by James Salter
She was forty-seven. Her hair was rich and beautiful, her hands strong. It seemed that all she had known and read, her children, her friends, things which had at one time been disparate, contending, were quiet at last and had found their place within her. A sense of harvest, of abundance, filled her. She had nothing to do and she waited.
She woke in the silence of a bedroom still cool and dark. She was not sleepy, she was aware the night had passed. The small, gnarled branches of the apple trees were stirring in a soundless wind. The sun was not yet up. The sky to the west was the deepest blue, with clouds almost too brilliant, too dense. In the east it was almost white. Her body and mind were rested, they were at peace. They were being readied for a final transformation she only guessed.
In Rome the old woman who cleaned for Lia sat crying. She was eighty. She was slow but still able to work. Her hands were blunt with age.
“What is it?” Lia asked. “What’s wrong?”
The woman only went on weeping helplessly. Her body sobbed.
“Ma come, Assunta?”
“Signora,” she moaned, “I don’t want to die.” She was sitting on a chair in the kitchen, grief-stricken.
“To die? Are you sick?”
“No, no.” Her face was worn and pleading, the face of an ancient child. “I’m not sick.”
“Well, what are you talking about?”
“It’s just that I’m afraid.”
“Oh, dear,” Lia said gently. “Now, don’t be upset. Don’t be foolish.” She took the old woman’s hand. “Everything will be all right, don’t worry.”
“Signora …”
“Yes.”
“Do you think there’s anything after?”
“Assunta, don’t cry.” How touching old people are, she thought. How honest they are, how emptied of deception and pride.
“I’m afraid.”
“I’ll tell you what it’s like,” Lia said, calming her. “It’s like being tired, very, very tired and just falling asleep.”
“Do you think so?”
“A beautiful sleep,” she said. “A sleep which only those who have worked a long time deserve, which does not end.”
She was warm, she was comforting with the strength of those who have nothing to lose. She could not even begin to imagine an end to life. She had decades before her, trips to Paris in December with her husband, dinners in small hotels near the Place Vendôme, the lights and Christmas decorations outside, oysters—her first—in the cold afternoon, the half-lemons beside them, the small squares of bread.
“A lovely sleep,” she said.
The old woman wiped her eyes. She was quieter now. “Yes,” she agreed. “Yes, that’s it.”
“Of course.”
“Still …” she said, “how beautiful to wake in the morning and have fresh coffee …”
“Yes.”
“The smell is so good.”
“Poor woman,” Viri commented later.
“I gave her some wine,” Lia said.
“She has no family?”
“No, her family is gone.”
That summer Franca came to visit her mother once more. They sat beneath the trees. Nedra had money, she had bought some good wine. “Do you remember Ursula?” she asked.
“Our pony? Yes.”
“She was so impossible. I wanted to sell her, your father wouldn’t permit it.”
“I know. He really loved her.”
“He loved her at certain times. Do you remember Leslie? Leslie Dahlander?”
“Poor Leslie.”
“It’s strange. I’ve been thinking of her lately,” Nedra said.
“But you didn’t know her very well.”
“No, but I knew those years.”
She looked at her daughter, a feeling of envy and happiness swept her, a gust of it thick as air. They talked of the house, of days long past, the hours lay beside them like a stream that barely moved. All around stretched the wide farmland made thrilling by hidden sea. Rabbits were feeding in the dusty fields, there were sea birds on the shore. All this would vanish, it would belong to poodle owners, Arnaud had said. Its remoteness had saved it, but now the farms were melting like ice in the spring; they were breaking, drifting off forever. All this vast endland, this barren province would disappear. We live too long, Nedra thought.
“Do you remember Kate?” Franca asked.
“Yes. What’s become of her?”
“She has three children now.”
“She was so thin. She was almost a boy—a beautiful, wicked boy.”
“She lives in Poughkeepsie.”
“Exile.”
“Her father’s famous,” Franca said. “Did you see the article?” She went inside to find the issue of Bazaar.
“I read something,” Nedra recalled.
Franca was flipping the pages. “Here,” she said. She offered it. It was a long essay. “He had a show at the Whitney.”
“Yes, I remember.”
A large, gray face, pores visible in its nose and chin, stared at her. It was as if she were looking at a kind of passport, the only kind which mattered.
“He’s really a very good painter,” Franca said.
“He must be. He’s right in here with the French countesses.”
“You’re making fun of him.”
“No, I’m not. Well, goodbye, Robert.” She turned the page to vivid, green pictures of the Bahamas, green and blue, long, tanned girls in caftans and white hats. “It’s just that it’s hard to believe in greatness,” she said. “Especially in friends.”
They lay in the holy sun which clothed them, the birds floating over their heads, the sand warm on their ankles, the backs of their legs. She too, like Marcel-Maas, had arrived. She had arrived at last. A voice of illness had spoken to her. Like the voice of God, she did not know its source, she only knew what she was bidden, which was to taste everything, to see everything with one long, final glance. A calm had come over her, the calm of a great journey ended.
“Read to me,” she would ask.
