by Sarah Smith
“You take care, now.”
They said goodbyes. He wouldn’t be away long; the filming would take at most three weeks. It wasn’t far to Arras; he could come back to Paris if there were a crisis here. Everything would be solved, Perdita and Toby would come back, they’d go out to Courbevoie and see Roy and Suzanne. Everything would work out. He watched Daugherty trudge off toward the Métro station.
He walked up as far as Les Halles and had a bowl of onion soup at one of the cafés. The flower market was quiet under its glass eaves; le monde was beginning to desert Paris for its yachts and country estates. When Perdita was here and he was restive at night, he would sometimes come here for the walk and buy her flowers for the pleasure of looking at her as she smelled them. She would close her eyes, fanning scent off the flowers as if she were splashing water onto her face. Oh, love, love, he thought. He bought a bare-root rosebush for her, a well-scented variety, and added to it a bunch of the flowers as a bribe for Madame Herschner to pot it. Roots in a pot now. Someday, roots in a garden; someday a past on which to build a future, and a self, and security for them all.
When he got home, at about six in the morning, Perdita was there.
Gilbert arrives in Paris
IT WAS TOBY HE saw first, crawling intently across the front-hall carpet into a patch of sun. Reisden stood still, lightning-struck, then dropped the rosebush and the roses and scooped up his boy. Toby stared at him, startled, and burst into tears, and took hold of the buttons of his coat and wouldn’t let go. He hugged his baby, they hugged each other—“Oh, Toby, Toby my love, I’ve missed you.” But they should be in New York still, they should be safe. Toby sobbed as though his heart would break. Reisden wanted to cry, too; he took deep breaths instead, smelling Toby, who needed changing, but never mind. “Dear little one, where’s your mama?” And there she was at the hall door. For a second he saw her as one sees people who have been away, a little strange, such a beautiful woman, and then he crossed the hall in two steps and held them both.
Man and wife is one flesh. True. Man and wife and child. He felt as if home had come home to him.
He gave her the roses; she held them, fanning them, as he’d pictured her doing. “Think of your bringing roses,” she said. “As if you knew I was coming.” They went into the kitchen where Aline was cutting bread. He wadded a kitchen towel under Toby’s wet diaper and held him, surrounded by stink and wordlessly in love. “You’ll get all red and chapped. You’ll have to let Aline change you,” he murmured into his boy’s little pink milk-smelling ear, but Toby just gave a hiccupy sob and held tight. “All right. Soon, but not now.”
“But you’re going someplace,” Perdita said, bewildered. “I found your luggage in the bedroom. Where? How long? I thought you would be here; you didn’t say you were going anywhere.”
He told her the story briefly.
“But I thought you would be here,” she said.
You were supposed to stay in New York. Obviously she had missed his letter. Come to Montfort with me, he thought; don’t come to Montfort; let me know you’re safe; stay away.
“We need breakfast,” she said. He sat with Toby at the kitchen table: unreasonable demanding baby, smelly and inconsolable and too young to be talked to; equally unreasonable Perdita, making coffee, lighting the gas-burner while he held his breath, wondering whether this time she would go up in flames; family life, half-irritating, half-frightening, wholly what he wanted. Perdita sent Aline off for eggs. He looked at her critically; you don’t need coffee, he thought, you need sleep. Preferably with me. Perdita, who didn’t usually have nerves, was pale and tight-wound, fussing about the kitchen, moving things an inch to the right, an inch to the left, tidying her way back into being at home.
“How did the concerts go?” he asked.
“Oh, fine.” Not fine. Something to talk about later.
“Come, sit down.”
She stood at the kitchen sink. “Why you?” she said. “Why do you have to do this, Alexander?”
He told her again in a little more detail: only about André, not about Gehazy. She brushed her hand over his face. “You haven’t been eating,” she said. “You’re thin.”
“Everything will be all right,” he said. “André wants to talk about whatever’s bothering him, I hope.”
“André,” she said, and made a face.
