“Oh, it was all right when we were tramping around looking at those damned churches,” she said. “But right from the beginning I knew it was going wrong. I felt something in him – a sort of disapproval of me. Everything he’d liked until now he started to criticize. Those Catholics – they always go back to what they were. Sex was wrong, living was wrong. Only God was O.K. He said why didn’t I work, why didn’t I start training to be a nurse. He said there was a world shortage of nurses. ‘You could be having a useful life,’ he said. It was horrible, Potter. I just don’t know what went wrong. I thought maybe he’d met a girl he liked better than me. I kept fishing, but he wouldn’t say. He was comparing – I could tell that. He said, ‘All you ever think about is your lunch and your breakfast’ – something like that.”
Piotr said, “What is the business he so enjoys running?”
“Watch straps.”
“Watch straps?”
“That’s what he was doing in Italy. Buying them. We were in Florence, Milan. Venice was the holiday part. You should have seen the currency he smuggled in – Swiss, American. The stuff was falling out of his pockets like oak leaves. His mind was somewhere else the whole time. We weren’t really together. We were just two travellers who happened to be sharing a room.”
“You didn’t happen to find yourself in the same bed?” said Piotr. He moved the ashtray out of the way and edged a box of paper handkerchiefs into its place. Although her face did not crumple or her voice change, tears were forming and spilling along her cheek and nose.
“Oh, sometimes, after a good dinner. He said a horrible thing. He said, ‘Sometimes I can’t bear to touch you.’ No, no, we were just two travellers,” she said, blowing her nose. “We each had our own toothpaste, he had his cake of soap. I didn’t bring any soap and when we were moving around, changing hotels, he’d pack his before I’d even had my bath. I’d be there in the bathtub and he’d already packed his soap. He’d always been nice before. I just don’t know. I’ll never understand it. Potter, I can’t face going out. I haven’t eaten all day, but I still can’t face it. Could you just heat some water and pour it over a soup cube for me?”
“Watch straps,” said Piotr in a language she could not understand. He turned on the little electric plate. “Watch straps.”
“He pretended he was doing it for me,” said Laurie, lying flat on her back now. “Letting me go so I could create my own life. Those Catholics. He just wanted to be free for some other reason. To create his, I suppose.”
“Is he still young enough for that?” said Piotr. “To create a whole life?”
“He’s younger than you are, if that’s young.”
“I thought it might have been a much older person,” said Piotr. “Your first friend of all. He took you home for holidays, out of Bishop Purse.”
“That one. No-o-o. What finally happened with him was, his wife got sick. She got this awful facial neuralgia. It made a saint out of him. Believe me, Potter, when you get mixed up with a married man you’re mixed up with his wife, too. They work as a team. Even when she doesn’t know, she knows. It’s an inside job. They went all over the place seeing new doctors. She used to scream with pain in hotel rooms. It’s the sickness of unhappy wives – did you know?”
“I know about the ailment of bachelors. I thought you said it was the Venice person” – he was about to say “the Austrian” – “who knew you when you were young.”
“Everybody got me young, when it comes to that. Oh,” she said, suddenly alert, sitting up, dry-eyed, “don’t sit there looking superior.”
“I am standing,” said Piotr. “I am here like a dog on its hind legs with a bowl of soup.”
She took the bowl, with a scowl that would have meant ingratitude had its source been anything but mortification. “Well,” she said abruptly, “I couldn’t count on you, could I? You come and go and you’ve got those children. Who do they live with?”
“Their mother.”
A tremor, like a chill, ran over her, and he recalled how she had trembled and spilled her coffee long ago. “How old are they?”
“Twelve and six.”
“Why did you have the second one?” (Her first sensible observation.) “Girls?”
“Two boys.”
“I hope they die.”
“I don’t,” said Piotr.
“Do they love you?”
He hesitated; where love was concerned he had lost his bearings. He said, “They seem to eat up love and wait for more.”