In the tall brown grass of the dunes, a pagan couch that overlooked the sea, she sat clasping her knees and listening while Franca read, as Viri had so often, to his daughters, to them all. It was Troyat’s life of Tolstoy, a book like the Bible, so rich in events, in sorrow, in partings, so filled with struggle that strength welled up on every page. The chapters became one’s flesh, one’s own being; the trials washed one clean. Warm, sheltered from the wind, she listened as Franca’s clear voice described the landscape of Russia, on and on, grew weary at last and stopped. They lay in silence, like lionesses in the dry grass, powerful, sated.
“It’s good, isn’t it?” her daughter asked.
“How I love you, Franca,” Nedra said.
Of them all, it was the true love. Of them all, it was the best. That other, that sumptuous love which made one drunk, which one longed for, envied, believed in, that was not life. It was what life was seeking; it was a suspension of life. But to be close to a child, for whom one spent everything, whose life was protected and nourished by one’s own, to have that child beside one, at peace, was the real, the deepest, the only joy.
Barefoot along the hissing shore, sometimes touching, hip to hip, in the shadowy interior of cars, entering shops, were couples lost in obsession with each other, heavy with the satisfaction of possessing, laden with it, brimming. She saw them, they passed before her blandly, as ordinary souls appear to a pilgrim. She had no interest in them. They were limp, translucent, like petals. Their time had not yet come. Gone from her completely was the knowledge she once was sure she would keep forever: the taste, the exaltation of days made luminous by love—with it, one had everything. “That’s an illusion,” she said.
Her thoughts reached backwards, deeply forgiving, fond. There were things she had nearly forgotten, she had never told. They came to her unexpectedly for perhaps the last time.
“Your grandfather,” she said, “my father—he was in the navy, did you know th
at? He was boxing champion of his ship. He used to tell stories about it. When I was a little girl, I can remember him doing it all, reenacting it. He’d put up his hands, you know. The admiral was there, and all the men. And across the ring, with his face shining and his teeth gold, the Cuban …”
“You never told me that.”
“I used to love those stories. I suppose he wanted a son. When I was about twelve, when it was quite clear I was a girl, that’s when he stopped. He was a difficult fellow. Not easy to know. You know, the strangest thing, I learned it by chance: Eve’s mother and mine are buried in the same little cemetery in Maryland. I mean, it’s a very small place. In the country.
“She came from there. She met my father at a picnic. It was so long ago. And now they’re dead. Her family were storekeepers. They came from Virginia. She had two sisters and a brother, but the brother died when he was a little boy. He was the favorite. His name was Waddy.”
“I wish I’d known her.”
“She had beautiful hands. I think she pined for Maryland. She wasn’t very strong.”
“What was her maiden name again?”
“McRae.”
“Yes, McRae.”
“Not one of them with money.” Nedra said. “That’s the pity of it. Honest, yes, but you can’t pass on honor.”
“So I have Scotch blood.”
“Mostly Russian, I think. You’re a lot like your father.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Yes, it’s good.”
“Why?”
“Let me look at you. Well,” she said, “because there is something unfathomable there.” She reached out to touch Franca’s cheek. “Yes,” she said. “Unfathomable and divine.”
Franca took the hand and kissed it.
“Mama …” she began. She was close to tears.
“You know, I’m so glad you could come this year,” Nedra said. “I keep thinking we won’t be coming here much longer, we’ll have to find someplace else. We should really go out to dinner once or twice. Catherine tells me there’s a Greek place run by two brothers, that isn’t bad. We can have moussaka. I had it in London. There’s a wonderful Greek restaurant there. We’ll go sometime.”
“Yes.”
She was stroking her daughter’s hair. “I’d like that,” Franca said.
10
SHE DIED LIKE HER FATHER, SUDDENLY, in the fall of the year. As if leaving a concert during a passage she loved, as if giving up an hour before the light. Or so it seemed. She loved the autumn, she was a creature of blue, flawless days, the sun of their noons hot as the African coast, the chill of the nights immense and clear. As if smiling and acting quickly, as if off to a country, a room, an evening finer than ours.
She died like her father. She felt ill. Abdominal pains. For a while they could diagnose nothing. The x-rays showed nothing, the many tests of blood.
The leaves had come down, it seemed, in a single night. The prodigious arcade of trees in the village gave them up quickly; they fell like rain. They lay like runs of water along the melancholy road. In the turning of seasons they would be green again, these great trees. Their dead branches would be snapped away, their limbs would quicken and fill. They would again, in addition to their beauty, to the roof they made beneath the sky, to their whispering, their slow, inarticulate sounds, the riches they poured down, they would, besides all this, give scale to everything, a true scale, reassuring, wise. We do not live as long, we do not know as much.
They had given up their leaves as if to mourn her, as if weeping for an arboreal queen.
Among those few at the funeral, Franca stood alone. She had no husband. Her face and hands seemed bare as if washed clean. She was numinous, pale, her face the very face of the dead woman but more beautiful, far more than her mother could ever have been. The present is powerful. Memories fade.
