“Mountford? Are you sure that’s the person you mean? You’ve hardly met him.”
“I know,” said the child, “but he’s so much richer, and he has such lovely conversation.”
It was further proof of shallowness, but also of her dismal innocence: If Mountford had been capable of saying one civil word to the child, it was only because he knew the little brat would not be in his house longer than an hour; she would eat her cake and drink her milk and be led away. He was the totality of everything the child’s father despised; at the very sight of Mountford, his scorn for amateurs – amateur painters, actors, singers, poets, playwrights – rose and choked him. Any exchange was out of the question; they could not have discussed a crossword puzzle. Obviously, he could not translate such feelings into a child’s language, while words such as “hypocrisy,” “coldness,” “greed” would convey nothing except a tone of adult spitefulness. She smiled to herself, perhaps remembering a “lovely conversation” in which she had mistaken a fatuous compliment for a promise. What did she mean by “richer,” he wondered. It couldn’t be money; not at that age. Meanwhile he saw Mountford clearly, with his slack mouth and light eyes. He did not seem like a man but like a discontented woman.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll take you to his house. We’ll see if he can keep you. Remember,” he added needlessly, “it was your decision.”
Now he had relinquished her; they had put each other in the past. He wanted to say, “I didn’t mean it,” but she was beyond taking the slightest notice of anything he meant, or said, or did, or was. He went on, “You must do as you are told, for the last time. You are to stay in the car while I speak to Mr. Mountford.” She seemed astonished, perhaps at her own power; and, after a brief gesture that might have been rebellious, sat quite still.
I WAS NOT THE ONE who pushed things to the limit, he said to himself, as he walked up to Mountford’s door. Did I abdicate? Let go too soon? It seemed settled in her mind; what else could I have done? Beside him trotted the monster with its collar and bell. She had thrust it out of the car, slyly, and sent it along to be her witness, to see if her father lied, later, about his conversation with Mountford. As though I would lie to the child, he said to himself, in despair at this new misunderstanding. But when the door was opened for him he stepped aside and let the creature scuttle through.
Mountford was dressed in his waffly felt gardening hat; a battered cream-colored corduroy jacket; dark-green hairy shirt with a hairy tie, woven for a Cottage Industry shop; trousers perpetually kneeling; shoes to which clay from a dreary promenade accrued.
How can I allow this child to live in a house where there are no flowers, no paintings, no books, and (this seemed the most miserly of all deprivations) no cigarettes? He knew there would be no musical instrument, and no records – it was a theory of Mountford’s that right-thinking people went to concerts. If you lived in a provincial part of the world, in a resort, a watering place where you had to depend on military tunes played in the casino garden, then you did without. When you have heard an opera once in your life, it is up to you to remember it; it saves time, and any amount of money. The child’s father supposed Mountford had said all of this to him once. He found he had a store of information concerning Mountford; how he felt about climates, sonnets, the sea, other people, the passage of time, the importance of pleasure; he possessed this knowledge, condensed, like a summary he had been given to read. He knew that Mountford went into the kitchen to see if his cook was using too much olive oil. Perhaps this was only gossip – but no, Mountford now held the bottle of oil up to the light of the kitchen window.
“You don’t need all those ingredients for a simple poulet chasseur,” Mountford said to the cook. “White wine, bouillon, brandy, butter, oil, flour, tomatoes, tarragon, chervil, shallots, salt and pepper … ridiculous. You can use a bouillon cube,” he said, putting the bottle down. “Vinegar instead of wine. Cooking fat. No one will ever know. Go easy, now,” he said, in his jovial way. “Go easy with the brandy and the flour. You know how things are…. You can stay for lunch,” he said, turning to the child’s father, “but you understand I can’t keep her. I scarcely know her. She’s more of a stranger, if you know what I mean. We’ve had a few words together, nothing more. Tell her she has made a mistake, I don’t know her and that’s that.”
