All the Days and Nights

by William Maxwell

  “There it is!” Dorothy cried. “Look, children!”

  Linda added the name Mont-Saint-Michel to the list of places she could tell people she had seen when she got home. Alison put her glasses on and dutifully looked. Mont-Saint-Michel was enough like a castle to strike her as interesting, but what she remembered afterward was not the thing itself but the excitement in her father’s and mother’s voices. Trip sat up, looked, and sank back again without a word and without the slightest change in her expression.

  The abbey was immediately obscured by a big new hotel. Boys in white jackets stood in a line on the left-hand side of the road, and indicated with a gesture of the thumb that the Volkswagen was to swing in here.

  “What an insane idea,” Reynolds murmured. He had made a reservation at the hotel where they had stayed before, right in the shadow of the abbey.

  At the beginning of the causeway, three or four cars were stopped and their occupants had got out with their cameras. He got out too, with the children’s Hawkeye, and had to wait several minutes for an unobstructed view. Then he got back in the car and drove the rest of the way.

  At the last turn in the road, he exclaimed, “Oh, no!” In a huge parking lot to the right of the causeway there were roughly a thousand cars shining in the sunlight. “It’s just like the World’s Fair,” he said. “We’ll probably have to stand in line an hour and forty minutes to see the tide come in.”

  A traffic policeman indicated with a movement of his arm that they were to swing off to the right and down into the parking lot. Reynolds stopped and explained that they were spending the night here and had been told they were to leave the car next to the outer gate. The policeman’s arm made exactly the same gesture it had made before.

  “He’s a big help,” Reynolds said as he drove on, and Trip said, “There’s a car just like ours.”

  “Why, so it is,” Dorothy said. “It must be the people who passed us.”

  “And there’s another,” Trip said.

  “Where?” Alison said, and put on her glasses.

  They left the luggage in the locked Volkswagen and joined the stream of pilgrims. Reynolds stopped and paid for the parking ticket. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw the sand flats extending out into the bay as far as the eye could see, wet, shining, and with long, thin, bright ribbons of water running through them, just as he remembered. The time before, there were nine sightseeing buses lined up on the causeway, from which he knew before he ever set foot in it, that Mont-Saint-Michel was not going to be the earthly paradise. This time he didn’t even bother to count them. Thirty, forty, fifty, what difference did it make. But the little stream that flowed right past the outer gate? Gone.… Was it perhaps not a stream at all but a ditch with tidal water in it? Anyway, it had been just too wide to jump over, and a big man in a porter’s uniform had picked Dorothy up in his arms and, wading through the water, set her down on the other side. Then he came back for Reynolds. There was no indication now that there had ever been a stream here that you had to be carried across as if you were living in the time of Chaucer.

  The hotels, restaurants, cafés, Quimper shops, and souvenir shops (the abbey on glass ashtrays, on cheap china, on armbands, on felt pennants; the abbey in the form of lead paperweights three or four inches high) had survived. The winding street of stairs was noisier, perhaps, and more crowded, but not really any different. The hotel was expecting them. Reynolds left Dorothy and the children in the lobby and went back to the car with a porter, who was five foot three or four at the most and probably not old enough to vote. Sitting on the front seat of the Volkswagen, he indicated the road they were to take out of the big parking lot, up over the causeway and down into the smaller parking lot by the outer gate, where Reynolds had tried to go in the first place. The same policeman waved them on, consistency being not one of the things the French are nervous about. With the help of leather straps the porter draped the big suitcases and then the smaller ones here and there around his person, and would have added the hand luggage if Reynolds had let him. Together they staggered up the cobblestone street, and Reynolds saw to his surprise that Dorothy and the children were sitting at a café table across from the entrance to the hotel.

  “It was too hot in there,” she said, “and there was no place to sit down. I ordered an apéritif. Do you want one?”

  And the luggage? What do I do with that? his eyebrows asked, for she was descended from the girl in the fairy tale who said, “Just bring me a rose, dear Father,” and he was born in the dead center of the middle class, and they did not always immediately agree about what came before what. He followed the porter inside and up a flight of stairs. The second floor was just as he remembered it, and their room was right down there — where he started to go, until he saw that the porter was continuing up the stairs. On the floor above he went out through a door, with Reynolds following, to a wing of the hotel that didn’t exist eighteen years before. It was three stories high and built in the style of an American motel, and the rooms that had been reserved for them were on the third floor — making four stories in all that they had climbed. The porter never paused for breath, possibly because any loss of momentum would have stopped him in his tracks. Reynolds went to a window and opened it. The view from this much higher position was of rooftops and the main parking lot and, like a line drawn with a ruler, the canal that divides Brittany and Normandy. He felt one of the twin beds (no sag in the middle) and then inspected the children’s room and the bathroom. It was all very modern and comfortable. It was, in fact, a good deal more comfortable than their old room had been, though he had remembered that room with pleasure all these years. The flowered wallpaper and the flowered curtains had been simply god-awful together, and leaning out of the window they had looked straight down on the heads of the tourists coming and going in the Grande Rue — tourists from all over Europe, by their appearance, their clothes, and by the variety of languages they were speaking. There were even tourists from Brittany, in their pardon costumes. And they all seemed to have the same expression on their faces, as if it were an effect of the afternoon light. They looked as if they were soberly aware that they had come to a dividing place in their lives and nothing would be quite the same for them after this. And all afternoon and all evening there was the sound of the omelette whisk. In a room between the foyer of the hotel and the dining room, directly underneath them, a very tall man in a chef’s cap and white apron stood beating eggs with a whisk and then cooking them in a long-handled skillet over a wood fire in an enormous open fireplace.

