A Splendid Gift Read online

  But when her pilot left, the quiet in the apartment proved unbearable. He took a piece of her every time he departed. And Stephen, too, was growing attached. The paper airplanes Saint-Exupéry had made with him, the set of paints he had given the boy, and the times they’d spent in Central Park feeding the squirrels or flying kites made her son even happier than she had hoped. Now she regretted that they weren’t all spending another day together, but Saint-Exupéry had insisted he had to leave by noon and she didn’t want to have to say good-bye to him in front of Stephen. The last few times he had gone back to Long Island, she found it difficult to mask her tears.

  ***

  As Saint-Exupéry slept, Silvia took the papers he had brought with him and began to study the sketches, in an effort to decode the story by looking at all the illustrations he had spent hours perfecting.

  She lifted the first pages, which described a hat that was really a well-fed boa constrictor, and smiled when she came upon the drawings of a sheep, which only she and the pilot knew was based on her poodle, Mocha. She also knew that the rose whom the little prince loved despite its thorns, who needed incessant care and protection from the sun and the wind, was Consuelo.

  But the newest ones were sketches of baobab trees, with their menacing trunks and branches that looked like gnarled fists squeezing tight. In some of the sketches, the giant tree trunks engulfed the asteroid. Silvia knew, without reading a single word, that this was Nazi Germany overtaking his beloved France. She shuddered and put the papers down.

  ***

  He entered the living room shortly thereafter. His shirttail hung over the waistband of his pants, and his eyes were rimmed in shadow.

  She stood up and went over to him, brushing her hand across the stubble on his cheek. Just a few hours before, she had kissed young Stephen good-bye, and now the pilot stood in her living room like another sad little boy. His eyes were lowered, as if he were ashamed. She could sense he was about to say something he knew would upset her.

  “I need to get back to Long Island,” he told her. He held his watch in his hand and fastened it around his wrist.

  She was frustrated she couldn’t find the words in French to tell him how she was breaking apart inside. For months now he had lain in her arms, and when he was with her, she knew he was happier than when he was on his own or with Consuelo.

  She stood only a few inches away from him. He towered over her.

  He saw her eyes glisten, but she fought back her urge to cry.

  He reached for her palm and his fingers enveloped her own. Neither of them said anything, but a thousand words were still uttered, all in the touch of his hand.

  ***

  For five days he doesn’t call her, and the wait is eternal. She tries, without success, to reassure herself by considering all of his other commitments—his efforts with Washington and his publishing deadlines, not to mention the stress from his turbulent wife. All of these are valid reasons for his silence. But every hour passes more slowly than the next. She stares at the phone, and eats ice cream straight from the freezer to placate her nerves. She tries to hide her distress from Stephen, but when it becomes too hard, she asks her parents to take the boy to the beach so she can continue to remain at home, still hopeful that the pilot might call.

  The summer air is so thick and stifling that, despite the fans running in the apartment, she feels she is suffocating waiting for him. When Stephen returns home, she goes to the fire escape to shake out his swim trunks. The smell of the sea clings to the cloth as briny as seaweed, and the sound of the sand falling out over the ironwork reminds her of rainfall and soothes her.

  The next day she sends her son for yet another overnight stay with her parents. Stephen hardly looks at her as he’s leaving. When he departs, she swears to herself that it’s the last time she’ll put her life on hold for the pilot. But that afternoon, she hears a sudden rapping on her door. His knock is impatient. Exuberant. When she opens the door, he is standing there with an armful of roses and a bottle of wine, and smiles. He pulls her into his arms, and all the harsh words she had planned to say to him—after she had sworn to herself she could no longer endure his absences—vanish immediately from her mind.

  When he again leaves her later that afternoon, she finds he has scattered poetry for her around the apartment. “My heart is healed in your arms,” he scribbles on paper torn from a Chinese menu. Taped to the mirror, she finds another scrap of paper, this one containing a single line in English: “You are my eternal embrace.” She tucks them within the pages of her copy of Wind, Sand and Stars so that his words are all nested together, and smiles to herself.

  All those days she just spent waiting for him have slipped away from her mind. She takes the flowers he brought her to her nightstand and savors their intense fragrance. She slips into her nightdress and calmly finishes the last bits of her cigarette. The memory of him fills the room, and for the first time in nearly a week, she no longer lies awake yearning for the phone to ring or a knock at the door. Instead, she can now sleep.

  ***

  Early that evening, he returned to find the house in Eaton’s Neck empty. He walked past the open French doors of his study and headed toward the dining room where the housekeeper had stacked the mail. In a neat pile were several bills, a letter from his American publisher, and a note from a local girl, Adèle Breaux, inquiring whether he was in need of English lessons. He left them on the table and went over to the bar to pour himself a glass of gin. The air was hot. From the bay window, he noticed the water in the harbor was perfectly still. He took a few sips of his drink before refilling the glass, and then walked outside to the porch and sat down on one of the deck chairs.

