A Citizen of the Country

by Sarah Smith

  André snatched the egg out of the pan as soon as it was done, scraping the fat with stale bread, shaking his hair away from his face so as not to get it in the food. At Montfort, he’d been starving.

  “Come see the set models,” Jules said to Reisden.

  They went down into the basement of the theatre, into the room that was usually the set designer’s and that now housed the models for the film. They had already made the model for the Grand’Place. Jules held a student lamp in his hand and moved it to make the sun set; shadows reached across the square like hands. In the middle of the square, the model guillotine glittered.

  “He didn’t eat at Montfort,” Reisden said. “I got him to Arras on Saturday.”

  “I make him eat,” Jules said.

  “He’ll be at Montfort for—how long is your shooting schedule, three weeks?”

  “I’ll cook for him,” Jules said. “Lots of eggs. Canned food.”

  Jules set down the lamp and stared at the model. The shadows raked across the square, light from a sun that had gone down.

  “How was it at Montfort, Reisden?”

  He tried to scare me, and did very well. “Do you know,” Reisden asked, “did his mother commit suicide?”

  Jules blinked: kindly, innocent Jules. “No.” It was the flat no of a practicing Catholic.

  “She didn’t have a funeral.” Which meant, unless she was not a be-liever, that her priest had refused to bury her with the rites: an almost impossible thing for a countess. “She wasn’t a freethinker, was she?”

  Jules shook his head.

  Reisden thought over it that night, while failing to write a cheerful letter to Perdita. André was obsessively acting out an endless drama in which members of a family kill one another. My wife is poisoning me.

  And then she’d done it.

  He thought of Leo again. Leo had been a good man, in his way, a good guardian; he had taught Reisden to look below every surface. He would have made a good psychiatrist; his favorite expression had been I wonder what he means by it. “I wish I knew more about the Such-and-so family; Mr. Such-and-so has some very inconvenient opinions, I wonder what he means.” One was expected to find out. “Mrs. Such-and-so, a pretty woman, and so bored; pay her a little attention, you dog you.” When one was at a friend’s house, one should notice what newspapers were on the table, open to what stories; one should let no implication get away; one should talk with one’s friends, and the friends of the friends, the uncles, the mothers, the wives, the servants. (Never take your own servants to a weekend unless they are your accomplices; use the ones the host offers you. You are young, so they will be the least experienced and the most likely to talk.) It had seemed not too much different from amateur theatre, an amusing game that everyone was playing; at least Reisden had thought everyone was playing it, as a new whist-player thinks everyone is playing whist.

  In Leo’s world, of course, everyone had been playing; and no one could imagine not playing, or ever ceasing to play, leaving the cards on the table and the Great Game not won. Leo had been a good man, almost a good father. Perhaps an uncle, the cynical disreputable uncle who introduces one to women and teaches one good taste, and has a dark side. They had certainly liked each other. But when Reisden had wanted to lay down the cards, Leo had not let him go, or ever stopped wondering what Reisden meant by it.

  He tapped his pen against the inkwell, looking at his unfinished letter to Perdita.

  For all Perdita knew about him, he had never told her what he had done for Leo.

  He would have to, he thought. Eventually. But she was American. She was young. In the end he’d been disgusted with the life, appalled at the things he was getting into.

  How would she feel?

  He didn’t trust her with this any more than with Toby’s safety.

  ***

  “Tell me about your mother.”

  Reisden cornered André in the effects room at the Necro, where André was inspecting a severed head. André didn’t want to talk, tried to tell him about the film, tried to show him the head. Reisden persisted. “Your mother and poison.”

  Finally André folded up into a chair, his shoulders hunched, the severed head at his feet. He clasped his hands between his knees as if he were cold. “Dr Jouvet didn’t believe me,” he said. “My mother poisoned my father and me.”

  Reisden nodded.

  “Papa first,” André said. “Then herself and me. The poison was in a green bottle. I saw her mixing it. I pretended to take it but I spit most of it out.”

  Reisden waited. André didn’t go on. “And then?”

  “Well, she died,” André said. “And Papa died.”

  And nobody discovered you for a couple of days, and you were five years old. “What was that like?”

  “What was it like?” André said. “I don’t know.” André looked at him, blue eyes flat as marbles, angry, defensive, unsure.

