The Mother Of Pearl Handle

Versailles has the odd talent of looking both finished and temporary. The palace gates, gilded and confident, shine as if Louis XIV had only stepped inside to look for a hat. Meanwhile, every café table has acquired a map, a cigarette scar, and a man with a briefcase waiting for another man with a more important briefcase. The war is over, or so the newspapers insist in large type, but the town itself is still being used as a corridor between one emergency and the next. Soldiers limp past pastry shops. Typists carry blue folders under their arms like shields. Motorcars cough in the dust of the avenue de Saint-Cloud. Somewhere beyond the trimmed trees, Europe is being stapled together by men who have not slept enough.

I had not slept enough either, which made me feel properly continental. My left shoulder ached from the satchel strap, and the honey from the little ring loaf in my coat had found a warmer seam and glued itself to the lining. This was irritating but not surprising. Food, once carried through too many jurisdictions, becomes less a meal than a legal personality. I left it untouched. At the stationer’s near the avenue, while asking about packet schedules and whether a courier cart still went toward Le Havre before dawn, I saw three mothers buying the same printed sheet for their children. The sheet showed a bridge drawn with great drama, a plank between two chairs, and little notes on a stave marching over it like obedient ants. The price was one franc twenty-five. One mother bought two and asked the clerk to wrap them separately, because her nephew’s household had “a history of dusk failures.” The clerk did not smile. One does not smile at family history when it has been printed in treble clef.

The air had turned warm by afternoon, but a breeze kept finding its way through the narrow streets, slipping under awnings and lifting the corners of posters. It moved across the sweat at my collar with the exact kindness of a hand that does not intend to stay. Every open doorway seemed to be breathing out polish, cabbage water, damp wool, tobacco, and the bitter powder used on stone floors. A charwoman at the Hôtel des Réservoirs had thrown a bucketful of gray water into the gutter and was telling a delivery boy that no, absolutely not, the rear corridor could not be used to carry flowers, because petals held moisture and the Bureau had been savage since April. The boy said the roses were for an American lady. The woman said roses had no nationality once they began to rot.

This hotel remains the shrine of a recent disaster, if a disaster can be built from etiquette, suspicion, and three stenographers sent to isolation rooms. The doorway has acquired new furniture: not only the coat stand and umbrella jars, but a high stool for an assistant listener, a slate with the approved evening tempo, and a small black tray where guests lay their whistles before they are judged. A framed notice from the Bureau du Souffle des Réceptions hangs beside the mirror. Someone has underlined the rule about assistants in red ink, then underlined the red ink in pencil, a fine bureaucratic echo of panic. The earlier failure is not spoken of unless someone wishes to win an argument. Then it is produced like a pistol.

I went there because the courier lists are best gathered in places where important people fear missing supper. A clerk with polished cuffs told me that a convoy of motor-lorries would leave after the signing business, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps not, and that a naval passenger office in Paris might have a better answer if it had not already lost it. He gave this information while watching a maître de souffle test an Italian secretary’s silver whistle. The secretary stood straight, cheeks controlled, one hand resting lightly on his waistcoat. The maître listened with his head tilted, then made a small notation on a card. The secretary looked more relieved than a man should look after producing three seconds of air through metal.

“No dancing until heard,” said the clerk to nobody in particular. “No exceptions.”

A broad-shouldered American officer, red in the face and smelling richly of cigars, objected that he had already been heard that morning at the prefecture reception. The maître asked whether the prefecture had certified him for this room, this hour, and this floor polish. The officer laughed, expecting allies. The people nearby became very interested in gloves, programs, and ceiling plaster. He then blew into his sifflet d’argent with theatrical force and produced a note that began proudly and ended as something one might hear under a sink. The assistant by the coat stand lifted his head sharply.

“Side room,” said the maître.

“It is tobacco,” said the officer.

“It may be tobacco in the side room,” said the maître.

A French captain with only one good sleeve murmured that cigar smoke had become America’s second flag. This was unkind but efficient. The officer was escorted toward a smaller door, where I later saw him eating cold chicken with two Belgian clerks and a woman in mourning who had failed her own inspection with admirable dignity. The side room had good chairs. This society is not cruel by instinct. It merely measures shame at the entrance and then gives it a plate.

