The Eleventh Year (4 page)

“You still write your own poetry?” he asked.

“You're off early?” she countered.

“Boss shut down the shop. Has some kind of influenza.”

“Oh. That's nice.”

He threw back his head and laughed, that raucous, mirthless laugh of his, and she could see his Adam's apple. He was tall and thin: wiry, really. He smelled a man's smell, and she could sense it from below, and it was exciting. He said: “For him it isn't so nice. Sweet little Jamie.”

He had embarrassed her, and now she wanted to find an excuse to leave. Years of resentment welled up inside her: sweet little Jamie, indeed! He'd rejected her as a sister, as a friend. Now he sat down beside her, and her first reaction was to pull away. But he was wiping his brow, sighing. “I'm so tired,” he said simply.

“You don't like your life?”

“I don't like it, and I don't
not
like it. It's just a life.”

“But life is supposed to be joyful—if you can learn to take hold of it.”

“Straight from the lips of her papa, the good reverend.”

“I'm quite serious. Don't waste it.”

He narrowed his eyes at her and said tersely: “Don't lecture me, Jamie. I don't need it and I don't like it.”

“No, of course not! You're wiser and more intelligent than us all, and you never need anything or anybody!” Now the anger came tumbling out of her, and her surprise at its vehemence was as great as his. She moved closer to him, took his chin in her firm young fingers, looked hard into his eyes. “You're nothing but a loser,” she finally stated with disgust.

The muscles tightened in his shoulders, in his arms. “So. After years of friendship, it all comes out. You're ashamed of me too, because of what I am.”

“Not of what you are—of who you've become! What do I care who your father is, or if your mother scrubs floors? But I can't be friends with a fellow who won't respect himself. Does she let you do this—what's her name?”

“Eva. No. Eva and I don't talk.” He laughed a little, but this time in a more private manner, a low chuckle. “Talking was with you.”

“And you got bored and threw me away.”

Willy noticed for the first time that she was still holding him by the chin, and she dropped her hand, embarrassed again. But this time he picked it up with strong, blunt fingers of his own. “Oh, Jamie,” he murmured. “Jamie, Jamie. I never threw you away. We drifted our separate ways, as people do when they grow up.”

“Why must they?” she asked earnestly.

“I don't really know.”

In the stillness that followed, there was awkwardness, sadness, and a hint of something else. Jamie wanted him to leave and wanted him to stay, and could feel the pulse beating in her wrists. When he bent toward the round softness of her neck, above the white starched schoolgirl collar, she was not really surprised, and wanted to feel his lips on her skin. She made a little sound and lifted her face to his, and then he kissed her. She wanted to weep, she wanted the release, and yet her tongue wanted the taste of more, and it was as if she were being sucked inside a marvelous deep velvet cave. It was hot and warm and burning and lovely, and it was the spring sunshine on her naked arms, on her naked limbs. If there was pain when they finally came together, when they had made sense of all the buttons and hooks on their respective clothing, the pain was welcome too, though unexpected. He knew what to do although she did not. He wanted her not to know. He had entered a hidden place where none had come before him, and she understood that he wanted to explore it with the miracle of discovery. “I love you,” he said, and she nodded, because they had always loved each other, because it was right.

During the next month Jamie and Willy made love again, many times, whenever and wherever they could. She hoped that he would reconsider taking the exams, but she dared not ask him to do it for her sake. Changing a person was an intrusion and an error: You were who you were, true only to yourself. And she did not tell him about her own plans. She had no real reason for not telling him, except that, somehow, inside, it felt right not to speak. And so when he finally said, a month later, “Marry me, Jamie,” she knew. She knew with certainty, and she knew with pain, and she knew with numbing fear.

“I can't,” she answered.

“You can't? But why?”

She then turned aside, weeping. “Because I'm going to Vassar in the fall. I'm going East to college.”

“Then—I suppose I'll wait. You'll come back, won't you?”