That much is settled, the man thought. She will not live in a house where she can hear “No one will ever know.” She will not he infected by meanness. As for himself, he had come out of it well. He had not bullied, or shown authority, or imposed a decision. He had not even suggested a course! She had been given free choice all the way.
“If I were you,” said Mountford as they went into the front part of the house, “I would just give her to old Bertha in the kitchen.”
“It isn’t a matter of giving her away,” he said. “I’m not giving her.”
“Well, old Bertha would be one solution. We ought to repopulate those empty peasant areas – fill them with new stock, good blood.”
“Not with my child,” he said. He knew exactly how he ought to murder Mountford. He saw the place between his eyes, and his own hand flat, like a plate skimming. Mountford’s eyes would start, fall out nearly, while the skin around them went black as ink. That was the way to show Mountford what he thought of him. He saw the kitchen again, the large stove, and the hag who must be old Bertha. Mountford, untouched, was still pink of face and smiling.
THE CHILD HAD DISOBEYED. She stood in the hall, fragile, composed, her hands bright in a shaft of light. This is her first shock, he remembered; I must tell her gently. She was so confident, so certain she would always be wanted. He thought, She must be mine – she is so independent. He spoke tenderly, but the small, resolute face did not alter. He felt the hopeless frustration of talking to someone whose mind is made up, and understood how difficult it must have been, sometimes, for someone to deal with him. He had a living memory of having once been secure in his ideas and utterly convinced. She has courage, too, he decided. But it was not courage – she was simply pretending not to mind. Perhaps she is stupid, he thought. All that acting, that pretending nothing matters. She must be her mother’s, after all. “There,” he wanted to say to the child’s mother, “do you see how patient I had to be?”
As they walked away from the house, he heard the reptile. He recognized the frantic note of the creature abandoned; there was no mistaking the hysteria and terror, the fear that no one would ever come for it again.
“Go back and get him,” he said.
“I don’t want him.”
“You can’t leave him,” said the man. “You’ve taken him out of his own life and made a pet of him. You can’t abandon him now. You’re responsible for him.”
“I don’t want him,” the child said without emphasis.
Why, he thought, she is cruel. How horrible this has become – she can’t belong to either of us, for surely we were never guilty of cruelty? The child sat in the car now, confident she would never he made to account for anything, that she had another choice, that her chances were eternal.
He stood with his hand on the door of the car and said once again, “Look here, how old are you exactly?”
“Six and a half.”
“Then that’s it,” he said. “That would be the age. There’s no getting away from it.” He had to give in; he had to accept her.
Well, she will have to help me then, he decided, and an access of fierce and joyous hostility toward the child’s mother made him think he was seeing clearly for the first time. I may have made some mistake, he said, but she got away with murder. Look at the pain and grief I thought were finished; she had nothing to remind her.
But then, he remembered, she does not know the child exists. I must have forgotten to tell her. How can I suddenly say, “Here is the result, the product, the thing we have left?” She could say, “Why didn’t you mention it sooner?”
“I would like to take you to your mother,” he said, “but it
will take a little planning. She may not know anything about you. You are quite like her, I am afraid, though also like me. She may not want to admit who you are like. If she knew you had abandoned that creature, she might tell you there are two sorts of people, that the world is divided …” He thundered on, as if making himself heard, “People who give up … who destroy … though her own position is not all that good. Still, I’m certain she would say you are on the wrong side.”
“Who do you think you’re shouting at?” the calm child seemed to be saying. “And why are you bothering me?”
MADELINE’S BIRTHDAY
(1951)
THE MORNING OF Madeline Farr’s seventeenth birthday, Mrs. Tracy awoke remembering that she had forgotten to order a cake. It was doubtful if this would matter to Madeline, who would probably make a point of not caring. But it does matter to me, Mrs. Tracy thought. Observances are important and it is, after all, my house.
She did not spring up at once but lay in a wash of morning sunlight, surveying her tanned arms, stretched overhead, while her mind opened doors and went from room to room of the eighteenth-century Connecticut farmhouse. She knew exactly how the curtains blew into Madeline’s room, which had once been hers, and why there was silence on one floor and sound on the other. It was a house, she told herself, in which she had never known an unhappy moment.