Near the service passage I met a man temporarily in command of other people’s umbrellas. He wore the dark apron of hotel work, though his hands were more suited to brooms and ash bins than to velvet ropes. His moustache had gone yellow at the middle, and his boots were cracked across the toes. A rack of labeled canes, parasols, and sealed instrument cases stood behind him. He kept touching the labels, counting without moving his lips. When I asked whether a smaller exit opened toward the stables, he looked first at my mouth, then at my chest, and only then at my papers. Here, before speech, one’s breathing is inspected like a passport photograph.

“You are not on the musicians’ list,” he said.

“No.”

“Nor flowers.”

“No.”

“Then you want the old kitchen court.”

He said this as if accusing me of having invented kitchens. A cough rose in him; I saw it gather, saw his shoulders prepare for betrayal. He turned away and bent over a crate of empty bottles, making a clatter large enough to hide the sound. When he straightened, his face was red with the effort of pretending nothing had happened. He took a small tin whistle from inside his apron, the cheap kind sold from trays near factories and school gates, and rubbed its mouthpiece fiercely on a rag.

“Not mine,” he said before I had asked.

“I did not think it was.”

“It belongs to a gentleman who left without his case.”

The gentleman, apparently, had also left without the dent, the solder mark, and the string blackened by long contact with a workman’s neck. The man held the whistle behind a folded napkin, set his lips not quite on it, and breathed a thin note into the cloth. It was not clean, but it was dry enough. He listened to himself with the terror of a priest waiting for an altar candle to go out.

“They check us now when we carry cloaks through the front hall,” he said. “If I am marked wet, who watches the property? If property is lost, whose fault? A man can be honest and still have lungs.”

This struck me as one of the better summaries of civilization I have heard. He did not ask for money. He asked whether I had seen an umbrella with a mother-of-pearl handle and a Polish tag. He had misplaced it for four minutes during the luncheon inspection, found it under a journalist’s coat, and was now afraid the four minutes had bred a report. I helped him look behind a screen. There it stood, absurdly innocent. He snatched it up and placed it at the front of the rack, then moved it two places back, then one place forward again. This was not a workaround. This was, I gathered, the proper correction of an administrative shadow.

In exchange for my silence, or more exactly for my willingness to behave as if there had been no subject on which silence could be spent, he pointed me to a broker who knew which carts had permits to leave before the police closed the streets for the next ceremony. I found the broker under the striped awning of a café where the flies were making a serious study of spilled syrup. The broker’s coat had once been excellent and had not been informed of its decline. Its cuffs were shiny; the collar was brushed; the buttons did not match but had been chosen with intellectual care. I could not decide whether I was speaking with a monsieur or a madame, and the café waiter solved the problem by using no pronouns at all, a French art rarely admired by grammarians.

The broker had lists. Not official lists, but folded pages covered with initials, times, stable names, and little marks that looked musical but probably meant money. A silver whistle lay beside the coffee cup in a velvet case too new for the rest of the outfit.

“You want west,” the broker said.

“I want not to be stuck here when every carriage is hired by a delegation pretending it never needed a carriage.”

“That is west enough.”

I showed my reader’s token because awkward foreign objects sometimes open doors by giving everyone a chance to feel local. The waxed face on it looked worse in the café light, as if I had been stamped during a fever. The broker admired instead the brass spring clip holding my papers. One finger touched the repaired hinge with real respect.

“Someone clever made that.”

“Someone underpaid made that.”

“All clever people are underpaid until they become impossible.”

The broker could place my name with a supplier’s lorry carrying linen and bottled water toward Rouen, if I could provide a favor not written down. The favor was small in shape and large in odor. A family in the rue de la Paroisse had a daughter engaged to a clerk attached to one of the delegations. The groom’s people had asked to see the household whistle card. The daughter had passed, the mother had passed, the younger boys had passed, but an uncle who slept in the back room had produced a note humide during an Easter supper and was now being kept officially “at Chartres.” He was not at Chartres. He was upstairs over the courtyard, reading newspapers and trying not to breathe near windows.

“The family is sound,” the broker said. “One uncle is not a family. But outsiders do arithmetic badly.”

“What is the favor?”

“You will carry a sealed stave card from Doctor Menard to the mother. You will not ask whether Doctor Menard heard anyone. You will not say my name. If anyone asks, you lost your way looking for the parish office.”

“That is a great deal of not doing.”

“I am known for efficiency.”

