• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1398 0

of Phyllida’s time in Monaco, from the moment she arrived to the moment she left, a week later, she never once said “I told you so.” Madeleine loved her mother for this. She was surprised to see how worldly Phyllida was, how unruffled she remained when it became clear what the “establishment” Leonard had visited turned out to be. On learning this, Madeleine had been reduced to tears again. But Phyllida had said with grim humor, “If that’s the only thing you have to worry about in your marriage, you’ll be lucky.” She also said, humanely, “He wasn’t in his right mind, Maddy. You have to forget about it. Just forget it and go on.” It struck Madeleine that Phyllida was speaking from personal experience, that her parents’ marriage was more complicated than she’d ever suspected.

Phyllida’s sickroom visits were awkward, however. Phyllida and Leonard still barely knew each other. As soon as Leonard was “out of the woods,” she flew home to New Jersey to get the house ready for Madeleine and Leonard’s eventual arrival.

Madeleine stayed on at the hotel. With nothing to do but watch French television on the two stations the TV set in her room received, and determined never to set foot in the casino again, Madeleine spent hours in the Musée Océanographique. It soothed her to sit in the underwater light, watching sea creatures glide across their tanks. At first she ate alone, in the dining room of the hotel, but her presence attracted too much male attention. So she stayed in her room, ordering room service and drinking more wine than she was used to.

She felt as if she’d aged twenty years in two weeks. She was no longer a bride or even a young person.

On a clear day in May, Leonard was discharged. Once again, as she had the year before, Madeleine waited outside a hospital while a nurse brought him down in a wheelchair. They took the train back to Paris, staying at a modest hotel on the Left Bank.

On the day before they flew back to the States, Madeleine left Leonard in the room while she went out to buy him cigarettes. The summer weather was lovely, the colors of the flowers in the park so bright they hurt her eyes. Up ahead, she saw an amazing sight, a troop of schoolgirls being led by a nun. They were crossing the street, heading into the courtyard of their school. Smiling for the first time in weeks, Madeleine watched them proceed. Ludwig Bemelmans had written sequels to Madeline. In one, Madeline had joined a gypsy circus. In another, she’d been saved from drowning by a dog. But, despite all her adventures, Madeline had never gotten any older than eight. That was too bad. Madeleine could have used some helpful examples, further installments of the series. Madeline passing the baccalauréat. Madeline studying at the Sorbonne. (“And to writers like Camus, Madeline just said ‘Poo poo.’”) Madeline practicing free love, or joining a commune, or traveling to Afghanistan. Madeline taking part in the ’68 protests, throwing rocks at the police, or crying out, “Under the pavement, the beach.”

Did Madeline marry Pepito, the Spanish ambassador’s son? Was her hair still red? Was she still the smallest and the bravest?

Not exactly in two straight lines, but orderly enough, the girls disappeared through the doors of the convent school. Madeleine went back to the hotel, where Leonard, still bandaged up, a casualty of a different kind of war, was waiting.

They smiled at the good

and frowned at the bad

and sometimes they were very sad.

Down the track, the Northeast Corridor train appeared in a haze of soot and heat distortion. Madeleine stood on the platform, behind the yellow line, squinting through her crooked glasses. After two weeks of being lost, the glasses had turned up yesterday at the bottom of her laundry hamper. The prescription was too weak now, the lenses no less scratched and the frames no more in style than they’d been three years ago. She was going to have to break down and get a new pair before grad school began.

As soon as she’d confirmed that the train was approaching, she took off the glasses and shoved them