Till We Meet Again (80 page)

On a clear day, as real-estate salespeople always point out, you can see Catalina. But not today, she realized, as it began to disappear. She looked at her compass, adjusted her heading, and pointed the Bonanza directly toward the island.

As she came near Catalina, a pouncing sponge of fog, dense and disorienting, moving much faster than she had estimated, unexpectedly slopped over her windshield. Her nose and wings disappeared. She was, it seemed, flying a magic cockpit. So what, thought Freddy angrily, so what. A California fog was nothing. She could always head upstairs and punch through to sunlight but, damn it, she wanted her
coffee, she
owned
this territory, it was her personal sky, claimed when she was a kid, won and rewon time after time, and she was damned if she’d let a little shitty fog snatch it away from her. She was the only person in her sky, and she knew the approach to Catalina so well that she could fly it blindfolded. She checked her altimeter. She had plenty of altitude, which was the only thing to worry about as she started to plan her landing.

Moving dexterously, handling her plane with supreme confidence, her coordination unaffected by either her emotions or the fog, Freddy flew the perfect invisible rectangle that would bring her, in a minute, smoothly settled onto the landing strip on top of the boulder-strewn, treeless bluff. The Bonanza was slowed down to its precise landing speed, the landing gear extended, the flaps down.

Too low
, were the only words Freddy had time to think as Catalina, like soundless thunder, came at her out of the fog, a wall of rock, inescapable. There was a second left, only time enough to pull the nose up sharply, so that when she crashed she was at an angle to the side of the mountain. The shattered Bonanza still climbed the mountainside for yards and yards until it skipped and slid and fell into a ravine where it split apart and the noise stopped.

23

M
ARIE de La Rochefoucauld could be a young czarina, she could be an Infanta of Spain, Bruno thought. And yet she was so miraculously French. He had never imagined that anyone in this barbaric circus of Manhattan could possibly be so flawlessly, consummately French, so imprinted in every detail of her carriage and appearance and speech with the essence of a high-born Frenchwoman, that it was like a fragrance in the air around her, that moved when she moved. She carried France—old France—with her as she entered a room, so unassumingly that she barely displaced the atmosphere, yet with such quiet presence, with such mild and absolute dignity that heads turned toward her, glances flickered from eye to eye, and people signaled questions at each other, already envious, already acquisitive. They had to know who she was, these hard citizens of this tough stone city, because she was everything they could never hope to be. Even to be able to identify her would lend them some distinction.

Bruno had been one of the first people in New York to meet Marie de La Rochefoucauld, one of the many daughters of the most prolific noble family in all of French history, a family whose members, under the notation “House of La Rochefoucauld,” occupied more than a full page in that bible of aristocracy, the
Bottin Mondain;
a family of interrelated branches adorned by three dukes; a family so large that many a La Rochefoucauld heir had married a La Rochefoucauld heiress throughout the parade of centuries; a family allied to all of the great names of France; a family whose origins, as
Debrett’s Peerage
, with an editorial bow, would occasionally note about an English duke, were “lost in time.”

Bruno had known one of her brothers at school, and it was through him that Bruno had met Marie soon after she arrived to earn her master’s degree in Oriental art at Columbia University. Why she would want to do that was only one of
the marvelous mysteries of her supremely self-contained personality.

How could he have not expected that he would fall in love someday? Why had he been so sure that he was so different from other men, Bruno asked himself, yet, had he known, had he even suspected what love was like, how would he have been able to endure the years of waiting until he met Marie? In this spring of 1951, he was filled with an astonishing emotion that spread its branches through every one of his limbs, until he imagined himself looking like a chart of the circulatory system, each artery and vein and blood vessel a rushing thoroughfare of first love, all the more painful because he was thirty-six years old and Marie was only twenty-two.

Yet Marie didn’t treat him as if she thought he was too old for her, Bruno mused as he sat, immobilized by love, in his office at the bank. Of course, she did not know yet how he felt about her. She behaved toward him with beautifully simple but faintly reserved friendliness, the same friendliness, he had to admit, with which she acted toward everyone else she knew.

