A Splendid Gift Read online

  But neither the paper airplanes nor the adoring Silvia eased his malaise from not having made greater strides with the U.S. government. He had hoped to convince the Americans to join the Allied war effort, but his pleas had been ignored. His writing suffered as well. He was under contract with his American publisher to produce a new book, but he had yet to find sufficient inspiration. Almost every night, whatever he had written ended up in his trash bin.

  It was Elizabeth Reynal, the wife of his publisher, who seeded his next idea. She had noticed the little figure of a small boy with mop-topped hair and a scarf knotted around his neck sketched on the margins of the pilot’s manuscripts and the bottoms of his letters. She had also seen Saint-Exupéry draw the petit bonhomme on tablecloths and paper napkins at restaurants.

  “Why don’t you think of writing a children’s book?” she suggested one night over dinner, in an effort to distract him from his despair. By that June, the seed had begun to grow. He imagined this “Little Prince” on an intergalactic adventure.

  He bought a set of watercolors at a drugstore on Eighth Avenue and an expensive Dictaphone so he could record his random thoughts. He lay next to Silvia during their stolen afternoons and told her the journey the Little Prince would take beyond the stars.

  He began to work on the book in the sanctuary of her apartment, while Silvia took every step she could to maintain his morale. She served him eggs and English muffins on a tray. She rummaged through her closet to find one of Stephen’s old dolls and accessorized it with a scarf made from a strip of yellow felt before placing it beside the pilot, so he’d have further inspiration as he sketched.

  But the July heat became oppressive for Saint-Exupéry, and he found his own Manhattan apartment too sweltering to work. Hoping to give his wife an assignment she might enjoy, he asked Consuelo to find them a summer cottage where he could write. Preferably someplace on the water in Long Island not far from their friends, the Roussy de Saleses and the Lindberghs, who lived in Lloyd Neck.

  He had hoped for little more than a small hut, just a place where he could lie on the grass and breathe in the fresh air. But Consuelo, in her typical dramatic fashion, found something far more extravagant. The Bevin House, a beautiful white home on Eaton’s Neck. It had a rolling lawn and an enviable position that looked directly onto Duck Island Harbor, a quiet inlet off the Long Island Sound. Even though it was far grander than what he had envisioned, he found it enchanting. The house had all the privacy and calm he needed to write.

  ***

  The pilot awakened each morning with the sunrise, the windows open and the linen curtains fluttering like white sails. He kept an easel in the library and would sketch his drawings for the Little Prince in pencil and later add washes of watercolor. He traveled across the rooms of the Bevin House as the day stretched out, following the path of the sun. As the light left the library, he moved to the parlor, and when it departed from there, he went out to the porch where he gazed at the water between the branches of the centuries-old linden and hickory trees.

  He bought boxes of onion-skin paper and wrote draft after draft. He worked long into the night, with a cigarette dangling from his lips, fueled by coffee and Coca-Cola. For every ten pages he wrote, he threw nine into the garbage. He wanted every word to be essential.

  He called Silvia in the middle of the night to read fragments to her aloud. Her voice, still groggy from sleep, always perked up as soon as she heard him say her name, which had never sounded as beautiful as it did when it rolled off the pilot’s tongue.

  When he read her the latest chapters of The Little Prince, she was delighted he had chosen to share it with her, even though she couldn’t really understand the text.

  She had learned to say a few words in French. “Tu me manques.” “I miss you. . . .” she told him over the phone, slowly, like a caress. She had hired a tutor named Louise from the nearby Browning School and told her she needed to learn only the most important words for how to court and then how to love.

  “I’m coming,” he promised her, though he failed to give her an exact time. Like a pilot making an emergency landing, he would simply arrive.

  Fearful she might miss him, Silvia spent almost every waking hour in her apartment. When she needed to go grocery shopping or take Stephen to an appointment, she hurried quickly back home to wait.

  She wondered if her ten-year-old son noticed any changes in her since the pilot had entered their lives. She knew she was more erratic—the rush of adrenaline that flooded her body when she thought he was en route to see her, and the despair that washed over her if he failed to then appear.

