Foreign Affairs

by Alison Lurie

  Another longer ring. Cautiously, she crawls out from under the down comforter and pads barefoot along the hall in her flannel nightgown and bathrobe. The light from the entryway spills down through the transom onto the cold black-and-white tiles, and Vinnie feels a shiver up her legs. Her vision of the unknown caller multiplies, and she imagines on the doorstep an aggregation of drunken vagrants, then a gang of mauve-haired teenage punks chanting foul rhymes.

  A third ring at the bell, more prolonged, somehow plaintive. It is spiritless of her to cower behind two locked doors like this, Vinnie thinks. London is not, like New York, an anonymously indifferent city. She is acquainted with her neighbors in the house; if she were to scream they would come hastening to see what was the matter, the way everyone (including Vinnie) did when the baby-sitter upstairs scalded herself last month. Holding her bathrobe closely around her, she opens the door of the flat.

  “Yes?” she calls shrilly. “Who is it?”

  “Professor Miner?” An American male voice, muffled by the heavy slab of oak that is the outer door.

  “Yes?” Her tone is less fearful now, more impatient.

  “It’s Chuck. Chuck Mumpson, from the plane. I hafta tell you something.”

  “Just a moment.” Vinnie stands considering. It must be well past eleven, an impossible hour for a social visit, and she hardly knows Chuck Mumpson. She hasn’t seen him since they had tea at Fortnum and Mason’s, though he phoned once to report on his genealogical search. (Following Vinnie’s advice, he had located a village in Wiltshire called South Leigh—“They spell it different, like you said they might”—and was planning to visit it.) If she tells him to go away, she can return to bed and get enough sleep to be in decent shape for her nine A.M. appointment at a primary school in South London. On the other hand, if he goes away he may never come back, and she will never know what he has found out about his ancestor the local folk figure.

  “I’ll be with you in a minute,” she calls.

  “Okay,” Chuck shouts back.

  Vinnie returns to the bedroom and gets back into the dress she wore to the opera. She pulls a brush through her hair and gives a critical, discouraged glance at her face; but neither it nor her guest seem worth the effort of makeup.

  Her first impression of Chuck as he steps into the light is unsettling: he looks ill, sagging, disheveled. His leathery tan has faded to a grayed pallor; his piebald hair, what there is of it, is uncombed; his awful plastic raincoat is creased and mildewed. As she shuts the door of the flat he sways and staggers sideways, then recovers and stands gazing into the hall mirror in a fixed, dull way.

  “Are you all right?” she asks.

  “No, I guess not.”

  Instinctively, Vinnie steps back.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not drunk or anything. I’d like to sit down, okay?”

  “Yes, of course. In here.” She switches on a lamp in the sitting room.

  “Been walking a long ways.” Chuck lowers himself heavily onto the sofa, which creaks under his weight; he is still breathing hard. “I saw your light, figured you were still up.”

  “Mm.” Vinnie doesn’t explain that she always keeps the desk lamp on in the study, which faces the street, in order to confound burglars. “Would you like a cup of coffee? Or a drink?”

  “Doesn’t matter. A drink, if you’ve got one.”

  “I think there’s some whisky.” In the kitchen Vinnie pours a rather weak Scotch and water and puts the kettle on so that she can have tea, wondering what disaster it is that has overtaken Chuck Mumpson.

  When she returns, he is still sitting there staring out into the room; he looks wrong and too large for her flat and for her sofa. “Wouldn’t you like to take off your raincoat?”

  “What?” Chuck blinks toward her. “Oh yeh.” He grins weakly. “Forgot.” He heaves himself up, peels off the stained plastic, and drops down again, looking no better. The jacket of his Western suit has been snapped together wrong, so that the left side is higher than the right, and one point of his collar sticks out at an angle. Vinnie makes no comment on this; Chuck Mumpson’s appearance is none of her concern.

  “Here you are.”

  Chuck takes the glass and sits holding it as if stupefied.

  “What’s happened?” Vinnie asks, both apprehensive and impatient. “Is it—your family?”

  “Nah. They’re all right. I guess. Haven’t heard lately.” Chuck looks at the glass of whisky, lifts it, swallows, lowers it, all in slow motion.

