A Saint from Texas

by Edmund White

  Madame said complacently, “I wouldn’t know. Since I am widow I do not go out except to play bezique with my friend la princesse de la Tour du Pin.”

  Justine roused herself and said, “It’s what you call ‘peaknuckle’—is that how you say ‘pinochle’?”

  “That’s just how you say it!” I exclaimed agreeably. On a roll, I asked of Madame, “Do you play with a group of senior citizens at a community center?”

  “I go to the hôtel of the princess. It’s a game for two people.”

  “Oh, she has a hotel? Here in the neighborhood?”

  “Now we will eat delicious topinambour.”

  Justine said, “Ugh. Jerusalem artichokes.”

  Madame stood. “Or rather you will eat them. I repose me. Bonne nuit, Madamoiselle Goldwasser, bonne nuit, Madamoiselle Cravfjord.”

  “Bonne nuit, Madame de Castiglione,” we said in chorus, half-rising from our chairs.

  After she glided out of the room, Justine said, “This shit is not eatable. This is the third night she’s served this scheiss. It’s what people ate during the war. My father pays for real food. Meat!”

  “So,” I said, “what’s the deal with Madame?”

  “Spanky?”

  “Pardon?”

  “That was her nickname in le monde before the war.”

  “She was known as Spanky?”

  “They were all Anglophiles. She was very Mer-Mer. That’s what they call the upper-crust, named after the Merovingian dynasty, one of the earliest.”

  “Christian?”

  “They claimed to be descendants of Jesus Christ—but did Christ have children?”

  “Search me. Maybe a brother or cousin. So she was very snazzy, our Spanky?”

  “Lord, yes. Dressed by Jacques Fath. Her grandmother was a favorite of the Bourbon pretender to the throne, Henry the Fifth. Now they all make a fuss over the Orléans pretender, the comte de Paris, who lives in Morocco because he’s forbidden to live in France. Forgive me, I’m studying French history, so I’m up on all this crap. As recently as 1870 his grandfather was offered the throne, but he refused to wear the cockade because that was a symbol of the Revolution, so they withdrew the offer.”

  “Are there many of these royalists over here?”

  “Better say ‘monarchists,’ or else they want to shit. No, not so many. Some are not aristos at all. They worship Joan of Arc, all of them. And that moron Louis the Sixteenth and that silly dyke Marie Antoinette. There are some Bourbons in Spain, friends of Franco, no doubt. Some monarchists favor them over the comte de Paris.”

  “And Spanky?” I asked. “Did she collaborate with the Nazis?”

  “Not at all. She’s a war hero. She and her husband were both in la Résistance and sent off to concentration camps. Her husband died there but she survived. Two of her uncles were killed in the camps as well.”

  “What does she do with herself all day?” I said, not wanting to admire her. “Drink tea with other old bats?”

  “No, she works as a volunteer nurse at the local hospital.”

  “Why on earth?”

  “It’s part of her whole Catholic bit. The hospital is Catholic, of course, and she empties bedpans and pushes wheelchairs—six hours a day. And she’s in her eighties.”

  “I declare,” I said—I don’t think Justine knew what that meant; she scrunched up her face as if she were a car in a car wash. “She must be very pious.”

  “Oh, she is. She has a life-size statue of the Virgin Mary next to her bed, smiling down at her as she sleeps. And a prie-dieu in the corner. And she goes to Mass every morning on her way to the hospital.” I thought she’d like my sister more than me.

  Justine added with a conspiratorial smile, “In French they call these ladies ‘frogs in the holy water.’ ”

  “That’s rich. How do you say that in French?”

  “Des grenouilles dans l’eau bénitier, I think. I’m not sure. My English is much better than my French.”

  The next day I managed to move into a suite in the hotel next door. I tipped the bellboys handsomely. I took a long shower until the hot water ran out. I waited for the cistern to heat up again and I washed my hair. Then I decided to stop by American Express to cash another check; I got the hotel switchboard to connect me and I asked for directions. Rue Scribe behind the opera house. I tried to hail a taxi and a nice older woman, very neatly dressed in a suit, cape, and gloves, explained in English that I had to walk a block to a taxi stand and wait my turn. Why did everything have to be different?

