God Speed the Night (16 page)

Jacques quickened the tempo, whirling again. Everyone shouted approval. Gabrielle tried to pull back, but swinging around, her weight and his in their hands, the harder she pulled, the quicker her feet: they took to the dance with a will of their own.

Marc looked from her to Moissac. He stood with the shoe in his hand, close to his belly, stroking it like something alive. Marc wanted to shout. The monsignor had come to the door with the master of the feast; he stood clasping his own arms, his thumbs beating a slow tempo of disapproval. A cry burst from someone, and Marc looked back to the dancers. Gabrielle gave such a wrench to break her hands free from Jacques’ hold that she slipped, her feet shooting out in front of her. She fell on her back, and Jacques, off-balance too, tried to lunge past her. That Marc would say. He tried; but fell short, his long body collapsing on hers. He put one hand to the back of his head, the clown, and wiggled his fingers. His audience shrieked with delight.

Marc, sick with whatever had frozen him in the chair, forced himself into action. He strode across the room and caught Jacques by the collar. He pulled him up to his knees. Jacques made to collapse again on the girl. The crowd howled. Marc thrust him away, and, again the clown, Jacques propelled himself on his knees, helter-skelter away, bringing laughter from the women. Then without breaking motion, he climbed to his feet and, arms and legs flailing, found his way to Céleste; he whirled her around and into the parlor. Gabrielle rolled over, the impulse to hide her shame. Marc bent down and pulled her up. Then he lifted her in his arms and carried her to the side of the room. The women cooed their mockery.

Gabrielle struggled to be free of his arms, beating at him. He would have liked at that moment to beat her, the anger in him fierce at her, at himself, at all. He put her down hard on her feet.

“Give her some wine, monsieur. Make her drink the wine.” It was the female of the pair Marc had pegged as lovers. She came smiling and fawning and brought a goblet in which the wine sloshed over the brim. The other women pressed in upon them. Why? Marc wondered; it was as though out of some primitive motive they wanted to crush her, to overwhelm her with the thrust of their own sexuality. Gabrielle’s eyes were frantic. Marc thought she would scream.

But Gabrielle took the glass in her hands, steadier now than Marc’s own. She put it to her lips and, eyes closed, drained it even to the dregs.

“EEEeeeeee!” the woman gave a high squeal of pleasure. “She’s a Gascon sure!” And the pressure of the women round them eased off.

Marc caught the glass from Gabrielle’s hand when she might have dropped it. “We’ll go out now,” he shouted, close to her face. “It’s too much and I will not have it at all. No more.”

Gabrielle leaned, one hand on the back of the chair, half-laughing, half-crying. She shook her head that it was not necessary that they go. The music subsided with a crash, Jacques and his partner having careened into the table where the guitarist had perched himself. They all went down together, the musician holding the guitar high over his head to protect it.

Gabrielle tried to compose herself by taking long, deep breaths that she almost choked on. The room was a whirling panorama of faces: not one would stay still in her mind’s eye, not even Marc’s, where the veins in his forehead seemed to be crawling like worms. She covered her own face with one hand, holding still to the chair for support. Slowly the composure came. Opening her eyes she saw first her own breasts where the blouse V’d at her bosom. She gathered it tighter. The dizziness passed. “It’s so much noise,” she said. “I’d forgotten.”

“If you can make it, let us go,” Marc said.

“I’m going to be all right, Jean. I promise you.”

“And I promise you,” Marc said. He picked up the shoe still on the floor, and then saw the other where the policeman had set it on the table and fled the room. He left Gabrielle’s side to get it. It was only out of the corner of his eye that he saw the dwarf dash back into the room, screaming at the top of his lungs for attention. The revelers gathered around him. Marc, both shoes in hand, hoped to escape during the dwarfs distraction. But what Artur brandished in the air for attention was a bottle of cognac. It came, Marc realized, from his valise which the dwarf held hanging open in his other hand. Before Marc could reach him, he had plunged his hand into the valise again and brought out the silk nightgown, the one bit of trousseau Rachel had managed before they left Paris.

“Are you a bride?” The woman lifted Gabrielle’s chin with her finger.

