The three women took a taxi to the Place de la Concorde one afternoon and walked to the Pont Neuf. They crossed to the Left Bank over the tip of the Île de la Cité. It was a hot, transparent day; slumbering summer Paris; a milky sky, a perspective of bridges and shaking trees. Flor had let her long hair free and wore sandals on her feet. She seemed wild, yet urban, falsely contrived, like a gypsy in a musical play. Bonnie walked between the two girls and was shorter than both. She was conscious only of being shorter than Flor. It was curious, being suddenly smaller than the person over whom you had once exercised complete control. Bonnie’s step was light: she had been careful to keep a young figure. Doris, the big blond, thought she looked beaky and thin, like a bird. A mean little bird, she amended. There was something about Bonnie she didn’t like. Doris wore the dress they had come to consider her day-duty uniform: the neat, standard shirtmaker. Bonnie’s little blue hat would have suited her well. Bonnie thought of this, and wondered how to offer it. Doris expressed from time to time her sense of well-being on this lovely day. She said she could hardly believe she was really alive and in Paris. It was like that feeling after a good meal, she said, sincerely, for the gratification of her digestion compared favorably with any pleasure she had known until now. Although neither Flor nor Bonnie answered, Bonnie had an instant’s awareness that their reaction to Doris was the same: they needn’t share a look, or the pressure of hands. Later, this was one of her most anguished memories. She forgot the time and the year and who was with them, remembering only that on a lost day, with her lost, loved, girl, there had existed a moment of unity while crossing a bridge.
Flor was letting herself see in high, embossed relief, changing the focus of her eyes, even though she knew this was dangerous. Human cunning was keeping the ruin of Paris concealed. The ivy below Notre Dame had swelled through the city’s painted crust: it was the tender covering of a ruin. The invasion of strangers resembled the busloads of tourists arriving at Pompeii. They were disoriented and out of place. Recording with their cameras, they tried not to live the day but to fix a day not their own. It had so little to do with the present that something she had suspected became clear: there was no present here, and the strangers were perfectly correct to record, to stare, to giggle, to display the unease a healthy visitor feels in a hospital—the vague fear that a buried illness might emerge, obliging one to remain. Her heart had left its prison and was beating under her skin. The smell of her own hands was nauseating. Nobody knew.
When they reached the opposite shore, Bonnie decided the walk had gone on long enough. She began looking for a taxi. But Flor suddenly said she wanted to continue. The others fell in step: three women strolling by the Seine on a summer’s day.
“There is a window with a horse in it,” Florence said seriously. “I want to see that.”
Bonnie hoped Doris hadn’t heard. There was nothing she could do now. Her daughter’s eyes were wide and anguished. Her lips moved. Bonnie continued to walk between the two young women so that any conversation would, as it were, sift through her.
“Didn’t we walk along here when I was little?” said Flor.
Flor never spoke of the past. To have her go into it now was unsettling. It was also a matter of time and place. It was four o’clock, and Bonnie had a fitting with her dressmaker at five. She said, “Oh, honey, we never came to Paris until you were a big girl. You know that.”
“I thought we used to come along here and look at the horse.”
This was so bizarre, and yet Bonnie could not help giving Doris an anxious, pathetic glance, as if to say, “We used to do things together—we used to be friends.” They were still on the Quai de Montebello when Flor made them cross the street and led them to a large corner window. Well, there was a stuffed horse. Flor wasn’t so crazy after all.
An American woman, dressed rather like Doris, stood before the window, holding a child by the hand. Crouched on the pavement, camera to his eyes, was the husband, trying to get all of them in the picture—wife, child, horse. The boy wore a printed shirt that matched his father’s, and his horn-rimmed glasses were the same, but smaller. He looked like the father reduced. Doris’s delighted eyes signaled that this was funny, but Bonnie was too bothered with Flor to mind: Flor looked at the child, then at the horse, with a fixed, terrified stare. Her skin had thickened and paled. There was a film of sweat on her cheeks.