  With my money from American Express in hand I entered a grandiose café and was shown to a little round pink marble table surrounded by bad florid paintings of blowsy women with pink tits framed by acres of carved gilded wood. The second half of the menu, to my surprise, was in English; then I realized that the only other customers at eleven in the morning were other Americans. As I heard their flat, boring voices I thought I’d never escape the curse of being born on the wrong side of the Atlantic. Why wasn’t I created as a French countess? I asked God, as if he were a master of heraldry or the editor of the Bottin (as the French called their high-society Blue Book). It seemed so unfair to be a big-boned, big-toothed American bimbo, head empty of thought, heart full of banality, with sloping shoulders, pockets heavy with lucre, and a ready smile (too ready). A stylish French couple, perfectly turned out and heavily perfumed, elegantly unsmiling, came in with a little girl of five or six, who chattered gaily until her mother shushed her. The child lowered her head and shut down. When she became voluble a moment later, the mother said, “People are looking at you!” as if that were the worst fate imaginable. People—at least me—were looking; I returned my eyes to my café crème. Using an exaggerated theatrical whisper, the child chattered on and I thought, How unfair she can speak French and I can’t!

  I was morose for a full six minutes and then decided, in the best Theta tradition, to pick myself up and become practical. I gave myself three assignments: (1) learn fluent French; (2) become a French aristocrat; (3) turn haughty. Tomorrow I would figure out how to do all three. I knew I was smart enough—I had only to look at my identical twin, who was brilliant! I was young, rich, beautiful—and a Texan, which Pauline had told me the French thought of as “fun,” except she made the same mistake most French speakers make and said “funny.” Anyway, more amusing than a dour Bostonian or a transactional New Yorker. Texas had an air of fantasy about it, of cow-punchers, barbecue, and unimaginable riches. It was gushing with oil; Texans were loud, proud, and exhilarating, eager to buy the best, whether it was a jewel, an Old Master, or a titled husband.

  As I glanced out at the opera house, which looked to me like a Victorian inkwell, I thought of that ambitious, social-climbing young man at the end of Balzac’s Père Goriot, which we read in Miss Smithers’s French 301, the guy who looks at Paris lying at his feet and says, “It’s up to you and me now”—“À nous deux, maintenant.”

  CHAPTER 6

  True to her word, Mme de Castiglione would converse with us only in French. Luckily, she spoke clearly and slowly and said the same thing in two or three different ways. I gathered she was shocked that I had moved into the hotel next door; the concierge had snitched on me. I had already rehearsed what I would say and had even looked up a few words in my dictionary. I reassured her that I would still pay my full amount and that I treasured her hints (clins d’oeil) about French manners and morals and language, and that I hoped to still take my evening meals with her. I think she got it, though she was still puzzled by my extravagance and the rejection of her hospitality. No other “guest” (invitée) had ever done such a thing. I conceded that I was a spoiled brat (enfant gaté) and we exchanged a wintry little smile.

  I suspect she admired my resolve and simplicity. She told us that true elegance was being completely “natural.” At least I think that’s what she said; I couldn’t vouch for it. I had to master my irritation that she insisted on speaking this hushed, nasal language of her own when she co
uld speak English perfectly well—or perfectly enough—like everyone else. She was marginally more cordial in French than in her spiky English, though perhaps not as sincere. After a long life of speaking French she had accumulated a huge mass of rolling, ready-made phrases, whereas in her pidgin English she had to invent words to fit her thoughts, and frustration handicapped her slightly. I found out later she didn’t consider English (despite Shakespeare!) a real language but rather a sort of creole born out of German and French. Besides, the English didn’t have an academy to determine which words were acceptable and which were not. Shakespeare, all right for the great characters (Lady Macbeth), but the plays didn’t observe the unities or the necessity of having all the action offstage. We drifted into debating Shakespeare versus Racine; Madame clearly preferred the chiseled passion of Racine and his chaste vocabulary. As for Shakespeare, she liked him only in opera form—Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, Verdi’s Falstaff, Hamlet by Ambroise Thomas, in which the text had been sorted out by Alexandre Dumas. I thought I acquitted myself fairly well in French, that my three years of conversation with Pauline had paid off, but I felt I had to pour every thought into an electric mixer and break down all the pieces of bright fruit into a brown broth. I won’t speak of our dinner—the Jerusalem artichokes had been recycled in a soup. I filled up on a very crusty baguette, but then Madame said (in French), “I can’t sit here if you eat one more slice of bread and destroy your lovely figure (votre belle ligne).”