  “You shouldn’t believe me,” André said. “Don’t believe me. It’s all Necro. Papa Cyron says it is. So did your Dr. Jouvet.”

  Katzmann had told him They always say ‘I could have told you that anytime.’ André hadn’t. He’d said, Don’t believe me.

  Is he telling me he’s lying?

  “I can see marriage would be difficult whether you made the story up or not.” It was all he could think of. “What did your mother use? Arsenic, you think. Are you sure?”

  “What sort of son would tell a story like that about his mother?” André said, speaking beside the point too, or maybe not. “No. It’s wrong of me.”

  “If it’s arsenic, it would still be in their bodies. Would you like to know whether you’re right?”

  No, no, no, he wasn’t handling this well. André was barefoot, the way he usually worked; he drew a leg up, holding one bare foot between his hands, massaging it as if he were comforting it. He wanted comfort; all Reisden was offering him was facts.

  “They died of cholera. Dr. Jouvet said.” He doesn’t want to know, Reisden thought, just as André raised pleading blue eyes to him.

  “Go to Montfort with me. Help me dig up my parents,” André said. “Run the arsenic test on them. I would,” he hesitated, “I would like to know how crazy I am.” He grinned, Necrosar again. “As crazy as she was. How filial that would be of me.” But for a moment he had cracked wide open, and Reisden took advantage of it.

  “I will,” he said, thinking he had not the slightest idea what he was doing. Conventional psychiatry didn’t involve exhumations.

  All he knew was that William Knight had been crazy too, and Richard still wondered how crazy he was himself.

  Perdita meets Gilbert in Boston

  PERDITA HAD WRITTEN TO Gilbert first from Paris, and got a delighted reply and an invitation to stay at the house on Commonwealth Avenue. She had written again as soon as she docked in New York—and heard nothing, no reply at all. This she did not tell Alexander; he would have told her she shouldn’t go to Boston. She wrote to Gilbert again while she and Toby were on her little tour, three times, and three times she got no reply.

  So, with the air of a woman who had much more to spend than Perdita did, she reserved rooms at the Parker House in Boston; and there, on the morning after she arrived, Harry came to see her.

  “He won’t see you. None of us want to see you. So you might as well go home.”

  “I don’t believe so yet, Harry; I have a concert to give for the Massachusetts Women’s Suffrage League.”

  She had made sure she had a concert, to give her a perfectly good reason to come to Boston.

  “None of my friends will come to your concert.”

  None of his friends would have come anyway, she thought a little sadly. She knew his friends; she had been queen of them when she had been going to marry him. “How are you and Efnie, Harry?”

  “We’re none of your business, Perdita.”

  She expected that Harry was fighting with Uncle Gilbert over seeing her, but Gilbert would come to see her, if only to her c
oncert. She must simply bide her time. So she introduced Toby to the swan boats in the Public Garden, which he loved. They saw a baseball game at Nickerson Field and she strolled Toby in his perambulator past the enormous new ballpark that was being built on the Fens. Every morning she practiced piano on one of the rentals at Steinert Hall. In the afternoon, before Toby’s naptime, she rehearsed or went to the offices of the League in a tiny third-floor walkup office on Stuart Street; Toby napped on the floor while she talked with the other women.

  But Uncle Gilbert didn’t come to the concert, because the concert was cancelled.

  It was to be given in a Unitarian church hall just off Commonwealth Avenue. Perdita and two women students from the Conservatory, Betsy and Joanna, violin and violincello, were to do Brahms’ Piano Trio #1. Three days before the concert, when all the posters had been put up (and most of them torn down), the League was called by the police. “Ladies, you can’t have your concert. Too rowdy. The neighbors complained.”

  What was rowdy about a piano trio, they asked?

  “D’you mean to say there won’t be pickets out on the street? I can guarantee there will. You bring it on yourselves, acting unwomanly as you do.”

  “I know some of those neighbors,” Perdita said to Miss Grey, the League secretary. “May I call round?”

  “You’ll find—” said Miss Grey.

  “Let her try,” said Miss Rutherford, who was treasurer.

