All the Days and Nights (27 page)

“What if they fall?” she said. “It could be quicksand.”

“If it’s quicksand, I’ll jump in after them. Isn’t it lovely and quiet here?”

For in spite of all those cars in the parking lot they had the evening to themselves. Nobody had come down here to see the tide sweep in. At first it was silent. They saw that the channels through the sandbars were growing wider, but there was no visible movement of water. Then suddenly it began to move, everywhere, with a rushing sound that no river ever makes on its way to the sea. It was less like a force of Nature than like an emotion — like the disastrous happiness of a man who has fallen in love at the wrong season of life.

When it was over, they walked up to the abbey in the dusk, by a back way that was all stairs, and down again along the outer ramparts, looking into the rear windows of houses and restaurants, and were just in time to be startled by a blood-curdling scream. It came from a brightly lighted room in a house that was across a courtyard and one story down from where they were. It could have been a woman’s scream, or a child’s. There was an outbreak of angry voices.

“What
is
it, Daddy?” the children asked. “What are they saying?”

“It’s just a family argument,” Reynolds said, making his voice sound casual. His knees were shaking. Listening to the excited voices, he made
out only one word —
“idiot.”
Either the scream had come from a mental defective or somebody was being insulted. The voices subsided. The Americans walked on until they came to a flight of steps leading down to the street in front of their hotel.

When the children were in bed, Reynolds and Dorothy sat at the window of their room, looking out at the night. “The air is so soft,” she said, and he said, “Ummm,” not wanting to spoil her pleasure by saying what was really on his mind, which was that they should never have come here and that nothing on earth would make him come here again. In a place where things could easily have been kept as they were — where, one would have thought, it was to everybody’s advantage to keep them that way — something had gone fatally wrong. Something had been allowed to happen that shouldn’t have happened.

And it was not only here. The evening they arrived in Paris, the taxi driver who took them from the boat train to their hotel on the Left Bank said,
“Paris n’est plus Paris.”
And in the morning Madame said when she gave them their mail, “Paris is changed. It’s so noisy now.” “New York too,” he said, to comfort her. But the truth was that nowhere in New York was the traffic like the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The cars drove at twice the speed of the cars at home, and when the lights changed there was always some side street from which cars kept on coming, and pedestrians ran for their lives. Like insects. The patrons who sat at the tables on the sidewalk in front of Lipp could no longer see their counterparts at the Deux Magots because of the river of cars that flowed between them. The soft summer air reeked of gasoline. And there was something he saw that he could not get out of his mind afterward: an old woman who had tried to cross against the light and was stranded in the middle of the street, her eyes wide with terror, like a living monument.

Reynolds was quite aware that to complain because things were not as agreeable as they used to be was one of the recognizable signs of growing old. And whether you accepted change or not, there was really no preventing it. But why, without exception, did something bad drive out something good? Why was the change always for the worse?

He had once asked his father-in-law, a man in his seventies, if there was a time — he didn’t say whether he meant in history or a time that his father-in-law remembered, and, actually, he meant both — when the world seemed to be becoming a better place, little by little. And life everywhere more agreeable, more the way it ought to be. And then suddenly, after that, was there a noticeable shift in the pattern of events?
Some sort of dividing line that people were aware of, when everything started to go downhill? His father-in-law didn’t answer, making Reynolds feel he had said something foolish or tactless. But his father-in-law didn’t like to talk about his feelings, and it was just possible that he felt the same way Reynolds did.

Once in a while, some small detail represented an improvement on the past, and you could not be happy in the intellectual climate of any time but your own. But in general, so far as the way people lived, it was one loss after another, something hideous replacing something beautiful, the decay of manners, the lapse of pleasant customs, as by a blind increase in numbers the human race went about making the earth more and more unfit to live on.

