The Chateau Read online

  Though there were matches on the table beside her, Mme Viénot waited for Harold to return and light her cigarette. Her hand touched his as she bent over the lighted match, and this contact—not accidental, he was sure—startled him. What was it? Was she curious? Was she trying to find out whether his marriage was really pink and happy or blue like most marriages?

  “There is no tram line at Chartres,” she said, blowing a cloud of smoke through her nostrils. “I ought to know the château, but I’m afraid I don’t. There are so many.”

  And what about M. Viénot, he wondered. Where was he? Was he dead? Why had his name not come up in the conversation before or during dinner?

  “It was like a castle in a fairy tale,” Barbara said.

  “Cheverny has a large lawn in front of it. Have you been there?” Mme Viénot asked. Barbara shook her head.

  “I have a brochure with some pictures of châteaux. Perhaps you will recognize the one you are looking for.… You are going to be in France how long?”

  “Until the beginning of August,” Barbara said. “And then we’re going to Switzerland and Austria. We’re going to Salzburg for the Festival.”

  “And then to Venice,” Harold said, “and down through Italy as far as Florence—”

  “You have a great deal in store for you,” Mme Viénot said. “Venice is enchanting. You will adore Venice.”

  “—and back through the Italian and French Rivieras to Paris, and then home.”

  “It is better not to try to see too much,” Mme Viénot said. “The place one stays in for a week or ten days is likely to be the place one remembers. And how long do you have?… Ah, I envy you. One of the most disagreeable things about the Occupation was that we were not permitted to travel.”

  “The luggage is something of a problem,” he said.

  “What you do not need you can leave here,” she said.

  Tempting though this was, if they left their luggage at the château they would have to come back for it. “Thank you. I will remember if we …” He managed not to commit them to anything.

  The Canadian was talking about the Count of Paris, and it occurred to Harold that for the first time in his life he was in the presence of royalists. His defense of democracy was extremely oblique; he said: “Is the Count of Paris an intelligent man?”—having read somewhere that he was not.

  “Unfortunately, no,” Mme Viénot said, and smiled. “Such an amusing story is going the round. It seems his wife was quite ill, and the doctors said she must have a transfusion—you say ‘transfusion’ in English?—or she would die. But the Count wouldn’t give his consent. He kept them waiting for two whole days while he searched through the Almanach de Gotha.”

  “It was a question of blue blood?”

  She nodded. “He could not find anyone with a sufficient number of royal quarterings in his coat of arms. In the end he had to compromise, I believe, and take what he could get.” She took a sip of coffee and then said: “Something similar happened in our family recently. My niece has just had her first child, and two days after it was born, she commenced hemorrhaging. They couldn’t find her husband—he was playing golf—so the doctor went ahead and arranged for a transfusion, without his consent—and when Eugène walked in and saw this strange man—he was a very common person—sitting beside his wife’s bed, he was most upset.”

  “The blood from a transfusion only lasts forty-eight hours,” Harold said, in his own peculiar way every bit as much of a snob as the Count of Paris.

  “My niece’s husband did not know that,” Mme Viénot said. “And he did not want his children to have this person’s blood in their veins. My sister and the doctor had a very difficult time with him.”

  On the other side of the circle of chairs, M. Carrère said that he didn’t like Germans, to Mme Bonenfant, who was not defending them.

  Mme Viénot took his empty cup and put it on the tray. Turning back to Harold and Barbara, she said: “France was not ready for the war, and when the Germans came we could do nothing. It was like a nightmare.… Now, of course, we are living in another; we are deathly afraid of war between your country and the Union of Soviet Republics. You think it will happen soon?… I blame your President Roosevelt. He didn’t understand the Russian temperament and so he was taken in by promises that mean nothing. The Slav is not like other Europeans.… Some years ago I became acquainted with a Russian woman. She was delightful to be with. She was responsive and intelligent. She had all the qualities one looks for in a friend. And yet, as time went on, I realized that I did not really know her. I was always conscious of something held back.”

