The Witness Tree

by Brendan Howley

  “That would seem to be your way, Miss Dulles.”

  “Thank you. You’re a man of a certain age, a certain outlook. Have you ever been married?”

  He slid back onto his seat. “Divorced. I’m divorced.”

  “I didn’t know Jews believed in divorce.”

  He smiled, a thinner smile yet. “Depends on the Jew. My, we’re certainly moving along, aren’t we?”

  “I like moving along. Paris is all very interesting, especially with a fine dinner too, thank you, but I like knowing who I’m with.”

  “I’m a Jew,” he said, his voice flat. He was staring at her now. “That is a problem for you?”

  She blinked at him. “I ask what I need to know—I didn’t know what the Jewish belief about divorce was. That’s all.”

  “I was beginning to worry there for a minute.” He laughed too, relieved, then rapped on the glass partition behind the driver, ordering him to pull over. “Let’s toast to that.” He filled their glasses, then raised his.

  “I’m not quite sure what I’m toasting,” Eleanor said, sensing the wetness before she realized what had happened. “Oh, I’ve spilled. I’m so clumsy.”

  He reached over, a napkin in his hand, and wiped the driblets of champagne off her sleeve. Then Eleanor found herself being kissed.

  She felt she’d plummeted two floors in the elevator at Macy’s. She raised a hand to his cheek, not liking at all the way her head was tilting back. It was too much like a visit to the dentist’s, no matter how hard she blushed. He continued to kiss her. She opened her hand …

  The glass flute broke with a quiet clink on the cab’s floor.

  He knelt, picking up the fragments of glass. “I’m so sorry. Will you forgive me?”

  Eleanor didn’t know what to do with her hands; she pressed them down into the duvet, all her secrets suddenly just under her skin. I can’t let him know this is my first kiss with a man. I can’t. “I think you …” she said as slowly as she could. “I think … I think I’d like it very much, if you don’t mind, if you would see me home.”

  She didn’t let him come to the door.

  Her concierge, Madame Perrault, unlocked the thick door to the art studio and admitted her as the limousine pulled away. A farm woman from the Armagnac country as clever as she was short, she took in the departing car, big enough for a state funeral. “Oh, madame is not well? The car, peut-être …” she inquired, too shrewd to ask a direct question, her small bird’s eyes scanning Eleanor for clues.

  “I want a coffee, Madame Perrault. Have you made any?”

  “Oh, of course, madame,” the concierge replied in her throaty English, following her up the stairs, solicitous enough to encourage a nugget for the neighborhood’s morning round of gossip. “Of course.” She was no stranger to her lady guests’ ups and downs.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Eleanor said, her hand on her door. “He’s just awful, awful, clumsy. And a terrible kisser. That must count for something, no?”

  Madame Perrault wore many faces for her varied tasks as concierge. At this she softened, thinking of a moment like this in her own life, long ago. Then she raised her eyebrows slightly, lowering her voice. “Madame Dulles, I like you. I like you very much.”

  “I can’t see him anymore. Look at me. I’m in pieces.”

  The concierge plucked at her apron pocket. “Madame, take this. It belonged to Monsieur Perrault. Voilà.”

  The concierge’s handkerchief was linen and very fine; she dabbed it at Eleanor’s cheeks. “Thank you. Merci.”

  Madame Perrault put her hands on Eleanor’s shoulders. “I have seen this before, madame, in my ladies. You have le choc. “

  “The shock? I don’t understand,” Eleanor said through her tears.

  The concierge cocked her head to one side, puzzled. “Surely madame understands. Le choc. This is the électrique. Le choc électrique. Madame,” Madame Perrault announced, “you are in love.”

  VIII

  DECEMBER 1926/JANUARY 1927

  The neighbors believed Madame Perrault had fiery Gascon blood in her. That accounted for Madame’s tight way with a franc, her stubborn silences and milkmaid’s fist and pistol-shot knock. The bathroom door jumped when her knuckles struck.

  Eleanor had dozed off in the bath, her tropical refuge. She had her cigarettes, her tea; she’d been catching up on the weekend’s newspapers, and noticed a mention of Foster’s law firm in a story about the renaissance of the great German steelworks. She tore it out and left it on the windowsill and, reading on, calculated the worth of her own nest egg, the portfolio she’d nursed along since graduation, entirely on her own. It was up, gratifyingly, on the strength of her latest Wall Street picks; she would have some small capital at her back when she returned home. That made her proud.

