June 15, 2022

Suddenly Barbara let out a cry, her umbrella was no longer on her arm.

“…Suddenly Barbara let out a cry, her umbrella was no longer on her arm. She distinctly remembered starting out with it, from the apartment, and she was fairly certain she had felt the weight of the umbrella on her arm as she stepped out of the taxi. She could not remember for sure but she thought she had laid it down in the china shop, in order to examine a piece of porcelain.

They left the steps of the Madeline, crossed through the traffic to the shop, and went in, The clerk Barbara spoke to was the not the one Harold had wanted her to ask. No umbrella had been found; also the clerk was not interested in lost umbrellas. As they left the shop, he said: “Don’t worry about it, You can buy another umbrella.”

“Not like this one,” she said The umbrella was for travelling, folded compactly into a third the usual length, and could be tucked away in a suitcase. “If only we’d gone to the Rodin Museum this afternoon, as we were intending to,” she said, “I’d never have lost it there.”

“He went back to the Madeleine and waited another quarter of an hour while she walked the length of the rue Royale, looking mournfully in shop windows and trying to remember a place, a moment, when she had put her umbrella down, meaning to pick it up right away….”

—William Maxwell, The Chateau