Rachel—pronounced the French way, and otherwise called Madame (she refused to be a ladyship)—had actually been born Sinsheimer, a German refugee-from-Hitler, who by her service in the Resistance had long since been translated into French. A woman of somewhere between fifty and sixty, she had the self-contained beauty of one able to live up to such a magnificently hooked nose; all of her—sleek-knobbed hair, daubed brows and a strong skin now and then pink-wattled with energy—gave an impression of having been pomaded backwards from it. As Sir Harry’s third wife she was still his “young” one, no indication being given of where his place was in her succession of husbands—he was clearly so delighted to be the incumbent. If she wasn’t a disciple, then what was she?
To Linhouse she appeared first off as one of those foreign women who were translated very quickly but never lost the hard core of themselves; whether what they kept was a kind of femininity, he couldn’t say. It appeared to him that she too might be a traveler, and for this reason he studied her carefully. In her crow-satins and midnight crepes, always some Gallic manipulation of the many colors of black, she had as many pockets as a concierge (she must have had them made that way), these currently inhabited by one or more of the Cahiers of Péguy. She might be a Catholic convert then, at least some of the time—why Linhouse thought of it that way he couldn’t say either, at least not at their first dinner. When it came about that, because of a worrying illness of his mother’s, he wasn’t going to leave the country immediately, the three of them had several dinners.
On the second, it appeared that she was a Socialist, though not of the British variety, her husband’s, which she despised.
“They have no clarté,” she said, setting the word down on the cloth like a solid, where it sat like a small candle burning. “Look at him, he takes a title.”
“Before I knew you. And only for service in the War Department,” said Sir Harry. At other times he was driven to protest his lack of aristocracy by citing his background—father a brewer, and not a rich one—and his university—Leeds.
“I accept the aristocracy,” she said with a grin—and Linhouse for the first time was faintly reminded. “And the money, if we go to America, but it’s the lack of style. Politics, yes—la politique d’abord. But ’ere it ’ave no mystique.”
She drew out one of the notebooks, entitled De la Grippe, then another, Encore de la Grippe, and yet another, Toujours de la Grippe, while Linhouse, pocket-dazzled, wondered where she would light—nearer hypochondria or Christian Science?—until he was made to understand that Péguy had written these particular issues during a bout of influenza. They were dated 1900. When it came out that she was now, almost three quarters of a century later, a passionate Dreyfusard, he thought he understood her better. He’d met women, men too, who yearned impossibly backwards toward eras temperamentally theirs, couples knocking about Greenwich Village in raccoon coats, talking of what “Scott” said (and they didn’t mean Sir Walter), women who after the third bourbon of being some man’s “good sort,” spoke tearfully of bustles and la belle époque, and ordered a chartreuse. It was just luck even now for instance, if half the bright schoolboys in Britain got safely past the Yellow Book and out the other side. He himself, for all he knew, had come to his profession by some such pass, an early Greek or Roman one. There was only one trouble about Rachel—he couldn’t quite pin down her era. And the next time, what dropped from her, from reticule or marsupial pouch (how could he tell which?), was a mixed bag indeed: a pamphlet, Tea Ceremony in Role of Japanese Women; a reprint, this much-thumbed, of a lecture by her own husband, if Linhouse’s eye was accurate—; also W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions, and a volume by Chateaubriand. She tucked them all back.
Was she a feminist? Did she travel, or yearn to? He asked her.
To the first query, Sir Harry answered for her, making his wife the little bow of a husband so much at one that he could speak. “In a bisexual world such as ours, women physically own the civilization already. Both sexes spend their lives concealing that from each other.”
“Ah, we don’ want it, this world,” said Rachel. “We amuse ourselves—s’amuser?—watching you work for it. For what you could have by default.” She spread her hands. “Non! Ce n’est pas ce que je veux—féminisme. It is an invention of man, that.”
“What is it you want, nowadays?” Linhouse spread his own hands. It was catching. “Women, I mean.”
She inspected her nails, but tossed him a keen, kind look, as if aware that someone in particular had entered here. “For it not to be nowadays, mebbee? ’Arry is right. We are very civilize’.”
