Promise at Dawn Read online

  Our new guest didn’t look like an artist at all, and when he wrote down his profession in the hotel form, my mother took one look at the word artiste-peintre and instantly and very rudely asked for one week’s money in advance. He had a long, distinguished face, with sad eyes and a very fine, silky, blond gray mustache, and his whole personality, his beautiful manners and almost ghostlike discretion struck me as being very much at odds with my mother’s oft-voiced opinion that all painters were condemned to drunkenness, poverty, disease and despair. There could be but one explanation for Mr. Zaremba’s gentlemanly appearance, and she expressed it quite firmly, long before she even bothered to look at his paintings: the man had no talent whatsoever. This statement of fact was soon confirmed in her eyes when it appeared that Mr. Zaremba was internationally known and successful enough to keep a house in Florida and travel extensively, and so my mother began to treat him with slightly ironic pity. I suspect that she feared he might have a bad influence on me: the sight of a prosperous painter could, God forbid, drive me to take up painting myself once again. I still felt a confused longing for vast canvases, brushes and tubes of paint; but if I showed myself well disposed toward Mr. Zaremba and took to visiting the studio he had rented in the neighborhood, this had nothing to do with my interest in art. The Pole had aroused in me certain hopes, for it soon became clear that this rather romantic and sad-faced figure, who, with his drooping mustache, reminded me of Dora’s drawing of Don Quixote, was seeking my mother’s company and attention with a discreet and yet unmistakable persistence, and I felt more and more convinced that this delicate situation, if properly handled, could mean a most welcome change in our life.

  Mr. Zaremba was a lonely man and, from some casual remark, I got the impression that his childhood had been even more lonely than his middle age. His parents had died young, of a rather romantically shared tuberculosis, and were buried in the Russian cemetery at Menton, which he visited from time to time; he had been raised by a bachelor uncle on a rich estate in eastern Poland. We often took to discussing Mr. Zaremba’s personal problems with great frankness.

  “You are a very young man, Romain,” the painter would say with a sigh, “and your whole life is still ahead of you. Mine is almost over. It would be very nice if I could meet someone who would care for me a little. I say, a little: I am not an exigent man. I would be quite content to take second place in a woman’s affections.”

  “I think you can still be a very happy man,” I answered prudently—only a fool would rush in on such delicate ground. “Of course, it would mean a certain amount of responsibility for you—financially, for instance. I don’t know if a painter can afford to support a family.”

  “I am really quite well off,” Mr. Zaremba would say, rather sadly. “I even welcome the idea of sharing my material success with someone. It’s rather disgusting to spend everything on oneself.”

  My heart began to beat quite fast. A mad, quite improbable idea of a car—a small car, with me at the wheel—suddenly crossed my mind. A Citroën two-seater convertible it would be. I was not prepared to settle for anything less—and perhaps a trip around the world. I also had noticed that the painter owned a superb, richly embroidered Damascus dressing gown.

  But there was more to it: something very much like a chance of escape. There were moments when my mother’s overwhelming love crushed me, moments when it was more than I could bear. I needed a little help. It was not that I dreamed of evading the responsibilities that her devotion and self-sacrifice imposed on me: I was still determined to fulfill all her dreams. But I longed for a moment of respite. For someone who could take over, or at least share, while I went out to fight and conquer and came back home to lay the world at her feet.

  I soon noticed that my mother was becoming aware that something was afoot, for she began to treat poor Mr. Zaremba with a considerable amount of suspicion and even of hostility, in a certain very feminine and not entirely unprovocative way. And then I became aware of something else. She was in her fifty-third year and, although despite her white hair her features still held traces of earlier beauty, I knew that my shy and distinguished friend had not fallen in love with her simply as a man loves a woman. There was in this sophisticated aristocrat a child who had never received enough affection and who was now aroused to an almost frantic hope by the maternal love that shone so splendidly and uninhibitedly before his eyes. He had obviously decided that there was room for two in it, and so languidly and yet desperately longed to be admitted. It often seemed to me that there was a trace of exasperation, a hurt and even a slightly indignant look on Mr. Zaremba’s face whenever my mother, in her moments of what I used to call “expressionism,” threw her arms around me in an overflow of emotion, or when she appeared before me in the little garden in front of the hotel with an offering of fruit, cakes or tea and a smile of happiness. He would stand there, watching the scene sadly and a little reproachfully, leaning on his elegant walking stick, with its ivory and silver head, pathetic, lonely and somehow irrevocably an outsider, a man locked out who was quietly and yet stubbornly, even desperately, trying to get in. I must confess that I was young enough and ignorant enough of what awaited me at the other end of the line to enjoy the situation, and was not above throwing in his direction a slightly superior and even ironic look. He had in me a solid ally, but if I ever was to make good in diplomacy this was the moment to show it. He never interfered during my mother’s display of love, he never allowed himself to make some pointed remark like “You are spoiling him.” He just stood there in his white silk suit, looking hurt. I knew that my mother, although she never mentioned it, was quite aware of the situation, and I think she enjoyed it in a way, for it created a new complicity between us and made us both even more conscious of our bond. And then, one day, after my mother had triumphantly deposited her offering of fruit before me on the garden table, Mr. Zaremba did allow himself something that, coming from him, amounted almost to an open manifestation, a silent and yet vehement proclamation of his feelings. He suddenly sat down at my table, without being invited, and extending a shaking hand, he took one of my apples from the tray and began to eat it, staring defiantly into my mother’s eyes. I sat there completely stunned, gaping. Then my mother and I exchanged an indignant glance and she looked at poor Mr. Zaremba with such an expression of coldness and scorn, standing there, her head high, a statue of indignant rejection, that the painter, after one or two more desperate attempts at chewing the apple, put it back on the plate, got up and walked away, his shoulders hunched and his head low.

