Carson McCullers

by Carson McCullers

  The college had every reason to be satisfied with Madame Zilensky. She taught with a fierce insistence. She could become deeply indignant if some Mary Owens or Bernadine Smith would not clean up her Scarlatti trills. She got hold of four pianos for her college studio and set four dazed students to playing Bach fugues together. The racket that came from her end of the department was extraordinary, but Madame Zilensky did not seem to have a nerve in her, and if pure will and effort can get over a musical idea, then Ryder College could not have done better. At night Madame Zilensky worked on her twelfth symphony. She seemed never to sleep; no matter what time of night Mr. Brook happened to look out of his sitting-room window, the light in her studio was always on. No, it was not because of any professional consideration that Mr. Brook became so dubious.

  It was in late October when he felt for the first time that something was unmistakably wrong. He had lunched with Madame Zilensky and had enjoyed himself, as she had given him a very detailed account of an African safari she had made in 1928. Later in the afternoon she stopped in at his office and stood rather abstractly in the doorway.

  Mr. Brook looked up from his desk and asked, ‘Is there anything you want?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Madame Zilensky. She had a low, beautiful, sombre voice. ‘I was only just wondering. You recall the metronome. Do you think perhaps that I might have left it with that French?’

  ‘Who?’ asked Mr. Brook.

  ‘Why, that French I was married to,’ she answered.

  ‘Frenchman,’ Mr. Brook said mildly. He tried to imagine the husband of Madame Zilensky, but his mind refused. He muttered half to himself, ‘The father of the children.’

  ‘But no,’ said Madame Zilensky with decision. ‘The father of Sammy.’

  Mr. Brook had a swift prescience. His deepest instincts warned him to say nothing further. Still, his respect for order, his conscience, demanded that he ask, ‘And the father of the other two?’

  Madame Zilensky put her hand to the back of her head and ruffled up her short, cropped hair. Her face was dreamy, and for several moments she did not answer. Then she said gently, ‘Boris is of a Pole who played the piccolo.’

  ‘And Sigmund?’ he asked. Mr. Brook looked over his orderly desk, with the stack of corrected papers, the three sharpened pencils, the ivory-elephant paperweight. When he glanced up at Madame Zilensky, she was obviously thinking hard. She gazed around at the corners of the room, her brows lowered and her jaw moving from side to side. At last she said, ‘We were discussing the father of Sigmund?’

  ‘Why, no,’ said Mr. Brook. ‘There is no need to do that.’

  Madame Zilensky answered in a voice both dignified and final. ‘He was a fellow-countryman.’

  Mr. Brook really did not care one way or the other. He had no prejudices; people could marry seventeen times and have Chinese children so far as he was concerned. But there was something about this conversation with Madame Zilensky that bothered him. Suddenly he understood. The children didn’t look at all like Madame Zilensky, but they looked exactly like each other, and as they all had different fathers, Mr. Brook thought the resemblance astonishing.

  But Madame Zilensky had finished with the subject. She zipped up her leather jacket and turned away.

  ‘That is exactly where I left it,’ she said, with a quick nod. ‘Chez that French.’

  Affairs in the music department were running smoothly. Mr. Brook did not have any serious embarrassments to deal with, such as the harp teacher last year who had finally eloped with a garage mechanic. There was only this nagging apprehension about Madame Zilensky. He could not make out what was wrong in his relations with her or why his feelings were so mixed. To begin with, she was a great globe-trotter, and her conversations were incongruously seasoned with references to far-fetched places. She would go along for days without opening her mouth, prowling through the corridor with her hands in the pockets of her jacket and her face locked in meditation. Then suddenly she would buttonhole Mr. Brook and launch out on a long, volatile monologue, her eyes reckless and bright and her voice warm with eagerness. She would talk about anything or nothing at all. Yet, without exception, there was something queer, in a slanted sort of way, about every episode she ever mentioned. If she spoke of taking Sammy to the barbershop, the impression she created was just as foreign as if she were telling of an afternoon in Bagdad. Mr. Brook could not make it out.

