A Saint from Texas

by Edmund White

  We had lots of interesting guests. One, Aimery de Lusignan, is the direct descendent of a mermaid and the King of Jerusalem; he is a great guy, a polo champ, and lots of fun. Daddy said he never met so many highfalutin folks. I pawned him off on a family friend, a Communist called the Red Duke, who once lived in Texas and sounds like a good old’ boy—you’d love him. They had a lot in common and talked for hours about agar, whatever that is. I didn’t dare tell Daddy he was a Communist; you know how worked up he gets about “pinkos.” I’m not so sure Bobbie Jean was happy. She was under the impression that Europeans are still living in poverty in bombed-out hovels. She was shocked to discover so much luxury and thinks the “frogs” and “wops” are pulling the wool over American eyes and taking advantage of us with the Marshall Plan. I tried to tell her she’s only seeing the gratin with us, that the “peasants” are in rough shape. (I’m still not used to calling people “peasants,” but I don’t know how to translate paysans, and besides, everyone likes them, peasants are respected as the backbone of France, though of course they’re dirty and uneducated.) Adheáume thinks of Daddy and Bobbie Jean as something like peasants; he’s shocked by how naive they are.

  Addy wanted me to join the Church but I thought that was hypocritical to do just for the sake of convention; of course, he thinks it’s for family (he’s very family-oriented) and I’ve agreed if we have children to raise them Catholic, which here just means baptism, catechism, first Communion, Easter, marriage, and funeral. Nobody ever goes to church or talks about the pope or anything; Addy says they weren’t even allowed to read the Bible till 1905, but that can’t be true. They’re very fierce about the separation of church and state, except the aristocrats, who pretend to be pious but know nothing about Jesus, whom they call Christ. So that we could get married in church I went through the motions—baptism, first Communion, and confirmation—but believe me I had a big reservatio in petto about the whole rigamarole.

  My bridesmaids were all relatives of Adhéaume, except Jane Beth was my maid of honor; she was a darling to come over. Givenchy dressed them all in heliotrope with little silver tiaras and Daddy footed the bill except for Jane Beth’s, who’s richer than all of us. When we saw each other at the airport (I went out to meet her plane) we stamped and squealed (“Jane Beth, oh my God, I can’t believe you’re here in Paris”) and she looked down and said, “Cute shoes,” and I cried a little for my lost youth and Addy made fun of us for screaming and acting like kids and making a spectacle of ourselves (remarks I did not translate for Jane Beth, you can well imagine). She and I have had so much fun doing all the tourist things (Versailles, Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame, three-star restaurants, shopping). I took her to the Galant Vert on the Île de la Cité and she loved it but was vexed they didn’t understand what a “doggy bag” was and wouldn’t give her one for her extra pork chop.

  Well, I lost my virginity on my wedding night and it didn’t hurt at all. Thank God it was Addy; he was so gentle and romantic and kept calling me his little pigeon. I didn’t mind it. You’d be surprised, I didn’t bleed much, just enough to satisfy him I was a virgin. He was very sweet and his thing wasn’t too big, not like that awful Duke Willens, but it looked big because in Europe they’re not circumcised. I don’t think I could get to like it, but it wasn’t bad. You guessed I always had a crush on Jane Beth, but she’s no longer up for it; she said she’d “outgrown” it. Hmnn … Anyway, Addy believes in separate bedrooms, which is good (he snores) and when he sees me I want to be at my best (teeth brushed, eyelashes on, hair combed, perfume fresh); I can’t bear to have people see me after eight hours of sleeping. You know how some people order breakfast to their hotel rooms and use that as an alarm to wake up? Not me! The poor bellhops … Really squalid.

