All this had given Virolun a winter of gossip, much of which was still repeated. One of the research workers had, quite recently, asked Major Marshall whether it was true that when young Mrs. Gould asked Madame Pégurin if she had a vacuum cleaner, she had been told, “No, I have a servant.” Was this attitude widespread, the research worker had wanted to know. Or was the Army helping break down the feudal social barriers of the little town. Oh, yes, the Major had replied. Oh, yes, indeed.
Passing Louise on the staircase with Madame Pégurin’s breakfast tray, the Major smiled, thinking of Madame Pégurin and of how fond she was of his children. Often, on his way to breakfast, he saw the children through the half-open door, watching her as she skimmed from her coffee a web of warm milk; Madame Pégurin’s levees, his wife called them. Paula said that Madame Pégurin was so feminine it made her teeth ache, and that her influence on the children was deplorable. But the Major could not take this remark seriously. He admired Madame Pégurin, confusing her, because she was old and French and had once been rich, with courts and courtesans and the eighteenth century. In her presence, his mind took a literary turn, and he thought of vanished glories, something fine that would never return, gallant fluttering banners, and the rest of it.
He found his wife in the dining room, staring moodily at the disorder left by the children. “They’ve vanished,” she said at once. “I sent them to wait in the garden with Joey and Henry, but they’re not out there now. They must have crept in again by the front door. I think they were simply waiting for you to come down so that they could go up to her room.” She was flushed with annoyance and the unexpected heat of the morning. “These red walls,” she said, looking around the room. “They’ve made me so uncomfortable all summer I haven’t enjoyed a single meal.” She longed to furnish a house of her own once more, full of chintz and robin’s-egg blue, and pictures of the children in frames.
In the red dining room, Madame Pégurin had hung yellow curtains. On a side table was a vase of yellow late summer flowers. The Major looked around the room, but with an almost guilty enjoyment, for, just as the Methodist child is seduced by the Roman service, the Major had succumbed in Madame Pégurin’s house to something warm and rich, composed of red and yellow, and branching candelabra.
“If they would only stay in the garden,” Paula said. “I hate it, always having to call them and fetch them. The girls, at least, could help with the sandwiches.” She began to pile the plates one on another, drawing the crumbs on the tablecloth toward her with a knife. “And they’re probably eating things. Glacéed pineapple. Cherries in something – something alcoholic. Really, it’s too much. And you don’t help.”
She seemed close to tears, and the Major, looking down at his cornflakes, wondered exactly how to compose his face so that it would be most comforting. Paula was suspicious of extravagant tastes or pleasures. She enjoyed the nursery fare she gave the children, sharing without question their peas and lamb chops, their bland and innocent desserts. Once, long ago, she had broken off an engagement only because she had detected in the young man’s eyes a look of sensuous bliss as he ate strawberries and cream. And now her own children came to the table full of rum-soaked sponge cake and looked with condescension at their lemon jello.
“You exaggerate,” the Major said, kindly. “Madame Pégurin takes a lot of trouble with the children. She’s giving them a taste of life they might never have had.”
“I know,” Paula said. “And while she’s at it, she’s ruining all my good work.” She often used this expression of the children, as if they were a length of Red Cross knitting. As the Major drank his coffee, he made marks in a notebook on the table. She sighed and, rising with the plates in her hands, said, “We’ll leave it for now, because of the picnic. But tomorrow you and I must have a long talk. About everything.”
“Of course,” the Major said. “We’ll talk about everything – the little Goulds, too. And you might try, just this once, to be nice to Mrs. Baring.”
“I’ll try,” said Paula, “but I can’t promise.” There were tears in her eyes, of annoyance at having to be nice to Colonel Baring’s wife.
Madame Pégurin, in the interim, descended from the shuttered gloom of her room and went out to the garden, trailing wings of gray chiffon, and followed by the children and Louise, who were bearing iced tea, a folding chair, a parasol, a hassock, and a blanket. Under the brim of her hat her hair was drawn into tangerine-colored scallops. She sat down on the chair and put her feet on the hassock. On the grass at her feet, Margaret and Ellen lay prone, propped on their elbows. John sat beside them, eating something. The little Goulds, identical in striped jerseys, stood apart, holding a ball and bat.
