William Maxwell - The Chateau

While Pierre was changing the plates, Harold said suddenly: “Would you like to hear a ghost story?… In Marseilles, all the hotels were full, because of a big fair of some kind, and we went to one after another, and finally one that the taxi driver had never heard of, and he didn’t even think it was a hotel, but it was listed in the Michelin, so I made him stop there and I got out and went inside. There was no hotel sign, and when I opened the door and walked in off the street, there wasn’t any lobby either. Nothing but a spiral stairway. I decided the lobby must be one flight up. On the second floor there was a landing, but no doors led from it. So I went on, and while I was climbing the stairs I heard footsteps.”

“This is not a true story?” Sabine said. “You are inventing it just to please me?”

“No, no, it all happened.… Someone was climbing the stairs ahead of me. I called out and there was no answer. I stood still and listened. The footsteps continued, and I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. I went a little farther, and when there were still no doors, I stopped again. This time there wasn’t any sound. My heart was pounding. I could feel somebody up there waiting for me to climb the last few steps. I turned and ran all the way down the stairs and burst through the doorway into the open air.… What was it, do you think? Was it really a hotel?”

“I think it was a nightmare,” Sabine said.

“But I was wide awake.”

“One is, sometimes,” she said, and he thought of the drama that had happened in her family. He had a feeling that if he leaned forward at that moment and asked: “What did happen?” she would tell them. But the next course arrived, and put an end to the possibility.

Sabine said to Barbara: “Where did you find your little heart?”

The little heart was of crystal, bound with a thin band of gold, and Barbara had noticed it in the window of an antique shop in Toulon, during the noon bus stop. “It wasn’t very expensive,” she said. “Do you think it’s a child’s locket? Do you think I shouldn’t wear it?”

“No, it’s charming,” Sabine said. “And perfectly all right to wear.”

“Do you remember,” Barbara said, “that little diamond heart that Mme Straus always wore?”

They began to talk about the gloves and scarves and purses in the window of Hermès, and he picked up his fork and started eating.

After dinner they walked through the square and back to the hotel, and sat on the big bed, leaning against the headboard or the footboard, with their legs tucked under them, talking, until eleven thirty. He knew that Sabine liked Barbara, and had always liked her, but as he was walking her to the Métro station he realized with surprise that she liked him too. She could not say so, directly and simply, as Alix said such things; it came out, instead, in her voice, in the way she listened to his account of their last days in Paris, and how queer he felt about going home. It was something he had been refusing to think about, but apparently he had been carrying the full weight of it around, because now that he had spoken to somebody about it, he felt lighter. He had the feeling that, no matter what he told her, she would get it right; she wouldn’t go off with a totally wrong idea of what he was feeling or thinking.

He was going to take her all the way to her door but she wouldn’t let him. At the entrance to the Métro, they stopped and he started to say good-by, under a street lamp, and she said: “I will be at my aunt’s house on Monday.”

“Oh, that’s good,” he exclaimed. “Then I won’t say good-by.… I keep trying to get to the Ile St. Louis. It’s as if my life depended on it. As if I must see it. And every day something keeps me from going there. What is it like?”

“From the Ile St. Louis there is a beautiful view of the back of Notre Dame,” she said. “Voltaire lived there for a while. So did Bossuet. And Théophile Gautier, and Baudelaire, and Daumier. In the Ile St. Louis you feel the past around you, more than anywhere else in Paris. The houses are very old, and the streets are so silent. Perhaps you will go there tomorrow.…”

HE SUGGESTED to Mme Straus, over the telephone on Sunday morning, that she take a taxi directly to their hotel, and she said Mon dieu, she would be taking the bus, and that they should meet her at one o’clock in front of the church of St. Germain-des-Prés, which was only five minutes’ walk from where they were staying.

Barbara was still dressing when the time came to start out to meet her, and since Mme Straus was usually prompt and they did not want to keep her waiting outside on a damp, raw day, he went on ahead. As he crossed the boulevard St. Germain, he saw standing in front of the church a figure that could have been Mme Straus; he wasn’t sure until he had reached the sidewalk that it wasn’t. In the two months since they had seen her, her face had grown dim in his mind. The old woman at the foot of the church steps was poorly dressed, and when he got closer to her, he saw she had a cigar box in her hand. The purpose of the cigar box became clear when people began to pour out of the church at the conclusion of the service. Harold stood in a doorway where he could keep an eye on the buses arriving from Auteuil and from across the river. One bus after another arrived, stopped, people got off and other people got on, but still no Mme Straus.

The beggarwoman was also not having much luck. About one person in fifty, he calculated. He found himself judging the people who came out of the church solely in relation to her. Those who gave her something were nice, were good, were kind. Those who ignored her outstretched box, or were annoyed, or raised their eyebrows, or just didn’t see her, he disliked. He watched a young woman who was helping an older woman down the steps—mother and daughter, they must be. So like Alix, he thought. The young woman didn’t notice the box at first, and then when she did see it, she immediately smiled at the old woman, stopped, opened her purse—all in such a way that there could be no questioning her sincerity and goodness of heart. As for the others, perhaps they had been stopped by too many beggars, or knew the old woman was a fraud, or just didn’t have ten francs to spare.

He kept expecting the old woman to come over to him, and she did finally. She came over and spoke to him—a rushing speech full of bitterness and sly derision at the churchgoers—that much was clear—though most of it he could not understand. He looked at her and listened, and smiled, and didn’t say anything, thinking that she must know by his clothes that he was an American, and waiting for her to present the box. She didn’t, and so he didn’t put his hand in his pocket and draw out his folded French money. Something more personal was happening between them. Either he was serving her well enough by listening so intently to what she said, or else she recognized in him a character somehow on the same footing with her—a beggar holding out his hand for something if not for money, a fraud, a professional cheat of some kind, at odds with society and living off it, a blackmailer, a thief—somebody the police are interested in, or if not the police then the charity organizations.… A poor blind tourist, that’s what he was.

While he was listening, his eyes recorded the arrival of Mme Straus-Muguet. She stepped down to the cobblestones from the back platform of a bus, and as he went toward her, looking at her clothes—her fur piece, her jaunty hat with a feather, her lorgnette swinging by its black ribbon—he wondered how he could, even at a distance, have mistaken the old beggar woman with the cigar box and a grievance against society for their faithful, indomitable, confusing friend.