  She was looking directly at Harold’s face but he was not sure she even saw him. He studied her, while she took a sip of coffee, trying to see her as her friend the Russian woman saw her—the pale-blue eyes, the too-black hair, the rouged cheeks. She must be somewhere in Proust, he thought.

  “Never trust a Slav,” she said solemnly.

  And what about the variations, he wondered. There must be variations, such as never trust an Englishman; never trust a Swede. And maybe even never trust an American?

  “Are French people always kind and helpful to foreigners?” he asked. “Because that has been our experience so far.”

  “I can’t say that they are, always,” Mme Viénot said. She put her cup and saucer on the tray. “You have perhaps been fortunate.”

  She got up and moved away, leaving him with the feeling that he had said something untactful. His own cup was empty, but he continued to hold it, though the table was within reach.

  M. Gagny was talking about the British royal family. He knew the Duke of Connaught, he said, and he had danced with the Princess Elizabeth, but he was partial to the Princess Margaret Rose.

  Mme Viénot sat down beside her mother, patted her dry mottled hand, and smiled at her and then around at the company, lightly and publicly admitting her fondness.

  M. Carrère explained to Barbara that he could speak English, but that it tired him, and he preferred his native tongue. Mme Carrère’s English was better than his, but on the other hand he talked and she didn’t. Mme Bonenfant did not know English at all, though she spoke German. And the Canadian was so conspicuously bilingual that his presence in the circle of chairs was a reproach rather than a help to the Americans. Harold told himself that it was foolish—that it was senseless, in fact—to make the effort, but nevertheless he couldn’t help feeling that he must live up to his success before dinner or he would surrender too much ground. A remark, a question addressed directly to him, he understood sufficiently to answer, but then the conversation became general again and he was lost. He sat balancing the empty cup and saucer in his two hands, looked at whoever was speaking, and tried to catch from the others’ faces whether the remark was serious or amusing, so that he could smile at the right time. This tightrope performance and fatigue (they had got up early to catch the train, and it had already been a long day) combined to deprive him of the last hope of understanding what was said.

  Watching him, Barbara saw the glazed look she knew so well—the film that came over his eyes whenever he was bored or ill-at-ease. As she got ready to deliver him from his misery, it occurred to her suddenly how odd it was that neither of them had ever stopped to think what it might be like staying with a French family, or that there might be more to it than an opportunity to improve their French.

  “COULD YOU UNDERSTAND THEM?” he asked, as soon as they were behind the closed door of their room.

  She nodded.

  “I couldn’t.”

  “But you talked. I was afraid to open my mouth.”

  This made him feel better.

  “There’s a toilet on this floor, at the far end of the attic corridor. I asked Mme Bonenfant.”

  “Behind one of the doors I was afraid to open,” he said, nodding.

  “But it’s out of order. It’s going to be fixed in a day or two. Meanwhile, we’re to use the toilet on the second floor.

  They undressed
and got into their damp beds and talked drowsily for a few minutes—about the house, about the other guests, about the food, which was the best they had had in France—and then fell into a deep sleep. When they woke, the afternoon was gone and it was raining softly. He got into her bed, and she put her head in the hollow of his shoulder.

  “I wish this room was all there was,” he said, “and we lived in it. I wish it was ours.”

  “You wouldn’t get tired of the red wallpaper?”

  “No.”

  “Neither would I. Or of anything else,” she said.

  “It’s not like any room that I’ve ever seen.”

  “It’s very French.”

  “What is?” he asked.

  “Everything.… Why isn’t she here?”

  “Who?”

  “The French girl. If this was my room, I’d be living in it.”

  “She’s probably having a much better time in Paris,” he said, and looked at his wrist watch. “Come on,” he said, tossing the cover back. “We’re late.”

