We spent most of our time together listening to records, while Arnaud told me what was wrong with Toscanini or Bruno Walter. He would stop the record and play the same part again, pointing out the mistakes. The music seemed as worn and shabby as the room. I imagined the musicians in those great orchestras of the past to be covered with dust, playing on instruments cracked, split, daubed with fingerprints, held together with glue and string. My children in Lille had spotless instruments, perfectly tuned. Their music floated into a dark garden drenched with silent rain. But then my thoughts would be overtaken by the yells and screams of one of Arnaud’s doomed sopranos — a Tosca, a Mimi — and I would shut my eyes and let myself fall. A still surface of water rose to meet me. I was not dying but letting go.
Bernard’s father answered Papa’s second approach, which had been much like the first. He said that his son was a student, with no roof or income of his own. It would be a long time before he could join his destiny to anyone’s, and it would not be to mine. Bernard had no inclination for me; none whatever. He had taken me to be an attractive and artistic girl, anxious to please, perhaps a bit lonely. As an ardent writer of letters, with pen friends as far away as Belgium, Bernard had offered the hand of epistolary comradeship. I had grabbed the hand and called it a commitment. Bernard was ready to swear in court (should a lawsuit be among my father’s insane intentions) that he had taken no risks and never dropped his guard with an unclaimed young person, encountered in a public park. (My parents were puzzled by “unclaimed.” I had to explain that I used to take off my engagement ring and carry it loose in a pocket. They asked why. I could not remember.)
M. Brunelle, the answer went on, hoped M. Castelli would put a stop to my fervent outpourings in the form of letters. Their agitated content and their frequency — as many as three a day — interfered with Bernard’s studies and, indeed, kept him from sleeping. Surely my father did not want to see me waste the passion of a young heart on a delusion that led nowhere (“on a chimera that can only run dry in the Sahara of disappointment” was what M. Brunelle actually wrote). He begged my father to accept the word of a gentleman that my effusions had been destroyed. “Gentleman” was in English and underlined.
My parents shut themselves up in their bedroom. From my own room, where I sat at the window, holding Bernard’s messages, I could hear my father’s shouts. He was blaming Maman. Eventually she came in, and I stood up and handed her the whole packet: three letters and a postcard.
“Just the important one,” she said. “The one I should have made you show me last April. I want the letter that mentions marriage.”
“It was between the lines,” I said, watching her face as she read.
“It was nowhere.” She seemed sorry for me, all at once. “Oh, Sylvie, Sylvie. My poor Sylvie. Tear it up. Tear every one of them up. All this because you would not try to love Arnaud.”
“I thought he loved me,” I said. “Bernard, I mean. He never said he didn’t.”
The heaven-sent vision of my future life had already faded; the voices of my angelic children became indistinct. I might, now, have been turning the pages of an old storybook with black-and-white engravings.
I said, “I’ll apologize to Papa and ask him to forgive me. I can’t explain what happened. I thought he wanted what I wanted. He never said that he didn’t. I promise never to paint pictures again.”
I had not intended the remark about painting pictures. It said itself. Before I could take it back, Maman said, “Forgive you? You’re like a little child. Does forgiveness include sending our most humble excuses to the Brunelle family and our having to explain that our only daughter is a fool? Does it account for behavior no sane person can understand? Parents knew what they were doing when they kept their daughters on a short lead. My mother read every letter I wrote until I was married. We were too loving, too lenient.”
Her face looked pinched and shrunken. Her love, her loyalties, whatever was left of her youth and charm pulled away from me to be mustered in favor of Papa. She stood perfectly still, almost at attention. I think we both felt at a loss. I thought she was waiting for a signal so she could leave the room. Finally, my father called her. I heard her mutter, “Please get out of my way,” though I was nowhere near the door.
My friend Chantal — my postal station, my go-between — came over as soon as she heard the news. It had been whispered by my mother to Chantal’s mother, over the telephone, in a version of events that absolved me entirely and turned the Brunelles into fortune-hunting, come-lately provincial merchants and rogues. Chantal knew better, though she still believed the Brunelles had misrepresented their case and came in for censure. She had brought chocolates to cheer me up; we ate most of a box, sitting in a corner of the salon like two travelers in a hotel lobby. She wore her hair in the newest style, cut short and curled thickly on her forehead. I have forgotten the name of the actress who started the fashion: Chantal told me, but I could not take it in.
Chantal was a good friend, perhaps because she had never taken me seriously as a rival; and perhaps in saying this I misjudge her. At any rate, she lost no time in giving me brisk advice. I ought to cut my hair, change my appearance. It was the first step on the way to a new life. She knew I loved children and might never have any of my own: I had no idea how to go about meeting a man or how to hang on to one if he drifted my way. As the next-best thing, I should enter a training college and learn to teach nursery classes. There wasn’t much to it, she said. You encouraged them to draw with crayons and sing and run in circles. You put them on pots after lunch and spread blankets on the floor for their afternoon nap. She knew plenty of girls who had done this after their engagements, for some reason, collapsed.
She had recently got to know a naval lieutenant while on a family holiday in the Alps, and now they were planning a Christmas wedding. Perhaps I could persuade my family to try the same thing; but finding a fiancé in the mountains was a new idea — to my mother chancy and doubtful, while my father imagined swindlers and foreigners trampling snow in pursuit of other men’s daughters.
Since the fiasco, as he called it, Papa would not look at me. When he had anything to say he shouted it to Maman. They did not take their annual holiday that year but remained in the shuttered apartment, doing penance for my sins. The whole world was away, except us. From Normandy, Claudine sent my mother a postcard of the basilica at Lisieux and the message “My maman, being a mother, respectfully shares your grief”—as if I had died.
At dinner one night — curtains drawn, no one saying much — Papa suddenly held up his hands, palms out. “How many hands do you count?” he said, straight to me.
“Two?” I made it a question in case it was a trick.
“Right. Two hands. All I needed to pull me to the top of my profession. I gave my wife the life she wanted, and I gave my daughter a royal upbringing.”
I could sense my mother’s close attention, her wanting me to say whatever Papa expected. He had drunk most of a bottle of Brouilly by himself and seemed bound for headlong action. In the end, his message was a simple one: He had forgiven me. My life was a shambles and our family’s reputation gravely injured, but I was not wholly to blame. Look at the young men I’d had to deal with: neutered puppies. No wonder there were so many old maids now. I had missed out on the only virile generation of the twentieth century, the age group that took in M. Pons, Cousin Gaston, and, of course, Papa himself.