Aline came back with food. They changed Toby in the kitchen, because he howled when they tried to put him down for a nap. Aline brought the bassinet in, fixed them omelettes, and disappeared discreetly. They brought their chairs around to the same side of the table, so they could touch as they ate, and fell on the food.
“André’s wife is pregnant,” Reisden said, finishing his toast. “She hasn’t told him. She did give him something toxic once, in Egypt. She didn’t mean to. She’s a little frightened of him.”
“I don’t wonder.”
“I’m going to listen to him while he talks.”
“That’ll take you a long time,” Perdita said. “I imagine he can talk for hours and not say a thing.”
She leaned against his shoulder and sighed explosively. Something was making her nervy, he thought. Not André’s troubles. He laid the backs of his fingers against her cheek. She took his hand as if it were a lifeline, holding hard with both of her hands.
“Oh, dear. Oh, Alexander.”
“What?”
“Not yet,” she said. She undid his cuff link and ran her fingers up the underside of his wrist, bent to kiss his wrist.
Men are used to being sexually frustrated; happily married young women are not. Good, he thought, finding the little buttons at the back of her collar.
***
They lay beside each other in bed in a tangle of sheets. Toby’s bassinet was beside the bed with a baby blanket over it to keep the sunlight from him. They had tried to put him in his own room to spare his blushes; he had only started wailing again. In their room he had fallen asleep, lulled by his parents whispering to each other.
“Are you sure you have to go?” Perdita said. “We need to talk.”
“I don’t want to go, but yes, I’m sure. What happened in Boston?” He was sure it was Boston that was worrying her. Her eyes widened and she sighed, confirming it for him.
“It was as awful as you said it would be,” she said.
Good, he thought, with a pinch of regret. “I’m sorry,” he said.
She was wearing a silver necklace, which she hadn’t taken off. It nestled in the hollow between her breasts. He admired it there, but it was Woolworth’s finest: a lavallière studded with gaudy rhinestones on a nickel chain. She tugged at it as if it were part of the story. “Uncle Gilbert gave me this,” she said.
Gilbert’s style was not Woolworth’s. Especially not for Perdita. He unfastened it from her neck and turned it round curiously in his fingers.
“I went to Boston,” she said. “I didn’t hear from him. I wrote three times and got no reply. Harry told me no one wanted to see me. I stayed in a hotel.” Perdita said the word hotel as if she were holding it with tongs.
“But you saw Gilbert,” he prompted.
“The last day. Alexander, he didn’t know I was there. I had written letters to him. He didn’t get them.”
Reisden swore to himself and said nothing.
“Was that what you thought would happen?”
“No,” he said. “I was worried what would happen when Gilbert met Toby.”
“So was Harry, I guess.”
“I’m sorry Harry feels it threatening. But all of that isn’t our business.”
“Alexander,” she said. “Don’t act so tough.”
“You are my wife,” he said. “Not Richard’s.”
“It’s my business,” she said. “Uncle Gilbert was being mistreated. It is our business because you’re my husband.”
“Harry and Gilbert should get on better.”
“There’s more to it than that,” she said.
“I don’t want any
thing to do with it,” he said.
“When I talked to Gilbert,” she said, “he asked me what you were doing. I told him that you were working hard to build up Jouvet, and that you had spent all this year working on business, not doing much science; that it looked as though Jouvet would be very successful; that it was a change for you, and I wondered whether you were doing what you really wanted, but I knew you wanted Jouvet. We talked a lot about Jouvet, later. Do you know what he said? I wanted to talk about it,” she said, “because it startled me.”
“What?”
“He said you reminded him of William.”
He stood up from the bed as if it had been burning. He stood beside it, naked, and looked down at her. She looked up at him, not quite up at him, half-focused beyond him, seeing something other than him. Family. Violence in a family lives in the very blood. He turned away from her and hit the wall beside the door, flat-handed, so hard it stung. It woke Toby; Perdita felt for him and gathered Toby up and held him in her arms, rocking him.