The child said, “Why’s the horse there?” and the mother replied in a flat bored voice, “I dunno. He’s dead.”
“That’s wrong,” said Flor harshly. “He’s guarding the store. At night he goes out and gallops along the river and he wears a white and red harness. You can see him in the parks at night after the gates are locked.”
Doris, joining in what she imagined the play of a whimsical mind, said, “Ah, but if the gates are locked, how do you get in to see him?”
“There’s a question!” cried Bonnie gaily.
She was not listening to her own voice. Everything was concentrated on getting Flor away, or getting the three open-mouthed tourists away from her.
“We did come here when I was little,” said Flor, weeping, clasping her hands. “I remember this horse. I’m sure I remember. Even when I was playing in the grass at home I remembered it here.” She saw the leafy tunnels of the Tuileries on an autumn day, and the galloping horse: she could not convey this picture, an image of torment, nostalgia, and unbearable pain.
“Oh, love,” said her mother, and she was crying now too. There was something in this scene of the old days, when they had been emotional and close. But their closeness had been a trap, and each could now think, If it hadn’t been for you, my life would have been different. If only you had gone out of my life at the right time.
Doris thought: Spoiled. Fuss over nothing. She also thought, I’m like a sister, one of the family. They say anything in front of me.
Perhaps this was true, because it seemed natural that Doris find a taxi, take them home, and put Flor to bed. She even ordered a nice cup of coffee all around, putting on a harmless comedy of efficiency before the cook. By now, after a few days, she might have known them for years. She came into their lives dragging her existence like a wet raincoat, and no one made a move to keep her out. She called them by their Christian names and had heard Bonnie’s troubles and hinted at plenty of her own. Bob referred to her as Moonface because she was all circles, round face, round brown eyes. The first impression of American crispness had collapsed. Her hair often looked as if mice had been at it. The shirtmaker dresses were held together with pins. Dipping hems had been stitched with thread the wrong color. She carried foolish straw baskets with artificial flowers wound around the handle, and seemed to have chosen her clothes with three aims in mind: they mustn’t cost much, they must look as if anybody could wear them, and they must be suitable for a girl of sixteen. She did not belong in their lives or in the Paris summer. She belonged to an unknown cindery city full of used-car lots. She sat by Flor’s bed, hunched forward, hands around her knees. “I know how you feel in a way,” she said. “Sometimes I feel so depressed I honestly don’t like going out on the street. I feel as if it’s written all over me that something’s wrong. I get the idea that the mob will turn on me and pull me apart because I’m unhappy and unhappiness is catching.” She seemed genial and lively enough, saying this. She was fresh from a different world, where generalized misery was possibly taken for granted. Bob said that Moonface was stupid, and Flor, for want of any opinion, had agreed, but could Flor be superior? She would have given anything to be a victor, one of that trampling mob.
There wasn’t much to be had from Flor, and Doris turned to Bonnie instead. She would try every member of the family in turn, and only total failure would drive her away. Within the family, on whatever bankrupt terms, she was at least somewhere. She had been afraid of never knowing anyone in Paris: she spoke very little French, and had never wanted to come abroad. But it was not long before she understood that even though they had lived here for y
ears, and used some French words in their private family language, they were not in touch with life in France. They had friends: Bob and Bonnie seemed to go about; but they were not in touch with life in the way Doris—so earnest, so sociologically minded—would have wanted. Still, she enjoyed the new intimacy with Bonnie. For the few days that remained, she had tea every day in Bonnie’s bedroom. Bonnie was packing like a fury now. They would shut themselves up in the oyster-colored room, Bonnie dressed in a slip because a dress was a psychological obstacle when she had something to do, and gossip and pack. Doris sat on the floor: the chairs were laden with the dresses Bonnie was or was not going to take to Deauville. Bonnie was careful to avoid dropping the Deauville hostess’s name, out of an inverted contempt for Doris, but Doris got the point very soon. She was not impressed. She suspected all forms of titled address, and thought Bonnie would have been a nicer and more sincere person if she had used her opportunities to cultivate college professors and their wives.