I
N
the morning, Reynolds woke ready to pay the bill and leave as soon as possible, but it was only a short drive to Dinard, and their plane didn’t leave until five o’clock in the afternoon, so after breakfast they climbed the steps of the Grande Rue once more, for a last look at the outside of the abbey, and found something they had overlooked before — an exhibition marking the thousandth year of the Abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel. There were illuminated manuscripts: St. Michael appearing to Aubert, Bishop of Avranches, in a dream and telling him to build a chapel on the Mount; St. Michael weighing souls, slaying dragons, vanquishing demons, separating the blessed from the damned; St. Michael between St. Benoît and the archbishop St. William; St. Michael presenting his arms to the Virgin; St. Michael the guardian of Paradise. There was a list of the Benedictine monks living and dead at the time of the abbot Mainard II, and an inventory of the relics of the monastery at the end of the fifteenth century. There was the royal seal of William the Conqueror, of Philip the Fair, of Philip the Bold, of Louis VIII, of Philip Augustus. There was an octagonal reliquary containing a fragment of the cranium of St. Suzanne the Virgin Martyr. There was a drawing, cut by some vandal from an illuminated manuscript, of Jeanne d’Arc, Alison’s friend, with her banner and sword, corresponding exactly to a description given at her trial, and a letter from Charles VII reaffirming that Mont-Saint-Michel was part of the royal domain. There were maquettes of the abbey in the year 1000, in 1100, in 1701, and as it was now. There was an aquarelle by Viollet-le-Duc of the flying buttresses. There were suits of armor, harquebuses, a pistolet, and some cannonballs. There was far
more than they could take in or do justice to. When they emerged from the exhibition rooms, dazed by all they had looked at, Reynolds remembered the little gardens. It would never do to go away without seeing them. He couldn’t find the gate that opened into the first one, and he wasn’t sure, after eighteen years, on which side of the Mount they were, but Dorothy had noticed a sign, down a flight of steps from the abbey, that said
THE BISHOP
’
S GARDEN
. They bought tickets from an old woman sitting at a table under a vaulted archway and passed into what was hardly more than a strip of grass with a few flowers and flowering shrubs, and could have been the terrace of a public park in some small provincial French town. Reynolds began to look for the medieval gardens in earnest, and in the end they found themselves in what must once have been the place they were looking for. It was overrun with weeds, and hardly recognizable as a garden, and there was only that one.

Later, after he had closed and locked his suitcase, he went to the window for the last time. The shutters of the room that had contained so much drama were still closed. Looking down on the courtyard between the new wing of their hotel and the hotel in front of it, he knew suddenly what had happened. The medieval gardens didn’t exist any more. To accommodate an ever-increasing number of tourists, the hotels had been added on to. So that they could hold thousands of souvenirs instead of hundreds, the souvenir shops had been deepened, taking the only available land, which happened to be those enchanting walled gardens. The very building he was in at that moment, with its comfortable if anonymous rooms with adjoining bath, had obliterated some garden that had been here for perhaps five hundred years. One of the miracles of the modern world, and they did just what people everywhere else would have done — they cashed in on a good thing. And never mind about the past. The past is what filled the gigantic parking lot with cars all summer, but so long as you have the appearance you can sell that; you don’t need the real thing. What’s a garden that has come down intact through five hundred years compared to money in the bank?
This is something I will never get over
, he thought, feeling the anger go deeper and deeper.
I will never stop hating the people who did this. And I will never forgive them — or France for letting them do it. What’s here now is no longer worth seeing or saving. If this could happen here, then there is no limit to what can happen everywhere else. It’s all going down, and down. There’s no stopping it
.…

In order to pay the bill, he had to go to the cashier’s desk, which was at the far end of the dining room. As he started there, walking between
the empty tables, he saw that the only maître d’hôtel in the whole of France who looked like a Yale man was avoiding his eyes — not because he felt any remorse for putting them next to the fish tank with a clown for a waiter, or because he was afraid of anything Reynolds might say or do. He didn’t care if Reynolds dropped dead on the spot, so long as he didn’t have to dispose of the body. He was a man without any feeling for his métier,
tout simplement
, and so the food and the service had gone to hell in a basket.

W
HILE
Reynolds was at the concierge’s desk in the foyer, confirming their reservations at the airport by telephone, a gentle feminine voice said behind him, in English, “Monsieur, you left your traveler’s checks,” and he turned and thanked the cashier profusely.