  “Did you find any ancestors in Wiltshire?”

  “Yeh.”

  “Well, that’s nice.” She adds more milk to her tea, to avert heartburn. “And did you find the wise man, the hermit?”

  “Yeh. I found him.”

  “That’s very good luck,” Vinnie remarks, wishing he would get the hell on with it. “Lots of Americans come over here to search for their forebears, you know, and most of them don’t find anything.”

  “Bullshit.” For the first time that evening Chuck speaks with his normal force, or more.

  “What?” Vinnie is startled; her china teacup rattles on its saucer.

  “The whole thing was bullshit, excuse me. The earl, the castle—My grandfather, he was just shooting me a line. Or somebody shot him one, maybe.”

  “Really.” Vinnie affects surprise, though on consideration it doesn’t seem strange that Chuck Mumpson isn’t descended from the English aristocracy. On the other hand, for her purposes it doesn’t matter whether his ancestor the hermit was an earl or not. “Yes, go on.”

  “Okay. Wal, I rented a car from that garage you recommended, and drove down into the country, to this South Leigh. It’s not much of a place: old church, a few houses. I checked into a hotel in a town near there. Then I went to the library, asked how I could get to see the parish registers for South Leigh, like you told me, and the tax records. I found a whole mess of Mumpsons, but they weren’t anybody special. Farmers, most of them, and none of them was named Charles. It took a hell of a long time. Everything kept being out of commission for different dumb reasons, like for instance it was Thursday afternoon. The whole place just shut down in the middle of the week. All the stores too. Hell, no wonder we’ve got so far ahead of them, right?”

  “Mm.” The last thing Vinnie wants at this time of night is to start an argument about the comparative economic achievements of America and Britain.

  “Anyhow, finally this antiquarian society was open. I talked to the secretary, and she found what looked like it might be the right place, a ways out in the country. Her book said a hermit used to live there, back at the end of the eighteenth century. It was on the estate of some people she’d met once, Colonel and Lady Jenkins their name was. So she called them up, and they invited me over. Mind if I smoke?”

  “No, go ahead.” Vinnie sighs. Usually she doesn’t allow cigarettes in her classroom, office, or home; when she gives a party she asks her nicotine-addicted guests to go outdoors or into another room.

  “I keep trying to quit.” Chuck takes out a pack. “The doctor says I hafta. But I get real crazy without cigarettes. Can’t sleep, can’t concentrate on anything.” He gives a light false laugh, strikes a match, inhales.

  “That’s too bad,” says Vinnie, who has often quietly (and on certain occasions noisily) prided herself on never having smoked.

  “Ahhh.” A foul, smelly, gray backwash issues from Chuck’s mouth. “Wal, we all gotta go some way.”

  With difficulty, Vinnie refrains from remarking that lung cancer and emphysema, according to all reports, are two of the most unpleasant methods of departure.

  “Anyhow, I had almost the whole day to kill before I could see Colonel Jenkins. I was hanging round the antiquarian society reading up on the local aristocracy, and I got into a conversation with this archaeologist guy. He’s working on a dig outside the town, where there used to be an old village. I mean really old, back in the Middle Ages. For him a couple of hundred years is like yesterday. He was finding some
stuff, only the best excavation site they had kept filling up with water. Nobody on his crew could figure out where it was coming from or what to do about it. Wal, that’s my line of work; at least it used to be.”

  A pained, plaintive note has entered Chuck’s voice. Vinnie recognizes it: it is the whistle of self-pity that has so often in the past called Fido to her. Perhaps because she is still a little blurry from sleep, she imagines Fido hearing it too under the sofa where he has been more or less hibernating for the past two months; waking, blinking open his huge mournful brown eyes.

  “Wal,” Chuck continues, “I said I’d go out and look his setup over. Turned out what they’d done was, they’d got one of the pumps hooked up wrong, so most of the water they took out was running right back into that excavation.

  “So this guy, Professor Gilson his name is, got his team together, and we moved the pipes, and the water started to go down. I felt real set up with myself. I got my camera and took a load of pictures of them and the site and some of the stuff they’d found. Then we all went and had a beer to celebrate, and then we had lunch in the local pub. Better food than I ever got in my London hotel by a long shot, and a lot cheaper too. I told everybody what I was doing in Wiltshire, and how I was going to locate my ancestor the earl that afternoon. Asshole that I was. I should’ve known what was coming, with my luck.”

