The Chateau

by William Maxwell

  Yes, but then I like to know if the conclusions I have come to are the right ones.

  How can they not be when everything that happens happens for so many different reasons? But if you really want to know why something happened, if explanations are what you care about, it is usually possible to come up with one. If necessary, it can be fabricated. Hector Gagny didn’t go up to Paris on Bastille Day because Mme Carrère invited him to go driving with them, and he was perfectly happy to put off his departure until the next day. And the reason that Mme Michot was so curious is that her only daughter was married and had left home, and M. Michot had left home, too, years before, in a crowded box car bound for the German border, and there had been no word from him since. It is only natural that, having to live with an unanswered question of this kind, she should occupy her mind with other questions instead.… But if you concentrate on details, you lose sight of the whole. The Americans fell in love with France, the way Americans are always doing, and they had the experience of knowing some French people but not knowing them very well. They didn’t speak French, which made it difficult, and they were paying guests, and the situation of the paying guest is peculiar. It has in it something of the nature of an occupation by force. Once they were home, they quickly forgot a good many of the people they met abroad and the places they stayed in, but this experience with a French family, and the château, and the apartment in Paris, they couldn’t forget. Hearing the blast that departing liners give as they turn in the Hudson River, Harold Rhodes raised his head and listened for a repetition of the sound. For those few seconds his face was deeply melancholy. And he took a real hatred—briefly—to an old and likable friend whose work made it possible for him to live in Paris. Neither of these things needs explaining. As for those that do, when you explain away a mystery, all you do is make room for another.

  Even so. If you don’t mind.

  No, I don’t mind. It’s just a question of where to begin.

  Begin with the drama.

  Which one?

  Were there two?

  There was a drama that occurred several years before the Americans came to stay at the château, and there was another, several years after. One was a tragedy, the other was a farce. They don’t belong together, except as everything that happens to somebody, or to a single family, belongs together. In that case, though, there is no question of why anything happened, but only what happened, and what happened then, and what happened after that—all of it worth looking at, as a moral and a visual spectacle.

  Well, what happened to the money, then?

  That’s the first drama. You’re sure you want to hear about it?… “Somebody will tell us,” Harold said, and sure enough somebody did. A cousin turned up, in New York, and called Mrs. Ireland, who invited her to lunch. She was the same age as Sabine and Alix, but a rather plain girl, and talkative. And what she talked about was the sudden change in the situation of the family at Beaumesnil. She said that shortly after the war ended, M. Viénot sold all the securities that Mme Bonenfant had been left by her husband, who was a very rich man, and bought shares in a Peruvian gold mine. The stocks and bonds he disposed of were sound, and the gold mine proved to be a swindle.

  Then he was a crook?

  It may have been nothing more than a mistake in judgment.… The cousin said that he himself profited by the transaction, but then she may not have got the facts straight. People seldom do.

  But how could he have profited by reducing his wife’s family from affluence to genteel poverty? It doesn’t make any sense.

  No, it doesn’t, does it? Neither did his explanations. So Mme Viénot left him and went to live with her mother. But quite recently Barbara had a letter from Sabine in which she said that her mother and father were living in Oran, and Beaumesnil was closed. So they must have gone back together again.

  The day young George Ireland arrived to spend the summer, M. Viénot turned up at the château, in an Italian sports car, with a blonde on the seat beside him. She was young, George said. And pretty. They were invited to stay for lunch, and they did, and drove back to Paris that night.

  How extraordinary.

  After which Mme Viénot communicated with him only through her lawyer, but Sabine continued to see her father, and so did her sister. The family could only suppose that his reason had been affected, what he did was so out of character, so unlike the man he had always been. And since Mme Bonenfant had always loved him like a son, she particularly clung to this explanation of his disastrous behavior. But there were certain signs they ought to have paid attention to. He had begun to wear less conservative clothes. He drove his car recklessly, was inattentive and irritable, sighed in his sleep, and showed a preference for the company of young people. He had even ceased to look like the man he used to be. These changes were gradual, of course, and they saw him with the eyes of habit.

  So much for the tragedy. The second drama, the farce, began when two men appeared at the door one day and asked to speak to Mme Viénot. They said that they had heard in the village that she took guests and they wanted to stay at the château. Mme Viénot said that surely the person who told them this also told them that she only took guests who came to her with a proper introduction. They said they’d be back in an hour with a proper introduction and Mme Viénot said that she was sorry they had had this long walk for nothing, and shut the door on them. After lunch, at the moment when Thérèse should have appeared in the drawing room with the coffee tray, she appeared without the coffee tray, and informed Mme Viénot that the cook wanted to speak to her. This was unprecedented, and Mme Viénot foresaw, as she excused herself, that on the cook’s face too there would be a look of fright.

  This was Mme Foëcy?

  This was a different cook. Mme Foëcy was there only that summer. She was not in the habit of staying very long in any one establishment.… The same two men had turned up at the kitchen door, it seems, and asked for something to eat. The cook gave them a sandwich but wouldn’t let them come inside. They wanted her to leave the kitchen window open that night, so they could get into the house. She threatened to call out for help, and so they left. That same afternoon, at teatime, Mme Viénot saw the gardener hovering in the vicinity of the drawing room windows.

