All the Days and Nights (25 page)

Because her mind and her cousin’s were so differently occupied, they were able to let one another alone, except for some mild offensive and defensive belittling now and then, but Alison and her younger sister had to ride in separate seats or they quarreled. Trip was lying stretched out, unable to see anything but the car roof and hating every minute of the drive from Fougères, where they had spent the night. It didn’t take much to make her happy — a stray dog or a cat, or a monkey chained to a post in a farmyard, or an old white horse in a pasture — but while they were driving she existed in a vacuum and exerted a monumental patience. At any moment she might have to sit up and put her head out of the car window and be sick.

They passed through Antrain without running over anybody on a bicycle, and shortly afterward something happened that made them all more cheerful. Another salmon-and-cream-colored Volkswagen bus, the first they had seen, drew up behind them and started to pass. In it were a man and a woman and two children and a great deal of luggage. The children waved to them from the rear window as the other Volkswagen sped on.

“Americans,” Dorothy Reynolds said.

“And probably on their way to Mont-Saint-Michel,” Reynolds said. “Wouldn’t you know.” They were no longer unique.

He saw a sign on their side of the road. She also noticed it, and they smiled at each other with their eyes, in the rearview mirror.

Eighteen years ago, they had arrived in Pontorson from Cherbourg, by train, by a series of trains, at five o’clock in the afternoon. They had a reservation at a hotel in Mont-Saint-Michel, but they had got up at daybreak and were too tired to go on, so they spent the night here in what the
Michelin
described as an
“hôtel simple, mais confortable,”
with
“une
bonne table dans la localité.”
It was simple and bare and rather dark inside, and it smelled of roasting coffee beans. It was also very old; their guidebook said it had been the manor of the counts of Montgomery, though there was nothing about it now to indicate this. Their room was on the second floor and it was enormous. So was the bathroom. There was hot water. They had a bath, and then they came downstairs and had an apéritif sitting under a striped umbrella in front of the hotel. He remembered that there was a freshly painted wooden fence with flower boxes on it that separated the table from the street. What was in the flower boxes? Striped petunias? Geraniums? He did not remember, but there were heavenly blue morning glories climbing on strings beside the front door. Their dinner was too good to be true, and they drank a bottle of wine with it, and stumbled up the stairs to their room, and in the profound quiet got into the big double bed and slept like children. So long ago. And so uncritical they were. All open to delight.

In the morning they both woke at the same instant and sat up and looked out of the window. It was market day and the street in front of the hotel was full of people. The women wore long shapeless black cotton dresses and no makeup on their plain country faces. The men wore blue smocks, like the illustrations of Boutet de Monvel. And everybody was carrying long thin loaves of fresh bread. A man with a vegetable stand was yelling at the top of his lungs about his green beans. They saw an old woman leading a cow. And chickens and geese, and little black-and-white goats, and lots of bicycles, but no cars. It was right after the war, and gasoline was rationed, but it seemed more as if the automobile hadn’t yet been heard of in this part of France.

They were the only guests at the hotel, the only tourists as far as the eye could see. It was the earthly paradise, and they had it all to themselves. When they came in from cashing a traveler’s check or reading the inscriptions on the tombstones in the cemetery, a sliding panel opened in the wall at the foot of the stairs and the cook asked how they enjoyed their walk. The waitress helped them make up their minds what they wanted to eat, and if they had any other problems they went to the concierge with them. The happier they became the happier he was for them, so how could they not love him, or he them? The same with the waitress and the chambermaid and the cook. They went right on drinking too much wine and eating seven-course meals for two more days, and if it hadn’t been that they had not seen anything whatever of the rest of France, they might have stayed there, deep in the nineteenth century, forever.

R
EYNOLDS
thought he remembered Pontorson perfectly, but something peculiar goes on in the memory. This experience is lovingly remembered and that one is, to one’s everlasting shame, forgotten. Of the remembered experience a very great deal drops out, drops away, leaving only what is convenient, or what is emotionally useful, and this simplified version takes up much more room than it has any right to. The village of Pontorson in 1948 was larger than John Reynolds remembered it as being, but after eighteen years it was not even a village any longer; it was now a small town, thriving and prosperous, and one street looked so much like another that he had to stop in the middle of a busy intersection and ask a traffic policeman the way to the hotel they had been so happy in.

