Beautiful Girl Page 5

  Winter Rain

  Whenever in the final unendurable weeks of winter, I am stricken, as now, to the bone with cold—it is raining, the furnace has somehow failed—I remember that winter of 1947–1948 in Paris, when I was colder than ever in my life, when it always rained, when everything broke down. That was the winter of strikes: GRÈVE GÉNÉRALE, in large strange headlines. And everyone struck: Métro, garbage, water, electricity, mail—all these daily necessities were at one time or another with difficulty forgone. Also, that was the first winter of American students—boys on the G.I. bill and girls with money from home, Bennington meeting Princeton in the Montana Bar. There were cellar clubs to which French friends guided one mysteriously: on the Rue Dauphine the Tabu, with a band; the Mephisto, just off the Boulevard Saint-Germain; and further out on Rue Blomet the wicked Bal Nègre, where one danced all night to West Indian music, danced with everyone and drank Pernod. It was a crowded, wild, excited year.

  I think of friends of that time—I have kept up with none of them, certainly not with Bruno, nor Laura, nor Joe, not even with Mme. Frenaye. And it gloomily occurs to me that they may all be dead, Bruno in some violent Italian way, Laura and Joe in Hollywood, and Mme. Frenaye of sheer old age, on the Rue de Courcelles, “tout près,” as she used to say, “du Parc Monceau.” Though we parted less than friends, it is she of whom I think most often.

  Madame and I really parted, as from the first I should have known we would, over money. And, more than I regret the loss of our connection, I regret the sordidness of its demise. But I should have known; the process was gradual but clear. As was the fact that I, and not she, would lose face in any conflict.

  To begin with, she extracted from me an enormous amount of money for permission to live at the cold end of the long drafty hall in her flat. Of course I didn’t have to take the room, or to accept the arrangement at all, but from the first I was seduced. I had heard, from friends, that a Mme. Frenaye might be willing to take a nice American girl student into her charming home. I inquired further, and was invited to tea. It was raining dreadfully, even in September, and I wore, all wet and shivering, a yellow summer coat and summer dress since, probably owing to a strike somewhere, my trunk of winter clothes had not arrived. The street seemed impossibly gray, chilled and forbidding, but the central room of the flat into which I was ushered by Madame was warm and graceful. There were exquisite white Louis XVI chairs, a marvelous muted blue Persian rug, a mantel lined with marble above a fireplace in which a small fire blazed prettily.

  Mme, Frenaye was a great goddess of a woman. She must have been sixty, or even seventy—I was never sure—but she was very tall and she held herself high; she was Junoesque indeed. She still mourned her husband, dead five years, and wore only black, but her effect was vivid. Her hair was bright gold and she wore it in a thick crowning braid across the waves that rose from her brow. Her eyes were very blue, capable of a great spectacle of innocence or charming guile, and she wore mascara heavily on her long lashes. She had dimples and perfect white teeth.

  We took tea from a beautiful table before the fire, and we talked about Antibes, where I had spent the summer. Mme. Frenaye poured a little rum from a pretty porcelain jug into the tea, and said, “I would not have thought of going to the Riviera in the summer. So crowded then. But of course you are so young, you have not been to France before.”

  She seemed prepared to forgive, and I did not want to protest that I had had a very good time.

  She went on, “But a winter in Paris, there you have chosen wisely, this time you will not regret your choice. Theatre, opera, it is all here for you, the best in the world. And of course the Sorbonne, since you have chosen to study.” She was vastly amused to learn that the name of my course at the Sorbonne was Cours de la civilisation française. “But you will spend the rest of your life—” she said, and I agreed.

  We talked, and drank our tea, and ate small delicious cakes, until it occurred to me that I had perhaps stayed too long and so rose to leave. I think I had really forgotten that I had come about a room, or perhaps such a crass consideration seemed inappropriate in Louis XVI surroundings. Instead, on the way out I admired a painting. Mme. Frenaye said, “Ah, yes, and it has a gross value.” I translate literally to give the precise effect of her words on me. My French was not good, and I thought I had misheard her, or not known an idiom. I would not be warned.

