Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books)

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  I was as young as you are, as ardent as you are, as idealistic as you are, and when the Revolution came, I rejoiced, I was exalted, I felt fulfilled.

  When our family’s little landholding was taken, I was glad. My parents fled to Germany where they had relatives. I was sorry about that, but I rejoiced to see the family business taken over by the local Revolutionary council. Within six months, the business was closed forever, its assets drained and dispersed. Again, I was glad, relieved of the guilt of my comfortable young life — relieved at my old parents’ expense. Yet I thought I was seeing justice done.

  Until later, when even I had to admit in horror that what I saw about me was not justice but madness, bloodthirst, and greed without limit. The promised new order arrived and devoured everything in its path.

  I, fortunately, was too small to be noticed, and I had the sense to leave Paris after the fall of Robespierre, for I saw that the wave of revolutionary madness had crested and that retribution, terrible retribution, must follow. So that too — the worst of the reaction — I escaped, by going quietly home to the country.

  Good luck and obscurity preserved me. My once-despised provincial cousins here took me in and spoke for me. With their aid and support I was able to live out the upheavals following Robespierre’s death. I know you have never cared for Cousin Henri, and it is true that he has engaged in certain ambiguous practices in his grain business and has profited greatly while others have gone to the wall.

  Yet, I owe him a great deal, for he helped me when I came wearily home, a fugitive from my own precious Revolution gone mad.

  Living under Henri’s protection, making myself as useful as I could in my native province, I began to see how simple-minded we young men had been in Paris, blinded by our radical ideals. I do not mean that I ever condoned the vengeful blood-letting of the White Terror, but I did begin to understand the furious anti-Revolutionary resentment from which it sprang. A conviction possessed me that we with our youthful, foolish, longing hearts had brought our country to her knees under a horde of profiteers and madmen, and I was filled with despair and shame. In the end, I did not oppose the White Terror by word or deed. I learned to be humble and to hold my peace. It is a lesson that I hope you can learn at less cost.

  Cousin Henri obtained for me a place as a schoolmaster in a nearby village. I worked. I was cold and silent, and I knew others like me, men whom I avoided and who avoided me. I ventured to write some pamphlets concerning the importance of the rule of law. Recognition came. I was cheered, though surprised, to find myself appointed a defender of the law, a member of the courts of the Emperor Napoleon’s government. I married your mother, a worthy woman, and in time came to love her, as I think even you will not deny.

  And yes, it is true, I continued to accept such advances as came to me, for I saw that they gave pleasure to my wife, and then I trust for a time at least to my sole surviving child, yourself. And I have remained here, in the quiet of my native province, working and writing and never more pleased than when no notice is taken of me, and in this, believe me, I am far from unique.

  There are no old revolutionaries, unless you count LaFayette, who is, I think, a little mad. In making our Revolution in l789 we unmade ourselves, and we have become something else: chastened failures who cannot be profitably judged by the standards of idealistic, romantic youth.

  As for my dead friends, I honor and mourn them. They were hotter souls than I, truer to their visions, consumed while still steadfast. I no longer think of myself as one of the heroes who will set all right; and so, my dear son, I will not aid you in attempting to bring about a new revolt, a new “new order,” a return to the Revolution. Indeed, I must set my face against you in this, for I have passed once through such an upheaval, and I tremble to contemplate the approach of yet another.

  I realize that now, in your youth, you look back on my times with romantic longing. You see these new agitations for reform and revolution throughout Europe as a revival of the glorious aspirations of those days. My son, I do not begrudge you the wish to take hold of such vital currents yourself. It is only that you are wrong. Not wrong in your objections — I agree that the gains of the Republic are being destroyed by the return of the restored King and the aristocrats. But do not ask me to write articles saying so for your outlawed newspapers, do not ask me to intervene on behalf of your radical friends when they are arrested, do not ask me to join you in a hopeless battle.