  Her parents, who still lived in her childhood home in Brooklyn, had not questioned Silvia too deeply the few times she had asked them at the last minute to pick up Stephen from school. But she knew they would grow suspicious if her requests became frequent. Beautiful, quick-witted, and charming, she had been raised to marry rich. Her mother was elated when Silvia became engaged at the age of eighteen to a Manhattan lawyer named Shapiro, who was several years her senior. And although he wasn’t handsome or particularly eloquent, his bank account was full and he enjoyed spending money on her. While courting the young Silvia, he brought two bouquets to their apartment each visit, one for Silvia and an even bigger one for her mother.

  Three years later, Silvia divorced the lawyer and took two-year-old Stephen and all of their belongings uptown to her new apartment on Park Avenue. She received enough money in her settlement to ensure that she and her son could live comfortably on Manhattan’s elegant Upper East Side. But her parents had still hoped she’d remarry, and that their grandson would have a more involved father figure in his life.

  Those moments when Saint-Exupéry took out his paints and began working with Stephen, Silvia could feel the urge for domestic stability wash over her. One day before the school term ended, Stephen came home distraught that his teacher had told him his illustration of a turkey was lackluster and that he should try harder at home. When the pilot saw the young boy so upset at his teacher’s criticism, he took out his watercolor set and a sheet of paper and produced a lively sketch of a turkey for the boy to present to his teacher.

  “She said yours wasn’t good either!” Stephen told Saint-Exupéry the next time he saw him.

  “Ignorant!” he said, hoping to amuse the little boy by showing his disapproval of the teacher’s poor artistic judgment. “Ma dinde était parfaite,” he said shaking his head. “My turkey was perfect.”

  Silvia delighted in her son’s laughter merging with Saint-Exupéry’s. But she knew her parents would find no pleasure that their daughter was cavorting with a married Frenchman, one who lived from paycheck to paycheck from his publisher. In their eyes, there was little romance in poverty, nor any point being with a man who could never be a proper husband. Silvia could easily imagine their criticism.

  She knew they were right. She had not realized when she first pursued the pilot that he was married, and it wasn’t until their third meeting that he revealed to her the truth.

  In limited words, he tried to tell her that his wife was fragile and that their marriage was “inexplicable.” It was a word she understood, though it frustrated her all the same.

  What he didn’t say was how much of an inferno his life was with Consuelo. It wasn’t just her other romantic entanglements that plagued him, for he too was guilty of such indulgences. It was more her disrespect of their marital privacy, how she insisted on putting her affairs on display. At dinner parties she reveled in making overly dramatic statements. Sometimes she would announce that her husband had just ravished her, while other times she would cut him down by saying his body had suffered from flying at high altitudes so he was no longer capable of satisfying her insatiable needs. She had no sense of shame.

  Saint-Exupéry lacked the words to tell Silvia what was happening at home with his wife. How he often waited up until the early morning to see if Cons
uelo would return to their house in Eaton’s Neck or, when in the city, whether she would respond to the note he had left in her upstairs apartment imploring her to come down to see him. He kept those facts buried and hoped that Silvia would somehow sense, as she did with so many other things, the truth that lay hidden beneath.

  ***

  He continued to seek out Silvia’s company. She released him from the roles so many people expected of him: the debonair pilot, the charming Frenchman, or the clown. She understood the comfort of silence.

  She did not grow frustrated when his injured body failed him. She lay peacefully with him, chest to chest, her lips against his neck, her leg draped over his thigh.

  “Tell me about the desert,” she would whisper, her breath a gentle caress of wind. And soon she would see the light resurface in his eyes.

  Her gentle coaxing awakened something deep within him. “The desert . . .” he said, as if the word itself contained its own magic. Instantly, he went back to another time, when his plane was dusted in sand and his face was burned from the sun. He relished the chance to tell her a story from his travels. To wrap her in his arms and share memories that were as vivid to him as the stars.

