The Chateau Read online

  William Maxwell

  THE CHTEAU

  William Maxwell was born in 1908, in Lincoln, Illinois. When he was fourteen his family moved to Chicago and he continued his education there and at the University of Illinois. After a year of graduate work at Harvard he went back to Urbana and taught freshman composition, and then turned to writing. He has published six novels, three collections of short fiction, an autobiographical memoir, a collection of literary essays and reviews, and a book for children. For forty years he was a fiction editor at The New Yorker. From 1969 to 1972 he was president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He has received the Brandeis Creative Arts Award Medal and, for his novel So Long, See You Tomorrow, the American Book Award and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives with his wife in New York City.

  ALSO BY WILLIAM MAXWELL

  All the Days and Nights (1995)

  Billie Dyer and Other Stories (1992)

  The Outermost Dream (1989)

  So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980)

  Over by the River and Other Stories (1977)

  Ancestors (1971)

  The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing and Other Tales (1966)

  Stories (1956)

  (with Jean Stafford, John Cheever, and Daniel Fuchs)

  Time Will Darken It (1948)

  The Heavenly Tenants (1946)

  The Folded Leaf (1945)

  They Came Like Swallows (1937)

  Bright Center of Heaven (1934)

  Copyright © 1961 by William Maxwell

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1961.

  Acknowledgment for the epigraphs is made to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., for the quotation from A World of Love by Elizabeth Bowen and to W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., for the quotations from The Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 1892–1910.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Maxwell, William, 1908–

  The château / William Maxwell.

  p. cm. —

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80936-0

  I. Title. II. Series.

  PS3525.A9464C5 1995

  813’.54—dc20 95-14183

  Author photograph © Dorothy Alexander

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part I: Leo and Virgo Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part II: Some Explanations Chapter 19

  “… wherever one looks twice there is some mystery.”

  ELIZABETH BOWEN,

  A World of Love

  “And there stand those stupid languages, helpless as two bridges that go over the same river side by side but are separated from each other by an abyss. It is a mere bagatelle, an accident, and yet it separates.… ”

  RAINER MARIA RILKE,

  letter to his wife, September 2, 1902,

  from Paris

  “… a chestnut that we find, a stone, a shell in the gravel, everything speaks as though it had been in the wilderness and had meditated and fasted. And we have almost nothing to do but listen.… ”

  RILKE,

  letter to his friend Arthur Holitscher,

  December 13, 1905, from Meudon-Val-Fleury

  Part I

  LEO AND VIRGO

  Chapter 1

  THE BIG OCEAN LINER, snow white, with two red and black slanting funnels, lay at anchor, attracting sea gulls. The sea was calm, the lens of the sky was set at infinity. The coastline—low green hills and the dim outlines of stone houses lying in pockets of mist—was in three pale French colors, a brocade borrowed from some museum. The pink was daybreak. So beautiful, and no one to see it.

  And on C Deck: Something had happened but what he did not know, and it might be years before he found out, and then it might be too late to do anything about it.… Something was wrong, but it was more than the mechanism of dreaming could cope with. His eyelids opened and he saw that he was on shipboard, and what was wrong was that he was not being lifted by the berth under him or cradled unpleasantly from side to side. He listened. The ship’s engines had stopped. The straining and creaking of the plywood walls had given way to an immense silence. He sat up and looked through the porthole and there it was, across the open water, a fact, in plain sight, a real place, a part of him because he could say he had seen it. The pink light was spreading, in the sky and on the water. Cherbourg was hidden behind a long stone breakwater—an abstraction. He put his head clear out into the beautiful morning and smelled land. His lungs expanding took in the air of creation, of the beginning of everything.

  He drew his head back in and turned to look at the other berth. How still she was, in her nest of covers. Lost to the world.

  He put his head out again and watched a fishing boat with a red sail come slowly around the end of a rocky promontory. He studied the stone houses. They were more distinct now. The mist was rising. Who lives in those houses, he thought, whose hand is at the tiller of that little boat, I have no way of knowing, now or ever.…

  He felt a weight on his heart, he felt like sighing, he felt wide open and vulnerable to the gulls’ cree-cree-creeing and the light on the water and the brightness in the air.

  The light splintered and the hills and houses were rainbow-edged, as though a prism had been placed in front of his eyes. The prism was tears. Some anonymous ancestor, preserved in his bloodstream or assigned to cramped quarters somewhere in the accumulation of inherited identities that went by his name, had suddenly taken over; somebody looking out of the porthole of a ship on a July morning and recognizing certain characteristic features of his homeland, of a place that is Europe and not America, wept at all he did not know he remembered.

  THE CABIN STEWARD knocking on their door woke her.

  “Thank you,” he called. Then to his wife: “We’re in France. Come look. You can see houses.” He was half dressed and shaving.

