The Arrangement (21 page)

It’s all right, Al,
she wrote.
And I know we have the spring and summer before us to figure it out when I return, and that there is no rush. We are young still, even when we do not feel it, and this life is longer, larger than we think. I feel we are on the cusp of something. Who knows what lies ahead?
Who knows.

She did not mention the meeting at Harper. She was waiting for him to do it first.

When she was finished with her letter, she would stand from the desk and run a bath, the bottle of violet-scented oil from the Warwick rationed out, and she would scrub to her toes with the thick white washcloth. She would dress, and Tim would come to the door and ask her if she’d finished her correspondence, and she would point to the letter on the desk and feel a kind of allowance about it all. She’d follow him down for a beer before lunch, the bar already packed with Germans, Tim with his sketch pad, she with her notebook, and they would sit quietly and wait for Mrs. Parrish.

She loved to write with Tim beside her, to write smart things they would pass back and forth more than they talked, a line, a thought drawn out. He sketched her, sometimes as she sat, and sometimes from memory, from the night, the afternoon before, the arc of her spine over the chair back, only her mouth, her lips open.

They ate with Mrs. Parrish in the little restaurant with the caged birds—Italian, Swedish, Mexican-German food, always heavy and rich, good and strange. Afterward they found conversations and card games and concerts for her, swapped novels with other passengers for her, and invented excuses to be alone. Mary Frances often forgot her wrap. Tim was often curious about the weather. If the elevator was empty, he kissed her. If the stairwell was empty, he ran his hand beneath her dress. Two, three steps away; there was no one here who knew them. He offered his arm, and she fit her side against him, her head sinking back on its stem, how delicious, how well they fit together, what a satisfying lock.

They didn’t talk; it was as though they had nothing to talk about, or that the talking would come later, but the current between them was live and thrumming.

The ship felt like their own, something private now, where no real scale applied. They would go to lunch, and then to stroll the deck in the blistering sea wind, and then to play cribbage in Mrs. Parrish’s stateroom. Mary Frances had no patience for cribbage and would bring her notebook and write. She marveled at how hard it was for people to find something pleasant to talk about, and how hard they tried even after it seemed unlikely they would find it. It seemed a lesson to her, that we try, even when we ought to know better, to connect with where we are, whom we are with. But whom was she with? She felt Tim’s presence in an empty room, she sparked and lifted to it, and when he touched her, her mind went everywhere and nowhere at once. But here, to be here, to feel like she could be here, she rose every morning to write a letter to Al.

*   *   *

The night before they landed in Cherbourg, the little dining room was transformed into a forest. Pine boughs arched the doorways, waxy with scent, and behind them hid the cabin boys with birdcall whistles, trilling at each other from all corners. It was meant to be a woodland feast, some sort of Bavarian tradition, and from the kitchen came huge platters of roasted boar and pheasant and trout, sheets of potatoes, sausages, schnitzels.

Mrs. Parrish clapped her hands like a girl at a play. “Isn’t this amazing,” she said. “Look at all the evergreens! Where have they been keeping them all this time?”

Mary Frances had no idea.

Tim had fallen quiet, watching. From the bar came the drunken Germans with their champagne flutes full of cherries, their tall buxom women on their arms, and their songs. The cabin boys peeped and twittered, the German women squealed with laughter, and platter after platter poured out of the kitchen on the upturned palms of white-jacketed stewards. There were people in California lining up for bread; a forest of game in the middle of the Atlantic seemed no more impossible than that.

There were songs, of course, salutes and toasts, all in German. The noise rose around them, and Mary Frances found herself intent upon her food, as if she hadn’t eaten in a week. The buxom women pointed and laughed. Some of them wore little felt hats with plumage. Some of them wore dirndl skirts and pinafores. A steward came around with a tray of wooden popguns and a basket of cotton balls.

“For the birds,” he said. “For shooting.”

Mary Frances leaned forward. “The cabin boys or each other?”

Tim shook his head. He didn’t know. The stewards went around, and the first cotton ball took flight, another and then another. Soon the air seemed filled with cotton balls.