“Is there always more?”
“So far.”
“They’re like me, then,” said Laurie.
“No, for children it is real food. It adds to their bones.”
“Then it’s not like me. I soak it up and it disappears and I feel undernourished. Do they like you?”
“They are excited and happy when they see me but hardly notice when I go.”
“That’s because you bring them presents.” She began to cry, hard this time. “They won’t need you much longer. They’ve got their mother. I really need you. I need you more than they do. I need any man more than his children do.”
Piotr found sheets in the wardrobe and made the bed; he found pajamas in one of her plastic boxes, and the Polish sleeping potion in the bathroom. He counted out the magic drops. “Now sleep,” he said. Something was missing: “Where is your white watch?”
“I don’t know. I must have lost it. I lost it ages ago,” she said, and turned on her side.
Piotr hung up Laurie’s bathrobe and emptied the ashtray. He rinsed the yellow bowl and put it back on the shelf. He still had to break the news of his going; he did not feel banished but rather as if it were he who had decided to leave, who had established his own fate. Who gave you the “Palmstroem” poems, said Piotr silently. Another Potter? The man who had you at fifteen and then shipped you to Europe when you started getting in his way? Was it the Austrian? The man in Venice who suddenly feels he is sinning and can’t bear to touch you? At the back of his mind was a small, anxious, jealous Piotr, for whom he felt little sympathy.
Laurie, though fresh from a shower, had about her a slightly sour smell, the scent that shock and terror produce on the skin. She was young, so that it was no worse than fresh yeast, or the odor of bread rising – the aura of the living, not yet of the dead. He remembered his wife and how her skin, then her voice, then her mind had become acid. “Am I plain?” she had said. “Am I diseased? Don’t you consider me a normal woman?” You are good, you are brave, you are an impeccable mother to your children, but I don’t want you, at least not the way you want me to, had been his answer. And so she became ugly, ill, haunted – all that he dreaded in women. It seemed to him that he saw the first trace of this change in the sleeping Laurie. She had lost her credentials, her seal of aristocracy. She had dropped to a lower division inhabited by Piotr’s wife and Piotr himself; they were inferiors, unable to command loyalty or fidelity or even consideration in exchange for passion. Her silvery world, which had reflected nothing but Piotr’s desperate inventions, floated and sank in Venice. This is what people like Maria and me are up against, he thought – our inventions. We belong either in books or in prison, out of the way. Romantic people are a threat to civilization. That man in Venice who wanted to make a nurse of poor Laurie was a romantic, too, a dangerous lunatic.
Laurie lay breathing deeply and slowly, in a sleep full of colored dreams – dreams of an imaginary Matisse, a real Lake Constance, a real Venice, dark and sad. “On a sailing holiday at Lake Constance …” Even now, when it no longer mattered, the truth of this particular dream clamped on Piotr’s chest like the ghost of an old pain. Quietly, in order not to disturb her, he took one of his pink placebos. He thought of how frightened she would be if she woke to find him in the grip of an attack – she would be frightened of nearly everything now. He could still see the car hurtling all over the map as Laurie tried to run away from him and what she called “the situation.” He could see it even though the journ
ey had been only in her imagination, then in his. She had flown to Zurich, probably, and been met by, certainly, the man whose business was watch straps, or even … It doesn’t matter now, he said. She had been telling the truth, because her mind had been in flight.
He lay down beside her and, reaching out, switched off the light. The pattern of reflected street lights that sprang to life on the ceiling had, for three nights long ago, been like the vault of heaven. After tonight Laurie would watch it alone – at any rate, without Piotr. Poor Laurie, he thought. Poor, poor Laurie. He felt affection, kindness – less than he could feel for his children, less than the obligation he still owed his wife. Out of compassion he stroked her darkened hair. No one but Piotr himself could have taken the measure of his disappointment as he said, So there really was nothing in it, was there? So this was all it ever was – only tenderness. An immense weight of blame crushed him, flattened him, and by so doing cleansed and absolved him. I was incapable of any more feeling than this. I never felt more than kindness. There was nothing in it from the beginning. It was only tenderness, after all.
