A Complicated Marriage

by Janice Van Horne

  From above, it looked like not much more than a hole in the ground with a small cluster of people gathered to be shepherded into the deep past. Damp, almost dark, and airless, a narrow passageway slanted into bulges of “rooms” of varied size. The ceiling pressed down. I shivered from the cold, the contrast so abrupt after the hot summer day above. But mostly I shivered from the sensation of standing on the ground where these people had first made their mark twenty thousand years before, give or take a few thousand. In Paris I had been enveloped by water lilies; here I was in the center of a stampede of bulls and bison and deer—their daily bread. The lighting flickered and was so dim that it took a while to take in the complex rendering of the animals and the use of color to shade and contour them. Here and there were a few handprints—the creator marking his turf, making magic. I felt the urge to press my hand into his to absorb his power. Like the child who experiences wonder when she traces her hand for the first time. Or the tourist who stands in the movie stars’ footprints at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. I couldn’t have known how fortunate I was to have had that glimpse of the caves. Discovered in 1940, they would be closed to the public by 1963, and thereafter could be viewed only in replica at a museum.

  That night we stayed at the thirteenth-century Château de Mercuès, near Cahors. We were given a round tower room, and at dinner we had the dining room to ourselves. We looked out across the vast gardens and later strolled there among the roses, where bishops had walked for 1,300 years. A remarkable day of time travel.

  The next day we drove on to the Ingres Museum and that of Toulouse-Lautrec before heading to Carcassonne for the night. Like an apparition, the fortified city appeared across the plains on the horizon, its stone walls and ramparts ablaze in the setting sun—a fairy-tale city that we entered through a gate. I liked the idea of a city with gates, as long as they were left open.

  We were close to the Mediterranean, and I could barely wait to get my first look. We were on our way to St.-Cyr-sur-Mer, a town far too small for any map, for a two-day visit with Clem’s old friend Busch, the widow of art writer Julius Meier-Graefe, “the lady with the dachshund” whom I had assumed was Clem’s wife the night I met him.

  High above the town, at the end of a tortuous dirt driveway, sat Busch’s doll-size cottage, which overlooked the fabled sea. Charming at first sight, it proved to have a few drawbacks. The ceilings and doorways through which our doll-size hostess gracefully sailed were so low that I felt like Godzilla. After repeatedly concussing myself until I saw stars, I gave up and took to a chair. As kind as Busch was, her connection to Clem was rooted exclusively in people I had never met and places I had never been. I could manage with that, but this was not a dinner with an end in sight, and this was no witty raconteur. Sprinting between French and German, their talk wore on. And wouldn’t you know, outdoors was off limits because of a savage scourge of mosquitoes.

  Later, Clem and I squeezed into a tiny bed for two, and I finally fell asleep to an ear-splitting lullaby of cicadas, a result of the unusually intense heat that had settled down like a blanket. Even Clem agreed we should cut our stay short, and we fled the next day to the hedonism of a Monte Carlo hotel: dinner on our balcony, with the lights of the Riviera stretching to Spain, or almost, and a toilet of our own, a first since the Mauritania.

  As we headed for the border, France set off a farewell salvo. As we went through Menton, we heard a series of explosions along the harbor. The earth moved, the Simca trembled, and the sky turned black. Amid murmurs of sabotage, we were told that an oil tanker had caught fire in the harbor and the fire was spreading, that we would do well to leave. Easier said than done—the road was soon backed up with emergency traffic. I had had enough of France and its fireworks.

  Sometimes—and this was one of those times—to break the tedium and tension of driving, I would sing. “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” sort of singing. Clem loved that and would always remark on how beautiful my voice was, as if discovering it for the first time. But he never joined in. He said he had no gift for it. But, that said, he would add that his life’s dream was to be an opera singer, a tenor.

  We crossed northern Italy, stopping at Piacenza and Verona before tackling the Alps via the Brenner Pass, our hopelessly underpowered Simca huffing through the Dolomites, surrounded by caravans of oil trucks. I thought I must be the only traveler in the world who had been to Italy and never seen Rome, Florence, or Venice, but Clem was eager to get to countries and cities and museums unknown to him. “Besides,” he said, “you have plenty of time—you’ll see it all.” He was right, though it would take me thirty years.

