Pa placed two heavy hands on Charley’s trembling shoulders and shook him gently. “I haven’t come to call down anathemas on you and Cordie. I’m not the old blood and thunder type of parson. It’s a wonder those old men didn’t drive their flocks straight back to the Pope. Perhaps some of them did. Try to remember that I, too, was young once and that there was a Paris even then.”
“Oh, young,” Charley muttered with a searing bitterness. “You’ll never be as old as I am now, sir.” And he pulled himself free of Pa’s grip and sat down morosely on the sofa, plunging his face in his hands.
Pa interpreted his action as at least accepting his own continued presence. He took a seat by the sofa and continued to address himself exclusively to Charley. “I’m not pretending that I’m pleased to have you and Cordie living as you are. You wouldn’t believe it if I said I was. But I love you both, and I want to help you. Don’t throw me out, Charley. Don’t hurt me. I’ve tried not to hurt you.”
“Oh, Dr. P,” Charley moaned, his face still covered. “It’s too crazy to have you in Paris like this. Don’t you see my position? It’s impossible, utterly impossible!”
“Don’t you see mine? Nothing is impossible if we both try.”
“But I’d ceased to believe you existed!” Charley exclaimed, half hysterically now, looking up at Pa in agony. “Cordie had persuaded me that you weren’t real!”
Pa shot a glance in my direction. Just a glance, but it would have convinced a total stranger which of the two of us he had come to save. “Really, Charley,” I protested, annoyed, “I didn’t mean Pa personally. I meant Justin, or rather what Justin stood for in your mind.”
“Cordie has her motives for not wanting me to be real,” Pa said with a hint of grimness. “Every child has. But parents are not that easily destroyed. We continue to exist, if for no other reason than that we may be able to help our children’s friends.”
It was evident at this point that Pa was going to stay and that he and Charley wanted to be alone, but I had no intention of leaving them. Unfortunately, as it was our cook’s day off, I had eventually to go to the kitchen to fix lunch, and brief as I was when I returned with a tray of lettuce salad and cold chicken, they were on intimate terms again.
“No, you’re wrong, Charley,” Pa was saying earnestly. “I can see that death might become the only reality. Of course, I’ve never been in a war. I’ve never been wounded or hungry or even particularly uncomfortable. But I have always been acutely conscious that such things existed. My father, you may remember, was killed in the Civil War when I was an infant, and I grew up in a world from which I thought all valor had departed. You would be astonished if you knew how many times in my life I have longed for the test of battle. How else could I know that I was a man? Or ‘real,’ as you would put it?”
“You wouldn’t have longed for a war if you’d ever seen one,” Charley muttered.
“Don’t be too sure. Have we not all imaginations? Can one not visualize, at least to some degree, how it would feel to be cold and wet and hungry, smelling a mountain of rotting flesh, and knowing that any moment one might be added to it?”
“Please, Pa,” I protested, “you’ll only upset Charley.”
“Don’t interrupt, Cordie!” Charlie barked at me with a rudeness that he had never shown before, and I flushed angrily that Pa should be the witness of my humiliation.
“Oh, yes, my boy,” Pa went on, heedless of the interruption, “we, too, have our nightmares, we who are left at home, haunted by never knowing how we would have measured up. They say that if the old men who made the wars had to fight them, we’d have eternal peace. I am not so sure. They might rush into battle! Here is reality, at last, at last. When I think of the nights that I have lain awake, imagining myself with limbs blown off in a trench, or burnt alive in the engine room of a sinking battleship or starving in a freezing prison camp, I sometimes wonder if I have not suffered as much from fancy in peace as I might have from reality in war. If so, it has served me right, for morbidness is a kind of vanity. My final punishment will probably be to die painlessly in bed.”
Charley looked at him with wondering eyes. “Is courage so important? I should have thought courage mattered very little.”
“That’s because you have it. And know you have it.”