He looked up, to find ’Arry regarding him not nearly so kindly.
They were momentarily alone, she and Linhouse, when he asked her the second question, on the eve of the couple’s departure for Bucks, where Harry had a house, half observatory and almost all glass, built for him by Mary, the second wife and the rich one.
“Marie, I love ’er,” said Rachel. “A big damp pavilion, we cawn’ go there except summer. A mad, impossible ’ouse, not at all convenable. But we can watch the stars there. And if ’e get lumbago, it is Marie who get the blame.”
Though so critical of the country, she never expressed any wish to leave it. Indeed, after the manner of the country itself, which had a way of tricking foreigners into its own prides, she could be distressfully local, ranging over the whole flower field of English accent, for instance, like a lady-in-waiting hunting patterns for a lambrequin to be embroidered for the Queen. She was likely to inform them mysteriously that Wykehamists spoke through cotton wool, Harrow and Marlborough men through linen, or to hush the man on the telly with a cry of “Kent!” or “Bethnal Green!” Though her mischief was better than her ear, once more Linhouse was reminded; wasn’t anthropology after all only localism to the nth? One couldn’t of course imagine Rachel on any man’s knee. In bed, an odalisque a la Jacques David, was where his mind (if it was his mind) placed her. But a teasing kinship trembled in the room. Perhaps it was the mockery of those who belonged to a tribe.
A lurid thought struck him. “Marie?” he said, low. “Is she—does she live down there?”
“Oui.”
“Oh.”
She let him simmer in his own cleverness.
“In the spirit,” she said then.
“Oh, dead!” In his relief, he spoke rather loud. The aberrations of one’s friends could make one queasy, if they came too near.
“Non.” Suddenly she burst into an uncontrolled laughter he’d never heard from her. All considered, it seemed to him a little late for it.
“Oh, it was very comme il faut,” she said, when she had finished. “While she was down there. In Bucks. And ’Arry, grâce á Dieu, was at a congress in Cairo. Before Suez. An’ before ’e meet me.” Her proud head equated the two.
“Oh.” No need to be that spirituelle, was his tone.
“Non” she said “—not divorce.” She crossed her fingers over her mouth, and its belated smile. “Disparue,” she said. “She disappear.”
Had he held an icicle in his hand again, there for a moment? Even now, looking back, he couldn’t say that he consciously had. These days, even the most ordinary man walked under the weight of so many crowns he changed with every step and never even saw, the crowns psychologica, para-psychologica and perhaps even astrologica—clouds of wire-and-fireflies gathering in on him once again from all the phantasms at which men, since Erasmus, had been daring to laugh.
But he did ask his question. He must have thought he was changing the subject. “Do you never want to travel?” he’d said. “Elsewhere?”
She’d looked past him, out of the window, over her glass of valedictory champagne. From her expression, she might have been seeing luminous Barbizons above the gray-prickle London street. But what she said was, rather anxiously, “In America, they will take good care of Harry?” She even pronounced the “h.”
Just then, Harry himself reentered, carrying his farewell gift, a scholar’s
compliment, that same pamphlet of which Linhouse would probably understand only the title. He presented it, then put an arm about his wife’s shoulder. “She wants me to go ahead of her to America, imagine! She thinks I’m strong enough!” His cheeks were slightly oranged by drink. He looked down at Linhouse, who was much the shorter man, with mettle. “And I may do. There’s an international congress at Berkeley in the autumn; they’re willing to pay my way.” He squeezed her shoulder, bare through its nun’s veiling. “But I’ll come back to bring you over, eh. Didn’t know I was training her up to be my assistant down at Bucks, did you, Linhouse? She had some math at Gottingen, before the war. I’ve some hobbies of my own down there; we may show that chap Anders a thing or two yet. Women are remarkable, you know, at some of these very painstaking operations. Getting so, once she gets down there, I can scarcely tear her away.”
