Scruples (8 page)

It has always been understood that a young male French aristocrat, without a family fortune, must marry money. It is a sacred obligation to his parents, to himself, and to the future of his family. And it is the only way to hold on to the land. A French aristocrat, female, without money, who does not obtain it through marriage, has an equal obligation to maintain certain forms, certain ways of dealing with the world, until she literally starves to death, although it is hoped that it will not come to that.

La Comtesse Lilianne de Vertdulac had lost everything in World War II except her sense of form, her courage, her style, and her kindness. Her style was a mixture of innate taste stripped down to its simplest expression and a personal evasiveness, a quality of holding herself back, eluding intimacy, which gave her that fascination that forthcoming people never inspire. Even her basic kindness had been all but extinguished by the yearly succession of paying guests, young and usually American, who provided the bulk of her livelihood. She was more than pleased to be able to shelter, for the next year, Miss Honey Winthrop, about whom Lady Molly had written so warmly. The girl obviously had only the very best connections, indeed she seemed to be related to most of Old Boston quite the way in which Lilianne was related to most of the Faubourg St.-Germain.

The tiny, blond Frenchwoman of forty-four lived in an apartment on Boulevard Lannes, facing the Bois de Boulogne. Through complications in the rent freeze of the war years, which still had not been untangled, she and her two teen-aged daughters were able to afford to live in this exceedingly fashionable part of Paris, although she had not been able to spend any money on her apartment since 1939. It was rather grand, if very shabby, with high ceilings flooded by sunlight. The apartment was pervaded by a kind of intensely feminine coziness that is found only in homes where no man lives or is catered to.

Madame La Comtesse herself came to the door when Honey arrived. Normally her cook, Louise, who lived in a room in the attic of the house, answered the bell when they expected guests, and Lilianne remained curled in the deep, worn cushions of the couch in the salon until the guests were shown in, rising only for an older woman, but today she wanted to show marked hospitality.

Her smile of welcome remained fixed, but her eyes widened in shocked astonishment and quick disgust as she shook hands with Honey. Never, no never, had she seen such an immense girl, She was a baby hippopotamus—it was incredible, a disgrace. How could this have happened? And what would she do with her? Where would she hide her? As she led Honey into the salon where tea was waiting, she tried to comprehend this unexpected horror. Although Lilianne had never expected to spend her life taking in paying guests, she nevertheless prided herself on the fact that any girl who spent a year in her home left it improved in two ways: first with a command of French as good as the girl’s brain and her application would allow and, even more important, with a sense of style, absorbed from the very air of Paris, which she never would have acquired if she had not had this opportunity.
But with this girl?

As they sat down in front of the tea tray she spoke with perfect calm in spite of her emotions.

“Welcome to my home, Honey. I shall call you Honey, no? and you may just call me Madame.”

“Please, Madame, would you call me by my real name?” Honey had rehearsed this speech over and over in the plane from New York to Paris, “Honey is just an old, childish nickname and I’ve outgrown it. My real first name is Wilhelmina, but I would like to be called Billy.”

“Why not?” It was certainly more appropriate, she thought, for such fat rendered the girl almost sexless. “Then, Billy, this is the last time we shall speak to each other in English. After I’ve shown you your room and you have put away your clothes, it will be almost time for dinner. We dine early in this house—at seven-thirty—because my daughters have a great deal of homework every day. Now, from dinner on we will speak French to you all the time. Louise, the cook, knows no English at all. It will be difficult, I know, but it is the only possible way for you to learn.” Lilianne always made this condition plain to each of her new girls. “You may feel very foolish and embarrassed at first, but unless we do this you will never learn to speak French as it should be spoken. We will not be laughing at you, but we will correct you constantly—so do not become angry when that happens. If we allow you to continue to make the same mistake, we will not be doing our duty.” Lilianne realized that her remarks had almost no hope of penetrating Billy’s mind. In spite of her best efforts, her paying guests spent their days and often their nights with the American students who flooded Paris, and never gave themselves a chance to truly sink into the language. Apparently they had all “studied French” in school. In her opinion every one of them had been abominably taught and they usually remained content to stumble along in ignorance.

