A Splendid Gift (3 page)

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, which 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.

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 language 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.