by Edmund White
“I was under the impression he was my father and he’d left the money to me.”
“No sophistry, please. It was always a clear arrangement: my title and taste for your fortune.”
“I don’t remember signing any such agreement.”
“But it was always understood. That’s the subtlety of the ‘unsaid,’ the non-dit in French.”
“Trust me, I’ve already mastered that expression.”
Adhéaume and his utterly predictable greed and vanity made me so weary. Why hadn’t I spotted the rotten fruit right away? Because of the fancy packaging? So many bows and so much glitter wrapping?
Every time I went past Addy’s door I could hear him on the phone talking urgently to New York, where it was six hours earlier—urgently, no laughter, none of his famous charm. This was serious business. He was probably taking notes and paying for each minute of counsel.
We went back to the castle in the Var. Addy’s parents were staying there. They felt so much more at ease, more “natural,” inside their ancestral walls than in their shabby one-room in the Sixteenth with its grand entrance and twenty-five square meters. Here they could spread out in the regal boredom of their domain. Days would go by without their ever setting foot outside. They blamed the weather, but in truth it was their age. They felt at once cozy and magnificent beside the electric fire in their vast painted chambers. They seemed to relish the tedium of their empty days, as if on the threshold of eventless death. They’d discuss something or read something and forget it the next day. Every day enjoyed the same featurelessness, which seemed somehow “aristocratic” to them, as though excitement were bourgeois and only people of ancient lineage could afford to be bored. Boredom, they thought, was becoming to people of their age and dignity and fragility.
Mercy sent me a telegram telling me that my sister had died. She had gone on her mission to the indigenous people, caught sick, and been brought back to Jericó by mule, where she died a day later. The convent had a telephone number that Mercy confided to me but warned me should be used only in emergencies. I judged my sister’s martyrdom to be an emergency. Mercy spoke English with difficulty and in such a tiny, little girl’s voice that I could scarcely understand her, but I grasped that Yvette had died in agony but in the embrace of her beloved Mercy, for which I was grateful.
“Do you think Oscar knew the mission would kill her and that he wanted her to die because she loved you more than him?” I asked.
My question was followed by such a long silence that I thought she’d hung up. At last I said, “She was such a good woman.”
Mercy said, “She una santa.”
“Yes, a saint. You and I—”
“Yes?”
“Let’s make her a saint.”
“Yes yes yes!”
“We make her a saint,” I said in my kind of Esperanto.
“Yes! How?”
“Ask the new bishop to nominate her.”
“What?”
“Nominar.”
“Yes!”
“Todo resto hago yo. I do all the rest.”
“¿Yo? ¿Nominar?”
“Si si. Gracias.”
“El Obispo. Nominar. Bishop nominate. Adios.”
Lord knows what poor Mercy made of all that. Her Spanish, I imagined, was almost as impressionistic as mine. Tagalog—wasn’t that her language?
Neither of these deaths (my father, my sister) affected me as much as they would have once, since neither person was part of my everyday life or woven into my habits. Of course, my sister had been remote from me for a long time. Whenever I thought of something funny that would tickle her I’d had to recognize that by the time I wrote her a letter and she responded the joke would long since have fizzled out.
I loved her as much as myself (which wasn’t all that much). I must have nursed the fantasy that someday we’d live together, that she’d give up the Church and I Paris, that we’d live somewhere warm, maybe Hawaii, and we’d spend our old age together, dressed in playclothes to expose the varicose veins on our legs, where we let the hairs grow in. Each of us tolerant of her twin’s proclivities toward girls, if we were interested in sex at all in our later years. We’d each have to become more feminine since I knew baby butches preferred older femmes. We’d live in Hawaii, get tired of the sun and surf, ration each other’s cocktails, flirt with the native housekeeper, learn to like pop music sung by overweight, round-faced, bare-chested Hawaiians, the sumo wrestlers of song.
I was grateful I’d been able to see her one last time and that she’d met my children, though Daddy had ruined everything with his senile sex obsessions. I suppose we were all oversexed. Now, at least, two of the three were quiescent.
