A few days later, a panting Alexander appears at the kitchen door.
His back hunches over under its load of textbooks and his face is streaked with dust
‘Mama, I’ve gotta tell you something.’
His face suddenly crumples into wrenching sobs, through which he croaks out, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.’
‘What’s happened? Are you all right?’
‘Please don’t get mad at me.’
I hate it when they do that. I’ll have every reason to get mad, while information I need is held ransom for a guarantee of superhuman maternal restraint. I hold him by both thin shoulders and look him straight in the eyes.
‘What happened?’
He heaves out the words, ‘I got . . . into . . . tr—tr—trouble.’
‘Why? What did you do?’
‘I . . . I . . . was waiting for the train home and some guys were leaning against the train car on the siding and I went over and I started leaning on it too, and it—it just moved.’
‘I don’t understand. You pushed a train?’
‘No, NO, I didn’t mean to push! It just moved! Then they arrested me.’
He wails and falls into my arms as the backpack crashes to the floor. A ten-year-old jailbird. He’s terrified. I cannot but help return the embrace.
‘They ARRESTED you?’
He weeps, stammering through my sweater, ‘The ticket seller and the bus driver stopped the wagon from ro—roll—rolling away. The other boys ran away. So they grabbed me. They made me hand over my pass.’
‘Alexander! You lost your pass? How’re you going to get to school now? And we just moved here. This is a small town. You want to be known all over the village as a juvenile delinquent?’
He can’t guess the real reason for my panic. The school director will be notified about Alexander’s suspended train pass. Local mothers talk about the ruthless factors that disqualify children of his age from the university track. Fifth and sixth grade children are eliminated not only because of poor academic performance, but also because of ‘lack of maturity.’
Troublemakers need not apply.
I hear myself shouting, ‘You realize that Monsieur Villar will get a letter about this?’
‘Yes, Mama, I’m sorry.’ He’s weeping uncontrollably. ‘Please don’t yell at me.’
‘Go to your room immediately. I’m calling the train station.’
Monsieur Voltaire rolls his eyes and resumes work at the dining table. It’s the only surface long enough to accommodate some epic verse he’s revising. The thick paper unwinds off the table and snakes across the carpet. He whistles, amused, under his breath.
‘My friend, the Duc de Richelieu, was thrown into the Bastille at fifteen for some boyish prank. He took his tutor with him, of course. I told you to engage a tutor. See what you get for not taking my advice?’
‘Not now, thank you, Monsieur. Where’s the phone directory?’
‘Madame du Châtelet hired a certain Abbé Michel Linant as tutor to her boy. Although there was the problem of the tutor’s sister . . .’ he sighs.
‘What should I look under? Gare? Train?’
‘I haven’t the slightest idea. Just send a messenger. We had to take in the tutor’s sister and mother, too.’
‘Quite a crowd just so the boy could conjugate verbs,’ I joke, flipping through the directory.
‘And then came Keyserlingk,’ V.’s expression sinks lower.
‘Kaiser Anybody doesn’t sound too good. Okay, here’s the number. Can you take this down for me? Three, six, six . . . ’
‘De Keyserlingk, to be exact,’ says V., his plumed pen scratching numbers furiously. ‘Prince Frederick of Prussia had compared me to Homer. Well, how could I resist the Prince’s envoy to Cirey? Madame du Châtelet and I threw on little plays, music, fireworks spelling out Frederick’s name as ‘The Hope of the Human Race,’ the usual red carpet stuff, and meanwhile the tutor, Linant, was just making a nuisance of himself You see, the Keyserlingk was homosexual. Of course, coming from Potsdam, he had to be—’
I cut off V.’s flow, my finger poised on the directory. ‘Wait, you mean, the Prussian court was gay?’
‘Oh, very jolly,’ V. tosses off, ‘and full of homosexuals, as well. As it turns out, so was our tutor, the Abbé Linant. The little ecclesiastical rodent was plotting with that nosy Keyserlingk to run off to illuminate Frederick’s court in Potsdam! And that, Madame, is why our tutor had to go!’
‘The sister?’
He growls, ‘Her, too.’
‘The mother?’
He peers at me through his magnifying glass with an eye now magnified four inches wide, ‘Especially the mother.’
