William Maxwell: The Chateau

That painful train journey, do you remember? the time he went up to Paris with Sabine and the Americans? What really happened?

He had quarreled with Alix on the way to the station, just as the Americans thought, and the quarrel was about them. After a few days of staying in the apartment by himself, he had found that he liked being alone, and he was sorry he had invited them. On the way to the station he proposed to Alix that she tell the Americans that it was not convenient to have them stay in the apartment at this time, and she refused. He said he would tell them himself, then, and she said that she could at least not be present when he did. After she left him, he decided that instead of telling the Americans outright that he didn’t want them, he could make them understand, from his behavior, that he had changed his mind about having them.

And they didn’t understand .

No, they did understand, and started to go to the Hôtel Vouillemont. But in the Métro, when they tried to leave him, he changed his mind again. For a moment, he felt something like affection for them. He continued to teeter in this fashion, between liking and not liking them, the whole period of their stay in the apartment.

But why did he act the way he did? Was it because Barbara did not dance with him? She really should have. It was inexcusable, her refusing to dance with him at the Allégrets’ party .

She would have danced with him, except that he was so sullen when he asked her. But that wasn’t why he changed.

Was it something Harold did?

It was something he was, I think.

What was he?

A young man with a beautiful wife and the money to spend four months traveling in Europe. An American. A man with a future, and no shadow across his present life.

But that isn’t what his life was like .

No, but that’s what it looked like, from the outside.

It was also wrong of them, very wrong, not to accept Alix’s invitation to come down to the country for the week end. And not to call on M. and Mme Carrère, after M. Carrère had given Harold his card, was —

True. Perfectly true. Their behavior doesn’t stand careful inspection. But on the other hand, you must remember that they were tourists. This is not the way they behaved when they were at home. And it is one thing to hand out gold stars to children for remembering to brush their teeth and another to pass moral judgment on adult behavior. So much depends on the circumstances.

In short, it is something you don’t feel like going into. Very well, what happened to Hector Gagny?

He divorced his wife, and married a woman with a half-grown boy, and she made him very happy. I always felt that his first wife was more—but she was impossible, as a wife. Or at least as a wife for him. The little boy in the carnival is grown up now and has a half interest in the merry-go-round. The gypsy fortuneteller dealt herself the ace of spades. Anybody or anything else you’d like to know about?

That drawing Sabine was going to send to the Americans. Did it ever arrive?

Yes, it arrived, about a month after Harold and Barbara got home, and with it was a rather touching letter, written the day they took the boat train:

Here is the little drawing promised, I hope it will not oblige you to lengthen your list for the douane!—Thanks still for all your kindness—You don’t know what it meant for me, nor what both of you meant to me—. It’s difficult to explain specially in English—. I think you represent like Aunt Mathilde and Alix an atmosphere kind , gay and harmonious, where everything is in its real place. And seeing you was a sort of rest through the roughness of existence, a bit like putting on fairy shoes.

Perhaps did you guess there was, a few years ago, a sad drama in our family. Since then many things changed, and I lived in one place and then in another—missing baddly that sort of atmosphere I just described. That’s why perhaps I bored you a bit like Mme Straus, in trying to see you often— I am very sorry if I did. But you know: qu’il est encore plus difficile de diriger ses bons mouvements que ses mauvais, car, contrairement à ces derniers on ne peut jamais prévoir exactement leur résultat. En tout cas sachez que vous m’avez fait grand plaisir.…

It is so curious how, in the history of a family, you have one drastic change after another, all in a period of two or three years, and then for a long long time afterward no change at all. Sabine continued to live now in this place and now in that. The one place where she was always welcome at any time, and for as long as she cared to stay there, the apartment in the rue Malène, she would not make use of. But she turned up fairly often, and stayed just long enough to take her bearings by what she found there. “You will stay and eat with us?” Mme Cestre would say, but she did not urge her. And a few minutes later, Alix would say: “Françoise has set a place for you.… Well, come and sit down with us anyway,” and Françoise waited and when the others were halfway through dinner she brought in a plate of soup, which Sabine allowed to grow cold in front of her, and then absent-mindedly ate. And then she went home—only it wasn’t home she went to but the apartment of a cousin or an uncle or an old school friend of her grandmother’s; and the bed she slept in was only a few feet away from an armoire that was crammed with somebody else’s clothes.

But the family stood by her. And people were kind; very kind. (“Such a pleasure to have you, dear child”—until the end of the month, when this large room overlooking the avenue Friedland would be required for a granddaughter whose parents were traveling in Italy, and who was therefore coming here for the school holidays.) And Sabine was still invited to the larger parties, but when she went, wearing the one dress she had that was suitable, what she read on the faces of older women—friends of her mother or her grandmother, women she had known all her life—was: “It is a pity that things turned out the way they did, but you do understand, don’t you, that you are no longer a suitable match for any of the young men in our family?”

And did she mind?

The way children mind a bruise or a fall. She cried sometimes, afterward, but she did not mind deeply. She did not want the kind of life that a “brilliant” marriage would have opened up to her. And the waters did not close over her head, though there was every reason to think that they would. Or perhaps there wasn’t every reason to think that. It all depends on how you look at things. She did have talent; it was merely slow in revealing itself. And failure—real failure—has a way of passing over slight, pale, idealistic girls with observant eyes and a high domed forehead, in favor of some victim who is too fortunate and whose undoing therefore offers a chance for contrast and irony. You know those marvelous windows in Paris?

In the Sainte Chapelle, you mean? And the rose windows of Notre Dame?

No. They’re marvelous too, God knows. But I meant the windows of the shops in the rue St. Honoré and the place Vendôme. She had a talent for designing window displays that were original and had humor and appealed to the Parisian mind. For example, she did a small hospital scene, in which the doctor and the patient in bed and the nurses were all perfume bottles dressed up like people. It created a small stir. She worked very hard, but her work was valued. The hours were long, and sometimes she overtaxed her strength. The family worried about her lungs. But she was well paid. And happy in her work. And she did not have to go to a fortuneteller because Eugène had a way of sardonically announcing the future. It was a gift the family stood in some fear of. “Would you like to know what is going to happen to Sabine?” he demanded one day. “She is going to be introduced to a man without any papers. Of good family, but dispossessed; a refugee. And he will not become a French citizen because he is a patriot and cannot bring himself to renounce his Polish, or Hungarian, or Spanish citizenship, and therefore, even though he speaks without an accent, and is educated, and has a first-class mind, he cannot even get a job teaching school. And Sabine, unequipped as she is, is going to take care of him, and they are going to marry, and her mother will never accept him or forgive her.… ”