A few moments later, they filed out of the sitting room, and those in the bedroom stood back to let them pass. Kennedy smiled at them as he went through, followed by his brother, Shriver and Connally. They were all straightening their ties and jackets, pulling themselves up importantly as they strode out over the patterned carpet.
“We’re going down to the Bowl,” said Salinger. “It’s Johnson.”
Frank followed the men down the corridor to the elevator, stepping aside to avoid a room-service wagon that had been left outside number 8309, with a half-eaten hamburger and a glass of untouched ice water with the Biltmore’s corrugated paper cap on top of it.
Chapter 13
The farther the van der Lindens’ hired Citroën DS traveled into the western parts of Brittany, the more the aroma of pâté, apples and baguette was exhaled by the soft crimson upholstery; each time the hydraulic suspension leveled out a rut, it released into the car the memory of the picnic purchased from the boucherie-charcuterie in the village outside Rennes. The fierce brake was nothing like the spongy pedal on the Kaiser Manhattan, and Louisa and Richard complained at the way it catapulted them into the back of the bench seat in front when Charlie touched the sensitive button with his foot. Mary periodically withdrew the red Michelin guide from the glove compartment as she guided Charlie through the more tangled town centers, hoping that a “TOUTES DIRECTIONS” would come to her aid. Forward to her was always north, and she had to twist the fat red book around so that they were traveling up the page at all times—a maneuver that she tried to conceal as far as possible from Charlie’s sideways glances.
In their absence at school the children had both grown: Louisa’s cotton dress was halfway up her thighs and Richard had to leave the waistband of his shorts open. They had developed new enthusiasms and a new argot in which to express them. Mary found that she could no longer follow everything they said—their references to school rituals, peculiar teachers and apocalyptically embarrassing events. They had withdrawn from her a little; they had developed the “independence” of which the school prospectus boasted, though it looked to her more like a survival reflex. They had been through some sort of cold fire together and had the sardonic shorthand and stoic intimacy of old lags.
The holiday had had a tense and lowering start when they went to stay with Mary’s parents in Regent’s Park. Elizabeth made every show of normality that she could manage, and the children appeared not to notice that she spent most of the day in bed. Mary was both proud of their tact and resigned to their youthful self-absorption; they played familiar games in the London garden, climbing a half-fallen elder tree, dressing up in their grandparents’ old clothes from the loft and leaving behind them a trail of plastic toys that crunched beneath adult feet. The atmosphere in the house was that which people call “life suspended,” Mary thought, though really it was death, not life, that had been temporarily held at bay. When it was time to say good-bye, Elizabeth’s brisk fortitude gave no indication of the fact that it was likely to be the last time that she would ever see her grandchildren. Mary did not know whether to stress the gravity of the occasion to Richard and Louisa or whether they already knew quite well but had decided not to make a fuss. So the good-byes passed off normally, with no more than an extra pressure of the hand, a slight prolonging of the hug, a lingering wave to vision’s end from the backseat of the taxi to suggest that it was more than a routine au revoir. Only people in their wretched middle age had to face the truth, Mary thought; the slipped responsibilities of the old and young were hers alone to bear.
It was growing dark as they approached their French destination. Mary had found an advertisement in the London Times that promised a roomy traditional house with the seaside, tennis and fishing nearby. They had previously taken holidays in hotels, but the state of Charlie’s finances made it impossible. He would not have gone on vacation at all, had not the illness of Mary’s mother made a trip to Europe inevitable; even the price of an empty house, where they would shop and cook for themselves, was unsustainable until Mary had the idea of inviting another family to share it. The Renshaws were going to Nantucket, and the only European friends of which they liked both partners had already made plans; but Lauren Williams, who had never been to Europe, was enthusiastic, even when Mary stressed how primitive it would be. Her husband—whose name, Mary reminded Charlie, was Vernon—was amenable, and the deal was done. Through someone at the French Embassy, Lauren conjured up a teenage girl from Vannes, who would act as mother’s help. The apparent size of the garden convinced Charlie he would have to spend no more than the duration of meals listening to Lauren’s animated reminiscences of people he had never met and what they said to people he had never heard of.
