by Edmund White
Suddenly I could hear the children’s laughter and voices. “Oh, are we near the nursery?” My life, my love, all my happiness …
“Yes,” Addy said, irritated that his tour had been interrupted, “I forgot to indicate it. Here we are,” and he led the way through a heavy, carved ogival door. The children looked up, startled. They had been freshly bathed and dressed in their best white clothes and their nanny was reading a week-old newspaper in German. Ghislaine looked really lovely, like a Romanov princess, with her beautifully braided spun-gold hair, her nearly transparent skin, her tiny, precise features like those on a newly minted silver coin before anyone touches it.
“Papa, Papa!” Foulques cried, running toward his father and hugging his leg. I’d never witnessed the child make such a display over his father, whom he usually shied away from and whom he hadn’t seen in a while. Ah, I understand, he’s almost two now. I think I read something in Dr. Spock about boys shifting their affections from their mother to their father at that age.
Adhéaume seemed terribly pleased as he glanced at his cousin to see what impression this domestic scene had made on her. She just smiled, exposing her tarnished teeth. I thought aristocrats always had perfect teeth—maybe not in postwar Germany.
“Foulques, this is your aunt Foxy, Princess Mecklenburg.” The child hid behind his father’s leg.
“Fuck?” Foxy asked. “What an extraordinary name.”
“It’s Foulques,” Addy said, frowning, “after one of our ancestors, a crusader.”
“Oh, you poor child, what a horrible name,” Foxy said, bending down and looking him in the eye; Foulques ducked back again behind his father.
“It’s a very noble name,” Addy said, vexed. “I’m not sure anyone called Foxy should complain about a name.”
“My real name is Maria Frederica,” she said simply.
“Give me a second to freshen up,” I said. We went back to my room, Foxy and I.
I brushed my teeth and hair, put on lipstick, changed my dress, all in minutes.
She came over to me and laced her arm around my waist. “Come, my dear, we’ll go through the galerie d’Hercule and descend the grand staircase and you can greet your mother and father-in-law in the Zodiac Room.” She emphasized each of these names in gentle mockery; she might be a princess, I thought, but not a pompous one.
On the way down, I said, “So you’re a music critic.”
“Only one of three on the Süddeutche Zeitung. My ‘beat,’ as you say in America, is baroque music—Bach, Buxtehude, like that.”
“Your English is excellent.”
“I went to school in New Hampshire, but I can’t speak a word of French.”
“Nor I of German,” I said, smiling.
Since the children’s nanny was Frau Dichter, Foxy talked in German with her, though Foxy reported she had a low, childish, Saxon way of speaking and referred to her cat Mozart familiarly as “Mözi.”
I liked Foxy instantly, and though no one could say she was beautiful, I found her sexy—to the touch. It was most extraordinary, holding her by the waist, I felt a womanliness, a firmness, even a slight physical heat emanating from her. Our bodies liked each other. I didn’t want to gross her out by seeming overly affectionate, by stroking or squeezing her, but there was nothing offensive in just holding her by the waist, surely, something she’d initiated, a sisterly gesture, not an amorous one.
Everything was very Mer-Mer, if that meant chic-Medieval, but a Vegas version of it—all polished and gleaming and on a scale that was slightly wrong. To be fair, it was all new, and no one had ever seen a brand-new castle before, just as no one living had ever seen Notre-Dame de Paris stuffed with silk banners, but that was how it originally looked. Before the flying buttresses and the spire were added.
“German is very very difficult,” Foxy said, “but I think you’re smart enough to learn it.” She smiled. “Especially with the right frau professor.”
“I’d offer to teach you French if you wanted to speak it brokenly and with an East Texas twang.”