  As he looked toward Duck Island, the memory of Silvia standing in her living room stoic but breaking, haunted him.

  He gazed at the large linden tree, then focused back to the copper beech near the water’s edge. He imagined Silvia sitting beside him there, the sunlight on her face and a glass cupped in her hands.

  But even though Consuelo thought nothing of disrespecting their household with her many lovers, he couldn’t bring Silvia and Stephen to Eaton’s Neck, despite how much he would have loved to see the boy play on the lawn or to have her sleeping beside him at night. He knew Silvia would have delighted in the grandeur of the grounds and its rooms with their arched doorways, mantels carved in white marble, and high windows and ceilings with crown moldings. He could see her setting the large oak wood dining room table with china and sterling, just as his mother had done during his childhood in Saint-Maurice. It gave him pleasure to imagine her bringing her innate sense of beauty to the domestic rituals that Consuelo never had any interest in. And yet it was part of his moral code that he must not invite Silvia into the home he shared with his wife.

  ***

  Consuelo always had too many angry words for him. Even when she wasn’t at home, he could still hear her voice like a scythe slicing through the air.

  And when she was feeling particularly vitriolic, she would throw plates or anything else she could find into the air.

  But even though Silvia hardly spoke more than a few words of French, she could still read his emotions more clearly than anyone else. Without the benefit of words, she looked for other ways of interpreting his thoughts. She would read the expressions in his eyes or sense the pressure of his touch. Even his appetite for her food conveyed to her what he was feeling. And she understood best how to respond to his moods. When his eyes were wet with melancholy, she knew she had to be almost maternal with him and restore him by putting extra butter on his English muffins and more milk in his scrambled eggs. And when his eyes were alive with creative energy, she searched her apartment for things to stoke his imagination. When his body was ailing, she tried to restore his aching muscles with a massage.

  She also understood how much she could soothe him simply by taking his hand in hers. Perhaps it was their la
nguage of touch that he loved the most. Her tight grip that begged him to stay a few minutes longer. Or the light caresses of her fingertips that felt as thrilling as the summer rain. He closed his eyes, and could convince himself that this was the way the heart truly communicated. As much as he sought to reveal the truth through his writing, he knew that words alone could fall short.

  He wanted to somehow immortalize her special gift. To honor her, Saint-Exupéry decided that in his story, he would freely cast the fox, the animal who was the little prince’s best and wisest friend, in her image. He knew this fox not only had to have Silvia’s auburn hair and her bright eyes, but that it also had to be wiser and more compassionate than all the rest. So he struggled to find the perfect words for this character to express.

  That evening he returned to his draft of The Little Prince, and reworked it for hours. He grappled to find the exact lines that could capture Silvia.

  After the paper had been made nearly illegible by his constant revisions, he finally found the phrase he sought: “On ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur. L’essential est invisible pour les yeux.” “One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

  ***

  By early August, The Little Prince was taking shape. Removed from the frenetic pace of New York City, Saint-Exupéry had been more productive than ever while at the Bevin House.

  Eager to share his latest revisions with Silvia, he raced into Manhattan with his most-recent draft tucked into his satchel. Although they had seen each other less often since he had moved full-time to Eaton’s Neck, he still called her several times a week. Never at a civilized hour, but almost always in the middle of the night, when his bouts of creative energy took him over.

  For days now, he had been imagining her dark eyes and lithe body beside him. But when he knocked at her door, in her arms was a small black dog. It was a boxer with a wet nose, a wrinkled brow, and a face somewhere between Winston Churchill’s and a smashed fruit.

  With her cheek against the puppy’s tiny velvet ears, she looked up at him. “I’ve bought you a small present.” She placed the little dog beside his feet.

  Clasped in her hand, she held a scrap of paper. Her tutor had translated exactly what Silvia wanted to say to him, so she could now pepper her sentences with a little French.

  “What are you going to call him?” she asked, as she led him inside the apartment. The dog was now busy teething at his shoelaces.

  “Hannibal,” he said, half joking. He knelt down to pet the dog, and his palm was so large it nearly enveloped the animal.

  “I wanted you to have something from me that you could still love when we’re apart,” Silvia told him.

  He put his satchel down and approached her.

  She felt the dog licking at her ankle and tried to suppress an urge to giggle.

  “Stephen?” he whispered in her ear. “Is he asleep?”

  “My parents took him to the Catskills for the weekend.”

  He understood enough to know the boy was away. She welcomed his hand traveling underneath her skirt.

  That evening, the fans blew hot air around the apartment and they lay in bed with his papers spread across the coverlet. She would pick one up and slowly try to make out what she could of the text, and he’d watch her face to gauge her reaction.

  With the story nearly complete, he could see how much it pleased her. When she had looked at the last illustration, he took it from her hands and placed it on the nightstand.