  These days like Candide I cultivate my garden, a lesson I might have taken from Voltaire at the outset had I been wiser and less idealistic. And I uphold the law — imperfect as it is — rather than invite the return of bloody chaos.

  As for your friend Moran the publisher, I have nothing to say, other than that it was foolish of you to send him to me. Whoever pried into my past and revealed to you the radical nature of my early career did not look deep enough, for that is all over. I have made my peace with the present. Therefore, I have turned Moran over to the local authorities to be returned to Paris for trial. If he — or you — persist in printing rabble-rousing attacks on the present government, he — or you — must be prepared to take the consequences. And I do not intend to play a part in assuring that those consequences should be a new destruction of the public order. Quite the opposite. My past to the contrary, or rather directly on account of the lessons of my past, I stand for stability, for humble devotion to my own work and affairs, and for peace even at the price of some injustice, for fear of the alternative that I have seen made real: injustice beyond imagining and constant warfare.

  So send me, I beg you, no more fugitives and no more inflammatory letters or articles. Come instead yourself. Leave the hotbed of reformism that Paris has always been and return to the true France, a land of pious and tradition-minded countrymen and townsmen who go about their business without any passion for change.

  I am completing my book on the law as I have known it, my own modest contribution to the world, I believe. I wish you would read it. Since you are to judge me, as all children judge their parents, I would have you judge not by my past nor by some imaginary reformist career that you wish on me now, but by the work that I have lately chosen to occupy my time and engage my declining energies.

  Your mother joins me in the earnest hope that you will come soon to see us and share a meal and perhaps some quiet talk in what is now and forever your home.

  In love and farewell, your father.

  Dorothea ceased reading, her lips trembling, her throat hoarse. Ricky said nothing. She looked up and saw his bony profile, his sunken eyes fixed on the hills beyond the patio wall.

  “You saw me write all this?” she whispered. She watched the slow focusing of his mind and eyes upon her.

  “Ricky, you’re crying,” she said stupidly.

  “Weeping,” he croaked, blotting at his eyes with his cuff. “Crying is noisy, it involves the voice. Why can’t you Americans ever learn these distinctions?”

  Near tears herself, she cried, “Oh, for God’s sake —!” She got up and hugged her robe around herself. She was cold. In shock, she thought numbly. I believe I’m in shock. “I’m going back to bed,” she said.

  He blinked at her, eyes still red-rimmed, as she went shivering past him.

  He came and stood by her bed a moment, and then got in with her and drew her against him, closing his hands over her icy ones. For a long time they lay like that. She had almost dozed off when she felt him shift suddenly and realized that it was his erection that had been prodding her thigh, and that he was embarrassed and was trying to conceal it.

  But why, when her own body was suddenly flush with appetite, ravenous and clamoring? “Ricky,” she whispered, “would you like to make love?”

  “God, yes,” he groaned, his whole body contracting possessively about her.

  “Then let’s get up and brush our teeth first so we can do it properly,” she said.

  They did. They made long, slow, careful love, burning away for a while the chilly voi
ce of that other life and time in the intensity of their absorption with each other. At the end she lay on her side with Ricky behind her, for he had no strength to hold himself above her. With her feet braced between his long, sharp shins, her body arched up and out, her arms stretched down her sides to clasp the backs of his hands where he held and steadied her hips, like a ship’s figurehead she rode his thrusts.

  Seated on a cushion on the floor, Ricky looked through Dorothea’s LPs for something to listen to over the thunderstorms that had come on with the sunset.

  Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, the first suite? A bit too youthful and dreamy and overblown, he thought, for an old man like me. Ah, but he had not been too old today. They had made love again, late in the afternoon, and to his joy and astonishment he had been up to it. She had come rolling into his arms with a great sigh, and perhaps it was from her happy confidence that he had drawn his own strength. Afterward he’d hiked up on his elbows, shaking his head at the optimism of his cock, which stood glistening at half-mast and twitching slightly as if minded to have another go.