Tim fiddled with the hammer on the popgun, trying to figure out the load. The room was getting louder now, the laughter turning coarse, and Tim was frustrated with the gun, prying open the mechanism with a butter knife and muttering something under his breath when all of a sudden, Mrs. Parrish let out a chirp of her own.

“Oh dear, oh dear, I shot him!”

Mary Frances looked up to see one of the Germans stiffly
bending in his tuxedo to look behind him, hand at the back of his neck. He pulled from the floor, not a cotton ball, but a round red grape, the same kind spilling from the centerpiece in front of Mrs. Parrish.

“Mother,” Tim said, “if you’d given me a second, I was trying to figure it out.”

“Here he comes, here he comes.” Mrs. Parrish picked up her fork and took a large bite of roast boar.

Tim set down the popgun.

“
Guten Abend.
” The man’s face was pasty and taut; he wore a sort of smile that seemed stretched into place. He bent slightly from the waist, and Tim stood. The man extended a hand, the red grape rolling in his palm.

“
Gehört das Ihnen?
”

“I’m sorry,” Tim said. He lifted his chin, his eyes scanning the room for a steward. Everyone was hiding; everyone was busy, Mrs. Parrish chewing furiously. “I don’t understand.”

“
Ihre Waffe zu haben scheint Befeuert. Ihre Gun. Diese Gun. Ja?
”

“I’m sorry.” Tim looked at Mary Frances, whose hand covered her mouth. “It was an accident.”

“Ein Unfall. Ein Spiel.
A game, yes?
”
The German smiled again, letting the grape roll onto the table next to Tim’s plate. “
Kraft durch Freude
.”

He bowed again, and Tim repeated the German back to him,
Kraft durch Freude
, as it seemed to solve the problem. He repeated it to himself, then repeated it again to a passing steward whose sleeve he caught.

“‘Strength through joy,’ sir. It is a common feeling in Germany now, that we will find strength through joy.”

“Of course,” Tim said.

“I am really terribly embarrassed,” Mrs. Parrish said. “I don’t know what came over me.”

“It’s all right, Mother. Your Nazi was very understanding. And they did hand out the guns.”

But neither Tim nor Mrs. Parrish went back to their meals. Mary Frances realized they’d been surrounded by these Germans for the entire crossing and yet she hadn’t spoken to any of them, no more than a nod in the passageway, an acknowledgement on deck. It was, in fact, their ship.

Slowly, the twittering cabin boys became less of a spectacle. The whistles and catcalls died away, the Germans pushing back from their tables with their goblets of cherries, making their way back to the lounge, to the bar, to other rooms on other decks. Mary Frances and the Parrishes stayed put, and slowly the cabin boys came out of hiding, shaking the needles from their hair.

Tim ordered another bottle of wine. The cabin boys began dismantling the forest. The stewards cleared the platters of food to the kitchen, snapped clean white linens over the empty tables for the morning’s service. There seemed to be a pall settled over them now. None of them were willing to be the first to stand and break it, and they sat there long after their wine was just sips in their glasses. The stewards had finished with their work, a line of white-jacketed young men at attention by the kitchen door, ready for the Americans to take their leave.

*   *   *

They lay in her cabin long after saying good night, the pitch of the ship beneath them. Mary Frances wanted to ask him
if he was scared, but it seemed such a silly question now, after all they’d done. All she seemed to have were silly questions.

“Tim?”

His breaths were deep and even.

“What happens tomorrow?”

“Well.” He rolled onto his side, his lips next to her ear. “We strike land. We make land travel to Paris. A train, I think. They have beds there too, but I’m not sure we will have the time to make use of them.”

“It will be different.”

“So serious.”

She didn’t say anything, and he didn’t try to see her face.

“Yes,” he said finally. “It will be different, for us. Than this.”

“Everything feels a bit more possible at sea.”

*   *   *

When the ship docked, they took the train from Cherbourg to Paris, through the wet, gray countryside. Mrs. Parrish seemed unsettled; she spoke to Tim with a surprising intimacy, as though Mary Frances were not there.

“I have real doubts, Timmy. I may well be too old for a journey like this one.”