It was still there, but he wouldn’t have recognized it without the sign. The fence was gone, and so were the morning glories twisting around their white strings, and the striped umbrellas. The sidewalk came right up to the door of the hotel, and it would not have been safe to drive a cow down the street it was situated on.

“It’s all so changed,” he said. “But flourishing, wouldn’t you say? Would you like to go in and have a look around?”

“No,” Dorothy said.

“They might remember us.”

“It isn’t likely the staff would be the same after all this time.”

Somewhere deep inside he was surprised. He had expected everybody in France to stand right where they were (one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine,
stillpost
) until he got back.

“I never thought about it before,” he said, “but except for the cook there was nobody who was much older than we were.… So kind they all were. But there was also something sad about them. The war, I guess. Also, there’s no place to park. Too bad.” He drove on slowly, still looking.

“What’s too bad?” Alison asked.

“Nothing,” Dorothy said. “Your father doesn’t like change.”

“Do you?”

“Not particularly. But if you are going to live in the modern world —”

Alison stopped listening. Her mother could live in the modern world if she wanted to, but she had no intention of joining her there.

They circled around, and found the sign that said
MONT-SAINT-MICHEL
, and headed due north. In 1948 their friend the concierge, having
found an aged taxi for them, stood in the doorway waving good-bye. Nine kilometers and not another car on the road the whole ride. Ancient farmhouses such as they had seen from the train window they could observe from close up: the weathered tile roofs, the pink rose cascading from its trellis, the stone watering trough for the animals; the beautiful man-made, almost mathematical orderliness of the woodpile, the vegetable garden, and the orchard. Suddenly they saw, glimmering in the distance, the abbey on its rock, with the pointed spire indicating the precise direction of a heaven nobody believed in anymore. The taxi driver said, “Le Mont-Saint-Michel,” and they looked at each other and shook their heads. For reading about it was one thing and seeing it with their own eyes was another. The airiness, the visionary quality, the way it kept changing right in front of their eyes, as if it were some kind of heavenly vaudeville act.

After the fifth brand-new house, Reynolds said, massaging his knee, “Where are all the old farmhouses?”

“We must have come by a different road,” Dorothy said.

“It has to be the same road,” he said, and seeing how intently he peered ahead through the windshield she didn’t argue. But surely if there were new houses there could be new roads.

Once more the abbey took them by surprise. This time the surprise was due to the fact they were already close upon it. There had been no distant view. New buildings, taller trees, something, had prevented their seeing it until now. The light was of the seacoast, dazzling and severe. Clouds funneled the radiance upward. It seemed that flocks of angels might be released into the sky at any moment.

“There it is!” Dorothy cried. “Look, children!”

Linda added the name Mont-Saint-Michel to the list of places she could tell people she had seen when she got home. Alison put her glasses on and dutifully looked. Mont-Saint-Michel was enough like a castle to strike her as interesting, but what she remembered afterward was not the thing itself but the excitement in her father’s and mother’s voices. Trip sat up, looked, and sank back again without a word and without the slightest change in her expression.

The abbey was immediately obscured by a big new hotel. Boys in white jackets stood in a line on the left-hand side of the road, and indicated with a gesture of the thumb that the Volkswagen was to swing in here.

“What an insane idea,” Reynolds murmured. He had made a reservation
at the hotel where they had stayed before, right in the shadow of the abbey.

At the beginning of the causeway, three or four cars were stopped and their occupants had got out with their cameras. He got out too, with the children’s Hawkeye, and had to wait several minutes for an unobstructed view. Then he got back in the car and drove the rest of the way.

At the last turn in the road, he exclaimed, “Oh,
no
!” In a huge parking lot to the right of the causeway there were roughly a thousand cars shining in the sunlight. “It’s just like the World’s Fair,” he said. “We’ll probably have to stand in line an hour and forty minutes to see the tide come in.”

A traffic policeman indicated with a movement of his arm that they were to swing off to the right and down into the parking lot. Reynolds stopped and explained that they were spending the night here and had been told they were to leave the car next to the outer gate. The policeman’s arm made exactly the same gesture it had made before.

