Judith Krantz

by Till We Meet Again

  “But I have no time! Surely you can see that if I went to live with you, even for a single year, I’d fall out of the race! Geoffrey and Jean-Paul would be ahead of me, and I could never get that lost year back. It would ruin my life! You don’t think that they’d wait for me, do you?”

  “I’m not talking about a single year. I’m talking about a different way of life.”

  “I don’t want a different way of life!” Bruno said, his voice suddenly reaching a passionate pitch. “I have the best life in the world—my friends, my school, my plans for the future, my cousins, my grandparents—and you want to take me away from everything, just so that I can live with you. I’d lose everything I have! I’ll never have a chance to lead my country,” he cried hysterically. “I’ll never even be able to ride in the Olympics for France, because suddenly you want me with you, as if you own me. I won’t do it! I refuse to do it! You can’t make me! You have no right!”

  “Bruno …”

  “Don’t you care what it would mean to me?”

  “I do, of course I do—it’s only for your own good.…” Paul stopped, unable to continue. He heard his own words and he realized how unconvincing they sounded. What did he have to offer Bruno that could replace what the boy already had, aside from a father Bruno had apparently never missed? He would be tearing him away from the one place he belonged, from the one kind of life he knew, from all the ties and values and beliefs he had formed since he was born, from a world that existed nowhere else on earth. It would be like taking an animal out of a zoo and returning him to the wild. He would be miserably unhappy outside of the rarefied air of the Seventh Arrondissement.

  “Bruno, we won’t talk about it anymore now. I’ll think over everything you’ve said. But this summer you must come and visit, for at least a month. I insist on that, at least. You may like it—who knows?”

  “Of course, Father,” Bruno murmured, suddenly subdued.

  “Good,” Paul said. A month of family life—that might make all the difference. He should have proposed that first. He should never have shocked the boy with such a new idea. He should … he should …

  “Father, here’s the house. Will you come in for tea? Grandfather will be there.”

  “Thank you, Bruno, but I have to get back to my hotel now. I’ll come tomorrow, if I may.”

  “Of course you may—I’ll take you to my fencing lesson if you like.”

  “Yes, I’d enjoy that,” Paul said sadly.

  “Well?” the Marquis de Saint-Fraycourt asked Bruno as the boy entered the salon.

  “You were right, Grandfather.”

  “How did it go?”

  “More or less as you expected. I said everything, just the way we decided. He wanted me to look at a picture of that person … that was the only part I didn’t expect. I never thought he would dare to show me her photo. But I made him understand … I told you I could. There was no need for worry.”

  “I’m proud of you, my boy. Go tell your grandmother that she can get out of bed and join us now. We didn’t know if he’d be coming back to tea, so we took no chances, eh? And, Bruno …”

  “Yes, Grandfather?”

  “Don’t you think you should try to work harder at school, now that you are planning to lead your country?”

  “France is led by functionaries and bureaucrats,” Bruno said scornfully. “Not aristocrats. Isn’t that what you’ve always told me?”

  “So it is, my boy.”

  “But I really do intend to ride in the Olympics,” Bruno said with a coaxing smile on his small, full mouth. “I was hoping that you might be thinking about giving me my own horse. My cousins each have one.”

  “The thought had crossed my mind.”

  “Thank you, Grandfather.”

  6

  “OUR new posting might have been to Ulan Bator, think of it that way, darling,” Paul said to Eve, to distract her from the view of the endless desert outside of the compartment window. Their train was the best that existed in this country in 1930, but its progress seemed imperceptible.

  “Ulan Bator?” she asked, turning to him from the window.

  “The capital of Outer Mongolia.”

  “Outer or Inner? Never mind, don’t answer that. On the other hand, it could have been Godthaab,” Eve retorted.

  “Greenland? No, I would never have expected that—much too close to Europe,” Paul answered with sardonic good humor.

  “What about Fiji?” she asked. “Wouldn’t you have liked that? It’s so green, especially compared to this” She waved in dismissal at the glare of the desert sand.

