In America

by Susan Sontag

  Bogdan was pacing. “I’ve done nothing strenuous but I am tired,” he said.

  Henryk snapped the book shut. “You’re not feeling ill?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You didn’t sample any strange mushrooms today?”

  “I did,” said Tadeusz.

  “And how are you feeling, young man?”

  “Couldn’t be better!”

  “Because you’re not supposed to eat whatever looks enticing to you in a forest.”

  “Everyone knows that,” Bogdan muttered. “But should someone have been imprudent, we have a doctor among us for the week.”

  “If I were you,” said Henryk, “I’d place no more confidence in doctors than in mushrooms.” He was toying with his empty glass. “Would you like to hear a cautionary tale about both?” He laughed. “It’s a dreadful story.”

  Ryszard looked up from his notebook.

  “You probably never heard of Schobert. Nobody plays his compositions now, which were written for the harpsichord.” He paused. “He lived in Paris. He was famous throughout Europe.”

  “Don’t you mean Schubert?” said Wanda.

  “Don’t answer her,” said Julian.

  “I’m afraid it’s Schobert,” said Henryk.

  He stood, slowly lit a pipe, and buttoned his jacket, as if he were off for a stroll.

  “So at last,” said Ryszard, “you’re going to tell us a story.”

  “Well, this is quite an unpleasant one.” Henryk sat down again. “I wonder why I thought of telling it.”

  “Henryk, don’t tease us,” Maryna said.

  Henryk knocked his pipe against the sole of his boot. “Could it be,” he said, “that I’m a little thirsty?” Józefina fetched him the bottle of arrack.

  He took a swig. “Courage,” said Maryna.

  Henryk looked about at his expectant auditors and smiled.

  “Well, it seems that this man, this valuable man, this admirable artist, was extremely partial to mushrooms, and so had arranged a day’s outing in the country, I think it was the forest of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, no matter, with his wife, the older of his two small children, and four friends, among whom was a doctor. They arrived in two carriages at the edge of the forest, descended, and began to walk. Schobert started scouting for mushrooms, and during the course of the day picked what he thought was a choice basketful. Late in the afternoon, the company went to Marly, to an inn where Schobert was known, and asked for a dinner to be prepared to which they would contribute the mushrooms. The cook at the inn glanced at the mushrooms, assured his guests that they were the wrong sort, and refused even to touch them. Schobert told the cook to do what he had been asked. But could they actually be the wrong sort, asked one of the friends. Nonsense, said the friend who was a doctor. Nettled at the cook’s obstinacy, though of course it was they who were being obstinate, they left and went to an inn in the Bois de Boulogne, where the headwaiter also refused to prepare the mushrooms for them. More obstinate than ever, for the doctor still insisted that the mushrooms were good, they left that inn, too.”

  “Heading for disaster,” murmured Ryszard.

  “Night having fallen and everyone admitting to being very hungry, they returned to Paris, to Schobert’s house. There he gave the mushrooms to his maidservant to cook for supper—”

  “Oh,” said Wanda.

  “—and all seven of them, including the doctor who claimed to know all about mushrooms, as well as the maid, who must have nibbled while cooking, and the dog, who must have begged a taste from the maid, were poisoned. Since they succumbed together, they were without any assistance until the following midday, a Wednesday, when a pupil of Schobert, arriving for his lesson, found them all thrashing about in agony on the parquet floor. Nothing could be done for them. The child, who was five years old, died first. Schobert survived until Friday. His wife did not die until the following Monday. Two lived as long as ten days more. Of Schobert’s little family only the three-year-old, who hadn’t been taken along on the outing and was asleep when everyone returned, was left.”

  Piotr giggled loudly.

  “Go inside and wash your hands, Piotr,” said Bogdan.

  The child went on pushing his trains about. “Crash!” he said. “It’s a train wreck.”

  “Piotr!”

  “What a grisly story,” said Jakub, who had been standing in the pegged doorway of the hut. “They had only to listen to the cook at the first inn, or the headwaiter at the second.”

  “Servants?” Ryszard exclaimed. “Who then did not feel superior to servants? It’s a perfect story of the ancien régime.”

