Alphonsine did go with Raoul in a yole after the light dimmed and Auguste stopped working, but not to lie with him on the bank. She went with him because she felt young, her oldness put away in a hatbox for the afternoon. She went with him because the day, the painting coming along, the exhilaration of steering the sailboat made her inexpressibly happy.
And she went so she could tease him as he’d teased her. Since the lady sitting on the cane-back bench in a yole has the steering cords that operate the rudder, and the man facing her has the oars, she had control of where they went. She pulled one cord so that the boat went in circles as they left the dock. On the bank, Auguste and Alphonse and Gustave laughed uproariously.
“All right, you coquette of canots, I’ll tell you something that happened to me on this river that won’t make you so sure of yourself.”
“Speak on, Baron.” She let him go straight but kept him away from the bank.
“I took out a skiff to fish one afternoon in a pretty little spot where the river bends, not far from Bougival.”
“Your first mistake.”
“Why, lady?”
“No one ever catches a fish there.”
He shrugged. “It was a beautiful sunny afternoon when I started, just like this. The river flowing calmly, a light breeze, just enough to rustle the leaves, birds chirping in the branches. I had no luck in fishing—”
“Naturellement.”
“But I was content to wait and enjoy the river, so I lowered an anchor. I lay down and dozed, lulled by the motion of the boat.”
“It’s nice to do that,” she said.
“A cool breeze made me wake and I discovered shadows stretched like arms across the boat. Since I had no luck, I reached to pull up the anchor. It wouldn’t budge. I yanked harder, but that only served to dig it in deeper to whatever it had hooked itself upon, perhaps a submerged branch. I rowed upstream to try to loosen it, to no avail.”
“Why didn’t you cut the anchor line?”
“It was a chain. Soon fog crept in, and as twilight came, it changed from gray to murky purple. I hallooed for help, but there were no pleasure boats foolhardy enough to venture out in the fog. All I could do was lie down and wait until morning.”
“Weren’t you afraid?”
“I didn’t sleep. Every sound mocked me.”
Why was he telling her this? To impress her with his bravery?
“Damp and cold crept into my bones, and in the morning, I was stiff. I couldn’t move one of my legs at all. It pained me from hip to ankle as acutely as if it had been shattered by mortar fire. I feared paralysis.”
This struck a false note. It didn’t belong in the telling.
“With the dawn warming the river by degrees, it became numb. I was able to move my arms, so I tugged at the anchor line but it was still caught. I thought I might be able to drag the thing to shore, so I set the boat crosswise to the river and pulled on the oars as hard as I could. After an hour or more of strenuous rowing, I’d made no progress. No one, not even your brother, could have.”
“So what did you do?”
“Eventually a steam tug came by and I hallooed until I was hoarse, and it came athwart, tied itself to me and dragged me and the thing ashore.” He leaned forward here, raised both eyebrows, and spoke in a low, unctuous voice. “Lady, the thing was a body. I’d been tied to a corpse all night.”
He waited for a sympathetic response.
“That’s an awful thing to tell me.”
He sat back. “I’m sorry, lady. I should have known it might be too raw for your tender sensibilities.”
“That’s not why. It didn’t really happen. That’s why. At least not to you.”
“Ma chérie, but it did.”
“Mon cher Baron, but it did not. It’s a story by Guy de Maupassant. It’s called ‘En canot.’ And it didn’t have anything in it about an aching leg.”
It irritated her that he assumed she didn’t read literature.
His shoulders sagged, and his face reddened. “I’m sorry, lady. I misreported myself.” His whole demeanor became troubled.
She guessed then why he had told a borrowed story as his own. Not to impress her. It was a substitute for his own. The mortar shell. The truth still too sharp and too personal to reveal, but the need to tell still aching. She understood all about needing to tell something. She felt a wave of empathy for him.
“That’s all right,” she said.
“You’ve got to admit that it’s a good story,” he said.
“Not as good as some of his others. I read everything he writes, and everything else he tells me to.”
“Do you know him?”
