Rhoda

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “Oh, why was that?” She was wearing large hornrimmed glasses. She reached up and took them off as she waited for his answer.

  “Because it interfered with baseball practice. Then I broke a finger and it was in a cast for a year.”

  “That’s terrible.” She moved near him. “That’s the worst thing I ever heard.”

  “I used to love the way it fit into the case.”

  “You could start again. It’s not too late.”

  “You think so?”

  “Sure. There are wonderful teachers here. Do you speak French?”

  “I won’t be here long.”

  “Let’s start walking,” Tannin said. “You can’t solve this on an empty stomach.”

  We had dinner at a brasserie along the Seine. The lights from the barges going along the river climbed the trunks of the trees, then filled the crowns, then climbed back down. Afterward, an afterglow. A heavy metaphor for love, if anyone needed one in Paris.

  May Chatevin and William were in love before we even got to the brasserie. They had paired up as soon as we left the opera house. They walked behind us, their heads bent toward one another. I had forgotten how fast it happens, had forgotten young men’s bodies, the cold shaking power of desire, had been glad to forget it, as I now had other things to do, being in the universe on this clearer, older plane.

  “My guardian angel must have finally made it across the ocean,” William was saying across the table. “Everyone who goes to Sewanee gets a guardian angel. When we go onto the campus we check him at the gates. When we leave we pick him up again. We don’t need him at Sewanee, you see, as it’s the closest place to heaven.” William laughed out loud. He was laughing at everything. And his cold had disappeared. It was the truth, what I told his parents later. He was the happiest young man I’d ever seen. In contrast to Tannin, who is as hysterical as I am. Searching, searching, dreaming, playing out the string. Philip Larkin has a metaphor for this. People sitting on the cliffs waiting for a white-sailed armada of hopes to come in. They arrive, Larkin says, but they never anchor. “Only one ship is seeking us,” the poem ends. “A black-sailed unfamiliar, towing at its back a huge and birdless silence. In its wake, no waters breed or break.”

  The four of us became inseparable. We went to the Sorbonne to hear a string quartet play Brahms. We walked in the Tuileries and had lunch at Les Deux Magots. We strolled the boulevard St-Germain and went to Sulka to look at the ties. We walked along the Seine and saw the small blue asters in the flower shops and I told the story of V. K. Ratchff’s trip to New York City to the wedding of Eula Varner Snopes to the Jewish Communist and how V.K. bought a tie the color of asters and how the Russian woman kissed him on the mouth as she tied it around his neck.

  We talked of writing and painting and music. We harvested the beauty of the city and fed it to each other. One day we rented a car and drove to Dieppe to see the coast. On the way home the skies were full of clouds and over a field of young corn we watched three parachuters playing with the wind. We talked of books we had read and artists we admired. We went to the Rodin museum and stood in line for fifty minutes. “Rilke came here every afternoon,” Tannin said. “He adored Rodin. ‘Rodin, c’est lui qui a inspiré le poete,’ Ran Rilke.”

  “I want to buy the tickets,” I said. “Tell me what to say?”

  “Quatre. S’il vous plaît.”

  “Quatre. S’il vous plaît,” I told the lady in the cage and counted out the money as if I were six years old.

  The billets were beautiful, reproductions of the statue called Le Bourgeois de Calais, 1895. Musée Rodin, 77 rue de Varenne, Paris.

  We had an audience with the brilliant translator, Barbara Bray, and took her to a concert with us at a cathedral. May Chatevin and I had our hair done at Julien et Claude, Haute Coiffure, St-Germain-des-Près. We stood outside the Louvre and watched the tourists going in. We bought a disposable camera and took photographs of each other by the statues of the continents. We went to Chanel and saw Catherine Deneuve shopping for costumes for a movie. We pretended not to know who she was and looked the other way.

  Often, in the afternoons, May Chatevin and William would disappear until suppertime. Tannin had sworn off women until his book was finished. And I had found out a wonderful thing. You do not have to be getting laid to be ecstatic in this city which worships love.

  Often while they were gone we went somewhere and wrote in our notebooks. He needed a château for a love scene in his book and we found one in the country and went there several times to draw it in our minds.

  “William’s sister is calling him twice a day,” Tannin told me. “His family’s furious. They want him to come home.”

  “His sister?”

  “She’s visiting Rome with her husband. She wants him to come there and go home with them.”

  “What does he tell them?”

  “He tells them no. He says he’s in love with a girl from the States.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked my cousin, when I had her alone one afternoon.

  “I’m in love with him. I want him to stay here with me.”

  “How could he work? An American can’t get work in Paris.”

  “It’s a problem.” She looked right at me. That old fierceness, selfishness, call it what you will. In the last two generations our family has a divorce rate about twice the national average. The reason is that look. This arrogance we breed or foster, here it was again, in Paris, in this twenty-nine-year-old girl with her perfect ear and talented hands. “I’m writing a symphony. The Saint Louis Symphony is going to perform it when it’s done. I can’t leave now. This city is my muse. I have to stay another year or two.”

  “Then what will happen?”

  “I don’t know. I want him to stay. He can live with me. He knows that. He can get a visa.”