He started up the stairs to see about the luggage and the concierge called after him, “Monsieur, your airplane tickets!”

They had banded together and were looking after him.

The same boy who carried the luggage up four flights of stairs now carried it down again and out through the medieval gate to the Volkswagen. “We were here eighteen years ago,” Reynolds said to him as he took out his wallet. “You have no idea how different it was.”

This was quite true. Eighteen years ago, the porter was not anywhere. Or if he was, he was only a babe in arms. But he was a Frenchman, and knew that a polite man doesn’t sneer at emotions he doesn’t feel or memories he cannot share. He insisted on packing the luggage for Reynolds, and tucked Dorothy and the children in, and closed the car doors, and then gave them a beautiful smile.

It’s true that I overtipped him, Reynolds thought. But then, looking into the porter’s alert, intelligent, doglike eyes, he knew that he was being unjust. The tip had nothing to do with it. It was because he was a harmless maniac and they all felt obliged to take care of him and see him on his way.

“M
Y
son Ned, from New York,” Mr. Ferrers said.

Why, he’s proud of me, Edward Ferrers thought; he wouldn’t be introducing me like this if he weren’t.

He put his thin hand through the grilled window in the waiting room of the railway station and shook hands with the ticket agent, who said, “Glad to know you, Ned.”

The ticket agent checked Edward’s return ticket (the sleeping-car reservation needed to be confirmed in Chicago) and ignored the telegraph’s urgent, lisping
click-click … click-click … click-click-click … click … click
.… The wall calendar, compliments of Orton Grain & Feed Co., was open to the month of June 1952.

Edward Ferrers came home to Draperville once every three years, for three or four days, which wasn’t quite long enough for him to get used to the way the town looked, and so he was continually noting the things that had changed and the things that had not changed. He also had changed, of course, and not changed. He had acquired the tense, alert air of a city man, and his accent was no longer that of the Middle West but a mixture, showing traces of all the places he had lived in. On the other hand, people who had known him as a little boy on his way to the Presbyterian Sunday school or marching with the Boy Scouts on the Fourth of July had no trouble recognizing him, even though he was now forty-three years old and the crown of his head was quite bald.

“I want to stop at the bank for a minute,” he said, as they were leaving the station.

“What for?” Mr. Ferrers demanded.

“I want to cash a check.”

“How much do you need?”

“I just want to be sure I have enough for the diner and the porters and the taxi home,” Edward said. “Ten dollars ought to do it, with what I have.” His voice in speaking to his father was gentle but careful, as if he were piloting a riverboat upstream with due regard for submerged sandbars and dangerous snags under the smoothly flowing surface of the water.

Mr. Ferrers took out his billfold, which was as orderly as his person, and extracted two new ten-dollar bills. “Your Aunt Alice is expecting us at one,” he said. “You don’t want to keep her waiting.”

Edward took the money and put it in his billfold, which was coming unsewed and was stuffed with he had no idea what. “I’ll give you a check when we get home,” he said.

“All right,” Mr. Ferrers said.

Neither as a child nor as an adult had Edward ever lied to his father, but he did hold back information that he had reason to think his father would be troubled by. For example, he didn’t tell his father what his salary as an associate professor was, or how much money he had. If his father knew, it would upset him, certainly. And what would upset him even more was that Edward had failed to put anything by. One of the primary rules of Mr. Ferrers’s life was that a certain percentage of what he made should be saved for a rainy day.

As a sullen adolescent Edward had accused his father — often in his mind and once to his face — of caring about nothing but money. This was not true, of course. Mr. Ferrers never confused the making of money with a man’s concern for his family or his own self-respect. But he took money seriously (who doesn’t?) and to this day carried about with him, in his inside coat pocket, a little memorandum book containing an up-to-the-minute detailed statement of his assets. He took it out and showed it to Edward the day before, while they were admiring the roses in the backyard. What would have happened if Edward had asked to see what was written in the little book he didn’t dare think. His father would probably have said that it wasn’t any of his business, and in fact it wasn’t.