The Arrangement (29 page)

She tried to write to Al several times to apologize, but she could never say what she was apologizing for. She could not admit to him what she had done; she hadn’t done it to him, it wasn’t his to know about. Finally just a note, on the hotel’s
stationery, that she had arrived and was waiting, would see him in a week.

She met Rex and Edith at the Gare du Nord on the platform like a heartsick puppy.

“Dote, darling, look at you,” Edith kept saying, though Mary Frances was unsure whether she meant this in a good or a bad way, and Rex never let go of her arm.

They sent the trunks by porter to the hotel, and Mary Frances led them upstairs to the restaurant at the top of the gallery. The grand ceiling arched above, muraled with scenes from any place you might think to travel on a train, and the brass lamps shone, and the floor sparkled. Lifetimes ago, her last trip to Paris, she and Tim and Mrs. Parrish had marked that first solid day together at these tables with champagne. She remembered hoping she would never return to that restaurant and compare that day to another, that there would only ever be the one morning at the Gare du Nord with Tim.

She ordered sweet ham and bread and butter and the cold Pommery as before. She had been so foolish; it was a train station for going to and from everywhere in Europe. Her mother would not stop staring at her.

Finally Edith said, “Dote, what’s wrong?”

She found she could not open her mouth to speak and so only shook her head and raised her glass.

“To us,” Rex said. “May we all be safe and warm.”

Mary Frances burst into tears.

Back at the hotel, Edith put her to bed. She was overworked, overtired, she had been alone in Paris too long; Edith both offered and accepted her own excuses. Across the room, Rex stretched out on the tiny sofa, his big feet hanging
from the edge, a small hole in the toe of his black sock Mary Frances would have given anything to mend.

“I have missed you both so much,” she said.

Edith laughed. “You can always come home, darling.”

Mary Frances shook her head. She had made such a mess of things, and it would only get worse when they returned to Vevey and the Kennedys saw for themselves. She could not imagine now the kind of blindness with which she’d been living. She felt as if she were bursting from a dark room into one where every lamp was burning. There seemed nothing to do but close her eyes again.

She woke hours later to Rex and Edith sitting on the edge of the sofa, dressed in their evening clothes. They seemed so much older than she remembered, so much more delicate and frail without their big house around them, the spaces they called their own.

“All right, then,” Rex said, rubbing his hands together. “Let’s get this show on the road. I could eat a horse.”

“Daddy.”

“Freshen up, Dote. We’ll meet you in the bar.”

Downstairs the marble lobby of the hotel sparkled with people. It was well past the hour when everything in Vevey would be closed, but Mary Frances found Rex and Edith finishing their cocktails, and they loaded themselves into a cab. Across the arrondissement to Maison Prunier, because this was Paris for Edith and Rex, as grand as anyone could make it. Inside the brasserie felt like an aquarium, the black marble walls inlaid with bubbles of gilt, the low candles and lush carpets and cut glass. Sweeping her hand along their banquette, Edith found a woman’s earring, skinned over with
rubies. Their waiter tucked it into his pocket as though he were embarrassed for them both.

They ordered all the things they’d never eaten before, things from the sea: Venus clams and whelks, potatoes pressed with caviar, champagne and Chambertin, Rex finally pulling the waiter aside and asking for more caviar, making a bowl with his giant hands, the best caviar he’d ever eaten, and by god, he wanted his fill.

They would eat caviar all across the city that week, in fine restaurants and cafés and bistros, mounded in ice bowls, from tiny ivory spoons, spread on toast, on blinis, on eggs and potatoes, but Rex would always return to that first night, his first bite, and how he would never have another as good. He would smile at Mary Frances, and she would feel ridiculously proud and wistful, and they would pay their check, stroll through the park or the Louvre or the gardens by the Palais Royale until they were hungry again.