  Economics had its rewards, she thought, considering Madame Perrault’s vast communal tub, with its ball feet and brass fittings and gas-fired water heater, an ominous-looking contraption, all hisses and tinks. Perhaps she would make a mark with her book after all.

  She lit another cigarette; the strong blue smoke mingled with the scent of lavender water. Madame Perrault’s geyser thumped and Eleanor let loose another liter of scalding water. The hot mingled with the tepid, warming her; she could feel her pulse in her belly. Perhaps she should have her hair straightened. Her gravity-defying frizz, uncooperative to the last strand, clung, damp and dumpy, to her temples. It made her crazy in those moments; she wanted to maul her head with a stiff brush. She sighed and drew on her cigarette. At least I’m not fat. Who could get fat on strong coffee and long afternoons with numbers?

  She stared at the dribbles edging down the pebbled glass in pearls. Why do men always act like mules in a stall? Why have they no sense of timing, of something like grace? She rehearsed what she’d say to him if they met in a café or on the boulevard. She would be firm but fair; he was a gentleman, clearly, and he knew better. He knew better. She felt a pang: perhaps it was her fault, perhaps she’d led him on, given an air of experience in these matters she did not possess. The point was, she knew better too. She could have kissed him back, had she had any sense that was what was required.

  “What was required.” Blast the Dulles sense of propriety, she thought; it’s like we learnt love backwards. My body a foreign country, my own body. She looked down at her breasts and the small, low swell of her belly. Who would want this? She thought of him, all that rambling on about Paris, and decided he must have been nervous too. Who wouldn’t be? Grace never had these problems; she simply cut her man out of the herd and that was that. She thought of his fine white hands, an intellectual’s hands, hopeless for real work. Would she let him touch her with those hands, if there was a next time? His hands. God help David on board a boat.

  She dismissed the thought of him wrestling with rope with those pianist’s fingers, trying to balance himself; that awkward vision disappeared like an old penny into the racket of the knocking Madame Perrault.

  “Monsieur has flowers! Madame Dul-lez! Monsieur is here!”

  “I’m in the bath,” Eleanor said. “And I’m not coming out.”

  She heard the rattle of the hall window as Madame Perrault hauled it up. Unbelievable, this man’s timing.

  “I’m not coming out, Madame!” Eleanor shouted against the closed door. “I’m not available. Pas disponible!” There are few things more annoying than having a man call for you when you’re content in the bath. Or having to talk to the man at all.

  Then Madame Perrault’s voice barked out the window and into the street: “Monsieur! Madame Dullez est ici, dans le bain!”

  Eleanor stood and reached for her towel. “The whole street doesn’t have to know,” she muttered. She dried herself, hard and fast, then pulled her wet hair back. The final humiliation was that all she had to wear in the bathroom was her cotton housecoat and Aunt Eleanor’s overcoat. She stepped, humiliated, into the cold hall, her bare feet leaving damp prints as she stalked, fire in her eye, to the wi
ndow where Madame Perrault patrolled, her eyes gleaming triumphantly. Eleanor looked down.

  David was right below, his hat in his hand, bald pate exposed. He looked up, smiled, and tucked his spray of tulips behind his back. “Did I get you out of the bath?” he asked, his eyes shining. From up here, she thought, he looks like an American Toulouse-Lautrec.

  “As you see, Mr. Barenberg.” That was a little sharp, but she hadn’t anything else to say. Let him work for it.

  “I’m so sorry. Shall I come back later?”

  “I won’t be here later, Mr. Barenberg. I have a meeting at the ministry at four.”

  A second-story window opened with a bang across the street. Wonderful, Eleanor thought: enter Madame Desrosiers, the butcher’s wife, a rail of a woman with steel gray hair and a matching mustache. Madame Desrosiers watched, impassive, with the mordant face of the onlooker who’s seen everything. She crossed her arms across her flat chest and gazed at David and his tulips.

  David cleared his throat, hesitant. “I understand. Shall I leave the flowers with your concierge?”

  “Madame must have the flowers,” Madame Perrault hissed.