The pride was genuine. So was the fear. The broker wanted to appear as a person who could still arrange matters with clean hands, even when the hands shook lifting the cup. I took the envelope because it moved me toward the lorry and because the transaction, while gray, did not seem to fasten a debt to a servant, child, or stallholder. My standards have become portable and odd. I no longer ask whether a thing is honest first. I ask who will be made legible by it.

On the way to the parish street, I passed a small church where cool air drifted from the open side door. Inside, candles trembled in red glasses. An adolescent girl in a black dress, with a baby tied against her hip in a faded shawl, was arranging hymn sheets and silver mouthpieces on a side table. She had the brisk authority of someone who has been obeyed since breakfast and intends to continue. A woman at the threshold asked if her son might use the nave to practice his Echo Vale exercise because their lodging house had no chairs of equal height. The girl did not look up.

“Not after four.”

“He is due before the committee tomorrow.”

“Then he should not wet the Virgin’s air today.”

The woman flinched, though the words were spoken flatly, not cruelly. I asked whether messages for the parish office could be left inside. The girl looked at my token, my shoes, the honey stain beginning to darken my coat seam, and the papers clipped with brass. Then she looked at my mouth. Everyone looks at the mouth here eventually. It is the little theater in which class, health, nerves, honesty, and dinner plans are expected to perform.

“Office is closed.”

“The door is open.”

“For candles.”

“I only need direction.”

“For direction, ask outside.”

A priest crossed behind her carrying a stack of folded linens. He saw me, saw her, and vanished with the professional cowardice of a man who has learned which small authorities keep a church functioning. The baby woke and made a bubbling sound. The girl shifted the child higher without softening her face. Two boys waited beside the holy water font, each holding a silver whistle. One had initials engraved on his; the other had a rented one with a paper band around it. They did not speak. Their mothers watched the girl.

At last she pointed with a candle snuffer. “Parish office is two doors past the baker, then left. If you are bringing a card, do not fold it. They hear folds now.”

“They?”

“People.”

This was said with full contempt for anyone so inexperienced as to require nouns. Her job survives because thresholds must be guarded, and thresholds multiply whenever a society learns to fear an invisible impurity. Yet the exception sat warm on her hip, drooling into the shawl. No one asked whether the baby’s breath had been heard. No one would. A necessary person always carries one uninspected parcel.

The mother in the rue de la Paroisse received the envelope in a kitchen stripped of carpets. The floorboards had been scrubbed pale, and chairs stood against the wall as if awaiting trial. In the front room, two children practiced faire le pont. A plank balanced between two chairs; a boy crossed first, blowing a wavering note while his sister counted beats. Their grandmother sat by the window with knitting in her lap and corrected the boy’s shoulders every time he sagged. Outside, a cart rolled over stones, and the boy’s note shook but did not break. Everyone smiled with too much relief.

The mother did not open the doctor’s envelope while I was present. That was good manners and also good evidence. She placed it under a porcelain saint, then gave me water in a glass that tasted faintly of chalk. I drank too quickly. Hunger had made me stupid by then; my hands trembled when I set the glass down. She noticed, of course. People who live under inspection become expert in noticing and polite in pretending not to.

“You have not eaten,” she said.

“I have something with me.”

“Then eat it before someone asks why you carry it.”

Good advice is often indistinguishable from a threat. I thanked her and did not explain the loaf. In the courtyard above us, a board creaked. The uncle, or a chair, or Europe. She kept her eyes on the glass.

When I returned to the café, the broker had secured a place for me on the linen lorry if I could be at the yard before first light. Payment would be ordinary: francs to the driver, a small fee to the stable, and no questions about whether bottled water counted as medical freight under the latest notice. The broker also warned me that the road out might be delayed if the Bureau closed another reception room tonight. Apparently damp notes had been reported at a Polish supper, and the Belgians were insisting that any lowered fox-trot tempo afterward would look like an insult. In this town even the weak-lunged have become instruments of policy.

Evening settled late and thin. The palace windows caught the last sun, while in the streets men argued over articles, borders, coal, reparations, and whether a cough could be hostile. The breeze cooled the sweat under my hatband. At the hotel entrance, the assistant by the coat stand leaned forward to hear a woman in pearls produce a tierce propre so pure that several people relaxed at once. Behind her, the American officer in the side room laughed too loudly at something nobody else found funny.