Le Divorce (33 page)

It was an American who had killed him. I knew they were not forgetting that. Nor had his American wife been able to prevent it, with her inadequate arts. Members of a childish nation—I knew what they thought—cradle of killers and art thieves. (And of porcelain thieves, they would have said, had they known.) How much better, they must have been thinking, if the Marquis de Lafayette had never gone over there.

How beautiful Roxy was, Roxy who was now theirs forever, widow of their son, mother of their grandchildren—the widow a hallowed person in France, I gathered, emblem of fidelity and patient grief. She stood a little apart from the Persands and also from our parents, solitary in her sorrow except for the attentive Maître Bertram.

“ ‘Je suis la ténébreuse, la veuve, l’inconsolée,’ ”
she whispered, kneeling by the grave, paraphrasing (she told me later) some lines of Nerval.
“ ‘Pleurez! Enfants, vous n’avez plus de père.’ ”

Maître Bertram assisted her to rise with a light, solicitous grasp of her elbow. Her expression of grief contained inner serenity, a luminous certitude. Perhaps she had everything she wanted. I was given a glimpse of Roxy, just then, as someone who always will get what she wants.

“Oh, Iz,” whispered Margeeve when the clods began to fall, “now Roxy can come home.” Maybe she would, maybe she wouldn’t.

She had no need to choose. She had everything she wanted.
L’américaine.
She could have everything. She had helped herself. She had borne and survived, and would continue, no doubt. She could choose among continents, languages, religions, and roles.

Not to speak of myself, but I was thinking of how perfect Roxy was, a lily of the field, and of how she had what she wanted. I thought of Mary and Martha. In our days of going to Sunday school (we had to when we were your age, Margeeve and Chester had explained when we asked them why they didn’t go) the story of Mary and Martha was one of the many Biblical stories from which I had drawn a moral the opposite of the one intended, and was on the wrong side, as in the novels of Henry James, which Mrs. Pace had suggested I read. I knew you were supposed to be Mary; but Roxy was Mary.

One should always have one’s boots on and be ready to leave.

—
Montaigne

C
ONFINED, IMMURED BY
grief, the conventions of bereavement and the new baby, we became aware only slowly, through Roger via his fellow lawyer contacts, that the situation of Tellman, arrested by the French police, had drawn the sympathy and indignation of the American community. Mrs. Pace confirmed that this was so. And I thought from her tone that she shared in part the general view that Tellman, a disturbed person, was being treated more harshly in French law than an enraged French lover would be treated—say, a fiery Corsican or a North African or an African, beings whose murderous rages would be taken for granted and responded to, if not with forgiveness, at least with a touch of condescending leniency congruent with the less civilized mores of their respective countries. A rich American lawyer excited unspoken enmities, implacable agendas of retribution.

The indignation of the American community on Tellman’s behalf was fueled mainly by his lawyer colleagues, who recited the humiliations the poor guy had been made to suffer by his tarty Czechoslovakian wife and her insolent Frenchman lover—
indignities greater than anyone could bear, let alone a fragile person like Doug, with his valiant struggle against some substance abuse problems he’d been able to handle until all this struck.

We had heard that there would be a meeting of interested Americans to consider organizing a protest on Tellman’s behalf: letters to the newspapers, delegations to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, perhaps intervention at the ambassadorial level. I did not expect when I went for my regular afternoon at the Cleve Randolphs to find a foregathering of concerned Americans there—the same EuroDisney people who had been there during their cocktail party, a dozen lawyers, Stuart Barbee and Ames Everett, David Croswell, the Reverend Dragon, Mrs. Pace, and even the American ambassador, Leo Burleigh, whom I had seen only from afar. It was for these that Peg Randolph had asked me to pick up some party food at the
traiteur
.

I came in as diffidently as a maid, carrying the pink boxes, and sidled toward the kitchen.

“We mustn’t lose sight of the fact that this is an
American citizen
,” Cleve Randolph was saying. “They are presuming him guilty until he can prove his innocence, which is totally un-American to begin with.
Guilty until proven innocent
—that’s what’s so intolerable about the Napoleonic code.”

