All the Days and Nights (9 page)

“Well, what he means is one thing,” Mildred Geliert said, her eyes fever-bright. “And what he does is just exactly the opposite!” The next time
they
drove out, her intimate friends, to see her, she would have something to tell them that would make them sit up and take notice. It wasn’t enough that Harrison had driven her from the house, forcing her to take refuge out here, in a place with no heat, and fall coming on; that didn’t satisfy him. Now he was going to win the children away from her with expensive gifts, so that in the end he’d have everything and she’d be left stranded, with no place to go and no one to turn to. He’d planned it all out, from the very beginning. That would be his revenge.

“What you aim to do with them? Send them back?” Adah Belle asked, looking at the two boxes she had carried all the way out from town.

“Put this on the trash pile and burn, it,” Mildred Geliert said and left the kitchen.

Outside, under a large oak tree, a little girl of five, her hair in two blond braids, was playing with a strawberry box. She had lined the box with a piece of calico and in it lay a small rubber doll, naked, with a whistle in its stomach. “Now you be quiet,” the little girl said to the doll, “and take your nap or I’ll slap you.”

From her place under the oak tree she watched the colored woman go out to the trash pile with the flat square box, set a match to the accumulation of paper and garbage, and return to the kitchen. The little girl waited a moment and then got up and ran to the fire. She found a stick, pulled the burning box onto the grass, and blew out the flames that were licking at it. Then she ran back to the oak tree with her prize. Part of the linen handkerchief was charred and fell apart in her hands, but the flames hadn’t reached the lavender butterfly. The little girl hid the handkerchief under the piece of calico and looked around for a place to put the strawberry box.

When she came into the house, five minutes later, her eyes were blank and innocent. She had learned that much in a year and a half. Her eyes could keep any secret they wanted to. And the box was safe under the porch, where her mother wouldn’t dare look for it, because of the snake.

I
N
a rented Renault, with exactly as much luggage as the backseat would hold, Ray and Ellen Ormsby were making a little tour of France. It had so far included Vézelay, the mountain villages of Auvergne, the roses and Roman ruins of Provence, and the gorges of the Tarn. They were now on their way back to Paris by a route that was neither the most direct nor particularly scenic, and that had been chosen with one thing in mind — dinner at the Hôtel du Domino in Périgueux. The Richardsons, who were close friends of the Ormsbys in America, had insisted that they go there. “The best dinner I ever had in my entire life,” Jerry Richardson had said. “Every course was something with truffles.” “And the dessert,” Anne Richardson had said, “was little balls of various kinds of ice cream in a beautiful basket of spun sugar with a spun-sugar bow.” Putting the two statements together, Ray Ormsby had persisted in thinking that the ice cream also had truffles in it, and Ellen had given up trying to correct this impression.

At seven o’clock, they were still sixty-five kilometers from Périgueux, on a winding back-country road, and beginning to get hungry. The landscape was gilded with the evening light. Ray was driving. Ellen read aloud to him from the
Guide Gastronomique de la France
the paragraph on the Hôtel du Domino:
“Bel et confortable établissement à la renommée bien assise et que Mme. Lasgrezas dirige avec beaucoup de bonheur. Grâce à un maître queux qualifé, vous y ferez un repas de grande classe qui vous sera servi dans une élégante salle à manger ou dans un délicieux jardin d’été.…”

As they drove through village after village, they saw, in addition to the usual painted Cinzano and Rasurel signs, announcements of the
spécialité
of the restaurant of this or that Hôtel des Sports or de la Poste or du Lion d’Or — always with truffles. In Montignac, there were so many of
these signs that Ellen said anxiously, “Do you think we ought to eat
here
?”

“No,” Ray said. “Périgueux is the place. It’s the capital of Périgord, and so it’s bound to have the best food.”

Outside Thenon, they had a flat tire — the seventh in eight days of driving — and the casing of the spare tire was in such bad condition that Ray was afraid to drive on until the inner tube had been repaired and the regular tire put back on. It was five minutes of nine when they drove up before the Hôtel du Domino, and they were famished. Ray went inside and found that the hotel had accommodations for them. The car was driven into the hotel garage and emptied of its formidable luggage, and the Ormsbys were shown up to their third-floor room, which might have been in any plain hotel anywhere in France. “What I’d really like is the roast chicken stuffed with truffles,” Ellen said from the washstand. “But probably it takes a long time.”