His Mother
His mother had come of age in a war and then seemed to live a long grayness like a spun-out November. “Are you all right?” she used to ask him at breakfast. What she really meant was: Ask me how I am, but she was his mother and so he would not. He leaned two fists against his temples and read a book about photography, waiting for her to cut bread and put it on a plate for him. He seldom looked up, never truly saw her – a stately, careless widow with unbrushed red hair, wearing an old fur coat over her nightgown; her last dressing gown had been worn to ribbons and she said she had no money for another. It seemed that nothing could stop her from telling him how she felt or from pestering him with questions. She muttered and smoked and drank such a lot of strong coffee that it made her bilious, and then she would moan, “God, God, my liver! My poor head!” In those days in Budapest you had to know the black market to find the sort of coffee she drank, and of course she would not have any but the finest smuggled Virginia cigarettes. “Quality,” she said to him – or to his profile, rather. “Remember after I have died that quality was important to me. I held out for the best.”
She had known what it was to take excellence for granted. That was the difference between them. Out of her youth she could not recall a door slammed or a voice raised except in laughter. People had floated like golden dust; whole streets of people buoyed up by optimism, a feeling for life.
He sat reading, waiting for her to serve him. He was a stone out of a stony generation. Talking to him was like lifting a stone out of water. He never resisted, but if you let go for even a second he sank and came to rest on a dark sea floor. More than one of her soft-tempered lovers had tried to make a friend of him, but they had always given up, as they did with everything. How could she give up? She loved him. She felt shamed because it had not been in her to control armies, history, his stony watery world. From the moment he appeared in the kitchen doorway, passive, vacant, starting to live again only because this was morning, she began all over: “Don’t you feel well?” “Are you all right?” “Why can’t you smile?” – though the loudest sentence was in silence: Ask me how I am.
After he left Budapest (got his first passport, flew to Glasgow with a soccer team, never came back) she became another sort of person, an émigré’s mother. She shed the last of her unimportant lovers and with the money her son was soon able to send she bought a white blouse, combs that would pin her hair away from her face, and a blue kimono. She remembered long, tender conversations they had had together, and she got up early in the morning to see if a letter had come from him and then to write one of her own describing everything she thought and did. His letters to his mother said, Tell me about your headaches, are you still drinking too strong coffee, tell me the weather, the names of streets, if you still bake poppy-seed cakes.
She had never been any sort of a cook, but it seemed to her that, yes, she had baked for him, perhaps in their early years together, which she looked back upon as golden, and lighter than thistledown.
On Saturday afternoons she put on a hat and soft gray gloves and went to the Vörösmarty Café. It had once had a French name, Gerbeaud, and the circle of émigrés’ mothers who met to exchange news and pictures of grandchildren still called it that. “Gerbeaud” was a sign of caste and the mark of a generation, too. Like herself, the women wore hats and sometimes scarves of fur, and each carried a stuffed handbag she would not have left behind on a tabletop for even a second. Their sons’ letters looked overstamped, like those he sent her now. She had not been so certain of her rank before, or felt so quietly sure, so well thought of. A social order prevailed, as it does everywhere. The aristocrats were those whose children had never left Europe; the poorest of the poor were not likely ever to see their sons again, for they had gone to Chile and South Africa. Switzerland was superior to California. A city earned more points than a town. There was no mistaking her precedence here; she was a grand duchess. If Glasgow was unfamiliar, the very sound of it somehow rang with merit. She always had a new letter to show, which was another symbol of one’s station, and they were warm messages, concerned about her health, praising her remembered skill with pies and cakes. Some mothers were condemned to a lowly status only because their children forgot to write. Others had to be satisfied with notes from foreign daughters-in-law, which were often sent from table to table before an adequate reading could be obtained. Here again she was in demand, for she read three foreign languages, which suggested a background of governesses and careful schools. She might have left it at that, but her trump credentials were in plain sight. These were the gifts he bestowed – the scarves and pastel sweaters, the earrings and gloves.