We entered the Zodiac Room, which was as high as it was wide, but I had nothing but an initial impression of scales and a goat in bright colors and there a crab and a sun because my parents-in-law were sitting in matching, armless slipper chairs upholstered in bright green plush, a lustrous velvet, the green of a meadow in sunlight after a rain. They both looked very tiny in this tall room and on their chairs, which somehow upstaged them, dressed as they were like people from the last century, he in a wing-tip collar, which I’d never seen before, and a silk cravat and a gold stick pin with eyes, she in a capacious dress that looked like bed ticking, striped horizontally in blue and white, her straw hat tossed on the gueridon. “Ma bru,” she said, using the French word for “daughter-in-law” that was correct but sounded rude, like “Jew,” as she rose to kiss both my cheeks but keeping her body at some distance. “Ma cousine,” she said as softly as a sigh.
“So wonderful to see you again,” Foxy murmured in English.
Adhéume’s father, Eudes, kissed my hand and Foxy’s. He asked me, “Did Adhéaume show you the tablet listing the family saints?”
“That will have to be for another day,” I said. In French I begged them to be seated.
Adhéaume arrived with a very happy Foulques and a whiny Ghislaine. Eudes held out his arms to Foulques, who glanced nervously at his father. Addy was nodding and smiling encouragingly. “Je suis ton grand-père,” Eudes said gently. “Tu ne me souviens pas?” I’d never heard before any French speaker pronounce the ne in conversation.
They were extremely nice, mild people and it was hard to imagine they’d produced someone as rude as Addy. Maybe he saw them as genteel antiques not to be emulated if one wanted to be up-to-date and a winner. He respected them, as he’d often told me, but primarily because they were family and his progenitors and aristocrats like him and now his son. His values were so strange, like those Catholics who say they respect the papal office but don’t like this particular pope. Was his respect for them completely formal, titular, just as his faith was active only on Christmas and Easter and during baptisms or last rites?
The father was reputed to have had an affair with Rita Hayworth but it was difficult to imagine this dry, tidy little man with the tweezered white mustache and the wing-tip collar who pronounced his ne’s in the arms of the Mexican redhead. But he’d been quite the lady’s man, it seemed, and a sportsman who’d owned the Thoroughbred Victor Emmanuel, winner at Longchamp, a playboy who was now going deaf and lost the family fortune speculating on Bolivian copper and seducing both respectable women and cocottes, a favorite of the scandal sheets. His wife was broad in the beam with a sweet face—almost as sweet as her perfume, lily of the valley. She must have been the most inoffensive woman in the world, every word stuttered, then retracted, her eyes closed as she spoke and opening only at the end of a sentence. I felt that they’d been sitting for some time in their green plush chairs, speechless. Isn’t that what “infant” meant, without speech? They seemed like old infants.
His mother was born Victorine Lambeth (was that why their horse was named Victor?) and her father had been the son of Lord D’Amour, though English had been lost along the way, if not her fierce blue eyes and pugnacious chin.
We were all at a linguistic loss and I felt it was incumbent on me, the Texan, to translate. “Foxy says she spent summers here as a girl,” I said in French first, then English.
“Then. Very dirty,” Victorine hazarded in English with a triumphant smile.
“Yes,” Foxy said, “it was a pit. Addy’s restored it—or rather invented it—brilliantly.”
Victorine’s triumph was short-lived with this onslaught of unfamiliar words.
Addy said in English (which I translated for his parents), “For this room I had nothing but the name to go on, those filthy revolutionaries, led by our own bailiff, I might add, x’d out the original paintings with charcoal.”
“Addy,” I asked, “how do yo
u say ‘bailiff’ and ‘charcoal’?”
“Huissier. Charbon.”
I translated but Victorine seemed slightly put out, as if I were insultingly offering help where none was needed. I thought I’d let her flounder about on her own for a while.