‘And you still say hire a tutor for Alexander?’
V. looks at me fixedly, his memories of the rodent Linant refreshed.
‘You’re right. Perhaps not.’
The story from the train stationmaster is only slightly less garbled than my son’s account. Glancing out of his window at the gaggle of pre-teens cruising the platform, he lifted his gaze to the sidings beyond just in rime to see one of the spare wagons inching down the rails. By the time he and the bus driver had secured the wayward wagon, there was only one skinny American boy left standing at the scene of the crime—my freckled felon.
‘It’s a serious matter, Madame,’ the master insists.
‘Yes, I know. He doesn’t deny it. I only ask myself how my son could have managed to move a train car. He weighs less than eighty pounds, I mean, oh, what’s that in kilos?’
The stationmaster is too busy to entertain this discussion with a foreigner who keeps muddling pounds with kilograms. The Commune will be in touch with us to set a date for the tribunal.
‘A tribunal? Not just a reprimand?’
‘Oui, Madame, un tribunal. Heureusement, personne n’etait blesse. C’est une affaire d’etat.’
I replace the phone. ‘Oh, great. They’re calling it an affair of state.’
V. looks up impatiently, ‘A train car, a poem, a little insult . . . Lèse-majesté. Nothing’s changed. In my day, you were thrown into prison on a whim. I can’t get any work done here! I’ll go and watch the boy pack.’
He starts to roll up his endless verse.
‘Pack? Alexander isn’t going anywhere!’
‘He may be seized in the middle of the night. I was.’
‘Don’t be absurd. Peter’ll call the Commune and straighten all this out. I’ll call his office now.’
‘Humph! Such a fuss! Be reassured, Madame. The Bastille was not so bad. They let me order in the essentials. You know: books, silver, family portraits, backgammon, mirrors, lamps, furniture, linen, perfume, and of course, a nightcap. Women took their maids. There was excellent food and wine. And the heating and laundry were provided by the King.’
‘No nail file?’
He laughs, ‘Why bother? All the best people, or at least the talented ones, passed through those stony chambers as ‘special guests of the King.’ The State could never afford a little pension here or there for a struggling poet, but it never minded how much it spent on them in prison!’
‘No way my son is going to jail. I’m just worried about his school record.’
‘Tranquillisez-vous, Madame! The Bastille was like having the measles to someone well-born.’ V. turns confidential. ‘He’ll meet the nicest people! I dined with the governor, played billiards and bowled with the guards. And Madame, I wrote La Henriade, my first real masterpiece, an epic that rivaled the Iliad, about Henri IV—bold, generous, lecherous—the usual bestseller stuff. I’m modernizing it right now for reissue.’
He brandishes his yellowing scroll.
‘They let you order in office supplies, with your take-out food?’
‘Well, no,’ he sighs deeply, ‘that would have been expecting too much, After all, a pen in my hand is a deadly weapon,’
‘Lethal,’ I nod, keeping a straight face,
‘So I wrote it between the lines of a printed book.’
‘Well, that’s better than the toilet paper the Chinese dissidents use these days, Will you excuse me, Monsieur?’
I hear Alexander sobbing with remorse behind his closed door up on the attic floor. Before I can comfort him, an annoying little tinkling bell summons me. One of the workers brought Eva-Marie a goat bell to ring for company or food. Sibling competition spurs Theodor during his ten days of recovery from the asthma attack to insist on an even bigger bell, as he’s recuperating up on the third floor, farther from the action.
The afternoon speeds by as I answer bell after bell. Finally Peter comes home from work, face drawn, to confront his tear-streaked son over the dinner table.
‘Now, Alexander, tell us exactly what happened,’
‘Pierre-Edouard, Ludo, and some other guy were playing next to a wagon.’
‘Do you know these boys’ last names so I can talk to their parents?’
‘Only Pierre-Edouard Gruyère.’
‘Did they come forward when you were stopped by the stationmaster?’
‘No, they ran away.’
‘Did you push the car?’
‘I sort of joined in. I didn’t think it would really move.’ Alexander eludes his father’s angry gaze and studies his congealing mashed potatoes.
