Song of the Amorous Frogs – Part 2
A Story of Paris in the 1920s
(This is a longer work of historical fiction - too long for a single post, so I’m serializing it in 6 parts, one every other day until finished. Apologizing in advance for so many emails. I promise not to make this a habit. You can read any parts you miss on my Substack space, RECOLLECTIONS, REFLECTIONS, FANTASIES, FICTIONS - and I’ll bring all the parts together there when done.)
III
The months passed. I finished my basic training, and, with a year of college already, went into officer school. Then the Spanish flu struck, spreading terror and death around the world. I fell sick with it, but after a perilous illness, recovered.
My sister, in Houston, did not recover. In her last letter, which I received shortly before the telegram telling me of her own death, she told me that Clem's wife had died some while before. She did not include his address so that I could send already long overdue condolences. And before I could even write a return, she’d died too.
When I read the sad news, even as I tried to share the pain I knew he felt, the thought came to me: "You could be as a wife to him, if that's what he desires." Though I hardly knew what it could mean. But I did know I should never say it to anyone - certainly not to him.
My orders assigned me to Europe, to France, though not to the trenches that filled even the bravest of us with trepidation as we heard their horrors described in stark, somber details. My duty would be in Paris, a minor member of the diplomatic efforts that would soon be undertaking major tasks as the likely outcome of the war became clearer.
Even though not an infantryman bound for battle, I shipped over on a transport with a thousand other soldiers. The frisson of anxious anticipation for what lay ahead seemed to keep the ship afloat as much as the ocean waters it traversed. By the time our ship docked at Saint-Nazaire, word had come that the armistice would be signed within days. I arrived in Paris in time to be told that I’d be going home almost immediately – that the war was over and my part in it, only preparation that saw no action, was over too.
I had only days for a first glimpse of Paris – the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, Sacré-Coeur, and the day and night celebrations in all the streets that made such a misnomer of the term, “The Peace.” Paris had meant nothing to me growing up in Texas, and even as I heard something of it, and the wonders it offered, during that first college year, I hardly thought of it except as a far away, foreign place. But seeing it, feeling it, even for just a few days, transformed it into a beacon for me, to which I knew I’d return soon, if I could.
IV
But “soon” stretched into years. With the war over, and the world turning to the new normal in which everything seemed different, and the future unknown, exciting, unnerving, I returned to St. Louis and Washington U. to finish my degree. That done, and with an invested legacy from my sister, I made plans to return to Paris – which, after that brief glimpse, and with a blossoming romantic spirit, had transformed, for me, from nothing to very much indeed. I began to know that the future I hoped for – a future just coming into focus – a future so different from that my Houston and St. Louis world said was inevitable – and right – could only happen in Paris. And, though I didn’t yet have the words, or courage, to say what I thought, hoped, knew that future had to be if I was to be my true self, and happy in it, I had begun to know in my soul that it was a reality so different than all that everyone expected from me, that I had to leave – to go to Paris – to achieve it.
In December of 1921, I sailed from New York on the steamship Leopoldina, bound for Le Havre. As it happened, my fellow passengers included a young couple named Hemingway – he from Chicago, she from St. Louis, though I had never met her during my years there. Taking a chance, I asked Ernest – that was his name – if he knew Clem. He didn’t, of course. But an obliging fellow, he offered to ask a Chicago friend, already in Paris, in case he might know him.
And to my surprise, the friend did know Clem. And – miracle! – the friend said that Clem was in Paris, had been for some time, and he had his address, at least the address of the rented room Clem occupied when he’d seen him last at the end of summer: a number on rue Cardinal Lemoine, just off Place de la Contrascarpe, in the 5th arrondissement, in the left bank Latin Quarter, far away from the fashionable Paris of the Champs-Élysées and Opéra Garnier.
As soon as I’d settled into my cheap hotel on the Quai Voltaire – the same hotel that the notorious Oscar Wilde had once stayed in, after his disgrace and imprisonment – I made my way to Montagne Sainte-Geneviève in search of the address I’d been given. I took the autobus along the Seine to Boulevard Saint-Michel, and transferred to another route, going up across Boulevard Saint-Germain, past the Cluny and the Sorbonne, to Rue Soufflot – with the magnificent Luxembourg, which Clem and I would come to love so dearly, to the right.