They stood there, arms unexpectedly laced about each other’s waist in more than friendship, like the mère and pire of a family inexplicably not present in photographs, valiant couple in their separate primes, who were now about to ascend to a bed where they might still find comfort in some massive reticulation of limb. It came to Linhouse—such hot flashes of insight came to the deserted—what the resemblance was. The smile under that nose of hers could still pearl so freshly, and with the same perverse calm—of creatures who might have been promised the end of the world on Tuesday. They none of them knew what they did or didn’t care for. They merely had the pockets made, and kept them at-the-ready. They were all of them natural converts.
Lids lowered, she was accepting both the praise and the squeeze. “I so look forward to the time down there,” she said.
Linhouse thanked them once more for dinner and pamphlet, promising to send on a small publication of his own. “Wish yours were all in Greek, Might have more chance of understanding it.” The dedication caught his eye. To my Wife, followed by: ayM + n = bxM(a—xN)
“You understand that, I suppose,” he said to Rachel. She nodded on her long neck, her eyes very wide. He waited. She didn’t tell him. He said good-bye rather brusquely. When he turned again at the door, she hadn’t moved and seemed still to be staring at him, as in some primitive or else very sophisticated drawing, from one long Etruscan eye.
The following week he saw his mother safely through her successful operation and contentedly ensconced in a nursing home where she could settle down to being “the pretty American who is really more like us”—a role she’d been playing most of her life, and was now, except for the prettiness that had lasted best, getting harder and harder to define on both sides. She’d spent her life getting away from that same State of Maine which had provided her with enough stamina to do so, this energy of hers in turn having been mistaken by his father for that sexual one of which later performance had shown him to be so in need.
“The Americans have an orgiastic climate, a Puritan heritage, and whole infusions of mixed bloods,” his father had written happily—and finally. “They want most to be a political nation but their own climate and distances have outwitted them. The subsequent melee is wonderful. No, I won’t come back.”
Privately, Linhouse knew his parents had gotten away with blaming temperamental differences on national ones. His father, correspondent for a London newspaper and circuit lecturer, had always been careful to send very good maintenance, to keep a respectable housekeeper for visiting progeny, and never to be seen with young women who had too much fringe. Meanwhile he had sent volumes of Chesterfieldian advice to all, those letters to his wife usually ending on a sharply human note: “Send for Betty, I’ve had enough of her,” or “Time for Patrick, isn’t it? Good God, he’ll scarcely remember me!” His wife in her own meanwhile had kept her calendar full, her causes and acquaintances visited, a circle of admirers of the opera-escort type dancing round the Maypole of a lively establishment, and almost certainly no lover. So, with the help of Atlantic crossings almost as common as mailings, the personal facade of the family had been preserved.
It followed that of the four children conceived before it had become a facade—while his mother no doubt was thinking of dynasty and his father wasn’t thinking—all had emerged like Linhouse, with a strong sense of the personal quotient. None had been too shaken about psychically to make good enough use of a dowry so suspiciously regarded by the century; all, within the aberrations of that century, were leading exactly the dull to vivid lives of people brought up exactly otherwise. Perhaps they hadn’t yet made full use of it.
Linhouse, who by his and his grandparents’ preference had been reared by them, was the quiet one; no one had ever said dangerously so. As one of the sawed-in-half who more normally came of divorce, he found himself no more reserved in the face of experience than was wise, still open to it with enough of the élan that most probably was meted out in the egg. Maybe he was a divided man. He accepted differences between nations, between people, between the sexes—and on this last score, was rather certain of his own. This seemed to him comfortable. As a human being, exclusive of his larger social obligations, he expected to itch, to weep, hopefully to love, and regretfully to die.
Particularly re the itch, of course, the words of Linhouse senior, deceased, now reverberated. “If the children are to spend that much time in England with you, they must be made to understand what a marvelously topical people they are among. Politics is not the full explanation of my countrymen. Early in life we are taught to sympathize rather than to feel, and we have absolutely no short-term talent for domestic drama, i.e. ‘scenes.’ That’s all right, the children will get enough of that over here.” After some digression, to the effect that Americans rarely had sympathies but always thought they had feelings, he continued. “As to summer plans. Our personal system, like any, was simpler when the children were young. But advantages still accrue. Summer romance, for instance, is particularly pretty in England, or used to be. The English are by no means sexless, indeed are well able to produce downy-rose girls and Anglo-Greek boy babies in moments of absentmindedness, especially if there is a touch of Irish in the family. But their deepest emotional shock is after all sunlight, and it is no wonder that in the long, greenish instances between they are forced to develop the pools, the literature and the society, and an addiction to warm drink. One must never forget also that ‘chaff’ is merely their natural defense; such a range of sympathy demands a constant cutting down of the candidates for it. The result of all this being that it is absolutely the ideal place to get rid of an emotional encumbrance!” As usual, the letter had a postscript. “N.B. Though Patrick is acquitting you admirably at Harvard—June marks splendid!—he’s a little under the weather otherwise and is joining you shortly. Send Jack.”
