The Chateau

by William Maxwell

  The village is just the same—or practically. M. Canourgue’s stock is now on open shelves instead of under the counter or in the back room. There is a clock in the railway station, and the station itself is finished. Though the travel posters have been changed and the timetables are for the year 1953, the same four men are seated on the terrace of the Café de la Gare.

  The village is proud of its first family, and also of the fact that the old lady chose to throw in her lot with theirs. Mme Bonenfant is eighty-eight now, and suffers from forgetfulness. Far too often she cannot find her handkerchief or the letter she had in her hand only a moment ago. On her good days she enjoys the quickness and clarity of mind that she has always had. She is witty, she charms everyone, she is like an ivory chess queen. On her bad days chère Maman sits with her twisted old hands in her lap, quiet and sad, and sometimes not really there; not anywhere. It bothers her that she cannot remember how many great-grandchildren she has, and she says to Sabine: “Was that before your dear father died?” and realizes from the look of horror that this question gives rise to that she has confused a son-in-law who is dead with one who is very much alive. She leaves the house only to go to Mass on Sunday, or to the potager with her wicker garden basket and shears. She is still beautiful, as a flower stalk with its seed pod open and empty or a tattered oak leaf is beautiful. The potager never ceases to trouble her, because ever since the war the fruit trees, flowers, and vegetables have been mingled in a way that is not traditional. And terrible things have happened to the scarecrow. “Look at me!” he cries. “Look what has happened to me!” Mme Bonenfant, snipping away at the sweet-pea stems, answers calmly: “To me also. All experience is impoverishing. A great deal is taken away, a little is given in return. Patience is obligatory—the patient acceptance of much that is unacceptable.”

  Now it is evening, but not evening of the same day. The house is damp, and it has been raining since early morning. There are no guests at the moment. With her poor circulation Mme Bonenfant feels the cold, and so sometimes even in summer a small fire is lit for her in the Franklin stove in the petit salon. Mme Viénot is sitting at the desk, going over her accounts. Alix is on the divan. And Mme Bonenfant is going through a box of old letters.

  “This is what the world used to be like,” she says suddenly. “It is a letter from my father to his sister in Paris. ‘The two young people’—Suzanne and Philippe, he is referring to—‘evinced a delicate fondness for each other that we ought to be informed of.… ’ ”

  “And were they informed of it?” Alix asks.

  “Yes. Shortly afterward,” Mme Bonenfant says, and goes on reading to herself. When she finishes the letter, she puts it back in its envelope and drops it into the fire. The paper bursts into flame, the pale-brown ink turns darker for a few seconds and then this particular link with the remote past is gray ashes, and even the ashes are consumed.

  “But surely you aren’t destroying old letters!” Mme Viénot exclaims.

  “When I am gone, who will be interested in reading them?” Mme Bonenfant says.

  “I am interested,” Mme Viénot says indignantly. “We all are. I have implored you—I implore you now—not to burn family letters.”

  “You didn’t know any of the people,” Mme Bonenfant says with finality, as though Mme Viénot were still a child.

  Though she is very old, and tired, and forgetful, she is still the head of the family.

  Now suppose I pass my hand over the crystal ball twice. What do we see? The furniture is under dust covers, the shutters are closed, the grass is not cut in the park, the potager is a tangle of weeds and briers. Sometimes in the night there are footsteps on the gravel terrace in front of the house, but no one lies in bed with a wildly beating heart, hearing them. All the rooms of the house are quiet except the third-floor room at the head of the stairs. The shutters here have come loose; they must not have been fastened securely. At some time, the ornamental shield has been removed from the fireplace, and occasionally there is a downdraft that redistributes the dust. Wasps beat against the windowpanes. In the night the shutters creak, the black-out paper flaps softly, the room grows cold. The mirrors recall long-forgotten images: the Germans; the young American couple; M. Lundqvist; Mme Viénot as a girl, expectant and vulnerable. Moonlight comes and goes. The mirrors remember the poor frightened squirrel that got in and could not get out. And in the hall at the foot of the stairs—this is really very strange—the grandfather’s clock chimes again and again, though there is nobody to wind it.