  “What would he do for money?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we have to live today and not think about it.” I had been wrong. She had stopped being Southern. She stood beside the window in my room, looking out onto the roofs of Paris. She was where she had meant to go, she was where she meant to be.

  I changed my plane reservation. I decided to stay another week. One morning Tannin met me in the hotel café for breakfast.

  “He’s leaving at noon,” Tannin said. “He’s run out of money and his sister won’t leave him alone. He’s going to Rome and fly home with them in his brother-in-law’s plane. His family has lots of money, but they won’t give it to him.”

  “They shouldn’t. That’s good. That’s right.”

  “He’s in love with your cousin. That’s our fault, Rhoda. We did that, you and I. He’s really broken up about leaving. Do you think she loves him?”

  “She loves her work. She’s writing a symphony. She wrote one last year that was played by the New Orleans Symphony Orchestra. She has an agreement to write one for Saint Louis. She’s going to be a star. Yes, I think she loves him. She wants to keep him here for a pet.”

  “He came home early last night. I guess they had a fight.”

  “It’s not our fault, Tannin. That’s nuts to think that.”

  We left the café. We walked to the Champs Elysées and window-shopped. We went to the Luxembourg Gardens and rode the carousel. We bought beignets with powdered sugar and sat upon a bench and ate them with our fingers.

  “I’d better call May Chatevin when I get home,” I said. “She has to play tonight. Maybe we can meet her later and get some supper.”

  “It’s not our fault, Rhoda, remember that.”

  “I know. It isn’t. By God, it has nothing to do with us. We didn’t do it.”

  Neither was it our fault that the Italian Mafia chose that day to load up a car with plastic explosives and drive it into the train station in Firenze just as William got off the train. For what? To turn around and come back to Paris? To buy a package of cigarettes? To call May Chatevin?

  I don’t buy group guilt. Or any of that politically correct bullshit. Most of
the people in the world are doing the best they can with whatever knowledge they have managed to attain or been fed by whatever myths they were raised under. So, somewhere in the darkness of the underside of existence, in the ancient land of Italy, someone, or two or three benighted souls, stuffed a Fiat full of explosives smuggled in from God knows where and with or without a driver ran it into the side of the old section of the Firenze train station where maybe William had just disembarked long enough to buy a sandwich or a drink or a newspaper. He was trying to learn Italian, he had said, one night when we were sitting beside the Seine using all our pidgin languages. Tannin is the only one of us who has mastered anything other than English, although May Chatevin’s French is charming and she gets by.

  Tannin and May Chatevin and I were together that night. We left my hotel about six and walked to the Jardin des Plantes to see the menagerie. It was cool that evening and May Chatevin was wearing pale yellow silk pants and a green silk jacket. Her hair was pulled back into a chignon. I thought she looked like her mother that night, as she was sad and trying to hide the sadness. “I couldn’t leave now,” she said a dozen times. “I couldn’t just leave all this and go back home. I think he understood that. Did he say anything to you, Tannin? What did he say?”

  “That he is in love with you, of course. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do. Maybe go to work for his brother-in-law. Make some money and come back for you.”

  “You could go and visit him,” I put in. “Surely you don’t have to work incessantly.”

  “Until I finish the symphony I can’t take a day away from it. I’ve wasted two weeks as it is, but not entirely. I’ve been working in the mornings.” We were walking along the rue Claude Bernard, trying to find our way to the boulevard de Vaugirard, where there was a Brazilian restaurant Tannin knew about.

  After dinner we decided to see the late showing of Much Ado About Nothing in English with French subtitles. It was over about eleven-fifteen and the two young people left me at my hotel and Tannin walked May Chatevin home. He is struggling with his novel and takes every opportunity to put off going home to write it, which he does in the middle of the night no matter how much I lecture him on the efficacy of the morning hours.

  I went up to my room and turned on the television set for the first time since I’d been in Paris. I turned on CNN and settled back into the pillows with a glass of Evian. It was the first event on the news. The train station in flames, people running with their hands up in the air, firemen spraying the flames with chemicals, demolished automobiles parked outside the station.

  I watched the full report. Then I called Tannin. He returned to my hotel and came up to my room and we began to call crazily around three countries trying to find something out.

  “Let’s go down there,” I said. “Rent a car.”

  “We have to stay here. He might have my address with him if he was hurt. He might call.”

  “What about May Chatevin?”

  “Wait until morning. If she knew she would have called. What could she do this time of night?”

  “It wouldn’t be him. He wouldn’t die. He’s not the type.”

  “Anyone can die, Rhoda. Anytime. Anywhere.”

  “Thinking he was a failure?”

  “He didn’t think that. He just couldn’t decide what to do.”

  “We’re overreacting. I shouldn’t have called you. You should be at home doing your work.”

  “Do you think he was in it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I.”

  Tannin slept on the sofa in my room. We woke up early and dressed and went to May Chatevin’s apartment. She had read it in the paper. “If he wasn’t hurt, he would have called us,” she kept saying. “He said he’d call when he got there.”

  “We can’t be sure.”

  “Then why hasn’t he called?”

  “What’s his sister’s name?