  The truth came to him very suddenly, and the truth made everything perfectly clear, or at least clarified the situation. Mr. Brook had come home early and lighted a fire in the little grate in his sitting room. He felt comfortable and at peace that evening. He sat before the fire in his stocking feet, with a volume of William Blake on the table by his side, and he had poured himself a half-glass of apricot brandy. At ten o’clock he was drowsing cozily before the fire, his mind full of cloudy phrases of Mahler and floating half-thoughts. Then all at once, out of this delicate stupor, four words came to his mind: ‘The King of Finland.’ The words seemed familiar, but for the first moment he could not place them. Then all at once he tracked them down. He had been walking across the campus that afternoon when Madame Zilensky stopped him and began some preposterous rigmarole, to which he had only half listened; he was thinking about the stack of canons turned in by his counterpoint class. Now the words, the inflections of her voice, came back to him with insidious exactitude. Madame Zilensky had started off with the following remark: ‘One day, when I was standing in front of a pâtisserie, the King of Finland came by in a sled.’

  Mr. Brook jerked himself up straight in his chair and put down his glass of brandy. The woman was a pathological liar. Almost every word she uttered outside of class was an untruth. If she worked all night, she would go out of her way to tell you she spent the evening at the cinema. If she ate lunch at the Old Tavern, she would be sure to mention that she had lunched with her children at home. The woman was simply a pathological liar, and that accounted for everything.

  Mr. Brook cracked his knuckles and got up from his chair. His first reaction was one of exasperation. That day after day Madame Zilensky would have the gall to sit there in his office and deluge him with her outrageous falsehoods! Mr. Brook was intensely provoked. He walked up and down the room, then he went into his kitchenette and made himself a sardine sandwich.

  An hour later, as he sat before the fire, his irritation had changed to a scholarly and thoughtful wonder. What he must do, he told himself, was to regard the whole situation impersonally and look on Madame Zilensky as a doctor looks on a sick patient. Her lies were of the guileless sort. She did not dissimulate with any intention to deceive, and the untruths she told were never used to any possible advantage. That was the maddening thing; there was simply no motive behind it all.

  Mr. Brook finished off the rest of the brandy. And slowly, when it was almost midnight, a further understanding came to him. The reason for the lies of Madame Zilensky was painful and plain. All her life long Madame Zilensky had worked—at the piano, teaching, and writing those beautiful and immense twelve symphonies. Day and night she had drudged and struggled and thrown her soul into her work, and there was not much of her left over for anything else. Being human, she suffered from this lack and did what she could to make up for it. If she passed the evening bent over a table in the library and later declared that she had spent that time playing cards, it was as though she had managed to do both those things. Through the lies, she lived vicariously. The lies doubled the little of her existence that was left over from work and augmented the little rag end of her personal life.

  Mr. Brook looked into the fire, and the face of Madame Zilensky was in his mind—a severe face, with dark, weary eyes and delicately disciplined mouth. He was conscious of a warmth in his chest, and a feeling of pity, protectiveness, and dreadful understanding. For a while he was in a state of lovely confusion.

  Later on he brushed his teeth and got into his pajamas. He must be practical. What did this clear up? That French, the Pole wi
th the piccolo, Bagdad? And the children, Sigmund, Boris, and Sammy—who were they? Were they really her children after all, or had she simply rounded them up from somewhere? Mr. Brook polished his spectacles and put them on the table by his bed. He must come to an immediate understanding with her. Otherwise, there would exist in the department a situation which could become most problematical. It was two o’clock. He glanced out of his window and saw that the light in Madame Zilensky’s workroom was still on. Mr. Brook got into bed, made terrible faces in the dark, and tried to plan what he would say next day.

  Mr. Brook was in his office by eight o’clock. He sat hunched up behind his desk, ready to trap Madame Zilensky as she passed down the corridor. He did not have to wait long, and as soon as he heard her footsteps he called out her name.