  These people had been her neighbors. The boys from the Iroquois Club and their girlfriends; Lothrop Ames and his cousin; the Blackstone sisters. They had all come to Harry’s coming-of-age party. They had all applauded when Perdita gave concerts as a girl. Now she was back, a better pianist with something to say; and they wouldn’t listen.

  “It would be so disruptive,” Amelia Ames said. “I’m so sorry I won’t get a chance to see you; I am so busy with the baby now.” The old girlfriends were now the wives. “We’re at the farm most weekends.” “I just don’t take an interest in such things.” “You know George wouldn’t like my being political; you know how he is!”

  And, frankly, “Your Harry called my husband, dear.”

  “I’m the cause the concert was canceled,” Perdita said to Miss Grey.

  “Oh no, my dear,” Miss Rutherford said mildly.

  “This time,” Miss Grey said. “Last time someone else. Next time some other reason.”

  “Harry doesn’t like me.”

  “My dear,” Miss Rutherford said, “if we had a tenth the money and the power that people like Harry Boulding do, they would feel they had to listen to us. And so they try to keep us from getting money and power. They prevent us from marching, from raising funds, from acting as lawyers and doctors and owners of business, everything that would make us serious people.”

  “But the women, too—” Perdita said.

  “The women take their cues from their husbands. What their husbands believe, they must believe, or, they think, their husbands will come home late because other women are more pliable. And other women are,” Miss Rutherford said. “I had a father, and I have a step-mother; I know what women do.”

  “We are difficult, us suffragists,” Miss Grey said. “We are troublesome.”

  “Everyone wants to do the easy thing, don’t they,” Perdita said. “Men too.”

  “And we are not easy.”

  Uncle Gilbert had not telephoned her, not written, not anything, not once. It would have been difficult for him—Harry was probably giving him trouble about her—but she and Uncle Gilbert had been true friends.

  Didn’t he want to see Toby? Was he thinking like Alexander now, that they should never meet? Alexander wouldn’t have written to him telling him not to—Alexander didn’t write him now at all—but Gilbert and Alexander were so close in all that they thought, all they believed. . . . That was exactly why they should talk to each other.

  She thought of how Alexander would feel if she forced herself on Gilbert.

  Did Uncle Gilbert simply want to do the easy thing, like everyone else?

  ***

  The last day she was in Boston was what would have been the day of the concert. Aline had packed everything; they were ready to go; there was nothing left to do but to be truly miserable and homesick before she had even gone. “And we won’t do that,” she told Toby, “will we? No, we’ll go out and take one last walk and go to the swan boats again, and then we’ll go back to Paris and you will be your papa’s boy.”

  And I will cry, she thought, but when no one is looking.

  “Mrs. Reisden, Mrs. Reisden!” Betsy and Joanna from the Conservatory, the ones she would have played the concert with, piled into the room. “Would you still play?” The two girls had brought their instruments; she could hear the strings sounding from inside the cases. “Right now? We have a piano in a wagon, and our friend Fred to drive it,” Joanna said.

  “Do you want to make mischief?” Betsy said.

  They had actually stolen the piano from the Longy School—“just borrowed!” Betsy corrected. Perdita felt so much older than they were. You will get in trouble, she thought; you could get expelled. I was at the Paris Conservatory; I know. They are only looking for excuses to get rid of us. And then she thought, Women ought to be pliable. Other women are pliable.

  “Any kind of mischief will do,” Perdita said. “Let’s go.” She wouldn’t spit in Uncle Gilbert’s eye or Alexander’s, but she would be delighted to spit in someone’s.

  On Commonwealth Avenue they arranged for the wagon to have a “breakdown.” Fred cut the harness. It was the middle of the day; mothers and children with their nursemaids were walking up and down the strip of park in the center of the avenue. Joanna and Betsy emerged, disheveled, carrying their instruments and wearing their Votes for Women sashes. Fred hauled the canvas back and revealed VOTES FOR WOMEN hurriedly painted on the inner side.

  And they played.

  They got through the first movement of the Brahms First before the police arrived. Traffic was snarled almost down to Copley Square. “Oh, look what we’ve done,” said Betsy unrepentantly. “Isn’t it awful," Joanna agreed. Fred was arguing with the policeman. “And all we’ve done is play music,” Perdita said.