She felt as though she were being torn apart. “No. I can't return here, Willy. I don't want to live in Cincinnati. And you— you don't have your magic dreams anymore, and without them we wouldn't have the right sort of life together.”

His fury did not surprise her. “Dreams!
Dreams'?
This is a rotten life, Jamie, a life of lies and cheating. But I love you. Why would you leave me after this? Don't you know how much my mother would have envied you? That man, whoever he was, simply took what he wanted and vanished, but I want you to be my
wife!”

“I know. But that isn't the right reason either, Willy. You wanted to prove that you were different and better than he, and I want something else. I don't know what. Maybe independence. You can't be independent in the American Midwest. Of course I love you—I always have.”

He was standing up, red in the face, and brushing off the burrs from his clothing. Oh, she thought, I hurt too! I don't want to give you up, I don't want to lose what we have either! And yet…marriage…It didn't matter anymore, because he had left, and she could see his footprints in the soft green earth.

Jamie Stewart wondered then when the pain would go away, or if it ever would. Love. It didn't make sense. Nothing made sense. But at the same time, she knew that she had made the only possible decision. For that very morning Mr. Hoffmann had announced to her that Vassar had accepted her as a scholarship student. There was no turning back, not from this.

P
lace de l'Etoile
was called the Barrière de l'Etoile, and beyond it Paris ended. Several of the twelve avenues bore different names. Avenue Victor Hugo was called Avenue de l'Impératrice, after the beautiful Eugénie, and its left sidewalk was three feet lower than its right one. The road itself was bisected lengthwise, the right half a yard higher than the left. Six of the elegant town houses between the avenues had already been erected, and it was there, in the sixth, that the Marquis Adrien de Varenne had settled with his family. Adrien's son Robert-Achille was born in it in 1855.

But the house, for all its stateliness, was not large enough. Adrien made a petition to build a seventh mansion, between Avenues Wagram and MacMahon. Yes, the authorities told him, he would be able to do so, as long as the new façade matched the other six. And so, in ‘67, the Varenne clan moved to grander quarters. From the road people saw three stories in white sandstone, simple and streamlined, with different masonry around the windows of each floor. The first was all bays; the second, rectangular panes topped with a decorative triangle of Greek style; and the third, a series of shorter rectangles adorned with curlicues of scroll-like appearance. Then came a double parapet, and highest of all the “attic,” in gray-blue tile, with its square windows jutting out, protected by triangular eaves of the same stone. Each story possessed at least twenty windows, some with grilled balconies, others with pillared, Doric ones. The second and the third became living quarters; the first, the ballroom and the reception halls; and in the attic, the servants slept.

The main entrance was on the dark, circular street behind the house. On the Etoile side the ground fell abruptly, and there were two enormous rooms facing a garden. On the street side this apartment was a basement without windows. It provided the ideal “bachelor's quarters,” and the Marquis Adrien reserved them for his son and his son's tutor. The young Count Robert-Achille was most relieved that his rooms faced the sunny Barrière, so he could watch the dainty carriages that drove by Napoleon's Arch of Triumph: especially he loved the pretty ladies inside the carriages. Tall plane trees bordered the sidewalk beyond the iron grillwork that protected the garden, and pigeons settled around them, completing a picture of peaceful harmony.

A Renaissance man, the Marquis had placed a copy of Michelangelo's Moses in the vestibule, between the two circular staircases that wound to the second floor. He was a tall man, well built and imposing, and had connections in high finance and government. Long ago the Varenne family had been intimates of the Bourbon kings; he himself, though disdainful of their plebeian origins, had befriended Napoleon III and Eugénie: or so he always phrased it, conscious that he was the truer blueblood. For he never hid the fact that he was still a monarchist: The Varennes had been royalists for centuries, since the days of the Crusades.