  “Imagine placing such faith in a doctor,” said Henryk.

  “Imagine a doctor being so confident he was an expert on mushrooms,” said Ryszard.

  “But Schobert was the one who was so fond of mushrooms,” said Bogdan. “It’s Schobert’s fault. He was the head of the family, he was in charge of the excursion.”

  “But a doctor,” Wanda said. “A man of science.”

  “While I suppose I should protect my wife’s illusions about men of science,” said Julian, “the truth is, both are equally to blame.”

  “No, the responsibility has to be Schobert’s,” Józefina said. “Nobody wanted to contradict him. Think of the force of his personality. A great musician, a man admired by everyone…”

  “What do you think?” Tadeusz said, the first to feel uneasy that Maryna was not taking part in the conversation. She shook her head. “If someone said that the mushrooms we had picked were poisonous but you wanted to eat them—”

  “Surely you would not follow me.”

  “Perhaps I would.”

  “Bravo!” said Henryk.

  Everyone looked expectantly at Maryna.

  “But I am not so stubborn,” she cried. “I would never insist on eating mushrooms that someone said were poisonous.” She paused. “What do you take me for?” (What did they take her for? Their queen.) “Oh, my dear friends…”

  * * *

  MARYNA HAD no desire to linger beyond early June, when the first summer tourists would be arriving. The men spent their last hours in the village purchasing sheepskin blankets and six of the sturdily crafted hatchets that double as weapons for the highlanders. Back in Kraków she visited Stefan, now alarmingly paler and thinner, before continuing on with Bogdan and Piotr, accompanied by Ryszard and Tadeusz, to Warsaw. There Tadeusz learned that he was finally to be offered a contract at the Imperial Theatre, which Maryna, seeing how much he dreaded disappointing her, warmly counseled him to accept, and abandon all thought of joining them. She did Tadeusz the honor of accompanying him when he signed the contract, and stayed on for a quiet talk about her own plans with the Imperial’s blustering, kindly managing director, who would not hear of anything but a year’s leave of absence, no more. Bogdan was busy raising the money needed for their great venture, and this furnished the detective assigned to follow him everywhere with a new list of names for other detectives to follow: those who came to look at their apartment and its furnishings, which Bogdan had put up for sale.

  Within two weeks, however, they were hurrying back to Kraków for Stefan, who, long separated from his wife, was now unable to care for himself at all and had gone home to their mother’s flat. The evening of their arrival Stefan closed his eyes and, with a loud sigh, tumbled into a coma. Kneeling by the bed, Maryna touched her lips to his brow and wept soundlessly. The clammy face on the pillow was eerily juvenile, bony, as when she had first seen him on a stage, without recognizing the beloved friend of both Don Carlos and his wicked father; the face of the gloriously handsome young man she had worshipped as a small child. Unbelievable to think that it was now his time to die!

  Mother was quite overcome with grief, she wrote to Ryszard, but Adam was there, and Józefina, and Andrzej, and little Jarek. Henryk, who never left us, did what he could, but there was no detaining my precious willful brother. I held him all night in my arms, his body felt dry and lig
ht as kindling while the blood came pouring from his mouth, and then he was gone.

  Stefan’s death was also Maryna’s farewell to her family.

  * * *

  BOGDAN, TOO, had to make a farewell visit: his family were rich landowners, living on large holdings in western Poland under Prussian rule. Maryna had been at the principal Dembowski estate once, in 1870, after she accepted Bogdan’s proposal of marriage—but not to stay, for Ignacy, Bogdan’s older brother and the head of the family, refused even to meet her, while telling Bogdan that he, of course, would always be welcomed with open arms. They took rooms at a nearby inn.