  We stopped in Kitzbühel, Austria, where we slept in our first featherbed, so high that we needed a stool to climb into it, then moved on to Vienna. The Bristol Hotel had a lushness I will always think of as Viennese: the room, its upholstery, draperies, and bed dripped with ecru satin, carved mirrors everywhere, ankle-deep carpeting, chandeliers with silk shades—a sumptuous cocoon so dense and hushed I held my breath. All a bit much, considering that the heat wave had followed us and was now breaking records all over Europe. Of course, air-conditioning was a thing of the future.

  By nightfall we had met some of the foremost up-and-coming artists and their wives: Josef Mikl, Wolfgang Hollegha, and Rupprecht Geiger. After dinner they took us to the Prater, where, from the top of the enormous Ferris wheel, I saw all of Vienna. So incongruous, as if Coney Island had been plunked down in the middle of Central Park. Vienna had hatched a thriving art center, thanks in large part to a contemporary-art gallery around the corner from St. Stephen’s and to the support it received from the cathedral’s extraordinarily progressive monsignor. Over the next few days, we visited their studios and spent hours in bars as they hammered Clem with questions about what was happening in New York. Clem read German with ease, had even translated a few books as a young man, but speaking was sometimes slow going. Conversation would flow for a few minutes and then abruptly stop as Clem, always a stickler for communicating precisely, searched his dictionary for just the right word.

  Our primary guide and companion in Vienna was Kurt List, musician, writer, and another old friend of Clem’s. Oozing charm, he was a dashing man with a beautiful blond always on his arm. He drove us everywhere in his convertible. It had been only four years since the city had been reunified after having been quartered between America, England, France, and the USSR. I became war conscious in Vienna and would remain so for the rest of our trip. My antennae were up, and I couldn’t shake the habit of trying to place people we met; were they too old, too young to have been soldiers, had they been Nazis? The hotel staff smiled too much, the people on the street too little. Kurt told us about people he knew who, upon reading about the Nuremberg Trials, claimed to be astonished to learn of the horrors. I cringed. I felt anti-Semitism was alive and well.

  When we went to the Kunsthistoriches Museum, its vastness was made even more vast by our inability to find the entrance. Like Laurel and Hardy, we walked the perimeter, the sun blazing, nary a soul in sight to guide us. Finally, we came upon the entrance, not far from where we had started. A man magically appeared, waving a camera. We agreed, and he took our picture and our money and said he would send it to us. He actually did, and for fifty years it has sat in a filigree frame of my mother’s on Clem’s bookshelf. I look for the wilted stress of our moment in Vienna and see instead a contented, overfed American couple off on an outing, she in her beige drip-dry Dacron dress, he in his drip-dry, short-sleeved shirt and seersucker jacket.

  As usual, we spent days in the museum, Clem annotating his catalog in his special code: check marks in ascending scale, often with pluses or minuses, and sometimes with exclamation points or question marks. The latter indicated the more interesting pieces, the ones that had confused his eye, that were perhaps, as he would say, “beyond me.” My pace was quicker. Since I had been in Europe, I had developed museum ennui. Airless, I would start yawning and couldn’t stop. The cure was simple; I would find a spot where I
could read or write in my journal.

  Next stop was Munich, a difficult city to visit, having been Hitler’s home base and the crucible of the Third Reich. We arrived at night at the large, echoing emptiness of the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten. The next day, we confronted the devastation around us. We would walk down a commercial avenue and turn a corner, only to find stretches of nothingness, as if we were touring a film set of facades. Before lunch we stopped at a small dark bar. The bartender struck up a conversation, the usual tourist chat, and moved on to some generalities about the war. He then said, “Hitler was a fool.”

  Clem responded, “No, he was evil.”

  Unused to having his conciliatory platitudes rejected, the bartender protested. Clem firmly cut him off and in his slow, deliberate German proceeded to define the difference between a foolish man and an evil man.

  The next afternoon, we took a taxi to a cathedral in another part of the city. A large structure, it appeared to be even more immense, sitting as it did in the midst of a wasteland, wounded, its stained-glass windows boarded up. Reconstruction was under way, and we roamed the interior, looking at the art to the sound of jackhammers and drills. As we were leaving, a man approached, this time not with a camera but with angry words. “Look at what you’ve done!” And more of the same.