Charlie was tired after his day at the wheel and the children’s listless bickering had made his nerves shrink and tighten; their raised voices and sudden squeals cracked like rim shots on the drum of his ear. He had swigged only once from the bottle at lunch for fear of falling asleep, and now he wanted to lay himself down in cool sheets with a pitcher of iced wine at his side, with a window overlooking the orchard through which a cool breeze would mingle with the exhaled smoke of a Pall Mall cigarette. Since most of the villages had similar names, Saint Brieuc, Saint Brion, he and Mary had taken to pronouncing them in an excessively anglo-phonetic way to avoid confusion. Once, on honeymoon in Italy, such games had seemed a comic way of sharpening the excitement; to Charlie, with his smashing headache, they were by this time an indispensable shortcut to deliverance.
The Citroën slid out of one more rocky town, and Charlie prayed it was the last limp hôtel de ville tricolore he would see recede in his wing mirror as, a mile or so later, they found themselves at an unmarked crossroads. It was almost dark, and Mary had to open the passenger door to shed some light on the map.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” she said.
“That’s no good to me,” said Charlie. “You’re the navigator. You have to know. I can’t do both.”
Mary glanced across at him in the dusk. “Don’t be cross with me, darling. It’s just impossible to say. We should have brought a bigger map.”
Charlie inhaled tightly and made an effort to be genial. “From my time as an infantryman, in the course of which I have to say I was lost for almost two years, I would say it’s definitely that way.”
He pushed the column shift into first and swung the car decisively to the right. Mary read from the owner’s directions: “After about half a mile, you will come to a farmyard with a small stone calvary by the roadside.”
“ ‘One ever hangs where shelled roads part,’ ” said Charlie.
“What?”
“Wilfred Owen.”
“ ‘Follow the cart track till you come to a grassy triangle.’ ”
“ ‘In this war he too lost a limb.’ ”
“ ‘If you come to the boulangerie, you have gone too far.’ ”
“I never go further than the grassy triangle.”
“Daddy! There it is.”
Charlie slowed down and switched the headlights to full beam. In addition to its hydraulically pumped suspension, one of the peculiarities of the car was that its headlights were directional: by use of the steering wheel, Charlie was able to wash the Breton countryside with shafts of bright illumination. Beneath a chestnut tree, they picked out the figure of a hanging Christ.
“The girl’s a genius. Let’s go.”
“ ‘… for two hundred yards, being careful to avoid the ducklings which—’ ”
“To hell with the ducklings.”
“ ‘… past the gate posts, then pull in at the second entrance.’ ”
The rough stones of the farmyard crunched beneath the Citroën’s sedulously leveled entrance; Charlie switched off the engine, and the big car sank to its knees as the suspension hissed away. The children’s good humor was restored at once as they clambered from the back and ran round the house to look for a way in. The key to the front door was eventually discovered beneath a
pot; Mary occupied herself with the children’s clothes, while Richard and Louisa sprinted over the wooden landings. Charlie went in search of liquor.
The house was certainly traditional. It dated from a time when Bretons regarded “France” as an invented novelty that would not catch on; it had been unaltered since before the Revolution and had resisted all incomers from the threatening Republic, particularly cleaners. There was fresh linen on the beds and the bare floorboards had been perfunctorily swept, but there were cobwebs in the corners and the bedrooms gave off a dry, exhausted smell. There were two bathrooms whose giant cast-iron tubs had rusted water stains, while, through connections to its unknown burial place outside, the septic tank had left a reminder of its proximity. As Mary made her quick inspection, she thought of a farmer’s daughter drawing up her knees for warmth and holding on as the telegram boy brought news from Verdun, a French hell in which her brothers and lovers were so reluctantly engaged. She pictured earlier inhabitants, Bovary-type girls wandering through the orchards in their dreams of desire, aching to be free of the anonymous countryside where even Quimper and Vannes and Concarneau seemed unreachably distant. This desire to be loved, without which they would not be alive … Silly girls, she thought, folding Louisa’s clothes into the drawer of a walnut chest.