Like most family members at a social impasse we turned our attention to the children, who by now were wild things, chasing each other around and screaming—in English, which seemed to make it worse. Their grandmother, though resolutely polite and sweet, still managed to radiate disapproval, which she expressed by looking pained. Which only intensified when Ghislaine fell and started to sob. Victorine rushed over to comfort the child, but a vexed Ghislaine wriggled off her lap and ran to me, and the grandmother darted a searing glance at me, as if what else could you expect from a Texas outlaw who’d turned the child sauvage and prejudiced her against her own grandmother. She never said anything and Eudes I suspected was usually checked out, like some Petainist dignitary who’d outlived his moment. I always thought they imagined I’d somehow sullied their bloodlines, a pollution they’d accepted in exchange for lucre. They were thinking of their generations to come as did the French who built the Gothic cathedrals, knowing they wouldn’t be finished for 150 years. This old man with the tweezered mustache and the rigid spine had “ruined” the family but Addy had “saved” it by marrying a bartered bride. Except the bride wasn’t happy, the groom was a foolish, odious spendthrift, and his parents were the purest expression of French bigotry and tunnel-digging weasel determination, though with beautiful manners.
The governess came in to scoop up the children, speaking in German baby talk, I suppose.
To irritate me Addy was complaining to his parents about Ercole: “He’s the sort of man who wears a wristwatch with a white tie.”
They both made disapproving sounds. Victorine, the dingbat, closed her eyes and said, “Who is he again, dear?”
Addy said, “A new friend of Von’s.”
Apparently they both recognized my new nickname, because they looked at me, albeit noncommitally. Maybe they’d chosen “Von” at a family conference.
I said, “My father also disapproves of wristwatches—he thinks they’re effeminate.” That puzzled everyone.
As we struggled for a topic, Adhéaume started to explain to his parents that in the Middle Ages the signs of the zodiac were associated with body parts—Cancer the crab with the lungs, Virgo with the waist, Aquarius with the knee, Taurus with the shoulder, and I forget the others. I started to translate for Foxy, who was sitting next to me, but she whispered, “Forget it. I don’t want to clutter my mind with the medieval zodiac.”
Victorine asked me if I would translate her fond greetings to Foxy’s mother and to ask her how she was doing.
In reply, Foxy said, “My mum is such a character. In the village she saw a tradesman with a cart and two horses. One of the horses was so adorable that she unhitched it and rode away bareback,” which I translated as, “She has such fond memories of you both and sends you all her love.”
Victorine smiled her smug little smile.
After a painful dinner (Addy pointed out that the painting by Mignard on the wall was of this very room, a comment that I didn’t translate) Foxy spoke of the deplorable backward state of serious music in France, which I did translate, since it was disagreeable. I said in both languages, “But what about Xenakis? Boulez?”
“Xenakis is Greek and very uneven. Boulez is interesting but doesn’t produce much. But how do you know of them? I’m impressed.”
“Music is Von’s forte,” Addy said. “She and her Italian friend—the Hercule of the notorious wristwatch—have a music salon.”
“I love music,” Victorine said. Her eyes fluttered open for an instant then closed. “So soothing.”
“I like music, too,” Eudes said, “as long as it’s Offenbach.”
“You like Bach?” Foxy asked, not understanding. “You can never go wrong with Bach.”
“Offenbach.”
“Oh.”
“Le can-can.”
“Vraiment, Eudes,” his wife said, smiling, in mock shock and disapproval. “Tu exagères.” Then she brought out an English word from the nursery: “Naughty.”
After dinner Addy asked me to take a walk with him to see the folly he’d rebuilt, a preruined Greek temple. It was still light out at ten P.M. The temple was beside a promontory, which gave me ideas. I looked down at the olive trees far below that the farmer must have stopped cultivating. They’d gone wild and were shaggy and overgrown. I said, “This is so beautiful, Adhéaume.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “You must admit I have a talent for arranging things. And for scénographie.”
I double-locked my door that night, but I didn’t need to. I realized Addy was no longer attracted to me—thank heavens! I wondered who his new mistress was and where he’d stored her.
I loved our boring days, with nothing to do but dress, stroll, daydream over a book, wash, change clothes, eat, undress. Since the children were so unruly it was decided that I would eat with them in the nursery, which suited me fine. No more translating. I let Addy do that for Foxy. I would take long walks with Foxy. One day we ran into Addy and I said, “Your chrysanthemums are lovely. I never thought you were a gardener.”