  “Suva has a nice climate, I understand, but it’s a bit limited from the cultural point of view.”

  “Still, it is their capital. You would have been Monsieur l’Ambassadeur.”

  “Ambassador? I’m only forty-five. Still too young, don’t you think?”

  “Entirely too young. And much too good looking. It would have been unfair to the ladies of Fiji. I’m told they can’t resist Frenchmen,” Eve answered, squeezing his hand.

  “What does that mean, ‘can’t resist Frenchmen’?” Freddy asked abruptly, her eyes, which she had closed in weariness only a few minutes before, popping wide open in interest.

  “Ah … it means that they think Frenchmen are so charming that they will, oh, do anything a Frenchman wants them to do,” Paul said laughingly, as he looked at Eve.

  “Like what?” Freddy insisted.

  “Like … well, I’m a Frenchman and that’s why you’re a good girl and do whatever I tell you to do.”

  “Daddy,” Freddy said, giggling, “don’t be silly.”

  “It wasn’t a good example,” Delphine said primly. “Freddy never does anything right, Daddy. I’m the one who can’t resist Frenchmen.” She gave Paul the smile of a female who had been born to the uses of enchantment.

  “I do so do things right,” Freddy flashed. “Remember when you dared me to dive off the high diving board at the club and I did it and hit the water perfectly? Remember when you said I couldn’t get on the new pony and ride him without a saddle, and I did and he didn’t even try to bite me? Remember when you bet me that I couldn’t win a fìstfight with that big old bully, Jimmy Albright, and I jumped him and beat him up? Remember when you dared me to drive the car and …”

  “Freddy! Delphine! Stop it, this minute,” Eve said warningly. “It’s almost time to arrive. There are bound to be some people waiting to greet us. Freddy, you have to wash your hands and wash your face and wash your knees and, oh, look at your elbows! How did you get your elbows dirty on a train? Good Lord, what happened to your dress? How did you get it so rumpled? No, no, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I’ll try to do something about your hair myself. Delphine, let me look at you. Well, I suppose you could wash your hands, but it’s not really necessary.”

  “They’re clean.”

  “That’s what I meant. How did you keep them so clean on a train all afternoon—no, don’t tell me, I already know.” Delphine was capable of sitting for hours, motionless and content, with only daydreams to occupy her, while Freddy rarely sat still for more than a minute. Eve looked at Paul, rolled her eyes and sighed.

  The trip from Cape Town to Paul’s new posting had taken them more than halfway around the world. Now, on the last lap of the weeks-long journey, they were confined in a train compartment where she and Paul had been exposed to more of their daughters than ever before since they had been small.

  Surely parents and two little girls, one of twelve and one of ten and a half, weren’t meant by any law of nature to be together for three solid days? No, it was unnatural, a thoroughly impossible situation, although less difficult to endure than the sight of the vast, almost frightening desert through which they had been traveling for endless hours. Was it possible that at their destination there would be anything that resembled civilization as she knew it? Canberra and Cape Town had not been metropolitan centers, true, but British tradition had been strong in both places,
providing a feeling of continuity and establishment.

  Eve had loved their big Cape Town home, with a superb view of Table Mountain, and a large, pleasant staff, but a career diplomat could no more refuse a new posting than he could not own a tailcoat, a suit of morning clothes, and three dinner jackets. She supposed she must regard this as a promotion. True, the city toward which they were traveling was only the fifth largest in this new country. True, Paul would still be Consul General, as far from an ambassadorship as ever, but nevertheless, he would be considered the head of the local French community, no matter how small. His philosophical, wry acceptance of his less-than-glorious career never failed him, but she knew, without any discussion of the matter, that he had been deeply disappointed to be posted yet again so far from the seat of any real power. Well, they would make the best of it, as they always had. The gentlemen who made these decisions had long memories and unbending rules … to them she was still that shockingly déclassé girl who sang on a music hall stage. But she and Paul had each other and the children, and that was all that really mattered to them.