When people saw me, the room fell as silent as a library. Faces turned to look at me; I could almost hear knuckles crack. Peg Randolph came toward me, wearing an expression suitable to be seen by the grieving, as I must be supposed to be doing, sister-in-law of the victim, and the heroine in her own right of, or at least participant in, the drama of the Tower.

“The man needs psychiatric help,” she said.

“I know,” I said, sidling nearer to the kitchen door so I could get on with putting little slices of smoked eel pâté on a platter and black olives in her Limoges bowls.

“Crime of passion,” the others went on.

“What would you do if someone was shtupping your wife?” said someone.

“And there’s another principle involved: Can foreign governments just do what they want with an American citizen?”

“I’m afraid they can,” interjected the American ambassador, vainly trying to calm them. “Think of the boy who was caned in Singapore. The president pleaded for clemency, and even that did not avail.”

“Just shows the contempt our president is held in,” said Cleve Randolph. “And you can see why.”

“American nationals are bound by the laws of the country they are in,” repeated the ambassador. “The issue is that we are dealing with a disturbed individual here, and he needs psychiatric help. He wasn’t really responsible for this admittedly horrible crime.”

“Stuart Barbee’s friend Conrad has been arrested too,” whispered Peg into the kitchen.

“Basic human rights,” I heard Ames Everett say, heard everyone saying much, much more, voices raised, faces indignant. I thought of a discussion I had had with Edgar about basic human rights. (“People who believe in Human Rights today are the same people who twenty years ago—longer ago than that, now—believed in Workers. Then Workers moved to the right, as they got a little money, and it was necessary to put the matter more broadly.”) Of course, I had never met a Worker.

I remembered the riot in the Town Crier. Now I noticed that people wore their names on paper stick-on badges, evidently distributed by the EuroDisney people, and the badges also bore the likeness of Mickey Mouse.

There was another hush of embarrassed silence when I—sister to the widow of the victim, etc.—came in with the brie and pâté of smoked eel. They imagined that of course I would want him executed. Of course I didn’t want him set free; but the thing was, I could see that they were right, he was a disturbed person. Child of my parents, of California, of America, I could see they were right that he needed help. Was this goodness or apathy? I wondered what Roxy felt.

I liked the bland and benevolent faces of my countrymen, handsome as pilots or the men in jewelry ads. The accent of one’s birthplace lingers in the mind and in the heart as it does in one’s speech, said La Rochefoucauld.

It seems we all try to get beyond America—but something
keeps pulling us back. Will I escape the magnetism, the undertow? I thought so, for a while at least, but I wasn’t so sure about Roxy.

I had the thought that none of us would be eating pâté of smoked eel if we were in Santa Barbara. By now I had eaten eels, and snails, and tripes, and brains, and winkles and cockles, and oysters, and salsify, and cèpes, and little teeny birds plunged whole into pots of foie gras that you ate head and all. What was Tellman eating in his jail cell? What did people get to eat in Sarajevo?

In any case, I couldn’t stay for the discussion, as I had promised to pick up new cases of donated Tampax and lipstick for Sarajevo, and then I was meeting Chester and Margeeve and the others for dinner. They were leaving tomorrow. Edgar had been in Zagreb since Sunday. I hoped my heart would not ache forever. I am not sure.

All of these Americans transplanted to France, they too probably had eaten those poor little birds—are they called greves? Grebes? Merles? What do the animal rights people say about them? The animal rights people disapprove of foie gras. Of the way the goose is forced to swallow grain, how it is stuffed down his gullet through a funnel, engorging his liver. What did I feel about foie gras? Are Americans still Americans when they are transplanted, or do they become something else, like, say, Lieutenant Calley, or like me, for that matter, a person without a country, planning to go to Zagreb, planning to lunch with an under-minister of culture, planning to drink a lot of orange tisane, planning to really buckle down to studying French?