Robert-Achille did not resemble his father. From the start he had been a disappointment to Adrien. He was, first of all, short—too short for a Varenne. His head was round like a ball, and his small nose pointed upward like a trumpet. His lips were thickly sensual, and his weak gray eyes had a tendency to blink a lot. He was not handsome, to be sure; but he was well dressed, and in his high-buttoned frock coat trimmed with braid and heavily starched choker collar and silk cravat, he seemed aristocratic in spite of his ugliness. What distressed Adrien more was his son's predilection for not studying and for carousing in Montmartre with the sons of other noblemen, similarly disinclined to be serious. Robert-Achille went out every night, drank champagne and gambled, and often the next day a bill would be delivered for broken furniture and windows in an establishment of ill repute. Adrien paid it and hid the fact from his Marquise.

In the eighties a Baroness von Ridenour arrived from Vienna, with her daughter, Charlotte. Charlotte was twenty-one and a rare beauty. Her hair was thick and black, her face pale and narrow, with azure eyes under arched brows. Her nose was regular and fine, her mouth well drawn, with small white teeth and a pearlescent skin. She was tall, shapely in a slender fashion, and her bearing was regal, almost arrogantly so. Adrien de Varenne fell in love with her by proxy—that is, she was too fine a lady to be made a mistress of his own, but she appeared perfect as a prospective wife for his wayward son. The fact that the Baroness von Ridenour had lost her fortune did not disturb the Marquis: Charlotte's beauty, her poise, and the obvious strength of her character impressed him sufficiently for him to overlook the matter of dowry. And for Charlotte's mother, this was an opportunity not even hoped for. How else could she have thought to marry off a daughter without the appropriate wedding monies?

Charlotte was not so eager to marry the unattractive Robert-Achille, but he did present her with a luxurious alternative to her previous life of quiet retirement in Vienna. He had a name and a fortune, and that was infinitely preferable to a name without means. Besides, he had fallen totally in love with her: she, a foreigner whom nobody knew in the elegant Parisian circles. She was excited at the notion of being at last a rich and independent woman. For Robert-Achille would not restrain her: He would be too busy with his disreputable friends, and besides, she was the dominating partner, without a doubt. She accepted his marriage proposal. Time was of the essence. At her age one had to grab one's opportunities without weighing them too seriously. Beautiful though she was, there were others as lovely who possessed large dowries.

This union was to be one of the most disastrous of the century.

Proud of his wife, whose smile was a veritable enchantment, whose ways were so engaging and sweet, and especially proud of the fact that she had accepted him in spite of his size and lack of distinction, Robert-Achille, Count de Varenne, took Charlotte every night to Montmartre to show her off to his dandy friends. Robert-Achille was not very bright and had little ability to think things through. Charlotte, on the other hand, was a remarkable opportunist. Admired and courted for the first time in her life, adored by her husband's friends, she suddenly became aware of her extraordinary beauty and of how she might gain from it. The finesse, charm, joyful spirit that were lacking in Robert-Achille, she soon found elsewhere. Life could be a never-ending diversion. On the one hand she was wealthy and lived as a queen; on the other there was love and intrigue. Happiness made her even more beautiful.

She came to hate her husband. Robert-Achille irritated and disgusted her in so many ways that she could barely tolerate to be in the same room with him. Whenever the Varennes were invited to a château for a weekend or a hunt, she never accepted a room with him, but would upset the plans of the hosts by demanding quarters at the opposite end of the suite.

Some years later she became pregnant. Fear overtook her. First of all, the child might look like her husband. Of course, the Marquis Adrien was a most distinguished-looking specimen. She had often noticed him, and knew that he was not indifferent to her either. But, second, who would want her now,
enceinte?
She would have to hide herself for the last few months. Rage shook her. Life had grown too pleasant for it suddenly to have to change, and all because, out of ridiculous duty, a woman had to submit several times a week to the disgusting ministrations of the man whose name she bore. But when the child was born, in 1890, it turned out to be a slender, elegant baby boy, and for a while she was pleased with him. She called him Alexandre. The name rang regal and sounded good in every language. She was pleased also to have finally delivered him and to be once again young, shapely, and available.