  For our honeymoon we didn’t go far, just to Provence, which is nice and warm in May, full of flowers. An aunt lent us her farmhouse just outside Saint Rémy de Provence on a huge piece of property. It was sort of primitive with a polished wood cage, a food cellar (eighteenth century), high on the wall to keep the food away from the mice but just for show, though the kitchen wasn’t all that modern either. I had a nice breezy room with my own bathroom (functional) and Addy was next door with lots of religious sayings on the wall and framed sheet music in funny old French (Provençal). He said it’s terribly important by someone called Mistral. There’s a swimming pool, but Addy says it’s just a bassin for animals and it’s so cold because it’s fed by a source (spring). My French is really getting fine-tuned, though Adhéaume’s relatives mainly talk about one another and whether their marriages were “good” (meaning high-born or rich). At least they all speak clearly and slowly, sort of like educated Texans, except in French of course. Bobbie Jean and Daddy came down for two days but stayed out of our hair (Bobbie Jean had a guidebook and wanted to see Avignon, which got three stars). Daddy was grumpy because he couldn’t wedge the big Cadillac they rented through the narrow streets and it was even worse in Arles, where they had to park and walk! You know how they hate to walk. And Bobbie Jean complained about what she called the “French food,” though I offered to get them itty-bitty steaks at the butcher’s.

  Sometimes I feel lonely, specially in the morning. Addy says soon I’ll have friends of my own and we should be sure to go to the Fourth of July party at the American embassy in Paris. I thought I had made an American friend, Helen, at the Red Duke’s château but that friendship fizzled on the vine. It used to be I mostly made friends with men, but as a married woman that would seem tacky to me, though the French gratin expect you to take lovers. I imagine Addy wants me to wait a bit till I’m preggers (wants the bloodlines to be pure).

  I guess you’re not lonely. You have the bishop. The nuns. Our Lord. Your pupils.

  It’s fun living in another culture, isn’t it, but I’d hate to die in France. I miss Texas. My sorority sisters. You.

  Addy thinks I’m a sentimental fool. Ungrateful bitch. But I don’t think French people have friends except school chums (if the chums have become a success and live in the sixteenth arrondisement) or family members, whom they don’t much like but are loyal to. Condemned for life.

  He’s sort of mad at me because he didn’t realize Daddy put our money in a trust and we can’t touch most of it till we’re thirty. He never asked and I never told. Well, at least I can be sure he’ll stick around for a few years. Cynical? No, I’m happy, but Addy thinks the world owes him a living. He’s mad as a cat in a bath because his grandfather spent all their money on chorus girls; he even sold some of their ancestor’s tombs, recumbent statues and all, to the Cloisters in New York City. And his father ran after the women, too.

  We came here for our honeymoon, I figured out, because he wanted to show me a castle that used to belong to his family. The grounds are beautiful, though the revolutionaries stove in the roof and pillaged it and it’s a complete ruin now. But Adhéaume wants to restore it. The ancestors who weren’t sold to the Cloisters are buried there. It has eighty-seven rooms—oi! We’ll have to go into debt but Adheáume won’t hear of waiting a bit. He’s already lined up an interior architect. But we’ll have to fix the roof first, and there are miles of it, all very special tiles, dark red and only slightly sloping, originally made in the Tuileries (get it?) but there’s still some place Addy knows. (He has all the bonnes adresses, as do all French people, they keep them in little notebooks, Mme de Castiglione even has addresses for saddles in Ireland!)

  Yvette, I think of you all the time. I think you should join the Catholic Church—how else are you going to become a saint? A “society priest” (yep, we have them in France) told me that to be named a saint, it’s like anything else, you need people with money and influence lobbying for you at the Vatican. Nobodies (at least unrepresented nobodies) don’t get beatified. Certainly not non-Catholics. Politics plays a part. Is a saint meaningful for our times? Different from the others? He told me that when there was a separation of church and state in 1905, the pope tried to regain ground soon after in Fra
nce (the oldest daughter of the church) by naming a French saint, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux—a sort of consolation prize. She died so young and did so little they had to attribute a posthumous miracle to her (pushing back a German tank in World War I).

  Hope you’re not falling for that sweaty bishop with the German name.

