Bread Upon the Waters (24 page)

“She means well. She’s not as foolish as she seems.”

“Not by a long shot,” Strand said.

“She’s unsure of herself and scared about the rest of her life and she still hasn’t gotten over the death of her husband and she’s uncomfortable with the image of the rich widow and she hides it all by pretending to be frivolous. She’d rather have people laugh at her than be sorry for her. Everybody to his own disguise.”

“What’s yours?” Strand asked.

“I pretend to be a big grown-up serious woman,” Leslie said, “when I really know that I’m only an eighteen-year-old girl who isn’t sure if the boys like me or not.” She laughed, stood and leaned over and kissed the top of his head. “The sun isn’t doing awful things to
your
hair,” she said. “I’m going in and getting ready for lunch.”

But when she went into the house, he heard her playing the piano, something sad and complicated that he couldn’t recognize.

Once, when he had come into their living room while she was playing Bach he had asked what she thought as she sat at the piano. “I hope,” she had said, “I am addressing God.”

Now, sitting in the seaside sun, tanned to a simulacrum of health, frail and escaped from the tubes, machines and flickering dials of the hospital, he listened to the shadowed and unfamiliar music of his wife, who had been counseled to consult downtown gypsies who had warned Linda Roberts of her husband’s end. The stars in their courses, fate in the whirl of planets, death in the corridors…

Christ, he thought, fragile in his comfortable, blanketed chair, what is going to happen to me, what is going to happen to us all?

H
E STOOD AT THE
window of the Hotel Crillon and looked out at the obelisk, the rearing stone horses set in the noble expanse of the Place de la Concorde. In the milky sunlight with the Seine and the Chamber of Deputies in the distance it was almost empty, because, as Hazen had explained when they arrived, everybody left Paris in August. His being there seemed almost miraculous to Strand. When Hazen had told them that he had pressing business in Europe and that a company for which he worked was lending him their corporate Lear jet to cross the ocean and had proposed that since there was room and he detested traveling alone the Strands and Linda Roberts accompanying him, he had immediately said, “Impossible.” He had suggested to Leslie that she make the trip on her own, but Leslie had said she wouldn’t go without him. He had tried to plead illness, but he had been walking a mile a day on the beach and the truth was that he was fit as a man his age who had been at death’s door only six weeks before had a right to feel and Dr. Caldwell had said the trip would do him good. The munificence of Hazen’s offer had embarrassed him but Leslie was so painfully anxious to go that he had felt that it would be cruel to deprive her of the experience. Eleanor, too, had said that it was sinful to reject the gifts that a benevolent fate, in the form of Russell Hazen, was offering him. Women, he had thought, accept favors more naturally than men. He had said yes reluctantly, but now, after a week in Paris, strolling slowly along the streets whose names he had known from his reading since he was a young man and sitting in the sidewalk cafés and making his way slowly through
Figaro
and
Le Monde,
pleased that he still half-remembered his college French, he was grateful that Leslie had insisted.

Actually, there had been no urgent reason to keep him in America for the moment. Mr. Babcock had visited him and, as Hazen had promised, had been a likable, diffident, rather dusty small man. The interview had been tactfully brief, and after he had outlined the nature of Strand’s duties Strand was relieved to see that after all his years of teaching history there was no need to prepare his courses. Leslie had gone to Dunberry to inspect the house they were to live in and pronounced it livable. They needed a car to get to town but Hazen had volunteered the old station wagon and Mr. Ketley had given her lessons in driving it. She was a nervous driver, but she had passed the test at the first attempt and now had her license.

Although from her gallery and her social life Linda knew, as she said, shoals of French, she had advised them that for their first short visit they’d have a better time just seeing what the French had produced and collected during the centuries rather than grappling with the race itself. Taking her advice as wise counsel, they had kept to themselves and escaped the rigors of not quite bilingual socializing. As Linda said, they had been spared the disappointment of comparing what the French had accomplished with what the French had become.