Once Alexander has been excused from the table and the dinner trays collected from the invalids, Peter briefs me on his conversation with a very stem Commune official who works by day for an insurance company.
‘He must appear before a hearing Friday evening at six.’
‘Alone?’
‘Apparently. If they’re not satisfied by his answers, they may revoke his train privileges.’
‘How will he get to school without his pass?’ I dread the answer.
‘You’d have to drive him back and forth to Genolier for the rest of the year. Don’t worry. We’ll go with him. I’m not having him made a scapegoat.’
‘He’s a human toothpick. He can hardly push our wheelbarrow.’
‘Well, obviously they haven’t seen him yet. If they’re picturing a fifth-grade Schwarzenegger, they’re in for a shock.’
It occurs to me that our bookworm Alexander, who never got into trouble in New York, has suffered from being the ‘new boy,’ with his faulty French and awkward, polite behavior. He’s trying to be accepted by the other boys to the point of getting into trouble. Now he awaits his Friday summons to the Salle Communale with a blend of contrition and martial stoicism, as if he half wanted some kind of public censure.
Peter can avoid the tension of the coming trial by spending his days on the usual distracting International Committee of the Red Cross trivia—lost children in Afghanistan, security for aid workers in Burundi, prisoner exchanges in Colombia, disappearing office disbursements in Moscow and funding flows from Washington and Tokyo.
For me, there’s no such easy escape. Left in the village to bear the family’s coat-of-arms, I become more nervous than Alexander. I’m unable to write or concentrate on the house repairs. Every bang of a worker’s hammer and every electric saw whining away in a far corner of the house grates on my rattled nerves.
The tale of the runaway train car has circulated St-Cergue’s main street already. Suddenly my most mundane transactions appear to me through a Hitchcockian lens of public guilt as that American Mother of the Train Pusher. Is it my imagination or does the bakery lady sell me my loaf of balois with a rather upbraiding bonne journée? The tabac proprietress, Madame Weber, has surely learned of Alexander’s ‘state crime’ as she dispenses papers, candies, cigarettes, and gossip—she hears absolutely everything. She hands me the French newspapers with an air of judgmental scrutiny.
‘I didn’t like the look she gave me,’ mutters V., clutching his fur-trimmed collar.
‘She can’t see you. She was scowling at me. Like we’re a whole family of train saboteurs bent on mowing down little kids.’
We’re walking uphill in a fluttering snowfall. My arms are full of small purchases. I’d like to think that V. would offer to carry something but for the disconcerting sight of floating bags in public, but I’m not sure I should give him credit.
‘Madame, I can’t figure it out. Even in my day, carriages were secured with hand-brakes.’
I’m not even safe in my own home. The laughter lacing our workers’ mid-morning coffee break grows louder as Friday nears. The approaching tribunal looms over my shortening days. Having bought and restored one of the oldest buildings in the village, complete with its hefty tax bill, this is not the way Peter and I had envisaged our first official encounter with the village Pooh-bahs. While waiting for the reckoning, I glare with accusatory fury at the mothers of the boys who escaped arrest.
‘The family honor is at stake,’ Monsieur Voltaire announces on Friday morning, as he toys with a butter knife. ‘There is only thing for it. Monsieur must fight a duel.’
‘I don’t think that’s going to solve anything. What bothers me is this omertà among the other parents shielding their own sons.’
‘Exactly. Monsieur cannot let Alexander accept total responsibility. He must insist that this was an accident of childish miscalculation. In fact, he must go further, and demand an official apology from the Commune.’
‘An apology? Or—?’
V. presses the butter knife on the nose of our new kitten, Frisbee. ‘—Or he must fight a duel with the chosen representative of the accusers.’
‘Yeah, right. Like you fought a duel. You’re even more a featherweight than Alexander.’
‘I beg your pardon! Has history not recorded the insults I received at the hands of the Chevalier de Chabot Rohan? That lily-livered nobleman who kept taunting me, ‘Monsieur Arouet, Monsieur de Voltaire, what really is your name?’ The scoundrel kept it up for days, at the Opera, and at the Comedie-Française, and this after I had been received at court and given a retainer of fifteen hundred livres by the Queen!’
‘You didn’t let him get away with it, I hope?’