  The rhythm of the train slowed and, looking out of the windows, the four Lancels spied sign after sign that, after all, there was a city at the end of the desert. Shacks, small buildings, larger buildings of great ugliness, a few automobiles on a street, and finally, almost out of nowhere, a surprisingly large station could be seen in the near distance.

  Three porters hurried through the corridor, carrying some of their dozens of pieces of baggage, while Freddy jumped up to stand on the seat, craning her neck in her characteristic impatience, so that her hat fell off, while Delphine checked the angle of her own hat, set precisely on her smooth hair, in the mirror that was attached to the flap of her small handbag. Eve felt a sudden apprehension as the train began to travel even more slowly, in the unmistakable cadence of arrival Australia, South East Africa and now, of all places, this—surely as outlandish, as far from reality, as anything Jacques Charles could have imagined for a decor at the Casino de Paris.

  “End of the line, folks,” the porter said, coming in. “We’re here.”

  “This is it, my love,” Paul said, giving Eve his arm.

  “Daddy,” Freddy asked, “could I just ask you one more question before we get there?”

  “Is it the same question you’ve been asking me the whole trip?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Then why don’t you ask the porter? You haven’t asked him yet today.”

  “Sir,” said Freddy, “do they really call this the City of the Angels?”

  “Yes, miss, they sure do. Welcome to L.A.”

  Two months later, although Eve was supposed to be dressing for dinner, she found herself sinking down on the window seat in the bedroom listening to the doves begin to herald the approach of evening. The birds lived in the avenue of orange trees that lined the driveway that led to the entrance of their house, in the Los Feliz district, a gracious suburb northwest of the commercial center of Los Angeles.

  The fragrance of the orange blossoms combined with the opening buds of climbing jasmine and the mingled scents of hundreds of rosebushes blooming in her garden. Was there, she asked herself in wonder, any other place on earth in which spring lasted so long or smelled so divine? Was Los Angeles the olfactory capital of the universe? She felt impregnated by the embrace of dusk, when trees and flowers released their drifts of aromas.

  It had been spring when they arrived in February, a spring of piercingly sweet-smelling lemon blossoms, huge yellow and purple pansies, tiny violas, English primroses and spreading forget-me-nots; spring again in March, which brought the first irises and tulips, tall calla lilies pushing up even where they weren’t wanted, and great gardenia bushes covered with small white flowers, just one of which could perfume an entire room; now spring had arrived for the third time in three months as the honeysuckle vied with the orange and jasmine for her pleasure; columbines, sweet peas, foxglove and larkspur grew in her garden, precisely as if it were spring in Sussex. Foxglove and palm trees? English cottage garden flowers growing in the shade of big-leafed tropical foliage? Blue-purple, otherworldly jacaranda trees—more than she had ever seen in Australia—sharing the same garden with the typically French hydrangea bushes? A spring with no end in sight?

  It was almost too much. There was something that confused Eve’s French soul about a land in which the combinations of flowers and trees were unrelated to any known botanical reality. Eve thought of April in Paris: the rain, the cold, the small, absolutely necessary comfort of a bunch of the first mimosa grown on a hillside near Cannes, bought at a Métro kiosk; rather pathetic and bewildered flowers with a blissful, nostalgic perfume and a powdery yellow bloom that would be gone tomorrow, flowers that were cherished for their bravery in existing at all. That was spring as she had known it. That was a familiar spring, miserable and miserly in its pleasures, spring during which only the dream of June kept you going. Was this land too good to be true?

  Yet why should she question the gifts of the gods, Eve asked herself. The first Frenchman to come to California in 1786, a visitor by sea, named La Pérouse, certainly hadn’t troubled himself with the question, and when Louis Bouchette had planted his first vineyard on Macy Street in 1831, followed by Jean Louis Vignes a year later, they had not wasted their time in philosophical speculation on the ridiculous bounty of the climate.

  By 1836 there had been a grand total of ten Frenchmen in Los Angeles. Now, less than a century later, the French community was two hundred thousand strong. An obvious affinity, she told herself, and stretched wearily, exhausted by her day with ladies possessed of an energy and enthusiasm she had never encountered anywhere in her life.