“He said,” she said in a whisper, “that William would always do something about something that bothered him. Sometimes he did it very badly, he was very bad about raising you, but he never neglected it. And he said you were like that about madness. He said you were like William that way. Not neglectful. It was one of your strengths. I didn’t expect you would neglect Gilbert.”
He didn’t know what to say.
“I have to go back to America,” she said in a flat, quiet voice. “You live here, your life is here, your job is here, but they only hire me to play in the States. So I have to go back, not all the time, but—” She held Toby to her, his head on her shoulder, and kissed him, and got up and put him back in his bassinet. She stood facing him, naked too, pushing her long hair back onto her sweaty shoulders. “And I was going to leave Uncle Gilbert there in the middle of it,” she said, still low-voiced. “I was going to do that, because I know what it means to you to get away from the Knights, and I hated myself for it, but I was going to do it. I hadn’t seen him. I hadn’t asked him why he didn’t want to see me. Because I knew how you would feel, because no one had encouraged me to ask him, not even you, Alexander; because I was going to be a good person and go along. And then, the last day—”
She told him the story of the concert: the cancellation of the official one, the impromptu concert on Commonwealth Avenue. What impressed him was that Harry had gone as far as to cancel one of her concerts, and she hadn’t spoken about that egregious act of meanness; she had talked about Gilbert. Family love is a dreadful thing, he wanted to tell her. Harry wants Gilbert’s attention and is willing to do anything to get it. What Harry did is dead wrong, but what he wants is right. She told him about them meeting, about the Woolworth’s teardrop Gilbert had given her.
“He told me,” she said, “you had told him a story. When you left Vienna with Tasy, you bought her a pin to celebrate because you were going to escape. It was a cheap pin, but it was a thing to celebrate, he said, because of the escape. So he gave me this,” she put her hand to her neck as though she were still wearing the necklace.
Reisden had put it on the nightstand; he picked it up by the chain. The pendant swung in his fingers.
“And I hated it. I hated the very idea that we could escape and he couldn’t, that you wanted to escape him the way you wanted to escape Vienna—”
The strong July sunlight brought out every detail of the tacky little thing, the irregular base-metal bumps meant to stand for pavé rhinestones, the uncertain edges, the glue at the edges of the stones. And the clear hard spark of the stones themselves. The pin he had bought Tasy when they left Vienna had been an enameled blue flower with a red glass center, another vulgar thing—
“It was a ruby by the time we ran away,” he said. He had sold everything he had to buy it. “We lived on it for months after we got to London. Do you know what he’s done?”
“I know,” Perdita said. “It’s diamonds. That doesn’t matter. He escaped too, Alexander. He’s not in Boston. Look out the window. He’s here.”
First scenes of the film
CYRON’S SPECIAL TRAIN FOR Arras, which Reisden had been supposed to be on, had already left; Reisden drove to Arras in his car. The back was loaded with luggage, his newly altered costumes, a tricorne hat borrowed from Dotty’s attic, and his old fencing sword. And not his wife and son.
“You stay here,” he said. “At Jouvet. Don’t go out. I wanted you well away from here.”
“What is happening?” Perdita said. “What about Gilbert?”
“You brought him, you can d—n well send him back.”
“You have to see him,” Perdita said.
He simply left. There might have been a person waiting on the street when he drove the car away from Jouvet; he deliberately did not notice.
He drove north through suburbs of Paris, through satellite towns and villages, up the valley of the Oise to Amiens. It is supposed to be pretty country; he didn’t notice. He crossed the marshes and bridges of the Somme, where France begins to blur into the old country of Burgundy, and came out onto the great hazy plain of Flanders, where the beet fields stretched from horizon to horizon and the only traffic was a horse-drawn mower clopping across the road from field to field.
