polite upbringing: “We hope you will come too.” He did not at all want her to come; it would be much pleasanter with just the three of them. But in the world of his childhood nobody had ever said that pleasure takes precedence over not hurting people's feelings, even when there is a very good chance that they don't have any feelings. “If the idea appeals to you,” he said, hoping to hear that it didn't. “Perhaps it would only be boring, since you have seen the château so many times.”

“I would enjoy going,” Mme Viénot said. “And perhaps the taxi could bring us home by way of Onzain? I have an errand there, and it is not far out of the way.”

But if Mme Viénot was coming to Chaumont with them, what about poor Mme Straus-Muguet? Wouldn't she feel left out?

“And will you please invite Mme Straus-Muguet for us,” he said.

“Oh, that won't be necessary,” Mme Viénot exclaimed. “It is
very nice of you to think of it, but I'm sure she doesn't expect to be asked, and it will make five in the taxi.”

When he insisted, she agreed reluctantly to convey the invitation, and a few minutes later, meeting him on the stairs, she reported that it had been accepted.

The taxi came promptly at two, and all five of them crowded into it, and still apologizing cheerfully to one another for taking up too much space they arrived at a point directly across the river from Chaumont, which was as far as they could go by car. The ferry was loading on the opposite shore, and Alix and Mme Viénot did not agree about where it would land. After they had scrambled down the steep sandbank to the water's edge, they saw some hikers and cyclists waiting a hundred yards upstream, at the exact spot where Mme Viénot had said the ferry would come. She and Harold began to help Mme Straus-Muguet up the bank again. The two girls took off their shoes and waded into the water. The sound of their voices and their laughter made him turn and look back. Alix tucked the hem of her skirt under her belt. Then the two girls waded in deeper and deeper, with their dresses pulled up and their white thighs showing.

There are certain scenes that (far more than artifacts dug up out of the ground or prehistoric cave paintings, which have a confusing freshness and newness) serve to remind us of how old the human race is, and of the beautiful, touching sameness of most human occasions. Anything that is not anonymous is all a dream. And who we are, and whether our parents embraced life or were disappointed by it, and what will become of our children couldn't be less important. Nobody asks the name of the athlete tying his sandal on the curved side of the Greek vase or whether the lonely traveler on the Chinese scroll arrived at the inn before dark.

He realized with a pang that he had lost Barbara. He was up here on the bank helping an old woman to keep her balance instead of down there with his shoes and stockings off, and so he
had lost her. She had turned into a French girl, a stranger to him.

The girls' way was blocked by a clump of cattails. They stopped and considered what to do. Then, taking each other by the hand, they started slowly out into still deeper water.… The water was too deep. They could not get around the cattails without swimming, and so they turned back and went the rest of the way on dry land.

The ferryboat coming toward them from the opposite shore was long and narrow, and the gunwales were low in the water. When it was about fifty yards from the bank, the ferryman turned off the outboard motor, which was on the end of a long pole, and lifted it out of the water. The boat drifted in slowly. Harold did not see how it could possibly hold all the people who were now waiting to cross over—hollow-cheeked, pale, undernourished hikers and cyclists, dressed for
le sport
, in shorts and open-collared shirts, with their sleeves rolled up. The slightest wind would have blown them away like dandelion fluff.

They pulled the prow of the boat up onto the mud bank and took the bicycles carefully from the hands of the ferryman. When the passengers had jumped ashore, the hikers and cyclists-stood aside politely while the party from the château went on board. Mme Viénot and Mme Straus-Muguet sat in the stern, in the only seat there was. Barbara and Alix perched on the side of the boat, next to them. Harold stood among the other passengers. Under the ferryman's direction a dozen bicycles were placed in precarious balance. The boat settled lower and lower as more people, more bicycles with loaded saddle bags came on board. There were no oars, and the ferryman, on whom all their lives depended, was a sixteen-year-old boy with patches on his pants. He pushed his way excitedly past wire wheels and bare legs, shouting directions. When everybody was on board, he shoved the boat away from the shore with his foot, all but fell in, ran to the stern, making the boat rock wildly, and lowered the outboard motor. The motor caught, and they turned around slowly and headed for the other shore.

“This boat is not safe!” Mme Viénot told the ferryman, and when he didn't pay any attention to her she said to Barbara: “I shall complain to the mayor of Brenodville about it.… The current is very treacherous in the middle of the river.”

Mme Straus-Muguet took Barbara's hand and confessed that she could not swim.

“Harold is a very good swimmer,” Barbara said.

“M. Rhodes will swim to Mme Straus and support her if the boat capsizes,” Mme Viénot decided.

“Très bien,” Mme Straus-Muguet said, and called their attention to the scenery.

Harold's mind ran off an unpleasant two-second movie in which he saw himself in the water, supporting an aged woman whose life was nearly finished, while Barbara, encumbered by her clothes, with no one to help her, drowned before his eyes.

Out in the middle of the river there was a wind, and the gray clouds directly over their heads looked threatening. Mme Straus-Muguet was reminded of the big painting in the Louvre of Dante and Virgil crossing the River Styx. She was so gallant and humorous, in circumstances a woman of her age could hardly have expected to find herself in and few would have agreed to, that she became a kind of heroine in the eyes of everyone. The cyclists turned and watched her, admiring her courage.