“That’s ridiculous, Mother.”

Mrs. Parrish made a sound.

“You just got off the ship and have now hurtled yourself off again. You’re still catching up. You need a nap, a meal, and then we’ll see who can stop you.”

Tim crossed his legs, nonchalantly snapping open the paper his French was nowhere near good enough to read. It was interesting to see him bolstering his mother; she wondered
where he had learned to do what he did to people. Everybody took his encouragement.

“I could go to the club car,” Mary Frances said.

“No, dear, it’s fine. The porter will be around shortly. Surely there are porters.”

“It’s no trouble. Those days on the ship have caught up with my appetite. I’m always hungry now.”

“You do look it, dear, healthier. Still, Timmy, fetch the porter.”

Tim folded the paper. “Of course.”

He slid back the pocket door, brushing against her knees only the barest bit as he passed through. Mrs. Parrish had such firm ideas about what was for her to do, what was for Tim, what she could do alone, and what she needed his escort for. Mary Frances was still learning her place and the expectations therein. She found herself wanting to lean over the rails to test them.

“If I may ask,” she said, “what’s the matter?”

Mrs. Parrish cut her eyes at Mary Frances, suddenly a much younger woman, capable of far more than prattle and worry.

“Years ago,” she said. Then she gave a sigh, the rest of what she was remembering trailing off. “I’m old, dear. Who wants to be old?”

“But you’ve looked forward to this trip for so long.”

“And now I won’t have it to look forward to any longer.”

Mrs. Parrish turned to the window, the countryside whipping past. Mary Frances followed her gaze, dizzy with the speed at which they traveled. She remembered taking this exact route with Al on their honeymoon, on their way to Dijon
by way of Paris. They’d gone to the club car, and she ordered her first French meal, good bread, good ham and butter, a bottle of champagne, and they’d eaten, so happy across from each other, she felt as if she would burst.

When Tim returned, both women sat with their chins in their hands, unreachable in their own places. He opened the French newspaper again and stared at the words until they ran together, blottish, swelling blackness, the opposite of clouds. He could tell fortunes by this newspaper, but he could not read it, and he had no idea what had happened in this compartment while he had been gone.

*   *   *

At the hotel desk, they were holding mail for Mary Frances, a letter from Al and two from Edith. It was cold in Whittier, and with Anne and the children away, with Mary Frances away, and Rex completely flummoxed by his new editor, Edith had nothing to do.
I miss you, Dote,
she said.
There is nothing so fine as our talks when I start to feel the blurries waiting in the wings.

Mary Frances took the other letters to the bar. She ordered a whiskey, then another after that, smoked a cigarette and then another after that. In all her travels, even when she and Al had lived in France, this was the first time she’d ever felt so distant from her family. By the time she reached Al’s letter, all she was good for was skimming it.

Tim pulled out the chair beside her, ordered a beer. “This hotel is quite modern,” he said. “Perhaps all of Paris is modern now.”

“Your mother will be disappointed.”

“My mother is indefatigable. She knows no French disappointments.”

Mary Frances tucked her letters into her purse, to read another time when she did not feel stretched so thin.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “Of course not. I mean, it’s hard to be in two places at once.”

“For you?” And maybe she didn’t want the answer to that, to hear his feelings were divided when he was with her, and who else he might be thinking of, but they had a long habit of being honest with each other, and it was out of her mouth before she could think twice.

Tim fiddled with the cocktail napkin. Finally he looked at her, and all his high fervent promises were in that look: how she was like no one else, how they were like no one else together.

“We could run away,” he said.

“You don’t really think so.”

“I’ve found it to be a perfectly acceptable response to life’s difficulties. Don’t I seem comfortable on the run? Dashing, even.”

“You’re trying to make me laugh.”

“So laugh,” he said. “Will you?”

*   *   *

It became her job to perform a certain part of every day as though she knew a great deal more about France than she did. She rose to the occasion, offering translation, checking maps, and making itineraries with Mrs. Parrish over lunch, because now that she and Tim stayed up half the night, nobody ate breakfast anymore, and their days unfolded from the table according to the various attractions of Paris.