Bonnie didn’t care what Doris thought. Everything was minimal compared with Flor’s increasing queerness and her own headlong and cowardly flight. She talked about Flor, and how Flor was magnifying Bonnie’s failings for Dr. Linnetti.
“All children hate their parents,” said Doris, shrugging at this commonplace. She was sewing straps for Bonnie. She bit off a thread. There were subjects on which she permitted herself a superior tone. These people had means but were strictly uneducated. Only Bob had a degree. As far as Doris could make out, Flor had hardly even been to school. Doris was proud of her education—a bundle of notions she trundled before her like a pram containing twins. She could not have told you that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line, but she did know that “hostility” was the key word in human relations, and that a man with an abscessed tooth was only punishing himself.
“All I can say is I adored my mother,” said Bonnie. “That’s all I can say.”
“You haven’t faced it. Or else you don’t remember.”
Bonnie remembered other things: she remembered herself, Bonnie, at thirty-seven, her name dragged in the mud, vowing to Flor she would never look at a man again; swearing that Flor could count on her for the rest of her life. She had known in her heart it was a temporary promise and she had said, “I still have five good years.” At forty-two, she thought, My life isn’t finished. I still have five good years. And so it had been, the postponement of life five years at a time, until now Flor was married and in a dream, and Bonnie was fifty-two. She wanted Flor to hold off; to behave well; not to need help now, this very minute. She was pulled this way and that, now desperate for her own safety, now aghast with remorse and the stormy knowledge of failure. She left Doris sitting on the floor and went into her daughter’s room. Flor was lying on the bed, wide-eyed, with a magazine. She kept a magazine at hand so that she could pretend to be reading in case someone came. None of them liked her habit of lying immobile in the semi-dark.
Bonnie sat down on the bed. She wanted to say, Flor, I’ve had a hell of a life. Your father was a Catholic. He made me be a Catholic and believe a lot of things and then he left off being one and divorced me. And that isn’t everything, it’s only a fragment. What she said was: “Darling, I’m not going to suggest you see a priest, because I know you wouldn’t. But I do agree with Bob, I don’t think Dr. Linnetti is any good. If you’re going to stay here in August anyway you should see someone else. You know, I used to know a doctor …”
“I know,” said Flor, loathing awakened.
But Bonnie hadn’t meant that old, disastrous love affair. She had meant a perfectly serious professional man out in Neuilly. Flor’s eyes alarmed her. She fingered the magazine between them and thought of the other doctor, the lover, and wondered how much Flor had seen in those days. Flor must have been eleven, twelve. She felt as though she had been staring in the sun, the room seemed so dark.
“You see,” said Flor, “I’m perfectly all right and I don’t need a priest. Mama. Listen. I’m all right. I’m slightly anemic. It makes me pale. Don’t you remember, I was always a bit anemic?”
Flor had said what Bonnie wanted said.
“Oh, I know,” said Flor’s mother eagerly. “I remember! Oh, lambie, when you were small, the awful chopped raw liver mess you had to eat! You were anemic. Of course I remember now.”
“It makes me tired,” said Flor gently. “Then there’s Doctor L., three times a week. That’s tiring too. It just wears me out. And so, I lie down. August alone will be just wonderful. I’ll lie down all the time. I’m anemic, Mama.”
Bonnie’s soft eager eyes were on her daughter. She would have cried at her, if she dared, Yes, tell me, make me believe this.
Now, that was the disarming thing about Flor. She could be so sensible, she could explain everything as though you were the nitwit. She could smile: “Don’t worry about me,” and you would think, Flor knows what she’s doing. She’s all right.
All the same, thought Bonnie, it was a pity that she was only twenty-six and had lost her looks.
