It was well that he kept his foot on the brake. There was a drainage ditch at the bottom of the stairway. The car skidded to a stop with the front wheels just over the edge.
Then the car rolled in. Harding jumped from one side. Alain seized Mary Ann and leaped out the other. All of them fell to the ground. The car rolled leisurely to the bottom as if it were taking itself for a Sunday drive, started up the other side, and then came back down, its shiny wheels settling into the mud.
Mary Ann lay still on the ground, Alain half on top of her. He was close enough to kiss her, and she hoped that he would. When he realized where he was, his eyes widened as if he was embarrassed by the unintended intimacy, and he pulled back.
From a few feet away came Harding’s voice. “Look out there,” he said, his voice strangely peaceful after their wild, terrifying ride.
In the distance, looking like an upright honeycomb glowing amber in the darkness, stood the Eiffel Tower. The Tower’s 22,000 gaslights illuminated the slender spire all the way to its peak. They turned the ugly brown stewed-beef color of the Tower in daylight to the burnished gold of night.
But Harding wasn’t pointing at the Tower. His face was turned upward to the night sky.
Mary Ann looked, too. She had not truly gazed at the sky since she was a child lying on her back in the summer fields. And now she realized why. It wasn’t safe to look at. It was too open. It bent your neck back too far. And it scared her. It had infinite depths—or no depths at all. It was an open door to the universe, the whole ocean of air above them. The prow of the ditch where they lay was the last of Land’s End, and all beyond was the Great Voyage. Out there, among bright stars, ancient nebulae fractured and new ones coalesced, smashed together by soundless explosions.
“It’s a beautiful moment isn’t it, the sky just before dawning?” asked Alain, still lying beside her. “Once I had them lower me into the dry bottom of a 40-foot well in Algeria.”
“What the hell for?” they heard Harding say.
“It was a trick that I learned from an old Arab,” Alain replied. “I sat there for 12 hours looking up through that small hole, with darkness all around. But because of the darkness, I could see stars glowing in the daytime, when no one else could. And as day passed into night, I saw distant constellations that have yet to be named. That sky is like our lives. There are no limits except the ones we put there.”
She heard Harding’s voice again, skeptical this time. “You mean to tell me that big sky up there will allow Man to be its equal? And, if it does, do you really think it will be one of the three of us, sitting like fools on the side of this ditch?”
There was silence for a moment, and Mary Ann thought that this strange debate in the dark was over.
But then Alain rose. “Who knows?” he said. “No one ever knows anything for sure. But I believe that there’s a star out there in the heavens for each of us, the born and the unborn. And I will find mine. Good night, Harding. And good night to you, Marianne.”
“What about the car?” asked Harding.
“Leave it,” said Alain. “The owner will find it...or buy a new one.” He walked away into the night, whistling.
Mary Ann watched him go, watched him as long as she could see into the darkness. “Good night, Alain,” she whispered.
“Look,” said Harding. And, in that instant, a shooting star flashed across the sky and fell to earth, leaving a second’s silvery glow behind it. “I wonder if someone has fallen from his place in Alain’s heaven to some unknown hell below?” he said.
She shivered, perhaps because the night was chilly.
Harding wrapped his coat around her. “Come on, Mary Ann,” he said, pointedly using her real name. “I’ll take you back to your hotel.”
Chapter Eight: On Board the Bethanie—Morning, May 27
Neville Bishop leaned both hands on his silver-headed cane, triangulating himself like a surveyor. He looked out over the boats beneath the shadow of the Pont Marie bridge.
Mary Ann stood beside him, wondering what he saw. Was it the quaint, wooden-slatted washrooms built out over the river? Was it the scrawled graffiti under the bridge? “Gave herself to me— fully” boasted one inscription. Was it the ducks on the quays, standing on one leg preening themselves?
No, thought Mary Ann. What Neville Bishop sees are possibilities. He’s the kind of man who looks at a forest and sees railroad ties. And what he’s looking at now is that boat over there, the Bethanie.