Voltaire hoots with laugher. ‘Non, non. Now there was a nonentity for you, just a worn-out old soldier and man-about-town who fancied my lover, the actress Adrienne Lecouvreur.’
I shake my head. ‘Pimpette, Suzanne, now Adrienne. I can’t keep track of your old girlfriends.’
He laughs, ‘I tell you frankly, in the days before Madame du Châtelet, neither could I. Anyway, he wasn’t even a real Rohan. His grandmother had lost that ancient Brittany name when she married. You see, that was my offense. I reminded him of that. ‘The difference, Monsieur,’ I said, ‘is that my name begins with me, yours ends with you’.’
‘How did he take that?’
V. drops his lofty manner and glances at me slyly. This is a man who goes too far, relishes the delight of his victories small and large against the stupidities of the world and willingly pays the price.’
‘Um, not too well. While I was dining with the Duc de Sully at his Hôtel, I got a message to come to the gate. Six hired thugs leapt upon me. The Chevalier shouted at them from the safety of his carriage, ‘Don’t hit his head! Something good may come out of that!’’’
‘Well, if you really were the versifier of your age, it’s like those attacks on Gangsta Rap stars by jealous rivals.’
‘Yes. By the way, I must ask you about these rap verses. They fascinate me as a commentary on the times. But I digress. I spent weeks hidden away in the Rue Saint-Martin, training with the fencer Leynault. I practiced pistol shooting as well as fencing. Finally, I summoned one of my relatives from the provinces to be my second.’
‘You actually fought a duel? Wow.’
V. stands to attention, proudly determined. ‘It was my intention, but non. I tracked the rogue down at the theater. He was sitting there in his box and slobbering over my Adrienne. I challenged him: ‘If your latest money-squeezing affair has not made you forget your insult to me, I hope that you will meet me, man to man’.’
‘Who won?’ I ask, breathlessly.
‘Nobody. On the night of April 18th, 1726, I was apprehended with two pistols in my pocket and taken to the Bastille for the second time. His so-called aristocratic family arranged it. It’s all in the police records.’
I’m unable to hide my disappointment at being cheated of a real live duel. Well, dead duel, but still. ‘After all that build-up, all that training. What a bummer,’ I say.
‘As you say, quel bummé.’
Friday evening arrives. Father, Mother, Son and Unholy Ghost drive the few village streets to the Salle Communale, a gloomy paneled chamber lined with hunting guns one floor above the police offices. V. is wearing a frighteningly formal outfit of black taffeta collar, pristine white tights, and a red hair ribbon at the nape of his powdered white wig. Peter has come straight from Geneva and is still in a dark suit.
The accused is wearing his St. Boniface blazer, suddenly too short in the sleeves. Alexander enters the room first, and before I even clear the entrance, I hear a gasp of suppressed amusement from the six waiting elders.
Clearly they expected a suspect of more heft.
A chinless woman in a hair band smiles slightly. I also see the chain-smoking fourth-grade teacher poised to serve as secretary. I recognize the father of a schoolmate of Alexander’s. The designated spokesman at the head of the table is a very fat man, with rosy fondue-fed jowls enveloping the collar of a nylon anorak puffing out in all directions. I’ve seen him putting his trained hunting dogs into the back of his Terrano II lined with caging. One of these sinister black beasts now lies at his feet under the table.
The fat man orders Alexander to the foot of the table. Alexander starts his plea, voice cracking when he gets to the part where the train moves out from under him. His French is hesitant and the words badly chosen, but respectful. Then the questions fly.
‘Is this the first time you played around the rails?’
‘Were you pushing or leaning?’
‘Were you aware of the danger?’
Alexander is shaking. No sooner have they pummeled him with one question, than another comes at him in colloquial French he struggles to understand. Things are not going well when the crucial question shoots from the teacher, tapping her pencil impatiently on the table.
‘Don’t you know the rules that were issued with your pass?’ she rasps.
I shiver at the mention of the all-necessary train pass.
V.’s eyes are burning with indignation. Peter has followed the discussion calmly. At this last question, he suddenly raises his hand.
‘May I put a question to my son?’
The inquisitors peer down the table to our little group sitting under the cantonal flag at the end of the room.