What she could not do was bring the émigré ritual to its final celebration; it required a passport, a plane ticket, and a visit to the absent son. She would never deliver into his hands the three immutable presents, which were family jewelry, family photographs, and a cake. Any mother travelling to within even a few miles of another woman’s son was commissioned to take all three. The cake was a bother to carry, for the traveller usually had one of her own, but who could say no? They all knew the cake’s true value. Look at the way her own son claimed his share of nourishment from a mother whose cooking had always been a joke.
No one had ever been close to Scotland, and if she had not applied for her own passport or looked up flight schedules it was for a good reason: her son had never suggested she come. And yet, denied even the bliss of sewing a garnet clip into a brassière to be smuggled to an unknown daughter-in-law, she still knew she was blessed. Other women were dismissed, forgotten. More than one had confided, “My son might as well be dead.” She did not think of him as dead – how could she? – but as a coin that had dropped unheard, had rolled crazily, lay still. She knew the name of his car, of his street, she had seen pictures of them, but what did she know?
After he disappeared, as soon as she had made certain he was safe and alive, she rented his room to a student, who stayed with her for three years in conditions of some discomfort, for she had refused, at first, to remove anything belonging to her son. His books were sacred. His records were not to be played. The records had been quite valuable at one time; they were early American rock slipped in by way of Vienna and sold at a murderous rate of exchange. These collected dust now, like his albums of pictures – like the tenant student’s things too, for although she pinned her hair up with combs and wore a spotless blouse, she was still no better a housekeeper. Her tenant studied forestry. He was a bumpkin, and somewhat afraid of her. She could never have mistaken him for a son. He crept in and out and brought her flowers. One day she played a record for him, to which he listened with deference rather than interest, and she remembered herself, at eighteen, hearing with the same anxious boredom a warped scene from “Die Walküre,” both singers now long dead. Having a student in the flat did not make her feel she was in touch with her son, or even with his gen
eration. His room changed meanwhile; even its smell was no longer the same. She began to wonder what his voice had been like. She could see him, she dreamed of him often, but her dreams and memories were like films with the sound track removed.
The bumpkin departed, and she took in his place a future art historian – the regime produced these in awesome numbers Now – who gave way, in turn, to the neurasthenic widow of a poet. The poet’s widow was taken over in time by her children, and replaced by a couple of young librarians. And then came two persons not quite chosen by herself. She could have refused them, but thought it wiser not to. They were an old man and his pregnant granddaughter. They seemed to be brokenly poor; the granddaughter almost to the end of her term worked long hours in a plasma laboratory. And yet they appeared endowed with dark, important connections: no sooner were they installed than she was granted a telephone, which her tenants never used without asking, and only for laconic messages – the grandfather to state that his granddaughter was not yet at home, or the girl to take down the day and hour of a meeting somewhere. After the granddaughter had her baby they became four in a flat that had barely been comfortable for two. She cleared out the last of her son’s records and his remaining books (the rest had long ago been sold or stolen), and she tried to establish a set of rules. For one, she made it a point to remain in the kitchen when her tenants took their meals. This was her home; it was not strictly a shared and still less a communal Russian apartment. But she could go only so far: it was at Gerbeaud’s that she ranked as a grand duchess. These people reckoned differently, and on their terms she was, if not at the foot of the ladder, then dangerously to one side of it; she had an émigré son, she received gifts and money from abroad, and she led in terms of the common good a parasitic existence. They were careful, even polite, but they were installed. She was inhabited by them, as by an illness one must learn to endure.
From the Fifteenth District Page 25