Their deaths had made all human effort seem pointless. At least Addy was concerned with the patrimony, though that concern didn’t go along with his vengeful attitude toward the children. As long as he could tap into my millions (money for title), the children were safe, but they would be the first victims of divorce, it seemed (Papa Addy’s surprise vendetta).
Yvette had been my ransom paid to virtue. She was living an alternative life, but somehow it was genetically identical. I was never completely alone while she was alive. I was bad, but not that bad as long as she was my double, my frail ambassador. I would often talk things over with her in my imagination. She could be sternly disapproving of me but she always understood me. To understand may not be a guarantee of forgiving, but at least it’s a down payment toward it.
Now I felt fragile. Every sniffle, every stomachache, our migraines (now they were just my migraines), every scratch seemed foreboding if not fatal.
I thought constantly about how my sister and I had been identical, how for the first twenty-four hours we’d been just one zygote, the fertilized egg, though that extreme, almost suffocating coziness had soon come to an end, how mitosis had split us one from the other, though we remained indistinguishable down to the last atom until fate sent us off in different directions—or rather made us the two very different sides of the same coin, she intellectual, martyrized by kindness, consumed by piety, me frivolous, robust, pagan. But what remained was the intuition that for a long day we’d been a single cell.
I had a friend, a priest, society’s priest (le prêtre mondain), called the Abbé Pierre Thomas. He was a charming, elderly man who had a big apartment near the Gobelins, which was convenient since it was near one of the few brasseries open on Sunday and I could meet him there after Mass. He had just one plume of hair on his head, shooting straight up, and only two soutanes, both of them shiny and worn. What made him distinct was that he loved literature, including modern poetry and fiction, though his two favorites of the past were Stendhal and Chateaubriand. He became friendly with Chateaubriand’s descendants and spent many months in their château, Cobourg, in Brittany. There he could imagine the author as a boy huddled with his mother and sister at the dark end of a vaulted hall while his melancholy father paced the length of the room with the only candle—or that moment as an adolescent when he attempted suicide (and failed because the gunpowder was wet).
Of course, Chateaubriand was ideal because he’d written a brilliant defense of Catholicism, The Genius of Christianity, and he hated Napoleon. The Abbé Pierre could quote from memory whole pages of Chateaubriand’s rolling periods, an account of when he was living in London as the pampered French ambassador, close to the room where he’d barely survived as an impoverished French teacher in exile after the Revolution and was so hungry, or when, earlier, as a very young courtier, he went on his first stag hunt with Louis XVI and in the confusion killed the animal, although the king was supposed to dispatch the stag. Pierre could also quote reams of Valéry’s “The Young Fate” and Baudelaire’s lesbian poems and Mallarmé’s beautiful nonsense. Every writer wanted to know him, especially the experimental ones. He was friendly with Alain Robbe-Grillet and his sadistic wife, Catherine, who had tortured many chic Parisians in their château-fort; she wrote down in a big book which things sh
e’d done to whom, next to the pasted-in label of the wine she’d served them over dinner (no repeat punishments or vintages). Alain, the author of Le Voyeur, looked on. Pierre knew the poets, too: Yves Bonnefoy, André du Bouchet. He had rare first editions of most of “his” writers. If they weren’t given to him, he’d demand them, saying, “I’m just a poor parish priest.” Originally he’d intended to donate his first editions to a school on the Côte d’Ivoire, but now it seemed more practical to sell them to a collector and give the proceeds to the school.
He was much in demand among the gratin; countesses competed over him as a dinner guest. Every reactionary aristocratic family was proud to have a priest in attendance, but most priests were such dunces and prudes and bores. Pierre was the most amusing of the lot—humble, kind, but witty and so cultivated!
