Not Now but Now. M.F.K. Fisher
slowly into the discreet little writing-room off the lobby.
It was from Paul, and it said that he was in black despair because he would not be at the Palace bar that evening, and that it was her fault because she had looked too beautiful to a little thing, Little Thing, the night before. “Do you understand, Jennie the mysterious, adorable Jennie?” it asked.
Jennie tore it across. It was a schoolboy note. She shrugged and put the scraps in her purse. The Jeannetôt men were alike in assuming that she was waiting to meet them when and where they wished, bold, arrogant schoolboys.
By the time she met Léonie she was free from her morning’s deliberate emptiness and her irritation. Lunch had been good. The lake had sparkled, and the air and the thin white wine had gone into her together, like the perfume from two meadowflowers growing from one seed. The people around her, elegant and easy in their summer clothes, had confirmed her own elegance and ease.
Léonie looked drabber than ever, sitting with her ankles crossed properly below her black dress in the lobby, but her face seemed younger, almost as if she had washed some spiritual dust from it during the night. She stood up eagerly, and “No, no!” she cried when Jennie said without much air of apology that she knew she was very late. “Nonono! It has been fun sitting here—such types, all so sophisticated! I used to come here to the winter balls a little, but I have given that up, all of it.”
It gave you up, Jennie said coldly, silently, and she looked with distaste at the girl’s pale mouth, at the little hairs that grew across the bridge of her nose above her large nervous eyes. It would be amusing, perhaps, to take her in hand.
“Madame!” Léonie said eagerly.
Jennie interrupted. “Call me Jennie, my dear,” she commanded, hoping that she sounded like an old family friend, the kind who boasts of being a real companion to the younger generation.
“Oh! Oh, may I? I’d love to. Jennie, the most marvelous luck! Today Papa gave me a hundred francs!”
God, this is dull, Jennie said to Jennie. I don’t think I can stomach it. Aloud she said, “How wonderful! But Léonie, don’t you have your own money? Forgive me for being indiscreet, but . . .”
The girl’s face stiffened, and she looked away. “Of course I have my allowance,” she said finally. “But Papa—I love my father, but he has no understanding of what I owe to my parish, to all the dreadful hardships in the mission field, to the good Sisters. When he finds that I have spent my allowance on all that he flies into a rage and cuts it down. Mama helps me, but then I hate to upset her. Poor Mama has such nervous attacks when she knows that Papa has misunderstood again. Jennie,” she said very low, biting with a kind of hunger at her thumbnail so that to Jennie she sounded horridly like a girl wolfing chocolate or bread, “my father is an agnostic, a professed agnostic!”
Jennie felt like asking what about Paul, what was he, what kind of disbelieving monster further to torture his self-righteous sister? How ridiculous the whole thing was! She put her hand on Léonie’s arm and shook it gently. “Come along,” she said. “A hundred francs! What on earth shall we do with it all?”
Léonie knew good places to go, little rooms up dark stairs, rooms filled with incredibly fine lingerie, handkerchiefs like cobwebs, racks of silky leather for gloves, bolts of Lyon silks. Jennie ordered drunkenly, watching her companion gradually grow tipsy too. They each bought a hat, and Jennie made Léonie order two simple dresses, the clear color of hyacinths and lake water.
“Oh, this is such fun,” the girl cried over and over, and her eyes were beautiful. “Darling Jennie, where did you come from? It is like magic, the way you make me feel!”
Jennie was firm: no teashop. She walked Léonie with little protest into the quiet bar of the hotel and ordered vermouth and soda. For a minute or two convent training revived itself; then the soft chairs, the polite omnipresent Duval, most of all Jennie’s obvious ease, loosened the chill oil of propriety in the joints, and Léonie sat back, relaxed and excited.
“What time is the cocktail hour, Jennie?” she finally asked naïvely.
“Pretty soon. Why?”
“I must go before then. I don’t want—that is, maybe you know about Paul. Maybe Papa told you. Paul will probably be here.”
“But what of that?” Jennie asked. “I should like to meet him if he is as sweet as you are. It would be so gay, the three of us here!”
“But Jennie!” Léonie put a finger into her mouth and drew up her lip, like a rabbit about to nibble a carrot. Then she took it out again, looking nervously around the almost empty room. She leaned closer. “Paul wouldn’t be alone! Oh, no, not Paul! He has a little friend! He has a mistress, right here in Lausanne, and he goes everywhere with her, and it is breaking our dear mother’s heart! But does he care?”
She stood up. “I must go, Jennie,” she said rapidly. “I will not, I absolutely refuse, to meet Paul here. I refuse!”
“But my dear,” Jennie said in a quiet voice that she hoped would shame Léonie a little, “how do you know you will meet him here? Can’t we sit peacefully and finish our drinks? Why should your brother’s wild oats spoil our tête-à-tête? Aren’t you treating him as if he were a naughty little boy?”
By this time the two of them were almost at the door. Jennie glanced at Duval and made a sign that she would pay him later. She followed Léonie into the dim corridor that went past the restrooms into the lobby. When they were almost at the end of it the girl turned, her face wild and pale.
“Jennie, will you ever forgive me?” Her voice was hysterical. “You’ve been so wonderful. It was so rude of me to impose our family disgrace on you. How can I ever apologize? You’ve been so darling . . .”
Jennie touched her hand. “Call me soon,” she said gently. “I want to see you very soon again.”
Léonie suddenly, awkwardly, bent down and kissed Jennie’s cheek. “You are so understanding! It’s like magic, what you do,” she whispered, and she hurried out through the open door into the sloped street.
Jennie turned back and went into the restroom and rubbed a little perfume from her pocket vial on the spot where she still felt the girl’s lips: she loathed being touched without invitation, especially by women.
She drank a Martini quickly. The bar was filling, and for a capricious second she considered staying there, to see if Paul came, and then to smile sweetly at him and Petit’ Chose. But she went sedately to the desk instead and asked for her key.
“There is a gentleman waiting for Madame in the small writing-room,” the concierge said. “I took the liberty of informing him that Madame might be returning soon.”
“Thank you.”
She felt a quick flutter of triumph. But when she went into the room, it was Emile, the father not the son, who stood up heavily to meet her.
“GOOD EVENING,” SHE said. “You were waiting for me?” Jeannetôt bowed without speaking. They stood for what seemed a long time, and then Jennie with a little sigh sat down on one of the forbidding gold chairs. She decided to let him speak next, but when he silently took his handkerchief from his pocket and began to wipe his palms with it, she asked impatiently again, “You were waiting? You wished to see me?”
At the same moment he blurted, “Madame, I—” and they looked mutely again at each other.
The light was soft, but even so his face seemed months older than it had yesterday, years older than in the train. He had been suffering.
Jennie smiled at him, not too warmly but not quite as artificially as she felt like doing. “Monsieur Jeannetôt, it is so nice to see you again! I have really been lonely. Your little Léonie has been so sweet to take pity on me. We just parted.”
“That