The Merry Month of May (11 page)

We were a pretty catholic group even for Paris-Americans. And almost all of us had some other reason for needing to be near there. I lived only just down the street, and I had no TV. Then there were two separate painters whom the Gallaghers had been buying, who both had apartments just across the river in the Latin Quarter near the Place Maubert. They were finding it hard to get home at night sometimes, if the students happened to be rioting at Maubert.

Then there was an American TV commentator who was quite a famous face back home and was an old poker buddy of Harry’s. He had to be out shooting and commentating the nightly riot every night. So he would stop by for a few drinks and some “Revolution” gossip, before he crossed the bridge and with his press armband on his arm plunged into the tear-gas clouds of the Quarter like Tarzan plunging into the jungle.

There was a very young twenty-two-year-old UPI man who was doing the same thing for UPI, without a cameraman. He was a friend of Harry and Louisa because he wanted to be a screenwriter, and also a novelist, if he had the time.

There was a wealthy, good-looking American businessman who was unmarried and lived on the Island. He would show up with any one of an apparently endless string of lush young—well, “humpers”, I believe they are called—that he had access to: humpers, that is, who do it with rich men for kicks and presents, as distinguished from call girls who do it for set prices of hard cash; and all of whom always lived in the heart of the Latin Quarter, naturally.

There was a portly young redheaded Jewish-Hungarian-American publisher’s assistant to a French publishing house whom Harry had met somewhere, who at 32 was so Continental he could hardly be classified as American any more, and who delighted in entertaining the gang of us with snobbish employments of the monocle he affected. He would stop by every night after walking out from his office in the depths of the Quarter, to have a few drinks to clear the tear gas out of his throat, he said, before calling a cab and going off to Auteuil where he lived.

There was Weintraub.

There were some others; and there were still others whose faces changed night to night.

And it was into this homogenized milk of Americans that Weintraub finally introduced the lactic acid of the young nineteen-year-old American Negro girl, Samantha-Marie.

Looking back on it from after the end of the ballgame, that week seems like a pretty dull inning now. Sure, it was a week of student demonstrations, and students rioting all night almost every night. But none of us felt that this student revolt could actually penetrate to the very heart of French life, and jerk it to a standstill. Normal life seemed to go right normally on. Housewives out shopping pushed with unconcern their baby carriages along the sidewalks of streets down whose centers students and police charged shouting or retreated, heaving paving stones and gas grenades at each other. (Sometimes it was very funny: to see the carriage-pushing mothers weeping as if their hearts would break as they pushed along; and then look down and see the babies sitting quietly in their prams blinking and weeping, too.) And—at least, that week—the Metro subways ran, autobuses and taxis continued functioning, you could still call New York (or in Harry’s case, the South of France, where his current producer was shooting). Food was plentiful, and there was not yet any talk of hoarding sugar or flour.

Sometimes the traffic got blocked up on the Boulevard St.-Michel and the Boulevard St.-Germain when the students were out, and there would be a great deal of illegal horn-honking, and a long wait. But by detouring around the Latin Quarter entirely, you could get to where you were going in Paris in the normal amount of time.

The students had three basic demands back then, during that first week: they wanted their seven convicted comrades released; they wanted the special riot police (the CRS:
Compagnies Républicaìnes de Sécurité
) withdrawn from the Latin Quarter; and they wanted the Sorbonne reopened and classes resumed. At the same time, they maintained they would continue to boycott the year’s-end exams. But they would consent to sit down with the Government and discuss their program for the reforms they wanted.

You have to understand that it was all really a question of
timing.
For example: To the eternal credit of their profound perspicacity and insight, the Government started off the week by refusing all three student demands. The arrested comrades were not released, the police were not withdrawn, and the Sorbonne remained closed. Only a few agitators were causing this, they stated in their news leaks, not the great mass of the student body. So on the Monday of May 6th, their big demonstration banned officially, the students took to street-fighting again and to building in the Quarter their barricades of paving stones, tree guards and traffic signs; and they kept it up for 14 hours all through the night. On the next day the big, nonviolent, unauthorized but uncontested, six-hour, 12-mile march was made all around Paris by more than 20,000 students some said (anyway, a number which obviously startled the authorities), only to end in more barricades and street-fighting when the police tried to break it up after the march was finished. And it was happening now in other cities, too: Toulouse, Strasbourg, Lyons, Bordeaux.