  “Madame isn’t going downstairs,” Eleanor hissed back, which inspired a string of resigned French mutterings from Madame Perrault.

  Another window opened across rue de la Grande Chaumière, the kitchen window of Monsieur Petrocelli, the quartier’s inebriate mutilé, a one-armed Corsican legionnaire. Another character has joined the peanut gallery, Eleanor registered, complete with Dutch clay pipe and mid-afternoon finger of fine.

  Madame Desrosiers unfolded her arms and pointed a long finger downwards. “Un duo d’injures, Madame Perrault? Ou l’échapper belle?”

  Petrocelli, taken with the romance unfolding below him, was moved to bawl a slurred rendition of the only song he ever favored the street with: “Auprès du ma blonde, qu’il fait bon …”

  Madame Perrault jabbed Eleanor with a sharp finger of her own. “Je tends la perche à madame l’Américaine.”

  Eleanor could only grasp the tone of the shouted French conversation about the dilemma of the flowers, but that was enough. “Oh, for God’s sake, Madame Perrault, get the darn things, will you? Half the neighborhood is watching.” Then, as an afterthought, because Madame Perrault ran her life: “S’il vous plaît.” Eleanor felt rather than saw David’s open-eyed gaze and regretted her tone the moment their eyes met. “Wait, David,” she called, “Madame Perrault will come down.”

  For some occult reason, hearing English delighted Monsieur Petrocelli, who wobbled to his feet, hauling his shapeless cap off his head. “Bonjour, Madame l’Américaine! Vos fleurs sont trop belles!”

  Eleanor crimsoned. “Bonjour, monsieur le légionnaire.”

  “I see,” Barenberg observed from the pavé, “that I have interrupted your bath. You look very clean. Beautiful, I would say. Beautiful, indeed.”

  Eleanor felt herself relenting. “Not a bad bath for two francs.”

  “Two? Well, that is a bargain. Madame Michaud charges me three francs, every other night only. It’s hard to indulge my American obsession with hygiene on the rue du Bac, I’m afraid.”

  Madame Perrault emerged on the street below, striding right behind David, eyeing his bouquet. She spread her arms wide. “Beautiful, madame! See, please! Beautiful!”

  David offered them up. “I do hope you like them. Came all the way from Rotterdam, I think.”

  Eleanor felt herself quite surrounded. “Thank you, David,” she surrendered, her voice steadier than she felt.

  Only too happy to make this match with an audience in attendance, Madame Perrault scuttled backwards, gesturing with imploring hands at David, glancing upwards at Eleanor, shepherding David toward the studio door. Monsieur Petrocelli stopped his bawling to applaud, as did the stone-faced Madame Desrosiers. The gendarme on the corner was watching now too; Eleanor could see him, his hands on his hips, smirking.

  “Oh, do come in, then,” she said at last, so many eyes on her.

  Madame Perrault clucked and fussed over the coffee, and stacked an ancient silver tray with petits fours. Where she kept those, Eleanor had no idea, for neither was there sign of a kitchen nor did Madame Perrault hold that anything but a good leg of pork was best for entertaining the hungry art studio models who came and went at all hours while not otherwise occupied downstairs. She had Eleanor and David knee to knee in her dark front room, more a parlor jumble sale than sitting room, with its Japanese scrolls and prints and brass jugs from India, all mysteriously unconnected to Madame Perrault. A matched pair of cats slept on a neatly folded Red Cross blanket in front of a stack of heavily worked canvases, their scent mingling with the tang of linseed oil and pigment. It suddenly occurred to Eleanor that Madame Perrault might well be a miser of some means. The flowers stood in a slim vase, yellow tulips; Eleanor reckoned David had spent a week’s spare cash to buy them.

  The concierge and David were talking a mile a minute about Madame’s collection of books on art, one of which David had propped on his lap. Eleanor stirred her coffee, wondering whether or not she should have accepted the flowers. This occupied her for some minutes while the conversation ebbed and flowed around her. Then Madame was gone, vanished somewhere behind a heavy hanging carpet, and David was looking at her.

  He shifted. “I must apologize for my advances the other night. That was utterly rude.”

  Eleanor put down her coffee. “Yes. Yes it was.”

  “I’ve considered my behavior and I want to assure you it will never happen again. You have my word, Miss Dulles.”