Gabrielle did not deny it.

“A bride, a bride!” The words rang round the room, an explanation at last for everything, the girl’s shyness, the man’s hauteur. The revelry now could start in good earnest, with dances that everyone knew. The women pressed in on Marc, a sea of billowing flesh.

Marc grabbed the valise, but the runt skittered between the women and reached Gabrielle where, like a grotesque at the feet of a princess, he groveled on his knees, offering the silken gown, playing with it sensuously all the while in his upraised hands.

Gabrielle drew back against the wall until she could go no further. Utterly desperate, she cried out, “Monsignor!”

Monsignor La Roque stood with his arms folded, gazing with disdain on the entire scene. The
châtelains
had drawn back into a tighter little circle of their own. The monsignor turned to the prefect of police who seemed to be looking himself for a place to hide, and said with mock formality, “Monsieur Moissac, it would seem the damsel is in distress.”

Moissac charged toward Gabrielle. He put his foot to Artur’s backside and sent the dwarf sprawling. He gazed at the girl until she opened her eyes. Then he lowered his, letting the heavy lids fall to where he could not be seen gazing at her breast. For only a moment; he looked then to the bare feet, feet he would have caressed as he had the shoe. When the husband came, Moissac went from the room, by way this time of the parlor, for he wanted no more traffic that night with the aristocracy. Trying to get back to the vestibule, which was where he belonged, where he should have attended to his duty in the first place and then departed, he had to fumble his way through the blasted beads. A strand caught in the buttons of his coat sleeve; he caught it and pulled it from the valance and then from his cuff, taking the button also. He stuffed the lot in his pocket, and went to madame’s desk bell which he rang until she came and unlocked the drawer with the I.D. cards.

Marc, having the valise and the nightgown, and moving into the vestibule with Gabrielle, saw Moissac at the desk. He took Gabrielle upstairs directly.

Moissac had wanted to question Belloir. A number of things had got beyond his control, and now the prefect of agriculture came up and asked for a ride as far as the
Granges Vieilles
where he was to stay. Moissac put off until the next day the checking of papers.

Marc watched from the small third-floor balcony that bellied out over the street. The smell of charcoal wafted up from the
gazogènes
awaiting three of the guests. He listened the cars out of hearing and the revelers into their beds. He heard the last clatter of dishes and madame throw the bolt on her vestibule door. All became darkness below which did but make the sky seem brighter. Finally he went indoors.

He knocked softly and opened the door. He was sure that he would find Sister Gabrielle billeted on the floor. It startled him nonetheless to see her prone, face down, her forehead to the bare boards, she still fully clothed and her arms outstretched in the shape of the cross. She did not speak. Nor did he. He turned out the light, removed his shoes and jacket only, and lay down upon the bed. Sleep was sudden and deep.

H
IS MOTHER WAS WAITING
up for Moissac, her head swathed in a nightcap which made him think of a bonnetted infant, its face puckered up to cry. She turned off the radio.

Moissac did not want to talk. “Leave it on, maman. I haven’t heard the news all day.”

“Lies,” she said. “One thing one day, another the next.” She switched on the radio again and took his coat from him.

He went to the sink and while he turned up his cuffs and drew a basin of water, he watched her reflection in the window. She was straightening the coat on the hanger when she discovered the bulge in the pocket, the string of glass beads he had torn from Madame Fontaine’s doorway. She put her hand in the pocket and pulled them out, the loose beads scattering over the floor.

“Put them in a dish, maman. I’ll have to take them back to Madame Fontaine.”

He could not hear what she was saying until he turned off the radio. “Now, what did you say?”

“I said, what else was she wearing?”

Moissac described the curtain of beads in the
pension
vestibule and how he had caught the strand in the button of his sleeve. He showed her where the button was now missing. It was ridiculous, but the more he explained, the guiltier he felt. “Believe me, maman, if she had been wearing them, I would not have come home with them in my pocket.”

“Did that woman sing again tonight?”

“Everybody sang. I will tell you about it in the morning.”

“I wouldn’t think of asking,” she said. She got the clock from the window-sill and wound it. “Maman, was René here tonight?”

