William Maxwell - The Chateau

Well, where to begin is the question. The summer he spent in bed with rheumatic fever on an upstairs sleeping porch? Or the street he lived on—those big, nondescript, tree-shaded, Middle Western white houses, beautiful in the fall when the leaves turned, or at dusk with the downstairs lights turned on, or in winter when the snow covered up whatever was shabby and ugly? Should we begin with the tree house in the back yard or with the boy he was envious of, who always had money for ice-cream cones because his mother was dead and the middle-aged aunt and uncle he lived with felt they had no other way to make it up to him? Given his last name, Rhodes, and the time and place he grew up in, it was inevitable that when he started to go to school he should be called Dusty. Some jokes never lose their freshness.

It helps, of course, to know what happened when they were choosing up sides and he stood waiting for his name to be called. And about the moment when he emerged into the public eye for the first time, at the age of six, in a surgical-cotton wig, knee britches, buckles on his shoes, and with seven other costumed children danced the minuet in the school auditorium.

The sum total of his memories is who he is, naturally. Also the child his mother went in to cover on her rounds, the last thing at night before she went to bed—the little boy with his own way of sleeping, his arm around some doll or stuffed animal, and his own way of recognizing her presence through layers and layers of sleep. Also the little boy with a new navy-blue suit on Easter Sunday, and a cowlick that would not stay down. Then there is that period when he was having his teeth straightened, when he corresponded with postage-stamp companies. The obedient, sensible, courteous ten-year-old? Or the moody boy in his teens, who ate them out of house and home and had to be sent from the table for talking back to his father? Take your choice, or take both of them. His mother’s eyes, the Rhodes nose and mouth and chin; the Rhodes stubbornness, his mother said. This book belongs to Harold Rhodes, Eighth Grade, Room 207, Central School.… And whatever became of those boards for stretching muskrat skins on, the skins he was going to sell and make a fortune from? Or his magic lantern and his postcard projector? Or his building blocks, his Boy Scout knife, his school report cards? And that medicine-stained copy of Mr. Midshipman Easy ? And the Oz books? Somewhere, all these unclaimed shreds of his personality, since matter is never entirely lost but merely changes its form.

As a boy of thirteen he was called up on the stage of the Majestic Theater by a vaudeville magician, and did exactly what the magician told him (under his breath) to do; even though the magician told him out loud not to do it, and so made a monkey of him, and the audience rocked with perfectly kind laughter. Since then he hasn’t learned a thing. The same audience would rock with the same laughter if he were called up on the stage of the Majestic Theater tomorrow. Fortunately it has been torn down to make a parking lot.

In college he was responsive, with a light in his eye; he was a pleasure to lecture to; but callow, getting by on enthusiasm because it came more natural to him than thinking, and worried about his grades, and about the future, and because, though he tried and tried, he could not break himself of a shameful habit. If he had taken biology it would have been made clear to him that he too was an animal, but he took botany instead.

But who is he? which animal?

A commuter, standing on the station platform, with now the Times and now the Tribune under his arm, waiting for the 8:17 express. A liberal Democrat, believing idealistically in the cause of labor but knowing few laborers, and a member in good standing of the money-loving class he was born into, though, as it happens, money slips through his fingers. A spendthrift, with small sums, cautious with large ones. Who is he? Raskolnikov—that’s who he is.

Surely not?

Yes. Also Mr. Micawber. And St. Francis. And Savonarola. He’s no one person, he’s an uncountable committee of people who meet and operate under the handy fiction of his name. The minutes of the last meeting are never read, because it’s still going on. The committee arrives at important conclusions which it cannot remember, and makes sensible decisions it cannot possibly keep. For that you need a policeman. The committee members know each other, but not always by their right names. The bachelor who has sat reading in the same white leatherette chair by the same lamp with the same cigarette box within reach on the same round table for so long now that change is no longer possible to him—that Harold Rhodes of course knows the bridegroom with a white carnation in his buttonhole, sipping a glass of champagne, smiling, accepting congratulations, aware of the good wishes of everybody and also of a nagging doubt in the back of his mind. Just as they both know the head of the family, the born father, with the Sunday paper scattered around him on the living-room rug, smiling benignly at no children after three years of marriage. And the child of seven (in some ways the most mature of all these facets of his personality) who is being taken, with his hand in his father’s much bigger hand, to see his mother in the hospital on a day that, as it turned out, she was much too sick to see anyone.

What does he — what do all these people do for a living?

Does it matter?

Certainly .

After two false starts he now has a job with a future. He is working for an engraving firm owned by a friend of his father.

What did he do, where was he, during the war?

He wasn’t in the war … 4F. He has to be away from Barbara, traveling, several times a year, but the rest of the time he can be home, where he wants to be. His hours are long, but he has already had two raises, and now this four months’ leave of absence, proof that his work is valued.

And who is she? whom did he marry?

Somebody who matches him, the curves and hollows of her nature fitting into all the curves and hollows of his nature as, in bed, her straight back and soft thighs fit inside the curve of his breast and belly and hips and bent legs. Somebody who looks enough like him that they are mistaken occasionally for brother and sister, and who keeps him warm at night, taking the place of the doll that he used to sleep with his arm around: Barbara Scully. Barbara S. Rhodes, when she writes a check.

And what was her childhood like?

Well, where to begin is again the question. At the seashore? Or should we take up, one after another, the dogs, the nursemaids? Or the time she broke her arm? She was seven when that happened. Or the period when she cared about nothing but horses? Or that brief, heartbreaking, first falling in love? Or the piles of clothes on the bed, on the chairs in her room, all with name tapes sewed on them, and the suitcases waiting to be filled?

Or should we open that old exercise book that by some accident has survived? “One day our mother gave the children a party.

There were fourteen merry girls and boys at the party.

They played games and raced about the lawn with Rover.

But John fell from a tree and broke his arm.

Mother sent a boy to bring the doctor.

The doctor set the arm and said that it would soon be better.

Was not John a brave boy to bear the pain as he did.”

Three times 269 is not 627, of course; and neither does 854 minus 536 equal 316. But it is true that there are seven days in the week, and that all the children must learn their lessons. Also that it is never the raveled sleeve of just one day’s care that sleep knits up. She should have been at home nursing her baby, and instead here they both are in Europe. And every month contains doomed days, such sad sighs, the rain that does not rain, and blood that is the color of bitter disappointment when it finally flows. This is the lesson she is now learning.