  The two hundred thousand French residents might have been two million as far as Eve was concerned. She had spent a long morning in a meeting in the director’s room of the French Benevolent Society to discuss the administration of the French Hospital, followed by another meeting of the ladies’ branch of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul. Her afternoon had been given over to a meeting of the Société de Charité des Dames Françaises. The only obligations she had managed to escape were the Grove Gaulois, which was the local chapter of Druids, the Cercle Jeanne d’Arc and the Société des Alsaciens-Lorraines.

  If only the Druids, the Jeanne d’Arcians and the natives of Alsace could get together with the dozen or so other French organizations of Los Angeles to form just one huge club, her life might be less exhausting, Eve thought hazily. The joiner mentality and booster spirit of the American citizen, combined with the lively ability for endless conversation common to all Frenchwomen, made for endless duties for Madame la Consule Generale. Canberra and Cape Town had been the tiniest of provincial towns by comparison.

  Yet she was as happy as she was weary. Paul was working hard every minute of the day, running the big Consulate on Pershing Square, and the girls, who both went to school at Sacred Heart, seemed to have adapted to the life of California even before they went to sleep the first night in their new home.

  Eve suspected that their instantaneous transformation had been caused by the arrival of the Good Humor man, whose tinkling bell had sounded just as they stopped at their new home. He had presented all four of them with free Good Humors, and both Delphine and Freddy had discovered that they had won the coveted “Lucky Sticks” after they had consumed the vanilla ice cream bar covered with a splintery hard chocolate coating.

  Lucky Sticks had been an omen of the days to come, a land in which each day that dawned was filled with infinite possibilities, even if they were merely the ripe kumquats on the trees on Franklin Boulevard, which Freddy popped into her mouth as she walked to the school at the corner of Franklin and Western. Delphine, with friends of her own age, sauntered sedately down the street, pretending that they were not sisters, while Freddy frisked and jumped and roamed until she looked as if she had not yet outgrown the long rope which Eve had been obliged to attach to her during her most rambunctious years in Canberra.
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br />   No question about it, Eve thought, Freddy was a child who was born to run away from home. Her first word had been “up,” her first activity had been to climb whatever lay in her path and head outside the house. As soon as she could walk, she squirmed her way up and over every enclosure around the house and set forth to conquer the space around her. Only alert neighbors had kept her from trekking to the Outback, Paul said in despair, as he concocted a sort of harness that would allow her to go everywhere except into the street.

  She takes after me, Eve told herself at first, secret delight mingled with mild public dismay. But it was soon apparent that Mademoiselle Eve Coudert had been a model of the most proper ladylike deportment compared to Miss Marie-Frédérique de Lancel. The child wanted to fly.

  “She distinctly said, ‘I want to fly,’ ” Paul told Eve, long before Freddy was three years old. “She said it five times and made a noise like those little sports planes from the Aero Club and ran around the room waving her arms.”

  “It’s just an idea, darling. Perhaps all children want to fly, like the fairies in those stories you read her,” Eve had answered him.

  “She means she wants to fly a plane. You know her as well as I do. If she said it, she meant it,” Paul said ominously.

  “How could she have an idea like that, at her age? She probably means that she wants to ride in a plane.”

  “How does she even know that people ride in planes?” he demanded.

  “Well, I didn’t plant the idea in her mind, I assure you, darling. How does she know that people fly them, when it comes to that? It’s nothing to worry about—she probably wants to be a plane,” Eve retorted.

  She dismissed the notion until, a year later, Freddy, who was supposed to be playing in her room, managed to grasp the four corners of a small quilt and jump out of a second-story window, hoping, apparently, that the quilt would serve as wings. She had been badly bruised, but her fall had been broken by thick bushes. Eve, terrified, rushed out to rescue her daughter, who emerged from the bushes by herself, disappointed but not frightened. “I should have jumped from the roof. Then it would have worked,” Freddy said thoughtfully.