Danny had her children with her, little girls of two and four who had hardly known their grandmother. Grandmother! It seemed incredible. They had pure features and a serene nature, though the older talked aloud during the service as if no one else were there. Two daughters, one on each side, who, though they were unaware of it, would know another century, the millennium. Perhaps they would read aloud as Viri had done on those long winter evenings, those idle summers when, in a house by the sea, it seemed the family he had created would always endure. Certainly they would be passionate and tall and one day give to their children—there is no assurance of this, we imagine it, we cannot do otherwise—marvelous birthdays, huge candle-rich cakes, contests, guessing games, not many young guests, six or eight, a room that leads to a garden, from afar one can hear the laughing, the doors open suddenly, out they run into the long, sweet afternoon.
There were so many things one wanted to ask her. The answers were gone. The small cemetery that lay in the road near the Daros’ was where they wanted her to lie. She may have even spoken about it at night when she’d been drinking, but it could not be arranged. Nedra herself might have managed it, but Franca tried in vain. There were very few plots, they told her, there was a board of trustees that decided such things; did the family live in town? The more difficult it became to gain entry, the more it became the only course. They wanted her to be apart from the ordinary dead. They did not want equality; she had never believed in it, not even for a moment.
Eve stood near them. Beneath the sleeves of her coat the bones of her wrists showed, they made her seem gaunt. Her lean fingers and long hands were like a woman’s on a foreclosed farm. The coat was cloth, the hat dark straw. As always, there was something thrillingly vulgar about her. She was the kind of woman who could say calmly, “What do you really know about it?” and in her face one could see that, yes, compared to her, one knew nothing. She stood impassively. As the casket was lowered, she suddenly seemed to cough, to bend her head as if choking. Her face was wet with tears.
“Your children are beautiful, Danny,” she said when it was over. She was introduced to them. She took a ring from her finger and the bracelet from her wrist and held them out. “Here. I didn’t give you anything when you were christened. But you probably weren’t christened, were you?”
“No,” Danny answered.
“It doesn’t matter. You should have something. It’s a very nice ring,” she said to the larger child. “You won’t lose it, will you? At one time I’d have given anything in the world for that ring.”
Artis, who was the younger, had dropped the bracelet. Danny picked it up. “Hold it tightly,” she instructed.
“It’s antique gold,” Eve said.
There was a brief reception at Catherine Daro’s. They said goodbye to everyone, they accepted the murmured regrets, they lingered and started back to the city finally in a hired car. The little girls were sleeping. The sun seemed very warm. At first there was nothing to say. They drove through the vacant countryside in silence, the last, unnatural heat of the year drifting from arm to lap.
“There’s the store that’s shaped like a duck,” Franca said. “Remember?”
They saw it ahead where the road curved, the round, somewhat primitive shape, a door in its breast. A relic of childhood love, how often they had passed it at dusk with light spilling from the door.
“Papa hated it,” Danny said.
“Remember?”
“It was because we loved it so much. We wanted to live in a house shaped like an enormous chicken. I was going to have a room in the beak. All right, he said. But covered with real feathers, we insisted. And then we’d begin to cry. We’d howl and hear each other and then howl even louder.”
Franca nodded. “Why aren’t we doing it now?” she murmured.
“Because it isn’t pretending.”
“No.”
Eve sat silent, as if by herself, the tears rolling down her flat cheeks.
The car, which had tinted windows, fled along the highways, the bare, unplanted earth on either side, the fruit stalls with their hand-painted signs, the plain homes. An hour and it was into th
e thickness of buildings, still in hot afternoon, apartments, stores, speeding over trash-strewn roads into the center of life, into the swarm.
11
IT WAS A SPRING WHEN VIRI RETURNED. He drove up from New York on a warm day. He had come alone. The still, silent air, the light, filled him with a kind of dread, the fear of seeing again things too powerful for him. He stopped at a place on the cliffs above the river and stood looking out. The height made him strangely dizzy. He glanced down. Hundreds of feet below lay glacial rubble at the foot of the vertical walls. The great, soiled river gleamed in the sun. On the far shore, the endless houses; he could almost smell their still rooms, the warmth of cooking in them, of bedclothes, rugs. The radios were playing softly, the dogs lay in squares of sun. He had severed himself from all this, he looked, at it with a kind of indifference, even hatred. Why should he be so stung by what he had rejected? Why should he offer it even disdain?
He looked down once more, his thoughts spilling slowly. The idea of falling was terrible to him, yet at that moment it seemed that everything that had gone before, all of his life, was no larger somehow than the time it would take to pass through the air.
There were only two other cars parked, both empty, as he left. He could not see where their occupants had gone. He was afraid of meeting someone, even of being smiled at by a stranger. The rubbish cans were empty, the refreshment stand closed.
Everything unchanged seemed terrible to him, a gas station with its wooden buildings, the very land. His mind grew numb. He tried not to think of things, not to see them. Everything was a confirmation of days that had continued, of requited life. His own was cast into vagrancy, despair.
He walked in the greening woods beyond his house. He could see it briefly through the trees, silent, strange. The leaves about him were pale and sun-filled. Fallen vines tugged at his feet.