  Love, Your sister, Baronne Yvonne (rhymes)

  Adhéaume bought us (with my money) a beautiful big apartment just two blocks from the Arc de Triomphe on the Avenue Foch, the most expensive street in the world. It used to be called the Avenue de l’Imperatrice, as Adéaume explained, named after Empress Eugénie, but then it was redubbed for a World War I hero. It’s the broadest street in Paris and is planted with hundreds of flowers and exotic trees, meant to serve as a royal road for the belle époque beauties in their carriages between the Arc de Triomphe and the Bois de Boulogne, where they all go to see and be seen, as the elegant men trot past on horses, sniffing their scented mouchoirs (the men, not the horses). The Rothschilds live nearby. We have a ballroom the size of a football field. Our very first dinner we had twenty-two guests, with a liveried footman behind each chair (hired for the occasion). The food was indifferent, but people expect that of aristocrats. Good cooking is considered bourgeois. The only cheese permitted was odorless, tasteless goat cheese, but best of all (classiest), Adhéaume told me, is no cheese at all. We drank champagne before and during the meal à la russe and people smoked like the Russians between courses. Nothing afterward except coffee or herbal tea (brandy is for drunks). You can see, I’ve learned a lot—a lot of trivial nonsense. A good hostess takes a newcomer around to the other guests and says, “Philippe is an art historian at the Louvre and Janet is an American, Philippe is an art historian at the Louvre and Henri is a retired banker who collects African sculpture, Philippe is an art historian at the Louvre and Madeleine is a great niece of Anatole France who has just redone her house in the seventh …” People think it’s intrusive or unnecessary (since everyone knows everyone already—theoretically), but they’re actually grateful to be handed a topic.

  I could see Adhéaume must have been running up astronomical bills on credit, using my good name and the myth of Texas oil millions; he certainly didn’t have a franc to his name. Daddy does have millions but not in oil so much now; recently he’s invested in downtown Dallas real estate and owns several blocks of office buildings and has put up his very own suburban galleria all rented out to high-end shops. I think Bobbie Jean is the real power behind the throne. She’s the greedy one.

  Suddenly one day my French was good enough that I understood exactly what Addy was telling his friend Guillaume as they smoked horrid cigars in the next room. Addy didn’t know I was measuring a couch in the pink salon for a new summer slipcover and that I could hear them guffawing like schoolboys.

  “It’s how to be married?” Guillaume asked, with a laugh in his voice.

  Addy actually laughed. “Claustrophobic.”

  “But at least you have no more money worries (ennuis de sou).”

  “It’s not true. We’re living, rather grandly, on credit.”

  “Et les amours?”

  “Je suis fidel.”

  “Pas vrai!”

  “Plus ou moins.” (He laughs.)

  “But you always liked the little ladies.”

  “My Texane is enough for me.”

  “Are you joking?” (“Sans blague?”)

  “I want sons. Then she’ll be mine forever. I perform my matrimonial duties in a very regular way, three times a week.”

  “And the other four nights?”

  “I’m not as obsessed as you.”

  “You’re kidding.” (“Tu rigoles.”)

  Then they started talking politics and I slipped away unheard and unnoticed.

  Then she’ll be mine forever—those words sounded ominous: cynical, selfish. My heart was pounding. I thought, Maybe I’ll start taking the pill. How to convince him I don’t want to be penetrated three times a week like a broodmare? He pretends to be romantic before and after, but it’s pretty unconvincing. I can tell he’s performing his “duties,” as if that’s all it takes to keep me quiet and footing the bills. He probably thinks he’s doing little me a favor by filling me with his noble sperm.

  The next few nights I kept my door locked and at breakfast he looked disgruntled. Finally he whispered when the maid left the room, “You don’t want sons?”

  “They might be daughters.”

  “One of each, okay?” But he pretended he was talking to a child: “Shall I explain to the little one how babies are made?”

  “No need. But I haven’t been in the mood (état d’ame).”

  “Unless you’re having your period (tes règles), you have no right to deny your husband—not in the first year of marriage.”

  “Who says?”

  “I say.”

  “Oh, the Autocrat of the Bedroom,” I said, but he didn’t catch the allusion, too American. Like most French people of the period who’d passed the baccalaureate he knows a few standard works by consecrated French authors (usually in précis form), but almost nothing in English (except Shakespeare, whose Hamlet was read in the Gide translation). That was fine with me, since I’m not a book person and reading is appropriate only for trains in my opinion. Why read if you can do anything else?