  I decided I liked Mme de Castiglione. She was a survivor, a war hero, an example to us all. If I talked too loud, she’d clamp her hands over her ears. Or she pretended there was an imaginary porthole between us and she was wiping away the ocean foam with circular motions. When I asked her why she was doing that, she said, “I’ve discovered that if girls become too excited, this calms them down.” As promised, she gave us a lecture on what a lady (une dame bourgeoisie) could wear. Definitely not loud colors (clinquant) or anything garish (bariolé), and nothing showy (voyant). She kept me busy strumming my dictionary. “A lady should be neat and very, very clean, impeccable, and if she’s too poor or old to be fashionable then she should try to be unnoticeable, anonymous. Just as a real lady should have her name in the newspaper only twice—at her birth and at her death.”

  “And when she gets married?” I asked gaily.

  “Never,” Spanky said, and shuddered.

  After Madame took her leave, Justine said, “I’m starving! We can’t eat soup like water and nothing else.”

  “Come with me to the hotel and we’ll order hamburgers. My treat.”

  “But Spanky doesn’t want me going out at night,” Justine wailed. “And I’d have to phone her and wake her up to get back in.”

  “Oh dear. You must ask her for a key.” She’d given me one—was Justine staying in the apartment? Later, I discovered Madame had given her bedroom to her paying guest and she herself was sleeping on the tattered red silk couch in the study.

  “Ha! Today I wanted to take a bath and she told me I owed her twenty francs for each bath and not to use too much hot water, not above waist level.”

  I didn’t want to be drawn into a conspiracy of bad-mouthing Madame. Besides, I felt guilty about breaking the no-English rule. I just touched Justine’s shoulder and slid past her. “Bonne nuit,” I whispered, pulling the apartment door shut behind me, pressing the button that turned on the timed hallway lights (the minuterie), and summoning the elevator. Once outside it was cold and damp with the constant drizzle the French compare to spit (crachin). Enormous white clouds were hanging over the sleeping city, like egret plumes over a black sultan. I hurried up to my hotel room, ordered a hamburger rare (à point) from room service, and began to review my wardrobe, selecting anything somber and wrenlike—bref, ladylike. That’s what I’d wear to Madame’s tomorrow; she’d promised to teach me how to tie and drape a scarf (which I’d buy tomorrow chez Hermès).

  The next evening I told her gleefully that my new teacher at the Alliance Française was Mme de Rochefoucauld.

  “Rochefoucauld?” she said with asperity. “They were nobodies in the eleventh century.”

  And the Crawfords? I thought. Indentured shepherds in Aberdeen, probably, struggling with the Black Death.

  If Madame disapproved of my conversation teacher as an upstart (arriviste), she liked my sober clothes (gray suit, ecru blouse, hair up in a brioche) and, as promised, gave me very precise instructions about tying my Hermès scarf.

  For dinner we had oeufs en murette, which turned out to be poached eggs on toast with a red wine sauce (the sauce contained onions, bacon bits, and mushrooms). There was even a tiny leaf of frisée lettuce with its own vinaigrette. After Madame retired, Justine explained that she’d complained to her father about the Jerusalem artichokes and he’d phoned Madame from Zurich and gently reproached her. He ran a luxury hotel, after all, and knew how to deal with difficult old women.

  “Good work!” I said. “Bon travail!” but I wasn’t sure you could say that.