“Are you sure it’s the longest one on the river?” Bishop asked Harding.
“Longest and widest,” said Harding.
“Then let’s go get it,” said Bishop.
He strode up the gangplank and onto the middle of the barge. There was a dog at the other end of the gangplank, yapping and trying to get loose from its chain. It wasn’t a big dog, and it didn’t look unfriendly, but Bishop pushed it out of the way with his cane. Behind him came his entourage: two big hired men, then Harding and Mary Ann.
Each boat on the Seine was home for a family that ferried cargoes up and down the river. They reminded Mary Ann of the little cottages and country gardens where she had spent her summers as a child. The rounded cargo bay, only slightly above deck level, went from the pointed prow to near the back, where a squared-off pilothouse spanned the width of the boat. Behind was a back deck that looked like a yard and extended all the way to the rudder.
The Bethanie was especially pretty. The boat had geraniums spaced all around the sides—obviously a woman’s work. There was a little doghouse and a tree in a pot on the back deck. Even the anchor was well-placed. It didn’t just lie on deck. It overhung the bow, mounted on a wrought-iron piece that looked like an inverted fishhook.
There were lace curtains in the window of the pilothouse. For a moment Mary Ann could see her and Alain floating down a peaceful river in a boat like this...then she caught herself.
Bishop made the short step from the rounded cargo bay to the top of the pilothouse. The dog was still yapping. Bishop bent over at the waist and rapped on the window with his cane. Mary Ann saw his pants stretch as they rode up over his ample rump. His ankles were surprisingly skinny and white. She wondered what the person inside saw—an upside-down look at Bishop? Better than the view she was getting.
Someone opened the door to the pilothouse. Bishop and the rest, still playing follow the leader, came down the ladder and through the door.
They filled up the pilothouse, which already had a big wood and brass wheel higher than a man. Bishop took the only seat available, leaving the others to stand. The barge captain and his wife offered them wine.
Bishop refused.
“Don’t mind if I do,” said Harding, who got a dirty look from both Bishop and Mary Ann.
“Harding, tell this frog that I’m a very wealthy man who wishes to rent his boat for a month to travel up and down the Seine,” Bishop said.
Harding translated, but left out the “frog,” Mary Ann noticed.
The captain and his wife looked at each other and both shook their heads vigorously. Mary Ann was relieved.
Harding turned back to Bishop. “He says that he would never rent his boat to a Frenchman, let alone a foreigner.”
“You’ve got to convince him. I need this boat.” Mary Ann could see Bishop struggling not to raise his voice. “Offer him more money.”
“That won’t do it,” warned Harding. He paused and thought for a second. “Put on your glasses, the pince-nez,” he told Bishop.
“What!”
“Just put them on quick.” Harding pulled a newspaper out of his pocket and showed it to the captain.
Mary Ann heard them talking and caught the words “San Juan Hill” and “vice president.”
Then the captain smiled and grabbed Bishop and hugged him.
“I told him that you were Teddy Roosevelt,” said Harding, showing the picture from the newspaper to Mary Ann. “Well, he does look a little like him.”
Mary Ann turned away and fa
ced the river, so as not to laugh.
“But Monsieur,” said the captain in broken English, “the Bethanie is our home. Where would we live?”
“Tell him that in addition to rent I will put them up in one of the best hotels on the Ile Saint-Louis during the time that I use their boat,” said Bishop. He took a gold money clip full of francs out of his pocket—with the hundreds on top—and started peeling off bills.
The captain and his wife eyed them hungrily.
“Monsieur is very generous,” the captain’s wife broke in. “But what about our dog?”
“We’ll keep the dog,” said Bishop. “Harding will take good care of it.”
“What?” said Harding.
“All the details are in this lease agreement,” said Bishop. “I had my French attorney draw it up for you. Please sign both copies.”
The barge captain and Harding exploded into French, and Mary Ann—with only her classroom knowledge—couldn’t keep up. She had a premonition, though. It reminded her of the time she had seen a weasel catch a chicken.