  Reynolds listened. There was no whisk, whisk, whisk now. Too far away. A car came down the causeway and turned in to the parking lot. When night came, the buses would all be gone and the parking lot would be empty.

  In this he was arguing from what had happened before. The tourists got back on the sightseeing buses, and the buses drove away. By the end of the afternoon he and Dorothy were the only ones left. After dinner they walked up to the abbey again, drawn there by some invisible force. It was closed for the night, but they noticed a gate and pushed it open a few inches and looked in. It was a walled garden from a fifteenth-century Book of Hours. There was nobody around, so they went in and closed the gate carefully behind them and started down the gravel path. The garden beds were outlined with bilateral dwarf fruit trees, their branches tied to a low wire and heavy with picture-book apples and pears. There was no snobbish distinction between flowers and vegetables. The weed was unknown. At the far end of this Eden there was a gate that led to another, and after that there were still others — a whole series of exquisite walled gardens hidden away behind the street of restaurants and hotels and souvenir shops. They visited them all. Lingering in the deep twilight, they stood looking up at the cliffs of masonry and were awed by the actual living presence of Time; for it must have been just like this for the last five or six hundred years and maybe longer. The swallows were slicing the air into convex curves, the tide had receded far out into the bay, leaving everywh
ere behind it the channels by which it would return at three in the morning, and the air was so pure it made them lightheaded.

  Before Reynolds turned away from the window, three more cars came down the causeway. Here and there in the parking lot a car was starting up and leaving. Though he did not know it, it was what they should have been doing; he should have rounded up Dorothy and the children and driven on to Dinan, where there was a nice well-run hotel with a good restaurant and no memories and a castle right down the street. But his clairvoyance was limited. He foresaw the accident that would never take place but not the disorderly reception that lay in wait for them downstairs.

  ON the way into the dining room, half an hour later, they stopped to show the children how the omelettes were made. The very tall man in the white apron had been replaced by two young women in uniforms, but there was still a fire in the fireplace, Reynolds was glad to see; they weren’t making the omelettes on a gas stove. The fire was quite a small one, though, and not the huge yellow flames he remembered.

  “Cinq,” he said to the maître d’hôtel, who replied in English, “Will you come this way?” and led them to a table in the center of the dining room. When he had passed out enormous printed menus, he said, “I think the little lady had better put her knitting away. One of the waiters might get jabbed by a needle.” This request was accompanied by the smile of a man who knows what children are like, and whom children always find irresistible. Trip ignored the smile and looked at her mother inquiringly.

  “I don’t see how you could jab anybody, but put it away. I want an omelette fines herbes,” Dorothy said.

  The maître d’hôtel indicated the top of the menu with his gold pencil and said, “We have the famous omelette of Mont-Saint-Michel.”

  “But with herbs.” Dorothy said.

  “There is no omelette with herbs,” the maître d’hôtel said.

  “Why not?” Reynolds asked. “We had it here before.”

  The question went unanswered.

  The two younger children did not care for omelette, famous or otherwise, and took an unconscionably long time making up their minds what they did want to eat for lunch. The maître d’hôtel came back twice before Reynolds was ready to give him their order. After he had left the table, Dorothy said, “I don’t see why you can’t have it fines herbes.”

  “Perhaps they don’t have any herbs,” Reynolds said.

  “In France?”

  “Here, I mean. It’s an island, practically.”

  “All you need is parsley and chives. Surely they have that.”

  “Well maybe it’s too much bother, then.”

  “It’s no more trouble than a plain omelette. I don’t like him.”

  “Yes? What’s the matter with him?”

  “He looks like a Yale man.”

  This was not intended as a funny remark, but Reynolds laughed anyway.

  “And he’s not a good headwaiter,” she said.

  The maître d’hôtel did not, in fact, get their order straight. Things came that they hadn’t ordered, and Trip’s sole didn’t come with the omelettes, or at all. Since she had already filled up on bread, it was not serious. The service was elaborate but very slow.

  “No dessert, thank you,” Reynolds said when the waiter brought the enormous menus back.

  “Just coffee,” Dorothy said.

  Reynolds looked at his watch. “It says in the green Michelin there’s a tour of the abbey with an English-speaking guide at two o’clock. We just barely have time to make it. If we have coffee we’ll be too late.”

  “Oh, let’s have coffee,” Dorothy said. “They won’t start on time.”

  As they raced up the Grande Rue at five minutes after two, he noticed that it was different in one respect: The shops had been enlarged; they went back much deeper than they had before. The objects offered for sale were the same, and since he had examined them carefully eighteen years before, there was no need to do anything but avert his eyes from them now.

