William Maxwell - The Chateau

“It was an accident,” Mme Bonenfant said.

“And M. Viénot?” Harold Rhodes asked the boy in the photograph. “Why does nobody speak of him? His name is never mentioned.”

“Do not interrupt,” the boy in the photograph said. “They are speaking of me—of what happened to me.”

AT QUARTER OF ELEVEN, when the Americans went upstairs, they found a large copper can in their bathroom. The temperature of the water in the can was just barely warm to the touch.

Lying awake in the dark, she heard the other bed creak.

“Are you awake?” she whispered, when he turned again.

He was awake.

“We don’t have to stay,” she said, in a small, sad voice.

“If it’s no good I think we could tell her that we’re not happy and just leave.” He sat up and rearranged the too-fat pillows and then said: “It’s funny how it comes and goes. I have periods of clarity and then absolute blankness. And my mind gets so tired I don’t care any more what they’re saying.” The bed creaked as he turned over again. He tried to go to sleep but he had talked himself wide awake. “Good night. I love you,” he said. But it didn’t work. This declaration, which on innumerable occasions had put his mind at rest, had no effect because she was not in his arms.

“It isn’t simply the language,” he said, after several minutes of absolute silence. “Though that’s part of it. There’s a kind of constraint over the conversation, over everything. I think they all feel it. I think it’s the house.”

“I know it’s the house,” she said. “Go to sleep.”

Five minutes later, the bed creaked one last time. “Do I imagine it,” he asked, “or is it true that when they speak of the Nazis—downstairs, I mean—the very next sentence is invariably some quite disconnected remark about Americans?”

THE VILLAGE OF BRENODVILLE was too small and unremarkable to be mentioned in guidebooks, and derived its identity from the fact that it was not some other village—not Onzain or Chouzy or Chailles or Chaumont. It had two principal streets, the Grande Rue and the avenue Gambetta, and they formed the letter T. The avenue Gambetta went from the Place de l’Eglise to the railway station. The post office, the church, the mairie, and the cemetery were all on the Grande Rue. So was the house of M. Fleury. It ought to have given some sign of recognition, but it didn’t; it was as silent, blank, secretive, and closed to strangers as every other house up and down the village street. While they stood looking at it, Mme Viénot came out of the post office and caught them red-handed.

“You are about to pay a call on M. Fleury?”

“We weren’t even sure this was where he lived,” Harold said, blushing. “The houses are all alike.”

“That is the house of M. Fleury. You didn’t make a mistake,” Mme Viénot said. “I think it is unlikely that you will find him at home at this hour, but you can try.”

After an awkward moment, during which they did not explain why they wanted to pay a call on M. Fleury, she got on her bicycle and pedaled off down the street. Watching the figure on the bicycle get smaller and smaller, he said: “She’s going to be soaked on the way home. Look at the sky.”

“A hundred francs was probably enough,” Barbara said. “In a place as small as this.”

“It would reflect on her, in any case,” he said.

“And if he isn’t there, we’d have to explain to his wife.”

“Let’s skip it.”

They bought stamps at the post office, and wondered, too late, if the postmistress could read the postcards they had just mailed to America. The woman who sold them a sack of plums to eat in their room may have been, as Mme Viénot said, a great gossip, but she did not gossip with them. They tried unsuccessfully to see through, over, or around several garden gates. With the houses that were directly on the street, shutters or lace curtains discouraged curiosity. They stood in the vestibule of the little church and peered in. Here there was no barrier but their own Protestant ignorance.

The Grande Rue was stopped by a little river that was a yard wide. Wild flags grew along the water’s edge. A footbridge connected an old house on this side with its orchard on the other. They decided that the wooden shelter on the river bank was where the women brought their linen to be washed in running water.

“I don’t suppose you could have a washing machine if you wanted to,” he said.

“No, but you’d have other things,” she said. “You’d live in a different way. You wouldn’t want a washing machine.”

The sky had turned a greenish black while they were standing there, and now a wind sprang up. Out over the meadows a great abstract drama was taking place. In the direction of Pontlevoy and Montrichard and Aignan, the bodies and souls of the unsaved fell under the sway of the powers of darkness, the portions of light in them were lost, and the world became that much poorer. In the direction of Herbault and St. Amand and Selommes, all glorious spirits assembled, the God of Light himself appeared, accompanied by the aeons and the perfected just ones. The angels supporting the world let go of their burden and everything fell in ruins. A tremendous conflagration consumed meadows and orchard, and on the very brink of the little river, a perfect separation of the powers of light and darkness took place. The kingdom of light was brought into a condition of completeness, all the grass bent the same way. Darkness should, from this time on, have been powerless.

“We’d better start home,” Barbara said.

On the outskirts of the village they had to take shelter in a doorway. The rain came down in front of their faces like a curtain. At times they couldn’t even see through it. Then the sky began to grow lighter and the rain slackened.

“If we had a car,” he said, “it would be entirely different. We wouldn’t feel cooped up. The house is damp and cold. The books accumulate on the table in our room and I read a few sentences and my mind gets tired of translating and having to look up words and begins to wander.”

“A lot of it’s our fault,” she said, “for not speaking French.”

“And part of it isn’t our fault. It wasn’t like this anywhere else. With time hanging heavy on our hands, we always seem to be hurrying, always about to be late to lunch or dinner. We ask for a double bed and nothing is done about it, and she says nothing can be done about it because of the lamp. What actually has the lamp got to do with it? We didn’t ask for a lamp. Nothing is done about anything we ask for in the way of comfort or convenience. And neither is it refused. The hot water arrives while we’re at dinner. The cook’s bicycle is too frail for us to borrow, and we can’t borrow hers because it has just been repaired. The buses and trains run at the wrong time, the taxi is expensive. George Ireland showed me a snapshot of the horse hitched up to a dog cart, but that was last summer. Now the horse is old and needed in the garden. When I try to find her to ask her about some arrangement, she’s never anywhere. I don’t even know where her room is.”

“Did you hear her say ‘I like your American custom of not shaking hands in the morning’?”

“They shake hands at breakfast ?”

“Apparently.”

“The cozy atmosphere of the breakfast table is a fabrication that we are supposed to accept and even contribute to,” he went on, “as the other guests politely accept and support the fiction that Mme Viénot and her mother are the very cream of French society and lost nothing of importance when they lost their money.”