  Then, at the door, while helping me with my still damp yellow coat, she said that she had heard that I needed a pleasant place to live, that she would be willing to let me live there, that she would serve me breakfast and dinner, and she named an outrageous number of francs. Even translated into dollars it was high. I was so stunned by her whole method that I accepted on the spot, and it was agreed that I would bring my things on the following Monday. That I did not even ask to see the room is evidence of my stupor; I must have thought it would be exactly like the salon.

  And sometimes now I wonder whether she had any idea that I would accept; or made up that ridiculous figure simply to let me off. And I wonder too if I did not want to prove that I could do better than yellow coats and summer dresses in a cold September rain; behind me there were sound American dollars, and, as my father would have said, more where they came from. So, from our combined dubious motives, we were joined, to live and eat and talk together throughout those difficult historic months from September until February, until our private war became visible and manifest, and I left.

  The room was actually not as bad as it might have been, taken on such dazzled faith. It was not large, nor warm, nor did it contain a desk or a bookcase; however, the bed was regally gilded and huge and soft, and I slept under comforting layers of down, between pink linen sheets. Madame sighed, her beautiful eyes misted as she showed the bed to me and I felt badly about so depriving her until I realized that her own small bed-sitting room had been astutely chosen as the warmest room in the house. And the grand bed would not fit into it.

  When I said such things to Laura and Joe, later to Bruno, as we hunched over beers in the steamy Café de Flore or the Deux Magots, they reasonably exclaimed, “But why on earth do you stay there?” (Laura and Joe were Marxists, and I was acceptable to them partly because my arrangement with Mme. Frenaye left me with virtually no money at all.) In any case I did not think that they would feel the charm of Mme. Frenaye, and so I would say to them, “But the food is fantastic, and see how my French is improving.”

  Both of these things were quite true. I have never since tasted anything to compare with her poisson normand, that beautifully flaking fat white fish baked with tiny mushrooms, tiny shrimps and mussels in white wine. I have the most vivid sensual memories of her crisp green salads. I would arrive cold and usually wet from my long Métro trek, and hurriedly unwrap myself from my coat just in time to enter that small warm room where she had placed the white-clothed table. The room was full of marvelous delicate smells of hot food, and Madame in passage from the kitchen would greet me. “Bon soir, Patience. Mais vous avez froid. Asseyez-vous, je viens tout de suite. Oh, mais j’ai oublié l’essentiel—” and she was off to fetch the decanter of wine.

  And my French did improve. She knew no English, and we talked animatedly throughout those months of dinners. She was endlessly curious about America, though she pretended to disbelieve half of what I told her. “But, Patience, surely you exaggerate,” she would chide, in a tone of amused tolerance. Sometimes, fresh from Joe’s lectures, I became heavily sociological. She listened intently, nodded appropriately. Only when I hit on American anti-Semitism did I strike some chord in her—she found it absolutely incomprehensible. She adored American Jews. Her husband had been a cotton merchant, and in his business the only Americans he met were Jewish or from Texas. And the Texans, according to Madame, were appalling: they ordered the most expensive champagne or cognac and then got drunk on it. The Jewish families whom she met were quite another story. “Tellement cultivées, tellement sensibles.” Her most admired American friends, the
Berkowitzes (“Ah, les Berkowitz”), went to museums daily, to the theatre and the opera; the Texans never. She felt that “les Berkowitz” too squandered their money but in less visible and offensive ways. One of her most loved stories was of going shopping for a brassière, a soutien-gorge, with Marion Berkowitz. “C’était tout, tout petit,” she would say, with her thumb and forefinger gesturing a pinch of nothing, “et ça coûtait tellement cher!” This contradiction never ceased to amaze and delight her.