  They stood at the porthole talking excitedly, but what they saw now was not quite what he had seen. The mist was gone. The sky was growing much brighter. And they had been noticed; two tenders were already on their way out to the liner, bringing more gulls, hundreds of them.

  “So beautiful!” she said.

  “You should have seen it a few minutes ago.”

  “I wish you’d wakened me.”

  “I thought you needed the sleep,” he said.

  Though they had the same coloring and were sometimes mistaken for brother and sister, the resemblance was entirely a matter of expression. There was nothing out of the ordinary about his features, nothing ordinary about hers. Because she came of a family that seemed to produce handsomeness no matter what hereditary strains it was crossed with, the turn of the forehead, the coloring, the carving of the eyelids, the fine bones, the beautiful carriage could all be accounted for by people with long memories. But it was the eyes that you noticed. They were dark brown, and widely spaced, and very large, and full of light, the way children’s eyes are, the eyebrows na
turally arched, the upper eyelids wide but not heavy, not weighted, the whites a blue white. If all her other features had been bad, she still would have seemed beautiful because of them. They were the eyes of someone of another Age, their expression now gentle and direct, now remote, so far from calculating, and yet intelligent, perceptive, pessimistic, without guile, and without coquetry.

  “I don’t remember it at all,” she said.

  “You probably landed at Le Havre.”

  “I mean I don’t remember seeing France for the first time.”

  “It could have been night,” he said, knowing that it bothered her not to be able to remember things.

  Mr. and Mrs. Harold Rhodes, the tags on their luggage read.

  A few minutes later, hearing the sound of chains, he went to the porthole again. The tenders were alongside, and the gulls came in closer and closer on the air above the tenders and then drifted down like snow. He heard shouting and snatches of conversation. French it had to be, but it was slurred and unintelligible. A round face appeared, filling the porthole: a man in a blue beret. The eyes stared solemnly, unblinking, without recognition as the face on the magic-lantern slide moved slowly to the left and out of sight.

  ON SHORE, in the customs shed at seven thirty, they waited their turn under the letter R. She had on a wheat-colored traveling suit and the short black cloth coat that was fashionable that year and black gloves but no hat. He was wearing a wrinkled seersucker suit, a white broadcloth shirt, a foulard tie, and dusty white shoes. He needed a haircut. The gray felt hat he held in his hand was worn and sweat-stained, and in some mysterious way it looked like him. One would have said that, day in and day out, the hat was cheerful, truthful, even-tempered, anxious to do what is right.

  How she looked was, Barbara Rhodes sincerely thought, not very important to her. She did not look like the person she felt herself to be. It was important to him. He would not have fallen in love with and married a plain girl. To do that you have to be reasonably well satisfied with your own appearance or else have no choice.

  He was thin, flat-chested, narrow-faced, pale from lack of sleep, and tense in his movements. A whole generation of loud, confident Middle-Western voices saying: Harold, sit up straight … Harold, hold your shoulders back … Harold, you need a haircut, you look like a violinist had had no effect whatever. Confidence had slipped through his fingers. He had failed to be like other people.

  On the counter in front of them were two large suitcases, three smaller ones, a dressing case, and a huge plaid dufflebag.

  “Are you sure everything is unlocked?” she asked.

  Once more he made all the catches fly open. The seven pieces of luggage represented a triumph of packing on her part and the full weight of a moral compromise: it was in his nature to provide against every conceivable situation and want, and she, who had totally escaped from the tyranny of objects when he married her, caught the disease from him.

  They stood and waited while a female customs inspector went through the two battered suitcases of an elderly Frenchwoman. Everything the inspector opened or unfolded was worn, shabby, mended, and embarrassingly personal, and the old woman’s face cried out that this was no way to treat someone who was coming home, but the customs inspector did not hear, did not believe her, did not care. There was the book of regulations, which one learned, and then one applied the regulations. Her spinsterish face darkened by suspicion, by anger, by the authority that had been vested in her, she searched and searched.

  “What shall I tell her if she asks me about the nylon stockings?” Barbara Rhodes said.

  “She probably won’t say anything about them,” he answered. “If she does, tell her they’re yours.”

  “Nobody has twelve pairs of unused nylon stockings. She’ll think I’m crazy.”

  “Well, then, tell her the truth—tell her they’re to give to the chambermaid in hotels in place of a tip.”

  “But then we’ll have to pay duty on them!”

  He didn’t answer. A boy of sixteen or seventeen was plucking at his coat sleeve and saying: “Taxi? Taxi?”

  “No,” he said firmly. “We don’t want a taxi. One thing at a time, for God’s sake.”