  “Incredible,” he said. “Here I am, tottering toward my grave, and there’s this rooster as eager as he was at twenty. Pity I can’t set him loose, somehow, free him from this foundering hulk he’s hitched to; Noah releasing the dove.”

  “A totally different situation,” Dorothea had murmured, “and besides, this bird wouldn’t get far; not flapping those fat, round, hairy little wings, it wouldn’t!” And she had hooted into his shoulder. Fat, round wings indeed!

  Now, sitting in the storm-light after dinner, he realized that that moment had been the first in which he had felt any affection for his own body since sentence had been pronounced.

  “Ravel, perhaps?” he said. “ La Valse? No; we’ve got enough of the French on our plate as it is.”

  She was sitting at the little chess table by the window, studying the long yellow pages of their translation of the letter. How tired she looked, he thought with a pang; slouched there in her old corduroys and a gracefully shapeless cotton sweater of faded maroon. “Well,” she said, “this has got to come out of the late 1820s, don’t you think? Working up to the revolt in 1832.”

  Tired but not the least bit scared. She amazed him. Here they had this incredible document in their hands, a product of her mind and hand, and she pored over it like a student. But then she had been living for years with the amazing products of her own mind; he must not forget that. He must not forget how remarkable she was; not with the ordinary remarkableness of someone you’re in love with, but with the special quality of the creative spirit and the self-reflective mind. If anything, he thought, she must be intensely relieved to have something concrete in her hands, something besides her own memories of her dreams.

  “That sounds like the right period,” he said. Rain stippled the window behind her. She looked wonderful against the gray pane, whisps of hair curling on her nape. “Dorothea, I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve reconsidered, and I’d like to stay on a bit. I mean, in the light of that letter —”

  She shot him a wide, innocent glance. “You mean the sex isn’t good enough to hold you?”

  He blushed and stammered, and she rescued him with her mischievous laughter that dissolved him into helpless, red-faced laughter of his own. Then, seriously, she went on, “So it goes like this: first the wicked Old Regime, then the Revolution, then that’s captured and turned into the despotism of the First Empire by Napoleon. Then he’s defeated in, what, l8l7? And the French monarchy is restored. The aristocrats who fled come swarming back and try to reinstate their Old Regime privileges, and the tension between them and the liberals who want to preserve the gains of the Revolution leads to a succession of messy little uprisings in the l830s, right? Which is what it sounds as if our judge is trying to warn his kid to stay clear of.”

  “You’ve been reading my books.”

  She looked modestly smug. “I once knew all this stuff forwards and backwards, as a matter of fact, from reading about it in college — diaries, propaganda, novels, histories, the lot. Then it all slipped out of my head, but here we are again. Peculiar, isn’t it?”

  “Peculiar,” he repeated dryly. “Yes. And you Yanks call us Brits ‘masters of understatement!’ You do realize that we can’t do a damn thing with that letter; nothing public, that is. We’d be branded a pair of dotty old frauds.”

  She said, “I don’t want to go to anyone with it. This is ours, my dear; yours and mine and nobody else’s. We’ve earned it.”

  “And now?” he said, sliding a record from its sleeve. “How about Brahms?”

  “Good,” she said. “A good background for my theory.”

  “Ah,” he said, “I knew you had a theory.”

  “Yes. I think that the judge is someone from your family history, maybe an unknown or even an illegitimate kinsman. I think that he’s been trying to break through to you using my dreams because you’re too closed to him to receive his communications in any form. He’s using the material of his lifetime in the Revolution and after because he can get through to me that way on account of my past interest in that period. Also because there’s such a strong emotional charge attached to that time for him that it boosts his signal to an intensity that even I can pick up, though believe me, I’m no psychic!”

  “And the aim of this excessively roundabout method of communication?” he said with some asperity. The piano quintet began, flowing into him like liquid gold in his veins. He was ashamed of his own sharpness as soon as he had spoken.

  “To assure you, my dear,” she said in a tone of infinite gentleness, “that it isn’t all over when you die. And maybe that drifting around the world drinking tea with strangers is a good way to spend a lifetime — better than trying to make a revolution, for example.”