  Soon afterward—in fact, if I remember correctly, exactly three days later—Mr. Zaremba made a more direct attempt at finding in his middle age something he had so clearly missed in his childhood. I was sitting in my room on the ground floor in front of the open window, writing the last chapter of the great novel I was working on at the time. It was a great last chapter. I regret to this day that I somehow never got around to writing the preceding chapters. I have always had a certain tendency to do last things first, a feeling of urgency, an eagerness for achievement that always made me very impatient with mere beginnings. There is something pedestrian and even mediocre about beginnings. In those days I had written at least twenty last chapters, but I somehow could never bother to begin the books that went with them.

  My mother was sitting in the garden, drinking tea, and the painter was standing next to her, one hand on an empty chair, waiting for the invitation to sit down and join her that was never forthcoming. There was always one subject of conversation that was sure to find my mother accessible and so it was easy for Mr. Zaremba to find an opening.

  “There is something I feel it my duty, as an aging man of experience, to tell you,” he said. “It concerns Romain.”

  My mother had the strange habit of drinking her tea much too hot and then, after burning her lips, she would blow into the tea in an attempt to cool it.

  “I’m listening,” she said.

  “Believe me, Nina,” the painter s
aid, “it is very dangerous for a boy to grow up as an only son, to be the only loved one.”

  “I do not plan to adopt another child,” my mother stated abruptly, and it seemed to me sardonically.

  I could see the painter full face. I have never met a man more removed from childhood in his physical appearance and giving a greater appearance of mature nobility and poise. And yet he was but a little boy knocking with both fists at a closed door.

  “I didn’t imply anything of the sort,” Mr. Zaremba said, looking at the chair once more.

  “Sit down,” my mother said.

  The painter sat down.

  “I was merely implying that it is important at his age to feel that he is not the only man in his mother’s life. To learn to share, to give generously to . . . others some of the beauty and warmth he has been given so early in life.”

  My mother pushed her cup of tea away and took a Gauloise. The painter instantly produced a match and lit it.

  “What is it exactly that you are trying to say?” she asked. “You Poles have a way of going around in circles that has made your nation the dizziest and the most mixed up in the world.”

  “I am merely trying to say that it would be excellent for Romain if he shared the treasures of your love with someone else.”

  My mother was watching him very carefully with an expression that I can only describe as one of benign hostility.

  “Please understand that I am not speaking in any way against a mother’s love; on the contrary,” Mr. Zaremba said quickly. “I have never known it myself and I realize exactly what I have missed—what I am missing. It is as necessary in making a man as yeast is in making bread. I am an orphan myself. . .

  “You are certainly the oldest orphan I have ever met,” my mother said.

  “Age has nothing to do with it,” Mr. Zaremba exclaimed almost emphatically. “The heart knows no such thing. I am not talking of any youthful folly, of passion that in the end can only destroy the beauty of a true relationship between a man and a woman. But believe me, if you could bestow some of the affection, the love, the attention on someone else besides your son, Romain would become a much stronger, much more self-reliant young man.”

  My mother inhaled deeply and noisily through her nose, sat a moment with both her hands on her thighs, then got up. She waited a moment, looking at the pale, imploring face of my friend, and then she said something that even I, at first, failed to understand.

  “Cuckoo,” she said.

  “I beg your pardon?” the poor gentleman murmured.

  “Cuckoo in the nest,” my mother said, then she smiled scornfully and walked away.

  The painter’s eyes suddenly met mine. I don’t think he had been aware of my discreet presence, and for some reason or other it shook him visibly. With his drooping, graying blond mustache, he looked suddenly as if I had caught him stealing my marbles. I, on the other hand, was a firm believer in letting bygones be bygones. I merely leaned out of the window and smiled pleasantly.

  “I wonder if I could borrow fifty francs?” I asked.

  The painter’s hand instantly went for his pocketbook. He was a nice, kind and obliging man. I liked him.

