House of Cards

by Stanley Ellin

  “Stop it, Paul!” Utterly confounded by this pitifully small, snarling image of hate, I found myself furiously shouting back at him. I took control of myself. “Enough of that,” I said quietly. “Now come give me a hand unpacking these suitcases.”

  He remained at bay. “I’m not your servant!”

  “I’m asking you to help me as a friend, not a servant.”

  “I’m not your friend! I don’t want to be your friend! I don’t need any friends!”

  “Of course not.” I saw the opening and quickly moved into it. “But what about me? I’m a stranger in the house. I don’t know anyone here. It didn’t bother me before because I thought I’d find at least one good friend to count on. Now that I know how you feel about it—” I let my head droop disconsolately.

  I had gotten through to him. Slowly, the rigid little jaw unclenched, the bruised look faded, the fury in the eyes turned to frowning bewilderment. I sat down on the edge of the bed, my back to him, my head in my hands. I waited.

  “Reno?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t be sad.” He approached me as timidly as a puppy approaching some new and baffling object. “Please, don’t be sad, Reno.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “Yes, you can.” He tugged at my sleeve, and when I still refused to raise my head, he gave me a sharp, angry wallop on the shoulder with his fist. “Listen to me! I’ll be your friend.”

  I raised my head. “Will you really?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m very grateful.” I put an arm around him and took him on my knee. For a second he strained against the arm like a snared animal, but when I only tightened my hold he relaxed and leaned back against me. “After all,” I said, “it’s no fun being lonely.”

  “No.” He looked up at me doubtfully. “But what do friends do?”

  “Oh, everything. Help each other out, talk to each other, play games together—”

  A voice from the doorway broke the spell. “Is something wrong?” It was Madame de Villemont, her hand to her breast, her expression fearful. “I heard your voices. From the way it sounded, I thought perhaps—”

  “No, madame, there’s nothing wrong.” But there was something very wrong. As Paul slipped from my knee and turned to face his mother, my hand still resting on his shoulder, I felt the shivering tension that seized him, saw the way his face mirrored her anxiety. It gave me a sympathetic understanding of de Gonde’s weariness with the situation. The child couldn’t be separated from his mother, and she couldn’t seem to mask her feelings from him, protect him from them. I felt pity for her, too, mixed with my anger at this unwanted intrusion. After all, as de Gonde himself had said, it’s impossible to judge someone irrational by rational standards. “Paul and I were just having a little talk,” I said.

  Madame took herself in hand. “Well, you can continue it at dinner. It’s almost time, Paul, so go wash up and wait at the table for us. And please take off that gun. Cowboys don’t wear guns at the table.”

  Paul looked up at me. “Is that true?”

  “I’m afraid it is, partner. They’d seem mighty unneighborly otherwise.”

  “Is a partner the same as a friend?”

  “In this case it is.”

  “Okay, partner. Au’voir.”

  He clattered out of the room on an imaginary horse, and his mother quickly closed the door behind him and placed her back against it.

  “You didn’t tell him about the gun I gave you, did you?” she said in a low voice.

  “Of course not, madame.”

  “Good. Were you able to get the bullets for it?”

  “No.”

  Something about the way I said it put her on guard.

  “Did you try to get them?”

  “Yes,” I said uncomfortably.

  Madame de Villemont stared at me. I stared back at her, trying to brazen it out.

  “You’re lying,” she said at last.

  That stung all the more because it was deserved. I thought of the de Gondes pleading with me to make up a story about the gun that would appease Madame, would win me her confidence for her own good, but I would have to let them down. I wasn’t built to play the game their way.

  “You’re right,” I said. “The truth is I don’t want any part of a loaded gun. There’s always a chance it’ll go off when you least expect it to.”

  Her breath quickened. She struggled for words.

  “You fool!” she burst out. “Do you think I took you into this house as some sort of joke?”

  De Gonde was wrong, I thought with a sense of shock. The whole family was wrong. Looking at this woman, I could swear she was not imagining the dangers that so terrified her. She knew something that her family and her psychiatrist didn’t know. Something she didn’t dare reveal to them. Something real.

  “Madame,” I said placatingly, “I came here as Paul’s tutor, not as his armed guard. But if you’ll tell me—”

  “All I’ll tell you is that you’re being paid to follow my instructions without question!”

  So, even sooner than Louis had prophesied it would, the showdown had come.

  “Madame, there are some instructions no one in his right mind follows without question.”

  “That’s too bad. Especially when the only other choice you have is to pack up and get out of here.”

  My valise and carry-all lay open on the bed. In silence, I closed the valise and locked it.

  “Now what?” Madame demanded.

  “That should be obvious. I’m packing up and getting out of here.”

  She watched unbelievingly as I drew the zipper around the carry-all and set it on the floor.

  “You can’t be serious,” she said. “Simply because I want you to follow instructions—”

  “Commands,” I said. “Without question. But I’ve already served my time in the Marines.”

  “My God, you are thin-skinned, aren’t you?”

  “I’m glad you finally noticed it, madame. Better late than never, I always say.”