Mary’s unhappiness at being separated from Frank took the form of anger. She was impatient with the children and found that she disliked the dirty rustic house—miles from America, pointless. She had an aching wish to be back in the United States, to taste cheeseburgers made from grain-fed cattle that gave them that loose texture, to drink a cold martini with an olive; to sit at her corner table in Fiorello’s and look down at Teddy Roosevelt’s island while she ate the chocolate dessert with a large espresso in which floated a twist of puckered lemon peel.
The owners of the Breton house had assured them that Madame Bobotte, a neighbor, would have called round in the afternoon to leave them milk, bread and some emergency supplies until they could get to the shops the next day, but a thorough search of the kitchen showed that Madame Bobotte had failed to oblige. There was no address or telephone number for her and it was now too late to find anywhere open, so Mary went through the various cupboards to see what she could find. Behind a floral curtain on a wire, she discovered a fridge with a levered handle like those on the door of a butcher’s cold room. It was admirably cold inside, but empty except for a swollen ice tray dusted with frost crystals of an age to grace a mammoth’s tomb. In the dresser were many china dinner services, lidded soup tureens and piled plates of every size, but no food. A pine corner cupboard disclosed some packets of rat poison, a few bottles of dried herbs and a brush made of tied twigs.
Charlie rummaged at the back of his case for his emergency fifth of Wild Turkey. The water in the bathroom ran cloudy in the toothglass, which he cleaned and rinsed with a practiced forefinger. Bourbon was the finest disinfectant known to him, and he had no scruple about draining a glass of half whiskey and half warm eau de robinet, with which he swilled down three aspirin from his washbag.
He went downstairs to find Mary struggling over the gas in the kitchen. After he had discovered the butane cylinder on the floor, concealed behind another floral curtain on a wire, and spent some time turning the tap this way, that way and halfway, the burner eventually ignited with an explosive thump, causing Mary to leap backward with a squeal. Charlie resumed his search for liquor, while Mary lifted down a blackened skillet from its hook.
Eventually she was able to offer a dinner that consisted of last year’s walnuts fried in nut oil with anchovies, accompanied by most of a week-old baguette sliced and fried, for variation, in olive oil with pepper. There was half a bar of chocolate in the car. Mary drank water, the children drank a diluted grenadine cordial, both chilled with the slightly defrosted and rinsed mammoth’s ice, while Charlie drank something he had found at the bottom of a cupboard in the sitting room. It was a pure spirit, but with an oddly viscous surface and some sprigs of herb or plant in the bottle.
“It’s rather good actually,” he said. “Some sort of eau de vie, apple or prune or something. You want to try some?”
Mary shook her head. “It looks disgusting,” she said.
She watched the children’s faces as they ate. There was just enough food and it was just sufficiently edible to pass for dinner; together with the sugar of the grenadine and chocolate, it lifted their spirits.
Charlie lit a cigarette, drained his glass and smiled. “Marvelous supper,” he said. Mary noticed that he had not actually eaten it, but then he hardly ate at all anymore.
He began to speculate on the people who lived there, their observation of obscure saints’ days, the pious names of their numerous children, their repudiation of alcohol and their fanatical dislike of food. “We never eat in any month that has a vowel in its name. Which particularly rules out août.”
The light was on behind his eyes, Mary saw, and Louisa’s extraordinary laugh was gurgling up like water from an unblocked drain. It was almost like the old days and she had to look away.
It was a beautiful morning, cool and fresh, with air that no one, since the Atlantic rocks were formed, had breathed before, and the promise of sunshine to come. Charlie rose early and drove into Saint Brioche, as he now called it, to buy supplies, which included a plastic paddling pool and water pistols. When he returned to the house, he saw Mary in her white nightdress boiling water in the kitchen. She gestured to him to be quiet, miming that the children were still asleep.