Marie was living in the John Allens’ vast stone town house. For many years the Allens had been friendly with Marie’s parents, the two couples linked by a common passion for the Chinese ceramics that they collected to the benign lack of interest of their acquaintances. The Allens had invited Marie to stay with them during the two years of her studies, and had put several rooms at her disposal. She had a sitting room where, from time to time, she received her new American friends for tea or sherry, although her days were rarely long enough to permit her to spend time on such matters, for up at Columbia she plunged deeply into her studies.

As brilliantly made as a crown jewel, Marie was tiny and slim. She had long, straight, shining black hair that she wore hanging down almost to her waist, pulled back from her untroubled white forehead and tied behind her nape with a silk ribbon. Her eyes were gray, under thin black brows, so lovely in shape that they might have been designed by Leonardo, and her fine nose had a delicate arch. Her mouth was gentle, excellently formed, and untouched by lipstick. She had little color in her exquisite face; the fascination was in the contrast of the blackness of her hair, the whiteness of
her delicate skin and the clear, exceptionally light gray of her eyes.

Marie dressed innocently, almost childishly, in simple sweaters, blouses and skirts, artlessly thrown together with a lace scarf or a velvet vest or an embroidered jacket, in which she looked enchantingly old-fashioned in a city where tailored suits were the rule. She might have found her clothes in the attic of one of her family’s châteaux, Bruno thought, as he longed helplessly to buy her sumptuous clothes and great jewels. On her birthday he had gone to the best dealer in Oriental antiques in the city and bought her a bowl of Ching-te-chen whiteware of the Sung Dynasty, unequaled in its simple shape and its unadorned glaze, and she had taken one enraptured look at it and refused to accept it, because she knew the value of the seven-hundred-year-old work of art. If she had taken the bowl it would have been as if she had allowed him to give her a sable coat. Now the rejected ceramic was placed on his bedroom mantelpiece to remind him not to behave like a besotted nouveau riche with Marie de La Rochefoucauld.

She had such purity that it drove him mad. Marie never mentioned it, but Bruno, who had become the sleuth that every man in love discovers within himself, found out that she went to early mass every morning. One day when he had arrived a few minutes too early for tea and found himself the only guest, alone in her sitting room, he looked through a partly opened door and glimpsed a corner of her bedroom where a worn prie-dieu was placed before a crucifix. He had not dared to open the door any farther, and the image of her unseen bed had become a holy mystery to him, a mystery about which he knew he was unworthy to speculate.

When he woke up in the middle of the night, as he did now with increasing frequency, Bruno found himself wondering how it could have happened that he had fallen so completely and unexpectedly in love with an inexperienced, religious, intellectual, virtuous girl, whose young life had passed tranquilly in convents and classrooms and museums; who cared nothing for society or intrigue or position or possessions; whose desire, if what he deduced was true, was to spend most of her life in pursuit of scholarship, for the pure joy of learning; a girl who was, from the sensual point of view, a blank page, waiting without impatience for the destiny that would or would not bring her a husband and children.

Was it merely a turn toward an idealized virgin that had overtaken him, after so many years spent living out the most hidden, shame-laden fantasies of mature women of the world? Was this an aberration, born of sexual satiety? Could it be explained as an infatuation with her quality of being entirely French that made him, the homesick exile, believe that Marie, and Marie alone, would rescue him from the wasteland of his life?

None of these rational explanations ever lasted more than the time it took Bruno to form them. They vanished as soon as he thought of Marie, turning her little imperial head toward him, and laughing at one of his jokes, or letting him take her out to dinner and to a movie, for she adored American movies, the sillier the better, and she thoroughly enjoyed New York, making him ride on the subway and take the Fifth Avenue bus all the way down to Washington Square Park. They would watch the chess players in the park and then walk to Bleecker Street and find a cheap student coffee house where she liked to sit and watch the bohemian life swirl around her. He had this happiness only occasionally during a weekend, for on weekday nights Marie ate dinner with the Allens and studied until she went to bed.