  Before they left two days later, Bogdan brought Maryna into the sprawling white-pillared manor to meet his grandmother, who had sent word to him that she, naturally, did not oppose his marriage. Squeezing his wife’s hand, Bogdan had pulled her through room after room over the brightly polished wooden floors (she remembered their shine) as if they were naughty children, fleeing a justly wrathful adult, or children in disgrace, fleeing an ogreish tyrannical adult—so much did he dread coming upon his brother in one of those large, sparsely furnished rooms. Bogdan in a hurry, panting, seemed to have relapsed into a disquieting vulnerability in this house where he’d been a child. Maryna didn’t want to feel like a child. It was partly so as not to feel like a child, ever, that she had become an actress.

  They gained his grandmother’s upstairs sitting room. Bogdan bent his knee as he kissed her hand, then sank to both knees to let her hug his head while behind him Maryna offered a curtsy that was, pointedly, not a stage curtsy, and in her turn kissed the old woman’s hand. Then he left them alone.

  Maryna had never met anyone like Bogdan’s grandmother. Born in 1791, the year before the Second Partition, when the last king of Poland, Stanislaw August Poniatowski, was still on the throne, she was a survivor of a distant, more free-spirited era. She thought her grandchildren, with the possible exception of Bogdan, were fools. Above all, Ignacy, the eldest—as she explained to Maryna at a rapid clip and with a twinkle in her rheumy eye.

  “He’s a prig, ma chère, that’s all there is to it. A frightful prig. And don’t expect him to soften and come around. The well-being of his younger brother counts as nothing to him compared to some vain idea of the family’s dignity. Is this what our bold, virile Polish gentry has come to? Disgusting! I can hardly believe I’m related to this sanctimonious, Mother-of-God-worshipping fool. But there you have it, mon enfant. Modern times. Que voulez-vous? And he calls himself a son of the Church. As far as I understand, Jesus did look favorably on brotherly love. Now you see the true face of our ridiculous religion. Should not a Christian rejoice that such a charming accomplished woman as you has arrived to make his brother happy? Mais non. You do make him happy, I hope. You know what I mean by happy?”

  Maryna was more surprised by the old lady’s scorn for religion—she had never heard anyone rail against the Church—than by the impertinent question she’d sprung at the end of her tirade. Bogdan had mentioned that his grandmother was reputed to have taken many lovers during her long, contentious marriage to the man with the sword, General Dembowski. Considering that she had a right not to reply, Maryna mustered a becoming, modest blush: she could blush as easily as weep on inner command. But the old lady was not to be put off.

  “Well?” she said.

  Maryna gave in. “Of course I try.”

  “Ah. You try.”

  Maryna didn’t, wouldn’t, answer this time.

  “Trying is a very small part of it, ma chère. The attraction exists or it doesn’t. I would have thought you, an actress, would know all about these matters. Don’t tell me that actresses don’t in any way deserve their interesting reputation? Just a little? Come now”—she bared her toothless gums—“you disillusion me.”

  “I don’t want to disillusion you,” Maryna answered warmly.

  “Good! Because there’s something that troubles me about Bogdan. C’est un sérieux. Trop sérieux peut-être. Of course, he’s too intelligent to think himself bound to grovel before ignorant priests mumbling in barbaric Latin. Unlike Ignacy, Bogdan has a mind. He has the makings of a free spirit. Which is why he chose you. But still, I’ve worried about him. He’s never had dalliances like his brother or all the other young men in his circle. And chastity, ma fille, is one of the great vices. To be twenty-eight and still know nothing of women! You have a great responsibility. It’s the one defect for which I reproach him, but you have arrived to correct that, unless of course, which would explain the mystery, for there are men like that, as you must know, being of the theatre, he—”

  “He really loves me,” Maryna interrupted, feeling a stab of anxiety. “And I love him.”

  “I see that I displease you with my candor.”

  “Perhaps. But you honor me with your trust. Surely you wouldn’t say these things to me if you did not believe I love Bogdan and intend to do everything in my power to be a good wife to him.”

  “Prettily said, mon enfant. A charming evasion. Well, I will not press you on this matter. Just promise me you won’t leave him when he ceases to make you happy—for he will, you have a restless spirit, and he is not a man who knows how to possess a woman entirely—or when you fall in love with someone else.”

  “I promise,” said Maryna gravely. She sank to her knees and bowed her head.

