William Maxwell - The Chateau

He carried the dufflebag into the bathroom, and she changed from her suit into a wool dressing gown, and then began transferring the contents of the large brown suitcase, a pile at a time, to the beds, the round table in the center of the room, and the armoire. She was pleased with their room. After the violent curtains and queer shapes of the hotel rooms of the past week, here was a place they could settle down in peacefully and happily. An infallible taste had been at work, and the result was like a wax impression of one of those days when she woke lighthearted, knowing that this was going to be a good day all day long—that whatever she had to do would be done quickly and easily; that the telephone wouldn’t ring and ring; that dishes wouldn’t slip through her nerveless hands and break; that it wouldn’t be necessary to search through the accumulation of unanswered letters for some reassurance that wasn’t there, or to ask Harold if he loved her.

Standing in the bathroom door, with his shirt unbuttoned and his necktie trailing from one hand, he surveyed the red room and then said: “It couldn’t be handsomer.”

“It’s cold,” she said. “I noticed it downstairs. The whole house is cold.”

He glanced at the fireplace. The ornamental brass shield over the opening was held in place with screws and it looked permanent. There was no basket of wood and kindling on the hearth. In her mind the present often extended its sphere of influence until it obscured the past and denied that there was going to be any future. When she was cold, when she was sad, she was convinced that she would always be sad or cold and there was no use doing anything about it; all the sweaters and coats and eiderdown comforters and optimism in the world would not help, and all she wanted him to do was agree that they would not help. Unfortunately, she could not get him to agree. It was a basic difference of opinion. He always tried to do something. His nature required that there be something practical you could do, even though he knew by experience that it took some small act of magic, some demonstration of confidence or proof of love, to make her take heart, to make her feel warm again.

“Why don’t you take a hot bath? You’ve got time if you hurry,” he said, and turned to the bookcase. Because there were times when he was too tired, or just couldn’t produce any proof of love, or when he felt a deep disinclination to play the magician. At other times, nothing was too much trouble or exhausted his strength and patience.

His finger, in the pursuit of titles, stopped at Shaw and Wells, in English; at Charles Morgan and Elizabeth Goudge, in French, and so inconsistent from the point of view of literary taste with the first two; at La Mare au Diable , which he had read in high school and could no longer remember anything about; at Le Grand Meaulnes , which he remembered hazily. The letters of Mme de Sevigné (in three small volumes) he had always meant to read some time. The Fables of La Fontaine, and the Contes , which were said to be indecent. A book of children’s songs, with illustrations by Boutet de Monvel. A book of the religious meditations of someone that he, raised a Presbyterian, had never heard of. He said: “Say, whose books are these, do you suppose?” and she answered from the bathroom in a shocked voice: “Why, there’s no hot water!”

“Let it run,” he called back.

“There’s no water to let run.”

He went into the bathroom and tried both faucets of the immense tub. Nothing came out of them, not even air.

“It’s the war,” he said.

“I don’t see how we can stay here two weeks without a bath,” Barbara said.

He moved over to the washstand. There the cold-water faucet worked splendidly but not the faucet marked chaud .

“She said in her letter ‘a room with a bath.’ If this is what she means, I don’t think it was at all honest of her.”

“Mmmm.”

“And I don’t see any toilet.”

They looked all around the room, slowly and carefully. There was one door they hadn’t opened. He opened it confidently, and they found themselves staring into a shallow clothes closet with three wire coat hangers on the metal rod. They both laughed.

“In a house this size there’s bound to be a toilet somewhere,” he said, by no means convinced that this was true.

They washed simultaneously at the washbowl, and then he put on a clean shirt and went out into the hall. He listened at the head of the stairs. The house was steeped in silence. He put his head close to the paneling of the door directly opposite theirs, heard nothing, and placed his hand on the knob. The door swung open cautiously upon a small lumber room under the eaves. In the dim light he made out discarded furniture, books, boxes, pictures, china, bedclothes, luggage, a rowing machine, a tin bidet, a large steel engraving of the courtyard and Grand Staircase of the château of Blois. He closed the door softly, struck with how little difference there is in the things people all over the world cannot bring themselves to throw away.

The remaining door of the third-floor hall revealed a corridor, two steps down and uncarpeted. The fresh paint and clean wallpaper ended here, and it seemed unlikely that their toilet would be in this wing of the house, which had an air of disuse, of decay, of being a place that outsiders should not wander into. The four dirty bull’s-eye windows looked out on the back wing of the château. There were doors all along the corridor, but spaced too far apart to suggest the object of his search, arid at the end the corridor branched right and left, with more doors that it might be embarrassing to open at this moment. He opened one of them and saw a brass bed, made up, a painted dresser, a commode, a rag rug on the painted floor, a single straight chair. He had ended up in the servants’ quarters.

Retracing his steps, he listened again at the head of the stairs. The house was as still as houses only are on Sunday. When he opened the door of their room, Barbara had changed back into her traveling suit and was standing in front of the low dresser. “I couldn’t find it,” he said.

“Probably it’s on the second floor.” She leaned toward the mirror. She was having difficulty with the clasp of her pearls. “But it’s funny she didn’t tell us.”

“She has dyed hair,” he said.

“Sh-h-h!”

“What for?”

“There may be someone in the room across the hall.”

“I looked. It’s full of old junk.”

She stared at him in the mirror. “Weren’t you afraid there’d be somebody there?”

“Yes,” he said. “But how else was I going to find it?”

“I don’t believe that she was about to go to the station to meet us.”

“Do you think she forgot all about us?”

“I don’t know.”

He put on a coat and tie and stood waiting for her.

“I’m afraid to go downstairs,” she said.

“Why?”

“We’ll have to speak French and she’ll know right away that Muriel helped me with those letters. She’ll think I was trying to deceive her.”

“They don’t expect Americans to speak idiomatic French,” he said. “And besides, she was trying to overcharge us.”

“You go down.”

“Without you? Don’t be silly. The important thing is you got her to figure the price by the week instead of by the day. She probably respects you more for it than she would have if we—”

“Do you think if we asked for some wood for the fireplace—”

“I don’t know,” he said doubtfully. “Probably there isn’t any wood.”

“But we’re right next door to a forest.”

“I know. But if there’s no hot water and no toilet—Anyway, we’re in France. We’re living the way the French do. This is what goes on behind the high garden walls.”