  With that as my farewell, I gathered the typewriter under one arm and the package of books under the other, took the valise and carry-all in hand and managed to get myself through the door while Madame de Villemont stood there watching me. Then I remembered the dismal object that had caused the whole crisis. I deposited my belongings on the hallway floor and wearily went back into the room to take the gun from beneath the mattress and return it to its original hiding place in the chest.

  Through all this, Madame de Villemont remained immobile. Then, when I straightened up and turned toward the hall door again, she came to sudden life. She crossed the room to me and caught hold of my arm. From the way she hastily withdrew her hand, I was sure she had gotten the same exciting shock from that contact that I had.

  She was imperious Nefertiti descended from her throne, with eyes wide with panic.

  “Monsieur Reno,” she said, forcing herself to say it, “]e vous en prie—”

  “I beg you”—but spoken in French as if the English for it were unknown to her.

  I had never expected she would condescend to say it. It was all she needed to say.

  PART TWO

  The Tower

  1

  Of course, the family had been right. The arrangement, as it had warned, was made to order for gossip. My door opened into Paul’s room from one side, Anne de Villemont’s door opened into it from the other; neither door was ever kept locked. Every evening, the three of us ate dinner together en famille in the dining room of the apartment. The constraint at the table was exactly the constraint one would find between a husband and wife not on very good terms with each other. I knew, because during my short-lived marriage to a woman whom Madame resembled in more ways than one—she was as rich, as strong-willed, and as sensually attractive—that was the way it had usually been at the table. To the furtive eyes and avid ears of the maids who waited on this table, it would also be the constraint of two people sharing a guilty secre
t.

  Furtiveness was the hallmark of all the servants in the house. They made up a suspicious, tight-knit little confraternity devoted to the too silent step, to the covert, sidelong glance, to the whispered voice behind the half-closed door so that only the voice could be heard and never the words. Those occasional nights, when, on edge with boredom, I joined a party of them at a game of cards or dominoes in the kitchen, they gave me the feeling I had entered a meeting of conspirators who had no intention of allowing me into their inner councils. The rank miasma of this slyness and secretiveness permeated the whole house. It made the kind of poisonous atmosphere in which gossip had to flourish. Gossip about Madame de Villemont and her son’s tutor especially, since Madame was in the family’s bad graces anyhow, and the tutor, for all his polite ways, only an American roughneck hauled in from the gutters of the Tenth Arrondissement.

  Regrettably, from my point of view, this gossip did not have the least foundation in fact. Regrettably, because no matter how much I detested her own secretiveness which easily matched that of the household help around her, no matter how I was angered at the way she selfishly made Paul a victim to her tensions, no matter how I resented her habit of addressing me with a “You will do such-and-such” which was her idea of giving instructions, I was, after all, a healthy male and Madame a highly desirable female. It would have taken very little encouragement from her to land us in bed together.

  The encouragement was not forthcoming. However, what I did earn from her after a while was a wholehearted respect for my methods with Paul and an effort to co-operate with me in those methods.

  This came about as the result of a crisis between Madame and me at the end of my second week in the house. With no training in how to serve as pedagogue and nurse to a morbidly fearful, violently emotional child who had been bound too long and too tightly to his mother’s skirts, I devised a rough-and-ready program for him of no nonsense during lessons each morning and plenty of nonsense for the rest of the time we spent together.

  At the end of the second week of this regimen I saw it wasn’t working and I saw why. When Anne de Villemont asked me for a progress report, I came out with it.

  “If you mean progress at his school work, he’s doing fine. If you’re talking about his physical condition and the state of his nerves, there is no progress. He won’t eat enough; he doesn’t sleep well; whenever you look at him he’s biting his nails until they bleed; he has fits of shakes sometimes like somebody with the D.T.s. You know that as well as I do.”

  “Yes.” Anne de Villemont looked up at me haggardly. “I’ve been wondering what you can do about it.”

  “Nothing,” I said bluntly. “But I know what you can do about it.”

  “I?”

  “Who else do you think is responsible for the state he’s in? Don’t you realize how you’ve infected him with your fears, your emotionalism? You’re not blind. Watch him when you walk into the room. He might have been laughing at something one second before. Then he sees you and starts to go to pieces again. You’re afraid of something—afraid for him, afraid for yourself—and he can smell the fear whenever he’s near you. That’s what’s destroying him.”

  Anne de Villemont stiffened. She came to her feet with outrage. “Have you forgotten yourself completely? Do you know whom you’re talking to? Is it your impression you were hired to worry about my well-being? You weren’t. Paul is your only concern.”

  “I know it, madame. That’s why I’m telling you the truth, much as you don’t want to hear it. Paul is my concern. And if all I’ve been hired for is to be his attendant until he’s taken off to an institution—”

  It was calculated cruelty, and it worked. Eyes blazing, Anne de Villemont flung up a hand as if to aim a blow at me. The hand froze in midair, fell to her side. The woman seemed to disintegrate before my eyes.

  “But what can I do?” she whispered. “What can I do?”

  “Why are you so afraid something will happen to Paul?”

  Her lips became a tight unyielding line. She shook her head.

  It would be hopeless, I saw, trying to make headway against that granite resistance.

