William Maxwell - The Chateau

His name was Frédéric. His father was a well-to-do banker in——. In the fall of 1939, when the sky was full of German planes day after day, the house Frédéric grew up in, along with whole blocks of other houses, was destroyed by a bomb. The family was in the country when this happened. The caretaker was killed, but no one else. Then the Russians came, and they were allowed to keep one room in that enormous country place, and Frédéric’s father arranged for him to escape in a Norwegian fishing vessel. Or perhaps it was on foot, across the border, with a handful of other frightened people. His father remained, to avoid the confiscations of his property, and his mother would not leave his father. For a year and a half, Frédéric lived in the Belleville quarter of Paris. Would you like to see him the way he was at that time? He is stretched out on a bed, in an ugly furnished room that he shares with a waiter in a café in the rue de Menilmentant. He is fully dressed, except for his bare feet, which are thin and aristocratic. The bulb in the unshaded ceiling fixture is not strong enough to bother his eyes. The one window is open to the night. The soft rain fills the alleyway outside with small sounds, sounds that are all but musical, and he is quite happy, though the walls are mildewed and the bedclothes need airing and the sheets are not clean and shortly he will have to get up and spend the rest of the night on the stone floor. He turns on his back, and with his hands clasped under his head, he thinks: She is hearing this rain .…

The girl who hid out from the Gestapo in Mme Cestre’s apartment had brought him to a party where Sabine was, and he saw her home from the party, but she could not, of course, ask him in. One of the ways by which Ferdinand and Miranda are to be distinguished from all commonplace lovers is that, along with Prospero, Ariel, and Calaban, they have no island. It has sunk beneath the sea. Sometimes Frédéric and Sabine meet in an English tea room that is one flight up and rather exposed to the street, but there is one table that is private, behind a huge chart of the human hand showing the lines of the head and the heart, and the mountains of Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, the Sun, Mercury, and Mars. Also the swellings of the palmar faces of the five fingers, indicative of (beginning with the thumb) the logical faculty and the will; materialism, law and order, idealism; humanity, system, intelligence; truth, economy, energy; goodness, prudence, reflectiveness. When the weather permits, the lovers meet on the terrace in front of the Jeu de Paume.

This time, she arrives first. She goes up that little flight of marble steps and crosses the packed dirt to where there are two empty iron chairs. It is a beautiful evening. There are pink clouds against a nearly white sky. Shortly afterward he comes. There is a greenish pallor to his skin. His hands are beautiful and expressive. And he is just her height and just her age, and he speaks French without an accent. His suit is threadbare, but so are most people’s suits in France at this time. The part of the terrace they are sitting in now is like the prow of a ship. They look down at the bicycles and motorcars and taxis that come over the bridge and disappear into the delta of wide and narrow streets that flows into the Place de la Concorde. He says: “You are looking at the hole in my shoe?”

“I was looking at your ankle,” she says.

“You don’t like it?” he says anxiously. “It is the wrong kind of ankle?”

“I was thinking I would like to draw it.”

“I was afraid you thought it looked Polish,” he says. (Or Hungarian. Or Spanish. I forget which he was.)

They see that the old woman who collects rent for the chairs is coming toward them. He digs down in his coat pocket and produces a five-franc note. Wrinkled and dirty and sad, the old woman gives him his change and moves on.

“You have never thought of committing suicide?” he asks after a time.

She shakes her head.

“I think I used to be in love with death,” he says. “I sat in a cold room on an unmade bed with the barrel of a loaded revolver in my mouth, counting to … the number varied. Sometimes it was three, sometimes it was seven, and sometimes it was ten.”

Farther along the balustrade, the old woman has got into an altercation with a middle-aged couple, and the altercation is being carried on in two languages.

“I was not in any particular trouble, and one is supposed to want to live.… What are they saying? They speak too fast for me.”

“The man is saying that in America it does not cost anything to sit down in a public park.”

“And is he indignant?”

“Very.”

“Good,” Frédéric says, nodding. “I have hated that old woman for a year and a half. And is she giving him as good as she is taking?”

“Yes, but he does not speak French, and she does not understand English.”

“Too bad, too bad. Shall we go and translate for him? With a little help from us, it may become an international incident—the start of the war between the United States and the U.S.S.R.” He starts to rise, and she puts a hand on his wrist, restraining him.

A few minutes later, he turns to her and says: “You are going to your aunt’s?”

She nods. “You could come too. She has told me to bring you. And you would like them.”

“I’m sure I would.”

And then, after an interval, in a toneless voice, he says: “I must not keep you.”

She gets up from her chair and walks with him to the head of the stairs. In the sky the two colors are now reversed. The clouds are white, and the sky they float in is pink. As they shake hands he does not say: “Will you marry me?” but this question hangs in the air between them, and is why she looks troubled and why he steps out into the traffic like a sleepwalker. Oblivious of the horns and shouts of angry drivers, he arrives safely at the other side. She stands watching him until he passes the Crillon and is hidden by a crowd of people who are waiting in a circle around the red carpet, hoping to see the King of Persia.

Would you like to know about the King of Persia?

Not particularly. What I would like to know is the name of that white château with the green lawn in front of it that Barbara Rhodes was always looking for .

One time when Eugène and Sabine were going down to the country together, there was a picture, behind glass, in their compartment. Eugène was furious at her because she had given her seat to an old woman who was sitting on her suitcase in the corridor, and so had made him sit next to a stranger. Or perhaps it was because the old woman was large and crowded him in his corner. Or it might not have been that at all, but something that had nothing to do with her that was making him cold and abstracted. Ultimately the cause of his black moods declared itself, but first you had the mood in its pure state, without any explanation. She stood in the corridor for a while, looking at the landscape that unreeled itself alongside the train, and when the old woman got off at Orléans, she went back into the compartment. She was eager for the trip to be over. The compartment was airless and cramped. With her head against the seat back she sat watching the sunset and noting the signs that meant she was nearing the country of her childhood. She found herself staring at the photograph opposite her. It was of a white château that looked like a castle in a fairy tale. Was it Sully, she wondered. Or Luynes? Or Chantilly? There was a metal tag on the frame, but it was tarnished and could not be read.

You don’t know what château it was?

There is every reason to be grateful that these losses do occur, that every once in a while something that is listed in the inventory turns up missing. Otherwise people couldn’t move for the clutter that they make around themselves.