  Madame Zilensky stood in the doorway. She looked vague and jaded. ‘How are you? I had such a fine night’s rest,’ she said.

  ‘Pray be seated, if you please,’ said Mr. Brook. ‘I would like a word with you.’

  Madame Zilensky put aside her portfolio and leaned back wearily in the armchair across from him. ‘Yes?’ she asked.

  ‘Yesterday you spoke to me as I was walking across the campus,’ he said slowly. ‘And if I am not mistaken, I believe you said something about a pastry shop and the King of Finland. Is that correct?’

  Madame Zilensky turned her head to one side and stared retrospectively at a corner of the window sill.

  ‘Something about a pastry shop,’ he repeated.

  Her tired face brightened. ‘But of course,” she said eagerly. ‘I told you about the time I was standing in front of this shop and the King of Finland——’

  ‘Madame Zilensky!’ Mr. Brook cried. ‘There is no King of Finland.’

  Madame Zilensky looked absolutely blank. Then, after an instant, she started off again. ‘I was standing in front of Bjarne’s pâtisserie when I turned away from the cakes and suddenly saw the King of Finland——’

  ‘Madame Zilensky, I just told you that there is no King of Finland.’

  ‘In Helsingfors,’ she started off again desperately, and again he let her get as far as the King, and then no further.

  ‘Finland is a democracy,’ he said. ‘You could not possibly have seen the King of Finland. Therefore, what you have just said is an untruth. A pure untruth.’

  Never afterward could Mr. Brook forget the face of Madame Zilensky at that moment. In her eyes there was astonishment, dismay, and a sort of cornered horror. She had the look of one who watches his whole interior world split open and disintegrate.

  ‘It is a pity,’ said Mr. Brook with real sympathy.

  But Madame Zilensky pulled herself together. She raised her chin and said coldly, ‘I am a Finn.’

  ‘That I do not question,’ answered Mr. Brook. On second thought, he did question it a little.

  ‘I was born in Finland and I am a Finnish citizen.’

  ‘That may very well be,’ said Mr. Brook in a rising voice.

  ‘In the war,’ she continued passionately, ‘I rode a motorcycle and was a messenger.’

  ‘Your patriotism does not enter into it.’

  ‘Just because I am getting out the first papers——’

  ‘Madame Zilensky!’ said Mr. Brook. His hands grasped the edge of the desk. ‘That is only an irrelevant issue. The point is that you maintained and testified that you saw—that you saw——’ But he could not finish. Her face stopped him. She was deadly pale and there were shadows around her mouth. Her eyes were wide open, doomed, and proud. And Mr. Brook felt suddenly like a murderer. A great commotion of feelings—understanding, remorse, and unreasonable love—made him cover his face with his hands. He could not speak until this agitation in his insides quieted down, and then he said very faintly, ‘Yes. Of course. The King of Finland. And was he nice?’

  An hour later, Mr. Brook sat looking out of the window of his office. The trees along the quiet Westbridge street were almost bare, and the gray buildings of the college had a calm, sad look. As he idly took in the familiar scene, he noticed the Drakes’ old Airedale waddling along down the street. It was a thing he had watched a hundred times before, so what was it that struck him as strange? Then he realized with a kind of cold surprise that the old dog was running along backward. Mr. Brook watched the Airedale until he was out of sight, then resumed his work on the canons which had been turned in by the class in counterpoint.

  Correspondence

  113 WHITEHALL STREET

  DARIEN, CONN.

  UNITED STATES

  NOVEMBER 3, 1941

  Manoel García,

  Calle São José 120,

  Rio de Janeiro,

  Brazil,

  South America

  DEAR MANOEL:

  I guess seeing the American address on this letter you already know what it is. Your name was on the list tacked on the blackboard at High School of South American students we could correspond with. I was the one who picked your name.