  As soon as she could, she slipped outside. The gardener was in a state of excitement. He too had had a visit, and the two men said that there was a treasure hidden somewhere in the house.

  No!

  Gold bullion. Left by the Germans, because they didn’t have the means or the time to take it with them.

  And was it true?

  It is true that there was such a rumor in the village. The same story was told of other country houses after the war, and probably had its origin in a folk tale. The story varied, according to who told it. Sometimes the treasure was buried in the garden, in the dead of night. Sometimes it was hidden inside the walls. Great importance was attached to the fact that no member of Mme Bonenfant’s family had ever denied this story, but actually it had never reached their ears.

  The gardener told the men he would help them. He agreed to leave a cellar window open for them, but not that night. It was not a good time, he said; the house was full of people. And if they’d wait until there was no one here but the women, their chances would be better. They decided upon a signal, and as soon as the two men were off the property, the gardener came to find Mme Viénot.

  Then what happened?

  She went to the police, and together they worked out a plan. The only men in the house, Eugène and Mme Viénot’s son-in-law, Jean-Claude Lahovary, were to leave as conspicuously as possible in Eugène’s car and come back after dark, on foot. The gardener would hang the lantern in the potting shed—the signal that had been agreed upon—and the police would be nearby, waiting for a telephone call saying that the robbers were actually inside the house. It was all very melodramatic and like a British spy movie, except for one characteristically French touch. When the police cars came up the drive, they were blowi
ng their sirens.

  So the robbers got away?

  No, they were caught. They must not have heard the sirens. Or else they were confused, or couldn’t find their way out of the house in the dark. They were convicted of housebreaking, and sentenced to a term in jail. At the trial it came out that one of them had had some education; he had been a government clerk. Later, in the woods back of Beaumesnil, somebody found the remains of a campfire, and it was assumed that the robbers hid out there, while they were waiting for the signal.

  What an amazing story.

  Yes, isn’t it. What would you like to know about next?

  I think I’d like to know about Eugène—why he acted the way he did. Was he in the study, the day the Americans came to say good-by?

  Of course.

  And Alix knew that he was there?

  Her hearing was excellent. It was her mother who suffered from deafness. There was no one Eugène could not make love him if he chose to, but he blew hot and cold about people. He blew hot and they mistook it for friendship; he blew cold and they had to learn, in self-defense, to despise him. This deadly, monotonous pattern did not occur with his wife. In spite of his belief that married people change and grow less fond of one another with time, this did not happen in his case. Their marriage had its ups and downs, like all marriages, but it did not become absent-minded or perfunctory. Would you like to see them sleeping together?

  Well, I don’t know that I—

  It’s quite all right. No trouble at all. The workshirt hanging across the attic window has been replaced by a potted geranium, and the Prodigal Son is gone. Someone, unable to stand the sight of so much raw emotion any longer, took it down and put it away in a closet. If you look closely, you will see that the fauteuil that belonged to Eugène’s great-great-grandfather has been mended. The dresses and skirts in the armoires throughout the apartment are of a different length, and Alix and Eugène have three children now. But certain things are the same: the church bell, the rays of the star arriving and departing simultaneously, and whoever it is that at daybreak comes through the rue Malène and silently searches through the garbage cans for edible peelings, cheese rinds, moldy bread, good rags, diamond rings, broken objects that can be mended, shoes with holes in their soles, paper, string, and other treasures often found in just such refuse by old men and women with the will to live. The sky, growing lighter, says: What is being but being different, night from day, the earth from the air, the way things were from the way things are? The newspaper lying in the gutter announces that a turning point has been reached in the tide of human affairs, and the swallows, skimming the rooftops—

  I’ve really had enough of those swallows.

  For some reason, I never grow tired of them. The swallows, in their quick summarizing trip over the rooftops prove conclusively that there is no point of turning, because turning is all there is—constant, never-ending patterns of turning.

  The shutters are open, the awnings are rolled. Alix and Eugène are sleeping with their backs turned to each other but touching. When she moves in her sleep, his body accommodates itself to the change without waking. Now they are facing each other. Of his forearm, shoulder, and cheek he makes a soft warm box for her head. Over her bent knees he extends protectively a relaxed weightless leg. Shortly afterward they turn away from each other. In their marriage also there is no real resting place; one partner may dominate, may circumscribe, the actions of the other, briefly, but nothing is fixed, nothing is final.

  His moods—what were they all about?

  Those recurring periods of melancholy, of a kind of darkness of the soul, had nothing to do with her.

  What did they have to do with?

  Money, chiefly. Money that is lost becomes a kind of magic mirror in which the deprived person sees himself always in the distorted landscape of what might have been. When they were living in Marseilles, Eugène did not think about money, largely because everyone else was poor also. But in Paris he was reminded continually that his father had always lived in a certain way, and so had his grandfather, and he would have liked to live in the same way himself and he couldn’t, and never would be able to, because they have made no provision for him to do this.

