The Eleventh Year (7 page)

“My father claims it's the only free country in the world. I don't agree.”

Jamie was remembering Willy. “I had a friend in Cincinnati,” she murmured, “who was of German descent. His mother was an immigrant. They all made fun of her accent. He was as American as you or I—but not American enough.”

Lesley asked, “Was this someone special?”

“Very special. He was my brother—my first love. He's bitter because he's never been treated with any decency. He was born illegitimate.”

“And he wanted to marry you?”

“Yes. But I didn't think it would work. There's so much I want to do, and he saw life as encompassed by our home town. He never wanted me to go to college.”

“Would you want children, some day?”

“How can I tell? I don't see myself tied down, but then perhaps that's because of Willy. Married to Willy, I wouldn't have had any other options. He's the type of man who'd get a job somewhere, earn his weekly salary, come home, eat his dinner, read his paper, make love, and go to sleep snoring. I'd be lying awake in the darkness, feeling like a trapped animal.” She looked away, her eyes filling with tears. She'd worried, once, about becoming pregnant. She'd sat up praying for her period to come, for fear of being caged by force into a marriage she had no wish for. Then she added, somewhat coldly: “But you wouldn't understand that sort of life, Lesley. The life of a day worker in a city like Cincinnati, Ohio.”

“It isn't that different from the life my sister leads in New York City. She has luxuries that a day worker would never even dream of—but basically, there are no vistas and she has no horizons. George comes home every night and insists on seeing the same parade of couples every weekend. No one looks her in the eye because she's a matron, a married woman with a child. There are no possibilities, no risks, no miracles for Emily. She must lie awake in the dark too, unless she's anesthetized her mind to such an extent that she can't see her situation clearly anymore. I don't want to end up like her. It's the nightmare I've been staring at.”

“Whom did she marry?” The description sounded horrible, and Jamie pictured a fifty-year-old man with a pipe and a paunch.

“A very nice young Harvard graduate. Handsome, funny. I can't stand to be around them!”

They were suddenly laughing, laughing over George who was so nice and bright and who could be compared to Willy who had never been to college; George who was a bore and Willy who might not have been, if he'd been born into a luckier family. They laughed, understanding each other, and all at once they were friends, and the room had become smaller, more cozy, filled with warmth. Lesley in one movement was unpinning her hair, letting it flow unimpeded down her back, shaking loose the waves.

“God,” she said, “I wish we could be in Paris drinking wine.” Then she looked at Jamie, and her eyes were serious, wide, and striking. “Are they drinking wine in Paris, do you think? I read that the government had fled to Bordeaux.”

“That was last year,” Jamie replied. They stared at each other, wondering about this war that neither one of them could imagine, could understand. “Now the elegant folk have come back to the capital from their resort hideaways.”

“Then the French don't care either about their own men?”

Jamie didn't know what to answer. “I can't really believe that,” she finally stated. But what was death from the vantage point of the living? “This is my first trip away from Ohio,” she admitted. “All I know of Paris is through the books I've read, and from the newspapers.”

“Why is it,” Lesley asked bitterly, “that we can't even be entitled to a dream? I've so often pictured myself in a garret somewhere on the banks of the Seine, watching the barges moving slowly down the gray waters. But in my pictures there have always been young men, and wine, and roses.”

“And love?”

“And of course love. But not the love of pessaries and condoms, and of coy petting in the back seats of cars. Real love, like Natasha and Prince Andrei in
War and Peace.
”

“He died,” Jamie cut in. “From his battle wounds.”

“I want my money back,” Lesley said, watching a brown leaf fall twisting onto the hill below the window. “I bought the book thinking he would survive, because she was by his side, loving him, nursing him. And Anna Karenina threw herself in front of a train. Is that love? Would you have done that for Willy?”

“I'm here, no?” Jamie retorted. “I guess maybe I didn't love him. Or maybe just not enough.”

“But at least you've had something close to the real thing. To me it's still Anna and Natasha, never me.”

Jamie started to laugh. “I'll write about you. We can make each other famous. You live the romance, and I'll be your biographer.”

“Oh, Jamie,” Lesley said gently. “You were the first to be kissed, and I'm still waiting, so to speak.”

She rose and went to shut the curtains on the dismal twilight of autumn. Jamie sighed and turned on a lamp. Its pale-yellow glow spread over the room, making odd patterns on the spread on Lesley's cot. Soon, again, it would be Christmas, and she knew she didn't want to go home. “Let's go to dinner,” she said, “and pretend we're painting Paris from the rooftops.”

C
harlotte von Ridenour
, Marquise de Varenne, was, in 1914, fifty years old. Only the wrinkles on her neck betrayed her age. She was very thin, more so than ever before, but her thinness added to her distinction. She had allowed her hair to turn perfectly gray, knowing that to tint it would have made the years all the more apparent; and still, for her, nothing was more important than men. She dressed in black, white, and gray, to set off her extraordinary face, with its brilliant blue eyes and fine bone structure.

The death of her husband in 1902 provided one unexpected shock: He had left behind a most confused estate. Adrien de Varenne had bequeathed lands and châteaux to his only son, but Robert-Achille's affairs were riddled with debts. His gambling and general heedlessness had depleted the family fortune. Charlotte felt the hysteria mounting within her. She had married him for his position but also for the funds behind that position. To be left with nothing . . .