She looked the couple over. The captain was in his early 60s, a sturdy, bullet-headed man with a salt and pepper mustache. He looked like a lot of American farmers Mary Ann had seen: big and rough, but not nasty. When he signed the lease, he wrote his name in big block letters, like a schoolboy. He would be easy prey for Bishop.
The wife was short, round and had a full bosom. She was beaming at Mary Ann. She looked motherly, and Mary Ann wondered: “Did the couple have any children.” Unexpectedly she got her answer. It was both yes...and no.
“You will take good care of our boat?” the captain’s wife asked Bishop. “She was named after our only daughter, Bethanie Émelie. She died two years ago September.”
She came over, pinched Mary Ann on the cheek and smiled at her. “She looked a lot like you.”
Bishop had Harding reassure her. She bustled around polishing the crockery and Limoges collection on the wall before she left. An hour later the captain had their suitcases in hand and was walking down the gangplank, his wife waving goodbye to her dog, her boat and her flowers.
“Au revoir, mes petits,” Mary Ann heard her say. Harding went along to help them get settled.
When they were out of sight, Bishop said: “Go to work.”
His two men started dismantling everything. They tore the pilothouse loose from the boat and pushed it into the river. The flowerpots went into the water. The dog was barking. It was kicked into silence. Bishop shouted orders. The mast came down. It too went into the water. The fishermen along the quay watched the destruction impassively, cigarettes dangling from their mouths.
Finally the Bethanie was leveled right down to the deck. Carpenters arrived with planking that was nailed crosswise the entire length of the boat. A huge catapult, looking like a siege engine, that had been resting on the quay was uncovered and hoisted on board.
* * *
That evening, by the light of the moon, Bishop walked up and down the planking alone. He reached the prow of the boat and looked over the dark lapping waters of the Seine.
“I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul,” he said to the river.
Mary Ann drew a bucket of water out of the Seine and took it over to the dog, who was whimpering. “What soul?” she muttered to herself.
Chapter Nine: A Walk in the Night—Evening, May 27
That night Mary Ann left her hotel and wandered around the city, trying to find sleep and—perhaps—forgiveness for her role in what had happened earlier in the day.
In the moonlight up toward Montmartre she could see what looked like glistening bones, the beams and rafters of the still uncompleted Sacre-Coeur church. It was being built as an offering to God, France’s self-imposed penalty for losing the war to the Germans in 1871.
She remembered Harding telling her about a play called “Mademoiselle Fifi,” in which a French prostitute plunges a knife into a German lieutenant after he pours wine on her head. She remembered too the way that Meurthe and Maximilian, the German, had glared at each other that day on the Eiffel Tower. Would either of them ever forget? she wondered.
She strolled past the bars and heard singing through the open doorways. The dance halls, some of them old windmills, were filled with sweaty men in straw hats and women kicking up their legs to show flesh-colored stockings. She did not go in.
She walked by restaurants and looked in open windows. Lovers sat, sharing food by a single candle, the light reflecting in their eyes.
And then there were the prostitutes in bright dresses sitting on their front porches. The older ones knitted while the younger ones, some barely teenagers, played with dolls while they waited for their gentlemen clients to come and take them upstairs.
The French had a whole language of illicit sex, Mary Ann discovered. The women were called “les horizontales” or “the unbuttoned,” but like French society itself, they were divided into classes. At the top were the demimondaine, who were scarcely ladies of the night at all but very high-class kept women, the kind she had seen at the Aéro Club the previous night. Below them were the “maisons de tolérance” where ordinary prostitutes lived and worked. There were over 100 of them in Montmartre alone, with large illuminated street numbers to help clients identify them. The lowest class lived, worked and even coupled on the street in alleyways or abandoned doorways.
There were many bums or “clochards.” Everyone tolerated them, if they were amiable. She saw them go to the bars late that night, when the owners were just putting the stools up, and stagger out with half-empty bottles that had been left on the tables. They would wave to their friends and walk down to the river where the midnight fires still burned.
Then she saw a familiar figure in a white suit come out of a bar—Harding. He seemed uncertain of his direction and then headed across the street, where he had seen a calico cat.
