She lifted and dropped one shoulder in a gesture of physical contempt and looked at me. 'Is something the matter out here?'
'We seem to be getting on your husband's nerves. This wasn't a good time to come.'
Tappinger said to his wife in a quieter tone: 'It's nothing that need concern you, Bess. I'm supposed to prepare some questions to test a certain man's knowledge of French.'
'Is that all?'
'That's all.'
She closed the kitchen door. Tappinger turned to us: 'Forgive the elevation of the voice. I've got a headache.'
He pressed his hand to his pale rounded forehead. ' I suppose I can do this work for you now - I've expended twice the energy just talking about it - but I don't understand the hurry.'
Peter said: 'Martel is taking Ginny with him. We have to stop him.'
'Ginny?' Tappinger looked puzzled.
'I thought you told him about her,' I said to Peter.
'I tried to, on the phone, but he wouldn't listen.'
He turned back to Tappinger. 'You remember Virginia Fablon, professor?'
'Naturally I do. Is she involved in this?'
'Very much so. She says she intends to marry Martel.'
'And you're in love with her yourself, is that it?'
Peter blushed. 'Yes, but I'm not doing this merely for selfish reasons. Ginny doesn't realize the mess she's getting into.'
'Have you talked to her about it?'
'I've tried to. But she's infatuated with Martel. He was the reason she dropped out of school last month.'
'Really? I thought she was ill. That was the word that went around the college.'
'There's nothing the matter with her,' Peter said. 'Except him.'
'What is her opinion of his French-ness?'
'She's completely taken in,' Peter said.
'Then he probably is French. Miss Fablon has a fair grasp of the language.'
'He could be both a Frenchman and a phony,' I said. 'We're really trying to find out if he's the cultivated aristocrat he pretends to be.'
For the first time Tappinger really looked interested. 'That should be possible. Let me try.'
He sat down at his cluttered table and picked up his pen. 'Just give me ten minutes, gentlemen.'
We retreated to the living room. Mrs. Tappinger followed us from the kitchen, trailed by the three-year- old.
'Is Daddy all right?' she asked me in a little-girl voice so thin and sweet it sounded like self-parody.
'I think so.'
'He hasn't been well, ever since last year. They turned him down for his full professorship. It was a terrible disappointment to him. He tends to take it out on - well, anybody available. Especially me.'
She made her shoulder gesture. This time her contempt seemed to be for herself.
'Please,' Peter said in embarrassment. 'Professor Tappinger has already apologized.'
'That's good. He usually doesn't. Especially when his own family is involved.'
She meant herself. In fact it was herself she wanted to talk about, and it was me she wanted to talk about herself to. Her body leaning in the doorway, the blue side glances of her eyes. The drooping movements of her mouth more than the words it uttered, said that she was a sleeping beauty imprisoned in a tract house with a temperamental professor who had failed to be promoted.
The three-year-old butted at her, pressing her cotton dress tight between her round thighs.
'You're a pretty girl,' I said, with Peter standing there as a chaperone.
'I used to be prettier - twelve years ago when I married him.'
She gestured with her hip. Then she picked up the child and carried him into the kitchen like a penitential burden.
A married woman with young children wasn't exactly my dish, but she interested me. I looked around her living room. It was shabby, with a worn rug and beat-up maple furniture. The walls were virtually papered with Post-Impressionist reproductions, visions of an ideally brilliant world.
The sunset at the window competed in brilliance with the Van Goghs and the Gauguins. The sun burned like a fire ship on the water, sinking slowly till only a red smoke was left trailing up the sky. A fishing boat was headed into the harbor, black and small against the enormous west. Above its glittering wake a few gulls whirled like sparks which had gone out.
'I'm worried about Ginny,' Peter said at my shoulder.
I was worried, too, though I didn't say so. The sudden moment when Martel pulled a gun on Harry Hendricks, which hadn't seemed quite real at the time, was real in my memory now. Beside it the idea of testing Martel in French seemed faintly preposterous.
A redheaded boy about eleven came in the front door. He tramped importantly into the kitchen and announced to his mother that he was going next door to watch some television.
'No you're not.'
Her sharp maternal tone was quite different from the one she had used on her husband and me. 'You're staying right here. It's nearly dinnertime.'
'I'm starved,' Peter said to me.
The boy asked his mother why they didn't have a television set.
'Two reasons. We've been into them before. One, your father doesn't approve of television. Two, we can't afford it.'
'You're always buying books and records,' the boy said. 'Television is better than books and records.'
'Is it?'
'Much better. When I have my own house I'm going to have color television in every room. And you can come and watch it,' he concluded grandly.
'Maybe I will at that.'
The door to the garage study opened, ending the interchange. Professor Tappinger came into the living room waving a sheet of paper in each hand.
'The questions and the answers,' he said. 'I've devised five questions which a well-educated Frenchman should be able to answer. I don't think anyone else could, except possibly a graduate student of French. The answers are simple enough so that you can check them without having to know too much French.'
'That's good. Let's hear them, Professor.'
He read aloud from his sheets: 'One. Who wrote the original Les Liaisons dangereuses and who made the modernized film version?
Choderlos de Laclos wrote the original, and Roger Vadim made the movie.
'Two. Complete the phrase: `Hypocrite lecteur. . .'
Answer: Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere- from the opening poem of Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal.
'Three. Name a great French painter who believed Dreyfus was guilty.
Answer: Degas.
'Four. What gland did Descartes designate as the residence of the human soul? Answer: the pineal gland.
'Five. Who was mainly responsible for getting Jean Genet released from prison? Answer: Jean-Paul Sartre. Is this the sort of thing you had in mind?'
'Yes, but the emphasis seems to be a little one-sided. Shouldn't there be something about politics or history?'
'I disagree. If this man is an impostor passing himself off as a political refugee, the first thing he'd bone up on would be history and politics. My questions are subtler; and they cover a range that it would take years to bone up on.'