  The wind was off the harbor and the air was fresh and stimulating. The confusion in the tin-roofed customs shed had an element of social excitement in it, as if this were the big affair of the season which everybody had been looking forward to, and to which everybody had been asked. More often than not, people seemed pleased to have some responsible party pawing through their luggage. In the early spring of 1948 it had seemed to be a question of how long Europe would be here—that is, in a way that was recognizable and worth coming over to see. Before the Italian elections the eastbound boats were half empty. After the elections, which turned out so much better than anybody expected, it took wire-pulling of a sustained and anxious sort to get passage on any eastbound boat of no matter what size or kind or degree of comfort. But they had made it. They were here.

  “Taxi?”

  “I wish I hadn’t brought them now,” she whispered.

  Tired of hearing the word “taxi,” he turned and drove the boy away. Turning back to her, he said: “I think it would probably look better if we talked out loud.… What has she got against that poor woman?”

  “Nothing. What makes you think exactly the same thing wouldn’t be happening if the shoe were on the other foot?”

  “Yes?” he said, surprised and pleased by this idea.

  He deferred to her judgments about people, which were not infallible—sometimes instead of seeing people she saw through them. But he knew that his own judgment was never to be trusted. He persisted in thinking that all people are thin-skinned, even though it had been demonstrated to him time and time again that they are not.

  In the end, the female customs inspector made angry chalk marks on the two cheap suitcases. The old woman’s guilt was not proved, but that was not to say that she was innocent; nobody is innocent.

  When their turn came, the inspector was a man, quick and pleasant with them, and the inspection was cursory. The question of how many pairs of stockings a woman travels with didn’t come up. They were the last ones through the customs. When they got outside, Harold looked around for a taxi, saw that there weren’t any, and remembered with a pang of remorse the boy who had plucked at his coat sleeve. He looked for the boy, and didn’t see him either. A hundred yards from the tin customs shed, the boat train stood ready to depart for Paris; but they weren’t going to Paris.

  Two dubious characters in dark-blue denim—two comedians—saw them standing helplessly beside their monumental pile of luggage and took them in charge, made telephone calls (they said), received messages (perhaps) from the taxi stand at the railroad station, and helped them pass the time by alternately raising and discouraging their hopes. It was over an hour before a taxi finally drew up and stopped beside the pile of luggage, and Harold was not at all sure it hadn’t arrived by accident. Tired and bewildered, he paid the two comedians what they asked, exorbitant though it seemed.

  The taxi ride was through miles of ruined buildings, and at the railway station they discovered that there was no provision in the timetables of the S.N.C.F. for a train journey due south from Cherbourg to Mont-Saint-Michel. The best the station agent could offer was a local at noon that would take them southeast to Carentan. At Carentan they would have to change trains. They would have to change again at Coutances, and at Pontorson. At Pontorson there would be a bus that would take them the remaining five miles to Mont-Saint-Michel.

  They checked their luggage at the station and went for a walk. Most of the buildings they saw were ugly and pockmarked by shellfire, but Cherbourg was French, it had sidewalk cafés, and the signs on the awnings read Volailles & Gibier and Spontex and Tabac and Charcuterie, and they looked at it as carefully as they would have looked at Paris. They had coffee at a sidewalk café. They inquired in half a dozen likely places and in none of them was there a public toilet. The pe
ople they asked could not even tell them where to go to find one. He went into a stationery store and bought a tiny pocket dictionary, to make sure they were using the right word; also a little notebook, to keep a record of their expenses in. Two blocks farther on, they came to a school and stood looking at the children in the schoolyard, so pale and thin-legged in their black smocks. Was it the war? If they had come to Europe before the war, would the children have had rosy cheeks?

  He looked at his wrist watch and said: “I think we’d better not walk too far. We might not be able to find our way back to the station.”

  She saw a traveling iron in a shop window and they went in and bought it. They tried once more—they tried a tearoom with faded chintz curtains and little round tables. The woman at the cashier’s desk got up and ushered Barbara to a lavatory in the rear. When they were out on the sidewalk again, she said: “You should have seen what I just saw!”

  “What was it like?”

  “It was filthy. And instead of a toilet there was a stinking hole in the floor. I couldn’t believe it.”

  “I guess if you are a stranger, and homeless, you aren’t supposed to go to the bathroom in France. Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m perfectly all right. But it’s so shocking. When you think that women with high heels have to go in there and stand or squat on two wooden boards.…”

  They stopped to look in the window of a bookstore. It was full of copies of “Gone With the Wind” in French.

  THE LOCAL TRAIN was three coaches long. At the last minute, driven by his suspicions, he stepped out onto the platform, looked at the coach they were in, and saw the number 3. They were in third class, with second-class tickets. The fat, good-natured old robber who had charged them five hundred francs for putting them and their luggage in the wrong car was nowhere in sight, and so he moved the luggage himself. His head felt hollow from lack of sleep, and at the same time he was excited, and so full of nervous energy that nothing required any exertion.