William Maxwell - The Chateau

IN THE MORNING, the study door was open and the room itself neat and empty. All through breakfast the Americans breathed the agreeable air of Eugène’s absence from the apartment, and they kept assuring each other that he would not possibly return that night; it was a long hard journey even one way.

When Harold took the mail from Mme Emile there were several letters for M. Soulès de Boisgaillard, which he put on the table in the front hall, by the study door, and one for M. et Mme Harold Rhodes. It was from Alix, and when Barbara drew it out of the envelope, they saw that she had put a four-leaf clover in it.

“ ‘… I was so sad not to say good-by to you at the station on Sunday. But I love writing to you now. It was delightful to know you both, and I wish you to go on in life loving more and more, being happier and happier, and making all those you meet feel happy themselves, as you did here—’ ”

“Oh God!” Harold exclaimed.

Barbara stopped reading and looked at him.

“Read on,” he said.

“ ‘We miss you a lot. Do write and give some of your impressions of Paris or Italy. And I hope we shall see one another very often in September. I should like to be in Paris with you and Eugène now. I hope you have at least nice breakfasts. I suppose you are a little too warm—but I will know all that on Friday as Mummy and I will join Eugène in the train for Tours. Good-by, dear you two, and my most friendly thoughts. Alix.’ ”

He put the four-leaf clover in his financial diary, and then said: “It’s a nice letter, isn’t it? So affectionate. It makes me feel better about our staying here. At least her part wasn’t something we dreamed.”

“If she were here, it would be entirely different,” Barbara said.

“Do you think he will tell her how he has acted?”

“No, do you?… On the other hand, she may not need to be told. That may be the reason she waited so long to speak about our staying here.”

“But the letter doesn’t read as if she had any idea.”

“I don’t think she has.”

They went and stood in the kitchen door, talking to Françoise, who was delighted with the nylon stockings that Barbara presented to her. Holding up a wine bottle, she showed them how much less than a full liter of milk (at twenty-four times the price of milk before the war) they had allowed her for the little one, who fortunately was now in the country, where milk was plentiful. They told her about their life in America, and she told them about her childhood in a village in the Dordogne. They asked if the Germans had gone, and she said no. She had given them their dinner the night before, in their room.

“What a queer household we are!” she exclaimed, rolling her eyes in the direction of Mme Cestre’s room. “Nobody speaks anybody else’s language and none of us belong here.” But they noticed that she was pleasant and kind to the Germans, and apparently it did not occur to them that she might have any reason to hate them. They did not hate anyone.

The door to Mme Cestre’s room was open, and the sounds that came from it this morning were cheerful; those mice, too, were enjoying the fact that the cat was away. The Americans left their door open also, and were aware of jokes and giggling down the hall.

“When we need butter, speak to Mme Emile,” Eugène had said, and so Harold went downstairs and found her having a cup of coffee at her big round table. She rose and shook hands with him and he took out his wallet and explained what he had come for. While she was in the next room he looked at the copy of Paris Soir spread out on the dining table. The police had at last tracked down the gangster Pierrot-le-Fou. He had been surprised in the bed of his mistress, Catherine. The dim photograph showed a young man with a beard. Reading on, Harold was reminded of the fire in Pontorson. No doubt the preparations had been just as extensive and thorough, and it was a mere detail that the gangster had got away. Mme Emile returned with a pound of black-market butter, which she wrapped in the very page he had been reading, and since her conscience seemed perfectly clear, his did not bother him, though he supposed they could both have been put in jail for this transaction.

Shortly afterward, he went off to pick up their passports and the military permit to enter Austria, and when he returned at two o’clock, he found Barbara half frantic over a telephone call from Mme Straus-Muguet. “I didn’t want to answer,” she said, “but I was afraid it might be you. I thought you might be trying to reach me, for some reason. I tried to persuade her to call back, but she said she was going out, and she made me take the message!”

What Barbara thought Mme Straus had said was that they were to meet her on the steps of the Madeleine at five.

They left the apartment at four, and took a taxi to the bank, where they picked up their mail from home. Then they wandered through the neighborhood, going in and out of shops, and at a quarter of five they took up their stand at the top of the flight of stone steps that led up to the great open door of the church. For the next twenty minutes they looked expectantly at everybody who went in or out and at every figure that might turn out to be Mme Straus-Muguet approaching through the bicycle traffic. The more they looked for her, the less certain they were of what she looked like. Suddenly Barbara let out a cry; her umbrella was no longer on her arm. She distinctly remembered starting out with it, from the apartment, and she was fairly certain she had felt the weight of the umbrella on her arm as she stepped out of the taxi. She could not remember for sure but she thought she had laid it down in the china shop, in order to examine a piece of porcelain.

They left the steps of the Madeleine, crossed through the traffic to the shop, and went in. The clerk Barbara spoke to was not the one Harold had wanted her to ask. No umbrella had been found; also, the clerk was not interested in lost umbrellas. As they left the shop, he said: “Don’t worry about it. You can buy another umbrella.”

“Not like this one,” she said. The umbrella was for traveling, folded compactly into a third the usual length, and could be tucked away in a suitcase. “If only we’d gone to the Rodin Museum this afternoon, as we were intending to,” she said. “I’d never have lost it there.”

He went back to the Madeleine and waited another quarter of an hour while she walked the length of the rue Royale, looking mournfully in shop windows and trying to remember a place, a moment, when she had put her umbrella down, meaning to pick it up right away.…

“I’m sure I left it in the china shop,” she said, when she rejoined him.

“It’s probably in that little room at the back, hidden away, this very minute.… ”

He led her through the bicycle traffic to a table on the sidewalk in front of Larue’s and there, keeping one eye on the steps of the church, they had a Tom Collins. It was possible, they agreed, that Barbara had misunderstood and that Mme Straus might have been waiting (poor old thing!) on the steps of some other public monument. Or it could have been another day that they were supposed to meet her.

“But if it turns out that I did get it right and that she’s stood us up, then let’s not bother any more with her,” Barbara said. “We have so little time in Paris, and there is so much that we want to do and see, and I have a feeling that she will engulf us.”

“We’ve already said we’d have dinner with her and go to the theater, tomorrow night.”

“If she knows so many people, why does she bother with two Americans? She may be making a play for us because we’re foreigners and don’t know any better.”