  Clem turned on him. “No. Look at what you have done!” And we walked away. I asked Clem if he had wanted to take a swing at him. He shrugged. “It wasn’t personal.”

  After Munich we visited Kassel, Cologne and Düsseldorf. And then we left Germany. Two days later we were in the Netherlands. For the next two weeks we would be tourists. No more artists and studios, but saturated in art nonetheless.

  It was in Amsterdam that I felt I was bottoming out. We had been traveling almost three months and it had been gradual, but now it was unmistakeable. It had been the oppressiveness of Germany and its language—for me the family language of secrets and portent—and I was tired of driving. Our entry into the city was the last straw. I went the wrong way on a one-way street and was stopped by a cop. I became hysterical and Clem told me to shut up. I shut up. He took over the wheel and expertly navigated the rest of the way, driving better than he ever had before or ever would again.

  For the first time, we had to scrounge for a room, going from one place to another in that overcrowded, underbuilt town. At last we were installed in the attic of a run-down rooming house. I was pleased to note that I wasn’t the only one winding down. For once, the mellow, indefatigable Clem was frayed and exhausted. I found Amsterdam as heavy and leaden as the breakfast tray the landlady brought up the creaking stairs each morning, with its cold meats, cheeses, eggs, fruits, hot cereals, breads . . .

  One night at dinner Clem said, “We’re not getting along very well.” This from someone who had never assessed “us,” at least not out loud.

  I bit back with, “You can say that again,” or some such. My flippancy belied the quaking I felt as I reeled into a dire scenario where I was abandoned on the streets of Amsterdam, panhandling for my fare home. Naturally, I was sure it was all my fault. I didn’t measure up. I had fallen short. Problem was, I knew he was right. I wasn’t happy as part of Clem’s package deal; I wanted to see castles, he wanted museums, and I didn’t have the spirit of adventure to pursue an agenda of my own. Oh, I blamed him, but being my mother-the-martyr’s daughter, I blamed myself more. A no-win impasse. But our travel routine continued as usual. And I stowed my scenario under my pillow.

  I found it hard to find the heart or the rhythm of Amsterdam. Touring by day the old parts of the city, I found it overly precious, too picture-book to be real or intriguing. Then, walking at night through the “New” town, with all its glitz and neon, I found it jarring and tedious. Both were trying too hard and at odds with each other. Perversely, it was the glitz and neon that spoke to me of the effects of the war. They spoke louder than the devastation of Munich. I found I wasn’t ready, even fourteen years after the war, to have it blotted out by a second-rate circus.

  But there was plenty of art. At least in the museums I could feel the deep roots of the city. We spent several days at the Rijksmuseum where I stood forever in front of Rembrandt’s Night Watch, which even I had heard of, trying desperately to be moved by it but failing utterly. We went on a day trip to Haarlem to wallow in Hals, until the dour men in black with their white ruffs blurred, until more became less.

  On to the Hague, where the noise of traffic in dense narrow streets and the crush of men in dark suits and ties told me this was a city of intrigue and business. Then to Scheveningen, so like a New England beach town with its grand old hotels, except here I dipped my toes in the North Sea. It was the last day of August and the heat had finally broken as the cold weather swept in, sending tourists to cozier venues. I reveled in the bleakness. Before the sun set, I went out to stroll the “shingle.” As the stones dug into my feet, I was happy to be away from the crowds and to once again have a hotel to ourselves. At dinner that night, wrapped in our coats, we watched the approaching storm. Before we left, I once again walked to the sea and sat in the chill morning fog. With an urge to be deep and romantic, I tried to write a poem. But trying does not always make it so.

  While we were in Brussels, Clem decided to spend a day in Bruges, while I, in need of a breather from art and togetherness, opted for another beach town, Ostend. At the racetrack I managed to place bets with touts, and lose. And I managed to feel like a grown-up navigating my day and the buses. I realized how childlike I had become after three months dancing in the lockstep of coupledom. Though we were certainly a couple at home, travel was making the dance untenable.