“But I have a friend (une amie) who lives nearby and she helps me.” Addy often began a sentence with “But …” as if he couldn’t imagine an utterance that wasn’t in opposition to something I’d said, as if he were asserting something contested.
“Ah! Une amie—quick work.”
“She’s just a little countess from Entrecasteaux, famous for its sundials.”
“Well, she has a green thumb,” I said (we were speaking English for Foxy’s sake), “but I imagine the rest of her is the color of a veal daube. The way you like them.”
“You must be very bored with us,” Addy said to Foxy.
“I command you not to say that!” I said, laughing. “You didn’t hear that, Foxy.” I waved my hands in front of her eyes and chanted, as if hypnotizing her, “You love it here and will never leave.” They both laughed.
On rainy days we wandered around the château. The massive dining hall in the Charles X style led to the guards’ hall, where we’d play cards in the window nooks. Or we played billiards on the massive, if slanting, green baize table, while the gold-lettered inscriptions on the wall clamored, VIVE LE ROI! VIVE LE ROI! C’EST MON PLAISIR, in honor of Henri III, who once spent the night here on his return from Poland, where he’d also been king.
The château library contained nothing that interested me except some ancient numbers of the Edinburgh Review. In the Flower Bedroom blue nigellas, red tulips, and white lilies (the tricolor) were painted on the walls, shutters, and coffered ceilings. Who had been the Republican? I wondered. Everything was in order and ready to go. There was soap in the soap dishes, quills in the plumier, eau de cologne in the water closet.
I knew that Addy was related to everyone and could summon hundreds of rich or titled people to a masked ball, but he had few friends. No one dropped in on us. His parents, apparently, were installed in the château for good. I often overheard Addy quarreling with them, jeering, hissing, or murmuring that ultimate French expression of disbelief or mild outrage, “Quand même!” I was glad he had them to convince him that he was leading a life, that their grudges, delights, abbreviated references to distant events or nicknames for relatives—that all this hubbub and buzzing could animate their loneliness. I had always been amazed that great-aunts and sorority sisters or old aristocrats could fill up their days with chatter. This ongoing process of knowing names, keeping schedules, assigning duties, writing letters, evaluating new acquaintances, at once familial and competitive, could stave off the grand silence awaiting us all. Was this marriage proposal suitable or a mésalliance? Was his title mediatized under the Holy Roman Empire (“neither holy, Roman, nor imperial”)? How were the Courcys related to the Gramonts? Was she the first woman of the grati
n to utter the mot de Cambronne (“shit”)? The frowns, smiles, whispers, the stains and how to get rid of them (“white wine to dilute red wine”), the schemes (“But how to introduce them when she won’t answer the phone?”), les bonnes adresses and the precious contacts, the plans for trips, charities, and goutés ouvroirs (working teas where aristocratic ladies knitted for the poor), the dull, passed-along mots, the semiprecious stones of conversation (“She said that when she was young she was a dream, though as an old woman she’s become a nightmare”). I thought they’d spent their lifetimes reading Paris Match and Allo!, debriefing friends on the phone for hours, relaying tepid scandals, quizzing members of the government or the Goncourt Prize committee over dinner, courting today’s genius, lowering their social standards by frequenting mere journalists (“She’s common but amusing—and so up on things!”), criticizing one another’s clothes (“Forgive me, but that color gives you a dirty complexion” [une sale gueule]), comparing prices, debunking genealogies, relishing rumors of divorce, bankruptcy, corruption. Although he claimed to be so sure of his taste, Addy tested out each new wineglass or fork against his mother’s approval (“You know,” he said, “Henri first introduced forks from Poland, where they invented them”). Addy would casually refer to Henri III by name, but his mother would say, “Yes, I know his majesty the king did us the honor of once accepting our hospitality.”
Addy not only had spent a fortune on the château, he was also redecorating all twelve rooms of the Avenue Foch apartment. He wanted to celebrate its completion in a year with a masked ball. I heard him saying to his mother, “We could have surrealism as our theme; you could come as a sugar cube soaked in absinthe with a tiny spoon as your hat.”