Family Furnishings

by Alice Munro

  Those sisters—Clara and Elisa—had been startled the first day Sophia entered their sitting room on her way to the study. The servant who admitted her had not been trained to be selective, because those in the house lived such a retired life, also because the students who came were often shabby and unmannerly, so that the standards of most respectable houses did not apply. Even so, there had been some hesitation in the maid’s voice before she admitted this small woman whose face was mostly hidden by a dark bonnet and who moved in a frightened way, like a shy mendicant. The sisters could get no idea of her real age but concluded—after she was admitted to the study—that she might be some student’s mother, come to haggle or beg about the fees.

  “My goodness,” said Clara, whose speculations were the more lively, “my goodness, we thought, what have we here, is it a Charlotte Corday?”

  This was all told to Sophia later, when she had become their friend. And Elisa added drily, “Fortunately our brother was not in his bath. And we could not get up to protect him because we were all wrapped up in those endless mufflers.”

  They had been knitting mufflers for the soldiers at the front. It was 1870, before Sophia and Vladimir took what they meant to be their study trip to Paris. So deep they were then in other dimensions, past centuries, so scant their attention to the world they lived in, that they had scarcely heard of a contemporary war.

  Weierstrass had no more idea than his sisters of Sophia’s age or mission. He told her afterwards that he had thought her some misguided governess who wanted to use his name, claiming mathematics among her credentials. He was thinking he must scold the maid, and his sisters, for letting her break in on him. But he was a courteous and kindly man, so instead of sending her away at once, he explained that he took only advanced students, with recognized degrees, and that he had at the moment as many of those as he could handle. Then, as she remained standing—and trembling—in front of him, with that ridiculous hat shading her face and her hands clutching her shawl, he remembered the method, or trick, he had used once or twice before, to discourage an inadequate student.

  “What I am able to do in your case,” he said, “is to set you a series of problems, and ask you to solve them and bring them back to me one week from today. If they are done to my satisfaction, we will talk again.”

  A week from that day he had forgotten all about her. He had expected, of course, never to see her again. When she came into his study he did not recognize her, perhaps because she had cast off the cloak that had disguised her slender figure. She must have felt bolder, or perhaps the weather had changed. He had not remembered the hat—his sisters had—but he had not much of an eye for female accessories. But when she pulled the papers out of her bag and set them down on his desk, he remembered, and sighed, and put on his spectacles.

  Great was his surprise—he told her this too at a later time—to see that every one of the problems had been solved, and sometimes in an entirely original way. But he suspected her still, thinking now that she must be presenting the work of someone else, perhaps a brother or lover who was in hiding for political reasons.

  “Sit down,” he said. “And now explain to me each of these solutions, every step taken.”

  She began to talk, leaning forward, and the floppy hat fell over her eyes, so she pulled it off and let it lie on the floor. Her curls were revealed, her bright eyes, her youth, and her shivering excitement.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes. Yes. Yes.” He spoke with ponderous consideration, hiding as well as he could his astonishment, especially at the solutions whose method diverged most brilliantly from his own.

  She was a shock to him in many ways. She was so slight and young and eager. He felt that he must soothe her, hold her carefully, letting her learn how to manage the fireworks in her own brain.

  All his life—he had difficulty saying this, as he admitted, being always wary of too much enthusiasm—all his life he had been waiting for such a student to come into this room. A student who would challenge him completely, who was not only capable of following the strivings of his own mind but perhaps of flying beyond them. He had to be careful about saying what he really believed—that there must be something like intuition in a first-rate mathematician’s mind, some lightning flare to uncover what has been there all along. Rigorous, meticulous, one must be, but so must the great poet.

  When he finally brought himself to say all this to Sophia, he also said that there were those who would bridle at the very word, “poet,” in connection with mathematical science. And others, he said, who would leap at the notion all too readily, to defend a muddle and laxity in their own thinking.

  —

  AS SHE HAD EXPECTED, there was deeper and deeper snow outside the train windows as they travelled east. This was a second-class train, quite spartan in comparison with the train she had taken from Cannes. There was no dining car, but cold buns—some filled with various spicy sausages—were available from the tea wagon. She bought a cheese-filled bun half the size of a boot and thought she would never finish it, but in time she did. Then she got out her little volume of Heine, to assist in bringing the German language to the surface of her mind.

  Every time she lifted her eyes to the window it seemed that the snow fell more thickly, and sometimes the train slowed, almost stopping. They would be lucky at this rate to reach Berlin by midnight. She wished that she had not let herself be talked out of going to a hotel, instead of to the house on Potsdam Street.

  “It will do poor Karl so much good just to have you for one night under the same roof. He still thinks of you as the little girl on our doorstep, even though he gives great credit to your achievements and takes pride in your great success.”

  —

  IT WAS IN FACT after midnight when she rang the bell. Clara came, in her wrapper, having sent the servant to bed. Her brother—she said this in a half whisper—had been wakened by the noise of the cab and Elisa had gone to settle him down and to assure him that he would see Sophia in the morning.