  “Mm,” Vinnie says. The call is unmistakable now; Fido crawls out from under the sofa to lie at Chuck’s feet.

  “What I did instead was kinda went back to the hotel and got all spiffed up; I was muddy from the dig, and I wanted to look like I was related to a lord. I was disappointed at first when I saw the Jenkins’ place: it wasn’t my idea of a castle. No towers or moat or anything. But it was a great big old stone house, over two hundred years old I found out later, with a pediment and columns and sculptures of Roman emperors on the lawn with two-hundred-year-old moss growing on them. And the grass was like Astroturf sprinkled with little flowers. I thought, yeh, this’ll do okay. My head was full of blown-up ideas. I knew Colonel and Lady Jenkins had only owned the house for thirty years, so I figured my ancestors must have sold the place sometime. Maybe they were living somewhere else grander, or maybe they’d all died off by now. That’d be too bad in a way, because I wouldn’t get to meet them; but then maybe I’d turn out to be the long-lost heir, why not? I mean it could’ve been like that, right?”

  “I suppose so,” says Vinnie, distracted by her vision of Fido, who is now wagging his dirty-white tail and gazing eagerly up at Chuck.

  “Only it wasn’t. Colonel and Lady Jenkins knew all about it. They took me to see the hermitage down in the woods behind the house. It was what they called a grotto—sort of a natural cave in the rocks next to a stream, built out with cement and pebbles and shells into a kinda little stone room. It had an arched door and one window, and the back walls were dripping wet. It was full of moss and dead leaves and spiderwebs and a couple old pieces of furniture made out of logs with the bark still on, like you see in national parks, y’ know.”

  “Mm.”

  “Of course nobody lives there now, but they said there was a hermit once upon a time. Only he wasn’t any lord, he was just some old guy that was hired to stay in the grotto. Rich people used to do that back then, Colonel Jenkins told me, the same way a Tulsa businessman with a ten-acre ranch will buy himself a coupla horses or a few head of cattle: not for profit, just to make the place look good, to decorate it, like. So they bought this guy. The Jenkinses showed me a picture of the grotto, when it was new, in an old book. The hermit was standing in front of it, with a scraggy beard and long hair and a droopy straw hat like some old bag lady.”

  “Still, there’s no proof it was your ancestor,” Vinnie says.

  “It was him all right. He was called Old Mumpson, and he got twenty pounds a year and his board, it was all in the book. He couldn’t even write, he had to sign his name with an x, he was just a dirty old bum.”

  In Vinnie’s mind, Fido rises to his legs and places his front paws on Chuck’s knee. “But what about the story your grandfather told you?” she asks. “About your ancestor being a kind of wise man, and the cloak made out of a dozen kinds of fur?”

  “Who knows? It coulda been fur in the picture, you couldn’t tell for sure. Colonel and Lady Jenkins’d never heard any of that stuff, though they were interested, said they were going to write it all down. They were real nice to me. They gave me tea and cake and muffins and homemade jam. The jam was kind of a weird green color, but it tasted okay. It was made out of goose berries, whatever they are. And they showed me all over the place and answered all my questions. But I could tell they thought I was a poor dumb jerk, looking for earls in a dirty wet cave in the woods. They’re loaded with ancestors themselves, real ones. The house was full of oil paintings of them.”

  “That’s too bad,” Vinnie says, referring to her own frustration as well as Chuck’s.

  “It about knocked me out. First thing, I just wanted to get out of there. I drove to London and turned in the car and checked back into that hotel I stayed in before, near the Air Terminal, and all the time I felt worse and worse. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep or eat anything or even sit still in the room. Finally I went out for a walk. Didn’t have any idea where I was going, must’ve walked half over London. Then I thought of you.” He sags back against the sofa and falls silent.

