conceive in the first place, and then to have let themselves believe that children might still bring joy and happiness. What a cruel joke that was! And what dupes they!
Young Jeannetôt was just back from the French colonies, spoiled, feverish, with a little Algerian half-breed tagging after him, wanting marriage of all things. She was good to look at, the father said, and here Jennie saw that he was jealous of his son’s rights over her. But marriage! It had sent Madame into one nervous crisis after another, so that Paul rarely came home any more, but spent all his time with his Petit’ Chose, the Little Thing he had brought back from Algiers with him, living God knows how on his allowance and what his mother gave him secretly, dancing at the Palace, not working . . .
Jeannetôt slapped his hands together in disgust. He looked out the window, too angry suddenly to go on. Jennie knew he was thinking of his own younger years, years full of hard, sober work, of two young promising children, of a gradual rise, better apartments, all as it should be for a Swiss engineer. What a dolt he was!
“Tell me about your daughter,” she said gently, and she let her hand light for a second on his thick, well-clothed knee. He turned back apologetically to her, and his eyes were a little moist with gratitude and self-pity.
“What is there about you, Madame, that makes me talk this way? It is not my habit, I assure you. Forgive me, and forget my silly confidences!”
“No, no,” Jennie protested, her voice full of the understanding and compassion she knew he now expected. She was completely amused: this was all part of the unreal staginess of her flight. Instead of a book it was now high comedy, written and rehearsed so that it unfolded too smoothly ever to be stopped. Every line was there, every puppet in place. The scenery was consummately designed and lighted. And the audience—ah, who but Jennie?—the audience was tight with anticipation, with eagerness to be entertained, with tolerance. “Talk more,” she commanded sweetly. “Tell me of your daughter, Monsieur Jeannetôt.”
He looked at her for a minute, and his eyes dried, and he tossed back his head with a hard, mocking snort of laughter. “Hah!” he said. “Now, there’s a case for you!”
Jennie relaxed in her comfortable gently rocking seat. She thought vaguely of another swig of brandy, but decided there would be too many complications. They were past Avallon. Lunch would be soon. She’d order a Byrrh first: it was always so good on trains, like the cream cheeses and the Cointreau afterward, sweet, sticky, horrible stuff anywhere in the world but there, and there a part of the intricate immobility of shooting across Europe with grace. Thus Jeannetôt was perfect. He lured her, and in what was almost a kindly way he interested her. Papa Jean, she thought mockingly, dear old puzzled family man, kindly clown Papa Jean . . .
He was talking about Léonie. She smiled trustingly at him, and nodded and frowned, and although so much of her was not there, a great deal was. What she heard she tucked away, just as she would unconsciously have remembered the details of a dull novel or a hackneyed play.
“Of course Léonie is a few years older than Paul,” he was saying heavily, painfully, as if he were reading from a letter he himself had written after much thought, but had never meant to make public. “That may perhaps explain her—her troubles. Paul has always been a happier kind of person, very insouciant and teasing and thoughtless. And then there is the question of religion. Her mother is believing and very devout. I myself, I must confess to you, am agnostic, and have always been so. But Madame Jeannetôt—as I say, she is devout. Indeed, at certain times . . .”
Jennie knew that he was telling her that the Church was a part of their marital pleasures, and that the Cross was a sword between them on the bed, and that when his wife was full of monthly pain she knelt more easily than ever to confess her sins. The lines were written: the puppet was jerking neatly on cue. She sighed in sympathy, without looking at him. He would go on.
“Yes,” he said, “Léonie was raised according to her dear mother’s wishes, and I cannot help feeling, although of course I have no right to say so, that it might have been better for her to have left the convent a little sooner. Léonie has never been beautiful—”
“Oh,” Jennie said in soft protest, “anything young and fresh is beautiful.”
Jeannetôt looked at her instead of going on, and for a second annoyed her by stepping out of his part. He should have reminded her that his daughter was not young. Instead he looked at her. She was soon reassured, for she knew that he would say the alternate line, the other possible one.
“Yes, that is true,” he said, and he looked on at her heavily, with courteous sincerity. You are very beautiful, he was saying.
Jennie smiled at him, a little withdrawn to remind him that they were, theoretically at least, strangers, and then she said, “But Léonie? Is she not beautiful?”
“No. No, I regret to admit. When she was about eighteen, that is when she should have left the Sisters. But now she is past twenty-five, past the age.”
“The age?”
“That is, she is not interesting to the young men we can introduce her to, men in my office, friends of Paul’s. They all find her too serious. She has let herself grow sallow, and she seldom goes to the beauty salons for her hair, her nails. Instead”—and in his voice was an impotent curse—“she goes down to St. Jacques and falls on her knees and sucks in the incense. Then she comes home, locks her door, weeps.”
He looked at his hands and wiped them carefully with his handkerchief. He was leaning forward slackly, swaying with the train, like an old clown. “Children are sometimes very disturbing,” he said.
Jennie thought, Oh no! No, he can’t be going to say those lines too! She felt a little hysterical, as if she might laugh in his face. If he told her that they were still worth all the suffering they caused their parents, she would. She shrugged a little and let her eyes fall away from his grayish face.
“I have never been a mother,” she murmured as softly as she could against the noise of the train. Then, before he could say, “Ah, Madame, there is no joy to compare with that of motherhood!” she asked eagerly, “But Léonie with the Little Thing? What is the situation there?”
He did not answer, but smiled grudgingly, as if he were remembering things he should not smile to remember.
“I am indiscreet,” Jennie said. “I ask impertinent questions.”
“Not at all. My God, I have never met such a magically intuitive, sensitive confidante in my life, Madame! My own indiscretion astounds me. How could I, how dared I, thus unburden myself to you, a complete stranger?”
“But I do not feel like one.”
“No. No, you are not. You are a part of this whole exquisite day, so full of rebirth . . .” He looked at the rich land flashing by. “We are almost at Dijon. When the train stops, will you be charitable enough to join me at lunch? We are two cars away from the restaurant. It is easier to walk then.”
His knuckles were white, Jennie saw. She did not want to eat with him. She wanted to be alone, to look unhindered at the lusty or mincing or suspicious or jolly manners of the people all about her. She wanted to be silent, to be alone and enjoying it, not pitted against the world, as she drank the crude apéritif, ate the crude hors-d’oeuvres and then the simple crude fresh food on its great trays held skillfully over and around her as the train hurtled through Burgundy. She loved eating alone on trains. She looked again at Jeannetôt’s tired burgher-master face and then at his hands, which he surely did not know were thus tightly, whitely clenched