“And how is your mother?” Madame Pégurin asked Joey and Henry. “Does she still have so very much trouble with the vegetables?”
“I don’t know,” Henry said innocently. “Where we live now, the maid does everything.”
“Ah, of course,” Madame Pégurin said, settling back in her chair. Her voice was warm and reserved – royalty at a bazaar. Between her and the two girls passed a long look of feminine understanding.
In the kitchen, attacking the sandwiches, Paula Marshall wondered what, if anything, Mrs. Baring would say to Madame Pégurin, for the Barings had been snubbed by her so severely that, thinking of it, Paula was instantly cheered. The Barings had wanted to live with Madame Pégurin. They had been impressed by the tidy garden, the house crowded with the salvage of something better, the portrait of Monsieur Pégurin, who had been, they understood, if not an ambassador, something just as nice. But they had offended Madame Pégurin, first by giving her a Christmas present, a subscription to the Reader’s Digest in French, and then by calling one afternoon without an invitation. Mrs. Baring had darted about the drawing room like a fish, remarking, in the sort of voice reserved for the whims of the elderly, “My mother collects milk glass.” And the Colonel had confided to Madame Pégurin that his wife spoke excellent French and would, if pressed, say a few words in that language – a confidence that was for Madame Pégurin the depth of the afternoon. “I wouldn’t think of taking into my house anyone but the General,” she was reported to have said. “Or someone on his immediate staff.” The Barings had exchanged paralyzed looks, and then the Colonel, rising to it, had said that he would see, and the following week he had sent Sergeant Gould, who was the General’s driver, and his wife, and the terrible children. The Barings had never mentioned the incident, but they often, with little smiles and movements of their eyebrows, implied that by remaining in a cramped room at the Hotel Bristol and avoiding Madame Pégurin’s big house they had narrowly escaped a season in Hell.
Now they were all going to the picnic, that symbol of unity, Sergeant Gould driving the General and Madame Pégurin, the Barings following with the mayor of Virolun, and the Marshalls and the little Goulds somewhere behind.
The Major came into the kitchen, carrying his notebook, and Paula said to him, “It will be queer, this thing today.”
“Queer?” he said absently. “I don’t see why. Look,” he said. “I may have to make a speech. I put everyone on the agenda but myself, but I may be asked.” He frowned at his notes. “I could start with ‘We are gathered together.’ Or is that stuffy?”
“I don’t know,” Paula said. With care, and also with a certain suggestion of martyrdom, she rolled bread around watercress. “Actually, I think it’s a quote.”
“It could be.” The Major looked depressed. He ate an egg sandwich from Paula’s hamper. The basket lunch had been his idea; every family was bringing one. The Major had declared the basket lunch to be typically American, although he had never in his life attended such a function. “You should see them all in the garden,” he said, cheering up. “Madame Pégurin and the kids. What a picture! The photographer should have been there. He’s never around when you want him.”
Describing this scene, which he had watched from the dining-room windows, the Major was careful to leave out any phrases
that might annoy his wife, omitting with regret the filtered sunlight, the golden summer garden, and the blue shade of the parasol. It had pleased him to observe, although he did not repeat this either, that even a stranger could have detected which children were the little Goulds and which the little Marshalls. “I closed the dining-room shutters,” he added. “The sun seems to have moved around.” He had become protective of Madame Pégurin’s house, extending his care to the carpets.