“Of course. He stays here sometimes. Alphonse takes care of his boats.”
“So do I know him. We go about together in Paris.”
They passed the place where she’d found the two bodies after the flood. She had made Alphonse promise not to tell Guy because she feared he would use it in a story and make the couple appear foolish and shallow. She wouldn’t tell Raoul because he might tell Guy. Telling him would be triumphant of her, but it was such a private thing.
“That’s not to say there aren’t bodies in the river,” she said. “You know the big dredger that shoots up sand through a chute onto a hill to be carted away? All sorts of things are flung out too. I’ve watched carriage wheels, trunks, rudders, goats thrown up. Once I saw what looked like a mud-covered dog, but it wasn’t. It was a boy.”
He looked abashed, as if he knew that hers was the true story, which it was, and his had been plundered cheaply. But hers of the boy was a substitute too.
“I’m sorry I lied,” he murmured.
This man at the oars, sorry. This man who limped, wearing a fine bowler, who had tried to entertain her, had been trying all afternoon, in good humor, calling her “lady,” this man who had cheerfully turned the way Auguste wanted even though that meant no one would be able to identify him in the painting.
“That’s all right. I like the way you told it. In your personal way.”
He wore his melon just right, not on the back of his head. There had been that man who came into the shop wanting a melon and she advised him how to wear it. And just before him, that moment of cold horror when, after the Siege, the surrender, the Commune, they told her—the two army officers with serious faces, their eyes darting to the display of umbrellas on that gray day, and she had asked if she could help them find something, though she knew all along. Otherwise Louis would have been home by then. He would have wasted no time coming back to her. It rained that afternoon—better if they had come for umbrellas—not a hard rain, just the slow, fine, interminable drip of tears.
As the officers left, their message delivered, the door still open, that customer had come in wanting not just any bowler, but a French melon. Thousands of Communards in Montmartre not even buried yet, and he wanted a melon. He must have been a Versaillais official. They’re frightfully dear now, she had said. All English imports. She spent a long time advising him the way she remembered Louis doing with customers. It was so dreadfully important to her that he would be satisfied. And he was, and left the shop smiling, and then she was alone.
“Shall we go back now, and have a brandy with the others?” Raoul asked.
“My father does have some Menuet Hors d’Age. I know where he keeps it in the cellar. He won’t miss a glass.” She pulled the right steering cord so that the boat made a wide loop.
“It is a beautiful afternoon, isn’t it?” All the oiliness had left his voice.
“The river flowing calmly, a light breeze, just enough to rustle the leaves, birds chirping in the branches.”
She hoped he would take her smile to be one of understanding. “But we did have luck in fishing,” she said softly.
After everyone left, she and Auguste went up to the narrow balcony that wrapped around the building, and watched the sky on both sides of the island play out its tribute to the day. Turquoise spread with wisps of rosy chiffon blushed the river with a lighter rose.
“La vie en rose,” she murmured.
Auguste kept tapping the railing with his fingernails.
“What’s the matter?”
“Gustave paid for everyone’s meal today.”
“That’s because he saw the day as an idea.”
“What idea?”
“Friendship. Collaboration. Nous.”
One corner of his mouth turned up. He was never one for big smiles.
“Did you enjoy the company of our titled buccaneer?” he asked.
“Yes. He tried to impress me with a story, and he did, but not in the way he had intended.”
“Did he tell you about himself?”
“Not directly. Would you mind if I asked how he got his limp?”
“He was wounded in battle twice,” Auguste said. “As a young recruit in the Crimea and again at the Battle of Reichshoffen. He was a cavalry officer by then. He dragged himself on his elbows through Prussian lines. At a field hospital in Alsace, some army surgeon threatened to amputate, but he screamed bloody murder and walked out with only a cane, shouting, ‘I have more life to live.’”
“Does it still pain him?”
“He won’t talk about it.”
That might mean that it did. And yet he danced the chahut last Sunday, overcoming pain with joy.
Too moved to speak, she could only watch the rose sky deepening.