  You are not asking me to believe that?

  No. The wheels turn, revealing (but in the dark, and to nobody) the exact hour of the day or night when footsteps are heard on the gravel. The children on their teeter-totter on the clock face are not afraid. They go right on recording the procession of seconds. Time is their only concern: the relentless thieving that nobody pays any attention to; or if they have become aware of it, they try not to think about it.

  If you are of a certain temperament, you do think about it, anyway. You think about it much too much, until the sense of deprivation becomes intolerable and you resort to the Lost-and-Found Office, where, by an espèce de miracle, everything has been turned in, everything is the way it used to be. It requires only a second to throw open the shutters and remove the dust covers and air out musty rooms. “Do, do, l’enfant, do …” Alix sings, pushing the second-hand baby carriage back and forth under the shade of the Lebanon cedar, until Annette lets go of her thumb and falls fast asleep. The departure is as abrupt as if she had stepped into a little boat. The baby carriage has become a familiar sight on the roads around the château. Propped up on a fat pillow, the fat baby stares at the barking dog, at M. Fleury when he drives past in his noisy camion, at the little boy, Alix’s friend, who has now fully mastered the art of riding a bicycle and rides round and round the baby carriage, sometimes not using his hands. Watching Alix go off down the driveway, Mme Viénot is sometimes tempted to say to her sister: “She does not look happy,” but it is not the kind of remark one shouts into a hearing aid, if one can avoid it, and also, Mme Viénot reflects, it is quite possible that Mathilde’s daughters do not confide in her, either.

  During the daytime, Sabine reads or draws. She makes drawings of grasses and leaves and fruit from the garden. She makes a drawing of the two rain-stained statues, with the house in the background. Mme Viénot observes that no letters come for her, and that she does not seem to expect any. There is a note from a cousin, and Sabine leaves it unopened on the table in her room for three days. The sound of her voice coming from her grandmother’s room is cheerful, but that is perhaps nothing more than the effect chère Maman has on her, on everybody. Mme Bonenfant arranges bouquets in the manner of Fantin-Latour, who is her favorite painter, in the hope that Sabine will be tempted to paint them. Sabine draws the children instead.

  For the second week in a row, Eugène does not come down from Paris. Neither does he write, though Alix writes to him. In the evenings, Mme Viénot works at her desk in the petit salon. The two girls sit side by side on the ottoman, sharing the same pool of lamplight. Alix is knitting a sweater for the baby, Sabine is reading Gone With the Wind in French, Mme Bonenfant and Mme Cestre face each other across the little round table, with the diamonoes spread out on the green baize cloth. If she plays with anyone else, Mme Bonenfant finds that the game tires her. But Mme Cestre, far from being impatient with her mother when it takes her so long to decide where to place her counter, does not even notice, and has to be reminded that it is now her turn. The evenings pass very much as they did during the war, except that everybody is a little older, trucks do not come and go in the courtyard all night, and the only male in the house is a little boy of four, who shows no signs of ever becoming a professional soldier.

  When they have all gone up to bed, the grandfather’s clock in the downstairs hall chimes eleven fifteen and eleven thirty and a quarter of twelve and midnight.

  Hearing the clock strike, Mme Viénot gets u
p from her desk, where she is writing a letter, and goes into the room across the hall. Mme Bonenfant is sitting up in bed, and when Mme Viénot takes the book from her hands, she sees that her mother has been reading Bossuet’s funeral oration on the Grand Condé. The white bedspread is lying on a chair, neatly folded. The room’s slight odor of camphor and old age Mme Viénot has long since become accustomed to. Mme Bonenfant removes her spectacles, folds them, and puts them on the night table, beside the photograph of her dead son.

  Mme Viénot takes away the pillows at her mother’s back, and the old woman lies flat in the huge double bed, as she will lie before very long in her grave. Is she afraid, Mme Viénot wonders. Does she ever think about dying?

