William Maxwell - The Chateau

At twenty-five minutes after six, he walked into the study with a calling card in his hand and stood by Eugène’s desk, waiting until his wrist watch and the clock on the mantelpiece agreed that it was half-past six. On the back of the card Mme Straus-Muguet had scrawled the telephone number of the convent in Auteuil, and “coup de fil a 6h½.” During the three and a half weeks that they had been in France he had managed, through the kindness of one person and another, not to have to talk over the telephone. He would just as soon not have done it now.

A woman’s voice answered. He asked to speak to Mme Straus-Muguet and the voice implored him not to hang up. He started to say that he had no intention of hanging up, and then realized by the silence that if he did speak no one would hear him. It was a long, long discouraging silence that extended itself until he wondered why he continued to hold the telephone to his ear. At last a familiar voice said his name and he was enveloped in affectionate inquiries and elaborate arrangements. Mme Straus’s voice came through strong and clear and he had no trouble understanding her. They were to meet her on Saturday evening at eight thirty sharp, she said, on the corner of the rue de Berry and the avenue des Champs Elysées. They would dine at the restaurant of her goddaughter and afterward go to the theater to see Mme Marguerite Mailly.

“At the Comédie Française?” he asked. They had not yet crossed that off their list.

Mme. Mailly had had a disagreement with the Comédie Française, Mme Straus said, and had left it to act in a modern comedy. The play had had an enormous success, and tickets were impossible to obtain, but knowing that they were arriving in Paris this week, she had written to her friend, and three places for the Saturday performance would be waiting at the box office.

“I don’t know that we should do that,” Barbara said doubtfully, when he told her about the arrangements. “It sounds so expensive, and she may not be able to afford it.”

“I don’t know that I’m up to dissuading her,” he said. “Tactfully, I mean, over the telephone, and in French. Besides, it is no longer 6h½, and if I called her back I probably wouldn’t reach her. Do you want to call her?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Maybe she’ll let us pay for the dinner,” he said.

AT BREAKFAST the next morning, Eugène surprised them by saying, as he passed his coffee cup across the tray to Barbara: “I am having a little dinner party this evening. You are free?… Good. I have asked Edouard Doria. He is Alix’s favorite cousin. I think you will like him.”

From the way he spoke, they realized that he was giving the dinner party for them. But why? Had Alix asked him to? And were the Berliners invited?

Meeting them in the hall, a few minutes later, Harold stepped aside to let them pass. They greeted him cheerfully, and when he inquired about their situation, they assured him that progress was being made, in the only way that it could be made; their story was being heard, their reasons considered. What they wanted was in no way unreasonable, and so in time some action, positive or negative, surely must result from their efforts. Meanwhile, there were several embassies they did not get to yesterday and that they planned to go to today.…

Harold stood outside the dining-room door and listened while Eugène consulted with Françoise about the linen, the china, the menu. They reached an agreement on the fish and the vegetable. There would be oysters, then soup. He left the soup to her discretion. For dessert there would be an ice, which he would pick up himself on the way home.

The Americans left the apartment in the middle of the morning, and crossed over to the Left Bank. They walked along the river as far as Notre Dame, and had lunch under an awning, in the rain. In the window of a shop on the Quai de la Mégisserie they saw a big glass bird cage, but how to get it home was the question. Also, it was expensive, and the little financial diary kept pointing out that, even though they had no hotel bill to pay, they were spending quite a lot of money on taxis, flowers, books, movies, and food.

As they came through the Place Redouté, they picked up the kodak films they had left to be developed. They were as surprised by what came out as if they had had no hand in it. Some of the pictures were taken on shipboard, and some in Pontorson and Mont-Saint-Michel. But there was nothing after that until the one of Beaumesnil, with the old trees rising twice as high as the roofs, and a cloud castle in the sky above the real one. The best snapshot of all was a family picture, taken on the lawn, their last morning at the château. This picture was mysterious in that, though the focus was sharp enough, there was so much that you couldn’t see. Alix’s shadow fell across Mme Bonenfant’s face. There was only her beautiful white hair, and her hand stretched out to steady herself against the fall all old people live in dread of. Alix’s hair blacked out the lower part of Harold’s face, and what you could see of him looked more like his brother. Barbara had taken the picture and so she wasn’t in it at all. A shadow from a branch overhead fell across the upper part of Mme Cestre’s face, leaving only her smile in bright sunlight and the rest in doubt. The two small children they had hardly set eyes on were nevertheless in the picture, and Mme Viénot was wearing the green silk dress with the New Look. Beside her was a broad expanse of white that could have been a castle wall but was actually Eugène’s shirt, with his massive face above it looking strangely like Ludwig van Beethoven’s. And Sabine, on the extreme right, standing in a diagonal shaft of light that didn’t come from the sun but from an inadvertent exposure as the film was being taken from the camera.

“I don’t see how we could not have taken more than one roll in all this time,” Barbara said.

“We were too busy looking.”

“We have no picture of Nils Jensen. Or of Mme Straus-Muguet.”

“With or without a picture, I will never forget either of them.”

“That’s not the point. You think you remember and you don’t.”

When they got home, she made him go straight out on the balcony where, even though it was late in the afternoon and the light was poor, she took a picture of him in his seersucker suit and scuffed white shoes, peering down into the rue Malène, and he took one of her in her favorite dress of black and lavender-blue, with the buildings on the far side of the Place Redouté showing in the distance and in the foreground a sharply receding perspective of iron railing and rolled-up awnings.

There were no sounds from behind the closed door of Mme Cestre’s room. Nothing but a kind of anxious silence. Were they gone? Had somebody at last reached for a rubber stamp?

The Germans were not at the dinner party, and Eugène did not mention them all evening. The dinner party was not a success. The food was very good and so was the wine, and Alix’s cousin was young and likable, but when he spoke to the Americans in English, Eugène fidgeted. Barbara never came out from behind the shy, well-bred young woman whom nobody could ever have any reason to say anything unkind to, and Harold did not want to repeat the mistake they had made with Jean-Claude Lahovary, and so he did not proceed as if this was the one moment he and Edouard Doria would ever have for knowing each other (though as a matter of fact it was). He did not ask personal questions; he tried to speak grammatically when he spoke French; he waited to see what course the evening would take. In short, he was not himself. Edouard Doria sat smiling pleasantly and replied to the remarks that were addressed to him. Eugène did not explain to his three guests why he had thought they would like one another, and neither did he take the conversation into his own hands and make tears of amusement run down their cheeks with the outrageous things he said. As the evening wore on, the conversation was more and more in French, between the two Frenchmen.