  The truth was that I liked Mme. Frenaye. I admired her beauty and her charm; and her scorn, her assumption of superiority to the world, comforted me since I felt that she counted me on her side. Moreover, I simply could not imagine a scene in which I told her that I was going to leave. I think that if I had not met Bruno, near Christmas, during one long night in the Bal Nègre, where I had reluctantly gone with Laura and Joe, I would have lived on the Rue de Courcelles until June, when I took that huge and final boat for New York.

  My memory of Bruno is also involved with the cold: I see the two of us clinging together in a garish white-lit Métro entrance, because it was too cold outside, and our partings were endless and all unendurable. We walked together. I remember my ungloved hand pressing against his, together jammed deeply into his shabby tweed pocket, as we walked past steamed bright windows in the iron cold, stopping to kiss.

  Even Bruno seems legendary to me now; both our romantic intensity and the facts of his life sound mythic. His father was an Italian anti-Fascist who had left Italy in the Twenties. Bruno was born in Toulouse, and spent his fifteenth birthday in a Vichy concentration camp, his sixteenth in a similar camp in Italy. He had fought with the Maquis, and with guerrilla fighters in the Italian Alps. He had no scars nor any limp to show for all of this; he was tall and sturdy, smooth-skinned, clear-eyed as any innocent American boy—in fact he was often taken for a G.I., which amused him and privately annoyed me. He studied law in Paris, and lived with relatives out in the 14th arrondissement. Thus in the cold we had no place to go, and between partings we dreamed of a furnished room, warm and light, anywhere in Paris. I can no longer remember the substance of our quarrels, nor of our talk, but both went on forever, punctuating each other, and all the time our eyes held together, our hands touched.

  Out of some misguided sense of duty I spent Christmas Day that year with Madame rather than with Bruno. And it was a bad day. Madame was far from being at her best. She sniffed deprecatingly at my gift of a tiny bottle of perfume from Worth, telling me she had once calculated the contents of all the bottles on her dressing table and it came to more than two liters. “You can imagine,” she said, “how much that would be worth.” She had given me a pair of felt slippers from Trois Quartiers, and they were not very pretty.

  We rallied somewhat at dinner. There was an incredible roast chicken, an unheard-of luxury in Paris that year. But then, with the token glass of brandy, Mme. Frenaye grew sad again, and spoke of the death of her husband. “Over and over he said to me, ‘Ah, how good you are,’ ” and her great eyes misted. I was wildly impatient to go; I had promised to meet Bruno at the Flore at nine. I wanted to hear of no other love, no death.

  That night we fought because I lived so far away. Bruno found incomprehensible my refusal to move. “On purpose you isolate yourself in your gray prison,” he said. (Once he had accompanied me home, had seen from the outside the fortress of apartments on the Rue de Courcelles.) He said, his clear blue eyes near mine, “How much more time we would have if you even lived near the Sorbonne—I think you don’t want to be with me—you would rather stay safely beside your little fire.” I protested this violently, but in a sense it was perfectly true. I was afraid of him; life with Madame, though difficult, seemed safer than the exposure of a room alone.

  But at the same time that I resisted Bruno I found my fortress more and more impossible. I was extremely tense; the most petty annoyances grew large. I once calculated that with all the small sums of money which Madame had borrowed from time to time to tip porters, buy stamps, I could have bought Bruno a gaudy present.

  And there was the matter of my CARE packages. My anxious mother sent them punctually each month, thus assuring herself that I would never starve. I had written and asked her not to. Their arrival embarrassed me; I was sure the porter who carried them upstairs knew what they were, and thought of his own hungry family. I wanted badly to give them to him, but some misplaced shyness held me back. Madame adored all that American food. She appropriated each package and opened it on the marble-topped kitchen table. She exclaimed over, and later used, the boxes of cake mix, and she devised a marvelous method of stuffing baked potatoes with the liver pâtté that came in large cans. The pancake mix she especially loved. “Ah, les crêpes américaines,” she would cry out lovingly, expressing her whole indulgent fondness for the young rich crazy country of dollars and handsome brave G.I.s, of fantastic machines that did everything, of her cherished Berkowitzes and of me.

