Another time she said to him, “Everyone is condemned to die.” They had sat in the half-darkness of her front room; she had stared vacantly out the tall windows at the roofs of Paris. “But only a few are condemned to live after the time when death would be preferred.”
She did not speak often when he came to see her. Sometimes she would greet him at the door and then return to her chair by the window and it would be as though he were not there at all. Jeanne could not explain the sense of melancholy that had descended on her. It colored her days. At night, when she lay awake in the darkness of the room, listening to the city boom in life beyond her open windows, she would think of Manning as he left her that morning. She would think she had heard the shots that took his life.
Jeanne Clermont had grown thin and grown old.
The proprietor of the Rose de France had made a nervous joke about her thinness. He had insisted on serving her his special veal, and he had been comically disappointed when she barely ate it. He spoke to her several times, but she would stare at him for a moment after he finished the words, as though trying to understand what he had said. Her responses were polite and laconic.
The dishes were cleared. Only wine remained on the table between them. She stared at her glass for a long time before she spoke to him.
“You knew that William would take me to this place?”
“Yes.”
“How many lives ago was that? It seems so long ago.”
“Jeanne.”
She stared at him then, at his gray eyes, at the lines cut deep in the rock of the winter face. He seemed to reflect the coldness in her, as though this melancholy had been transferred to his own features.
“There is nothing to be said,” Jeanne Clermont replied. “‘Every joke that’s possible has long ago been made.’ Do you know that? An Englishman said that. It becomes so absurd; it must be someone’s joke, don’t you think? Perhaps God’s.”
“You survived,” Devereaux said. “It is the only important thing.”
“I wanted to arrange my own death but I could not; I can only arrange the deaths of others, it seems.”
“That is self-pity,” he said.
“Should I not pity myself then?” She paused and picked up the glass of wine. The light caught the dark red of the liquid. She tasted it; it was warm against her tongue. She put down the glass and held it. “You place all on your survival. A simple philosophy because you think there is nothing beyond this place, beyond our bodies or this little square. A simple faith, to believe nothing. It is comforting to think that death merely ends life.”
“You wanted to die,” he said.
“To see God and understand the joke at last. I wanted to laugh with Him.”
“Manning knew what he was doing, that someday here or in Saigon or in any of the places he might have been killed.”
She said nothing. She stared at him, but her eyes had become dull, without depth. The mirror of her soul that had been in them had been shattered and swept away like broken glass. “You see death as such a simple matter. You take death; you give it away.”
Devereaux touched the stem of the glass before him but he did not pick it up. The shadows of the trees had crossed the walks; the restaurants were all lit gaily around the darkened square.
“Do you understand me?” she said at last.
“Yes.”
She smiled at him. “You loved then? Are you wounded? Is existence pain? Do you yearn to die?”
“No. It is too easy to die.”
“When I sleep, I dream of him; when I waken, I feel him next to me in the empty bed. In a little while, my memory of him will begin to fade, as it did the first time he left me; and I will become able to endure the pain of his parting from me and go on for as long as I must live. That is what I cannot bear, that I will even be able to forget him at times, that the pain will lessen, that before I die it will be as though he had not existed.”
Now, for a moment, her eyes glistened with tears. In that strong face, the dampness in her eyes seemed to betray her. “I long to be wounded each day by his memory; I want the thought of William to always cause me pain, to always think of him dead, to always think of him as he left me that morning. But memory is such a traitor. It will fade in time, the pain will lessen, and William will be someone I had known. Do you see? I don’t want to forget him and yet I will, day by day, year by year. Don’t you see? That is why I wished to die, while the pain of losing him was new to me.”
Devereaux sat for a long time and stared at her haunting, darkly lovely face, at the shining eyes. In her he was reminded of his own life of betrayals, of promises made and denied, of acts of love and acts of hatred that faded equally in memory until they had become mere items in a catalogue of his mind. Yes, he understood her.
The proprietor came out and looked at them and did not speak. He put the bill, facedown, on the table and waddled away.
Devereaux sighed. He reached in the pocket of his coat and pulled out a sheaf of franc notes and put them on the table. In the middle of the wad of notes was a photograph. He had forgotten the photograph.
He put it on the table, apart from the notes, and looked at her.
She stared at the photograph.
A young woman and a man standing at the entrance of the Tuileries on a day in spring, captured in an instant of memory by a chattering monkey of a photographer who danced around them and made her laugh, who was part of the day and the time.
She stared at the photograph until tears blurred her eyes and the photograph became only a vague whitish shape on the table. She felt the tears dropping from her eyes down her cheeks. When she wiped at them, finally, she felt the pain of her tears stinging her eyes. She wiped harshly at them with the back of her hand and drove the tears into her eyes.
And when she looked up, Devereaux was gone.
The evening had come so softly. The sounds of the city beyond this quiet park were muted. The warmth of the day lingered but the breeze of night was cool to her face, to the hot tears staining her cheeks.
Jeanne Clermont picked up the photograph and put it in the pocket of her dress and got up from the table, scraping the chair across the sidewalk.
It was as though Devereaux had only been an apparition, and yet, he had been there: There were two glasses of wine on the table, there were franc notes covering the white bill. And the photograph in her pocket. He had given her a souvenir to keep the pain of her memory of William Manning fresh for all the years left to her. He had understood her sorrow.
Jeanne Clermont slowly crossed the little street and walked in the park to the opening between the banks of buildings that led to the Pont Neuf over the Seine. Beneath the trees, an old man with an accordion played a sweet and sentimental song for a young couple sitting together at a table before another café. She remembered the words of the song and repeated them to herself in a whisper.
She would remember.
About the Author
An award-winning novelist and reporter, Bill Granger was raised in a working-class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. He began his extraordinary career in 1963 when, while still in college, he joined the staff of United Press International. He later worked for the Chicago Tribune, writing about crime, cops, and politics, and covering such events as the race riots of the late 1960s and the 1968 Democratic Convention. In 1969, he joined the staff of the Chicago Sun-Times, where he won an Associated Press award for his story of a participant in the My Lai Massacre. He also wrote a series of stories on Northern Ireland for Newsday—and unwittingly added to a wealth of information and experiences that would form the foundations of future spy thrillers and mystery novels. By 1978, Bill Granger had contributed articles to Time, the New Republic, and other magazines; and become a daily columnist, television critic, and teacher of journalism at Columbia College in Chicago.