There I got off and walked up toward the Panthéon, final resting place of French heros. A brisk December wind blew toward me as I walked up the hill, but, under the clear blue winter sky, it invigorated rather than chilled. Even at mid-morning, the cafés along the avenue bustled with Parisians lingering over café and croissant, or, for some, already, Pernod. I passed Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, with its majestic, and rare, stone rood screen – the church Clem and I would come to think our favorite in all of Paris.
I walked up rue Clovis, past the fragment of the old Medieval city wall of Philip II Augustus, jutting into the sidewalk. The scent of innumerable dogs, laying claim to the now decrepit fortification, nipped my nose. Even in Paris – but in Paris it almost seemed exotic perfume. At rue Cardinal Lemoine I turned right and continued up the hill to number 75. The massive wooden gate fronting the street was closed, but I tried the door cut into it – which was unlocked. I went in.
Before me, a paved carriageway went up between two buildings toward what looked to be a well tended – though, in December, leafless – garden. No concierge came out to warn me off with a gruff “greeting” – perhaps in this quarter, not often frequented by foreigners, interlopers generally were not bold enough to come in uninvited. I walked boldly on, and, in a few steps, came into what, in spring, summer and fall must have been a lush country garden in the heart of the city.
Up three marble steps rose the epitome of an elegant French bourgeois residence – Second Empire, or maybe even Louis-Philippe – painted a pale pink, and with white shutters bracketing the windows, a white bench at a stone table to one side of the steps, and to the other, a grouping of now empty chipped, yellow Provençal pots. Even though so close to the busy street and Place, the atmosphere spoke only of quiet calm.
As I looked around the garden at the stark winter beauty, and imagined what a rich beauty it must burst into with the coming of spring, a maid – at least I took her for a maid; she did not have the bearing I supposed the Madame of such a Parisian house must certainly have – opened one half of the double inner door, and said, in a clipped, officious voice,
“Oui, monsieur?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t speak French. Je ne parle pas français.”
“Madame Le Floch n’est pas ici. Madame is not here.”
I tried to make her understand that I was not looking for her Madame – of whom, of course, I knew nothing – but rather that I was hoping to hear that Clem still lived somewhere here.
At the mention of his name, she brightened like a happy child.
“Ah, oui, Monsieur Clem. Il est là-bas. Au deuxième étage ,” and she pointed to a window at the top of the building across the garden, a garret window, of course, since it was Paris.
“L'escalier est là-bas,” and she pointed again, now to a closed door I’d passed as I walked up from the avenue.
“Thank you. Merci,” I said, nodding my head slightly.
She went back into the warm house and closed the door, but I sensed that she watched from the front window as I walked back to the door she’d pointed me to. I opened it and found a narrow stone stairway with a wooden banister, winding up in an elegant oval. I took the steps two at a time in my eagerness, and turned into the hallway at what I’d have called the third floor at home – but it was Paris, it was the “deuxième étage.”
I knocked on the door at the end, the one I supposed opened into the room of the window the maid had pointed out. I heard movement inside. After a moment, the door opened, and there he was. Clem! Not quite as I remembered him – a few years older, of course; perhaps matured and worn by the ordeal of his wife’s decline and death, but still the handsome man I’d come to feel so close to during the few short hours of the few short days we were together in Colorado Springs, those years ago.
I saw surprise on his face, almost shock, as he realized I stood there before him, with no hint ahead to help prepare him for the moment. Then, quickly, his face beamed, his eyes sparkled, his lips opened in a smile that filled me with the greatest satisfaction I’d ever felt. And he threw his arms around me and drew me to him, into the most genuine embrace I’d known till then.
“It’s you,” he said holding me close.
“It’s me,” I said. And then, as we held each other close, I said, “It’s us.”
(This is a longer work of historical fiction - too long for a single post, so I’m serializing in in 6 parts, one every other day until finished. Apologizing in advance for so many emails. I promise not to make this a habit. You can read any parts you miss on my Substack space, RECOLLECTIONS, REFLECTIONS, FANTASIES, FICTIONS - and I’ll bring all the parts together there when done.)