William Maxwell: The Chateau

“Are you sure everything is unlocked?” she asked.

Once more he made all the catches fly open. The seven pieces of luggage represented a triumph of packing on her part and the full weight of a moral compromise: it was in his nature to provide against every conceivable situation and want, and she, who had totally escaped from the tyranny of objects when he married her, caught the disease from him.

They stood and waited while a female customs inspector went through the two battered suitcases of an elderly Frenchwoman. Everything the inspector opened or unfolded was worn, shabby, mended, and embarrassingly personal, and the old woman’s face cried out that this was no way to treat someone who was coming home, but the customs inspector did not hear, did not believe her, did not care. There was the book of regulations, which one learned, and then one applied the regulations. Her spinsterish face darkened by suspicion, by anger, by the authority that had been vested in her, she searched and searched.

“What shall I tell her if she asks me about the nylon stockings?” Barbara Rhodes said.

“She probably won’t say anything about them,” he answered. “If she does, tell her they’re yours.”

“Nobody has twelve pairs of unused nylon stockings. She’ll think I’m crazy.”

“Well, then, tell her the truth—tell her they’re to give to the chambermaid in hotels in place of a tip.”

“But then we’ll have to pay duty on them!”

He didn’t answer. A boy of sixteen or seventeen was plucking at his coat sleeve and saying: “Taxi? Taxi?”

“No,” he said firmly. “We don’t want a taxi. One thing at a time, for God’s sake.”

The wind was off the harbor and the air was fresh and stimulating. The confusion in the tin-roofed customs shed had an element of social excitement in it, as if this were the big affair of the season which everybody had been looking forward to, and to which everybody had been asked. More often than not, people seemed pleased to have some responsible party pawing through their luggage. In the early spring of 1948 it had seemed to be a question of how long Europe would be here—that is, in a way that was recognizable and worth coming over to see. Before the Italian elections the eastbound boats were half empty. After the elections, which turned out so much better than anybody expected, it took wire-pulling of a sustained and anxious sort to get passage on any eastbound boat of no matter what size or kind or degree of comfort. But they had made it. They were here.

“Taxi?”

“I wish I hadn’t brought them now,” she whispered.

Tired of hearing the word “taxi,” he turned and drove the boy away. Turning back to her, he said: “I think it would probably look better if we talked out loud.… What has she got against that poor woman?”

“Nothing. What makes you think exactly the same thing wouldn’t be happening if the shoe were on the other foot?”

“Yes?” he said, surprised and pleased by this idea.

He deferred to her judgments about people, which were not infallible—sometimes instead of seeing people she saw through them. But he knew that his own judgment was never to be trusted. He persisted in thinking that all people are thin-skinned, even though it had been demonstrated to him time and time again that they are not.

In the end, the female customs inspector made angry chalk marks on the two cheap suitcases. The old woman’s guilt was not proved, but that was not to say that she was innocent; nobody is innocent.

When their turn came, the inspector was a man, quick and pleasant with them, and the inspection was cursory. The question of how many pairs of stockings a woman travels with didn’t come up. They were the last ones through the customs. When they got outside, Harold looked around for a taxi, saw that there weren’t any, and remembered with a pang of remorse the boy who had plucked at his coat sleeve. He looked for the boy, and didn’t see him either. A hundred yards from the tin customs shed, the boat train stood ready to depart for Paris; but they weren’t going to Paris.

Two dubious characters in dark-blue denim—two comedians—saw them standing helplessly beside their monumental pile of luggage and took them in charge, made telephone calls (they said), received messages (perhaps) from the taxi stand at the railroad station, and helped them pass the time by alternately raising and discouraging their hopes. It was over an hour before a taxi finally drew up and stopped beside the pile of luggage, and Harold was not at all sure it hadn’t arrived by accident. Tired and bewildered, he paid the two comedians what they asked, exorbitant though it seemed.

The taxi ride was through miles of ruined buildings, and at the railway station they discovered that there was no provision in the timetables of the S.N.C.F. for a train journey due south from Cherbourg to Mont-Saint-Michel. The best the station agent could offer was a local at noon that would take them southeast to Carentan. At Carentan they would have to change trains. They would have to change again at Coutances, and at Pontorson. At Pontorson there would be a bus that would take them the remaining five miles to Mont-Saint-Michel.

They checked their luggage at the station and went for a walk. Most of the buildings they saw were ugly and pockmarked by shellfire, but Cherbourg was French, it had sidewalk cafés, and the signs on the awnings read Volailles & Gibier and Spontex and Tabac and Charcuterie , and they looked at it as carefully as they would have looked at Paris. They had coffee at a sidewalk café. They inquired in half a dozen likely places and in none of them was there a public toilet. The people they asked could not even tell them where to go to find one. He went into a stationery store and bought a tiny pocket dictionary, to make sure they were using the right word; also a little notebook, to keep a record of their expenses in. Two blocks farther on, they came to a school and stood looking at the children in the schoolyard, so pale and thin-legged in their black smocks. Was it the war? If they had come to Europe before the war, would the children have had rosy cheeks?

He looked at his wrist watch and said: “I think we’d better not walk too far. We might not be able to find our way back to the station.”

She saw a traveling iron in a shop window and they went in and bought it. They tried once more—they tried a tearoom with faded chintz curtains and little round tables. The woman at the cashier’s desk got up and ushered Barbara to a lavatory in the rear. When they were out on the sidewalk again, she said: “You should have seen what I just saw!”

“What was it like?”

“It was filthy. And instead of a toilet there was a stinking hole in the floor. I couldn’t believe it.”

“I guess if you are a stranger, and homeless, you aren’t supposed to go to the bathroom in France. Are you all right?”

“Yes, I’m perfectly all right. But it’s so shocking. When you think that women with high heels have to go in there and stand or squat on two wooden boards.…”

They stopped to look in the window of a bookstore. It was full of copies of “Gone With the Wind” in French.

THE LOCAL TRAIN was three coaches long. At the last minute, driven by his suspicions, he stepped out onto the platform, looked at the coach they were in, and saw the number 3. They were in third class, with second-class tickets. The fat, good-natured old robber who had charged them five hundred francs for putting them and their luggage in the wrong car was nowhere in sight, and so he moved the luggage himself. His head felt hollow from lack of sleep, and at the same time he was excited, and so full of nervous energy that nothing required any exertion.