Billy’s eyes were shining. Instead of the trapped look that usually came over the faces of pensionnaires when she made this announcement, this disaster of a girl looked eager. Well, Lilianne mentally shrugged her shoulders, perhaps she would turn out to be somewhat serious. It was certainly the most one could hope for, considering. In any case she would not be like the girl from Texas who treated the apartment like a hotel and asked for fresh sheets three times a week, or the girl from New York who complained about there being no shower because she wanted to wash her hair every day, or the girl from New Orleans who got pregnant and had to be sent home, or the girl from London who brought four trunks, demanded dozens of extra hangers, and actually had the idea that she could share Lilianne’s closet.

The domestic arrangements practiced at the home of the Comtesse de Vertdulac were simple. Louise did all the housework, all the cooking, all the laundry, and all the shopping. She worked an eighteen-hour day and was perfectly content. She had been with her Comtesse all her working life, and neither she nor Lilianne thought there was anything unusual in this arrangement that was so mutually agreeable.

Every morning, long before breakfast, Louise went to the shops on the Rue de la Pompe and purchased the food for the day. She bought exactly what was necessary and not one item more. The kitchen did not contain a refrigerator. Anything, such as milk or cheese, that had to be kept cool was put into the
garde-manger
, a ventilated box built into the kitchen window, which would then be locked.

Louise was a skilled manager, particularly adept at finding bargains in the market, a well-known figure to the shopkeepers who had long ago stopped trying to sell her anything but the best quality at the lowest possible price. Even so, food accounted for at least 35 percent of the family’s budget. Lilianne de Vertdulac knew, every day, exactly how much money Louise had spent because she doled it out from her purse the night before and took back all the change when Louise returned. It was not a lack of trust in her servant that accounted for these measures but the simple fact that the money she received from the pension she charged her paying guest was the money on which her entire household lived. The rent she received from her small country house, in Deauville, paid only for her clothes and the girls’ school, but food and rent and all other necessities came from taking in a pensionnaire.

Billy put away her modest supply of clothes, mostly skirts and blouses in dark colors, and stood at the balcony of her room, inhaling with almost beatific rapture the smell of Paris of which she had read meaningless descriptions so many times. Now she understood why authors who should have known better had been tempted to do the undoable, to convey a smell through words. From her narrow balcony she could actually see the chestnut trees and the long grass of the Bois. The room itself was simply decorated, with a high, lumpy bed covered in a worn spread of faded yellow damask and boasting a fat bolster covered in the same material. Down the hall was a toilet, in a tiny tiled room of its own, with a pull chain and thin, slick, pale brown toilet paper. In her own room she had a sink with a little mirror above it. When she wanted a bath, she had been told that she must inform the Comtesse who would then make her own bathroom available.

Excitement had made her almost forget food, but when the rap on her door came to announce dinner she realized she was as hungry as she’d ever been in her life. She entered the salon, one end of which was given over to a small, oval dining table, and sniffed expectantly. Unlike dining rooms in Boston and at Emery, there was no smell of cooking in the air.

The Comtesse’s two daughters were waiting to be presented to Billy. Each of them shook hands and said a few words in French, with grave courtesy. Billy had never seen girls quite like them. Although Danielle, the younger, was sixteen and Solange, the elder, was seventeen, they both looked as young as American girls of fourteen. They had almost identical, pale, pointed, stern little faces with severely perfect features, long, straight blond hair parted in the middle, and pale gray eyes. They were dressed alike in their convent uniforms—pleated dark blue skirts and pale blue blouses; they wore no makeup at all and they gave off an aura of untouched dignity, like protected English schoolchildren. There seemed to be nothing French about them.