  After this little show of strength, my friend quite wisely decided that the best way to court my mother was to court me. I received a splendid wallet in crocodile skin, with fifteen American dollars in it, then a camera, then a wrist watch, all of which I accepted graciously, not in any mercenary spirit but out of the tactical consideration that it was important to get Mr. Zaremba in the proper mood and to make sure of the true quality of his nature. Thus I soon acquired a Waterman fountain pen and my little library began to prosper as never before. Cinema tickets were always available and I soon caught myself talking to my little friends on the beach about our family’s new house in Florida, and then one day I even brought up with Mr. Zaremba the possibility of acquiring a sailboat for our mutual benefit and entertainment. For those readers who tend to judge my behavior severely and term it cynical, I would remind them once more that I was then not yet eighteen years old, that I never had a father and, if Mr. Zaremba was perhaps seeing himself as a son, I was beginning to see him as a father, and was pushing him with both hands into the role.

  I succeeded rather well and finally the long-awaited day came when Mr. Zaremba proposed to me. I was lying in bed, with a slight cold, and the painter had come into my room, carrying a tray with some fruit, tea and honey, and my favorite biscuits, Les Petits Beurres Lulu, which still exist to this day, I am happy to say, and which I heartily recommend. I was wearing the painter’s pajamas and his dressing gown; his Turkish slippers stood by my bed; it had long been agreed between us that we ought to share everything—no doubt, he had considered this a clever maneuver, thinking of my mother’s heart, but practically it had resulted in the free access I had to everything in his room—and I was particularly well disposed toward him. He had chosen his moment well. He put the tray on the bed and sat on a chair, a tall, distinguished figure in gray tweeds, with good, brown earnest eyes. It was obvious that he felt embarrassed. He was swallowing hard and was pressing a handkerchief nervously in his hand.

  “My dear Romain,” he began in a voice which shook a little. “You know, of course, how I feel about you.”

  I had a grape. I looked at him kindly, encouragingly; I had the feeling that at last we were getting somewhere—in fact, that I had him exactly where I wanted.

  “Of course,” Mr. Zaremba said, “you are still a very young man. Perhaps it is difficult for you to understand my feelings.”

  I looked at him earnestly.

  “Listen, Josef . . . may I call you Josef?”

  Up to now I had always called him “Pan,” that is “Mr.” Josef and he called me “Pan” Romain.

  “Please do,” he said quickly.

  “All I can say, Josef, is that I like you very much. You are a great artist and a wonderful person.”

  I could almost see the faces of my little friends on the Grande Bleue Beach when I suddenly appeared before them in my new sailboat, with beautiful blue sails—I was determined to have blue sails. I was then particularly interested in a little Peruvian girl and my rival was no less a person than Rex Ingram, the famous American movie director. The Peruvian girl was fourteen years old, Rex Ingram was then in his fifties, I was eighteen and so the sails had to be blue. I didn’t quite know why.

  I could also see myself very well in Florida, a big white mansion, emerald sea, immaculate beaches—that was the life. We would obviously go there for our honeymoon.

  Mr. Zaremba took his handkerchief and wiped his perspiring brow. He was a good-looking man, with a typically Polish noble face, an eagle’s nose and firm, clean-cut proud features.

  “I am no longer a young man,” he said. “It is perhaps better to admit that I am asking more than I can offer. Art is a refuge, at best. You are an artist yourself, Romain. But I promise that I will take care of you as well as I can and facilitate your artistic beginnings in life to the best of my ability.”

  I nodded in silent and grateful acknowledgment. “I feel quite sure that we could be very happy together, Josef.”

  I was getting a little impatient. I just wanted him to ask his question, without beating around the bush.

  “So?” I shot at him bluntly.

  “Do you think your mother will marry me?” he asked.

  It was a strange moment. I had been angling for this very thing for many months, and now that the man was asking me for my mother’s hand I felt a little lost and completely unprepared. Besides, there was no point in making him feel that the goose was already cooked. If I was ever to enter the Diplomatic Service I might as well begin to prepare myself for it at once.

  “I don’t know,” I said gravely. “We have already had several offers.”

  I felt immediately that these last words were perhaps off key but Mr. Zaremba was obviously shaken.

  “Who?” he asked feebly.

  “I don’t think it’s pro
per for me to mention any names.”

  Tact, I knew, was an essential quality in a diplomat

  “Excuse me,” the painter said. “I didn’t mean to be indiscreet. But I would like to know how you feel about it.”

  I looked at him kindly.

  “I like you,” I told him. “I like you very much, Josef. But you must understand, of course, that this is an important decision. You mustn’t rush me.”

  “Will you talk to her?”

  “At the right moment, yes. But give me time to think it over. Marriage is a serious matter. How old are you exactly?”

  The painter sighed. “Fifty-five.”

  “I’m only eighteen,” I told him. “I just can’t throw my life in one direction suddenly, without knowing exactly where I am going.”

  “I am aware of that,” Mr. Zaremba said. “I am not a man to shirk my family responsibilities. I am also quite well off. I don’t think you would regret your choice.”

  “I’ll think it over,” I repeated, rather sternly.

  Mr. Zaremba rose from his chair with obvious relief.

  “Your mother is an exceptional woman,” he said. “I do hope you will find the proper words on my behalf. I’ll await your answer most anxiously.”