He had so many funny rejoinders, most of them irreverent. When one writer, a talentless and pompous member of the Academy, began to bore everyone with his piety, Pierre said, “Perhaps he wants a soutane. I have two!” Once he was seated next to a famous whore, who had gotten lucky and become a Romanian princess, and he said to her, “Your last lover will be Jesus Christ,” and she was instantly converted. But he could be acerbic. When someone pointed out a jeweled crucifix on a woman’s bony chest and asked him, “Have you seen the Cross?” he replied, “No, but I’ve seen the Calvary.” People choose (or God chooses) the oddest moments to be converted; the poet Max Jacob was watching a gangster movie when suddenly he had a vision of Christ’s head on the screen! The cardinal of Paris disapproved of Pierre’s frequentation of the best salons (or was envious) and assigned him to an extremely poor parish in Montreuil with the highest crime rate in France. The Communist Party had a stranglehold on the community. Montreuil’s main attraction was a miserable flea market selling unmatched shoes, damaged tires, and charred tinware. The church itself was ugly and recent, unattended and full of plastic hearts of Jesus that lit up from within, half-full of a liquid that looked like cherry soda.
Pierre never complained about his congregation, though they were rude and smelled bad. His own origins were rural and poor in the Meuse and he never felt superior to anyone. He had risen so high socially only because he was witty and literary. It helped that he was tiny and very pious—he felt to others like a piety doll! He was never censorious, although he disapproved strongly of war and was a pacifist, which made the Communists say they doubted his patriotism. He brought two countesses over to the Church; he was never stern in confession. He considered adultery a form of love. Homosexuality was “a throwback to the Golden Age.” His only fault was that he drank too much, mostly brandy and mostly when alone late at night. Someone in moral agony had once called on him at his apartment at the Gobelins after midnight and found him incoherent and reeking, walking on all fours.
He was a valuable ally and of course an ornament to my soirées. He brought the great composers Dutilleux and Messaien to my salon, so much more talented and bearable (and personally charming) than the serial killers. Both men seemed devoted to birds and their cries. And Messaien to Our Lord and angels and saints (years later I attended the premiere of his opera Saint François d’Assise with him; he wept throughout). At our salon Dutilleux tried out a cello sonata and sketches for a cello concerto. If I understood right he introduced a major theme first in fragments and hints, just as Proust might mention a character by reputation long before he or she comes “onstage.” Of course, as a priest Pierre had a special access to Messaien. My greatest joy was dropping in on Duteilleux at his small Île Saint-Louis apartment. He was always shaved and combed and neatly dressed. A beautiful Corot landscape hung over the fireplace. His wife, the pianist Genevieve Joy, would make me a cup of tea in a cup that didn’t seem altogether clean. I never stayed long.
Thanks to these two star composers, our musical salon became famous and Pierre and I became best friends. I knew he was keeping a detailed journal that would be published after his death—it was my passport to immortality, since it was sure to be an indispensable guide to Parisian aristocratic and artistic life during those years. Maybe he’d even say the awful truths he knew about me; that possibility urged me to say them first, from my point of view.
Adhéaume liked him since he thought priests were a good thing, especially one who was mondain. I invited Pierre to the castle in the Var along with the prince de Joinville, Addy’s cousin (Addy’s father’s sister was the prince’s mother). “Eddie,” the prince, didn’t much like Addy. The dislike was mutual, but at some point they’d agreed to be civil with each other. I think Eddie and Addy discerned in each other a superficiality joined to a pretentiousness; since they were French they were obliged to be cultured, but neither was. When they were teens they’d gone clothes shopping with each other more than once; they were about the same age and size.
One night Addy was specially rude to me because I’d never invited Spanky to the castle, which showed how ungrateful and egotistical I was. There she was, impoverished, obliged to take in boarders; she was responsible for our married bliss. I looked to see if he was being ironic. Oddly, he wasn’t.
He wasn’t interested in the reality of a situation but only in how it appeared to others.
I phoned Spanky and invited her to join us in the country. She said at the moment she had two “guests,” but they’d be gone by the end of the week. Could she come then? Of course. Would she like us to send our car and driver? Or a train ticket? Car, please.
