William Maxwell - The Chateau

“In the front hall,” he said. “By the study door. But it’s locked.”

“I know where the key is kept,” she said, but before she had a chance to tell him, the doorbell rang. “Are you comfortable in the rue Malène?” she asked as she started toward the hall.

Harold and Barbara looked at each other.

“Something has happened since I saw you?” Sabine asked.

“A great deal has happened,” he said. “It’s a very long story. We’ll tell you later.”

The young man she introduced to them was in his middle twenties, small, compact, and alert-looking, with hair as black as an Indian’s and dark skin. For the first few minutes, he was self-conscious with the Americans, and kept apologizing for his faulty English. They liked him immediately, encouraged him when he groped for a word, assured him that his English was fine, and in every way possible took him under their wing, enjoying all his comments and telling him that they felt as if they already knew him. The four-sided conversation moved like a piece of music. It was as if they had all agreed beforehand to say only what came into their heads and to say it instantly, without fear or hesitation. In her pleasure at discovering that Sabine had such a handsome and agreeable young man on a string, Barbara was more talkative than usual. She was witty. She made them all laugh. Sabine was astonished to learn of the presence of three Berliners in her aunt’s apartment, and said doubtfully: “I do not think that my aunt would like it, if she knew.”

“But if you saw them!” Harold exclaimed. “So pale, so thin. And as sensitive as sea horses.” Then he began to tell the story of the burst water pipe.

They sat down to dinner at a gateleg table in the drawing-room alcove. The Americans dug out of the young Frenchman that he was in the government. From his description of his job, Harold concluded that it was to read all the newspaper articles and summarize them for his superior, who based his statements to the press on them. This explanation the Frenchman rejected indignantly; it was he who prepared the statements for the press. Looking at him, Harold thought that if he had had to draw up a set of requirements for a husband for Sabine, they would have added up to the young man across the table. Though he must be extremely intelligent to hold down a position of responsibility at his age, there was nothing pompous in his manner or his conversation. He was simply young and quick-witted and unsuspicious. They felt free to tease him, and he defended himself without attacking them or being anything but more agreeable. The evening flew by, and when they left at eleven, they tried to do it in such a way that he wouldn’t feel he had to leave too. But he left with them, and as they were passing under a street lamp in the avenue Victor Hugo, they learned that he was not the person they thought he was; he was Sabine’s brother-in-law, Jean-Claude Lahovary.

“Mme Viénot told us about you,” Barbara said.

“Yes?”

“She told us about your family,” Barbara said.

Oh no , Harold begged her silently. Don’t say it .…

But Barbara was a little high from the wine, and on those rare occasions when she did put her trust in strangers, she was incautious and wholehearted. As if no remark of hers could possibly be misunderstood by him, she said: “She said your mother was hors de siècle.”

The Frenchman looked bewildered. Harold changed the subject. Exactly how offensive the phrase was, he didn’t know, and he hadn’t been able to tell from Mme Viénot’s tone of voice because her voice was always edged with one kind of cheerful malice or another. Trying to cover up Barbara’s mistake he made another.

“Do you know what you remind me of?” he asked, though an inner voice begged him not to say it. (He too had had too much wine.)

“What?” the Frenchman asked politely.

“An acrobat.”

The Frenchman was not pleased. He did not consider it a compliment to be told that he was like an acrobat. The tiresome inner voice had been right, as usual. Though table manners are the same in France, other manners are not. We shouldn’t have gone so far with him, the first time, Harold thought. Or been quite so personal.

The conversation lost its naturalness. There were silences as they walked along together. They quickly became strangers. As they crossed one of the streets that went out from the Place Redouté, they were accosted by a beggar, the first Harold had seen in Paris. Always an easy touch at home, he waited, not knowing if beggars were regarded cynically by the French, and also not wanting to appear to be throwing his American money around. The future minister of finance reached in his pocket quickly and brought out a hundred-franc note and gave it to the beggar, and so widened the misunderstanding: the French have compassion for the poor, Americans do not, was the only possible conclusion.

They shook hands at the entrance of the Métro and said good night. Still hoping that something would happen at the last minute, that he would give them a chance to repair the damage they had done to the evening, they stood and watched him start down the steps, turn right, and disappear without looking back. Though they might read his name years from now in the foreign-news dispatches, this was the last they would ever see of Mme Viénot’s brilliant son-in-law.

As they were walking home, past shuttered store fronts, Barbara said: “I shouldn’t have said that about his mother, should I?”

“People are very touchy about their families.”

“But I meant it as a compliment.”

“I know.”

“Why didn’t he realize I meant it as a compliment?”

“I don’t know.”

“I liked him.”

“So did I.”

“It’s very sad.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, meaning something quite different —meaning that there was nothing either of them could do about it now.

He called out who they were as they passed through the foyer of the apartment building. They went up in the elevator, and the hall light went out just as he thrust his key at the keyhole. He stepped into the dark apartment and felt around until he found the light switch. The study door was closed and so was the door of Mme Cestre’s bedroom.

Lying in bed in the dark, looking through the open window at the one lighted room in the building across the street, he said: “What it amounts to is that you cannot be friends with somebody, no matter how much you like them, if it turns out that you don’t really understand one another.”

“Also—” he began, five minutes later, and was stopped by the sound of Barbara’s soft, regular breathing. He turned over and as he lay staring at the lighted room he felt a sudden first wave of homesickness come over him.

THE FIRST DAYLIGHT, whitening the sky and making the windows shine, revealed that the three Berliners had spent the night in Mme Cestre’s bedroom. Their threadbare, unpressed, spotty coats and trousers, neatly folded, were on three chairs. Also, their shirts and socks and underwear, which had been washed without soap. Two of them slept in the narrow bed, with their mouths open like dead people and their breathing so quiet they might have been dead. The third slept on the floor, with a rug under him, his head on the leather brief case, his pink-tinted glasses beside him, and Mme Cestre’s spare comforter keeping him from catching pneumonia. So pale they were, in the gray light. So unaggressive, so intellectual, so polite even in their sleep. Oh heartbreaking — what happens to children , said the fruitwood armoire, vast and maternal, bound in brass, with brass handles on the drawers, brass knobs on the two carved doors. The dressing table, modern, with its triple way of viewing things, said: It is their own doing and redoing and undoing .