Charley was too interested now to waste time in modesty. “And it is that you envy me? How curious. I should not give it a pin’s fee alongside your faith. What can courage do? As Falstaff said of honor, can it set an arm? Can it take away the grief of a wound? But one can eat faith. One can live on faith.” He stared at Pa for a moment and then, with a curious gesture of appeal, a faltering extension of his Tight arm, he asked: “You do, don’t you?”
Pa’s eyes glittered as he shook his head sadly. “If I had real faith, Charley, I should not worry about courage. For my fear would be cast out, would it not? And without fear, there would be no need of courage.”
“But you have faith, do you not?” Charley persisted, with a stubborn, childish literalness. “You must have. For, after all, you do have courage, everyone knows that. It’s just that you think you may not. You had the faith on which you built Justin. You did build it, didn’t you?” He glanced now at me with what was beginning to seem like actual hostility. “I mean Cordie isn’t right, is she? There is a school there, isn’t there?”
“If I can convince you of that, then I haven’t come to Paris in vain!” Pa exclaimed, slapping the little table on which I had lain his plate. “I don’t care how you rate Justin. I don’t care if you call it, as one graduate did, ‘a motley derivative pile of red brick, shrouded in the fog of its headmaster’s platitudes.’ All I care is that you should admit it exists. Exists at least as much as that slithery rat that tried to eat your rations at Chateau-Thierry!”
Charley rose to his feet, trembling. “What do you know about that rat?” he cried hoarsely. “How could you know about that rat?”
“My dear fellow, don’t look at me as if I were a magician. You wrote me about it.”
“I did? And you got my letter?”
“Why should I not have got it?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Charley collapsed again into the sofa. “I suppose because I doubted there was a world beyond the trenches.”
“But I wrote you, too. Didn’t you get my letters?”
“Yes, I suppose I did.” Charley had a fit of coughing now which lasted until tears appeared in his eyes. “Yes, of course, I got your letters, Dr. P. Bless you for them. A fine return I’ve made for your kindness.”
I rose at this, too suffocated by the sentiment in the room to remain there longer, and went to our bedroom to await Pa’s leaving. Later that afternoon, alone with Charley, I tried to reason with him. I told him that he was not well enough to subject himself to the strain of further visits and that we both knew all that Pa would have to say. That under whatever guise of tolerance Pa chose to travel, his only purpose could be to separate us. That he was a wily old fox working subtly for the forces of superstition and bigotry. I suggested that I should make an appropriate number of filial visits to the Vendome and leave Charley out of it.
“But you don’t understand!” he shouted at me. “Your father doesn’t care about us. He’s trying to save my soul!”
“And he’s given up on mine?”
“Of course not. But he has time for yours!”
“Really, Charley,” I protested, “this isn’t like you. I want you to have peace and quiet—”
“Peace and quiet!” he retorted brutally. “What do you know of peace and quiet? A woman like you can kid herself into believing that simple distraction is a philosophy of life. But I can’t! I tell you, Cordie, stay out of this!”
I was so hurt that for a moment I was almost frightened. I would not have dreamed that Charley could have been so rough. I stood in the middle of the studio, a hand over my lips, staring at him like a little girl who has been unexpectedly and viciously slapped in the face. But he would not ev
en look at me; he went to his post by the window and stared gloomily down into the street. I think I would have left him on the spot had I not known that he was dying. Even I was not such an egotist as to abandon a dying man.
Pa called every day at the studio in a rented touring car with a chauffeur and took Charley for a drive. They usually ended up sitting on a bench by the Seine where they had long religious discussions. At home Charley grew more and more taciturn. Sometimes he would hardly speak to me at all. He looked grey and haggard, and his coughing was much worse. Twice I found blood on his pillow in the morning, but when I begged him to go to the doctor he simply stared at me and shrugged. He was like a dope addict for whom the real world has ceased to exist. Pa, of course, was feeding him the dope, and I found myself as much ignored as some old ranting peasant mother whose boy had discovered urban amusements. If I dined at the Vendome with Pa and Mother, Charley would refuse to accompany me. He had reached the point where he could no longer share my father. He had to have him all to himself.