“I cannot cope with it here,” Madeline had written to her father shortly after she arrived. “One at a time would be all right but not all the Tracys and this German.” “Cope” was a word Madeline had learned from her mother, who had divorced Madeline’s father because she could not cope with him, and then had fled to Europe because she could not cope with the idea of his remarriage. “Can you take Madeline for the summer?” she had written to Anna Tracy, who was a girlhood friend. “You are so much better able to cope.”
In the kitchen, directly beneath Mrs. Tracy’s bedroom, Doris, who came in every day from the village, had turned on the radio. “McIntoshes were lively yesterday,” the announcer said, “but Roman Beauties were quiet.” Propelled out of the house to the orchard by this statement, Mrs. Tracy brought herself back to hear Doris’s deliberate tread across the kitchen. She heard the refrigerator door slam and then, together with a sharp bite of static, the whir of the electric mixer. That would be Madeline’s cake, which must, after all, have been mentioned. Or else Doris, her imagination uncommonly fired, had decided to make waffles for breakfast. The cake was more probable. Satisfied, Mrs. Tracy turned her thoughts to the upper floor.
She skimmed quickly over her husband’s bed, which was firmly made up with a starched coverlet across the pillow. Edward spent only weekends in the country. She did not dwell on his life in town five days of the week. When he spoke of what he did, it sounded dull, a mélange of dust and air-conditioning, a heat-stricken party somewhere, and So-and-So, who had called and wanted to have lunch and been put off.
In the next room, Allie Tracy, who was nearly six, stirred and murmured in her bed. In less than a minute, she would be wide awake, paddling across the hall to the bathroom she shared with her mother. She would run water on her washcloth and flick her toothbrush under the faucet. She would pick up yesterday’s overalls, which Mrs. Tracy had forgotten to put in the laundry, and pull them on, muttering fretfully at the buttons. Hairbrush in hand, Allie would then begin her morning chant: “Isn’t anybody going to do my hair? If nobody does it, I want it cut off. I’m the only one at the beach who still has braids.”
Thinking of the overalls, Mrs. Tracy rose, put on her dressing gown and slippers, and went out into the hall, where she met Allie trotting to the bathroom.
“Madeline might do your hair,” Mrs. Tracy said. “And don’t forget to wish her a happy birthday. Birthdays are important.”
“I hope she’s in a good mood,” Allie said.
Had Edward Tracy been there, the day could not have been started with such verbal economy. “How’s my girl?” he would have asked Allie, even though it was plain she was quite well. “Sleep well?” he would have asked of his wife, requiring an answer in spite of the fact that he slept in the next bed and would certainly know if she had been ill or seized with a nightmare. Allie and Mrs. Tracy were fond of him, but his absence was sometimes a relief. It delivered them from “good morning”s and marking time in a number of similar fashions.
Through the two open doors came the morning sun and a wind that rattled the pictures in the hall. Near the staircase was another pair of doors, both of them firmly shut, and from this Mrs. Tracy inferred that half the household still slept. She found it depressing. The hall seemed weighted at one end – like a rowboat, she thought.
Actually, the German boy, Paul Lange, who was also a guest for the summer, was not asleep behind the closed door of his room but fully dressed and listening to Mrs. Tracy and Allie. His shyness, which Mrs. Tracy had stopped trying to understand, would not allow him to emerge as long as there was movement in the upper hall. Also, he slept with his shades drawn, even though there were no neighbors on his side of the house.
“It shuts out the air. Who on earth are you hiding from?” Mrs. Tracy had once asked him. At this, the poor boy had drawn up his brows and looked so distressed that she had added, “Of course, it’s your own affair. But I always thought Germans were terribly healthy and went in for fresh air.” Thus did she frequently and unconsciously remind him of his origin, although part of her purpose in inviting him to spend the summer had been to help him forget it.