She felt as if she were bearing something, that her job was to do it quietly. She listened to Edith exclaim over the flowers, to her worry about David, his graduation around the corner, about Norah, her boyfriend of the moment. She listened to Rex’s deep sighs of pleasure, his first vacation from the paper in as long as he could remember. They did not ask about her writing; she had never shown it to them, so it was not a part of how they thought of her. She imagined inscribing a copy of her book to Rex and Edith when it was published, packing it off to California in the mail. What could she say to her parents that might prepare them for the version of herself she’d put in those pages? The version she would be next year, when they read them?

*   *   *

There was never any news for her at the hotel.

*   *   *

The Spanish Pavilion was still under construction, the painting temporarily kept in a gallery nearby. Mary Frances led her parents down the Champs de Mars, the lattice of the Eiffel Tower at their backs, the snaps of flags and mist from the fountains in the breeze. Everything about the World’s Fair was still going up, except for the eagle-topped fortress of the German Pavilion, which seemed taller than the Russian hammer and sickle across the mall.

They found the gallery off the Trocadéro and presented their tickets, but the curator acted as if they’d forged the things themselves.

“I am sorry, Madame. It is not possible to see the
Guernica
today. You will come back in July for the gala opening?”

“We will not be here in July. We will not be in Paris.”

“Regardless, Madame, that is when the painting will be ready. You should be our guest, then, in July.”

Mary Frances looked at the doors to the gallery. Two large men stood ready, North Africans in uniforms she could not place, their hands on the butts of guns, their eyes fixed forward.

“There have been many threats, Madame. I am sure you can understand.”

She felt a kind of panic rising, and she thought of Tim sliding the address across the kitchen table, his face drawn with last resort. She did not like to become upset in French,
but here she was, and all she had at her disposal was the declarative command. “We have special permission,” she said. “Do you have a telephone? Call the gallery.”

The little man sighed. He folded her tickets into the pocket of his shirt, made a clicking sound of disdain or concession, she could no longer tell the difference. He stepped between the guards and opened the doors to the space with a kind of flourish. Mary Frances and her parents stepped inside.

The painting was enormous, stretching along the entire wall, and there was no way to step back far enough to take it in at once. She walked alongside its black and white clutter and mass, gaping mouths and trampled figures, beasts and people, the high looming outline of a bull, bleeding newsprint colors into the tangle at his feet.

The first thing she thought of was Al. She looked into the slantwise flattened face of a figure in the painting, arms lifted, supplicant and abject, and she understood what Al was getting at, with all his talk of Spain and war and what was coming. This was the kind of pain we could only bring ourselves.

She turned to find Edith and Rex standing behind her, chins lifted to the painting, now small and shyly holding on to each other, as if they were watching something about to fall atop them. On her mother’s face, a sickened expression was dawning, and Mary Frances knew she would not be able to tell her about what had really happened with Tim and Al. She would not be able to come clean.

They collected themselves in a café around the corner. There was no conversation; not even Edith tried. When the waiter came, Rex did not look up, and she ordered champagne and rillettes for the table in French, though the waiters
here served thousands of tourists. They would have understood Rex, and the way he silently handed the job to her made her somehow mournful.

Across the street, he watched tall blond German girls stirring in and out of an open doorway, a clutter of Nazi officers drinking beer and playing cards.

“Austria,” he said, “is very close to here.”

Mary Frances made a sound in her throat, but he didn’t say anything more, his high, clear brow drawn tight. It was her brow, too; she got it from him. She wanted to think about that, not Austria or Germany, not any of the things that seemed to be looming so clearly in the future now.

“Let’s take the train tomorrow,” Rex said. “I’m anxious to see your home.”

In spite of herself, Mary Frances said she was as well. Back in Vevey, she was surrounded—by the news, the Alps, by what was on the other side.

*   *   *

Mary Frances’s suitcase arrived with a porter from the train station sometime late in the afternoon. It was very heavy, probably filled with books and things her parents had bought for her that could only be bought in Paris. Al tipped the porter and put the suitcase in her bedroom at the foot of her bed. He looked at it for a long moment, then closed the door.

The porter had given him a note: the Kennedys would be arriving for a drink at five, Mary Frances had made reservations for dinner later at Doellenbach’s. She asked that Al be in the apartment to greet everyone and signed her initials, nothing more.

