He opened one of the dining-room windows and stepped out, and Harold followed him around the corner of the house and through the gap in the hedge and into the potager. With a light rain—it was hardly more than a mist—falling on their shoulders, they walked up and down the gravel paths. The Frenchman asked how rich the ordinary man in America was. How many cars were there in the whole country? Did American women really rule the roost? And did they love their husbands or just love what they could get out of them? Was it true that everybody had running water and electricity? But not true that everybody owned their own house and every house had a dishwasher and a washing machine? Did Harold have any explanation to offer of how, in a country made up of such different racial strains, every man should be so passionately interested in machinery? Was it the culture or was it something that stemmed from the early days of the country—from its colonial period? How was America going to solve the Negro problem? Was it true that all Negroes were innately musical? And were they friendly with the white people who exploited them or did they hate them one and all? And how did the white people feel about Negroes? What did Americans think of Einstein? of Freud? of Stalin? of Churchill? of de Gaulle? Did they feel any guilt on account of Hiroshima? Did they like or dislike the French? Had he read the Kinsey Report, and was it true that virtually every American male had had some homosexual experience? And so on and so on.
The less equipped you are to answer such questions, the more flattering it is to be asked them, but to answer even superficially in a foreign language you need more than a tourist’s vocabulary.
“You don’t speak German?”
Harold shook his head. They stood looking at each other helplessly.
“You don’t speak any English?” Harold said.
“Pas un mot.”
A few minutes later, as they were walking and talking again, the Frenchman forgot and shifted to German anyway, and Harold stopped him, and they went on trying to talk to each other in French. Very often Harold’s answer did not get put into the right words or else in his excitement he did not pronounce them well enough for them to be understood, the approximation being some other word entirely, and the two men stopped and stared at each other. Then they tried once more, and impasses that seemed hopeless were bridged after all; or if this didn’t happen, the subject was abandoned in favor of a new subject.
It began to rain in earnest, and they turned up their coat collars and went on walking and talking.
“Shall we go in?” the Frenchman asked, a moment later.
As they went back through the gap in the hedge, Harold said to himself that it was a different house they were returning to. By the addition of a man of the family it had changed; it had stopped being matriarchal and formal and cold, and become solid and hospitable and human, like other houses.
At the door of the petit salon, they separated. Harold took in the room at a glance. M. Carrère sat looking quite forlorn, the one man among so many women. And did he imagine it or was Mme Viénot put out with them? There was an empty chair beside Mme de Boisgaillard and he sat down in it and tried once more to follow the conversation. He learned that the woman he had taken for the children’s nurse or possibly M. de Boisgaillard’s mother was Mme de Boisgaillard’s mother instead; which meant that she was Mme Viénot’s sister and had a perfect right to be here. What he had failed to perceive, like the six blind men and the elephant, was that she was deaf and so could not take part in general conversation. During dinner she did not even try, but now if someone spoke directly to her she adjusted the pointer of the little black box that she held to her ear as if it were a miniature radio, and seemed to understand.
When the others retired to their rooms at eleven o’clock, Eugène de Boisgaillard swept the Americans ahead of him, through a doorway and down a second-floor hall they had not been in before, and they found themselves in a bedroom with a dressing room off it. They stood looking down at the baby, who was fast asleep on her stomach but escaped entirely from the covers, at right angles to the crib, with her knees tucked under her, her feet crossed like hands, her rump in the air.
Her mother straightened her around and covered her, and then they tiptoed back into the larger room and began to talk. Mme de Boisgaillard translated and summarized quickly and accurately, leaving them free to go on to the next thing they wanted to say.
Unlike M. Carrère, Eugène de Boisgaillard did not hate all Germans. His political views were Liberal and democratic. He was also as curious as a cat. He wanted to know how long Harold and Barbara had been married, and how they had met one another, and what part of America they grew up in. He asked their first names and then what their friends called them. He asked them to call him by his first name. And then the questions began again, as if the first thing in the morning he and they were starting out for the opposite ends of the earth and there was only tonight for them to get to know each other. Once, when a question was so personal that Harold thought he must have misunderstood, he turned to Mme de Boisgaillard and she smiled and shook her head ruefully and said: “I hope you do not mind. That is the way he is. When I think he cannot possibly have said what I think I have heard him say, I know that is just what he did say.”
At her husband’s suggestion, she left them and went downstairs to see what there was in the larder, and they were surprised to discover that without her they couldn’t talk to each other. They waited awkwardly until she came into the room carrying a tray with a big bowl of sour cream and four smaller bowls, a sugar bowl, and spoons.
Eugène de Boisgaillard pointed to the empty fireplace and said: “No andirons. Does the one in your room work?”
Harold explained that it had a shield over it.
“During the Occupation the Germans let the forests be depleted—intentionally—and so one is allowed to cut only so much wood,” Mme de Boisgaillard said, “and if they used it now there would not be enough for the winter. Poor Tante! She drives herself so hard.… The thing I always forget is what a beautiful smell this house has. It may be the box hedge, though Mummy says it is the furniture polish, but it doesn’t smell like any other house in the world.”
“Have your shoes begun to mildew?” Eugène de Boisgaillard said.
Barbara shook her head.
“They will,” he said.
“You will drive them away,” Mme de Boisgaillard said, “and then we won’t have anyone our age to talk to.”
“We will go after them,” Eugéne de Boisgaillard said, “talking every step of the way. The baby’s sugar ration,” he said, saluting the sugar bowl.
Sweetened with sugar, the half-solidified sour cream was delicious.
“Have you enjoyed knowing M. Carrère?” Eugène asked.
Harold said that M. Carrère seemed to be a very kind man.
“He’s also very rich,” Eugène said. “Everything he touches turns into more money, more gilt-edged stock certificates. He is a problem to the Bank of France. Toinette has a special tone of voice in speaking of him—have you noticed? Where does she place him, I wonder? On some secondary level. Not with Périclès, or Beethoven. Not with Louis XIV. With Saint-Simon, perhaps … In the past year I have learned how to interpret the public face. It has been very useful. The public face is much more ponderous and explicit than the private face and it asks only one question: ‘What is it you want?’ And whatever you want is unfortunately just the thing it isn’t convenient for you to be given.… Do you get on well with your parents, Harold?”