Bob Harris had no division of purpose. He wanted Flor to go away from Paris for the next four weeks. Sometimes he said Cannes, because she liked the sea. He mentioned Deauville, but Bonnie pulled a long face. He knew there was more to it than getting through August, but that was all there was time for now. His father had arrived from New York. He was a mild old man, who had not wanted this marriage. He seemed to take up no space in the apartment, and he made everyone generous gifts. Bonnie tried to charm him, and failed. She tried to treat him like a joint parent, with foolish young people to consider, but that failed too. She gave up. She felt that disapproval of the match should be her own family’s prerogative and that the Harrises were overstepping. The old man saw Flor, her silence, her absence, and believed she had a lover and that her pallor was owing to guilty thoughts. The young people had been married two years: it seemed to him a sad and wretched affair. There were no children and no talk of any. He thought, I warned him, but he held still: he did not want to cause the estrangement of his only son. His gentle sadness affected them all. He was thinly polite, and looked unwell. His skin had the bluish clarity of skimmed milk. Bonnie wanted to scream at him: I didn’t want your son! She wondered why he felt he had to be so damned courtly. In her mind there was no social gap between a Jewish wine merchant and her ex-husband’s old bootlegger of thirty years before.
Bonnie and her son-in-law were linked in one effort: keeping the old man from knowing the true state of affairs. Bonnie was always willing to unite when their common existence was threatened. She deplored the marriage and believed Flor might have made a better match, but most of the time she was grateful. She worshiped the Harris money: she would have washed all the Harris feet every day if that had been part of the deal. There had always been an unspoken, antagonistic agreement with Bob, which Flor had never understood. She never understood why Bob was nice to her mother. She guessed—that was at the start, when she was still curious and working things out—that it was Jewish-ness, respect for parents. But this was a subject from which he slid away. Evasion was seared into his personality. He had a characteristic sliding movement of head and body when conversation took a turn he didn’t like. It was partly because of this that they had named him the Seal.
The façade they put up now was almost flawless: the old man may even have been deceived. In the effort, they were obliged to look at themselves, and these moments, near-horror, near-perfection, were unrehearsed. They dragged resisting Flor to parties, to restaurants, to the theater. At times Bob and Bonnie began to believe in the situation, and they would say, in amazement, “There, do you see how good life can be?” Flor seemed quite normal, except that she complained of being tired, but many women are like that. One day they made an excursion to Montparnasse: Bob bought pictures, and Bonnie had unearthed a young artist. She said he was Polish and full of genius. It was a bad outing: Bob was irritated because Bonnie had promised to help the young man without telling him first. The studio
was like dozens more in Paris: there was a stove with last year’s ashes, and the pictures he showed them were cold and stale. There was a flattering drawing of Bonnie tacked to the wall. The painter talked as if he owed his diction to an attentive study of old Charles Boyer films. He had a ripe-pear voice and a French accent.
“I don’t like him,” said Bob, when they were driving home. “He’s nothing. He paints like a little girl. Anyway, he’s a phony. What’s that accent? He’s just a New York boy.”
“He has lived here for many years,” said Bonnie, the bristling mother-bird.
“I may live here a lot longer but that won’t change my voice,” said Bob. “He’s afraid. He’s scared of being what he really is. If he talked naturally he wouldn’t be Michel Colbert. Colbert. Colbert. What is that?”
“What is Harris?” said Bonnie, trembling.
Nothing was said, nothing was said about anything, and the silence beat about them like waves. The elevator in the building wasn’t working again. Bonnie clutched at Flor as they climbed the stairs. “What have I gone and done?” she whispered heavily, pinching Flor’s arm.
Flor had not been lying down a minute before her husband came in and slammed the door behind him. He stood over her and said, “Why the hell didn’t you back me up?”
“I didn’t listen,” said Flor in terror. “I didn’t speak.”
Paris Stories Page 34