I suppose it was jealousy, as well as frustration, that made me read the manuscript of Charley’s book. He had often offered it to me, and I had always refused to look at it. Now, as I dipped surreptitiously into its pages while he was out with Pa, sitting by the window so that I would see him if he should come home early, I felt horribly guilty. For I wanted to find something in the book that would shock Pa if I should ever show it to him. Not that I had any intention of showing it—I had not dropped that low. But I wanted to feel that there was a part of Charley that would never belong to Pa, even if it never belonged to me. Alas, if there was such a part, I did not find it. The book was as pure as its author. Charley was that rarest of creatures: an innocent who was able to convey a sense of his own innocence.
Certainly it was a curious manuscript. A chapter might start with a list of the things that Charley had observed from the studio window, described in the plainest, flattest terms. This list would continue until his mind took off, like an airplane on a runway, and then there might follow panoramic pictures of Justin days, boating on the river and football and then more intimate ones, of Pa in chapel, of myself in Paris at a restaurant, or painting, or even in bed. The manuscript was candid without being in the least salacious. It had some of the quality of an amateur film. At times the characters seemed to be moving at a frenzied pace, jumping up and down and jabbering; at others the inaction and repetition became cloying. The most unusual aspect of the book was its jumbling of dates, so that a walk with me and a lyric description of rowing at Justin and the death of a sergeant in the trenches seemed simultaneous. And not only simultaneous but of equal value. Charley was intent on breaking down his experience into units of the same size, a procedure that enabled him to introduce a dreary, at times a rather frightening order into his chaos.
It embarrasses me to confess, even at this late date, that my first reaction was one of pique. Charley, whom, in matters of art, I had treated with such condescension, had produced a more interesting work than any of my natures mortes! The shallow artist is apt to make the best critic, and I was a shallow artist. My second reaction was equally egotistical, but less painful—I imagined that I saw the manuscript already published and heard my name on every tongue. I saw it printed on thick parchment by a private Paris press (the kind that Harry and Caresse Crosby later started) with heavy black script and drawings by Derain or Picasso. If Pa was taking Charley away from me, he at least had left me his book.
He had also left me Mother, with whom I spent my afternoons. She adored Paris and was trying to make up for the lost years of summer travel which the war has cost her. She could spend hours at the book counters along the Quai Conti where bargains were still to be had, and she was indefatigable at poking into back alleys in search of some surviving fragment of a medieval wall or keep. As her Paris seemed to end with Louis XI while mine began with Degas, it was all sufficiently boring for me, but I had not the heart to begrudge her the obvious pleasure of these peregrinations.
It would have been difficult to imagine a more un-Gallic figure than she cut, with her dull Boston clothes, her big nose and long unpowdered face, her total indifference to the preoccupations of Paris women, even to food and drink, yet at the same time I had to admit that she fitted into the city quite as easily as I did. There was a distinction about her, made up of her total honesty, her probing curiosity and her wonderfully good manners, to which the French immediately responded.
“The thing about your mother,” a young French novelist told me, “is that the Atlantic doesn’t exist for her. Most of you Americans are either absurdly proud or absurdly ashamed of living on the wrong side of it. But your ma’s a genuine internationalist.”
Of course, I took this to mean that I wasn’t. Mother not only was making me feel a Philistine in the Paris to which I thought I had fled for Art’s sake; now she was taking over my friends. At a party of painters and writers, she became the storm center of a discussion that raged over Henry Adams’ study of Mont St. Michel and Chartres. She attacked him as a staunch medievalist for sentimentalizing, if not actually inventing, the cult of the virgin, and her loud driving syllables seemed to lay flat every distinction of age and class in the room so that we were all students together.