“That’s fine,” Paula said. In a few minutes, the cars would arrive to carry them all away, and she had a sudden prophetic vision of the day ahead. She saw the tiny cavalcade of motorcars creeping, within the speed limit, through the main street and stopping at the 1914 war memorial so that General Wirtworth could place a wreath. She foresaw the failure of the Coca-Cola to arrive at the picnic grounds, and the breakdown of the movie projector. On the periphery, scowling and eating nothing, would be the members of the Virolun Football Club, which had been forced to postpone a match with the St. Etienne Devils because of the picnic. The Major would be everywhere at once, driving his sergeant before him like a hen. Then the baseball, with the mothers of Virolun taking good care to keep their pinafored children away from the wayward ball and the terrible waving bat. Her imagination sought the photographer, found him on a picnic table, one sandaled foot next to a plate of doughnuts, as he recorded Mrs. Baring fetching a cushion for General Wirtworth and Madame Pégurin receiving from the little Goulds a cucumber sandwich.
Paula closed the picnic hamper and looked at her husband with compassion. She suddenly felt terribly sorry for him, because of all that was in store for him this day, and because the picnic was not likely to clarify his status, as he so earnestly hoped. There would be fresh misunderstandings and further scandals. She laid her hand over his. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have been listening more carefully. Read me your speech, and start with ‘We are gathered together.’ I think it’s quite appropriate and very lovely.”
“Do you?” said the Major. His eyes hung on her face, trusting. “But then suppose I have to give it in French? How the hell do you say ‘gathered together’ in French?”
“You won’t have to give it in French,” Paula said, in just such a voice as she used to her children when they had a fever or nightmares. “Because, you see, the mayor will speak in French, and that’s quite enough.”
“That’s right,” said the Major. “I can say, in French, ‘Our good French friends will excuse this little talk in English.’”
“That’s right,” Paula said.
Reassured, the Major thrust his notes in his pocket and strode from the kitchen to the garden, where, squaring his shoulders, he rallied his forces for the coming battle.
ONE MORNING IN MAY
(1952)
BY HALF PAST TEN, a vaporish heat had gathered on the road above the Mediterranean, and the two picknickers, Barbara Ainslie and Mike Cahill, walked as slowly as they could. Scuffing their shoes, they held themselves deliberately apart. It was the first time they had been alone. Barbara’s aunt, with whom she was staying in Menton, had begun speaking to Mike on the beach – she thought him a nice young boy – and it was she who had planned the picnic, packing them off for what she termed a good romp, quite unaware that her words had paralyzed at once the tremulous movement of friendship between them.
So far, they had scarcely spoken at all, passing in silence – in the autobus – between the shining arc of the beach and the vacant hotels that faced it. The hotels, white and pillared like Grecian ruins, were named for Albert and Victoria and the Empire. Shelled from the sea during the war, they exposed, to the rain and the road, cube-shaped rooms and depressing papered walls that had held the sleep of a thousand English spinsters when the pound was still a thing of moment. At sixteen, Barbara was neutral to decay but far too shy in the presence of Mike to stare at anything that so much as suggested a bedroom. She had looked instead at the lunch basket on her lap, at her bitten nails, at the shadow of her canvas hat, as if they held the seed of conversation. When they were delivered from the bus at last and had watched it reeling, in its own white dust, on to Monte Carlo, they turned together and climbed the scrambling path to Cap Martin.
“What will we talk about?” Barbara had asked her aunt, earlier that morning. “What will I say?”
Barbara’s aunt could see no problem here, and she was as startled as if a puppy tumbling in a cushioned box had posed the same question.
“Why, what do young people have to say anywhere?” she had asked. “Tell him about your school, if you like, or your winter in Paris.” Having provided that winter, she did not see why its value should be diminished in May, or, indeed, why it should not remain a conversational jewel for the rest of Barbara’s life.