A creaking, rumbling noise growing closer announced that Louise was wheeling in an ancient double-decker wooden cart from the kitchen, which was located at the far end of the L-shaped apartment. Billy was seated next to the Comtesse, who carefully ladled out a thin, delicious vegetable soup, first to herself, then to Billy and then to each girl. After the soup there were soft-boiled eggs in the shell, one apiece, followed by a large green salad with one thin slice of cold ham for each of them. After each course either Solange or Danielle would clear the plates and stack them neatly on the cart. A basket of bread stood on the table, but Billy realized that no one was eating it yet and she didn’t want to be the first to start. In any case, she discovered to her incredulous terror that she wasn’t sure of the right way to say “Pass the bread, please” in French. Was it
“Voulez-vous me passer le pain?”
or was it
“Passez le pain, s’il vous plaît?”
It seemed absolutely important not to say it unless she said it correctly. The French language that Billy had read and written so confidently at Emery didn’t seem to have the slightest connection with the sounds she heard swirling and dipping and bubbling and hissing around the table as the girls talked to their mother. One word in a hundred sounded vaguely familiar, but soon any comprehension she had disappeared in her growing panic, her realization that somehow, somewhere, she had made an incredible mistake. If this was French, she did not speak it. Not at all.

After the salad plates were cleared, fresh plates were put on the table and Madame placed a small platter in front of her own place. On it was displayed a small cheese sitting on a mat of woven straw and surrounded charmingly with fresh leaves. The Comtesse judiciously cut herself a slice and passed the platter to Billy. Billy cut herself a slice exactly as large as Madame’s, too intimidated to take more. The bread was finally passed and a round crock of butter, a very small crock, although a pretty design was stamped into the butter. The cheese was not passed a second time. Dessert was a bowl of four navel oranges, which the girls and Madame all peeled adroitly with their knives in a way Billy had never seen before but imitated center of the table, but only Madame helped herself to a glass. The girls drank water and so did Billy, who had never been offered wine at a meal.

After dinner Danielle and Solange whisked away the cart, and Louise brought in a tray holding two demitasse cups and a pot of café-filtre. She put it on the coffee table in front of the couch in the salon, and the Comtesse waved her hand to Billy in indication that she was to join her there, while the girls left to do more homework. So far Billy had not uttered more than four words. When a question was put to her by either of the girls she just smiled broadly—and, she felt, stupidly—shook her head and said, miming a combination of sadness and confusion,
“Je ne comprends pas.”
Neither of them showed the faintest surprise. They had lived with a parade of voiceless, speechless strangers all their lives and they only bothered to speak to them to show a polite interest. If Billy had answered them they would have been amazed.

After an abashedly silent five minutes of drinking strong black coffee sweetened with a big, brownish lump of blessed sugar, Billy ventured a timid
“Bonsoir”
and retreated to her room. She was ferociously hungry. That one lump of Sugar had started a craving for sweets that she assuaged only slightly with the last two chocolate bars in her handbag. However, she remembered, before she reached utter despair, that the French eat their main meal at lunch, not dinner, so tonight’s meal was just the equivalent of lunch. But still, why were there no second helpings, why were the portions so incredibly tiny—
one
boiled egg,
one
slice of ham, for God’s sake!—and why did everyone take such a small piece of cheese? Meditating on this, thinking of bowls and bowls of Cream of Wheat with butter, sugar, and raisins in it, she finally fell asleep.

Had she but known it, the dinner she had just eaten was to live in her memory as one of the largest evening meals she would consume under the roof of Lilianne de Vertdulac. The vegetable soup and the slice of ham had been special festive touches to welcome the new guest.

Billy soon discovered the normal way in which the Comtesse, her daughters, and Billy herself were to eat. Breakfast consisted of two
tartines
, slices of toasted French bread cut on the bias and covered with a thin scraping of butter and jam, accompanied by a large bowl, like a deep soup bowl without a handle, filled half with hot coffee, half with hot milk. For lunch there was always a plate of soup made of a puree of the vegetables left over from the day before with a few spoonfuls of milk added just before it was served, followed by one fair-sized slice, sometimes two, of roast veal, lamb, or beef, all lean, tasty, and inexpensive cuts Billy had never seen before. The meat was accompanied by a small handful of perfect shoestring potatoes and a sprig of parsley. Next came a separate, generous plate of hot vegetables, marvelously fresh, served steamed, with a faint gloss of butter sometimes visible. Then the small cheese, each of which was expected to last for two days, a large lettuce salad, and a bowl of fruit. Dinner normally consisted of an egg, in one form or another, cheese, salad, and fruit. Billy was getting about eleven hundred calories a day, most of them from lean protein and fresh fruit and vegetables.