Two other young leaders had emerged alongside
Dany le Rouge:
Jacques Sauvageot of UNEF, the biggest students’ union; and Alain Geismar of SNE Sup., the young teachers’ union. On Wednesday the 8th, after four days of refusal, the Government finally offered to reopen the University—if the students would stop demonstrating; the response, instead of the agreement the students would have given three days before, was now a wild student sit-in in the middle of the Boulevard St.-Michel, tying up traffic for three hours, and a stated threat by young M. Sauvageot that if the Sorbonne was opened, the students would take it over and occupy it. So on Thursday the Government announced the Sorbonne would stay closed, and the demonstrations and street-fighting began again, this time early in the afternoon.

It was all one long history of changing their minds, inefficiency, bungling, blundering, and execrable, inexcusably bad timing. Our group of Americans, in our almost ritualistic pattern of meeting at the Gallaghers’ every evening, watched and read and discussed it all. Almost everybody had been out at some time or other to watch.

I had not been out to the riots myself. I had been working hard, I had a considerable number of dinner dates that week, and the whole thing bored me. But Harry had been out. He had been out quite a number of times. But there seemed to be strangely little he could tell about it. He said there was a strangely nonserious air of gaiety about it all. It was too vivacious. He didn’t think it would accomplish much. To me he seemed irritated, even angry, at the students. You might almost have said he was jealous in some odd way.

They had not heard from Hill since the previous Sunday when I delivered them Hill’s second message. But Hill had had some young woman
(Anne-Marie the pipiste, I wondered?)
, who seemed to be “working” as his “assistant” they said, telephone them a couple of times. And he had been home once, they found out from their maids, to pick up his big Bolex 16-mm zoom-lens movie camera. But he had sneaked in and out without seeing them.

I found them both strangely unworried about it all. I knew I was worried about him. But they just seemed to go right on. Harry had made a deal two months before, and was deep into the writing of a new,
American
-Western. Louisa went out to her lunches at Lipp’s or Alexandre’s with her friends, shopped afternoons, entertained at home nights or went out with Harry. They both seemed to have at least their usual amount of fun. It was more as if Hill were away at school at some American university back home, instead of maybe running for his safety from the tough Paris cops.

“Naturally, we’re worried,” Harry said when I finally asked them. But then he stopped. And he went on with whatever it was he was doing: fixing himself or me a drink, I guess.

I had been very careful with them, when I told them about Hill’s second visit. I had underplayed Hill’s reaction to Harry’s offer of help. I hadn’t lied. I had told them the offer angered Hill. But I had not told them how angered. Neither of them had reacted. Not in any way I could see, anyhow. And I went away with a distinct feeling that if I
had
told them: told them how first strangely furious and then melancholiac Hill had acted, that they would not have reacted to that, either.

Finally I stayed late one night. I waited till all the congregated eight-o’clock news watchers had gone. I wanted to bring it up again. This all was a long way from the powerful parental reaction I had seen that night back in April, when Harry telephoned me to come over because Hill wasn’t home. And I wanted to know what was going on with them. This time it was Louisa who answered me.

“Of course we’re worried,” she said, just like Harry. But then she smiled one of her superior New England smiles at me, the kind that always irritated me, though I’m sure she never knew this, or was even aware of the superiority.

We three were all alone. The Portuguese maids had cleaned away the TV-and-cocktail debris of glasses and hors d’oeuvre plates, and had retired to the kitchen. McKenna was in bed asleep. But then when I brought up Hill, Harry seemed to just sort of fade away and disappear, too: fade right into the wall; or bend and secrete himself behind the bar or a chair somewhere. So that Louisa and I seemed alone.