His own sightseeing was limited, as Dr. Caldwell had warned him not to overdo things. His trying to keep up with Leslie and Linda Roberts in their tireless raids on museums, galleries and churches certainly wouldn’t have met with Dr. Caldwell’s approval. He had quickly fallen into a happy and comfortable routine, spending most of the days by himself. He slept late, waking in the beautifully appointed large room to breakfast with Leslie. When she went out to meet Linda Roberts he would go back to bed and sleep for an hour or so. Then, shaved and bathed, he would walk idly, looking at the windows on the Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré or the Rue de la Paix, admiring the lush displays of the shops, but with no itch of acquisition. He would meet with the ladies for lunch at a bistro, listening with amused detachment to their descriptions of the treasures they had viewed that morning, then go back to the hotel for a siesta, unhurried, content to let Paris bustle on without him for a while, before going out again to sit on an open
terrasse
with the newspapers, lulled by the sound of a language he could not quite understand, half-reading, half-watching, with a small smile on his lips, the lively show of pedestrians, approving, without lust, of the pretty, well-turned-out women and girls who passed by, and intrigued by the Japanese tourists who like himself were in Paris for the moment.

Hazen himself appeared only at odd times. He flew to a different city almost every day, Vienna, Madrid, Zurich, Munich, Brussels, trying to disentangle, as he put it, multinational chaos. “You won’t miss me,” he had said to Strand. “Linda knows Paris better than most Frenchmen and you couldn’t have a better guide.”

Among the things that Linda Roberts knew about Paris was where to find the best restaurants that were open in August, and for the first time since his twentieth birthday Strand found himself gaining weight and going to bed nightly a little drunk on French wine.

Hazen had invited Caroline to accompany them, but Caroline with an unexpected newfound seriousness had said she couldn’t interrupt her track training. When she wasn’t at the small animal clinic, she worked out for hours every day with the track coach of the East Hampton high school and had already improved her time in the hundred and was working on the two twenty. “I don’t dare go,” she had said when she was told she was included in Hazen’s invitation. “I have the rest of my life to see Europe, but this is the summer I have to get down to at least ten-five. I couldn’t stand the thought of showing up in Arizona and being an absolute flop and knowing everybody was asking, ‘What is that fat horse doing in the race?’” Hazen had agreed with her and assured Strand that the Ketleys would take perfect care of her. Mr. Ketley had become interested in her new career and had found a book on diet for athletes from which his wife prepared special meals for her.

So it was a man at peace with himself, soberly tasting foreign joys at age fifty, who stood in the late afternoon sunlight at the window of the large room gazing out at the heart of a country he had loved from afar and never hoped to visit.

Hazen arrived that evening from Madrid in time to take them all to dinner at an elegant small restaurant that offered a Burgundian cuisine and the accompanying wines. He was in a holiday mood and joked with the maître d’hôtel about how the prices of La Tache had gone up since he had been there last. Strand didn’t see the wine list but from the figures on the
carte
he could guess that the meal for the four of them would cost well over two hundred dollars. When he had been installed in the grandiose room in the hotel overlooking the Place de la Concorde, he had protested mildly to Hazen about his extravagance. “Nonsense, man,” Hazen had said. “A taste of luxury is part of the education of any intelligent human being. It teaches him how unnecessary it is.”

Easy enough to say, Strand had thought, for a man who has inherited a house with sixteen bedrooms.

Linda Roberts, who had overheard the exchange, said to him later, “Don’t thwart his Santa Claus complex. He gets very cross when he thinks people are trying to keep him from distributing largesse to us peasants.”

The “us” was diplomatically inclusive, Strand thought, and was typical of Linda’s sweetness of nature. His gratitude toward her grew daily as he saw how she devoted all her time to making Leslie’s visit as rewarding as possible and how Leslie’s face glowed when they returned from an afternoon at the galleries or a visit to the studio of a young painter who, according to Linda, was sure to make a name for himself in the future. “If a person couldn’t paint here,” she said, her enthusiasm for the city overcoming her usually well-developed critical sense, “he couldn’t paint anywhere.”

During the meal of
jambon persillé
and
entrecôte marchand de vin
and a hot pear tart, Linda had said, “I’ve crossed the ocean forty-five times and this is the best time of all.” She raised her glass. “I think we should drink a toast to the group that has made it possible.”