  There is little or no point in asking. Her mother would not consider this a proper subject for conversation. Actually, there are a good many subjects that chère Maman, close as she is to the end of her life, does not care to speak of. To question her about the past, to try to get at her secrets, is merely to provoke a smile or an irrelevant remark.

  As she opens the window a few inches, Mme Viénot suddenly remembers how when she was a child her mother, smelling of wood violets, used to come and say good night to her. If one only lives long enough, every situation is repeated.…

  Back in her own room, she undresses and puts on her nightgown and the dark-red wrapper, which is worn at the cuffs, she notices. Seated at the dressing table, she digs her fingers into a jar of cleansing cream and, having wiped away powder and rouge, confronts the gray underface. She and it have arrived at a working agreement: the underface, tragic, sincere, irrevocably middle-aged, is not to show itself until late at night when everyone is in bed. And in return for this discreet forbearance, Mme Viénot on her part is ready to acknowledge that the face she now sees in the mirror is hers.

  She goes over to the desk and takes up the letter where she left off. When it is finished, she puts it in its envelope, licks the flap, seals it, and puts it with several other letters, all written since she came upstairs. The pile of letters represents the future, which can no more be trusted to take care of itself than the present can (though experience has demonstrated that there is a limit, a point beyond which effort cannot go, and many things happen, good and bad, that are simply the work of chance).

  She begins a new letter. After a moment her pen stops moving, and she listens to the still house. Again there is a creaking sound, but it is in the walls, not in the passage outside her door. The pen moves on again, like a machine. Mme Viénot is waiting for Sabine to come and say good night. The poor child must be disheartened at losing her job with La Femme Elégante, and it is indeed a pity, but such things happen, and she is prepared to offer comfort, reassurance, the indisputable truth that what seems like misfortune is often a blessing in disguise. She glances impatiently at her wrist watch, and sees that it is quarter of one. She writes two more letters, even so. Her acquaintance, now that she no longer lives in Paris, shows a tendency to forget her unless prodded regularly with letters and small attentions. Paying guests, when they leave, cannot be counted on to remember indefinitely what an agreeable time they have had, and so may fail to return or fail to send other clients. A note, covering one page and part of the next, serves to remind them, if it is a question of someone’s searching out a pleasant, well-situated, wholly proper establishment, that they know just the place—a handsome country house about two hundred kilometers from Paris and not far from Blois.

  Mme Viénot takes off the red dressing gown and puts it over the back of a chair, gets into bed, and opens the book on her bedside table. She reads a few lines and then turns out the light. It is time that Sabine learned to be more thoughtful of others.

  Stretched out flat, she discovers how tired she is, and for a moment or two she passes directly into that stage of conscious dreaming that precedes sleep. Between dreams, she reflects that the younger generation has very little affection for Beaumesnil. It is important only to Eugène.

  The telephone rings, and when Mme Viénot answers it, she hears the voice of Mme Carrère. Monsieur has had a slight relapse—nothing serious, but the doctors think it would be advisable for him to be in the country, where there is absolute quiet, in a place that did him so much good before. They arrive that afternoon by car, and find their old rooms waiting for them. “You will want to rest after your long drive,” Mme Viénot says. “Thérèse will bring you a can of hot water immediately. Then you need not be disturbed until dinnertime.” And closing the door behind her, she passes happily over the border into sleep, but the ratching, scratching sound draws her back into consciousness. The sound continues at irregular intervals. A squirrel or a fieldmouse, she tells herself. Or a rat.

  After half an hour she sits up in bed, turns on the light, props the pillows behind her back. With a sigh at not being able to go to sleep when she so much needs a good night’s rest, she reaches for the book. It is the memoirs of Father Robert, an early nineteenth-century Jesuit missionary, who lived among the Chinese, and was close to God. Mme Viénot puts what happened to him, his harsh but beautifully dedicated life, between her and all silences, all creaking noises, all failures, all searching for answers that cannot be found.