“Mme Viénot told us about you,” Barbara said.
“Yes?”
“She told us about your family,” Barbara said.
Oh no, Harold begged her silently. Don’t say it.…
But Barbara was a little high from the wine, and on those rare occasions when she did put her trust in strangers, she was incautious and wholehearted. As if no remark of hers could possibly be misunderstood by him, she said: “She said your mother was hors de siècle.”
The Frenchman looked bewildered. Harold changed the subject. Exactly how offensive the phrase was, he didn’t know, and he hadn’t been able to tell from Mme Viénot’s tone of voice because her voice was always edged with one kind of cheerful malice or another. Trying to cover up Barbara’s mistake he made another.
“Do you know what you remind me of?” he asked, though an inner voice begged him not to say it. (He too had had too much wine.)
“What?” the Frenchman asked politely.
“An acrobat.”
The Frenchman was not pleased. He did not consider it a compliment to be told that he was like an acrobat. The tiresome inner voice had been right, as usual. Though table manners are the same in France, other manners are not. We shouldn’t have gone so far with him, the first time, Harold thought. Or been quite so personal.
The conversation lost its naturalness. There were silences as they walked along together. They quickly became strangers. As they crossed one of the streets that went out from the Place Redouté, they were accosted by a beggar, the first Harold had seen in Paris. Always an easy touch at home, he waited, not knowing if beggars were regarded cynically by the French, and also not wanting to appear to be throwing his American money around. The future minister of finance reached in his pocket quickly and brought out a hundred-franc note and gave it to the beggar, and so widened the misunderstanding: the French have compassion for the poor, Americans do not, was the only possible conclusion.
They shook hands at the entrance of the Métro and said good night. Still hoping that something would happen at the last minute, that he would give them a chance to repair the damage they had done to the evening, they stood and watched him start down the steps, turn right, and disappear without looking back. Though they might read his name years from now in the foreign-news dispatches, this was the last they would ever see of Mme Viénot’s brilliant son-in-law.
As they were walking home, past shuttered store fronts, Barbara said: “I shouldn’t have said that about his mother, should I?”
“People are very touchy about their families.”
“But I meant it as a compliment.”
“I know.”
“Why didn’t he realize I meant it as a compliment?”
“I don’t know.”
“I liked him.”
“So did I.”
“It’s very sad.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, meaning something quite different —meaning that there was nothing either of them could do about it now.
He called out who they were as they passed through the foyer of the apartment building. They went up in the elevator, and the hall light went out just as he thrust his key at the keyhole. He stepped into the dark apartment and felt around until he found the light switch. The study door was closed and so was the door of Mme Cestre’s bedroom.
Lying in bed in the dark, looking through the open window at the one lighted room in the building across the street, he said: “What it amounts to is that you cannot be friends with somebody, no matter how much you like them, if it turns out that you don’t really understand one another.”
“Also—” he began, five minutes later, and was stopped by the sound of Barbara’s soft, regular breathing. He turned over and as he lay staring at the lighted room he felt a sudden first wave of homesickness come over him.
Chapter 15
THE FIRST DAYLIGHT, whitening the sky and making the windows shine, revealed that the three Berliners had spent the night in Mme Cestre’s bedroom. Their threadbare, unpressed, spotty coats and trousers, neatly folded, were on three chairs. Also, their shirts and socks and underwear, which had been washed without soap. Two of them slept in the narrow bed, with their mouths open like dead people and their breathing so quiet they might have been dead. The third slept on the floor, with a rug under him, his head on the leather brief case, his pink-tinted glasses beside him, and Mme Cestre’s spare comforter keeping him from catching pneumonia. So pale they were, in the gray light. So unaggressive, so intellectual, so polite even in their sleep. Oh heartbreaking—what happens to children, said the fruitwood armoire, vast and maternal, bound in brass, with brass handles on the drawers, brass knobs on the two carved doors. The dressing table, modern, with its triple way of viewing things, said: It is their own doing and redoing and undoing.
“BONJOUR, monsieur-dame,” said the tall, full-bosomed woman with carrot-colored hair and a beautiful carriage. She raised the front wheels of the teacart and then the back, so that they did not touch the telephone cord. When she had gone back to the kitchen, Harold said: “There are plates and cups for three, which can only mean that he is having breakfast with us.”
“You think?” Barbara said.
“By his own choice,” Harold said, “since there is now someone to bring him a tray in his room.”
They sat and waited. In due time, Eugène appeared and drew the armchair up to the teacart.
It was a beautiful day. The window was wide open and the sunlight was streaming in from the balcony. Eugène inquired about their evening with Sabine, and the telephone, like a spoiled child that cannot endure the conversation of the grownups, started ringing. Eugène left the room. When he came back, he said: “It is possible that I may be going down to the country on Friday. A cousin of Alix is marrying. And if I do go—as I should, since it is a family affair—it will be early in the morning, before you are up. And I may stay down for the week end.”
They tried not to look pleased.
He accepted a second cup of coffee and then asked what they had done about getting gasoline coupons. “But we don’t need them,” Harold said, and so, innocently, obliged Eugène to admit that he did. “I seldom enjoy the use of my car,” he said plaintively, “and it would be pleasant to have the gasoline for short trips into the country now and then.”
He reached into his bathrobe pocket and brought out a slip of paper on which he had written the address of the place they were to go to for gasoline coupons.
“How can we ask for gasoline coupons if we don’t have a car?” Harold said.
“As Americans traveling in France you are entitled to the coupons whether you use them or not,” Eugène said. “And the amount of gasoline that tourists are allowed is quite considerable.”
Harold put the slip of paper on the teacart and said: “Could you tell us— But there is no reason you should know, I guess. We have to get a United States Army visa to enter Austria.”
“I will call a friend who works at the American Embassy,” Eugène said, rising. “He will know.”