So they all drank happily to themselves.

Hazen had drunk copiously and by the time they were at their coffee was expansive and jovial. “I have an idea,” he said. “I’ve got three days before I have to fly to Saudi Arabia and I propose we make the most of it. Leslie, have you ever been to the Loire valley?”

“I’ve barely been to New Haven,” Leslie said, flushed with the wine. She had bought a new dress because Linda had said that a girl couldn’t just
pass
through Paris but had to have something to show for it, and it was very becoming, deep plum-colored and close-fitting and cut daringly low in front, displaying her Hampton honey-colored skin and the fetching outline of her bosom. “My slinky outfit,” she had described it to Strand as she dressed. “I hope you’re not shocked.”

“I am ravished,” Strand had said loyally, not exaggerating by much.

“Why don’t we hire a car tomorrow morning and go take a look at the châteaus and drink some Vouvray?” Hazen said. “And if they’re still putting on the
Son et Lumière
shows, good old Allen can brush up on his French history.”

“At Chenonceaux,” Strand said, showing off a little, “Catherine de Medici used to have her prisoners tortured in the courtyard for the delectation of the ladies and gentlemen who happened to be her guests.”

“The bloody French,” Hazen said.

“From what I’ve read,” said. Strand, “they’ve stopped the practice. At least as a public amusement.”

“Now they do it for profit. To Americans. In business and politics. But give them a century or two,” Hazen said, “and they’ll probably get around to prisoners again. Anyway, they won’t be doing it in the next three days, unless the government happens to change or the Communists take over Orléans. What do you say, can we all be ready by ten o’clock in the morning?”

“Russell,” Linda said, “you’ve been gadding around so much, I think you could stand a day or two of just sitting in one place. Why don’t we all fly down to Nice and go to my place in Mougins? I hear the weather is divine just now and the garden is at its best.”

Hazen scowled. “Linda,” he said, with surprising harshness, “Leslie and Allen haven’t flown three thousand miles just to sit in a damned garden. They can sit in my garden all they want when they get back. Anyway, I told the pilots they could have three days off. They need the rest.”

“We could always fly down to Nice on Air France,” Linda said, “like the rest of the human race. And the Loire valley will be jammed with tourists. We’ll be lucky to find hotel rooms.”

“Let me worry about that,” Hazen said, his voice rising.

“It’d be a shame if Leslie and Allen went back home without seeing my little place in Mougins,” Linda persisted. “They must be getting tired of hotels by now. I know I am. There’s more to France than hotels.”

“It’s a shame that they have to go back to America without seeing Verdun and Mont-St.-Michel and the cathedral in Rouen and the Lascaux cave and a million other things,” Hazen said loudly. “But they only have two weeks. Christ, you’re a stubborn woman, Linda.”

“Leslie, Allen.” Linda turned toward them. “What do you want to do?”

Leslie glanced quickly at Strand, looking for a signal. Strand would have been happier just to remain in Paris doing exactly what he had done since he had arrived there. But the exasperation in Hazen’s voice was not to be ignored. “I’m sure,” he said tactfully, “that Leslie would love to see your house, Linda. But I know she’d regret missing the chance to see the châteaus.”

Leslie gave him a quick, grateful smile.

“There,” Hazen said with satisfaction, “it’s settled. And no more insane arguing, Linda. If there’s one thing I hate it’s arguing when you’re on a holiday. I get enough arguments at the office.”

“Do you ever lose, Russell?” Linda asked gently.

“No.” Hazen laughed, his good spirits restored.

“I’m glad I don’t work for you,” Linda said.

“So am I.” He reached for her hand and kissed it graciously. “So—ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Country clothes.”

“Leslie,” Linda said, “you know what we can do when we get rid of this brute—we can let him fly his toy plane back to America and we can stay on and go down to Mougins on our own and fly back home in our own good time.”

“That would be wonderful,” Leslie said. “But I have to go home and start getting ready to move. We have to be at Dunberry by September tenth. Maybe next year. That would be something to look forward to, wouldn’t it, Allen?”

“I’m looking forward to it already,” Strand said. If there will be a next year, he thought, as he said it.