  He spoke in as much English as he could not only about the different ports where he had been stationed, but also about the campfires, the wild gazelles, and the thrill of flying above the dunes. He painted a vivid picture of the Sahara. The infinite quiet. The golden light rippling across the sand. The sense that there, in the desert, time stood exquisitely still. Even when his lack of adequate English failed him, he was able to use his hands to gesture the pattern of the sand or the calm in the sky.

  Her bed became their magic carpet, with the pilot guiding them to places where she could see and feel every element. Heat and hunger. Wind and stars. Nestled against him, she begged for one story after another, the adrenaline rising through her in a thirst for adventure. The excitement in his voice and gesticulations of flying were so intense that Silvia could almost smell the petrol and feel the wind whipping her hair across her face.

  Sometimes they’d stay up so late that he would stop midsentence and declare that he was famished, patting his stomach with his two hands.

  “So now I have two little boys, and they’re both always asking for food,” Silvia would chide him, as her lips gently pressed against his own. She’d pull herself out of his arms and reach for her robe. Before she slipped on her silk kimono, she could feel his eyes on her back. Her shoulder blades were cut in high relief like a dancer’s. She knew they reminded him of wings.

  ***

  In bed they shared a plateful of scrambled eggs and then fell asleep exhausted by a night of tales and laughter. Before the sun rose, he would vanish, headed back to his rented home on Long Island.

  That summer he raced down Asharoken Avenue in his little green car, with the water as blue as a mussel shell, the sky soft with clouds. He felt himself restored by the sunlight and he savored his drives across the long, winding causeway that seemed to float over the bay. And despite his lack of domestic stability with Consuelo, their home on Eaton’s Neck, with its rolling lawn and sweeping views of the harbor, was a much-needed retreat.

  He was merciless in his revisions as he continued to craft the adventures of his petit prince. He stockpiled boxes of his onionskin paper and scratched his sentences in pencil, until each word was just right.

  By late morning, his room would look like a minefield of balled-up paper. Those few pages that he kept were often stained with droplets of black coffee or smudges of cigarette ash. He would stumble down the long carved stairway and attempt to make himself a plate of eggs and buttered toast in the kitchen. But whatever magic Silvia brought to a whisk, milk, and eggs, he certainly didn’t possess it. Even his toast, he always managed to burn.

  His sorcery was instead funneled into his work, polishing every sentence until it gleamed like a wet stone. He was determined that the message of his story be universal, regardless of the reader’s age.

  He wanted to create a world that revealed the essence of the soul.

  His memories of his childhood at his family’s estate in Saint-Maurice provided his inspiration. He imagined all of the animals his little prince would encounter on his travels, especially ones that had entranced him when he himself was a small boy. The sheep, the foxes, and the birds.

  In Saint-Maurice, he had read under the shade of ancient linden trees. It was a place where there were always gardens and games. It was his subsequent adulthood that struck him as a betrayal. He had no sense of money and had no finesse with navigating bureaucracy, and he imagined his little prince with the same innocent soul.

  ***

  He yearned for simplicity not only in his prose, but also with his personal life, which depleted his energy and caused him unrest. Saint-Exupéry’s marriage continued to frustrate and infuriate him, sometimes making him behave like a petulant child.

  Without any notice, Consuelo would appear and disrupt the pilot’s solitude. He despised the chaos she brought when she returned to their home in Long Island, often bringing with her a wide rotation of lovers she introduced under the guise of “her friends.”

  He could feel the transformation sweep over him when she arrived, as if the air in the room had suddenly grown tropical and charged, like a tornado that might at any moment break all the china and glass in the house.

  “Tonio,” she would cry out his name as soon as she entered the house. She never arrived without an entourage. Aside from her coterie of friends, she brought trunks of clothing and hat boxes, and, on one memorable afternoon, even a parakeet in a bright red cage.

  “What have you bought today?” he would inquire, cringing. No matter how much money his publisher advanced him, he could never keep up with her spending habits.