There were other men around Marie. The Allens had presented her to some of the most eligible young bachelors in New York, but to Bruno’s watchful and jealous eye, she had not shown a preference for any of them. Above all, not one of the other men who claimed her time was French, not one could even speak decent French, and he was certain, as certain as he could be of anything, that Marie had no intention of spending the rest of her life in the United States. Much as she was amused by New York, much as she felt rewarded by her studies, she had confided in him that she deeply missed her big family. Bruno had known Marie de La Rochefoucauld since Christmas of 1950 and now, in the late spring of 1951, she was eagerly anticipating the summer in France.

“I’m sailing on the
Ile de France
the day classes are over, and I won’t come back until just before the beginning of the fall semester—three whole months,” she’d said happily. “You’ll be in France for your summer vacation, won’t you, Bruno? Even New York bankers must get a few weeks off.”

“Of course,” he’d answered because he couldn’t think of an explanation for any Frenchman not going home on his vacation.
It was so traditional, such a basic thing to do, that to say he had made other plans would sound strange. Frenchmen didn’t travel outside of their own country if they could avoid it.

Marie had invited him to come and visit at the château near Tours where her family spent each summer. He’d told her that he’d try to come, even as he had known that he would be separated from her all summer long, and that every day of that summer would bring the possibility that Marie might fall in love. His worst fear was that Marie might not even come back to New York to finish her work at Columbia, for it seemed impossible to him that she should remain heart-free during the gay, pleasure-filled, hospitable days and nights of an entire summer.

Yet Bruno dared not return to France, not even to visit Marie for a few weeks. The La Rochefoucauld château was not in the neighborhood of Valmont, but the jungle drums of the French aristocracy would immediately sound with the news that Bruno de Lancel was back in his native land, after his long and remarkable absence. His father would inevitably learn that he had returned, and Bruno knew that Paul’s interdiction and Paul’s threats could not have changed in six years. He would do what he had said he would do. Bruno fingered the scar that still remained over his upper lip.

Why couldn’t he ask her to marry him now, before she left, Bruno asked himself for the thousandth time, and as usual the answer was the same. Marie was not in love with him, and so she would refuse him, as charmingly and certainly as she had refused the Ching-te-chen whiteware bowl. Then he would be unable to see her frequently, unable to claim her free evenings, unable to win her love. The rules Marie lived by, rules he respected, for they were part of the world they shared, would prevent her from encouraging false hopes. She would be scrupulously careful not to spend time alone with him once she knew how he felt. She would most gently and firmly ease him out of her life, for Bruno de Lancel was not a man she could relegate to the position of a mere friend.

He had to run the risk of losing her over the summer, since the only alternative was to lose her now, once and for all.

Jeanne’s letters still came. All was well with his family,
she was happy to assure him. “Yes, Monsieur Bruno, you will be glad to know, all is as it should be at Valmont.”

“Mr. Hampton, it doesn’t make sense for you to stay here any longer,” Doctor David Weitz said to Jock, who hadn’t left the corridor outside of Freddy’s room at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, since she had been wheeled into it on a gurney eighteen hours earlier, a grotesque mummy encased in a sarcophagus of white, with only the valiant strands of her hair to identify her “I promise to phone you the minute there’s the slightest change in Mrs. Longbridge’s condition.”

“I’ll just hang around,” Jock said stubbornly, for the tenth time.

“There’s no way to tell when she’ll come out of the coma. It may be days. It may be weeks. It could be months, Mr. Hampton. You’re not being reasonable.”

“I know.” Jock turned away, feeling another wave of intense, illogical hostility toward David Weitz. The man was too young, Jock insisted to himself, to be in charge of anything. He’d telephoned Swede and had him run a check on the guy.

Weitz was forty-two, enormously respected, and the youngest Chief of Neurology the great hospital had ever appointed. There was no higher authority at Cedars to whom he could appeal for an older, wiser, more experienced doctor. Every doctor Swede talked to said they were fortunate to have Weitz supervising Freddy’s case.