Save Me the Waltz: A Novel (29 page)

Alabama threw the broken fan and the pack of picture postcards that Bonnie had left behind in the wastebasket. They seemed hardly worth sending after her to Paris. She sat down to mend her Milanese tights. The Italian toe shoes were good but Italian tights were too heavy—they cut your thighs on the arabesque croisé.

II

“D’you have a good time?”

David met Bonnie under the pink explosive apple trees where Lake Geneva spread a net below the undulating acrobacies of the mountains. Opposite the Vevey Station a bridge of pencil strokes clipped pleasantly over the river; the mountains braced themselves out of the water on the Dorothy Perkins stems and thongs of purple clematis. Nature had padded every crack and crevice with floral stuffing; narcissus banded the mountains in a milky way, the houses tethered themselves to the earth with browsing cows and pots of geraniums. Ladies in lace with parasols, ladies in linen with white shoes, ladies in tangerine smiles patronized the elements in the station square. Lake Geneva, pounded for so many summers by the cruel brightness, lay shaking its fist at the high heavens, swearing up at God from the security of the Swiss Republic.

“Lovely,” replied Bonnie succinctly.

“How was Mummy?” pursued David.

Dressed in a catalogue of summer, even Bonnie noticed that his clothes were a little amazing, suggesting a studied sartorial selection. He was dressed in pearly gray and he looked as if he had stepped down inside his angora sweater and flannel pants with such precision that he had hardly deranged their independent decorative purpose. If he hadn’t been so handsome he could never have achieved so speculative and tentative an effect. Bonnie was proud of her father.

“Mummy was dancing,” said Bonnie.

Deep shadows sprawled about the streets of Vevey like lazy summer drunkards; clouds full of moisture floated like lily pads in the luminous puddle of the sky.

They mounted the hotel bus.

“The rooms, Prince,” said the sad, suave hotel man, “will be eight dollars a day because of the fête.”

The valet carried their luggage to a white-and-gold encrusted suite.

“Oh, what a beautiful sitting room!” ejaculated Bonnie. “There is even a telephone. Such ‘élégance’!”

She spun about, switching on the lurid floor lamps.

“And I have a room to myself, and a bath of my own,” she hummed. “It was nice of you, Daddy, to give Mademoiselle ‘vacances’!”

“How would the royal visitor like her bath?” said David.

“Well—cleaner, please, than in Naples.”

“Was your bath dirty in Naples?”

“Mummy said ‘no’——” said Bonnie hesitantly, “but Mademoiselle said ‘yes.’ Everybody gives me much contrary advice,” she confided.

“Alabama should have seen to your bath,” said David.

He heard the thin treble voice singing to itself in the tub, “Savez-vous planter les choux——” There was no sound of splashing.

“Are you washing your knees?”

“I haven’t got to them yet—’à la manière de chez-nous, à la manière de chez-nous’——”

“Bonnie, you
must
hurry up.”

“Can I stay up till ten o’clock tonight?—‘on les plante avec le nez’——”

Bonnie tore giggling through the rooms.

The sun winked in the gold braid, the curtains blew softly in the ghostly breeze, the lamps glowed like abandoned campfires under their pink shades in the daylight. The flowers in the room were pretty. There must be a clock. Round and round the child’s brain raced contentedly. The tops of the trees outside were shiny blue.

“Didn’t Mummy
say
anything?” said David.

“Oh, yes,” said Bonnie, “she gave me a party.”

“That was nice; tell me about it.”

“Well,” said Bonnie, “there was a monkey, and I was sick, and Mademoiselle cried about the preserves on my dress.”

“I see——well, what did Mummy say?”

“Mummy said if it weren’t for the orchestra she could do two turns.”

“It must have been very interesting,” said David.

“Oh, yes,” Bonnie compromised, “it was very interesting. Daddy——”

“Yes, dear?”

“I love you, Daddy.”

David laughed in little sharp jerks like a person making tatting.

“Well, you’d better.”

“I think so, too. Do you think I could sleep in your bed tonight?”

“Of course not!”

“It would be very comfortable.”

“Your own is just the same.”

The child’s tone changed to sudden practicality. “It’s safer near you. No wonder Mummy liked sleeping in your bed.”

“How silly!”

“When I am married all my family will sleep together in a large bed. Then I shall be quite easy about them, and they will not be afraid of the dark,” went on the child. “You liked being near your parents until you had Mummy, didn’t you?”

“We had our parents—then we had you. The present generation is always the one without the comfort of people to lean on.”

“Why?”

“Because solace, Bonnie, is an affair of retrospect and expectation. If you don’t hurry up, our friends will be here before you are dressed.”

“Are there children coming?”

“Yes, I am taking the family of one of my friends for you to meet. We are going to Montreux to see the dancing. But,” said David, “the sky is clouding over. It looks like rain.”

“Daddy, I hope not!”

“So do I. Something always spoils a party, monkeys or rain. There are our friends now.”

Behind their governess three blond children traversed the hotel court through the thin sun pinking suggestively the trunks of the firs.

“Bonjour,” said Bonnie, extending her hand limply in a juvenile interpretation of a grande dame. Inconsistently she pounced on the little girl. “Oh, but you are dressed as Alice in Wonderland!” she shrieked.

The child was several years older than Bonnie.

“Grüss Gott,” she answered demurely, “you too have on a pretty dress.”

“Et bonjour, Mademoiselle!” The two little boys were younger. They clambered over Bonnie with the stiff military formality of the Swiss schoolboy.