The Williamses arrived shortly before noon with their twins, Douglas and Elliot, and Marie-Laure, the girl from Vannes. Vernon Williams was a bespectacled, unathletic man in his late forties who worked at the State Department. He climbed out of the car and shot his hand out at Charlie to be shaken; Lauren offered her cheek, which, Charlie noticed, was fragrant and freshly powdered even after the tiresome journey.
Mary took the Williamses upstairs to show them where they were sleeping; the children greeted one another with muted hostility, then ran off wordlessly into the garden where there were two barns in states of dangerous disrepair. Charlie slunk down to the orchard with a book and did not return until summoned for lunch, which Mary and Lauren had laid out beneath some pear trees at the back of the house.
Vernon Williams folded away his copy of the Herald Tribune and helped himself to cold chicken. “I can’t believe they don’t have a shower here,” he said.
His wife laughed. “It’s Europe, honey. Things are a little different.”
Marie-Laure, the mother’s help, piled her plate with chicken legs, pâté and salad and lowered her head to the task with small grunts of appreciation. Charlie poured some wine.
Mary said, “We thought we’d stay in tonight. I’ll make dinner, so you can all just relax.” It was the kind of thing Charlie had heard her say a hundred times: helpful, accommodating, selfless. But was he imagining it, or was there an edge of sarcasm, almost of despair, in her voice?
He looked at her, in her navy cotton shirt, white slacks and loafers; she looked a little tired, he thought, but the good thing about Mary was that you never really had to worry about her.
In the course of lunch Charlie was able to disengage his mind and drift. He generally knew what people were going to say from the first few words of their sentences; after that it was a question of keeping an appearance of interest as they struggled on toward the end or, in Lauren’s case, were sidetracked before they reached it.
“You look so remote, Charlie,” people used to tell him, which was true, but a quarter of an ear was enough to keep up with what was being said; the remaining part of his attention searched for something else to occupy it, and it was the opinion of his psychoanalyst in Bethesda that this was the root of his problem: that he could not find a constructive or creative outlet for the rest of his mental activity, because he had no talents. So he drank to kill it off. He drowned it.
“Shouldn’t I be a repressed homosexual at least?” Charlie had s
aid. “Or the victim of some forgotten childhood cruelty?”
The analyst did not smile. “Would you like to be?” he said.
Charlie drank enough wine at lunch to make it possible for him to sleep through the hours from three till five, a time of the day he particularly disliked.
It grew hot in the afternoon and Mary changed into her bathing costume. It was a bikini, the first she had ever owned, black, with trunks that stretched to a squared-off end a little way down the thigh; when she lit the gas to boil water for tea, she felt the warmth of the flame against the bare skin of her belly. Despite being called Sir Winston Churchill Five O’Clock, the tea was too weak to restart Charlie’s day with the jolt it required, and he spent another hour on the bed doing a two-day-old Times crossword.
Mary labored alone over dinner. Cooking on holiday, with no guests and worries about time, was normally something she enjoyed, but she felt angry with the recalcitrant stove and annoyed at the stupid Williamses with their gormless children. She could not explain her frustration to anyone, but the pressure of it mounted so much inside her that she had to find some way of venting it. She let out shuddering sighs and swore at the kitchen implements, at Brittany, at the girl from Vannes and at her mother for dying.
At seven o’clock she called Charlie to the kitchen to help her light the oven. Twenty matches later, Charlie summoned Vernon Williams.
Vernon lay on his back on the red tiles of the kitchen floor.
“There’s a little hole, just there.”
“Maybe you should light the element on the top.”
“Or is that the grill?”
“Are you sure the gas is on, Charlie?”
“Do you have another match?”
“Is that a pilot light? That’s working anyhow.”
“Well, that argues that at least the gas is connected.”
“Didn’t they teach you anything at Harvard?”
“Have you tried that little hole up there?”
On Green Dolphin Street Page 21