Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die

by Howard Waldman

Chapter 25

  Out Of The Depths

  In constant terror of another sandstone clobbering, Margaret sees herself tottering out of it, white and brittle as chalk. It would be shared suffering of course but much worse for her than for the others, she judges. With the fragile remnants of her beauty she has so much more to lose than they have.

  She weeps uncontrollably. That too frightens her. Wouldn’t the loss of all those tears, torrents of them, leave her body a shriveled husk? Wouldn’t the constant mask of grief leave indelible lines and wrinkles on her face? She rubs rotten banana on her face and tries to stop the tears. She chokes over the attempt and goes on weeping.

  By now Margaret has abandoned all hope of a collective way out via a tunnel. There’s a possible private way out for her if she dares but she doesn’t dare. Yielding to that long white hand might result in instant brimstone and annihilation.

  She tries to hold on to the hope that maybe resisting temptation is a possible way out, each “no” to the Prefect clicking up good points for her. Maybe one night, saying “no” again she’ll suddenly be crowned for virtue and find herself out there in sunshine. But the hope dwindles every day.

  One day, seated alongside the others, staring out at her exclusive vision of 1937 Paris, Margaret has another spiritual illumination as she sees cowled black nuns herding deformed loping children in institutional gray along the quay. She sobs with sudden pity for the small monsters, perhaps the first tears she’s ever shed for others here or back then.

  Realizing that, she’s pulled out of the tar pit of depression. She sees herself again as selfless Sister Margaret out there, confined in black and dedicating herself to the deformed children. She’s so badly needed out there.

  She sees the deprived faces of her fellow-sufferers on both sides of her armchair, staring out at longed-for scenes invisible to her eyes and feels pity for them too. She realizes her unforgivable selfishness before, having restricted her plea for transfer to herself alone. They need her badly too.

  Remembering the cruelty of her last meeting with Jean Hussier, Margaret sees herself accepting the ring, not as parting two-carat gift but as wedding ring and so changing the course of things, saving him from suicide.

  But to help the little monsters, her fellow prisoners and her long-ago sweetheart she would have to say yes to the Prefect, have to sin in order to save.

  Sin? Wouldn’t saying yes to the Prefect be an act of piety, of supreme sacrifice of self, rather than an act of prostitution? Where was the sin of saying yes to the corpse-like Prefect? How could there be sin where, predictably, there could be no pleasure, only horror?

  But isn’t it possible that what she takes for spiritual illumination is actually another of the guises of temptation? Self-sacrifice a trap tricked out as altruism? For even cowled, she’d have precious sunshine on her face and enjoy colors. Or as Jean Hussier’s wife how could she abstain from champagne and wild but legitimate loving?

  If only God would give her a sign.

  Margaret quits the window. Out in the corridor she sinks to her knees and begs God to give her a sign. The dusty silence goes on.

  She fatigues her voice and knees in countless corridors as the days and seasons revolve on the good side of the window. Sometimes she imagines her words disintegrating against that shatterproof, prayer-proof window or dying out in the endless windings of corridors, perhaps ending as a file in some obscure room. The Prefecture isn’t an appropriate place for prayer. The appropriate place is, of course, a church. But churches are outside and her prayer is basically to be outside in the first place.

  Margaret weeps at the absence of a church here until Helen tells her that a place of prayer doesn’t have to be as grandiose as a cathedral. There are chapels. A chapel is room-size. Margaret asks Helen and the others to tell her if they find a chapel. They never do. Margaret never does.

  But one day as she rises from kneeling prayer in an unconsecrated place, the drab corridor vanishes and she finds herself in a familiar sunny street. She has a split-second recollection that exit or transfer might happen at any time, no warning, and now without warning it’s happened, transfer, transfer, to offer loving care to the small monsters, to say yes to Jean Hussier, Oh Lord, blessed be Thy Name.

  Then her posthumous future is blotted out. Sunshine and color cease being miraculous. No nun after all, she hurries down the Rue de l’Assumption, then turns into the Rue du Docteur Blanche, hurrying past l’Assiette Bleue, the corner four-star restaurant where he takes her so often, and turns into the tiny Rue Mallet Stevens. She approaches the elegant private two-story dwelling with its quietly superior flowerbeds and wrought-iron railing. She sees Jean’s bedroom curtains, open now but sure to be drawn later.

  Pushing the gate open she pictures the vast drawing room with precious oriental rugs and hundreds of leather-bound classics behind locked glass and the grand piano and a closed score on it which is always the same, something by somebody called Domenico Scarlatti. He’ll kiss her in a distinguished respectful way on her cheeks and just brushing her lips. She knows there’ll be, first, something serious and a little boring, her French lesson. But even in something awfully impersonal like verb conjugations he makes it elegantly personal. He always chooses adorer as the model regular verb (“perhaps a little irregular in our case,” he often says with that impassive dryness, so she knows he must be making a joke). The Present is: “I adore you” and that’s certain, he says and the reflexive form, “We adore each other.” “Less certain,” he says, “but I like to believe it.” The Past is “I adored you” but it’s sad to make it something past, he says and adds things to it like “I adored you as soon as I saw you.” Like what he adds to the Future, “I shall adore you forever,” and makes her say it to him over and over.

  After the lesson they’ll sip champagne and then he’ll put Ravel’s Bolero on the gramophone and she’ll dance in increasing nudity to it for him and then the tremendous climax to the bolero and then nothing from the gramophone except the hiss of the needle until much later when he’ll put on something nice and calm, Debussy, he says, The Afternoon of a Faun, and he’ll return to her.

  Then the table set for the two of them involving superior things like candle flames and caviar and a certain chilled white wine, much less blatant than champagne, he says. She loves to hear him say things like that.

  And there’s always a little precious-looking package for her, usually things for her graceful neck and perfect earlobes. And once, she remembers, she broke down and wept (she’d drunk almost a whole bottle of Meursant 1929) and said she didn’t want that, it was too much like payment, she wasn’t that kind of girl, but the next time there was another gift to prove he didn’t think she was that kind of a girl. He said that if she didn’t accept the gold ring with the big diamond and what went with it, my darling, he would press charges against her for the first ring she’d taken.

  The door is ajar for her. She pushes it open. Strange, the lights are out in the long corridor. The door clicks shut behind her.

  She gropes forward, calling out, “Jean? Jean?”

  The dark corridor goes on and on and then turns and she finds herself posthumous, breathing in rotting flowers and dust, facing a familiar white medalled and braided uniform and beneath the peaked cap the frighteningly bloodless emaciated mask of the Prefect with a mile of dimly lit corridor behind him and all those doors with crazy numbers.

  She stammers, weeping: “Oh let me return there, sir, I beg of you.”

  His distant cavernous voice formulates the familiar question between motionless lips. She stammers the familiar frightened reply.

  “I don’t dance any more, sir, my dancing days are over. God would be angered at me. Please, oh please, let me return there.”

  The Prefect says nothing. His bony long white hand reaches out for her. She shrinks back at the burning cold aura of it, cries out: “No! No! O God, help me!”