The arthritic Chihuahua, with cast, glazed eyes, walked among the plates and glasses on the tablecloth. We were in a restaurant near the Banque de France. Madame Devereux was telling her experiences of the war. She had rolled bandages. She had suffered privations, inconveniences. She had endured reports of the conditions at the front. At first, word of the ghettos in Eastern Europe had caught her sympathies. But then she was appalled. They, she was told on high authority, had stolen all the doorknobs off the ghetto doors, and sold the knobs. They were such salesmen; she had been naïve. But when, as Monsieur Devereux had known they would, they turned around and sold the bandages, Madame could roll no more. She caught our eyes. “N’est-ce pas, mon petit,” she said, stroking a tufted bald spot behind her Chihuahua’s ear. He wheezed and stretched. A wineglass overturned. “N’est-ce pas, mon petit, qu’ils allaient trop loin.” It was not one of us who overturned the glass. It was the dog. We were trying so hard. Maybe it was our French we were uncertain of.
We had lined up. We had crossed the Atlantic on a small, old boat of the French line called the Flandre, which we called the Flounder — partly for the joke but mainly to avoid in each other’s presence that attempt to pronounce the French r, which seemed of such importance to us then. We had lined up for the carte de séjour and the identity card, for student accreditation and for the certificate of equivalence to our American degrees. Having stood in one line long enough to reach the bureaucrat whose job it was to issue one document, we learned that the prerequisite for it was another. At the end of the line for this other, we learned from its bureaucrat that he could not issue his document without evidence that we had already obtained the first, or a third, perhaps others or both. It was the fall of 1961. French students — and, for all we knew, students of every other nationality — were already burning American flags in the Sorbonne courtyard, on behalf, they said, of Cuba. It was clear they hated us. We stood. We smiled. We had gone abroad with the American smile. We were very serious. Only the least serious of us roamed the streets at night, chanting “La Paix en Algérie” with one student crowd, or “Algérie Française” with another, until the two groups filled the boulevards, converged, and, with the help of massed policemen swinging weighted capes, rioted. On the same night the Marquis de Cuevas was borne by litter to a performance of ballet at the Opera, where he was strewn with rose petals, Bonbon Wechsler of Santa Barbara, who had already acquired a small Moroccan boyfriend and was chanting with him to improve her French, lost track of the boyfriend, and, being carried along by the demonstration, at its edge, was accidentally pushed through the window of a bookshop on the Rue Bonaparte, where she nearly bled to death among the old, incomplete sets of tarot cards. The complete sets had been bought up by American students of The Waste Land right after the war.
“Far from it,” the man who cleans up this office after hours keeps muttering to himself. “Far from it. Far from it.”
The most important line, the longest and the most embittered, was the line for the student restaurants. Some people stood in it for forty-six straight hours. The restaurant card required that all other cards and documents be in order. Quite often, an American or other foreign student would arrive with his completed file at the desk and be met with the stare, the shrug, and look of perfect insolence which characterizes, everywhere, the bureaucrat who likes his power to obstruct. Many students wept. Most of them persisted, with that flat determination to understand the country and the language which took them in so many different ways. In no other language, for instance — certainly not our own — were we so improbably familiar with the vocabulary of churches, with naves, Flamboyant Gothic arches, apses, capitals, transepts; or with the words of medieval hymns and songs of courtly love. We spoke of the quality of the blue in the stained-glass windows of Chartres, which modern science had not been able to reproduce, as though the medieval craftsman who had produced it were a colleague. He had, we knew, billed his diocese for the purchase of sapphires ground up to create that color. Modern science had, at least, established that sapphires played no part in its composition at all. It was our first, most scholarly appreciation of the padded expense account.
The fashion models walked down the ramp, surveyed the audience with utter, unamused contempt, turned, sauntered out. For some reason, this induced the lady customers to buy. Within a year, convinced of many European things and yet unalterably American, we all went home.
We are thirty-five. Some of us are gray. We all do situps or something to keep fit. I myself wear bifocals. Since I am not yet used to wearing specs at all, I tend to underestimate the distance required, for instance, for kisses on the cheek. If the other person wears glasses, too, we are likely to have a brushing clack of frames. We have had some drunks, an occasional psychotic break, eleven divorces, one autistic child, six abortions, two unanticipated homosexuals, several affairs of the sort that are lifelong and quiet and sad, one drowning, two cases of serious illness, one hatred each, no crimes. No crimes is no small thing. We might have run over somebody in high school and left the scene. Before that, we might have stopped putting pennies on tracks to be bent by trains, and tried to hitch rides on freight cars just as they began to move. We were always daring each other to do that. It would not have been a crime, of course. But it would have taken us over that edge of irreversible violence where, whether in a pattern of years or in the flicker of an oversight, crime begins.
“Far from it. Far from it,” he is muttering to himself again.
Every child, naturally, who was not a sissy swam. In lakes, and seas, and heavily chlorinated pools, they earned their certificates, Beginners, Intermediate, Advanced, Junior Life Saving, Senior Life Saving — all the New England summer accreditations of the healthy child. There has been, always, the preoccupation of people of our age and class with documents: degrees, cards, certifications, records, licenses. One got them the year one became of age to get them. Of age. People who missed their proper year often remained afraid of swimming, driving, hunting, or whatever, all their lives. The accreditations all began, though, in the water: at five, the dog paddle, and at twelve, the dive to break the death grip of some giant instructor, in order to tow him, by means of the chin carry, the hair carry, the cross-chest carry, whatever other carry, home. By now, there have been many years of accepted assurances that the water’s fine — quite warm, actually — once you get into it; many years’ insane passings on of such an assurance. And here we all are. All that is, except Barney, whose sailboat overturned two years ago last November. It is probable that he had been drinking. When Jim and I took him to dinner the preceding August, he said he was bored with his job.
“Now, class. Now, seniors,” the high school principal said, interrupting the Pledge. “It’s one nation. Under Gawd. Indivisible. Some of you are saying under Gahd. In fact, most of you. What are the parents going to think? What are your teachers going to think? What are the visitors from Hartford going to think? This is very important. Many of you are college bound. Now say with me, please. Gawd. Again. Gawd. Under Gawd. Indivisible. Good. Now let’s resume. Give it the feeling you’re going to give it on graduation day.” Her name was Miss Crosby. Crawsby, not Crahsby. We let it pass.