  No more dawdling—we headed south to Paris, our only detour, Vimy Ridge. My skin prickled as we drove down a narrow road through a small forest, the sunny day now dimmed and chill. Leaving the car, we found ourselves alone as we walked through what had been minefields, the craters still there. We walked in the trenches where thousands of men had lived, if they’d been lucky, month after month. Then up a hill to the Canadian war memorial, a long wall with the names of the dead, two pylons rising above it, a somber reminder of the sixty-six thousand Canadians who had died in the Great War, many of them there. I couldn’t take it all in. I looked at my feet, somehow ashamed to be standing there, young and alive.

  Since we had left England, the specters of war had taken up residence in me: the bombs of Paris, the Menton explosion, and the scars of destruction and deprivation, evident or masked, everywhere I looked. I hadn’t anticipated that. The war was past; it belonged to my childhood. That unsafe time of too many fathers, moves, and schools, my mother crying as she listened in the dark every night to Gabriel Heater, who brought the news of the war into the room we shared. Crying about the war? Crying about her life? For me it had all gotten mixed together, and I started listening for the bombs that would surely fall on Blind Brook Lodge. Hadn’t I been trained to listen for sirens and hide under my desk at school? Hadn’t my brother made me memorize the insignias of warplanes, ours and the dread Messerschmitts, that I should keep an eye out for? But to get retriggered fourteen years later? Oh, how I yearned to outgrow the past.

  And soon we were in Paris. We returned the car. Clem retrieved our maps and guidebooks, of course meticulously annotated by his Montblanc. I left behind my tense shoulders, tired eyes, and fear of getting lost. By ten o’clock that night we were on the boat train to London. This time, no gulls, no rhapsodizing about the white cliffs. Instead, a different kind of rhapsody, lying in Clem’s arms, in a berth of a train that was rocking on a boat.

  The next morning we were on our way to Liverpool, where we boarded the Corinthian. To Clem’s delight the ship was small, the weather foul. While most of the passengers took to their cabins or crept around looking green, Clem walked the decks glorying in the high seas, heavy winds, and salt spray. I didn’t get seasick, but I much preferred the snugness of our cabin, where I spent afternoons writing in my journal, trying to sort through experiences I wanted to reme
mber and tripping over a lot I would just as soon have forgotten.

  I was struck with a new theory: that proximity might well cause more divorces than infidelity. I allowed myself to reopen my dire Amsterdam scenario, to wonder about how close we might have come to splitting up. I knew that I had overreacted, though I still swerved abruptly between thinking it was all my fault and thinking what an insensitive bastard Clem could be. Even mid-Atlantic, between here and there, seeing any middle ground was beyond my grasp. One thing I knew for sure—I had shut down after we hit Germany, where I had felt most isolated and inconsequential. I had been spoiled by the English, who hadn’t talked through me but to me. So civilized that, unlike Americans, they could even make art talk sound like conversation.

  I thought about how complicated travel was for me, because on the one hand, some of the best parts of our journey had been the peaceful amblings and small towns, being on our own. At the same time, that unrelenting togetherness was what had eventually worn me down, especially in the last weeks. Like the horse that nears the barn, I was anxious to get back to the given, the routine and nourishment of home. At least there, there was variety, and whatever was going on between Clem and me, I had escape hatches every which way. In that damned Simca, well . . .

  Sick of insights, my thoughts turned to the party at hand, a costume party. I decided at the eleventh hour to jettison Clem’s mandated shipboard protocol of isolation and become a joiner. I was sick of pretending we were alone while corralled with 250 strangers. Besides, I had a great idea.

  Cunard ships were infamous for their rolls, served morning, noon, and night; beautiful to behold, small, round, and burnished to a light brown, they were impenetrable with tooth or chisel. In vain, people would crack them on the table, hoping for access to their yeasty secrets. I thought it was time to put those culinary rocks to some use. Borrowing knitting needles and some wool from the covey of grandmas in the lounge, and asking the bewildered steward to bring me four dozen rolls, I set to work. I pounded the needles through the rolls with Clem’s shoe and strung them together with the yarn, until there were yards and yards of them. Then, after dinner I wound the rolls around my head into a dome-like crown and let the rest hang down my back. The result was stunning, beautiful really, like nothing I had ever seen. Their color and symmetry; this, I thought, was what they had been created for. And the judges must have agreed, because I won first prize and was awarded a brass clock with the insignia of the ship on it. No, the ship didn’t instantaneously burst into all-singing, all-dancing Technicolor with me as the star. But at least I had given my shipboard fantasy a shot.