The children were very decorative under the vista of cropped plane trees. The green hills stretched away like a canvas sea to faint recesses of legend. Pleasantly loitering mountain vegetation dangled over the hotel front in swaying clots of blue and mauve. The childish voices droned through the mountain clarity conversing intimately in the sense of seclusion conveyed by the overhanging Alps.

“What is this ‘it’ I saw in the papers?” said the eight-year-old voice.

“Don’t be silly, it’s only sex appeal,” answered the voice of ten.

“Only beautiful ladies can have it in the movies,” said Bonnie.

“But sometimes, don’t men have it too?” said the little boy disappointed.

“Father says everybody does,” called the older girl.

“Well, Mother said only a few. What did your parents say, Bonnie?”

“They didn’t say anything, since I had not read it in the papers.”

“When you are older,” said Genevra, “you will—if it is still there.”

“I saw my father in a shower bath,” offered the smallest boy expectantly.

“That’s nothing,” sniffed Bonnie.

“Why is it nothing?” the voice insisted.

“Why is it something?” said Bonnie.

“I have swimmed with him naked.”

“Children—children!” reproved David.

Black shadows fell on the water, echoes of nothing poured down the hills and steamed over the lake. It began to rain; a Swiss downpour soaked the earth. The flat bulbous vines about the hotel windows bled torrents over the ledges; the heads of the dahlias bent with the storm.

“How can they have the fête in the rain?” the children cried in dismay.

“Perhaps the ballet will wear their ‘caoutchouc’ as we have done,” said Bonnie.

“I’d rather they had trained seals anyway,” said the little boy optimistically.

The rain was a slow sparkling leak from a lachrymose sun. The wooden platforms about the estrade were damp and soaked with dye from the wet serpentine and sticky masses of confetti. Fresh wet light through the red and orange mushrooms of shiny umbrellas glowed like a lamp store display; a fashionable audience glistened in bright cellophane slickers.

“What if it rains down his horn?” said Bonnie, as the orchestra appeared beneath the rain-washed set of chinchilla-like mountains.

“But it might be pretty,” protested the boy. “Sometimes in my bath when I sink beneath the water I make the most beautiful noises by blowing.”

“It is ravishing,” pronounced Genevra, “when my brother blows.”

The damp air flattened the music like a sponge; girls brushed the rain from their hats; the rolling back of the tarred canvas exposed the slick and dangerous boards.

“It is
Prometheus
they’re going to give,” said David, reading the programme. “I will tell you the story afterwards.”

From a whirr of revolving leaps Lorenz collected his brown magnificence, clenching his fists in the air and chinning the mystery of the mountain sky. His bare rain-polished body tortured itself to inextricable postures, straightened, and dropped to the floor with the suspended float of falling paper.

“Look, Bonnie,” David called, “there’s an old friend of yours!”

Arienne, subduing a technical maze of insolent turns and arrogant twists, represented a pink cupid. Damp and unconvincing, she tenaciously gripped the superhuman exigencies of her role. The workman underneath the artist ground out her difficult interpretation.

David felt an overwhelming unexpected surge of pity for the girl going through all that while the spectators thought of how wet they were getting and how uncomfortable they were. The dancers, too, were thinking of the rain, and shivered a little through the bursting crescendo of the finale.

“I liked best the ones in black who fought themselves,” said Bonnie.

“Yes,” said the boy, “when they were bumping each other it was far best.”

“We’d better stay in Montreux for dinner—it’s too wet to drive back,” suggested David.

About the hotel lobby sat many groups with an air of professional waiting; the smell of coffee and French pastry permeated the half gloom; raincoats trickled in the vestibule.

“
Bonjour!
” yelled Bonnie suddenly, “you have danced very well, better than in Paris even!”

Sleek and well-dressed Arienne traversed the room. She turned like a mannequin, exhibiting herself. A slight embarrassment covered the gray honest meadow between her eyes.

“I am sorry I am so
dégouttante
,” she said pretentiously, shaking her coat, “in this old thing from Patou! But you have grown so big!” She fondled Bonnie affectedly. “And how is your mother?”

“She too is dancing,” said Bonnie.

“I know.”

Arienne freed herself as quickly as she could. She had given her drama of success—Patou was the chosen couturiere of the stars of the ballet; only the finest sack-cloth was sewed by Patou. Arienne had said Patou. “Patou,” she said, emphatically.

“I must go to my room, our étoile is waiting for me there. Au ’voir, cher David! Au ’voir, ma petite Bonnie!”

The children were very dainty about the table, and somehow not an anachronism in this night place that had had music before the war. The wine barred the table with topaz shafts, the beer protested the cold restraint of silver mugs, the children giggled ebulliently beneath parental discipline like boiling water shaking the lid of a saucepan.

“I want the hors d’oeuvre,” said Bonnie.

“Why, daughter! It’s too indigestible for night.”

“But I want it, too!” wailed the boy.

“The old will order for the young,” announced David, “and I will tell you about Prometheus so you will not notice that you are not getting what you want. Prometheus was tied to an immense rock and——”

“May I have the apricot jam?” interrupted Genevra.

“Do you want to hear about Prometheus, or not?” said Bonnie’s father impatiently.

“Yes, sir. Oh, yes, of course.”

“Then,” resumed David, “he writhed there for years and years and——”

“That is in my ‘Mythologie,’ ” said Bonnie proudly.

“And then what?” said the little boy, “after he was writhing.”

“Then what? Well——” David glowed with the exhilaration of being attractive, laying out the facets of his personality for the children like stacks of expensive shirts for admiring valets. “Do you remember exactly what
did
happen?” he said lamely to Bonnie.