The Abbé Pierre had titled friends in the Var who came to kidnap him for a day or two. After one jaunt with some rich Italians he came back raving about their library. An eighteenth-century forebear had been a voracious bibliophile and had agents working for him in every country in Europe. The collector’s idea was to buy an illuminated manuscript of a title and the first printed copy of the same title. Pierre had had to wear white gloves when he handled the books. Their paintings were dull copies of Renaissance canvases, mostly of Judith cutting off Holofernes’s big, shaggy head with the beard and thick neck (Judith usually had an openmouthed maid helping with the sawing), but the books were splendid, the better part of the inheritance (the older brother had inherited the Luca Signorellis of dive-bombing, rubber-winged angels).
When Spanky arrived in the castle, we all sat down to dinner together—Victorine, Eudes, Prince Eddie, Pierre, Spanky, Addy, and me. The children were brought in by the German nanny to greet Mme de Castiglione. When the nanny spirited them away, Spanky said, “Adorable. Like little angels.”
“Not for long,” Addy said. “Soon they’ll be dirty ruffians if Von goes through with her plan to divorce me.”
“Let’s not go there!” I whispered, but he shouted, “I’ll go anywhere I damn want to! How dare you try to censure my conversation at my own table. You’ve become so prim”—he said the word in English—“for someone who started out as a cowgirl.”
Eddie grabbed my hand under the table and I was grateful for his kindness.
Spanky and Victorine looked confused and turned to praising the wine, which ordinarily they would never have done. Eudes just appeared bewildered with the perpetually exploratory expression of the hard of hearing. Spanky, not as clueless as the other Courcys and a bit more at home in the real world, gave me her condolences about my sister’s death. I was so unprepared for this show of sympathy that I burst into tears. Mme de Castiglione came to my side, put her arm around me, and said, “She sounded like such a beautiful soul—a saint, really.”
“Oh, she was so good, kind, self-sacrificing, pious. Father Pierre and I are going to campaign to have her made a saint, a real saint. If I throw myself—my time and prayers and money—into working toward her sainthood, then I might miss her less or at least feel I’m channeling my grief into something productive.”
I think Spanky, so quietly religious herself, volunteering day after day at the hospital despite her age, was impressed, or at least soothed, by my Vatican aspirations. She kept patting my shoulder as she’d never done before and even pre
sented me with an embroidered, lilac-scented handkerchief she’d hidden in her sleeve. I remembered that she’d opposed the Nazis and that she lived uncomplainingly in respectable poverty, that she coexisted with the most terrifying snobbery and the most Christian charity, that she loved the poor and despised the bougeoisie, respected the rich but worshipped the titled. She was a complex woman, but her kindness to me made me grateful to her.
After dinner I sat in the window embrasure of the great hall with Father Pierre. I explained to him Adhéaume’s threat to gain custody over our children and to send them to a gulag of a boarding school, where they’d become little dirty cigarette-smoking hoodlums (or “hoods” as we called them back in Texas, those knife-wielding, motorcycle slim boys and fat girls who smelled of leather, sweat, and tobacco).
The good Abbé held my hand. He smelled of Adhéaume’s expensive century-old brandy. Normally at night he smelled of chartreuse, perhaps out of loyalty to the monastery (or Stendhal).
“What shall I do?” I asked.
“Murder him,” Father Pierre said.
My eyes must have widened. Perhaps I gasped. Pierre patted my hand with his little boneless hand and smiled. “I can’t see any other way out.”
I swallowed. “You’re right.” I closed my eyes. “But how?”
He pulled a packet out of his shirt pocket under his soutane. “Put this in his wine, then walk him to the pre-ruined temple, the Hercules Victor, beside the precipice—and push!”
“What if he struggles?”
“He won’t. This powder is from a farmacia I know very well. He won’t be able to resist. His legs will be rubber. It’s guaranteed.”
“And then what?”
“You’ll grieve. You’ll mourn. You’ll be a very powerful—and respected!—widow.”
“But …?”
“The baron’s parents won’t want their grandchildren to have a murderer for a mother. They’ll back you up. There will be no autopsies. In any event the drug is undetectable.”