William Maxwell - The Chateau

“To what end?”

“Oh, I don’t know!” Barbara exclaimed. “I don’t like it here! Should we go?”

She was always depressed and irritated with herself when she lost something—as if the lost object had abandoned her deliberately, for a very good reason.

The waiter brought the check, and while they were waiting for change, Harold said: “She may call this evening.”

They crossed the street one last time, to make sure that their eyes hadn’t played tricks on them. There were several middle-aged and elderly women waiting on the steps of the Madeleine, any one of whom could have explained the true meaning of resignation, but Mme Straus-Muguet was not among them.

That night, when they walked into the apartment at about a quarter of eleven, after dinner and another movie and a very pleasant walk home, the first thing they saw was that the mail on the hall table was gone. The study door was closed.

“Oh why couldn’t he have stayed!” Barbara whispered, behind the closed door of their room. “It was so nice here without him. We were all so happy.”

ALIX SENT YOU HER LOVE,” Eugène said when he joined them at breakfast.

He did not explain why he had not stayed in the country, or describe the wedding. They were all three more silent than usual. The armchair, creaking and creaking, carried the whole burden of conversation. It had come down to Eugène from his great-great-grandfather. In a formal age that admired orators, military strategists, devout politicians, and worldly ecclesiastics, Jean-Marie Philippe Raucourt, fourth Count de Boisgaillard, had been merely a sensible, taciturn, unambitious man. He lived in a dangerous time, but, having bought his way into the King’s army, he quickly bought his way out again and put up with the King’s displeasure. He avoided houses where people were dying of smallpox and let no doctor into his own. He made a politic marriage and was impatient with those people who prided themselves on their understanding of the passions. He had children both in and out of wedlock, escaped the guillotine, noticed that there were ways of flattering the First Consul, and died at the age of fifty-two, in secure possession of his estates. His son, Eugène’s great-grandfather, was a Peer and Marshal of France under the Restoration. Eugène’s grandfather was an aesthete, and his taste was the taste of his time. He collected grandiose allegorical paintings and houses to hang them in, married late in life, and corresponded with Liszt and Clara Schumann. His oldest son, Eugène’s uncle, had a taste for litigation. The once valuable family estates were now heavily mortgaged and no good to anyone, and the house at Mamers stood empty. But scattered over the whole of France were the possessions of the fourth Count de Boisgaillard—beds and tables and armchairs (including this one), brocades, paintings, diaries, letters, books, firearms—and through these objects he continued, though so long dead, to exert an influence in the direction of order, restraint, the middle ground, the golden mean. But even he had to give way and became merely a name, a genealogical link, one of thousands, when the telephone started ringing. Seeing Eugène in his study, with his hat on the back of his head and the call going on and on in spite of his impatience and the air of distraction that increased each time he glanced over his shoulder at the clock, one would have said that there was no end to it; that it was a species of blackmail. The telephone seemed to know when he left the apartment. Once he was out the front door, it never rang again all day.

At nine o’clock, Mme Emile brought up the morning’s mail, and Eugène, leafing through it, took out a letter and handed it to Harold, who ripped the envelope open and read the letter standing in the hall:

Petite Barbara Chérie

Petit Harold Chéri

I am a shabby friend for failing to keep my word yesterday evening, and not coming to the rendezvous! But a violent storm prevented me, and no taxi in the rain. I was obliged to mingle my tears with those of the sky. Forgive me, then, petits amis chéris.… Yes, I say “chéris,” for a long long chain of tenderness will unite me to you always! It is with a mother’s heart that I love you both! My white hairs didn’t frighten you when we met at “Beaumesnil,” and at once I felt that a very sincere sympathy was about to be established between us. This has happened by the grace of God, for your dear presence has given back to me my twentieth year and the sweetness of my youth, during which I was so happy!… but after!… so unhappy! May these lines bring you the assurance of my great and warm tenderness, mes enfants chéris. Je vous embrasse tous deux. Votre vieille amie qui vous aime tant—

Straus-Muguet

This evening on the stroke of 8h½ if possible.

He put the letter in the envelope and the envelope in his pocket, and said: “Did you ever hear of a restaurant called L’Etoile du Nord?”

“Yes,” Eugène said.

“What is it like?”

“It’s a rather night-clubby place. Why do you ask?”

“We’re having dinner there this evening, with Mme Straus-Muguet.”

Eugène let out a low whistle of surprise.

“Is it expensive?”

“Very.”

“Then perhaps we shouldn’t go,” Harold said.

“If she couldn’t afford it, she wouldn’t have invited you,” Eugène said. “I have been making inquiries about her, and it seems that the people she says she knows definitely do not know her.”

Harold hesitated, and then said: “But why? Why should she pretend that she knows people she doesn’t know?”

Eugène shrugged.

“Is she a social climber?” Harold asked.

“It is more a matter of psychology.”

“What do you mean?”

“Elle est un peu maniaque,” Eugène said.

He went into the study to read his mail, and Harold was left with an uncomfortable choice: he could believe someone he did not like but who had probably no reason to lie, or someone he liked very much, whose behavior in the present instance … He took her letter out and read it again carefully. Mme Straus’s hair was not white but mouse-colored, and though the sky had been gray yesterday afternoon, it was no grayer than usual, and not a drop of rain had fallen on the steps of the Madeleine.

When he and Barbara went out to do some errands, they saw that a lot more of the rolling metal shutters that were always pulled down over the store fronts at night had not been raised this morning, and in each case there was a note tacked up on the door frame or the door of the shop explaining that it would be closed for the “vacances.” Every day for the last three days it had been like this. Paris seemed to be withdrawing piecemeal from the world. At first it didn’t matter, except that it made the streets look shabby. But then suddenly it did matter. There were certain shops they had come to know and to enjoy using. And they could not leave Harold’s flannel trousers at the cleaners, though it was open this morning, because it would be closed by Monday. The fruit and vegetable store where they had gone every day, for a melon or lettuce or tomatoes, closed without warning. Half the shops in the neighborhood were closed, and they had to wander far afield to get what they needed.

Shortly after they got home, there was a knock on their door, and when Barbara opened it, there stood the three Berliners in a row. They had come to say good-by. Herr Rothenberg and the one whose ears stuck out were going home. The one with the pink glasses had managed to get himself sent to a conference in Switzerland. There was something chilling in their manner that had not been there before; now that they were on the point of returning to Germany, they seemed to have become much more German. When they had finished thanking the Americans for their kindness, they took advantage of this opportunity to register with these two citizens of one of the countries that were now occupying the Fatherland their annoyance at being made a political football between the United States and the U.S.S.R.