  “You’d be happier if you just stopped counting,” she snapped. She was even smaller than Silvia, but her deep red lips and dark hair gave her an air of authority. She swallowed up nearly all the air in the room.

  On his own, he lived simply and stayed focused on his work. Coffee and cigarettes sustained him long into the night. But once Consuelo arrived, he invariably felt unsettled, and in need of reassurance and praise. He would think nothing of waking his household of sleeping guests to force them to look at his latest drawing or to use them as models. When the Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont came for yet another of his visits to the Bevin House, Saint-Exupéry enlisted the handsome young man as a model to create an illustration of his little prince in a bout of despair.

  When Saint-Exupery’s own sadness became too much, he escaped his house and sped to the Upper East Side, parking his little green car on the street.

  When he knocked at the door of Silvia’s apartment, using the lightest rap so as not to awaken young Stephen, he was greeted by the loveliest woman wrapped in a silk kimono. No matter how late he arrived, her eyes were never swollen with sleep, but rather fluttering with life and sheer happiness just to see him. They reminded him of dancing fireflies, their wings beating within a glass jar.

  ***

  He slept late the following morning, his long body extending over the edge of her bed. She was careful not to disturb him, removing herself from the tangle of white sheets that he had twisted around him like a parachute as he fell into his dreams. She wrapped herself in her kimono, tying the sash tightly around her waist and shutting the door of the bedroom firmly behind her so that her son wouldn’t see the pilot asleep in her bed.

  The first hours of the daylight were hers alone. She walked into the living room and picked up the plates and wineglasses from the night before. Aside from the hum of the fans she had placed through the apartment, the city was quiet. Most of her neighbors had already fled the heat for their summer homes in Connecticut or Long Island.

  By the time she had washed the last dish, Stephen was sitting at the kitchen table in his pajamas. His favorite pair, wh
ich she constantly had to keep washing so they’d always be ready in his drawer, were the ones with airplanes printed on the cotton.

  “What would you like for breakfast, lovey?” she asked him, though she already knew his answer.

  “Scrambled eggs and English muffins,” he replied, his voice hoarse from sleep.

  She knotted her apron around her waist and began to whisk the eggs. Only a few hours before she had performed the same ritual for her pilot, who was now fast asleep in her bed. The preparation for both was filled with love.

  ***

  She got ready to take Stephen to her parents after breakfast, packing a towel, a swimsuit, and a change of clothes in a canvas rucksack Saint-Exupéry had bought him for his birthday. “Now all you need is a set of goggles and a pilot hat to pull over your ears,” she had told him that afternoon after he opened the present, “and you’re ready to go to the stars.”

  She looked at Stephen and smiled.

  “A perfect day for Coney Island,” she said as she kissed the boy on top of his head, inhaling the scent of his hair.

  “Why can’t you come along, too?” Stephen’s eyes were focused on his plate and his fork gently prodded at the eggs.

  “Oh, how I wish I could . . .” As the words tumbled out, she felt a sharp pang. “Let’s go someplace tomorrow together . . . just the two of us. Maybe we could go to Central Park and head over to the boathouse.”

  He lifted his eyes at her, then got up from his chair.

  “Tell him I want him to stay here with us.”

  ***

  Her son’s words echoed inside her for the rest of the afternoon. She dropped him off at her parents’ house and kissed him on the cheek. “Tomorrow, boats . . .” she promised, as she turned to get back into the waiting taxi.

  On the ride back to Manhattan, melancholy came over her. She knew her son felt the same way she did about having Saint-Exupéry in his life. When he was there, he filled her with joy and made her mind feel alive. He was funny and entertaining, and she always loved to see what he was working on. She could not wait to pore over the pile of sketches he pushed at her for her approval. As much as she loved motherhood, she also yearned for a creative life and Saint-Exupéry brought that along with him. She dreamed of becoming fluent in French, of being not only a wife to him, but a partner in his work. Her mind was full of ideas, her spirit eager to travel and see the world. Part of her even imagined writing a book of her own.