  The word “settle” sounded ominous to Sophia. The sisters’ letters had mentioned nothing but a certain fatigue. And Weierstrass’s own letters had held no personal news, being full of Poincaré and his—Weierstrass’s—duty to mathematics in making matters clear to the king of Sweden.

  Now hearing the old woman’s voice take that little pious or fearful drop as she mentioned her brother, now smelling the once-familiar and reassuring but tonight faintly stale and dreary odors of that house, Sophia felt that teasing was not perhaps so much in order as it used to be, that she herself had brought not only the cold fresh air, but some bustle of success, an edge of energy, of which she had been quite unaware, and which might be a little daunting and disturbing. She who used to be welcomed with hugs and robust pleasure (one of the surprises about the sisters was how jolly they could be yet how conventional) was still hugged, but with tears standing in faded eyes, with old arms trembling.

  But there was warm water in the jug in her room, there was bread and butter on her night table.

  As she undressed she could hear faintly agitated whispering out in the upper hall. It might have been about their brother’s state or about herself or about the absence of a cover on the bread and butter, which maybe had not been noticed until Clara ushered her into her room.

  —

  WHEN SHE WORKED with Weierstrass, Sophia had lived in a small dark apartment, most of the time with her friend Julia, who was studying chemistry. They did not go to concerts or plays—they had limited funds and were absorbed by their work. Julia did go out to a private laboratory where she had obtained privileges hard for a woman to get. Sophia spent day after day at her writing table, not rising from her chair sometimes till the lamp had to be lit. Then she would stretch and walk, quickly, quickly, from one end of the apartment to the other—a short enough distance—sometimes breaking into a run and talking aloud, bursting into nonsense, so that anybody who did not know her as well as Julia did would wonder if she was sane.

&nbs
p; Weierstrass’s thoughts, and now hers, were concerned with elliptic and Abelian functions, and the theory of analytic functions based on their representation as an infinite series. The theory named for him contended that every bounded infinite sequence of real numbers has a convergent subsequence. In this she followed him and later challenged him and even for a time jumped ahead of him, so that they progressed from being teacher and pupil to being fellow mathematicians, she being often the catalyst to his investigations. But this relationship took time to develop, and at the Sunday suppers—to which she was invited readily because he had given up his Sunday afternoons to her—she was like a young relation, an eager protégée.

  When Julia came she was invited as well, and the two girls were fed roast meat and creamed potatoes and light delectable puddings that upset all the ideas that they had about German cooking. After the meal they sat by the fire and heard Elisa read aloud. She read with great spirit and expression from the stories of the Swiss writer Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. Literature was the weekly treat, after all the knitting and mending.

  At Christmas there was a tree for Sophia and Julia, though the Weierstrasses themselves had not bothered about one for years. There were bonbons wrapped in glittery paper, and fruitcake and roast apples. As they said, for the children.

  But there came before long a disturbing surprise.

  —

  THE SURPRISE WAS that Sophia, who seemed the very image of a shy and inexperienced young girl, should have a husband. In the first few weeks of her lessons, before Julia arrived, she had been picked up at their door, on Sunday nights, by a young man who was not introduced to the Weierstrass family and was taken to be a servant. He was tall and unattractive, with a thin red beard, a large nose, untidy clothes. In fact, if the Weierstrasses had been more worldly, they would have realized that no self-respecting noble family—which they knew Sophia’s to be—would have such an unkempt servant, and that therefore he must be a friend.

  Then Julia came, and the young man disappeared.

  It was some time later that Sophia released the information that he was named Vladimir Kovalevsky and that she was married to him. He was studying in Vienna and Paris though he already had a law degree and had been trying to make his way in Russia as a publisher of textbooks. He was several years older than Sophia.

  Almost as surprising as this news was the fact that Sophia gave it out to Weierstrass and not to the sisters. In the household they were the ones who had some dealings with life—if only in the lives of their servants and the reading of fairly up-to-date fiction. But Sophia had not been a favorite with her mother or her governess. Her negotiations with the General had not always been successful but she respected him and thought that perhaps he respected her. So it was to the man of the house that she turned with an important confidence.

  She realized that Weierstrass must have been embarrassed—not when she was talking to him but when he had to tell his sisters. For there was more to it than the fact that Sophia was married. She was well and legally married, but it was a White Marriage—a thing he had never heard of, nor the sisters either. Husband and wife not only did not live in the same place, they did not live together at all. They did not marry for the universally accepted reasons but were bound by their secret vow never to live in that way, never to—

  “Consummate?” Perhaps it would be Clara who said this. Briskly, even impatiently, to get the moment over with.

  Yes. And young people—young women—who wanted to study abroad were compelled to go through with this deception because no Russian woman who was unmarried could leave the country without her parents’ consent. Julia’s parents were enlightened enough to let her go, but not Sophia’s.

  What a barbarous law.