“Here kitty,” he said, holding out his hand a foot above the pavement.
The calico may have been an alley cat, but it had its dignity. It got to its feet, blinked twice, and sauntered away. Harding followed, and so did Mary Ann.
The cat jumped to a porch and then up to a board fence that marked the edge of a vacant lot. Harding did the same thing. If Mary Ann hadn’t seen it, she wouldn’t have believed it. His sense of balance, even when drunk, was perfect.
The cat was annoyed. Perhaps it felt it was being upstaged. Its tail twitched. It trotted nervously across the top edge of the fence. So did Harding, a trifle faster than he should have. The cat jumped for a wrought-iron second story porch. Harding stepped on a first floor window sill and swung himself up.
Perhaps the cat saw Harding as a pursuer. Or maybe it just didn’t want company. It leaped from window ledge to window ledge until it was on the roof of one of the low buildings. It turned again, its tail still twitching.
Harding was still behind it, mumbling “Good kitty.” One of the tiles gave way as he scrambled up the roof. It exploded on the cobbled street next to Mary Ann.
There was a flash overhead. The calico cat had made a tremendous leap across the alleyway to the opposite roof. In a moment Mary Ann knew Harding would try the same leap. But he wouldn’t make it.
“Harding!” she shouted.
Oil lamps flickered and brightened inside the houses on both sides of the alley. Voices yelled “Chut!” and “Taisez-vous!”
A face appeared over the edge of the roof. “Mary Ann, is that you?” Harding asked.
“Come down here,” she whispered hoarsely.
* * *
They started to walk, but all the starch had gone out of Harding. He leaned on her, his face scratchy against her cheek and smelling of bay rum. There had been times, many times before she met Alain, when she fantasized to herself about what it would be like to have Harding touch her, but not like this. She almost had to carry him, and he was heavy.
She searched frantically up and down the boulevard. There were no cabs. There was nothing on the empty street.
Even the horizontales, smelling no business, had gone in for the night. Then an empty glass-enclosed hearse came up the street, pulled by two big black-plumed horses. The letters on the side said, "Monsieur Mouftard, Undertaker."
“Oh God,” said Mary Ann. “What’s he doing out tonight?”
“Coming for us, perhaps,” said Harding. “He seems to be headed in our direction.” Harding flagged down the hearse. “Will you take us to my apartment?” he asked.
“Why not?” shrugged the top-hatted driver. “But you’ll have to ride in back.”
Harding opened the two etched-glass glass doors and lifted Mary Ann inside. Then he crawled in. They left the back doors open.
“This is actually comfortable,” said Harding, leaning back. “You get a nice view, too. A shame the usual occupant never gets to enjoy it.” He pulled out his bottle.
“You should put that away,” said Mary Ann. “If you keep drinking like this, you’re going to die.”
“Yeah,” said Harding. “I’ll give a whole new meaning to Tennyson’s ‘Crossing the Bar.’ You know, you remind me of a song I heard:
One evening in October,
I was very far from sober,
To toddle home to bed I vainly tried.
When my feet began to stutter,
I lay down in the gutter,
And a pig came up and lay down by my side.
Oh, we sang of stormy weather,
And the more we are together,
Till a lady passing by was heard to say:
‘You can tell a man who boozes
By the company he chooses,’
And the pig got up and slowly walked away.
Yes the pig got up and hung his head in shame,
And slowly walked away.”
Harding had a nice baritone, the kind that dominated a church choir. The driver turned around with a grin and then gave the horses a snap of the whip.
Harding was silent for a moment, looking out. Then he turned to her.
“Sure, I’m a drunk,” he said. “But I’m a pleasant drunk, a genial and well-meaning drunk. I’m never obnoxious and seldom piss my pants. Put me in a corner with a bottle and leave me; I’ll be perfectly happy. So, as a drunk, I can highly recommend myself for your next party. Give your guests someone to point the finger at and say, ‘At least I’m not as soused as that man over there!’”