  After dinner, Mme Viénot led her guests into the family parlor across the hall. The coffee that Harold was waiting for did not appear. He and Barbara smoked one cigarette, to be sociable, and then wandered outside. It had stopped raining. They walked up and down the gravel terrace, admiring the house and the old trees and the view, which was gilded with the evening light. They were happy to be by themselves, and pleased with the way they had managed things—for they might, at this very moment, have been walking the streets of Le Mans, or freezing to death at the seashore, and instead they were here. They would be able to include this interesting place among the places they had seen and could tell people about when they got home.

  From the terrace they went directly to their room, their beautiful red room, whose history they had no way of knowing.

  The village of Brenodville was very old and had interesting historical associations. The château did not, if by history you mean kings and queens and their awful favorites, battles and treaties, ruinous entertainments, genius harbored, the rise and fall of ambitious men. Its history was merely the history of the family that had lived in it tenaciously, generation after generation. The old wing, the carriage house, the stables, and the brick courtyard dated from the seventeenth century. Around the year 1900, the property figured in still another last will and testament, duly signed and sealed. Beaumesnil passed from the dead hands of a rich, elderly, unmarried sportsman, who seldom used it, into the living, eager hands of a nephew who had been sufficiently attentive and who, just to make things doubly sure, had been named after him. Almost the first thing M. Jules Bonenfant did with the fortune he had inherited was to build against the old house a new wing, larger and more formal in design. From this time on, instead of facing the carp pond and the forest, the château faced the patchwork of small fields and the River Loire, which was too far away to figure in the view. For a number of years, the third-floor room on the left at the head of the stairs remained empty and unused. Moonlight came and went. Occasionally a freakish draft blew down the chimney, redistributing the dust. A gray squirrel got in, also by way of the chimney, and died here, while mud wasps beat against the windowpanes. The newspapers of 1906 did not penetrate this far and so the wasps never learned that a Captain Alfred Dreyfus had been decorated with the Légion d’Honneur, in public, in the courtyard of the artillery pavilion at St. Cyr. In September of that same year, Mme. Bonenfant stood on the second-floor landing and directed the village paperhanger, with his scissors, paste, steel measuring tape, and trestle, up the final flight of stairs and through the door on the left. When the room was finished, Mlle Toinette was parted from a tearful governess and found herself in possession of a large bedroom that was directly over her mother’s and the same size and shape. The only difference was that the ceiling sloped down on one side and there was one window instead of two. With different wallpaper and different furniture, the room was now her younger daughter’s. So much for its history. Now what about the two people who are asleep in it? Who are they? What is their history?

  Well, where to begin is the question. The summer he spent in bed with rheumatic fever on an upstairs sleeping porch? Or the street he lived on—those big, nondescript, tree-shaded, Middle Western white houses, beautiful in the fall when the leaves turned, or at dusk with the downstairs lights turned on, or in winter when the snow covered up whatever was shabby and ugly? Should we begin with the tree house in the back yard or with the boy he was envious of, who always had money for ice-cream cones because his mother was dead and the middle-aged aunt and uncle he lived with felt they had no other way to make it up to him? Given his last name, Rhodes, and the time and place he grew up in, it was inevitable that when he started to go to school he should be called Dusty. Some jokes never lose their freshness.

  It helps, of course, to know what happened when they were choosing up sides and he stood waiting for his name to be called. And about the moment when he emerged into the public eye for the first time, at the age of six, in a surgical-cotton wig, knee britches, buckles on his shoes, and with seven other costumed children danced the minuet in the school auditorium.