  “And,” he said, “that perhaps also that it’s a good idea to communicate with one’s kind in the more conventional ways — letters, phone-calls, even face-to-face conversations — while one still can?”

  “You know how I feel about that,” she said. “And how I’ll miss you if you do decide to go home. Hey, come on over here and give me a game, will you? I’m tired to death of looking over and over these pages.”

  He hoisted himself to his feet, leaning on the phonograph cabinet — it’s only love, you know, he told himself, not remission — and crossed the room to sit opposite her at the little game table with its inlaid top.

  “I’m not sure,” he said severely, “that I’m willing to accept that old bastard as an ancestor of mine, no matter how obscurely connected. Judging by that self-serving, brazen attempt to justify himself, I’d say he was the worst sort of radical-turned-reactionary, probably as corrupt and cynical as they came, which was impressively corrupt and cynical, if you read Balzac, for instance. Which crooked politician of the time was it who provided the slogan of the whole post-Napoleonic age in France — ‘Enrichez vous!’ he said. Make yourself rich if you can. Pack of damned war-profiteers and heartless exploiters if ever there was one.”

  “That’s exactly why I’m inclined to believe it,” Dorothea said. “Because he’s an ordinary, even a less-than-admirable type.” She held out her hands, and he chose the white piece. “Your move,” she said.

  He studied the board. “You know,” he said, “I’ve known some odd occurrences. I don’t discount any possibility beforehand. But frankly, I don’t think I need reassurance so badly as to warrant all this effort. People die. I am a person. I shall die. Why all the fuss?”

  Did his voice sound bitter? He hoped not.

  “I’m not competent to answer that,” she said. “To me, any amount of fuss seems perfectly appropriate if it will make things better for you.”

  Lightning flared in the echo of thunder, frosting her hair with an icy light.

  “Did you dream last night?” he said.

  “No.”

  “What if it’s all over? Maybe now you’ve got the message, and the judge can stop trying so hard. Or maybe sex defuse
s it.”

  “It’ll be over,” she said, jumping two of his pieces, “when we don’t just theorize but understand. If we ever do.”

  “We will,” he said. “If I’m lucky, I’ll see it. If not, once I’m dead I’ll know the answer, won’t I? Just up and put it to the judge, as one ghost to another, what have you been after with all this? Then I’ll come back and enlighten you. In your dreams.”

  “Pax,” she said. “You’re cutting close to the bone.” She turned to the black, wet window. The music — he had forgotten it — rippled limpidly. He sighed. The point was not to win surrender from her. That was not the point at all. He loathed his meanness. She seemed not even to notice it, for she went on, “There is one possibility that we haven’t considered, which is that I am as crazy as a bedbug and simply hallucinating madly in my sleep, and that you’re taking it seriously out of an excess of good manners — the perfect guest.”

  He said, “You are not crazy, and I am most certainly not perfect.”

  They played three games, growing absorbed. At ten-thirty the rain stopped. She sat back from the table. “I’m going to bed. Will you come with me?”

  He had been wondering whether this moment would come. He avoided her eyes. “You don’t have to,” he said awkwardly. “Just because we — I wouldn’t want you to feel in any way obliged —”

  “I don’t. I feel damned lucky.”

  She touched the lump under the skin of his lower belly and could not prevent herself from checking for an instant: this was it, the killer, death under her touch.

  They went on without speaking of it. She came, but he didn’t.

  “Not to worry,” he said, after. “Effect of the medication, probably.” His bony arm lay across her ribs, amazingly heavy. The he added, “Doesn’t it put you off a bit — this moribund carcass —”

  His breath lightly feathered her shoulder, warm brush and warm brush again, while still inside her his penis wilted with small, creeping movements. Live breath, live flesh: she had not been making love with Death and must not let him think that way. Except that she had felt a lurch of panic in herself when she had touched that enigmatic lump.