  “All right,” I said, “granting you are afraid something will happen to him, you can’t let him know that. You’ll have to hide your feelings, bury them deep. You’ll have to keep tight control of yourself whenever you’re near him. I don’t think it’ll be easy, but will you at least try to do it?”

  She did. And because of the magic change that started to take place in Paul after that, she was encouraged to keep trying.

  In a way, it made things harder for me. Away from Paul she would frequently slip back to the familiar, arrogant, overwrought Madame de Villemont I detested, but now there were times when I saw the woman who might have been, and so discovered that one might dislike a woman and still be jealous of her.

  Times such as those evenings when she would come into Paul’s room after dressing for an evening on the town, Djilana, the maid she had brought with her from Algeria, following at her heels, anxiously making a last little adjustment of a wisp of hair, of the drape of her gown, and Madame would, with an apparently light heart, pose and pirouette for her son in a wicked imitation of a high-fashion model on display.

  “Well, what do you think?” she would ask him.

  At nine, he was already Frenchman enough to take these things very seriously.

  “But you’re making fun, Mama. How can I tell unless you stand still and stop being funny?”

  Then she would stand still, hands clasped, eyes demurely downcast, while he solemnly made a circuit around her.

  “It’s very beautiful, Mama. Don’t you think so, Reno?”

  And to this I would say “Very” in the most casual of tones, inwardly snarling at Madame’s escort for the evening whoever he was.

  Talk about Tantalus!

  2

  Raw weather made early spring a museum and movie season for Paul and me, but early in May we started to go afternoons to the Parc Monceau, which was easily the most staid and stuffy piece of greenery in Paris, a stronghold of prim nannies and nursemaids, of expensive children in elegant play clothes. It was hardly the place to play baseball or football, but play them we did every day before an audience of disapproving nannies and the policeman on the beat, who had to be regularly bribed not to interfere.

  The one advantage of the place was that it lay within walking distance of the house. Transportation was our problem. Georges was usually too busy to drive us anywhere—he was chauffeur for the de Gondes and Madame Cesira on Île Saint-Louis as well as for Madame de Villemont—and I was strictly forbidden to take Paul out in a car myself, whether one from the garage or a taxi. Since travel by bus or Métro was flatly ruled out, it meant that most afternoons Paul and I had no way of getting very far from home. Thus, such wonderlands as the Musée Grévin whose mirrored chamber of illusions suddenly becomes a steaming Amazonian jungle, and the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers with its model railroads and factories and mines were usually out of bounds. When it came to movies, the chic little theaters in our district did not show cowboys and Indians but only, as Paul acidly pointed out, a bunch of silly people kissing each other all the time.

  I could understand his increasing boredom and frustration with life in the park—they made for some bad scenes now and then when he would slip back into one of his almost uncontrollable, shaking furies—but this was one subject on which Madame was obdurate. We were intended to be kept on short leash outside the fortress walls and that was all there was to it.

  Then Louis, a born agitator, began to meet us in the park every few days and mischievously planted seeds of revolt against maternal restrictions at every opportunity. The first flowering of these seeds came as a startler to Madame de Villemont at the dinner table one evening.

  Paul, who was allowed to nurse a thimbleful of wine through dinner, this time finished his quota at a gulp and asked Djilana for more. When Madame, who, I had observed, occasionally used a full
bottle of wine as anaesthesia against her bad days, changed the order to a glass of milk, Paul heaved his shoulders in weary reproach.

  “Wine is more important than milk,” he pointed out to his mother. “Milk only makes bones. Wine makes blood.”

  Madame de Villemont blinked at this. “And where did you get that piece of information?”

  “From Louis.”

  “Who is Louis?”

  “He comes to the park. He’s Reno’s friend, and now he’s my friend, too.”

  Madame stiffened in her chair, a sure sign of trouble.

  “Someone who came up to you in the park?” she said to me in a tight voice.

  “No, madame. He used to be my fight manager. I’ve known him a long time.”

  The fear emanating from her had enveloped Paul. “He’s very nice, Mama.” His voice rose shrilly. “Don’t say we can’t see him any more. He’s really very nice.”

  Madame relaxed a little. She even attempted a smile.

  “Still, being a prizefight manager doesn’t make him an expert on health,” she told Paul.

  “But he wasn’t only that, Mama. He was a cowboy in America, too, and killed a lot of Indians. And he used to fight sharks in the bottom of the ocean with only his knife. Even if he is little he’s very brave.”

  “You see?” Madame said gravely. “If he had drunk his milk when he was a boy he would have been big and very brave.”

  After that, she could recognize the agitator’s handiwork without trouble.

  “Wetting the skin every day is dangerous,” Paul announced one evening when faced with his pre-dinner bath. “It becomes like a sponge and the germs get in very easily.”

  “Louis?” said Madame.

  “Yes, Mama. Also, he says—”

  Madame de Villemont gave her son a je m’en fiche de Louis look.

  “It seems to me,” she said, “that our little Louis certainly makes himself felt around here. I really ought to meet him.”

  So I arranged for them to meet—Madame walking with Paul and me to the Parc Monceau for the first time—and it turned out that Louis was the one to release us from our short leash.