“He’s a big help,” Reynolds said as he drove on, and Trip said, “There’s a car just like ours.”

“Why, so it is,” Dorothy said. “It must be the people who passed us.”

“And there’s another,” Trip said.

“Where?” Alison said, and put on her glasses.

They left the luggage in the locked Volkswagen and joined the stream of pilgrims. Reynolds stopped and paid for the parking ticket. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw the sand flats extending out into the bay as far as the eye could see, wet, shining, and with long, thin, bright ribbons of water running through them, just as he remembered. The time before, there were nine sightseeing buses lined up on the causeway, from which he knew before he ever set foot in it, that Mont-Saint-Michel was not going to be the earthly paradise. This time he didn’t even bother to count them. Thirty, forty, fifty, what difference did it make. But the little stream that flowed right past the outer gate?
Gone.…
Was it perhaps not a stream at all but a ditch with tidal water in it? Anyway, it had been just too wide to jump over, and a big man in a porter’s uniform had picked Dorothy up in his arms and, wading through the water, set her down on the other side. Then he came back for Reynolds. There was no indication now that there had ever been a stream here that you had to be carried across as if you were living in the time of Chaucer.

The hotels, restaurants, cafés, Quimper shops, and souvenir shops (the abbey on glass ashtrays, on cheap china, on armbands, on felt pennants;
the abbey in the form of lead paperweights three or four inches high) had survived. The winding street of stairs was noisier, perhaps, and more crowded, but not really any different. The hotel was expecting them. Reynolds left Dorothy and the children in the lobby and went back to the car with a porter, who was five foot three or four at the most and probably not old enough to vote. Sitting on the front seat of the Volkswagen, he indicated the road they were to take out of the big parking lot, up over the causeway and down into the smaller parking lot by the outer gate, where Reynolds had tried to go in the first place. The same policeman waved them on, consistency being not one of the things the French are nervous about. With the help of leather straps the porter draped the big suitcases and then the smaller ones here and there around his person, and would have added the hand luggage if Reynolds had let him. Together they staggered up the cobblestone street, and Reynolds saw to his surprise that Dorothy and the children were sitting at a café table across from the entrance to the hotel.

“It was too hot in there,” she said, “and there was no place to sit down. I ordered an apéritif. Do you want one?”

And the luggage? What do I do with that?
his eyebrows asked, for she was descended from the girl in the fairy tale who said, “Just bring me a rose, dear Father,” and he was born in the dead center of the middle class, and they did not always immediately agree about what came before what. He followed the porter inside and up a flight of stairs. The second floor was just as he remembered it, and their room was right down there — where he started to go, until he saw that the porter was continuing up the stairs. On the floor above he went out through a door, with Reynolds following, to a wing of the hotel that didn’t exist eighteen years before. It was three stories high and built in the style of an American motel, and the rooms that had been reserved for them were on the third floor — making four stories in all that they had climbed. The porter never paused for breath, possibly because any loss of momentum would have stopped him in his tracks. Reynolds went to a window and opened it. The view from this much higher position was of rooftops and the main parking lot and, like a line drawn with a ruler, the canal that divides Brittany and Normandy. He felt one of the twin beds (no sag in the middle) and then inspected the children’s room and the bathroom. It was all very modern and comfortable. It was, in fact, a good deal more comfortable than their old room had been, though he had remembered that room with pleasure all these years. The flowered wallpaper and the flowered curtains had been simply god-awful together, and leaning out of the window they had
looked straight down on the heads of the tourists coming and going in the Grande Rue — tourists from all over Europe, by their appearance, their clothes, and by the
variety
of languages they were speaking. There were even tourists from Brittany, in their
pardon
costumes. And they all seemed to have the same expression on their faces, as if it were an effect of the afternoon light. They looked as if they were soberly aware that they had come to a dividing place in their lives and nothing would be quite the same for them after this. And all afternoon and all evening there was the sound of the omelette whisk. In a room between the foyer of the hotel and the dining room, directly underneath them, a very tall man in a chef’s cap and white apron stood beating eggs with a whisk and then cooking them in a long-handled skillet over a wood fire in an enormous open fireplace.