  When he leaned over to kiss her, he saw her eyes were wet with tears.

  She didn’t need to say anything. He understood that she had seen herself as the fox, forever captured in the book, even if she didn’t understand the exact meaning of the story’s every word.

  “Mon petit renard,” he whispered into her ear. “My little fox.”

  That morning, after she had slept tightly in his arms, she pulled herself out from his embrace and went to the nightstand to take another look at his pages. Then she quietly slipped out to the kitchen table to transcribe each word he had written.

  She wrote out the French in careful, clear lines so Louise could translate exactly what he had said. But when the tutor eventually translated the words into English for her, Silvia realized she had wasted her money in paying Louise for this task. For she, like the fox, had already known their meaning.

  ***

  He brought Hannibal home to Eaton’s Neck and began housetraining him at once. But the dog had a mind of its own and continued to gnaw on every pair of shoes he could find.

  “Horrible Hannibal . . . he’ll be the tiger in the book,” he grumbled to Silvia over the telephone one night. When he heard her laughter on the other end, it always soothed him.

  He amused her by telling her that he now had his own prim tutor, a local girl who was adamant she could succeed in teaching him English where all the others had failed.

  By mid-October, with the book now completed, he found himself once again awash by the restlessness and depression that had plagued him before he became immersed in The Little Prince. As he felt when he first arrived in New York, the sense of powerlessness to help the French war effort overtook him.

  He began to write angry tirades to the newspapers and to demand more meetings in Washington with government officials. Silvia began to feel that she was losing him, for he no longer seemed to be soothed by anything, not even her.

  Even when he was beside her, he seemed far away. “Tell me again about the desert,” she’d say, hoping to coax him back into her arms. But he could think of little except the German occupation. And he worried about his friend Leon Worth, a Jew who he feared even in hiding couldn’t be kept safe from the Nazis.

  She noticed even in his slumber that he never seemed to rest. He slept fitfully, sometimes crying out names she did not know in a language that was almost impossible to decode.

  She knew that, though his body was in New York, he was already halfway across an ocean, his heart anchored to France.

  Instead of speaking about his past travels, he began to speak of war planes and plans for a North African invasion, or of missions and alliances that would work toward a greater goal. He continued to phone everyone he knew who had military connections, hoping to find a way to pilot a plane again and help save his homeland.

  ***

  By November, all the fireplaces in the Bevin House could still not keep out the cold. The wind penetrated the windows and the lawn became covered in dry autumn leaves. The New York Times Magazine published Saint-Exupéry’s “An Open Letter to Frenchmen Everywhere,” which was also broadcast on the radio in French. He had poured his heart into the letter, pleading with his countrymen not to be silent, but to determine how they might help free their country from the German occupation.

  But his letter did not receive the reaction he had hoped. Instead, he had opened himself up to criticism and ridicule, with most believing he should stick to writing literature, even if they hated the Germans’ living on French soil as much as he.

  Everything seemed to darken around him. Consuelo convinced him to leave the increasingly somber Bevin House and rent a town house on Beekman Place. Again, she had found a place that was far more extravagant than they needed. But given its location on the East River, it offered a spot of tranquility that was perhaps worth the high rent.

  But he and his wife continued to battle, which only increased his despair. Even though he was concerned about money, she bought him an expensive Spanish writing desk for their new apartment, thinking it would make him happy. But all he wanted was a clean surface and ample paper for his writing.

  He also made mistakes regarding Silvia, promising to see her when he was already committed to something else.

  He wrote her letters in which he pleaded for forgiveness, which she had translated by her embarrassed tutor.

  I understand fully why
you’re upset with me. I understand completely. I am furious with myself. I am distressed over the missed trains, the forgotten appointments, the phone calls I’ve failed to return, the friends I have disappointed. I adore you, Silvia and I loathe to hurt you.

  But unlike his letter to the New York Times, his letters to Silvia always garnered him sympathy. Whenever he did arrive at her apartment, no matter how long it had been since his last visit, she could never stay mad at him. It had become the pattern of their relationship. She opened her arms and brought him back to life.

  ***

  The Little Prince had already been submitted to his publisher, and she tried to encourage him to start another project. But whenever he sat down to write, what poured out was another “open letter” to the public in which he revealed his inner anguish and the need to fight Germany no matter the cost. A translated version appeared in the New York Times. Silvia knew that this was both his personal call to arms as well as a good-bye letter to America. And to her. He began to speak incessantly of the latest models of planes and cockpits, which he worried he was now too large to fit in. He was preparing to fly away.

  As always, Silvia was correct. At Beekman Place, he informed Consuelo she’d be better off without him. He told her that he could no longer remain in the comfort and safety of America while those he loved back home suffered. As much as she screamed and protested, a strange calm overtook him. He was determined to get himself to North Africa where the Allies had since landed, and he would not stop until he was put on a mission.