When Cousin Gaston came to dinner he and Papa discussed their relations in Nice and the decadent state of France. Women were not expected to join in: Maman always found a reason to go off to the kitchen and talk things over with Claudine, a farm girl from Normandy she had trained to cook and wait. Claudine was about my age, but Maman seemed much freer with her than with me; she took it for granted that Claudine was informed about all the roads and corners of life. Having no excuse to leave, I would examine the silver, the pattern on my dinner plate, my own hands. The men, meanwhile, went on about the lowering of morality and the lack of guts of the middle class. They split over what was to be done: Our cousin was a Socialist, though not a fierce one. He saw hope in the new postwar managerial generation, who read Marx without becoming dogmatic Marxists, while my father thought the smart postwar men would be swept downhill along with the rest of us.
Once, Cousin Gaston mentioned why his office was so seedily fitted out. It seemed that the government had to spend great sums on rebuilding roads; they had gone to pieces during the war and, of course, were worse today. Squads of German prisoners of war sent to put them right had stuffed the roadbeds with leaves and dead branches. As the underlay began to rot, the surfaces had collapsed. Now repairs were made by French workers — unionized, Communist-led, always on the verge of a national strike. There was no money left over.
“There never has been any money left over,” Papa said. “When there is, they keep it quiet.”
He felt uneasy about the franking business. The typist in the hall might find out and tell a reporter on one of the opposition weeklies. The reporter would then write a blistering piece on nepotism and the misuse of public funds, naming names. (My mother never worried. She took small favors to be part of the grace of life.)
It was hot on the bridge, July in April. We still wore our heavy coats. Too much good weather was not to be trusted. There were no clouds over the river, but just the kind of firm blue sky I found easy to paint. Halfway across, we stopped to look at a boat with strings of flags, and tourists sitting along the bank. Some of the men had their shirts off. I stared at the water and saw how far below it was and how cold it looked, and I said, “If I weren’t a Catholic, I’d throw myself in.”
“Sylvie!”—as if she had lost me in a crowd.
“We’re going to so much trouble,” I said. “Just so I can marry a man I don’t love.”
“How do you know you don’t love him?”
“I’d know if I did.”
“You haven’t tried,” she said. “It takes patience, like practicing scales. Don’t you want a husband?”
“Not Arnaud.”
“What’s wrong with Arnaud?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well,” after a pause, “what do you know?”
“I want to marry Bernard Brunelle. He lives in Lille. His father owns a big textile business — the factories, everything. We’ve been writing. He doesn’t know I’m engaged.”
“Brunelle? Brunelle? Textiles? From Lille? It sounds like a mistake. In Lille they just marry each other, and textiles marry textiles.”
“I’ve got one thing right,” I said. “I want to marry Bernard.”
My mother was a born coaxer and wheedler; avoided confrontation, preferring to move to a different terrain and beckon, smiling. One promised nearly anything just to keep the smile on her face. She was slim and quick, like a girl of fourteen. My father liked her in flowered hats, so she still wore the floral bandeaux with their wisps of veil that had been fashionable ten years before. Papa used to tell about a funeral service where Maman had removed her hat so as to drape a mantilla over her hair. An usher, noticing the hat beside her on the pew, had placed it with the other flowers around the coffin. When I repeated the story to Arnaud he said the floral-hat anecdote was one of the world’s oldest. He had heard it a dozen times, always about a different funeral. I could not see why Papa would go on telling it if it were not true, or why Maman would let him. Perhaps she was the first woman it had ever happened to.
“You say that Bernard has written to you,” she said, in her lightest, prettiest, most teasing manner. “But where did he send the letters? Not to the house. I’d have noticed.”
No conspirator gives up a network that easily. Mine consisted of Chantal Nauzan, my trusted friend, the daughter of a general my father greatly admired. Recently Papa had begun saying that if I had been a boy he might have wanted a career in the Army for me. As I was a girl, he did not want me to do anything too particular or specific. He did not want to have to say, “My daughter is …” or “Sylvie does …” because it might make me sound needy or plain.
“Dear Sylvie,” my mother went on. “Look at me. Let me see your eyes. Has he written ‘marriage’ in a letter signed with his name?” I looked away. What a question! “Would you show me the letter — the important one? I promise not to read the whole thing.” I shook my head no. I was not sharing Bernard. She moved to new ground, so fast I could barely keep up. “And you would throw yourself off a bridge for him?”
“Just in my thoughts,” I said. “I think about it when Arnaud makes me listen to records — all those stories about women dying, Brünnhilde and Mimi and Butterfly. I think that for the rest of my life I’ll be listening to records and remembering Bernard. It’s all I have to look forward to, because it is what you and Papa want.”
“No,” she said. “It is not at all what we want.” She placed the leather bag on the parapet and turned it upside down over the river, using both hands. I watched the envelopes fall in a slow shower and land on the dark water and float apart. Strangers leaned on the parapet and stared, too, but nobody spoke.
“Papa will know what to do next,” she said, altogether calmly, giving the bag a final shake. “For the time being, don’t write any more letters and don’t mention Bernard. Not to anyone.”
I could not have defined her tone or expression. She behaved as if we had put something over on life, or on men; but that may be what I have read into it since. I looked for a clue, wondering how she wanted me to react, but she had started to walk on, making up the story we would tell our cousin, still waiting in his office to do us a good turn. (In the end, she said the wedding had to be postponed owing to a death in Arnaud’s family.)
“Papa won’t be able to have Monsieur Pons as a friend now,” she remarked. “He’s going to miss him. I hope your Monsieur Brunelle in Lille can make up the loss.”
“I have never met him,” I said.
I could see white patches just under the surface of the river, quite far along. They could have been candy papers or scraps of rubbish from a barge. Maman seemed to be studying the current, too. She said, “I’m not asking you to tell me how you met him.”
“In the Luxembourg Gardens. I was sketching the beehives.”
“You made a nice watercolor from that sketch. I’ll have it framed. You can hang it in your bedroom.”