At the edge of the road, where the mower did not reach, a farmer stood scything the hay. The stalks slumped and fell in ranks, glistening. At the top of the field they had already begun to wilt. He thought of his son’s hand holding hard to his jacket button. He thought of himself in a rage against Thomas Robert; don’t take chances, don’t go out in the boat, keep me secure. Don’t leave me. Toby could have said don’t leave me. He should have turned back. But he went on.
He wouldn’t think of what Perdita and Gilbert had done until he could think of it without rage. And he was taking it out on his baby son, because, whatever happened in the family, Toby was part of it.
Gilbert. Coming to Paris in the midst of Jouvet’s money troubles. With diamonds.
About six, hot, dusty, tired, angry, discouraged, he drove through Arras and took the road northeast toward Montfort and the frontier. He saw the towers first, two black sticks in the sky, far away across the fields.
From Montfort hill, as he neared it, a cloud of dust rose. Wagons were heading up the hill, spiraling and circling upward. He followed them, coughing in the haze of dust. In the slopes between the walls, the sheep looked up to stare at the commotion of vehicles.
He drove through the Jerusalem Gate into the courtyard; the area inside the castle walls was already full of people, boxes, luggage, horses.
“Where do I park the car?” he asked.
“Stay off the grass, we’re filming on it,” a man with a clipboard shouted. “Put your car in the garage next to Monsieur Cyron’s Rolls. Costumes go to the old refectory, ground floor, north wing, New Buildings. ... Did you see the caterer’s wagons?”
The New Buildings were through the Lion Gate; he drove down the chalk path to the two brick wings of the abbey guesthouse. On the ground floor, the old refectory was crowded with metal pipe racks hung with soldiers’ or peasants’ costumes; piles of clothes were scattered on the floor. The costume manager was standing in the middle of them, clutching his hair, while his assistant leafed frantically through a notebook. “Are your costumes ironed? Keep them with you. It’s the only safe thing.” The costume manager sent him back to the lawn outside the main buildings. From a folding table set up in the entranceway, harried little Guix from the Necro thrust at him a rehearsal schedule, a red ticket, and a room key. “Don’t lose your catering ticket, you only get one.”
His room was 13, according to the brass ticket on the key. Why not.
He would have rehearsal for the first scene in half an hour. He went up to his room, unpacking himself and hanging up the eighteenth-century clothes first. On the top of his own clothes was the picture of Toby in Central Park that Perdita had sent from New York. He sat on the edge of the bed, head down, looking at his boy.<
br />
Toby will wake up and he’ll want me and I won’t be there.
It had already happened.
And he thought of Gilbert too, the figure on the other side of the street. Gilbert had always been afraid of boats. Reisden could picture him, peering over the rail at the hull of the ocean liner, urging Perdita and Toby to wear lifejackets to bed.
And he had come to France.
“Monsieur le Baron, Monsieur Cyron wants to rehearse with you before the witches are here. No need for costumes—”
They were rehearsing the first meeting between Mabet and the witches on the south slope of Montfort hill, where the light was good; film is greedy for light. Cyron was directing himself, stalking from stage left over the uncertain ground toward the box that was standing in for the Holy Well. “Stay back,” he snarled at Reisden, “don’t move, don’t act, don’t try to put an expression on your face; just stay out of my way.”
Reisden cleared his mind of anything but Méduc and stood to one side, hesitating while Mabet grasped the chance to make history. Mabet held the middle of the stage, gesturing to invisible witches.
Father and son; the father taking all the space with his concerns, his story.
Back in the refectory, the company barber cut Reisden’s hair shorter so it would not show under his wig. The rear of the ballroom had been made into the men’s dressing room, with makeup tables, lights, and mirrors. The makeup supervisor greased Reisden’s face an all-over yellow, the institutional yellow of the walls of an asylum, outlined his eyebrows and eyes in black, and painted his mouth ochre. Reisden closed his eyes. He wanted to lose everything but Méduc; loss had always been one of the pleasures of acting, emptying out oneself, being someone else. A sane thing. But he could think only of his son.
Even if he told Perdita what was going on, she wouldn’t understand.