  “I don’t know.”

  “Should we call his parents in the States?”

  “No. Oh, God, no. What if he’s all right?”

  In the end Tannin and May Chatevin had a car delivered and started driving. I stayed by the phone. They stopped and called every two hours. In between the second and third call the American embassy called to say his name was on the list of the dead.

  THE LIST OF THE DEAD. In June, in a peaceful Europe, the summer he was twenty-five. Random, inexplicable.

  I told her when she called at three that afternoon. They went on to Firenze to see if they could claim the body. I asked the embassy to get me his parents’ phone number. I sat in zazen on the floor of my room and waited for the courage to make the call. I could have looked out the window and seen the Eiffel Tower if I wanted to.

  I got his father on the phone. I told him his son had been completely happy when he left for Rome. I told him his son had been the happiest man I had ever known. I asked if I could meet the daughter in Firenze. If I could do anything at all for them. I gave them my phone number in the United States. I said they could come to visit me and I would tell them about every minute of the weeks gone by. “He was the happiest young man I’ve ever known,” I told them. “What fine parents you must have been. What a delightful son you had.” Had. Here in the maya of space and time. On the planet Earth, in nineteen hundred and ninety-three A.D., in the only world there is.

  Two days later Tannin and May Chatevin got back to Paris. They had met the sister. Tannin had helped identify the body. May Chatevin had lost ten pounds. I put her to bed in her apartment with one of my three remaining Xanax tablets. I sat in her living room while she slept and tried to read Le Monde. Tannin had gone home to rest.

  “Get up tomorrow morning and write,” I told him. “Now will you believe? Now will you go on and write your hero’s death?”

  “No,” he answered. “I’m going to skip over to the part that takes place in the United States. After the child is born.”

  “Requiem. Yes, go on.”

  “We got a dog the last year we were at Sewanee. This brown dog we found at the pound. We had to hide it from the landlord.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “He took it to Nashville and gave it to his mother. I guess she’s still got it. He used to let it ride in the car with him everywhere he went. That dog loved to ride in automobiles. He’d put his paws up on the window and stick his head out. Everyone knew our dog. We called it Vain for a girlfriend he once had.”

  “I told his father he was the happiest man I had ever known.”

  “He might have been. Now he is. Now he doesn’t care.” We had been whispering. Now we embraced. He left me there. I opened French Vogue and began to read an article about how to dye the hair on my legs. We don’t really need hair on our bodies anymore. But nature keeps it there in case things change.

  A Wedding in Jackson

  They were not getting married in a fever. Although they were young and full of hope and at least the bride seemed bright with passion. The boy was scared to death. His parents were there from Minnesota and his sisters stuffed into their ridiculous pink bridesmaid’s dresses. Well, there’s no point in getting judgmental. The point is, I was there. I hadn’t been to a family wedding in five years. I’d been too busy getting yet another anal-retentive Momma’s boy to like me to have time for my family. From the age of fifty-four to fifty-eight I spent all my time and money getting this slightly younger man to squire me around and show the world I was still physically attractive. What a bore I must have been. Mooning around and getting dressed up to go to movies just so people would think I was getting laid. Not that what we were doing could be called getting laid. Still, it got the job done and I’m not complaining about him. It was my idea to begin with, then, suddenly, that spring I had let it go and I was free to go back to the bosom of my family.

  My name is Rhoda, by the way. Rhoda Katherine Manning. You might have heard of me. I’m a famous scandal in some circles in the South. Our crazy cousin Rhoda, my respectable cousins cal
l me, in Birmingham and Nashville and Memphis and New Orleans. Even some of the ones who are making it in New York City run me down.

  Who cares, you might ask. Well, I cared enough to spend four years on this quasi-respectable man just to keep them at bay.

  Then I was free again and the first thing I did was call my mother and tell her I would come to Jackson for the wedding of my great-niece, Annie Laurie. She’s the first of her generation in our family to be married and I had made up my mind to be there. Was it my fault the plane couldn’t take off from our goddamn fog-ridden mountain town?

  I had gotten up at five-thirty in the morning to be out at the airport for a flight at seven. I had spent two days packing a dress and hat and shoes and pearls and even bought new earrings. I had called my ex-daughter-in-law and begged her for an hour to bring her new boyfriend and my grandchildren and meet me there. I had acted with enthusiasm and good faith. No, it was not my fault that I was late.

  If I were writing this as a play I would begin in my mother’s house on Woodwind Lane in Jackson, Mississippi, where she is waiting for me to come and take her to the wedding. She won’t ride in the car with my father and besides, he always rides with my brothers. The men against the world and so forth.

  My plane was supposed to get in around noon, which would have given us plenty of time to make the wedding at four. Only the plane was not taking off. The plane was sitting on the runway with a light flashing in the cockpit saying the right engine needed oil. It didn’t need oil. The switch to the light was broken and they didn’t have one in Fayetteville, Arkansas. So, fifteen minutes went by and it was hot as Hades in the plane and I was wearing my allergy mask and reading Rilke. “All this was mission, but could you accomplish it? Weren’t you always distracted by expectation, as if every moment announced a beloved?”