“Well, Roy,” said Malcolm, as if answering some comment, “half the people in the world don’t even get as far as I did just now.”
That was the end of it—the end of the incident. It turned into a happy evening, one of their last in France.
1968
THE REJECTION
HE SUPPOSED he had always been something of a sermonizer, but it was not really a failing; he had a mountain of information on many subjects, and silence worried him over and above the fear of being a bore. He had enjoyed, in particular, the education of his little girl. Even when she seemed blank and inattentive he went on with what he was saying. He thought it wrong of her to show so plainly she was sick to death of his voice; she ought to have learned a few of the social dishonesties by now.
They were in a warm climate, driving down to the sea. He must have been talking for hours. He said, “If indefinite time can be explained at all, it means there is another world somewhere, exactly like ours in every way.”
“No, you’re wrong,” she said, finally answering him—high and irritable and clear. “To make it another world you’d have to change something. The ashtray in the dashboard could be red instead of silver. That would be enough to make another world. Otherwise it’s just the same place.”
This was her grandmother’s training, he thought. She had been turned into a porcupine. Tears came to his eyes; none of it had been his fault.
“Who do you think tells the truth?” he said. “Your grandmother?”
“What do you mean?”
“Which of us do you like best? That must be what I meant.”
“To tell you the God’s truth,” said the child, in a coarse voice he was not accustomed to hearing, “I’m not dying about either one of you.”
In a rush of warm air the rest of her words were lost. She bent and picked up something that had been creeping on the floor—a reptile he could not identify. It was part lizard, or snake, or armadillo, the size of a kitten, and repulsive to see; but as the girl had made a pet of the thing—seemed attached to it, in fact—he said nothing.
He had lost her words, but he understood their meaning. “You don’t want me to bring you up, is that it?”
“Yes. I said that.”
“And your grandmother?”
“That’s finished, too.” Her voice was empty of anything except extreme conviction. She was a small girl, delicate of feature, but she wore, habitually, an expression so set and so humorless that her father felt weak and dispersed beside her—as if age and authority and second thoughts had, instead of welding his personality, pulled it to shreds.
I wonder, the man thought, if she can be mine? She had none of the qualities he recognized in himself, and for which he had been loved: warmth, tenacity, a sense of justice. Perhaps his desire to educate covered a profound unease, but he had never deserted the weak, never betrayed a friend. He was flooded with a great grievance all at once, as if he had been laughed at, his kindness solicited, his charity betrayed, for the sake of someone to whom he owed nothing. Perhaps, he thought—and this was even darker—perhaps she is not her mother’s; for where were her qualities? Charm over shyness; gaiety over anxiousness; camouflage, dissimulation, myth-making to make life easier—myths explain the dark corners of life. Not even those! The child was the bottom of a pool from which both their characters had been drained away. She had nothing, except obstinacy, which he did not admire, and shallow judgment. Of course she was shallow; she had proved it: she did not love her father.
“If you do not love me,” he wanted to say, “you will never care about anyone,” but he felt so much pain at the possibility of not being loved that he added quickly, “I forgive you.” Instantly the pain receded.
“Look here,” he said. “How old are you, exactly?”
“Six and a half,” said the child, without surprise.
“That would be it, that would be the right age,” he said. She could be ours. With that, the pain returned.
He could not remember what they had been saying during much of the drive, but he must have been using the wrong language, or, worse, have allowed the insertion of silence. Everything had been a mistake. The child sat, perfectly self-contained, protected by an innocence that transformed her feelings and made them neutral. We must make a joke of this, her father thought, or the pain will make me so hideous, so disfigured, that she will be frightened of me. He opened his mouth, meaning to describe, objectively, what anguish was like, giving as examples the dupe on his way to be sacrificed, the runner overtaken by a tank, the loathed bearer of a disease, but he said instead, “I can’t understand you,” in a reasonable voice. “I was interested in you, I never neglected you. If you’d had more experience, you’d know when you were well off. You just don’t know what other men can be like.”
As if pleased with the effect she had produced, the child played with the monster’s collar and bell. He heard the bell tinkle, and saw a flash of her small hands. She had not warned him, or prepared him, or even asked his advice. He could have stopped driving, flung himself down, appealed in the name of their past; but he had heard in his own last words a deliberate whine, which rendered any plea disgraceful.
He was dealing with a child, he suddenly recalled; it was not a father’s business to plead for justice but to dispense it. Pride, yes, pride was important, but he was not to give up his role. He resumed reasonableness; he said, “I suppose you find me tiresome, sometimes.”
“Yes, I did,” said the child. “That was one of the things.”
He was in the little girl’s past, and she was so young that the past was removed from life. This is my fault, he said to himself. I’ve let her believe she was grown up; I have been too respectful. She thinks her life is her own; she doesn’t know that she can’t plan and think and provide for herself. He said, jokingly, as if they had been playing a game all along, “All right, who do you want to live with?,” thinking she would laugh at the question, but instead she said at once, “With Mr. Mountford.”
“Mountford? Are you sure that’s the person you mean? You’ve hardly met him.”