Mrs. Tracy’s connection with Paul was remote, dating back to a prewar friendship in Munich with one of his cousins, a maiden lady now living in New York. Paul had been half orphaned in the war, and when his mother died, a few years later, his cousin had adopted him as a means of getting him to America. Impulsively, and with mixed motives of kindness and curiosity, Mrs. Tracy had offered to take him for the summer. His cousin had a small apartment and was beginning to regret having to share it with a grown boy.
Paul had disappointed Mrs. Tracy. He never spoke of the war, which must surely have affected his childhood, and he had none of the characteristics Mrs. Tracy would have accepted as German. He was not fair; he was dark and wore glasses. He could not swim. He was anything but arrogant. He disliked the sun. He spent as much time as he could in his room, and his waking life was centered around a university extension course.
Paul might just as well have stayed in town, for all the pleasure he gets from the country, Mrs. Tracy thought for the fiftieth time. Passing the last door, on her way downstairs, she heard a dull banging in Madeline’s room that was probably a hinged window swinging in the wind.
MADELINE AWOKE at that instant and was unable to place the banging sound or determine where she was. The days of her lifetime had been spent in so many different places – in schools, in camps, in the houses of people she was or was not related to – that the first sight of day was, almost by habit, bewildering. Opening her eyes, she recognized the room and knew that she was spending the summer in the country with the Tracys.
Reaching out of bed, she slammed the window. The room was suddenly quiet, and through the hot-air register she could hear Mrs. Tracy downstairs, asking Doris if she had ever seen such a perfect morning. Doris’s answer was lost in the whir of the electric mixer.
Every day of summer, so far, had been launched on a wave of Mrs. Tracy’s good will and optimism. Madeline settled back in bed and closed her eyes. Seven more days to Labor Day, she thought, and only then did she remember that it was her birthday. Three years ago, she had been fourteen. In another three, she would be twenty. She was unmarried and not in love and without a trace of talent in any direction. It seemed to her the worst of all possible days.
Turning to the window, she looked with distaste at the top of a pear tree. Someone, Paul or Allie, was scratching at her door.
“Paul, if that’s you, then come in. Please don’t lurk in the hall.”
He slid around the door, spectacles gleaming, with an armful of books. Too
wary to speak until he had judged her temper, he sat down on one of the blue-and-white striped chairs, balancing his books.
“Have you come to wish me happy birthday?” Madeline asked. She sat up in bed, tugging halfheartedly at a strap of her nightgown that had broken in the night. With everybody but Paul, she was almost nunlike in her decorum, but she had decided early in the summer that he would put up with anything, and immodesty was only one of the ways she showed her contempt for his unmanliness.
He smiled, or gave way to a nervous tic – Madeline could never be sure which it was. “No,” he said, fidgeting. “I did not come for your birthday but to ask you to read this paper and correct the English.” He seemed to Madeline doomed for life to ask for help and speak with a slight accent.
“Say ‘this,’” she said. “Not ‘ziss.’”
“Ziss,” he repeated after her.
Mrs. Tracy had hoped that Paul and Madeline would become friends, but, as it happened, they were without interest in each other. Their only common ground was the help Madeline could give him with his studies, and this she did with an ill grace.
“They’re nearly of an age – only three years or so apart,” Mrs. Tracy had told her husband in the spring, before she opened the house in the country. “They’re both adrift, in a way – Paul on account of the war, and Madeline from her family. A summer there might do wonders.”
Edward Tracy had said nothing. Technically, the Connecticut house belonged to his wife, who had inherited it. Loving it and remembering her own childhood there, she looked upon her summers as a kind of therapy to be shared with the world. Edward, therefore, merely added this summer of Paul and Madeline to his list of impossible summers. These included the summer of the Polish war orphans, the summer of the tennis court, the summer of Mrs. Tracy’s cousins, the summer of the unmarried mother, the summer of the Friends of France, and the summer of Bundles for Britain.
Going Ashore Page 29