  Maybe I ought to tell you something about myself. I am a girl going on fourteen years of age and this is my first year at High School. It is hard to describe myself exactly. I am tall and my figure is not very good on account of I have grown too rapidly. My eyes are blue and I don’t know exactly what color you would call my hair unless it would be a light brown. I like to play baseball and make scientific experiments (like with a chemical set) and read all kinds of books.

  All my life I wanted to get to travel but the furtherest I have ever been away from home is Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Lately I have thought a whole lot about South America. Since choosing your name off the list I have thought a whole lot about you also and imagined how you are. I have seen photographs of the harbor in Rio de Janeiro and I can picture you in my mind’s eye walking around the beach in the sun. I imagine you with liquid black eyes, brown skin, and black curly hair. I have always been crazy about South Americans although I did not know any of them and I always wanted to travel all over South America and especially to Rio de Janeiro.

  As long as we are going to be friends and correspond I think we ought to know serious things about each other right away. Recently I have thought a whole lot about life. I have pondered over a great many things such as why we were put on the earth. I have decided that I do not believe in God. On the other hand I am not an atheist and I think there is some kind of a reason for everything and life is not in vain. When you die I think I believe that something happens to the soul.

  I have not decided just exactly what I am going to be and it worries me. Sometimes I think I want to be an arctic explorer and other times I plan on being a newspaper reporter and working in to being a writer. For years I wished to be an actress, especially a tragic actress taking sad roles like Greta Garbo. This summer however when I got up a performance of Camille and I played Camille it was a terrible failure. The show was given in our garage and I can’t explain to you what a terrible failure it was. So now I think mostly about newspaper reporting, especially foreign corresponding.

  I do not feel exactly like the other Freshmen at High School. I feel like I am different from them. When I have a girl to spend the night with me on Friday night all they want to do is meet people down at the drug store near here and so forth and at night when we lie in the bed if I bring up serious subjects they are likely to go to sleep. They don’t care anything much about foreign countries. It is not that I am terribly unpopular or anything like that but I am just not so crazy about the other Freshmen and they are not so crazy about me.

  I thought a long time about you, Manoel, before writing this letter. And I have this strong feeling we would get along together. Do you like dogs? I have an airdale named Thomas and he is a one man dog. I feel like I have known you for a very long time and that we could discuss all sorts of things together. My Spanish is not so good naturally as this is my first term on it. But I intend to study diligently so that between us we can make out what we are saying when we meet each other.

  I have thought ab
out a lot of things. Would you like to come and spend your summer vacation with me next summer? I think that would be marvelous. Also other plans have been in my mind. Maybe next year after we have a visit together you could stay in my home and go to High School here and I could swap with you and stay in your home and go to South American High School. How does that strike you? I have not yet spoken to my parents about it because I am waiting until I get your opinion on it. I am looking forward exceedingly to hearing from you and find out if I am right about our feeling so much alike about life and other things. You can write to me anything that you want to, as I have said before that I feel I already know you so well. Adiós and I send you every possible good wish.

  Your affectionate friend,

  HENKY EVANS

  P.S. My first name is really Henrietta but the family and people in the neighborhood all call me Henky because Henrietta sounds sort of sissy. I am sending this air mail so that it will get to you quicker. Adiós again.

  113 WHITEHALL STREET

  DARIEN, CONN.,

  U.S.A.

  NOVEMBER 25, 1941

  Manoel García,

  Calle São José 120,

  Rio de Janeiro,

  Brazil,

  South America

  DEAR MANOEL:

  Three weeks have gone by and I would have thought that by now there would be a letter from you. But it is entirely possible that communications take much longer than I had figured on, especially on account of the war. I read all the papers and the state of the world prays on my mind. I had not thought I would write to you again until I heard from you but as I said it must take a long time these days for things to reach foreign countries.

  Today I am not at school. Yesterday morning when I woke up I was all broken out and swollen and red so that it looked like I had small pox at least. But when the doctor came he said it was hives. I took medicine and since then I have been sick in bed. I have been studying Latin as I am mighty close to flunking it. I will be glad when these hives go away.