by Nancy Young
“Okay. Okay, Lorraine. Of course, naturellement.” He removed his dinner jacket and unclasped his gold and onyx cuff-links. “I was planning to come very soon. Tonight in fact.” A cuff-link fell to the ground and rolled toward the guitar. He bent his body over to retrieve it. “I see you brought your beloved guitar? Very well.”
“Yes, Joël. It has been a better husband than you. At least I know where it is when the sun goes down. Tell, me Joël, who is she? Is she here? Do I know her?”
“No, no. Lorraine, please. Don’t ask me. Please, be reasonable.”
“Reasonable? How can I be reasonable, when my husband is making love to another woman? Or … perhaps it is another man? Joël, if it is a man … just tell me. I think I can … ”
“No, no. It’s not that,” he cut in. “I am not a homosexual, if that is what you think.”
“Then it is another woman. Why, Joël? In Québec you said you loved me. I did think it was strange that you proposed to me with a letter, after you had returned to Paris. But, why? Why me? Why did you ask me to marry you if you love some other woman? Why?” A suppressed sob finally escaped her. Even if she was not devastated by the possibility of his infidelity, she was still deeply hurt by the betrayal and the shame of it.
“I did love you, Lorraine. You are very beautiful, and young, and perhaps the most brilliant girl I have met in a very long time … ”
“You did love me? But you do not now?” She covered her face with her hands and sobbed loudly now, her humiliation dawning upon her.
“No … I mean yes. I loved you and still do. But, I am promised to someone else … someone who … whom I cannot marry.” The confession was wrenched out of him, but after the words were out of his mouth, he felt a monumental burden lift. Lorraine simply looked at him impassively with her streaked and stricken face, and drew away when he tried to wipe her tears with his neatly folded handkerchief.
“So, you wish you were married to this someone else?” she asked with feigned emotion, wiping her face with the back of her slender hand.
“Yes. I guess you could say that.” He hung his head, but still his relief was apparent. The relief was also now in her own heart. “I am very, very sorry, Lorraine,” he continued. “I should not have done this to you. But, my mother has hoped and hoped for years that I would forget this other woman and marry a nice French … Catholic … girl. You were my best friend when I was in Québec. I missed my … my … umm … my beloved very much. But you were such a beautiful girl … bright as a bird. When we made love that once, you were like the silver lining on my dark stormy rain cloud.” Yes, and we are in the same crazy, sad, and pathetic boat, she thought to herself.
“That is very sad, Joël. That makes me so sad.” And again the tears flooded as she held out her consoling arms to her husband. They embraced like brother and sister for a moment, then, with a woeful sigh, she sought out his lips and kissed him deeply. “I forgive you, Joël, but you must do the right thing now, and consummate this marriage. That is all I ask.”
The contrite groom obliged. Afterward, as they lay silently in the dark, she smiled wanly and heard again the sad, lamenting tune of the guitar by her bedside, as the scale ascended in a legato vibrato. When the tremolo scale finally descended and then subsided into an open-stringed chord, the curtains rustled dimly like the brush of long skirts. “Good night,” she whispered. “Et merci.”
Lorraine’s newly apparent condition brought with it myriad delicate personal duties, which were a welcome reprieve from her formerly demanding spousal responsibilities. With significant assistance from his father with regard to lobbying Le Général, Joël secured himself an assistant attaché position in Vietnam where his father had once been Chief Diplomat and Attaché Cultural until a year before independence was declared at the end of the Indochina War in 1954. Joël had attended primary and secondary school during these early years, while his mother taught conversational French to other diplomatic wives in Saigon, along with her other domestic and diplomatic spousal duties. Times had changed significantly and the unstoppable Ho Chi Minh now was the man in charge of that former French colony.
Joël’s position, like France’s position itself in Vietnam, was very tenuous. But he was happy just to be returning to his boyhood home. Lorraine guessed without any doubt that her husband’s “beloved” resided there. Never before had she seen him so amiable. They achieved an easy truce. Although they returned to Paris and to their separate apartments, for his mother they presented a united marital front, and to his government colleagues they were the perfect diplomatic couple. When the new civil servant was apprised of his new appointment in Hanoi to commence the following year, he wrote impassioned letters to his mistress, who was revealed, when pressed by Lorraine, to be, rather unromantically, a teacher of western medical science at the new National University in Hanoi. When pressed further he revealed that the woman had been his childhood sweetheart, a brilliant girl whose parents, a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and an herbalist, scraped together enough funds to send their exceptionally bright daughter to the exclusive French International School in Saigon.
After a politically fraught graduation from their school, they eloped. Joël and the girl both turned eighteen within a month of each other, and decided they would abscond to her family home in the countryside south of Saigon as his own parents were determined to leave the colony and return to France before the embassy could be closed down with violence during the political crisis of those final years. Their elopement was short-lived; they were quickly found by the diplomatic services department and Joël was brought back forcibly to Saigon without the girl. Although he tried desperately for days to convince his parents to allow them to marry so they could sponsor her immigration to France, his mother refused point blank, and his father capitulated to her wishes.
