William Maxwell - The Chateau

The gaiety did not quite last out the meal. The nine people around the table sank back, one after another, into their ordinary selves. There had been no real, or at least no lasting, change but merely a sleight-of-hand demonstration. As some people know how to make three balls appear and disappear and a whole flock of doves fly out of an opera hat, Mme Straus-Muguet knew how to lift a dead social weight. Out of the most unpromising elements she had just now constructed an edifice of gaiety, an atmosphere of concert pitch. Shreds of her triumph lasted until teatime, when Mme Viénot surrendered the silver teapot to her, and she presided—modestly, but also as if she were accustomed to having this compliment paid her.

Sitting with the others, in the circle of chairs at one end of the drawing room, Barbara listened to what Alix and Eugène were saying to each other. His train left at six, and there were last-minute instructions and reminders, of a kind that she was familiar with, and that made her feel she knew them intimately merely because the French girl was saying just what she herself might have said in these circumstances.

“You know where the bread coupons are?”

“You put them in the desk, didn’t you?”

“Yes. You’ll have to go and get new ones when they expire. Do you think you will remember to?”

“If I don’t, my stomach will remind me.”

“I have arranged with Mme Emile to buy ice for you, and butter once a week. And if you want to ask someone to dinner, Françoise will come and cook it for you. She will be there Fridays, to clean the apartment and change the linen on your bed. Can you remember to leave a note for the laundress? I meant to do it and forgot. She is to wash your dressing gown. Is it late?”

“There is plenty of time,” Eugène said, glancing at his wrist watch.

“If it should turn hot, leave the awning down at our window and close the shutters, and it will be cool when you come home at night. It might be better to leave all the shutters closed—but then it will be gloomy. Whatever you think best. And if you are too tired after work to write to me, it will be all right. I will write to you every day.… ”

A few minutes more passed, and then he stood up and started around the circle, shaking hands and saying good-by. His manner with M. and Mme Carrère was simply that of a man of breeding. And yet beneath the confident surface there was something a little queer, Harold thought, watching them. Was Eugène trying to convey to them that his father would not have permitted them to be introduced to him?

When he arrived at Harold and Barbara, he smiled, and Harold said as they shook hands: “We’ll see you on Friday.”

Eugène nodded, turned away, and then turned back to them and said: “You are coming up to Paris—”

“Next Sunday.”

“Good. We will all be taking the train together. That is what I had hoped. And where will you stay?”

Harold told him.

“Why do you spend money for a hotel,” Eugène said, “when there is room in my mother-in-law’s apartment?”

Harold hesitated, and Eugène went on: “I won’t be able to spend as much time with you as I’d like, but it will be a pleasure for me, having you and Barbara there when I come home at night.”

“But it will make trouble for you.”

“It will be no trouble to anyone.”

Harold looked at Barbara inquiringly, and misinterpreted her answering look.

“In that case—” he began, and before he could finish his sentence she said: “Can we let you know later?”

“When I come down next week end,” Eugène said, and bent down to kiss Mme Bonenfant’s frail hand.

Harold thought a slight shadow had passed over his face when they did not accept his invitation, and then he decided that this was not so. The relations between them were such that there was no possibility of hurt feelings or any misunderstanding.

Later, Barbara said that she would have been delighted to accept the invitation except for one thing: it should have come from Alix’s mother. “Or at least he should have made it clear that Mme Cestre had been consulted before he invited us. And also, perhaps we ought to be a little more cautious; we ought to know a little more what we’re getting into.”

“EUGÈNE ENJOYED TALKING to you so much,” Alix said, in the petit salon after dinner. “It was a great pleasure to him to find you here. He learned many things about America which interested him.”

“The things he wanted to know about, most of the time I couldn’t tell him,” Harold said. “Partly because nobody knows the answer to some of his questions, and partly because I didn’t know the right words to explain in French the way things are. Also, there are lots of things I should know that I don’t. Sometimes we couldn’t understand each other at all, and when I was ready to give up he would insist that I go on. And eventually, out of my floundering, he seemed to understand what it was I was trying to say. I’ve never had an experience quite like it.”

“Eugène is very intuitive.… I have been telling him that he ought to learn English, and until now he hasn’t cared to take the trouble. But it distressed him that I could speak to you in your language, badly though I do it, and he—”

“Your English is excellent.”

“I am out of the habit. I make mistakes in grammar. Eugène has decided to go to the Berlitz School and learn English, so that when you come back to France he will be able to talk to you. So you see, you have accomplished something which I try to do and couldn’t.”

She turned away in order to repeat to her mother a remark of M. Carrère’s that had pleased the company. Mme Cestre’s face lit up. She was reminded of an observation of her husband’s that in turn pleased M. Carrère. Alix waited until she saw that this conversation was proceeding without her help and then she turned back to Harold. “Eugène was so excited to learn that you have been married three years. We thought you were on your wedding journey.”

“How long have you been married?”

“A little over a year. Eugène thought that in marriage, after a while, people changed. He thought they grew less fond of one another, and that there was no way of avoiding it. When he saw you and your wife together, the way you are with each other, it made him more hopeful.”

“Where did you meet?” Harold said, to change the subject. He was perfectly willing to discuss most subjects but not this, because of a superstitious fear that his words would come back to him under ironical circumstances.

“When the Germans came,” she said, “my father was in the South, and we were separated from him for some time. We were here with my grandmother. But as soon as we were able, we joined my father in Aix-en-Provence, and it was there that I met Eugène. He was different from the boys I knew. I thought he was very handsome and intelligent, and I enjoyed talking to him. At that time he was thinking of taking holy orders. I felt I could say anything to him—that he was like my brother.”

“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.”