  Every night I retreated to my hotel room with the strangely shaped, asymmetrical, art nouveau windows, the amber overhead lamp made to look like a dragonfly’s swollen belly, and the twisting tendrils of rosewood scrolling across the walls. Everything resembled a fever dream of an expensive swamp. Televisions already existed back then but not normally in a Parisian hotel room, though there was one downstairs in the lounge, a little black-and-white thing that surrendered at midnight to a test pattern. I would order an old-fashioned and sip it gratefully while watching ironic blabbermouths showing off on-screen (I understood only one sentence in four, but by my second drink I imagined I was comprehending everything). When I finally fell in bed asleep, sometimes with the lights on and fully dressed, I was so exhausted from trying to fit in with these accursed foreigners that I passed out and awakened thirsty at three A.M. before properly undressing and returning to bed.

  I suppose Madame was pleased enough with the way we “held” ourselves at the table and conversed in our stiff, banal fashion right out of an Ionesco play that she invited her nephew Adhéaume de Courcy to stay over for dinner. It was the last week of January, when distant relatives dropped by with their New Year’s greetings. He had brought a little box of marrons glacés.

  At first I thought he must be homosexual, he had such graceful manners and yet seemed so reserved. His face was a mask of indifference—cold and inexpressive—except when he bent to kiss my hand (without touching it with his lips, I noticed). I had no idea what he was doing and he had to grab my right hand and raise it.

  He was beautifully dressed in a very subtle black watch plaid with a silk pochette and a harmonizing but not matching tie (things that match are vulgar, I was told). His suit struck me as too tight, but later he told me he had flown back and forth to London for Savile Row fittings (this was long before the Chunnel). He was rather short, slender, in his late thirties, with sandy curly hair and big bluish-green eyes, the color of a house finch’s eggs, and a hawklike nose (in fact his face was avian or, as he would say, “heraldic”).

  He spoke English to me until his aunt corrected him and insisted on French. I asked him (in French) where he’d learned to speak English with an English accent; he shrugged and said, almost impatiently, “In England, naturally.” Then, possibly realizing he’d been brusque, he explained, “French adolescents are sent to England in the summers to learn the language. Unfortunately I went with my sister and we spoke French all the time. I had better luck with German, since I lived in Vienna alone.”

  He was nice enough but rather cold (much later I realized he was determined to display sang-froid). All the boys I knew in Texas (except ruffians and other zircons in the rough) smiled a lot and leaned into a conversation with a pretty girl; Adhéaume struck me as rude (or a faggot, though the faggots I knew back home were extremely cordial).

  “Is it your sister who works for Givenchy?” I asked, hoping to establish a contact.

  He sighed and said, “Yes, painful as it
is for me to admit. Of course, she’s more a hostess than a shopgirl (midinette).”

  “Why is it painful?” I asked, genuinely puzzled and worried that I hadn’t understood.

  “The noblesse isn’t supposed to work. It’s a great source of shame.”

  “But why? I’d kill to work for Givenchy. He’s a genius.”

  “That’s a big word for a fournisseur,” Adhéaume said. Justine smirked and Madame looked blank (perhaps her hearing was bad).

  We went in to dinner. The first course was segments of lettuce tied with string and cooked in chicken broth, I think. The second was delicious chicken breasts and potatoes Anna (sliced thin and baked in butter). The dessert was riz à l’impératrice (a tasty rice pudding with almonds and raisins). The cook shuffled out resentfully with each dish and slammed it on the table. She was fat, in a greasy apron, and probably underpaid or unpaid. Madame is really putting on the dog for her nephew, I thought.

  She and he talked over something about an ailing relative, but it went on too long and Justine and I were excluded, so after a while I asked her what she’d done that day. She shrugged in her rude way. I told her I’d bought three white silk blouses that had enormous wide jabots attached and she said, “Very hard to keep clean.” I wanted to say, That’s why I bought three, but I resisted and just smiled. I could feel my period coming on and my innards cramping up. I had a headache and felt weak. The horrible cook brought out demitasses of burned coffee and Madame suggested we take them to the salon.

  We’d barely taken a seat there when Adhéaume said to me, “Perhaps you’d like to come with me to a meeting of the Knights of Malta. You’d find it very Vielle France and folklorique. It’s in two days. We’ve taken over the entire Opéra Comique. It’s very rustre.” (Which I later looked up. It meant “boorish.”)