Madame Marie de Vogel-Larochette was solidly built, stridently feminine, and formerly a blonde, but her carefully coiffed bouffant hairdo now gleamed silver like an ornate shield ensconced above a pair of forged steel eyebrows and an ice-blue stare. Although it was her husband, Émil, who was the grandson of the Marquis Georges de Vogel and traced his family back to the Hapsburgs, it was her regal bearing that identified them as royalty. Next to her rather effete husband, she was a formidable queen.
“I liked the girl enough when you were just naïve little children playing after school,” Madame de Vogel-Larochette proclaimed to her distraught and unhappy son. “But her family is probably Buddhist. And they are poor country mice, are they not?” She waved her hand in the air vaguely.
“What of it, Maman? What if they are Buddhist, or from the countryside? The young man challenged, looking to his father, who stood silently beside his wife as if awaiting the verdict.
“They are probably one of those revolutionaries. What are they calling themselves these days?” she asked rhetorically, disdainfully spitting out the word. “Communistes? These are reasons enough for the girl not to be a suitable match for you,” she retorted with certainty. “Or, for that matter, to be trusted!”
“I assure you, Maman,” he countered, now just barely containing his fury beneath a furrowed brow, “ … that Mae Anh is not a Communiste and can be trusted absolutely. And furthermore, I know for a fact she would readily be baptized into the Roman Catholic Church, if I asked her to. She has already suggested this!”
The young man felt confident that this fact would sway his obstinate mother. But she remained intractable and was already turning her attention away from her son’s useless arguments. Searching and finding a distraction through the window of their palatial apartment in the heart of Saigon, she glared at the large, smooth, elephantine fronds of tropical galangal, ginger and jasmine painting the lush courtyard garden a deep emerald, laced with lime and saffron, and sniffed in their elegant tropical scents first without pleasure, then again with some resignation. In the heady atmosphere of the mid-s
ummer evening, the delicate fragrance of the white flowers mixed perfectly with the subtle smells of the kaffir lime and the intoxicatingly sweet scent of ripe papaya. Joël mistook her resigned expression for capitulation and opened his mouth to speak, but she pre-empted him, rallying her substantial forces once again and laying siege.
“Non!” declared Madame de Vogel-Larochette. “We are French royals. We … cannot dilute eight hundred years of European royal blood with those from these ungrateful colonies!” She turned toward her son with an expression of absolute tyranny, and brought her carefully manicured fist down upon lacquered teak. “It is just not possible! You will be disinherited if you dare to defy me again!” With this final ultimatum, she left him shocked, withered, and defeated in the lounge room, as she disappeared into her boudoir.
For three years, while attending university in France, Joël sustained a wall of silence against his mother and made few friends. Eventually he finished his law studies at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, and left for far-away Québec for a year of graduate studies. There he met Lorraine at a Law faculty party and they became friends and eventually lovers. When he returned to Paris, although he never lost his love and yearning for Mae, the political separation between their two countries was immutable and he began to lose heart and consider alternatives. Communication by telephone and even post between Hanoi and Paris became unpredictable, difficult, and then impossible. All seemed lost. In his lonely, vanquished, and defeated state, he considered Lorraine for a partner. Marriage was an unwritten requirement of diplomatic service, and he decided that she might make a decent and not unpleasant wife after all.
In the serenity of his hotel-apartment, he considered her pedigree. As a commoner from the colonies with half-Scots, half-French, albeit Breton, heritage, she would be a perfect candidate to test his mother’s motives behind her ban on his love for Mae. Not surprisingly, his mother gave her immediate approval as soon as she saw a photograph of the lovely girl, learned of her background, and heard that she had a solid Catholic education. The breach between the maternal and filial relationship seemed mended finally — superficially, if not whole-heartedly. On the mother’s part there was never a real breach; for the son, however, it was another matter. He let go the fact that the “colony question” was never broached, and kept that small observation to himself, reserving it for another time, perhaps another place. He was determined that someday she would regret her unjust and entirely dictatorial judgment against his true love in the oppressive heat of that desperate and precarious summer evening in Saigon following what he considered his unforgivable capture, as if he were a wild and untamed animal.
When Lorraine wrote back to accept his proposal, Joël was somewhat regretful. But, it seemed the only way he could resolve the long-standing issues of his career requirements, his mother’s financial support, and his own personal needs. The unspoken rules of his desired diplomatic career dictated a certain marital status that could be resolved with this simple solution. He could never really love her, not like he loved Mae, but he was willing to look after her financially, if she looked after him “politically.” But how could he tell her this in a simple letter?
Such a practical-minded young woman was Lorraine that he convinced himself she would accept his complex personal situation without question or drama. He was correct to a certain extent, but when she arrived in Paris somewhat emotionally on edge and not quite herself, he found difficulty in divulging his plan. He put her lethargy and evasiveness down to the hardship of being away from her family and the familiarity of Québec, but he could not bring himself to expose his duplicitous scheme while she was not entirely well. Then finally, when the truth was ultimately revealed after the wedding, her level-headed reaction to it confirmed for him the aptness of his choice.
