William Maxwell - The Chateau

After the performance, she insisted that they go across the street, as her guests, and have something to eat. Harold and Barbara drank a bottle of Perrier water, and Mme Straus had a large ham sandwich.

“I am always hungry,” she confessed.

Worn out with the effort of keeping up the form of an affectionate relationship that had lost its substance, they sat and looked at the people around them. Mme Straus borrowed the souvenir program of a young woman at the next table, and they learned the name of the soprano with the beautiful voice: Irmgard Seefried. Then Mme Straus brought up the matter of when they would see her next. Barbara said gently that they were only going to be in Paris a few more days, and that this was their last evening with her.

“Ah, but chérie, just one time! After five years!”

“Two times,” Barbara said, and Mme Straus smiled. She was not hurt, it seemed, but only pretending.

They said good night on the stairs of the little hotel, and the Americans went off early the next morning, to Chartres; they wanted to see the cathedral again. When they got back to the hotel, Mme Straus had gone, leaving instructions about when they were to telephone her. There were several telephone calls during the next two days and in the end they found themselves having lunch with her, in that same impossible restaurant. She took from her purse a postcard she had just received from her daughter, who was traveling in Switzerland. It was simple and affectionate—just such a card as any daughter might have sent her mother from a trip, and Mme Straus seemed to have forgotten that they knew anything about her daughter that wasn’t complimentary.

At the end of the meal, Mme Straus asked for the addition , and Harold, partly out of concern for her but much more out of a deep desire to get to the bottom of things, reached for his wallet. In the short time that remained, perhaps it was possible to discover the simple unsentimentalized truth. At the risk of being crass and of hurting her feelings, he insisted on paying for the luncheon she had invited them to, and, smiling indulgently, she let him. So I could have paid for all the other times, he thought. And should have.

“Now what would you like to do?” she asked. “What would you like to see? Do you like looking at paintings and old furniture?”

They got into a taxi and drove to the shop of a cousin of Mme Straus’s husband. It was a decorator’s shop, and the taste it reflected was not their taste, in furniture or in objets d’art. Finding nothing else that she could admire, Barbara pretended to an interest in a Chinese luster tea set. “You like it?” Mme Straus said. “It is charming, I agree.” She could not be prevented from calling a salesman and asking the price—three hundred thousand francs. Mme Straus whispered; “I will speak to them, and tell them you are my rich American friends.” She giggled. “Because of me, they will give you a prix d’ami.”

Barbara said that the tea set was much too expensive. As she turned away, her short violet-colored coat swept one of the cups out of its saucer. With a lunge Harold caught it in mid-air.

They went upstairs and looked at what they were told were Raphaels. “Copies,” Harold said, committed now to his disagreeable experiment. “And not necessarily copies of a painting by Raphael.”

The salesman did not disagree, or seem offended. Seeing that they were not interested in what he showed them, he asked what painters they did like.

“Vuillard and Bonnard,” Harold said.

They were shown a small, uninteresting Bonnard and told that there were more in the shop if they would like to see them. Harold shook his head. It was tug of war, with Mme Straus endeavoring to give her husband’s cousin the impression that Harold and Barbara were rich American collectors and might buy anything, and Harold and Barbara trying just as hard to convey the truth.

Mme Straus started to leave the shop with them, and then hesitated. “I have some business to discuss with monsieur upstairs,” she said, and kissed them, and said good-by, and perhaps she would come to the airport.

In the taxi Harold said: “Is that the explanation? All this elaborate scheming so she can get her commission?”

“No,” Barbara said. “I don’t really think it is that.… I think it is more likely something she thought of on the spur of the moment. A role she performed just for the pleasure of performing it. But I kept thinking all the time we were with her, there is something about her manner and her voice. I couldn’t place it until we were in that shop. She is like the women in stores who try to sell you something. Whatever she is, or whoever she was, she knows that world. I think that’s why Pierre disapproved of our being with her.… But it is the young she likes. Now that we are no longer young, it isn’t worth her while to enchant us.”

The other reunions were not disappointing. They liked Sabine’s husband, and she was exactly as they remembered her. It was as if they had bicycled home in the moonlight from the Allégrets’ party the night before. She did not even look any older. The questions she asked were the right questions. They could convey to her in a phrase, a word, the thing that needed to be said. She is all eyes and forehead, Harold thought, looking at her. But what he was most aware of was how completely she took in what they said to her, so that talking to her was not like talking to anybody else. Walking to her door from the restaurant where they had had dinner, he heard their four voices, all proceeding happily like a quartet for strings. Allegro, andante, etc. While he was telling Frédéric about an experience with some gypsies outside the walls of Aigues-Mortes, she began to tell Barbara about the robbers. Harold stopped talking to listen. Then, turning to Frédéric, he asked: “She’s not making this up?” and Frédéric said: “No, no, it all happened,” and Harold said: “I guess when anything is that strange you can be sure it happened.” Looking up at the lamplit underside of the leaves of the chestnut trees, he thought: We’re in Paris, I am not dreaming that we are in Paris.…

The next day, they met Eugène and Alix for lunch, and that too was easy and pleasant. Eugène spoke English, which made a difference. And he was in a genial mood. Their eyes had no trouble meeting his. They did not have to make conversation out of passing the sugar back and forth. We’re not the same, are we? they all three agreed silently, and after that he treated them and they treated him with simple courtesy. And unwittingly, Harold saw, they had pleased Eugène by inviting him to this restaurant. He informed them that Napoleon used to play chess here, and that the décor was unchanged since that time. With its red curtains, its red plush, it was exactly right, and what a classical restaurant should look like.… He enjoyed his lunch as well. And the wine was of his choosing. He was sardonic only once, with the waiter, who urged them a shade too insistently to have strawberries.

After lunch they strolled through the gardens of the Palais-Royal, and Barbara took a picture of the three others, standing in front of the spray of a fountain. When Eugène left to go back to his office, Alix said, somewhat to their surprise, that, yes, she would like to go and see the rose garden at Bagatelle with them. In appearance she was totally changed. She was not an unconfident young woman with a baby; she was a stylish Parisian matron. Her hair was cut short, in a way that was becoming to her. Her black suit had the tailoring of Paris, and what made them instantly at ease and happy with her was that she didn’t pretend she wasn’t pleased with it. “All my life I’ve wanted a black suit,” she said, when Barbara spoke of it. If she understood the meaning of pretense, she did not understand the need for it. It had no part in her nature. We thought all these years that we remembered her, Harold said to himself—her voice, her face, how nice she is, how much we liked being with her. But all we had, actually, was a dim recollection of those things. And it didn’t even include the most important fact about her—that she would never under any circumstances turn away from the presence of love, happy or unhappy.