  Yes. Russian. But some young women found their way around this with the help of young men who were very idealistic and sympathetic. Perhaps they were anarchists as well. Who knows?

  It was Sophia’s older sister who had located one of these young men, and she and a friend of hers set up a meeting with him. Their reasons were perhaps political, rather than intellectual. God knows why they took Sophia along—she had no passion for politics and did not think herself ready for any such venture. But the young man looked over the two older girls—the sister named Aniuta however businesslike could not disguise her beauty—and he said no. No, I do not wish to go through with this contract with either of you estimable young ladies, but I would agree to do so with your younger sister.

  “Possibly he thought the older ones would be troublesome”—it might be Elisa who said this, with her experience of novels—“particularly the beauty. He fell in love with our little Sophia.”

  Love is not supposed to enter into it, Clara may have reminded her.

  Sophia accepts the proposal. Vladimir calls upon the General, to ask the hand of his younger daughter in marriage. The General is polite, aware the young man comes from a good family, though he has not so far made much of a mark in the world. But Sophia is too young, he says. Does she even know of these intentions?

  Yes, said Sophia, and she was in love with him.

  The General said that they could not act on their feelings immediately but must spend some time, some very considerable time, getting to know each other at Palibino. (They were at present in Petersburg.)

  Things were at a standstill. Vladimir would never make a good impression. He did not try hard enough to disguise his radical views and he dressed badly, as if on purpose. The General was confident that the more Sophia saw of this suitor, the less she would want to marry him.

  Sophia, however, was making plans of her own.

  There came a day on which her parents were giving an important dinner party. They had invited a diplomat, professors, military comrades of the General’s from the School of Artillery. Amidst all the bustle Sophia was able to slip away.

  She went out alone into the streets of Petersburg, where she had never walked before without a servant or a sister. She went to Vladimir’s lodgings in a part of the city where poor students lived. The door was opened to her at once, and as soon as she was inside she sat down and wrote a letter to her father.

  “My dear father, I have gone to Vladimir and will remain here. I beg you that you will no longer oppose our marriage.”

  All were seated at the table before Sophia’s absence was noticed. A servant found her room empty. Aniuta was asked about her sister and flushed as she answered that she knew nothing. To hide her face she dropped her napkin.

  The General was handed a note. He excused himself and left the room. Sophia and Vladimir were soon to hear his angry footsteps outside their door. He told his compromised daughter and the man for whom she was willing to forfeit her reputation to come with him at once. They rode home, all three without a word, and at the dinner table he said, “Allow me to introduce to you my future son-in-law, Vladimir Kovalevsky.”

  So it was done. Sophia was overjoyed, not indeed to be marrying Vladimir but to be pleasing Aniuta by striking a blow for the emancipation of Russian women. There was a conventional and splendid wedding in Palibino, and the bride and groom went off to live under one roof in Petersburg.

  And once their way was clear they went abroad and did not continue to live under one roof anymore. Heidelberg, then Berlin for Sophia, Munich for Vladimir. He visited Heidelberg when he could, but after Aniuta and her friend Zhanna arrived there, and Julia—all four women theoretically under his protection—there was not enough room for him any longer.

  Weierstrass did not reveal to the women that he had been in correspondence with the General’s wife. He had written to her when Sophia returned from Switzerland (really from Paris) looking so worn and frail that he was concerned for her health. The mother had replied, informing him that it was Paris, in these most dangerous times, that was responsible for her daughter’s state. But she seemed less upset by the political upheaval her daughters had lived through than by the revelations that one of them, while unmarried, lived openly with a man, and the other,
properly wed, did not truly live with her husband at all. So he was made rather against his will to be the mother’s confidant even before he was the daughter’s. And indeed he told Sophia nothing about this until her mother was dead.

  But when he did tell her at last, he told her also that Clara and Elisa had asked immediately what was to be done.

  This seemed to be the way of women, he had said, to assume that something should be done.

  He had replied, quite severely, “Nothing.”

  —

  IN THE MORNING Sophia took a clean though crumpled frock out of her bag—she had never learned how to pack tidily—fixed her curly hair as well as she could to hide some little patches of gray, and came downstairs to the sounds of a household already astir. Her place was the only one still set in the dining room. Elisa brought in the coffee and the first German breakfast that Sophia had ever eaten in this house—cold sliced meat and cheese and thickly buttered bread. She said that Clara was upstairs preparing their brother for his meeting with Sophia.

  “At first we had the barber come in,” she said. “But then Clara learned to do it quite well. She turned out to be the one who has the skills of a nurse, it is fortunate one of us has them.”

  Even before she said this Sophia had sensed that they were short of money. The damask and net curtains had a dingy look, the silver knife and fork she used had not recently been polished. Through the open door to the sitting room a rough-looking young girl, their present servant, was visible cleaning out the grate and raising clouds of dust. Elisa looked her way, as if to ask her to shut the door, then got up and did it herself. She came back to the table with a flushed, downcast face, and Sophia asked hastily, if rather impolitely, what was the illness of Herr Weierstrass?