“What if it does,” Ray said. “We’ll be eating other things first.”

He threw open the shutters and discovered that their room looked out on a painting by Dufy — the large, bare, open square surrounded by stone buildings, with the tricolor for accent, and the sky a rich, stained-glass blue. From another window, at the turning of the stairs on their way down to dinner, they saw the delicious garden, but it was dark, and no one was eating there now. At the foot of the stairs, they paused.

“You wanted the restaurant?” the concierge asked, and when they nodded, she came out from behind her mahogany railing and led them importantly down a corridor. The maître d’hôtel, in a grey business suit, stood waiting at the door of the dining room, and put them at a table for two. Then he handed them the menu with a flourish. They saw at a glance how expensive the dinner was going to be. A waitress brought plates, glasses, napkins, knives, and forks.

While Ellen was reading the menu, Ray looked slowly around the room. The
“élégante salle à manger”
looked like a hotel coffee shop. There weren’t even any tablecloths. The walls were painted a dismal shade of off-mustard. His eyes came to rest finally on the stippled brown dado a foot from his face. “It’s a perfect room to commit suicide in,” he said, and reached for the menu. A moment later he exclaimed, “I don’t see the basket of ice cream!”

“It must be there,” Ellen said, “Don’t get so excited.”

“Well, where? Just show me!”

Together they looked through the two columns of desserts, without
finding the marvel in question. “Jerry and Anne were here several days,” Ellen said. “They may have had it in some other restaurant.”

This explanation Ray would not accept. “It was the same dinner, I remember distinctly.” The full horror of their driving all the way to Périgueux in order to eat a very expensive meal at the wrong restaurant broke over him. In a cold sweat he got up from the table.

“Where are you going?” Ellen asked.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, and left the dining room. Upstairs in their room, he dug the
Guide Michelin
out of a duffel bag. He had lost all faith in the
Guide Gastronomique
, because of its description of the dining room; the person who wrote that had never set eyes on the Hôtel du Domino or, probably, on Périgueux. In the
Michelin
, the restaurant of the Hôtel du Domino rated one star and so did the restaurant Le Montaigne, but Le Montaigne also had three crossed forks and spoons, and suddenly it came to him, with the awful clarity of a long-submerged memory at last brought to the surface through layer after layer of consciousness, that it was at Le Montaigne and not at the Hôtel du Domino that the Richardsons had meant them to eat. He picked up Ellen’s coat and, still carrying the
Michelin
, went back downstairs to the dining room.

“I’ve brought you your coat,” he said to Ellen as he sat down opposite her. “We’re in the wrong restaurant.”

“We aren’t either,” Ellen said. “And even if we were, I’ve
got
to have something to eat. I’m starving, and it’s much too late now to go looking for —”

“It won’t be far,” Ray said. “Come on.” He looked up into the face of the maître d’hôtel, waiting with his pencil and pad to take their order.

“You speak English?” Ray asked.

The maître d’hôtel nodded, and Ray described the basket of spun sugar filled with different kinds of ice cream.

“And a spun-sugar bow,” Ellen said.

The maître d’hôtel looked blank, and so Ray tried again, speaking slowly and distinctly.

“Omelette?”
the maître d’hôtel said.

“No — ice cream!”

“Glace,”
Ellen said.

“Et du sucre,”
Ray said.
“Une —”
He and Ellen looked at each other. Neither of them could think of the word for “basket.”

The maître d’hôtel went over to a sideboard and returned with another menu.
“Le menu des glaces,”
he said coldly.

“Vanille”
they read,
“chocolat, pistache, framboise, fraise, tutti-frutti, praliné …”

Even if the spun-sugar basket had been on the
menu des glaces
(which it wasn’t), they were in too excited a state to have found it — Ray because of his fear that they were making an irremediable mistake in having dinner at this restaurant and Ellen because of the dreadful way he was acting.