He wondered what kind of notes she had been sending Tim.

It was an honest wondering; the fury he’d felt, the hurt and stupidity, the shame had all burned out, to leave a shell of removed curiosity. He wondered about chronology and timelines, which one of them had lied to him first—his guess was Mary Frances; he’d come to feel she was always lying to him, while Tim had been honest in all but one respect. He wondered why it was so much easier to hate Mary Frances than Tim. Perhaps it was simply that she had been gone, and once Al was gone, they would both seem equally, monstrously, to blame.

All of Le Paquis had been a lie; that he could chart for certain.

It was a matter of days now, a matter of survival. There was an envelope in his packed suitcase with five hundred dollars, a ticket for a ship that would depart England in August for New York. Just this last act of his marriage to get through, and then blackness, nothing, not even grief. He just saw nothing.

When he heard the Kennedys coming up the stairs, they sounded loud and happy, Mary Frances’s laughter loudest and brightest of all. Al suddenly remembered, lifetimes ago, arriving at Tim and Gigi’s house for that cocktail party right before Tim went back to Delaware. Tim had been broken. He certainly seemed fine now, and Mary Frances coming in the door of the apartment with her parents in tow, she was fine too. Al stood and extended his hand to greet Rex, bent to kiss Edith’s cheek; he could feel the muscles in his face grinding to work, and with a kind of grim kinetic force, the evening slid into place.

He offered martinis, the Kennedys accepted. He asked Rex
about Paris, and he heard about their walks in the Tuileries, the Champs-Élysées, the dogs, the bread, the art. He asked Edith about the children, and he heard about Norah’s French tutor whom Norah had to correct half the time, and David’s company exercises, his handsome uniform, his skill, it seemed, with a gun.

Then Mary Frances laughed, low and private like a curse slipped out by accident, and Al wanted to slap her. He couldn’t look at her. He focused on what Edith was telling him about the children.

God, if they’d had children.

Edith was blinking, making a small open gesture with her hand toward the silent room. For a moment, Al worried he might have said his thoughts out loud, but there were a thousand possible reasons for discomfort: Rex and Edith had traveled all day, did not know this place, or what their daughter was doing here. And Tim was nowhere to be found.

“Tim will be meeting us at the restaurant,” he said, because it felt like the thing everyone had been waiting for. Maybe Tim would be meeting them; the man had an uncanny ability to know what he needed to know and to be in the right place at the right time. Mary Frances laughed again, and Al stood up to mix himself another drink.

Out the window on the street below, Tim sat at one of the café tables on the sidewalk that had appeared with the spring weather. His white hair blew forward across his face, an open sketchbook, a short glass of wine at his elbow. Al felt a nauseous flipping in his gut: this had all happened, and would keep happening. The window was open. He leaned out.

“Al?” Mary Frances said.

“We’re ready to go, then?” Al said. He sloshed some of his martini, streaking his shirtfront as he took it down. He pointed to the window. “Tim’s waiting.”

*   *   *

Tim raised his hand for the check. Mary Frances would be gathering herself for dinner now, coming down the stairs. He had marked this day in his head when she left for Paris, and he’d thought about it constantly since she’d been gone. He’d known when her train made the station, the route she would take home; he had known she was in the apartment when he took his seat at the café. It was all a tremendous scale of increments and numbers: how close, how soon. With enough patience, he decided, anything was possible.

His head felt too large on his shoulders. The night at the theater had begun to dog him, the way the ground had dropped away. He could still feel it, maybe because of her, how she filled his thoughts. She was coming down the stairs. He closed his eyes, opened them.
Here she comes.

She stepped onto the sidewalk across the street, and it was as though someone had dialed in a radio, the frequency tight and every register clear. She touched her throat with the flat of her thumb, and he could feel the pulse there, the thin skin, her nail.

She looked for him. He stood to meet her gaze.

Mary Frances.

He crossed the street and greeted her parents, Al. He took her hand too, pressed her fingers to his cheek; she wore a new
perfume. He had not heard a word from her since she’d left for Paris, and it didn’t matter what they said now. He wanted to crush her in his arms.