  But in my new mood of sullen resentment I protested her appropriation. How dare she charge me ruinous rates for food and lodging and then accept such a bulk of food from my mother? In silence and secrecy my list of grievances against her mounted; that they were petty and degrading of course made them more unbearable. Also that I lacked the courage to say anything.

  It was perfectly appropriate to that year that my dilemma was finally resolved by a strike. And by Bruno.

  All during January, Bruno snarled and complained at my living arrangements. I remember an afternoon in the upstairs part of the Flore, where it was always warm and with luck one could stay for hours, seated on the plaid-covered banquettes, without having to order anything. We had, I remember, not enough money between us for hot chocolate—which we both felt could have saved the afternoon. Unkindly, Bruno reminded me that if I lived in the Quarter, in a cheap room, I could now be making hot chocolate and serving it in privacy. There was always a sort of European practicality about him—even in love, I thought—and in the phrase betrayed how American was my own romanticism. He gave a sense of the pressure of time, of destiny, as though along his way he could not be troubled with incidents of geography and money. By the end of the afternoon we had agreed never to meet again, and I wept conspicuously all the long Métro ride from Odéon to Place Péreire.

  The next week was unendurable. There was a violent cold black rain. The heat failed again in Madame’s long flat, the fires spluttered and would not burn. Wholly miserable, I mourned my forever lost love.

  Then came the mail strike. No letters at all, from anywhere. The papers described mountains of paper piled fantastically on post-office floors. I was completely dependent on letters from home for money, and now I could not pay Madame on the day when my fee came due. At dinner I tried to mention it casually to her. Much in the spirit of the times, I said, “After all, this strike can’t go on forever.”

  But Madame’s spirit was not at all with the times. “Strike or not, I have to shop for groceries,” she said with uncharacteristic terseness. I was totally upset; life, I felt, was too much for me; I had no resources. And even Madame, stronger and wiser and infinitely more charming, fell down. Apropos of nothing she told me again the story of Marion Berkowitz and the buying of the soutien-gorge, but the mention of high prices made us both nervous and we failed to be amused.

  That night, hunched frozen between the pink linen sheets, I decided that if I did not see Bruno again I would die.

  At breakfast my final long-delayed scene with Mme. Frenaye took place, over cups of powdered American coffee from my latest CARE package. I found that I had to say everything all at once. “I have to move,” I said. “It’s very nice here but I simply can’t afford it any longer. And really, you know, no one pays so much for a pension, I mean even in America this would be considered high. And also this is too far from my classes at the Sorbonne—you remember during the Métro strike I couldn’t even get there.”

  Madame listened to this somewhat with the air of a teacher of speech. And indeed
it was a tribute to the French I had learned with her that I was able to get it out. She seemed, on the whole, to approve both my eloquence and my logic, for at the end she said, “Certainement,” in a final tone.

  I needed her to argue with me, and I added defiantly, “I want to live in the Latin Quarter.”

  “Oui, le Quartier Latin.” But she was not thinking about my proposed life on the Left Bank; her tone was completely neutral. And hearing it I realized suddenly that as far as she was concerned I had already gone. Also, and this was doubly infuriating, I realized that she had undoubtedly known for some time that I would go. Probably from that first wet day when we took our tea by her pretty fire she had known that I would not last the year. Any concession on her part—if she had said she could wait for the rent—might have made me weaken. But she was far too realistic and too economical for any emotional waste.

  And so I packed that afternoon in a fury of frustration. I felt that I had been taken, conned out of my moment of righteous defiance by some ageless European trick of charm. As I hunted for shoe bags, I thought furiously that she had completely turned the tables. I was the one who had ended by being mercenary, petty.

  She came to the door later, and asked perfunctorily if there was anything that she could do to help, and I wanted to shout “No!” at her, but I did not; I only muttered negatively. She said, “Well, in that case I will say au revoir, Patience, et bonne chance.”

  We shook hands at the door to my erstwhile bedroom, and I said that I would call her when I was settled, and she said, “But please do,” and smiled with her beautiful wise blue eyes and was gone. I had no true parting scene.