She paused, her hand on the door to her bedroom. She was deciding whether or not to lie to him, Moissac thought. But why would she lie? “No,” she said.

Moissac dried his hands and wiped his face on the towel. “What do you talk about, the two of you?”

She shrugged. “The Michelet gossip.”

“You’d think he would have told you then about Madame Lebel’s daughter marrying old Divenet.”

“I may have forgotten. Don’t try to trick me, Théophile. I am not one of your refugees or black-marketeers.”

“Do you talk about the refugees?”

“We talk about you,” she said impatiently. “You forget that I like to talk about you and the way you’ve come up from the days in Michelet.”

“I came up, maman, because my predecessor was recalled to military service and then preferred de Gaulle’s exile to the prefecture of St. Hilaire. René knows that and so do you.”

“What are you trying to say, Théophile?”

“I am saying that if René pretends to admire me it is only because he wants information about the police.”

“What could I tell him? We are never that serious anyway. He flirts with me. You saw it last night.”

“Yes, I did.”

“I see,” she said. “Why would a man flirt with an old thing like me? Is that it?”

That was it, but even in his present mood he could not say so. “I do not like to be spied upon and I feel that’s what René is doing.”

“I shall tell him not to come any more,” she said and went into the bedroom.

A few minutes later, in bathrobe and pajamas, Moissac took his rosary and went into her room. She was buried deep under the quilt with only her face and the brown, twisted fingers showing. The bed seemed larger even than it had seemed to him as a child when she would take him into it and warm his cold backside against her. “It is ridiculous for us to quarrel about René, maman.”

“That’s not what’s ridiculous,” she said. “It’s the way you always bring him up when there is something else that you don’t want to talk about.”

He got her rosary from the bedside table and handed it to her. He made one more effort to placate her. “I will tell you about the harvest feast in the morning. The monsignor sent you his blessing, by the way.”

“The monsignor sent me his blessing,” she repeated, weighing the words. “Did I raise you to be so crooked, so sly, my son? Or is it because you’re a policeman?”

“You’re criticizing me for your own faults, maman.”

“Am I? Maybe I am. It is better than criticizing you for your father’s. It is strange to see a son grow older than his father. He would have looked just like you, Théophile.” She gave a dry little laugh. “It’s no wonder I get my generations mixed up.”

“Goodnight, maman.”

“We haven’t said our prayers yet.”

“I think I’ll say mine in bed tonight.”

She held her arms up to him. He bent and kissed her cheek. He could smell the age of her through the lavender. She touched his nose with her finger. “Just like his,” she said.

S
HE HAD DREAMED DURING
the night of her father, and it was a dream of waking: he had come into her cell and covered her with a quilt and he had touched her cheek with his fingers so that, waking within the dream, she had caught his hand and kissed it, but never looked up at him, even as the child awakening to the presence of love sinks back toward sleep holding fast that love until it too becomes a part of sleep and sleep itself but love’s prolonging. The first few seconds of real awakening that morning were a kind of ecstasy to Gabrielle, the dream so sweet and vividly remembered, and its having seemed in no way strange that her father should have entered the convent cell.

Then within the compass of her gaze, the silver-buckled shoes, the bedpost, the chamber pot, the woolly field of dust beneath the bed brought back reality far stranger than the dream. There was a blanket warm upon her back. She sat up and gathered it around her. Her whole body ached and the prayer it prompted was from childhood…Oh, Jesus, through the immaculate heart of Mary, I offer Thee all my prayers, works and sufferings of this day…

She was alone in the room; the bed had been straightened: she knew he had slept on it, having heard the creaking of the springs when he lay down last night. He had left his watch on the dresser. It was half-past seven. She listened to see if the watch was running; she could not remember ever having slept into that hour in the morning. At home—the word seemed not quite right now, having a diffuse feeling, neither farm nor convent—oh, but yes, the convent: she was able to summon its presence almost instantly—she would have finished in the scullery and answered the matins bell:
Venite, exultemus
…“Come, let us praise the Lord with joy…” With joy, with joy, with joy. She repeated the words again and again, for her own sense of joy at the moment was not diminished.