I was dimly aware of him somewhere there behind me; but I could not turn to look for him without taking my eyes and attention away from Louisa. And this quickly became increasingly impossible to do. I recognized dimly in some other part of my mind, with a small inner start, that to do so would be to insult her seriously, perhaps irreparably. I had seen her get the bit in her teeth this way several times before, some about politics, and once about summer camps. You simply dared not disagree with her.

“On the other hand, we know he’s doing exactly what he wants to do,” she said. “And what he wants to do is what we want for him: what we want him to do, too.” Her faint New England drawl seemed to get visibly longer and more prominent as she spoke.

Sitting on the couch, she tilted back her head and let her long New England jaw drop at me. And her veiled green eyes, always a prominent thing with her, seemed to come out, pop forward, in her face: now, they looked like two spot-lighted marbles. The smile seemed to tell me she was thinking very critically of me, her old friend Jack.

“After all, it was Hill’s decision to make. And
we
would certainly not attempt to interfere in that. So that, in quite another way, I can say that we’re not worried about him at all. We’re glad: that he’s there. We’re proud: that he is out there where he is.”

“Well,” I said. “Yes, of course. I mean, there’s very little chance of his—”

“Getting killed? None at all, or almost none,” Louisa said. “But even if there were. Even if there were, we should still want him to be where he is. We, Harry and I, are totally and without reservation on the side of the students in this thing. We’d be rather ashamed of Hill, if he were anywhere else.

“We wouldn’t want him to have to be coming home every day to reassure us, when there are important things he ought to be doing instead. We do not even expect him to telephone us. I told that little girl that. We will go right on carrying on here, I told her: that is the best way we can help Hill. Help them all.”

I could imagine what Hill would say to Anne-Marie about that.

“Well,” I said—somewhat inconclusively, I suppose.

But I found myself, without knowing why, on the defensive. Something had got her up on her high horse and from up there there she was looking down with those marbles for eyes and haranguing me, while I down below stood feeling I had put my foot dumbly into some bear trap, steel-sprung and saw-toothed.

“I expect we have all the normal parental anxieties, Jack,” she said. She shook her head. “But those count for little. And since Hill was not raised in any hypocritical background, I don’t see how we could expect him to do anything else than what he’s doing.”

“Well, yes,” I said. “Yes, of course not. But I just thought that, if you both wanted to, if there was any way to—”

She said it for me. “Contact him?” The superior smile seemed to writhe around on her face for a bit. “And how would that get done?”

“Well,” I said. Of course she was right. “You’re right, of course,” I said. “He did say something to me about some lofts. But he didn’t give me any addresses.”

“There you are!” Louisa cried, triumphantly, as if she had won a whole war from me.

I was beginning to wish Harry would turn up, from wherever it was behind me he had hidden himself, and get back into this.

“I just think that it’s horrible for them to set their police brutes on those children,” Louisa said. “Those kids are young, and idealistic, and they have a perfect right to protest against this hypocritical society that they’re forced to inherit and live in without any choice in the matter. If the young are not going to protest, who on earth is going to? Harry and I have been fighting the same two-faced, hypocritical human society all our lives. We are backing these kids all the way, Harry and I, and we are going to do everything we can to aid them.” The green marbles of her eyes seemed to have gone unfocused. “We are whole-heartedly behind everything these youngsters are doing. Isn’t that so, Harry? Isn’t it?”

“Absolutely,” Harry said from behind me. “Yes, absolutely.” He came up. He was carrying three new drinks. He gave one of them to Louisa, and then another to me, kept one. But I had a distinct impression he had used the making of them to keep out of the way, and out of the conversation. “To see those kids out there, taking those beatings from the damned CRS, is just beautiful. It’s just something beautiful to see.”

From the corner of my eye I saw Louisa bob her head emphatically from the couch. She smiled on us a kind of breathless, aggressive smile. And the eerily brilliant green eyes in her long face seemed to be looking far away. I am sure she was unaware she had a drink in her hand.