So Jack had been sent. In actual presence, his father hadn’t seemed nearly as wise—or perhaps had known quite well that his wisdom was of the epistolary kind. Certainly he’d done better with whichever children and countries happened to be at a distance. And now, from the severest distance, he was doing best of all.
For it was true, Linhouse thought, lounging on a summer’s day, at his mother’s flat, near one of her bell-glasses—the spirit of ridicule ran through this land like rheumatism; it was impossible to die of love here. Shelley, who hadn’t, slept Victorianly, his marble limbs sprawled in a crypt at the Oxford which had thrown him out in the body and readmitted him in the statue, surely the most naked thing in England. After that visit and other weekends, sailing-club or walking-tour, alone or accompanied and all as friendly as field, stream, and pub could make them, Linhouse sat for some days in the park with his mother, who was now convalescing.
Watching the pigeons, he understood even less why birds were the favorite fauna of the English, but more about the local attitude toward what might be phrased monosyllabically: Hop. The girl he’d chosen for his trip down the Thames danced at the Windmill Theatre but had turned out to be a bishop’s illegitimate daughter; her mother, it appeared, had remained in the vestry of life. The girl and he spent the night togeth
er, not without some political conversation.
He began to seek the company of other children of misalliance like himself. Almost everybody these days seemed to think himself or herself one of them—it was too simple. The days passed with a rubble and a twink, from furnace-groan—they had central heating in a way—to cufflinks and all the other knickknack medley of domestic sounds and routines that so easily became the permanent nostalgias of life. If he were to choose the coziest, it began to be the crowd of teacups waiting in the pre-dark of the kitchen cabinet in Wiltshire, in the house he would never again see. His vocabulary changed again with a natter and a patter and the echo of dozens of words a man could never decently use but kept hearing, the wireless keeping up the class war anxiously, Cockney on the Underground like two whelks talking, and the toy talk of two homos in Soho, two somos in Oho saying, “Oh all that sort of thing and tiddly-pom.” England redivivus. He was no longer in agony. Travel had cured him, or repatriated him. Like a good native son, he began to think of France for a change, but since money was ever more pressing—returned to the States.
On his return, by boat, the skyline smashed his teacups. Ah, stunning life, he thought, as the cab sped him from the docks, and he waited with respect for this land to assault him. The torn selvage of all coastal cities fluttered by him, all estuaries of the same debris, of what rust could and did corrupt, shot through with a nostalgia of oceans deserted for the single dull thud of land. He passed under the very mammoth that had brought him. Brave flashed the luxury bric-a-brac shops—stores. He thought with dread of his long-sealed flat—apartment. All along, he knew quite well what was happening.
In the naphtha gloom of the garage where he waited for his storaged car to be brought down to him, he was assailed by a sudden vision of the real, the right and the primeval—some copper beeches he’d once seen, kneeling with them in their own root mast, their tops several golden heavens away, in the profound air of Sussex. The grass there, so green. He forced himself quickly to think of sequoias, trees on this side of the water, and only as far as next summer’s adventure. He promised himself; as an experienced traveler, he knew what he was dealing with. The movable fantasy—already on the move. In the melancholic of other returns, he applied honesty. To all the vanitie of space, he now replied. That no country really waits for one personally, on any side of the water, that the home one is the most topical of all. That all-travel—no matter how palmy, or how upflung the finny sail—is only an outer bruise on an innerness that speeds with light. He wasn’t thinking of, preaching to, anyone in particular, elsewhere.
Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel Page 5