“I know,” said the child, “but he’s so much richer, and he has such lovely conversation.”
It was further proof of shallowness, but also of her dismal innocence: If Mountford had been capable of saying one civil word to the child, it was only because he knew the little brat would not be in his house longer than an hour; she would eat her cake and drink her milk and be led away. He was the totality of everything the child’s father despised; at the very sight of Mountford, his scorn for amateurs—amateur painters, actors, singers, poets, playwrights—rose and choked him. Any exchange was out of the question; they could not have discussed a crossword puzzle. Obviously, he could not translate such feelings into a child’s language, while words such as “hypocrisy,” “coldness,” “greed” would convey nothing except a tone of adult spitefulness. She smiled to herself, perhaps remembering a “lovely conversation” in which she had mistaken a fatuous compliment for a promise. What did she mean by “richer,” he wondered. It couldn’t be money; not at that age. Meanwhile he saw Mountford clearly, with his slack mouth and light eyes. He did not seem like a man but like a discontented woman.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll take you to his house. We’ll see if he can keep you. Remember,” he added needlessly, “it was your decision.”
Now he had relinquished her; they had put each other in the past. He wanted to say, “I didn’t mean it,” but she was beyond taking the slightest notice of anything he meant, or said, or did, or was. He went on, “You must do as you are told, for the last time. You are to stay in the car while I speak to Mr. Mountford.” She seemed astonished, perhaps at her own power; and, after a brief gesture that might have been rebellious, sat quite still.
I was not the one who pushed things to the limit, he said to himself, as he walked up to Mountford’s door. Did I abdicate? Let go too soon? It seemed settled in her mind; what else could I have done? Beside him
trotted the monster with its collar and bell. She had thrust it out of the car, slyly, and sent it along to be her witness, to see if her father lied, later, about his conversation with Mountford. As though I would lie to the child, he said to himself, in despair at this new misunderstanding. But when the door was opened for him he stepped aside and let the creature scuttle through.
Mountford was dressed in his waffly felt gardening hat; a battered cream-colored corduroy jacket; dark-green hairy shirt with a hairy tie, woven for a Cottage Industry shop; trousers perpetually kneeling; shoes to which clay from a dreary promenade accrued.
How can I allow this child to live in a house where there are no flowers, no paintings, no books, and (this seemed the most miserly of all deprivations) no cigarettes? He knew there would be no musical instrument, and no records—it was a theory of Mountford’s that right-thinking people went to concerts. If you lived in a provincial part of the world, in a resort, a watering place where you had to depend on military tunes played in the casino garden, then you did without. When you have heard an opera once in your life, it is up to you to remember it; it saves time, and any amount of money. The child’s father supposed Mountford had said all of this to him once. He found he had a store of information concerning Mountford; how he felt about climates, sonnets, the sea, other people, the passage of time, the importance of pleasure; he possessed this knowledge, condensed, like a summary he had been given to read. He knew that Mountford went into the kitchen to see if his cook was using too much olive oil. Perhaps this was only gossip—but no, Mountford now held the bottle of oil up to the light of the kitchen window.
“You don’t need all those ingredients for a simple poulet chasseur,” Mountford said to the cook. “White wine, bouillon, brandy, butter, oil, flour, tomatoes, tarragon, chervil, shallots, salt and pepper…ridiculous. You can use a bouillon cube,” he said, putting the bottle down. “Vinegar instead of wine. Cooking fat. No one will ever know. Go easy, now,” he said, in his jovial way. “Go easy with the brandy and the flour. You know how things are… You can stay for lunch,” he said, turning to the child’s father, “but you understand I can’t keep her. I scarcely know her. She’s more of a stranger, if you know what I mean. We’ve had a few words together, nothing more. Tell her she has made a mistake, I don’t know her and that’s that.”
That much is settled, the man thought. She will not live in a house where she can hear “No one will ever know.” She will not he infected by meanness. As for himself, he had come out of it well. He had not bullied, or shown authority, or imposed a decision. He had not even suggested a course! She had been given free choice all the way.
“If I were you,” said Mountford as they went into the front part of the house, “I would just give her to old Bertha in the kitchen.”
“It isn’t a matter of giving her away,” he said. “I’m not giving her.”
“Well, old Bertha would be one solution. We ought to repopulate those empty peasant areas—fill them with new stock, good blood.”
“Not with my child,” he said. He knew exactly how he ought to murder Mountford. He saw the place between his eyes, and his own hand flat, like a plate skimming. Mountford’s eyes would start, fall out nearly, while the skin around them went black as ink. That was the way to show Mountford what he thought of him. He saw the kitchen again, the large stove, and the hag who must be old Bertha. Mountford, untouched, was still pink of face and smiling.