“We came here on a pilgrimage,” he said to the maître d’hôtel, in a tense, excited voice that carried all over the dining room. “We have these friends in America who ate in Périgueux, and it is absolutely necessary that we eat in the place they told us about.”

“This is a very good restaurant,” the maître d’hôtel said. “We have many
spécialités. Foie gras truffé, poulet du Périgord noir, truffes sous la cendre —
”

“I know,” Ray said, “but apparently it isn’t the right one.” He got up from his chair, and Ellen, shaking her head — because there was no use arguing with him when he was like this — got up, too. The other diners had all turned around to watch.

“Come,” the maître d’hôtel said, taking hold of Ray’s elbow. “In the lobby is a lady who speaks English very well. She will understand what it is you want.”

In the lobby, Ray told his story again — how they had come to Périgueux because their friends in America had told them about a certain restaurant here, and how it was this restaurant and no other that they must find. They had thought it was the restaurant in the Hôtel du Domino, but since the restaurant of the Hôtel du Domino did not have the dessert that their friends in America had particularly recommended, little balls of ice cream in —

The concierge, her eyes large with sudden comprehension, interrupted him. “You wanted truffles?”

O
UT
on the sidewalk, trying to read the
Michelin
map of Périgueux by the feeble light of a tall street lamp, Ray said, “Le Montaigne has a star just like the Hôtel du Domino, but it also has three crossed forks and spoons, so it must be better than the hotel.”

“All those crossed forks and spoons mean is that it is a very comfortable place to eat in,” Ellen said. “It has nothing to do with the quality of the food. I don’t care where we eat, so long as I don’t have to go back there.”

There were circles of fatigue under her eyes. She was both exasperated
with him and proud of him for insisting on getting what they had come here for, when most people would have given in and taken what there was. They walked on a couple of blocks and came to a second open square. Ray stopped a man and woman.

“Pardon, m’sieur,”
he said, removing his hat.
“Le restaurant La Montagne, c’est par là”
— he pointed —
“ou par là?”

“La Montagne? Le restaurant La Montagne?”
the man said dubiously.
“Je regrette, mais je ne le connais pas.”

Ray opened the
Michelin
and, by the light of the nearest neon sign, the man and woman read down the page.

“Ooh,
LE
Mon
TAIGNE
!”
the woman exclaimed suddenly.

“
LE
Mon
TAIGNE
!”
the man echoed.

“Oui, Le Montaigne,”
Ray said, nodding.

The man pointed across the square.

S
TANDING
in front of Le Montaigne, Ray again had doubts. It was much larger than the restaurant of the Hôtel du Domino, but it looked much more like a bar than a first-class restaurant. And again there were no tablecloths. A waiter approached them as they stood undecided on the sidewalk. Ray asked to see the menu, and the waiter disappeared into the building. A moment later, a second waiter appeared.
“Le menu,”
he said, pointing to a standard a few feet away. Le Montaigne offered many specialties, most of them
truffés
, but not the Richardsons’ dessert.

“Couldn’t we just go someplace and have an ordinary meal?” Ellen said. “I don’t think I feel like eating anything elaborate any longer.”

But Ray had made a discovery. “The restaurant is upstairs,” he said. “What we’ve been looking at is the café, so naturally there aren’t any tablecloths.”

Taking Ellen by the hand, he started up what turned out to be a circular staircase. The second floor of the building was dark. Ellen, convinced that the restaurant had stopped serving dinner, objected to going any farther, but Ray went on, and protesting, she followed him. The third floor was brightly lighted — was, in fact, a restaurant, with white tablecloths, gleaming crystal, and the traditional dark-red plush upholstery, and two or three clients who were lingering over the end of dinner. The maître d’hôtel, in a black dinner jacket, led them to a table and handed them the same menu they had read downstairs.

“I don’t see any roast chicken stuffed with truffles,” Ellen said.

“Oh, I forgot that’s what you wanted!” Ray said, conscience-stricken. “Did they have it at the Domino?”

“No, but they had
poulet noir —
and here they don’t even have that.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “Are you sure they don’t have it here?” He ran his eyes down the list of dishes with truffles and said suddenly. “There it is!”