William Maxwell - The Chateau

After a rather painful silence, Harold asked: “Was your son like you?”

“But exactly!” she exclaimed. “We were alike in every respect. His death was a blow from which I have never recovered.”

Harold turned and looked at the picture of him. So pleasure-loving, so affectionate, so full of jokes and surprises that were all buried with him.

When they sat down again, she showed them a small oval photograph of herself at the age of three, in a party dress, kneeling, and with her elbows on the back of a round brocade chair. A sober, proud child, with her bangs frizzed, she was looking straight at the click of the shutter. Mme Straus explained that in her infancy she had been called “Minou.” Barbara expressed such pleasure in the faded photograph that Mme Straus took it to her desk, wrote “Minou à trois ans” across the bottom, and presented it to her. Then she asked Harold to bring out from under the bed the pile of books he would find there. He got down on his hands and knees, reached under, and began fishing them out: Mme Mailly’s verses, the memoirs of General Weygand in two big volumes handsomely bound, and, last of all, the plays of Edmond Rostand, volume after volume. The two books of verse were passed from hand to hand and admired, as if Harold and Barbara had never seen them before. The General’s memoirs had an inscription on the flyleaf and looked highly valued but unread. Mme Straus explained that she had enjoyed Rostand’s friendship during a prolonged stay in the South of France. Each volume was inscribed to the playwright’s charming companion, Mme Straus-Muguet; and Mme Straus described to Harold and Barbara the moonlit garden in which the books were presented to her, on a beautiful spring night shortly before the First World War. “These are my treasures,” she said, “which I have no place to keep but under the bed.”

When the books were returned to their place of safekeeping, they went downstairs and walked in the garden. It was a gray day, and from the rear the convent looked dreary and like a nursing home. The only other person in the garden was a young woman who was sitting on a bench reading a newspaper. As they approached, Mme Straus explained that it was one of her dearest friends, a charming Swedish girl. They were presented to her, and the Swedish girl acknowledged the introduction blankly and went on reading her newspaper.

They sat down on a bench in the far end of the garden, but after a minute or two the chill in the evening air made them get up and walk again. Barbara suggested that Mme Straus come out and have dinner with them. There was a little restaurant nearby, Mme Straus said, very plain and simple, where she often went. The food was excellent, and she was sure they would find it agreeable.

The restaurant was dirty, and they sat under a harsh, white overhead light. The waitress, whom Mme Straus addressed by her Christian name, was brusque with her, and the food was not good. They were all three talked out.

On the way back to the convent, Mme Straus saw a lighted pastry shop, rushed in, bought all the palmiers there were, and presented them to Barbara. Still not satisfied with what she had given the Americans, she opened her purse while they were standing on a street corner waiting for their bus and took out two religious stamps that were printed on white tissue paper. She gave one to Harold and the other to Barbara. The design was Byzantine—the Virgin and the Christ child, with two tiny angels hovering like birds, one on either side of the Virgin’s rounded shoulders. The icon from which the design was taken was in a church in Rome, Mme Straus said, where they must go and pray for her. Meanwhile, the stamps, through their miraculous efficacy, would conduct her two dear children safely on their journey and bring them back to her in September.

ON THE FOURTH OF SEPTEMBER, with their faces pressed to the window of the San Remo-Nice motorbus, they saw a little harbor surrounded by cliffs. They saw the masts of fishing boats. They saw a bathing beach. They turned their heads and saw, on the other side of the road, a small three-story hotel. “Since we don’t have any hotel reservation in Nice,” he said, “what about staying here?” She nodded, and, rising from his seat, he pulled the bell cord. The bus came to a stop on the brow of the next hill, and the driver, handing the suitcases down to Harold, said: “Monsieur, that was a very good idea you just had.”

The small hotel could accommodate them, and sent a busboy back with Harold to help with the luggage. When Harold tipped him, he also asked if the tip was sufficient, and the boy looked at him the way people do at someone who is obviously running a fever. Then, serene and amused, he smiled, and said: “Mais oui.” In Beaulieu nobody worried about anything.

Very soon Harold and Barbara stopped worrying also. Right after breakfast, they went across the road to the beach. They read for a while, and then they stretched out on the sand and surrendered themselves to the sun. When it grew hot they swam, with their eyes open so that they could watch their shadows on the sandy floor of the harbor. Barbara walked slowly up the beach and back again, searching for tiny pieces of broken china which the salt waves had rounded and faded and made velvet to the touch. She was collecting them, and she kept sorting over her collection, comparing and discarding, saving only the best of these treasures that no one else cared about. Harold sat watching her and eavesdropping. At first the other people on the beach thought Barbara had lost something: a ring, perhaps. And one of the life guards offered his help. When they found out that it was only an obsession, they paid no more attention to her searching. They did not even make jokes about it. If Harold grew tired of looking at sunbathers, he looked at the cliffs, or at the sails on the horizon. Or he got up and went into the water.

By noon they were ravenous. After a long heavy nap they got dressed, yawning, and went out again. They walked the streets of Beaulieu, stopping in front of shop windows or to stare at the huge, empty Hôtel Bristol. They found a café that sold American cigarettes. They bought fruit in an open-air market. They went to the English tea shop. They had a quick swim before dinner. In the evening they sat in a canvas tent on the beach, drinking vermouth and dancing, or watching the hotel chambermaids dancing with each other or with the life guards, to a three-piece band that played “Maria de Bahia” and “La Vie en Rose.” Or they walked, under a canopy of stars, with the warm sea wind accompanying them like an inquisitive dog. Now and then they stopped to smell some garden that they could not see: box and oleander, bay leaves, night-blooming stock.

One afternoon they took a bus into Nice to see what they were missing. Half an hour after they had stepped off the bus they were on their way back to Beaulieu. Nice was like Miami, they decided, without ever having been to Miami.

They walked all the way around Cap Ferrat. Behind one of the high, discolored stucco walls was the villa of Somerset Maugham; behind which was the question. Instead of becoming friends with Somerset Maugham, they took up with a couple fifteen years older than they were—a cousin of Mme la Patronne and his English wife. The four of them climbed the Moyenne Corniche and saw Old Eze; lingered in the dining room of the Hôtel Frisia, drinking brandy and Benedictine; went to Monte Carlo and saw the botanical gardens. In the Casino at Beaulieu, Barbara won four hundred francs at roulette, and a life of gambling opened before her.

On all the telephone poles there were posters announcing a Grand Entertainment under the Auspices of the Jeunesse de Beaulieu. Harold and Barbara went. Nothing could have kept them away. The Grand Entertainment was in a big striped circus tent. The little boy from the carnival in Tours came and sat at their table—or if it was not that exact same little boy, it was one just like him, his twin, his double. They supplied him with confetti and serpentines and admiration, and he supplied them with family life. The orchestra played “Maria de Bahia” and “La Vie en Rose.” Fathers danced with their two-year-old daughters tirelessly. At midnight the little boy’s real mother claimed him. Harold and Barbara stayed till the end, dancing. When they rang the bell of their hotel at two o’clock in the morning, the busboy let them in, his eyes pink with sleep, his good night unreproachful. He was their friend. So was the single waiter in the dining room. Also the chambermaids, and—but in a more reserved fashion—Mme la Patronne.