“But it's hardly nothing, my dear,” the attorney informed her sympathetically. “If you sell the house on the Barrière and find yourself a more modest residence, you'll be able to keep the castle in Beauce, with a smaller staff.”

Charlotte was appalled. She had known the relative poverty of coming to Paris without benefit of dowry. To give up what she had so struggled to attain…and all because of that repulsive, cowardly fool! She looked at her sons, twelve-year-old Alex and eleven-year-old Paul, and thought: Some day the older will save me. He must. It is his duty. But Paul, now…. He was different. He was, after all, not Robert-Achille's son. If Alex had to suffer because of present debts, that was only right. Justice demanded that he correct the mistakes of his own father. She said to him coldly: “I am not accustomed to being poor. You must decide on a career and make a brilliant marriage. Your grandfather would not want the great name of Varenne to go hand in hand with restrictions and parsimony. He was
a grand seigneur.”

“Yes, Mama.” What did one do when one was still so young? But Alex had lost his childhood when he had faced the truth about Charlotte. He was afraid now to express his desperate need for his mother's affection. Paul was caressed. Alex, never. And so he closed off his emotions even more, guarding the tenderness of his heart from the coldness of the Marquise.

She purchased a spacious ground-floor apartment on the Boulevard Saint Germain, which she decorated sumptuously in the finest Oriental styles: rare carpets, turquoise vases of the Chinese Ming dynasty, silk screens bordered in black lacquer. Every month she had to change maîtres d'hôtel; for if anything went wrong, she blamed the majordomo. Alex was growing accustomed to his mother's bitter scenes with her servants. And he swore never to marry a headstrong woman. He dreamed of finding a gentle soul, who would soothe him and make him forget that he had never been loved. Paul, on the other hand, found his mother a source of amusement. But Alex was ashamed, and hurt.

Her exhortations did not go unheeded. At the Lycée Condorcet, he was an excellent student. In 1908, Alexandre obtained his baccalaureate degree with the qualification of honor,
Bien.
It was doubtful that Paul, the following year, would pass the dreadful test at all. But Charlotte said, her voice suddenly most Germanic in its dryness: “You missed
Très bien. A
Varenne must always be the best, Alexandre.” A Varenne: Then why was Paul not expected to succeed, to bear the double-edged responsibility of the ancient name?

Alexandre thought he knew the answer, one day, when he was eighteen. He looked quietly at his mother, who was forty-four, and at his seventeen-year-old brother who resembled no one in the family. His brother who laughed at life, who took nothing seriously. And he knew what he had always suspected was true. And felt hatred for the two of them, Charlotte and that other son of hers, the one who was exempt from all the troubles. The one who was not a Varenne.

He studied for the bar and did his military service. In spite of Charlotte's evident disdain and lack of concern, he did well at the Sorbonne. His professors had been impressed. There was even talk of a career in politics. He had listened, interested. Maybe. But he held back, afraid that elected officials could not earn enough money to keep his mother happy.

When he met Yvonne, Alexandre had just opened a small but distinctive office with a ready-made, choice clientele. Charlotte's own attorney and dear friend had recently retired, and she had convinced him to recommend to her son certain important people. Alex resented her for this, because it meant that he was in debt to her, that the cord would take even longer to cut. But he also knew that her help in Parisian circles was a
sine qua non.
He wanted to be free of her, because he wanted to forget the shame of her adultery and wanted to erase the pain of not being loved. Yet only by work would he succeed in “buying” her out of his life for good.

Yvonne de Larmont was not particularly beautiful. She was tall, slender, with a narrow face and attractive hazel eyes. Her father, Henri de Larmont, was a well-known surgeon whose business Alexandre had been asked to handle. The professor, as he was known to his associates, was a somewhat formidable man with a wry wit. Alexandre liked them both. For the first time in ages, he was able to relax.

He began to invite Yvonne to the opera, to hear Caruso, and to sessions of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. He was not a ballet aficionado, and neither was she. But afterward, in the quiet little restaurant booths where he took her for a late supper, they laughed about it together. “Why have you never married?” he finally asked, blushing, one evening.

“Why? It's very simple. On my wedding day I shall receive a great deal of money—call it a dowry, or a trust. Papa believes that an intelligent married woman needs her own funds, although until then her parents should take care of her. Right now my life is good. Marriage is a large responsibility. I don't want to go into it lightly.”

Later that night, without warning, it was she who kissed him. She cupped his face in her hands, rose on tiptoe, and kissed him full on the lips. Alexandre was startled. For a moment he could not respond, and then he seized her slender form and crushed her to him, driving his tongue into her mouth, tasting. Then, embarrassed, he stepped back. Yvonne smiled and said nothing.

But the next day he was strangely restless. He cared for Yvonne. He would propose to her. By doing so he would of course be playing right into his mother's hands. Charlotte would be thrilled by the dowry, but Yvonne would understand. They would do for Charlotte what had to be done, and then they would bar her forever more from their lives and the lives of their children. Charlotte would be rescued by Yvonne's money. Then life would begin.

When Alexandre went to the Cité to make his formal proposal, he was met in the entrance hall by Yvonne, her hair in disarray over her shoulders. He was surprised, but she gave a little cry and held her hands out to him, her face aglow. She knew why he had come, and she was glad.

“It's all right, dear, we shall be very happy,” he heard her answering moments later. She had accepted and so quickly! He touched the fineness of her hair, the fabric of her blouse. And for once he felt happy.