  Eleanor thought for a moment. “Is this your usual way with women? Car rides around the city, flowers, a lunge? Is that your style, Mr. Barenberg?”

  David looked horrified. “No. Certainly not, not at all. I assure you.”

  Eleanor raised a finger. “I am not without feelings for you.”

  “I am very pleased to hear that, Miss Dulles.”

  “Well, don’t be, because those feelings right now are mainly annoyance and irritation.”

  “I apologize,” he said. “I’m very sorry.”

  “I accept your apology. Here’s the thing: I can take a walking tour of the city anytime I like. You, on the other hand, David Barenberg, you need to speak for yourself. If you please. And remember, you’re on probation.” She allowed herself a smile. “You are, you know, not without charm.”

  He was beaming now. “Where shall I start?”

  “Think of yourself as an interesting building you want me to get to know. Start there.”

  He laughed. They had water in common, he began shrewdly, because he was from Baltimore. His grandfather was a stevedore who, like many Jews fresh off the boat, simply walked the hundred yards up from the pier to South Hanover Street and looked for work.

  Yes, he was a Jew. That had its consolations and its sorrows; his family was more or less assimilated, respectable but barely making ends meet. He was a Johns Hopkins scholarship boy from a south Baltimore row house. Obsessed with words, he collected dictionaries and etymologies the way other, less driven boys collected tadpoles or baseball cards. He had been married once, a mistake for all sorts of reasons. There was a child, now in Palestine, and a complete ostracism by his ex-wife’s family, who were Orthodox and unforgiving of the divorce. “They hate me,” he said. He missed his child terribly. The ostracism was almost as painful: he felt he’d betrayed something bigger than even family—his heritage.

  His own family were more understanding. He was closest to his sister; they met as often as they could, for long, probing dinners, sorting through their lives. Eleanor, he suggested, reminded him of his sister: her intellect, her way with an argument, her open-mindedness. The two had a tradition of a full-blown Thanksgiving dinner, all the trimmings, every year, especially since his divorce.

  And France? It was a place to escape to at first, a new universe to be decoded, like the numbers in economics, but he loved it on a deeper level, he said. He loved France becau
se it was somewhere he could begin again.

  Eleanor took in the man behind the words, listening, conscious only of thinking that this was, for all his faults, the first man she was interested in meeting again and talking with again. He described many more things: his time at Johns Hopkins, the men and women he’d met, how much he loved Paris. Noticing the time, concerned for her meeting at the ministry, he excused himself and left, utterly correctly. Eleanor went back upstairs, light-headed.

  Almost an hour after Barenberg left, Eleanor, an empty coffee cup in her fingers, stood and went to the shuttered window overlooking the street, her addled mind a blank. She swung the shutters open; the wintry gray light leaked in, too feeble to cast shadows. Outside, the taxidermist’s fat widow, a woman who’d never stopped wearing her black mourning veil since her husband was killed in action at Beauséjour in 1915, had begun her daily ritual washing of her storefront window. That meant it was a little after three in the afternoon on rue Meuron. Eleanor placed her hand carefully on the flaking sill, looked down the street toward the rumble of traffic on the boulevard Montparnasse. The shutter swung out in the winter breeze; she caught it and held it by the lock hasp. She felt her cheek and her chin with her fingertips, absently tracing her jawline. She was dreaming—about David’s voice and the animation of his face, the soap-and-tweed smell of him, the way his words flowed like springwater, enthusiasm and brains all at once.

  David was learning: a month later he asked her to fly with him to Calais, for a day on the beach. There was a friend, he’d said, Auguste Dinant of the Académie Française, who had a nephew who flew for the government mail service, not the poste but the official government mail. He would smuggle them aboard; they could ride with the mail and paperwork and files. “Dinant and I, we trade old dictionaries,” David had said, as if that explained everything. Then he grinned. “Come on, Eleanor, you’ve flown before, haven’t you?”

  He hadn’t, it turned out—she had. She’d flown from London-Croydon to Brussels in a converted Great War bomber. She’d had a grand time watching the waves below when they flew out over the vast mudflats of The Wash. Her ears rang for two days afterwards, but it beat the ferry by a full day. Flying travel was, as Foster would say, the future.