William Maxwell - The Chateau

The play never recovered from this offstage effect, but the actress’s son was allowed to marry the ingénue and there was a reconciliation between the playwright and Mme Mailly, who, Harold realized as she advanced to the apron and took a series of solo curtain calls, was simply too large for the stage she acted on. The effect was like a puppet show when you have unconsciously adjusted your sense of scale to conform with small mechanical actors and at the end a giant head emerges from the wings, the head of the human manipulator, producing a momentary surprise.

The lights went on. Mme Straus, delighted with the comedy, gathered up her fur, her umbrella, her coat, and the present of fruit. She spoke to an usher, who pointed out the little door through which they must go to find themselves backstage. They went to it, and then through a corridor and up a flight of stairs to a hallway with four or five doors opening off it and one very bright light bulb dangling by its cord from the ceiling. Mme Straus whispered to Harold: “Don’t forget to tell her you admire her poetry. You can tell her in English. She speaks your language beautifully.”

Four people had followed them up the stairs. Mme Straus knocked on the door of the star’s dressing room, and the remarkable voice answered peremptorily: “Don’t come in!”

Mme Straus turned to Harold and Barbara and smiled, as if this were exactly the effect she had intended to produce.

More people, friends of the cast, came up the stairway. The little hall grew crowded and hot. The playwright came out, wearing a silk dressing gown, his face still covered with grease paint, and was surrounded and congratulated on his double accomplishment. Mme Straus knocked once more, timidly, and this time the voice said: “Who is it?”

“It’s me,” Mme Straus said.

“Who?” the voice demanded, in a tone of mounting irritation.

“It’s your friend, chérie.”

“Who?”

“Straus-Muguet.”

“Will you please wait.… ” The voice this time was shocking.

Harold looked at Mme Straus, who was no longer confident and happy, and then at Barbara, who avoided his glance. All he wanted was to push past the crowd and sneak down the stairs while there was still time. But Mme Straus-Muguet waited and they had no choice but to wait with her until the door opened and the actress, large as Gulliver, bore down upon them. She nodded coldly to Mme Straus and looked around for other friends who had come backstage to congratulate her. There were none. Barbara and Harold were presented to her, and she acknowledged the introduction with enough politeness for Barbara to feel that she could offer her program and Mme Straus’s fountain pen. The actress signed her name with a flourish, under her silhouette on the first page. When Harold told her that they had read her poems, she smiled for the first time, quite cordially.

Mme Straus tore the string off the pasteboard carton and presented it open to her friend, so that Mme Mailly could see what it contained.

“No, thank you,” Mme Mailly said. And when Mme Straus like a blind suppliant continued to show her peaches, the actress said impatiently: “I do not care for any fruit.” Her manner was that of a person cornered by some nuisance of an old woman with whom she had had, in the past and through no fault of her own, a slight acquaintance, under circumstances that in no way justified this intrusion and imposition on her good nature. All this Harold could have understood and perhaps accepted, since it took place in France, if it hadn’t been for one thing: in his raincoat pocket at that moment were two volumes of sonnets, and on the flyleaf of one of them the actress had written: “To my dear friend, Mme Straus-Muguet, whose sublime character and patient fortitude, as we walked side by side in the kingdom of Death, I shall never cease to remember and be grateful for.… ”

In the end, Mme Mailly was prevailed upon to hold the pasteboard box, though nothing could induce her to realize that it was a present. The stairs were spiral and treacherous, requiring all their attention as they made their way down them cautiously. The passageway at the foot of the stairs was now pitch dark. By the time they found an outer door and emerged into the summer night, Mme Straus had had time to rally her forces. She took Barbara’s arm and the three of them walked to the corner and up the avenue de Wagram, in search of a taxi. No one mentioned the incident backstage. Instead, they spoke of how clever and amusing the play had been. As they parted at the taxi stand, Harold gave Mme Straus the two books that were in his coat pocket, and she said: “I’m glad you remembered to ask for her autograph. You must preserve it carefully.”

ON SUNDAY MORNING, Eugène showed his membership card at the gate in the stockade around the swimming pool in the Bois de Boulogne. Turning to Harold, he asked for their passports.

“You have to have a passport to go swimming?” Harold asked in amazement.

“I cannot get you into the Club without them,” Eugène said patiently.

“I don’t have them. I’m so sorry, but it never occurred to me to bring them. In America …”

With the same persistence that he had employed when he was trying to arrange for food and lodging for the Berliners, Eugène now applied himself to persuading the woman attendant that it was all right to let his American guests past the gate. The attendant believed that rules are not made to be broken, and the rule of the Racing Club was that no foreigner was to be admitted without proof of his foreignness. There are dozens of ways of saying no in French and she went through the list with visible satisfaction. Eugène, discouraged, turned to Harold and said: “It appears that we will have to drive home and get your passports.”

“But the gasoline— Couldn’t we just wait here while you go in and have a swim?” Harold asked, and then he started to apologize all over again for causing so much trouble.

“I will try one last time,” Eugène said, and, leaving them outside the gate, he went in and was gone for a quarter of an hour. When he came back he brought with him an official of the Club, who told the attendant that it was all right to admit M. de Boisgaillard’s guests.

Harold and Barbara followed Eugène into a pavilion where the dressing rooms were. There they separated, to meet again outside by the pools, in their bathing suits. Though he had seen French bathing slips at Dinard, Harold was astonished all over again. They concealed far less than a fig leaf would have, and the only possible conclusion you could draw was that in France it is all right to have sexual organs; people are supposed to have them. Even so, the result was not what one might have expected. The men and women around him, standing or lying on canvas mats and big towels or swimming in the two pools, were not lightened and made happier by their nakedness, the way people are when they walk around their bedroom without any clothes on, or the way children or lovers are. Standing by herself at the shallow end of one of the pools was a woman with a body like a statue by Praxiteles, but the two young men who were standing near her looked straight past her, discontented with everything but what they themselves exposed. It was very dreamlike.

Having argued energetically for half an hour to get Harold and Barbara into the Club, Eugène stretched out in a reclining chair, closed his eyes, and ignored them. Sitting on the edge of the pool with his feet in the water, Harold thought: So this is where he comes every afternoon.… What does he come here for? The weather was not really hot. And what about his job? And what about Alix? Did she know that this was how he spent his free hours?