  All we’ve done is play music. She knew every tree on this block by the sound of its leaves; she had played in this park as a child. I’ve cut myself off, she thought, I don’t belong here anymore; she felt desolated, surprised; relieved, but sadly relieved. Now she could go back to Paris homeless, ready to find a home. It was like the morning after a funeral. I could have stayed here, she thought. I could have been like those women, telephoning the authorities to get rid of those dreadful suffragists because my husband’s club friends don’t approve of them.

  For funerals there is only one kind of music: jazz. She had seen Willie Williams in New York and got new tunes to play. While the policeman argued with Betsy and Fred, she let the blues stomp all over Commonwealth Avenue. Homeless girl, put your red dress on. The police arrested Fred but not the rest of them; police never took women seriously. She left off playing the piano only as it was towed away.

  Aline was waiting with Toby. Perdita gave Toby a big hug, glad it was over after all. “Mais c’était magnifique, madame!” Aline giggled. “That was grand!”

  “Oh, it wasn’t, Aline. Let’s go get tea.”

  “You should have seen all those faces, like a row of gherkins— Scram, you!” A wet nose was snuffling at Perdita’s skirt. “Never mind, madame. It’s only a dog. But oh, isn’t that strange—”

  “What?” she asked casually.

  “That man over there? The man who owns the dog. He looks so like Monsieur Alexandre.”

  Perdita gives Gilbert an ultimatum

  “OH MY DEAR,” SHE said.

  “My dear,” said Uncle Gilbert.

  “You didn’t know I was here?”

  “I had no letters,” Uncle Gilbert said. “Only the one from Paris. Why did you not write?”

  He took her to a coffe
e shop near the Museum of Fine Arts. Uncle Gilbert urged her not to drink the coffee; tea at the museum would probably not be bad for her, he conceded, but coffee of any sort! Perhaps they had not washed the pot recently! Perhaps not in a long time!

  “Oh, Uncle Gilbert,” she said, taking his hands. “Don’t fuss about that.”

  Fuss about what we’ve come to, she thought. He had not taken them to tea at the Athenaeum, where his friends would have seen them, but here. How could Harry have done that to him, she thought. How could he. She was ashamed of her own reluctance to call. She had been willing to make a scandal for music or the vote, but not for Uncle Gilbert.

  They sat for a while, simply holding hands. And then they talked. Toby was asleep in his pram by the table. “He looks like Tom,” Uncle Gilbert said.

  Alexander had said he wished Toby looked like no one. She didn’t say that. “He’s a wonderful baby,” she said. “He even liked going on tour; he likes a good audience, just like his mama, don’t you, sweet? He loves to get attention.”

  “Are you happy?” Uncle Gilbert said. “I hope so.”

  “I miss America,” she said, but no more than that, not talking about how she needed the smells and the music. “I don’t miss Boston! I miss you.”

  “I miss you, my dear.” There were things he might have said too, she thought, and he didn’t. She didn’t ask him whether he was happy. She didn’t want to talk about why the letters hadn’t come.

  “Is—Alexander—is he happy?” Uncle Gilbert asked.

  She had never quite thought about this; she had been too focused on whether Alexander loved her, what he thought of her. Uncle Gilbert, she thought, I needed to talk with you. “He isn’t,” she confessed. “I don’t think I can do enough for him.” I don’t think I’m right for him. “He needs someone to take care of things for him.” I can’t even make French fries. But I won’t complain to Uncle Gilbert.

  “Alexander was doing research with the department head of Physio. Psych.,” she said. “That’s a combination of biochemistry and psychology and measuring things. When the building collapsed, he took leave from the Sorbonne. While he was gone his research partner died and the group fell apart.—So now he spends all his time at Jouvet. He loves Jouvet and he says now he doesn’t want to do anything else, but it’s a huge responsibility and it’s all new for him. Not that it won’t go very well in the end.—He’s never had a family before,” she said, “not one he likes. He’s never rebuilt a building or been a father. And he has to do everything; he has meetings and more meetings and, with all that, he has to check little things like whether the plasterer did the walls right because—” She put out her hand and gestured as if she were patting wet plaster. “There’s so much I can’t do to help him that any sighted woman could. He needs to come home and have someone take all his cares away, do things for him, make things right for him,” she said, and then she added something she hadn’t even known about her husband. “He’s lonely,” she said.