  Adhéaume has constant plans to buy beautiful paintings and furniture from the past. Every antique dealer in Paris is willing and eager to tell him about the wonderful eighteenth-century commode that had just come on the market. (“Yes, the old Marquise Belleboeuf finally died and her son Geoffroy wants to sell all this gloomy old stuff, as he calls it, and replace it with rubber and steel furniture and those big horrid Arcimboldo paintings he collects of vegetable people. Of course, nothing could be more exquisite than the Belleboeuf collection of old furniture—including a door lunette painted by Fragonard, very characteristic of a girl on a swing and a boy pushing her, staring at her panties all pink cheeks and silk trousers against a backdrop of a huge exhausted stone Silenus, in case you didn’t notice the eroticism. These items will never come up for sale again; they’ll be grabbed by a Cleveland museum and how much more sympathique to keep them in France with a Courcy,” and here he moved in for the kill, “who will know how to arrange them.”) Addy was certain that that was his strong suit—an eye for composing.

  He had agents scouting “buys” or “attractive possibilities,” as he would say; it was really like a private postal service in some earlier century. If he heard of an “important” Gobelins tapestry showing Louis XIV on horseback pointing toward a Batavian haystack he’d just conquered, the victory described eloquently on a scroll just beside him, the words written by Racine, no less, who was the official court historian—that’s all Adhéaume could think about, though he had no place to put all his treasures. That’s why it was absolutely essential we start restoring the family château; that tapestry would be éclatant in the Great Hall just as the Coromandel lacquered screen would be perfect for the baronne’s wardrobe.

  His other obsession was his own clothes, which were bespoke, made for him on Savile Row. He was endlessly plying the English Channel for hats at Lock’s or shirts at Turnbull & Asser or suits at Gieves & Hawkes. His jackets always looked tight on him, as if they’d run out of that kind of fabric—a “popinjay,” isn’t that what they call such gentlemen? That degree of narcissism doesn’t match with any Texas idea of manliness; can you imagine John Wayne fussing over collar width, suit sleeves that unbuttoned and rolled back, trousers that “broke” just so over his cowboy boots? No rear vent, so that he looked like he had a duck ass? Detachable celluloid shirt collars?

  He was absurdly demanding with the servants. The furniture must not lose its patina through sacrilegious polishing. He sent the woman who does our ironing for “lessons” with the Spanish ambassador’s wardrobe mistress, who knew how to turn out a shirt to perfection. Geneviève, our maid, was very humiliated. He gave the cook vague and confusing rec
ipes for “those tiny pigeons with cream and mushrooms” he’d once tasted at the Duchess of Alba’s table; he thought the pigeons had to be spit-roasted first, but he wasn’t sure. She just made the usual dish à la grande-mère and he declared it a “triumph.”

  I suppose I should talk, the hateful way I treated Pinky back home, sowing my bed with bread crumbs from late-night snacks, leaving my soiled clothes scattered about, teasing her about mispronounced words. But at least we said “Please” and “Thank you” and gossiped about her only behind her back, whereas Adhéaume would complain about how backward the Auvergne was and how greedy and beady-eyed were Auvergnates right in front of Geneviéve, as if she couldn’t understand French. Even more insulting, he’d usually switch to English the minute she entered the room and back to French the instant she left it, thereby underlining, I suppose, what an eavesdropper he thought she was.

  After my Givenchy clothes were ready at last, Addy wanted me to wear them every day with jewels, purse, hat, and shoes he’d selected after endless consultations with his cousine. He expected me to throw away all my old clothes, even nice things from Oscar de la Renta. He allowed me to keep my mink but wanted me to shorten it to a three-quarters length. When I objected to giving my Texas clothes to Geneviève, he said, “You Americans have closets bursting with clothes and none of them fit. They’re in loud colors, cheap materials, and they’re usually too old or too young for the individual, too dressy or too casual. You see something nice on someone else and you think you can look like that if only you dress like that, forgetting that that dress is for teenagers or women with smaller butts.”

  Thanks to Addy’s thrice-weekly conjugal duties and my animal health, I was soon pregnant. After I missed my period the second time I told Addy.

  I make fun of him now that he’s no longer alive, but I must admit at that moment he was perfect. He knelt beside me and held me in his arms and said how happy he was. He called me his little pigeon and then little mother and he actually had tears in his eyes. I fell in love with him for the first time.