The next hurdle was to convince Mae Anh that this was the best resolution to their problem. Several letters were begun expressing his excitement at the imminent possibility of his return to her country, but when he tried to explain the delicacy of his situation, to explain the complex turn of events and relations, no expression or collection of contrite words could properly convey what he knew he must do. He had to give her a choice to refuse him, of course. But that made him sick with sadness. With a passionate optimism he dreamed of them becoming united, and with the blessing from his surprisingly open-minded wife, she would join their relationship as an equal partner. His son would have two mothers; he especially liked this fantastical idea. But the letters became complex and inconclusive, like a half-constructed city in a futuristic fiction novel or an unfinished symphony.
Though his personal petitions were not successful, his professional appeal for an assignment in Vietnam was, and the confirmation of it finally came about in the middle of the French summer. With his background in the region, familiarity with the culture and language, and understanding of the delicate nature of the current political climate, his placement was hardly in question. A full year in Paris was required before he would be permitted to relocate to Hanoi. This would allow for his child to be born on solid French soil and for the official negotiations with the new Vietnamese government to continue apace.
Prior to the diplomatic assignment, their life was quiet, almost retiring. For Joël it seemed interminable. But the quiet life suited Lorraine, whose burgeoning belly became harder to obscure behind loosely flowing couture dresses, not unlike her antique eighteenth-century wedding gown. After the assignment, everything changed. Suddenly, the constant string of mandatory cocktail dinners and soirées of varying cultural significance became the routine. As an aspiring diplomatic couple, Joël and Lorraine were required to host their own dinner parties, and they did so on a regular basis. Occasionally, an impromptu guitar concert would be demanded of Lorraine to entertain the guests, and once following a particularly impassioned performance, she was invited to travel to Madagascar to perform with a guitar ensemble which was in Paris at the moment for an official government-hosted tour. Ever graciously she declined, pointing out her expectant state, but she accompanied her husband to official function after function, smiling demurely, courteously kissing the air above elegantly coiffed temples and sipping champagne, even as her feet began to swell in the final trimester and her stomach swelled to a monstrous size.
Philippe Stewart de Vogel-Larochette was born in early October, an extremely large, weighty, but placid child. Cherub cheeked and bright-eyed, he won the affection of the entire clan, his busy parents, the society press photographers, and particularly Madame Marie de Vogel-Larochette. Gifts flooded in through their front gate like a flotilla into a port under siege from every corner of Europe and around the world. It seemed she had written thank you notes to every single friend, former friend, colleague and acquaintance from current and previous diplomatic assignments, as well as distant relatives. Exquisitely made garments from the exclusive French fashion houses arrived. Little blue and white sailor suits with matching caps and an oversized red pom-pom; gilded specialty toys and 24-carat charms, Louis XIV baby furniture and fine Belgian lace linen, exquisite gold-leafed albums, porcelain-ware — there was nothing more the small lad could possibly require.
But Lorraine was nearly ruined by the exhaustion of pushing out such an over-sized infant, followed by an incessant string of official visitors and royal relatives. The only consolation was that she was temporarily excused from her diplomatic spousal duties until sometime in December when celebrations of the Noël would begin in earnest. During this time she was free from the soirée circuit, and began to consider how she might be able to convince her husband to let her travel to St.-Gérard with the child in order to introduce him to her parents. The traumatic birth left her anemic and constantly fatigued, and nearly psychotic from the excruciatingly painful nursing; in truth, she never completely recovered from it.
The delicacy of her health worked in her favor, for Joël was feeling very contrite towards his good wife, and yet quite excited about
the imminence of his overseas assignment. A decision was finally made — when the posting was to commence in April, Lorraine would return to her family in St.-Gérard with the infant for a spell, and he would travel to Hanoi in advance to set up their residence and ensure the safety and viability of his position in Vietnam. When he sent word for her, she and their son would join him. These plans immediately set Lorraine’s heart at ease. By December, she was beginning to recover her energies and the baby thrived with her rejuvenated spirits and improved lactation. Fortunately, she knew it was her own desperate attachment and retention of the baby that caused her son to be born so late and with a full layer of mature fat, so her depleted state and inability to lactate properly during the first few months since his birth was no cause for real concern. More life-threatening had been her own physical deterioration. She was emaciated, her hair limp, lifeless, and falling out in large handfuls.
But the news that she would be going home soon buoyed her spirits, and her thoughts began to wander to the cabin on the lake. Many times in the past year she had begun to compose a letter in her mind, but there was nothing really she could explain to him that would not be painful in one way or another. The apartment, she knew, was no longer occupied, as she had her father arrange for her lease to be terminated and her furniture and possessions placed into storage at their family home in St.-Gérard. There was no news of Bernard from her parents and she did not know if he had stayed on in her apartment in the city for a while without her, or whether he returned straightaway to his lakeside cabin. Her guess was the latter; he had the quiet grace of an animal of the wild and his rightful place was really in the embrace of the evergreen trees and shoal of the lake. The dream-like quality of her memories of him made her believe that he was just a fantasy — a dream lover, a phantom of the passionate embrace, a silent winged angel bestowing beautiful music upon the world.