  The old lady burst out laughing. “Get up, get up! You are not on a stage. Of course your promise is worth nothing.” A bony hand reached out and seized her arm. “But nonetheless I shall hold you to it.”

  “Grand-mère?” It was Bogdan at the door.

  “Oui, mon garçon, entre. I have done with your bride, and you may take her away with the knowledge that I am quite pleased with her. She may be too good for you. You may both visit me once a year, and, rappelle-toi, only when your brother is traveling. You will have a letter from me when you may come.”

  * * *

  MARYNA WAS FURIOUS not to be regarded as a worthy wife to Bogdan by his family for … what? Being a widow? They couldn’t know that Heinrich had been unable to marry her or that he wasn’t dead; having decided to return to Prussia, his health failing, he had given his promise, she believed a sincere promise, never to enter her life again. Having a child? Could they be so base as to suspect that the late Mr. Załężowski, her husband, was not Piotr’s father? But he was! No, she was certain the reason was Ignacy’s disapproval of his younger brother’s lifelong passion for the theatre. Gratifying as it was that the Dowager Countess Dembowska did not share the family scorn of actresses, Maryna knew that until she was accepted by the older brother she would never be accepted by the others. Maryna supposed the distinguished old lady had some influence on Ignacy—but either she didn’t or she disdained to use it, and Maryna had never seen her again. Whenever Bogdan was summoned for his yearly visit, Maryna was mid-season in Warsaw or on tour.

  They had never accepted her. Eventually she had won the love of Bogdan’s maiden sister Izabela, but Ignacy’s opposition only hardened with time, and Bogdan ceased to have any relation with his brother, pride dictating even that he decline, out of his income from the various family properties, the portion due him from the estate managed by Ignacy. But Bogdan had no choice except to ask for a proper assignment of this money now. He wrote Ignacy explaining the reason for his impending arrival. An investment, he said. An excellent investment. He wrote to his grandmother asking her permission for an unscheduled visit. Maryna said that she wished to say good-bye to his grandmother, too.

  As soon as they arrived and had installed themselves in their rooms at the inn, Bogdan and Maryna hired a carriage and drove to the manor. The chief steward told Bogdan that the Count would receive him in an hour in the estate office, and that the Dowager Countess was in the library.

  They found her heaped with shawls in a high deep chair, reading. “You,” she said to Bogdan. She wore a white lace headdress and there were patches of rouge on her seamed, knobby face. “I don’t know whether you are la
te or early. Late, I suppose.”

  Bogdan stammered, “I didn’t think—”

  “But not too late.”

  Beside her was a low table with a tall glass of something thick and white that Maryna could not identify until she and Bogdan were brought glasses of their own: it was hot beer with cream and morsels of finely chopped white cheese floating in it. “A votre santé, mes chers,” murmured the old woman, and raised the glass to her sunken mouth. Then, looking at Maryna, she frowned.

  “You’re in mourning.”

  “My brother.” Recalling the Dowager Countess’s style of impertinent declaration, Maryna added, “My favorite brother.”

  “And he was how old? He must have been very young.”

  “No, he was forty-eight.”

  “Young!”

  “We knew Stefan was very ill and unlikely to recover, although of course one is never really prepared for—”

  “One is never really prepared for anything. Ah oui. But the death of someone is always a liberation for someone else. Contrary to what is usually said, la vie est longue. Figurez-vous, I am not speaking of myself. It is very long even for those who don’t attain any spectacular longevity. Alors, mes enfants”—she was looking only at Bogdan—“here is what I have to say to you: I like your folly, cela vous convient. But may I ask why?”

  “Many reasons,” said Bogdan.

  “Yes, many,” said Maryna.

  “Too many, I suspect. Well, you’ll find the real one sur la route.” Suddenly her head dropped forward, as if she had fallen asleep, or …

  “Bogdan?” whispered Maryna.

  “Yes!”—she had opened her eyes—“a long life is altogether wasted on most people, who quickly run out of enthusiasm or dreams and still have all those years ahead of them. Now, a fresh start, that would be something. Something rare. Unless, as people usually do, you manage to turn your new life into the old one.”