  The sum total of his memories is who he is, naturally. Also the child his mother went in to cover on her rounds, the last thing at night before she went to bed—the little boy with his own way of sleeping, his arm around some doll or stuffed animal, and his own way of recognizing her presence through layers and layers of sleep. Also the little boy with a new navy-blue suit on Easter Sunday, and a cowlick that would not stay down. Then there is that period when he was having his teeth straightened, when he corresponded with postage-stamp companies. The obedient, sensible, courteous ten-year-old? Or the moody boy in his teens, who ate them out of house and home and had to be sent from the table for talking back to his father? Take your choice, or take both of them. His mother’s eyes, the Rhodes nose and mouth and chin; the Rhodes stubbornness, his mother said. This book belongs to Harold Rhodes, Eighth Grade, Room 207, Central School.… And whatever became of those boards for stretching muskrat skins on, the skins he was going to sell and make a fortune from? Or his magic lantern and his postcard projector? Or his building blocks, his Boy Scout knife, his school report cards? And that medicine-stained copy of Mr. Midshipman Easy? And the Oz books? Somewhere, all these unclaimed shreds of his personality, since matter is never entirely lost but merely changes its form.

  As a boy of thirteen he was called up on the stage of the Majestic Theater by a vaudeville magician, and did exactly what the magician told him (under his breath) to do; even though the magician told him out loud not to do it, and so made a monkey of him, and the audience rocked with perfectly kind laughter. Since then he hasn’t learned a thing. The same audience would rock with the same laughter if he were called up on the stage of the Majestic Theater tomorrow. Fortunately it has been torn down to make a parking lot.

  In college he was responsive, with a light in his eye; he was a pleasure to lecture to; but callow, getting by on enthusiasm because it came more natural to him than thinking, and worried about his grades, and about the future, and because, though he tried and tried, he could not break himself of a shameful habit. If he had taken biology it would have been made clear to him that he too was an animal, but he took botany instead.

  But who is he? which animal?

  A commuter, standing on the station platform, with now the Times and now the Tribune under his arm, waiting for the 8:17 express. A liberal Democrat, believing idealistically in the cause of labor but knowing few laborers, and a member in good standing of the money-loving class he was born into, though, as it happens, money slips through his fingers. A spendthrift, with small sums, cautious with large ones. Who is he? Raskolnikov—that’s who he is.

  Surely not?

  Yes. Also Mr. Micawber. And St. Francis. And Savonarola. He’s no one person, he’s an uncountable committee of people who meet and operate under the handy fiction of his name. The minutes of the last meeting are never read, b
ecause it’s still going on. The committee arrives at important conclusions which it cannot remember, and makes sensible decisions it cannot possibly keep. For that you need a policeman. The committee members know each other, but not always by their right names. The bachelor who has sat reading in the same white leatherette chair by the same lamp with the same cigarette box within reach on the same round table for so long now that change is no longer possible to him—that Harold Rhodes of course knows the bridegroom with a white carnation in his buttonhole, sipping a glass of champagne, smiling, accepting congratulations, aware of the good wishes of everybody and also of a nagging doubt in the back of his mind. Just as they both know the head of the family, the born father, with the Sunday paper scattered around him on the living-room rug, smiling benignly at no children after three years of marriage. And the child of seven (in some ways the most mature of all these facets of his personality) who is being taken, with his hand in his father’s much bigger hand, to see his mother in the hospital on a day that, as it turned out, she was much too sick to see anyone.

  What does he—what do all these people do for a living?

  Does it matter?

  Certainly.

  After two false starts he now has a job with a future. He is working for an engraving firm owned by a friend of his father.

  What did he do, where was he, during the war?

  He wasn’t in the war … 4F. He has to be away from Barbara, traveling, several times a year, but the rest of the time he can be home, where he wants to be. His hours are long, but he has already had two raises, and now this four months’ leave of absence, proof that his work is valued.

  And who is she? whom did he marry?

  Somebody who matches him, the curves and hollows of her nature fitting into all the curves and hollows of his nature as, in bed, her straight back and soft thighs fit inside the curve of his breast and belly and hips and bent legs. Somebody who looks enough like him that they are mistaken occasionally for brother and sister, and who keeps him warm at night, taking the place of the doll that he used to sleep with his arm around: Barbara Scully. Barbara S. Rhodes, when she writes a check.