“I suppose so,” Barbara had said, determined not to mention it at all. She was in France not as a coming-out present or because she had not smoked until she was eighteen but ignominiously, because she had failed her end-of-term examinations for the second year running. She had been enrolled in one of the best day schools in New York, a fact that she was frequently reminded of and that somehow doubled her imperfection. Her mother had consulted a number of people – an analyst she met at a party, two intimate women friends, the doctor who had delivered Barbara but had noticed nothing unusual about her at the time – and finally, when the subject was beginning to bore her, she had dispatched Barbara to Paris, to the distressed but dutiful sister of Barbara’s late father. Barbara was conscious, every moment of the day, that she was to get something from her year in France, and return to America brilliant, poised, and educated. Accordingly, she visited all the museums and copied on slips of paper the legends of monuments. Her diary held glimpses of flint tools, angular modern tapestries, cave drawings, the Gioconda (“quite small”), and the Venus de Milo (“quite big”); of a monument “that came by ship from Africa and was erected to the cheers of a throng;” and of a hotel where Napoleon had stayed as a young man, “but which we did not really see because it had been pulled down.” These mementos of Paris she buttressed with snapshots in which ghostly buildings floated on the surface of the Seine, and the steps of the Sacré-Coeur, transparent, encumbered the grass at Versailles. The snapshots she mounted and shielded with tissue in an album called “Souvenirs de France.”
She was proud of the year, and of the fact that she had shivered in unheated picture galleries and not spent her time drinking milk shakes in the American Embassy restaurant; still, she felt her year no match for Mike’s. When her aunt, testing, asked him where he lived in Paris, he had replied, “Oh, St. Germain,” and Barbara had been ill with envy, unaware that he stayed at a recommended pension, the owner of which sent fortnightly reports to his mother.
Glancing now at Mike shyly, as they walked along the upper road, Barbara caught from the corner of her eye the movement of her own earrings, Moroccan hoops she had bought, in the merciful absence of her aunt, from an Arab on the beach. With his sweaty fez and his impertinent speech, the Arab had seemed to Barbara the breathing incarnation of oil, greed, and problems. She had read a great deal in the winter, and she could have told anyone that Africa seethed, Asia teemed, and that something must be done at once about the Germans, the Russians, the Chinese, and the Spanish or Heaven only knew what would happen. She had also been cautioned that these difficulties were the heritage of youth, and this she acknowledged, picturing the youth as athletic, open-shirted, vaguely foreign in appearance, and marching in columns of eight.
“Straight over there is the Middle East,” she said to Mike, placing him without question in those purposeful ranks. She pointed in the direction of Corsica, and went on, “All the Arabs! What are we going to do about the Arabs?”
Mike shrugged.
“And the Indians,” Barbara said. “There are too many of them for the food in the world. And the Russians. What are we going to do about the Russians?”
“I don’t know,” Mike said. “Actually, I never think about it.”
&n
bsp; “I suppose you don’t,” she said. “You have your work to do.”
He glanced at her sharply, but there was no need to look twice. He had already observed her to be without guile, a fact that confused and upset him. Her good manners, as well, made him self-conscious. Once, when she mentioned her school, he had not mentioned his own New York high school and then, annoyed with himself, had introduced it with belligerence. He might have saved himself the trouble; she had never heard of it and did not know that it was a public school. He blamed his uneasiness, unfairly, on the fact that she had money and he had not. It had not occurred to him, inexperienced as he was, placing her with the thinnest of clues, that she might not be rich.
Mike was older than Barbara, although not by a great deal. He had come to France because the words “art” and “Paris” were unbreakably joined in his family’s imagination, the legend of Trilby’s Bohemia persisting long after the truth of it had died. When his high school art teacher, a young woman whose mobiles had been praised, pronounced that his was a talent not to be buried under the study of medicine or law, his family had decided that a year in Paris would show whether or not his natural bent was toward painting. It was rather like exposing someone to a case of measles and watching for spots to break out.
In Paris, Mike had spent the first three weeks standing in the wrong queue at the Beaux-Arts, and when no one seemed able to direct him to the right one, he had given up the Beaux-Arts entirely and joined a class instructed by an English painter called Chitterley, whose poster advertisement he had seen in a café. It was Mr. Chitterley’s custom to turn his young charges loose on the city and then, once a week or so, comment on their work in a borrowed studio on the Quai d’Anjou. Mike painted with sober patience the bridges of the Seine, the rain-soaked lawns of the Tuileries, and a head-on view of Notre Dame. His paintings were large (Mr. Chitterley was nearsighted), askew (as he had been taught in the public schools of New York), and empty of people (he had never been taught to draw, and it was not his nature to take chances).
Going Ashore Page 16