but neither of us has to worry about that now. We’re alive and we buried our savagery back there in the trenches. I didn’t save your life for you to fret and stew about yesterday. It’s behind us, Daniel.”
“Did I ever thank you, Reuben? You know what I mean—a real thank-you? Someday I’m going to be able to thank you properly. I know you think I’m just a dumb green kid, and I guess I am. I’ll grow up, though.”
Reuben let his shoes scuff the carpet. To cover his embarrassment, he lit a cigarette and put it in Daniel’s hand and then took one for himself. “Someday I’ll take the thanks out of your hide,” he joked gruffly. For some reason the words didn’t sound like a joke when he uttered them. To cover his confusion, he asked, “Well, do you want to hear about what I saw or not?” He placed a little crystal ashtray on Daniel’s chest.
“First I walked through the house. I counted twelve rooms, and that doesn’t include where the servants sleep—that’s a separate wing. They have four rooms off the kitchen. There’s a lot of color here. Color makes a difference somehow. I never gave it much thought before, but it can make something look big or small. It’s amazing, Daniel. The furniture is kind of spindly, as you know, fragile-looking, but I tested out a couple of the chairs and they hold my weight just fine. I saw furniture like this in a moving picture once, it was about the French Revolution and the women wore these high white wigs.” Reuben knew that Daniel liked details.
“There are mirrors everywhere. Over the fireplaces, over little tables lining the hallways, like the one over that long piece of furniture in the dining room, I think I heard Mickey call it a buffet last night. And there are paintings, and the walls are all covered in tapestry where they’re not painted with hunting scenes like in the foyer, and countrysides and, get this, some kind of goddesses with their breasts exposed and men with all their equipment hanging out in this room that’s big enough to hold a ball—band and all!”
Daniel was impressed. “I hadn’t realized it was so big. Imagine one person having twelve rooms all to herself.”
“Mickey didn’t always live alone. She said they entertained a lot, and most of the rooms are bedrooms. Almost every room has a fireplace. There are hundreds of little statues and dishes and bowls full of Mickey’s flowers, and draperies. Maybe they’re junk, maybe they’re treasures. I don’t know. There’re oil paintings everywhere. Every one is signed.”
“Are they beautiful?”
“I guess so. They’re just pictures to me. There’s a sunrise and one with ladies in a garden and another of two naked ladies lying side by side. They didn’t make me want to hurry out and buy a paintbrush, if that’s what you mean. Besides, I’d be lucky if I could draw a straight line.”
Daniel chuckled. He couldn’t wait to go around the house on his own when his eyes were better to see how apt his friend’s descriptions were. “What else?”
“Mickey and her husband must have loved clocks. There’s one or two in every room. For as long as we’re here we’ll know what time it is every second of the day. I walked through the kitchen and my mouth watered. Good smells in there, Daniel. Dinner tonight is going to be tasty again. I checked out the wine cellar and it’s stocked to the brim. There’s a root cellar and a storehouse as well as a dairy. Madame Mickey could feed a division of men if she wanted. We’ll never starve, I can tell you that!”
“How rich do you think she is?”
“I think the lady has more money than you or I can ever dream of having. The Fonsard Wineries are the largest in all of France. At the clinic she used to talk about shipping their wines to the States. Maybe when the war is over she will. We really stepped into it, Daniel.”
“Is there a stable? I’ve always liked horses. Actually, I like all animals. Someday I’m going to get myself a dog. Not one of those squeaky little things, either. I want one that howls and barks and craps where it shouldn’t. I want it to beg for food and lick my face and come when I call it. Someday,” Daniel mused softly. So many somedays. Would they ever come?
“You got a name for this mutt, too?” Reuben laughed. “Male or female?”
Daniel snorted. “A boy dog, of course. I’ll call him Jake, after my best friend at the orphanage. Well, he was my best friend before someone took him to work in their factory. I really missed him. I think about him a lot and wonder if he signed up when I did.”
Something pricked at Reuben, something he couldn’t identify at first. And then he had a name for it: jealousy. Daniel had never mentioned Jake until now. Here he was going to name his dog after this fellow. Well, he’d go Daniel one better: he’d get the dog for him. It would be his flesh-and-blood gift, more important than a silly name.
When he began to describe the exterior of the château to Daniel, he forced a lightness he didn’t feel into his voice. “It looks smaller than it really is from the road because the major part of the house is in the back. Reminds me of a fairy-tale house; you’d almost expect gnomes and elves to come running out. The roof is tiled, real clay tiles, those half-round gray ones. And most of the windows are stained glass, the top of them anyway. That’s another thing—when the sun shines through them there’s a rainbow in the room. And some of the windows have designs on them. We couldn’t see them last night when we drove up, but the entrance leading to the house has huge stone columns that have frescoes on them. See, I know that word because Mickey uses it. They’re kind of weathered and the paint is peeling, but they’re still elegant-looking. In the spring, flowers and rosebushes must surround the house. I didn’t look in the greenhouses yet. Well, that’s it, Daniel. Someday I’m going to have a house like this. I’ll call it my summer home, just like the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers I read about in the newspapers back home. I’ll pattern the house after this one. I can smell money here, pal. And when you have money, you have power. I think that’s what I want more than the money, but they go hand in hand. Power! I even like the sound of the word.”
Daniel flinched under his compresses. The reaction rose from a combination of things. First was the intensity in Reuben’s voice. Daniel believed that Reuben would indeed be powerful someday. Wealthy and powerful, an awesome combination. But the second reason was personal: his life was in Reuben’s hands, and his friend’s words served to bring everything he had been thinking about right out into the open.
The truth was, Daniel had never before slept in a room such as the one he had slept in last night. Large, luxurious, and, best of all, private—the fact that it was all his made him want to run back upstairs and look at it and touch it to make sure it was real. He was overwhelmed by the sumptuous environment Reuben had just described. Mickey was a dream come true for both of them, but to Daniel she was truly the angel he had heard about, more nurturing and generous and bountiful than he could ever have imagined.
It was a miracle being in this house, and when his eyes were closed he was desperate to open them again and feast on his surroundings. With all his heart and soul, he hoped that Reuben knew what he was doing.
The road back to where he came from rose eerily in his mind. It was studded with places like his spare cot in the barrackslike dormitory of the orphanage, the deathly lonesome, seemingly eternal holidays he had endured there, in the place where he had felt utterly lost from God’s eyes. From there he’d moved even further, into the black hole of the war…. The thoughts began to paralyze him with sadness, especially now that he was finally experiencing the real thing: a home.
Chapter Three
Mickey returned home after the shroud of evening had fallen. She came in