I decided that I would have to get out of Paris. The midsummer heat was becoming unbearable, and Mother made matters worse, the old lizard, by showing no effects of it while I unbecomingly sweated. I suggested that she and I go to Venice while Pa and Charley worked on the latter’s soul and then down the Dalmatian coast to Spalato where I knew she would want to see the noble remnants of Diocletian’s palace. The idea intrigued her, and we went off; we spent two weeks in Venice and two in Spalato. In the middle of our visit to the latter, where conditions were primitive, we changed hotels, and Mother made a mistake in forwarding our new address to Paris. A total suspension of communications resulted, and when we finally got Pa’s telegram, Charley had been dead two days.
We went straight from the train to the American Cathedral where Pa was to conduct the funeral, and we had no chance to speak to him before the service began. Never had I heard him read the comfortable words in a more beautiful or resonant tone, but in my numbed state, where feelings of bitter grief and abandonment loomed like dead monsters under the dark ice of my despair, he might have been declaiming a paean of triumph.
We sat in a pew behind Charley’s widowed mother and spinster sister who lived on the Riviera and whom I had never met. After the service Pa walked with them to a waiting limousine to drive to the Protestant cemetery, and Mother persuaded me to return with her to the hotel. Only later did I learn that this had been at the request of Mrs. Strong. She had been afraid that if we met at the edge of the grave, an introduction would have been unavoidable, and she would have had to touch the hand of the woman who had debauched her dying boy.
I shall never forget my last glimpse of those two ladies sitting primly on either side of Pa as their car drove away from the cathedral. He did not, of course, have his arms around their shoulders, but I felt that he might as well have. He had an air of having taken them, as well as Charley, under his big wings, of hugging to his benevolent chest all creatures but his own Cordelia. King Lear had not been content to deny me my share of his kingdom; he had seized the little principality that I had gained on my own. Obviously he felt that he had little to fear from filial ingratitude.
13
Cordelia’s Story
I CAN SEE from your face, Brian, that I must sound very cold and unfeeling. I assure you I did not sound so at the time. Charley’s death turned me inside out, and I could not get through a day without at least one fit of tears bordering on hysteria. I had to close the studio, as I could not possibly spend a night there alone, and move to the Vendome, in a room next to my parents, where I plagued them by calling Mother at least twice during each night to come and sit by my bed and hold my hand.
All that, however, was a long time ago, and I have since been psychoanalyzed, so
that if I sound detached today it is because I have faced up to the fact that I was really more detached then. What I fundamentally minded about Charley’s death, as I now more honestly see it, was that he had departed in peace, owing none of that peace to me. Or to put it more baldly, he had owed it to my absence. On my analyst’s couch I plumbed the humiliating depths of the egotism and possessiveness of love. But at the time I thought myself an inconsolable widow, which must have been hard for my parents to bear.
Pa, in fact, did not bear it. Two weeks after Charley’s death we had our first big row when he told me that he had destroyed the manuscript of Charley’s book. He insisted that he had done so in obedience to Charley’s dying instructions, but I denied that this was an excuse.
“It was a work of art!” I kept shouting at him. “No one has the right to destroy a work of art, not even the artist. Supposing Lavinia Dickinson had burnt all her sister Emily’s poems? Think of the loss to civilization!”
“Charley’s manuscript was hardly the equivalent,” Pa said dryly. “He had read parts of it aloud to me. But even if it had been, I should have felt constrained to do as he had asked. I cannot admit that works of art, any more than artists themselves, are outside the moral law.”
“We don’t have so much beauty in the world that we can afford to go about destroying it!”
“The beautiful thing about Charley was the way he met his death,” Pa said gravely. “His little book was simply one of the steps that led to it. Of course, you’re all excited about it, because it was a book. Communication is everything to you artists. You can’t look at a landscape or a bowl of fruit without thinking how you will put it on a canvas so that somebody else will see it as your landscape or your bowl of fruit. That is the inescapable vulgarity of art.”
The Rector of Justin Page 19