  The English-speaking tour had already left the vaulted room it started from, and they ran up a long flight of stone steps and caught up with their party on the battlements. A young Frenchman with heavy black-rimmed glasses and a greenish complexion was lecturing to them about the part Mont-Saint-Michel played in the Hundred Years’ War. There was a group just ahead of them, and another just behind. The guides manipulated their parties in and out of the same rooms and up and down the same stairs with military precision.

  “There were dungeons,” Alison Reynolds afterward wrote in her diary, “where you could not sit, lie, or stand and were not allowed to move. Some prisoners were eaten by rats! There were beautiful cloisters where the monks walked and watered their gardens. There was the knights’ hall, where guests stayed. The monks ate and worked in the refectory.…”

  “It’s better managed than it used to be,” Dorothy said. “I mean, when you think how many people have to be taken through.”

  The tour was also much shorter than Reynolds remembered it as being, but that could have been because this time they had an English-speaking guide. Or it could just be that what he suspected was true and they were being hurried through. He could not feel the same passionate interest in either the history or the architectural details of the abbey that he had the first time, but that was not the guide’s fault. It was obvious that he cared very much about the evolution of the Gothic style and the various uses to which this immensely beautiful but now lifeless monument had been put, through the centuries. His accent made the children smile, but it was no farther from the mark than Reynolds’s French, which the French did not smile at only because it didn’t amuse them to hear their language badly spoken.

  When the tour was over, the guide gathered the party around him and, standing in a doorway through which they would have to pass, informed them that he was a student in a university and that this was his only means of paying for his education. The intellectual tradition of France sat gracefully on his frail shoulders, Reynolds thought, and short or not his tour had been a model of clarity. And was ten francs enough for the five of them?

  Traveling in France right after the war, when everybody was so poor, he had been struck by the way the French always tipped the guide generously and thanked him in a way that was never perfunctory. It seemed partly good manners and partly a universal respect for the details of French history. A considerable number of tourists slipped through the doorway now without putting anything in the waiting hand. Before, the guide stood out in the open, quite confident that no one would try to escape without giving him something.

  At the sight of the ten-franc note, the young man’s features underwent a slight change, by which Reynolds knew that it was sufficient, but money was not all the occasion called for, and there was a word he had been waiting for a chance to use. “Votre tour est très sensible,” he said, and the guide’s face lit up with pleasure.

  Only connect, Mr. E. M. Forster said, but he was not talking about John Reynolds, whose life’s blood went into making incessant and vivid connections with all sorts of people he would never see again, and never forgot.

  The wine at lunch had made him sleepy. He waited impatiently while Dorothy and the children bought slides and postcards in the room where the tour ended. Outside, at the foot of the staircase, his plans for taking a nap were threatened when Dorothy was attracted to a museum of horrors having to do with the period when Mont-Saint-Michel was a state prison. But by applying delicate pressures at the right moment he got her to give up the museum, and they walked on down to their hotel. When he had undressed and pulled the covers back, he went to the window in his dressing gown. Some cars were just arriving. American cars. He looked at his watch. It was after four, and the parking lot was still more than half full. On the top floor of the hotel just below, and right next to an open window, he could see a girl of nineteen or twenty with long straight straw-blond hair, sitting on the side of a bed in an attitude of despondency. During the whole time he stood at the window, sh
e didn’t raise her head or move. He got into his own bed and was just falling asleep when somebody came into the courtyard with a transistor radio playing rock and roll. He got up and rummaged through his suitcase until he found the wax earplugs. When he woke an hour later, the courtyard was quiet. The girl was still there. He went to the window several times while he was running a bath and afterward while he was dressing. Though the girl left the bed and came back to it, there was no change in her dejection.

  “That girl,” he said finally.

  “I’ve been watching her too,” Dorothy said.

  “She’s in love. And something’s gone wrong.”

  “They aren’t married and she’s having a baby,” Dorothy said.

  “And the man has left her.”

  “No, he’s in the room,” Dorothy said. “I saw him a minute ago, drinking out of a wine bottle.”

  The next time Reynolds looked he couldn’t see anyone. The room looked empty, though you couldn’t see all the way into it. Had the man and the girl left? Or were they down below somewhere? He looked one last time before they started down to the dining room. The shutters in the room across the court were closed. That was that.

  AT dinner Reynolds got into a row with their waiter. For ten days in Paris and ten more days at a little seaside resort on the south coast of Brittany they had met with nothing but politeness and the desire to please. All the familiar complaints about France and the French were refuted, until this evening, when one thing after another went wrong. They were seated at a table that had been wedged into a far corner of the room, between a grotto for trout and goldfish and the foot of a stairway leading to the upper floors of the hotel. Reynolds started to protest and Dorothy stopped him.

  “Trip wants to stay here so she can watch the fish,” she explained.

  “I know,” he said as he unfolded his napkin, “but if anybody comes down those stairs they’ll have to climb over my lap to get into the dining room.”

  “They won’t,” she said. “I’m sure it isn’t used.” Then to the children, “You pick out the one you want to eat and they take it out with a net and carry it to the kitchen.”