  Shouldn’t they have?

  Perhaps.

  Then why didn’t they?

  Life was beautiful, and they thought it couldn’t go on being this way—about this they were quite right—and in any case it would have meant sacrificing their pleasures and they needed their pleasures; they needed all of them. His father’s desk was a mosaic of unpaid bills, which he never disturbed. When he wanted to write a letter, he used his wife’s desk.

  What about Alix? Did she mind it that they were poor?

  Not for herself. But she listened carefully to what Eugène had to say about rich young men like Jean Allégret and René Simon, and what she perceived was that it was not the money itself but that he felt the loss of it had cast a shadow over their lives so dense that they could not be seen. They were no longer part of the world. They did not move among people who counted. They might as well be the children of shopkeepers.

  It would have been better if she had not made him give up his work among the poor in Marseilles.

  She didn’t. That was only Mme Viénot’s idea of what happened. Since he had renounced his spiritual vocation in order to marry her, she was prepared to give up everything for his sake, but unfortunately it turned out that he did not really have a spiritual vocation. If he had, he would not have taken it so to heart when the men he was trying to educate failed him by falling asleep over the books he lent them, or by getting drunk and beating their wives, or simply by not understanding what it was that he wanted from them. Two or three years later, he threw himself into politics in the same high-minded way. He dedicated every free moment to working for the M.R.P.—the Mouvement Républicain Populaire, the Catholic reform party. Then he decided that all political efforts were futile, and found himself once more committed to nothing, nothing to cling to, no foothold, and totally outside the life around him. And though he was patient—no one was ever more patient—he was not always easy to live with. Or pleasant to people. Anyone in trouble could count on his help, and the telephone rang incessantly, but he had no friends. If he met someone he liked, someone who interested him, he was intensely curious, direct, personal, and charming. And then, his curiosity satisfied, he was simply not interested any more. The friends of his school days called up, made arrangements to see him, were startled by what they found, and didn’t return.

  That painful train journey, do you remember? the time he went up to Paris with Sabine and the Americans? What really happened?

  He had quarreled with Alix on the way to the station, just as the Americans thought, and the quarrel was about them. After a few days of staying in the apartment by himself, he had found that he liked being alone, and he was sorry he had invited them. On the way to the station he proposed to Alix that she tell the Americans that it was not convenient to have them stay in the apartment at this time, and she refused. He said he would tell them himself, then, and she said that she could at least not be present when he did. After she left him, he decided that instead of telling the Americans outright that he didn’t want them, he could make them understand, from his behavior, that he had changed his mind about having them.

  And they didn’t understand.

  No, they did understand, and started to go to the Hôtel Vouillemont. But in the Métro, when they tried to leave him, he changed his mind again. For a moment, he felt something like affection for them. He continued to teeter in this fashion, between liking and not liking them, the whole period of their stay in the apartment.

  But why did he act the way he did? Was it because Barbara did not dance with him? She really should have. It was inexcusable, her refusing to dance with him at the Allégrets’ party.

  She would have danced with him, except that he was so sullen when he asked her. But that wasn’t why he changed.

  Was it s
omething Harold did?

  It was something he was, I think.

  What was he?

  A young man with a beautiful wife and the money to spend four months traveling in Europe. An American. A man with a future, and no shadow across his present life.

  But that isn’t what his life was like.

  No, but that’s what it looked like, from the outside.

  It was also wrong of them, very wrong, not to accept Alix’s invitation to come down to the country for the week end. And not to call on M. and Mme Carrère, after M. Carrère had given Harold his card, was—

  True. Perfectly true. Their behavior doesn’t stand careful inspection. But on the other hand, you must remember that they were tourists. This is not the way they behaved when they were at home. And it is one thing to hand out gold stars to children for remembering to brush their teeth and another to pass moral judgment on adult behavior. So much depends on the circumstances.

  In short, it is something you don’t feel like going into. Very well, what happened to Hector Gagny?

  He divorced his wife, and married a woman with a half-grown boy, and she made him very happy. I always felt that his first wife was more—but she was impossible, as a wife. Or at least as a wife for him. The little boy in the carnival is grown up now and has a half interest in the merry-go-round. The gypsy fortuneteller dealt herself the ace of spades. Anybody or anything else you’d like to know about?

  That drawing Sabine was going to send to the Americans. Did it ever arrive?

  Yes, it arrived, about a month after Harold and Barbara got home, and with it was a rather touching letter, written the day they took the boat train:

  Here is the little drawing promised, I hope it will not oblige you to lengthen your list for the douane!—Thanks still for all your kindness—You don’t know what it meant for me, nor what both of you meant to me—. It’s difficult to explain specially in English—. I think you represent like Aunt Mathilde and Alix an atmosphere kind, gay and harmonious, where everything is in its real place. And seeing you was a sort of rest through the roughness of existence, a bit like putting on fairy shoes.