Beautiful Girl by Alice Adams Page A

the food is fantastic, and see how my French is improving.”
    Both of these things were quite true. I have never since tasted anything to compare with her
poisson normand
, that beautifully flaking fat white fish baked with tiny mushrooms, tiny shrimps and mussels in white wine. I have the most vivid sensual memories of her crisp green salads. I would arrive cold and usually wet from my long Métro trek, and hurriedly unwrap myself from my coat just in time to enter that small warm room where she had placed the white-clothed table. The room was full of marvelous delicate smells of hot food, and Madame in passage from the kitchen would greet me.
“Bon soir, Patience. Mais vous avez froid. Asseyez-vous, je viens tout de suite. Oh, mais j’ai oublié l’essentiel
—” and she was off to fetch the decanter of wine.
    And my French did improve. She knew no English, and we talked animatedly throughout those months of dinners. She was endlessly curious about America, though she pretended to disbelieve half of what I told her. “But, Patience, surely you exaggerate,” she would chide, in a tone of amused tolerance. Sometimes, fresh from Joe’s lectures, I becameheavily sociological. She listened intently, nodded appropriately. Only when I hit on American anti-Semitism did I strike some chord in her—she found it absolutely incomprehensible. She adored American Jews. Her husband had been a cotton merchant, and in his business the only Americans he met were Jewish or from Texas. And the Texans, according to Madame, were appalling: they ordered the most expensive champagne or cognac and then got drunk on it. The Jewish families whom she met were quite another story.
“Tellement cultivées, tellement sensibles.”
Her most admired American friends, the Berkowitzes (
“Ah, les Berkowitz”
), went to museums daily, to the theatre and the opera; the Texans never. She felt that
“les Berkowitz”
too squandered their money but in less visible and offensive ways. One of her most loved stories was of going shopping for a brassière, a
soutien-gorge
, with Marion Berkowitz.
“C’était tout, tout petit,”
she would say, with her thumb and forefinger gesturing a pinch of nothing,
“et ça coûtait tellement cher!”
This contradiction never ceased to amaze and delight her.
    The truth was that I liked Mme. Frenaye. I admired her beauty and her charm; and her scorn, her assumption of superiority to the world, comforted me since I felt that she counted me on her side. Moreover, I simply could not imagine a scene in which I told her that I was going to leave. I think that if I had not met Bruno, near Christmas, during one long night in the Bal Nègre, where I had reluctantly gone with Laura and Joe, I would have lived on the Rue de Courcelles until June, when I took that huge and final boat for New York.
    My memory of Bruno is also involved with the cold: I see the two of us clinging together in a garish white-litMétro entrance, because it was too cold outside, and our partings were endless and all unendurable. We walked together. I remember my ungloved hand pressing against his, together jammed deeply into his shabby tweed pocket, as we walked past steamed bright windows in the iron cold, stopping to kiss.
    Even Bruno seems legendary to me now; both our romantic intensity and the facts of his life sound mythic. His father was an Italian anti-Fascist who had left Italy in the Twenties. Bruno was born in Toulouse, and spent his fifteenth birthday in a Vichy concentration camp, his sixteenth in a similar camp in Italy. He had fought with the Maquis, and with guerrilla fighters in the Italian Alps. He had no scars nor any limp to show for all of this; he was tall and sturdy, smooth-skinned, clear-eyed as any innocent American boy—in fact he was often taken for a G.I., which amused him and privately annoyed me. He studied law in Paris, and lived with relatives out in the 14th arrondissement. Thus in the cold we had no place to go, and