  Research has its dangers, Vinnie thinks, looking at him. The study of children’s literature, for instance, has revealed to her a number of things she is glad she did not know as a child and is not very glad to know now: for instance, that Christopher Robin Milne’s schooldays were made miserable by his association with the Pooh books; or that The Wind in the Willows is full of Tory paranoia about the working class. Some adult fantasies, such as Chuck Mumpson’s belief in an aristocratic ancestor, might also be better left alone.

  “Well, of course it’s a disappointment.” Vinnie speaks briskly so as not to encourage Fido. “But I can’t really see why you’re so upset. After all, most people don’t have ancestors. Some of them don’t even have descendants.” Fido turns his head and gives Vinnie a hopeful look. “I mean, you’re no worse off now than you were before.”

  “That’s what you think.” Chuck gives a suppressed groan that reengages Fido’s total attention. “You don’t know what it’ll mean for me back in Tulsa. Myrna’s relations, they’re high-class people: got charts of their family going back to before the Revolution. They’ve always snooted me. They didn’t like what I came from or my language or the kinda jobs I had. Sanitary engineer, Myrna’s mother thought that was a dirty word. She told Myrna once it always reminded her of sanitary napkin.”

  “Really,” says Vinnie, forming a negative opinion of Myrna’s relatives’ claims to gentility.

  “And her sister, she’s a psychologist, got a degree from Stanford University. She said to Myrna the reason I missed my job so bad was my mind was stuck at the age of three, and secretly all I wanted was an excuse to play with my poo-poo.”

  “Really.” Vinnie says again, but this time with some indignation.

  “After Amalgamated flushed me out it was worse. It was ‘Wal, Myrna, I always told you so.’”

  “I suppose everyone has relatives like that,” Vinnie says, though in fact she does not. It was her so-called friends, rather, who had warned her that her husband was still carrying the torch for his former girlfriend and that her marriage wouldn’t last—and had later reminded her of how prescient they had been. “You’ve simply got to ignore them.”

  “Yeh. I try. But Myrna doesn’t. When I couldn’t find another job she figured her sister was right all along. Thought I wasn’t making an effort. Hell, I must’ve sent out near a hundred inquiries and résumés. But the thing of it is, nobody wants to hire a guy who’s fifty-six, fifty-seven. The benefit package is too expensive, and you naturally figure he’s past his best effort. Hell, I used to think that way myself.”

  “Mm,” Vinnie sa
ys, remembering certain meetings of the tenure staff of her department. “I suppose many people do.”

  “After a while I about gave up. I started drinking too much, mostly at night at first, when I couldn’t sleep. It was better then. The place was quiet, and I didn’t have to talk to Myrna, or watch the maid hustling around, following me all over the house with the damn vacuum cleaner. If I felt real bad, I’d keep at the booze till I passed out. Some days I didn’t get out of bed till the middle of the next afternoon. Or I’d get in the car and drive, most of the night sometimes, going nowhere like a goddamn rat out of hell. I mean bat.” Chuck laughs awkwardly. “So then I was in this smashup.”

  “Yes,” Vinnie prompts after a minute, but he does not continue. “An accident? Were you hurt?”

  “Naw; nothing much. I—. Never mind. It was bad. I totaled the car, and the cops took me in for DWI. That about finished it for Myrna. She used to like me pretty well once, but after that she didn’t even want to look at me. She couldn’t wait to get me on that plane. She’s ashamed of me now, they all are. Greg and Barbie too.” Fido, triumphant, puts his paws on Chuck’s shoulders and enthusiastically licks his broad weatherbeaten face.

  “Oh, I don’t think—” Vinnie says, and stops. Maybe Chuck’s wife and grown children are ashamed of him; how should she know?

  “That’s why I didn’t go home with the damn package tour. I was sick as hell of London, but I couldn’t face Tulsa again. I kept thinking, the best thing for everybody would be if I never came back. Myrna would carry on, but she’d be relieved really. She’d be free, and she’d be respectable. There’s this developer, this fat guy she sold a big land parcel to for a shopping plaza, that has a crush on her and a lot of dough and big political ambitions. Myrna would take to that: she always wanted me to run for some office. Her family would’ve put up the cash, only I couldn’t see it; I never liked politicians. But this guy’s also got born-again Christian principles, and real conservative fundamentalist backing. He could marry a widow, but not a divorcee.