‘Alexander, did you release the wagon’s brakes?’ he asks in French.
Monsieur Voltaire slaps his knee and explodes, ‘Exactement!’
Alexander has not understood his own father’s French. ‘Le frein?’
‘The brake, Alexander,’ Peter repeats, in English. ‘Did you or anyone else release the brake?’
‘Nobody touched anything that looked like a brake.’
‘So the wagon wasn’t secured when you started playing near it?’
The Commune officials glance at each other sideways, shifting slightly in their seats. I suspect none of them speaks English.
‘I guess not. It just started to move.’
Peter looks up at the village officials. ‘I see,’ he says simply and then switching into French, continued, ‘My son has just clarified what was worrying me a little; that neither he nor the other boys touched the wagon’s brake.’
The council of six stares at us stonily. Voltaire makes a glaring face right back.
Peter continues, ‘My American wife and I have recently moved here, as you might know. We aren’t familiar with local procedures, we admit, but are we to understand that the wagon was left unsecured on the platform during the hours of heaviest use by hundreds of schoolchildren?’
There is a painful pause. The hunting dog stirs and then drops his chin on his paws. The council members glance at each other and then from under lowered brows, scrutinize me.
‘Touché,’ murmurs Voltaire.
‘You say you were not alone, mon cher?’ the little woman in the hair band asks Alexander.
‘No, Madame. I joined the other boys who were already there.’
‘Could you tell us the names of the other boys who started pushing the wagon?’
Alexander watched too many movies on the American Movie Channel back in New York for this turn in the questioning. He straightens his back and announces, ‘I will name no names.’
‘Bravo!’ V. shouts. ‘To the Bastille with our heads high!’
Peter and I try not to smile and even the counselors are squirming with embarrassment.
‘Well,’ says the slight woman, ‘we take playing around the trains very seriously in this village. Three years ago, a child was pushed off the platform by a careless schoolmate into the path of a train. That child is dead. A housepainter was killed recently by the train. I hope you understand our concern.’ She looks long and hard at Alexander.
The jowly hunter barks from the end of the table. ‘We won’t revoke your train pass on one condition.’
‘Oui, Monsieur?’
‘You warn those boys—when you see them—that if anything like this happens again you will all be severely punished. And they are to tell their parents about this meeting we’ve had with you today.’
Alexander senses that torch will not be laid to stake tonight. He wags his head with frantic compliance; ‘Oui, oui, Monsieur, but don’t blame me if Pierre-Edouard Gruyère doesn’t tell his parents. ‘
Peter sinks his head in his hands as the officials adjourn in giggles. We all shake hands and file out into the cold night.
‘Peter, why was everybody staring at me when it was you who mentioned the brake?’
‘Because, my dear wife, it reminded them that you are American. I realized that although a Swiss would never dare contemplate charging the Swiss train authorities with negligence, everybody in that room would see you as a native of the Land of Crazy Lawsuits. Like most small-town bullies, the last thing that bunch wants us to do is to involve higher authorities.’
He smiles and puts his arm around me, The Secret Weapon. ‘Oh, there was one other thing. This morning I found the hand brake of my car down. Strange, especially for me, to forget it. I never leave the handbrake down. But it got me thinking . . . ’
That night, I find Monsieur Voltaire dressed for bed in a flouncy nightshirt and nightcap. He is completely entwined in his revision of his ‘hit,’ La Henriade.
‘Thanks for coming to the tribunal. At least Alexander didn’t lose his pass. Or go to the Bastille.’
‘Your husband’s interjection about the brakes was a deadly thrust. Admirable.’
‘But not as good as a duel?’
He sighs, ‘I would have made a wonderful second, but once again, all my training goes to waste.’
‘Maybe not. Was it just an inspiring coincidence that Peter’s car had been fiddled with?’
‘Yes, that was very opportune,’ V. murmurs.
‘Next time the family honor is threatened, I promise you’ll be the second.’
He smiles. ‘Any time, Madame, any time. In the end, there was no need to worry.’
‘No?’
‘Non. Had the boy been condemned to the Bastille, I would have gone, too—to guarantee treatment worthy of your standing, of course.’
He licks two fingers and pinches out the flame of his ghostly tallow.
Of course.