The child had disobeyed. She stood in the hall, fragile, composed, her hands bright in a shaft of light. This is her first shock, he remembered; I must tell her gently. She was so confident, so certain she would always be wanted. He thought, She must be mine—she is so independent. He spoke tenderly, but the small, resolute face did not alter. He felt the hopeless frustration of talking to someone whose mind is made up, and understood how difficult it must have been, sometimes, for someone to deal with him. He had a living memory of having once been secure in his ideas and utterly convinced. She has courage, too, he decided. But it was not courage—she was simply pretending not to mind. Perhaps she is stupid, he thought. All that acting, that pretending nothing matters. She must be her mother’s, after all. “There,” he wanted to say to the child’s mother, “do you see how patient I had to be?”
As they walked away from the house, he heard the reptile. He recognized the frantic note of the creature abandoned; there was no mistaking the hysteria and terror, the fear that no one would ever come for it again.
“Go back and get him,” he said.
“I don’t want him.”
“You can’t leave him,” said the man. “You’ve taken him out of his own life and made a pet of him. You can’t abandon him now. You’re responsible for him.”
“I don’t want him,” the child said without emphasis.
Why, he thought, she is cruel. How horrible this has become—she can’t belong to either of us, for surely we were never guilty of cruelty? The child sat in the car now, confident she would never be made to account for anything, that she had another choice, that her chances were eternal.
He stood with his hand on the door of the car and said once again, “Look here, how old are you exactly?”
“Six and a half.”
“Then that’s it,” he said. “That would be the age. There’s no getting away from it.” He had to give in; he had to accept her.
Well, she will have to help me then, he decided, and an access of fierce and joyous hostility toward the child’s mother made him think he was seeing clearly for the first time. I may have made some mistake, he said, but she got away with murder. Look at the pain and grief I thought were finished; she had nothing to remind her.
But then, he remembered, she does not know the child exists. I must have forgotten to tell her. How can I suddenly say, “Here is the result, the product, the thing we have left?” She could say, “Why didn’t you mention it sooner?”
“I would like to take you to your mother,” he said, “but it will take a little planning. She may not know anything about you. You are quite like her, I am afraid, though also like me. She may not want to admit who you are like. If she knew you had abandoned that creature, she might tell you there are two sorts of people, that the world is divided…” He thundered on, as if making himself heard, “People who give up…who destroy…though her own position is not all that good. Still, I’m certain she would say you are on the wrong side.”
“Who do you think you’re shouting at?” the calm child seemed to be saying. “And why are you bothering me?”
1969
THE WEDDING RING
ON MY WINDOWSILL is a pack of cards, a bell, a dog’s brush, a book about a girl named Jewel who is a Christian Scientist and won’t let anyone take her temperature, and a white jug holding field flowers. The water in the jug has evaporated; the sand-and-amber flowers seem made of paper. The weather bulletin for the day can be one of several: No sun. A high arched yellow sky. Or, creamy clouds, stillness. Long motionless grass. The earth soaks up the sun. Or, the sky is higher than it ever will seem again, and the sun far away and small.
From the window, a field full of goldenrod, then woods; to the left as you stand at the front door of the cottage, the mountains of Vermont.
The screen door slams and shakes my bed. That was my cousin. The couch with the India print spread in the next room has been made up for him. He is the only boy cousin I have, and the only American relation my age. We expected him to be homesick for Boston. When he disappeared the first day, we thought we would find him crying with his head in the wild cucumber vine; but all he was doing was making the outhouse tidy, dragging out of it last year’s magazines. He discovers a towel abandoned under his bed by another guest, and shows it to each of us. He has unpacked a trumpet, a hatchet, a pistol, and a water bottle. He is ready for anything except my mother, who scares him to death.
My mother is a vixen. Everyone who sees her that summer will remember, later, the gold of her eyes and the lovely movement of he
r head. Her hair is true russet. She has the bloom women have sometimes when they are pregnant or when they have fallen in love. She can be wild, bitter, complaining, and ugly as a witch, but that summer is her peak. She has fallen in love.
My father is—I suppose—in Montreal. The guest who seems to have replaced him except in authority over me (he is still careful, still courts my favor) drives us to a movie. It is a musical full of monstrously large people. My cousin sits intent, bites his nails, chews a slingshot during the love scenes. He suddenly dives down in the dark to look for lost, mysterious objects. He has seen so many movies that this one is nearly over before he can be certain he has seen it before. He always knows what is going to happen and what they are going to say next.
At night we hear the radio—disembodied voices in a competition, identifying tunes. My mother, in the living room, seen from my bed, plays solitaire and says from time to time, “That’s an old song I like,” and “When you play solitaire, do you turn out two cards or three?” My cousin is not asleep either; he stirs on his couch. He shares his room with the guest. Years later we will be astonished to realize how young the guest must have been—twenty-three, perhaps twenty-four. My cousin, in his memories, shared a room with a middle-aged man. My mother and I, for the first and last time, ever, sleep in the same bed. I see her turning out the cards, smoking, drinking cold coffee from a breakfast cup. The single light on the table throws the room against the black window. My cousin and I each have an extra blanket. We forget how the evening sun blinded us at suppertime—how we gasped for breath.
My mother remarks on my hair, my height, my teeth, my French, and what I like to eat, as if she had never seen me before. Together, we wash our hair in the stream. The stones at the bottom are the color of trout. There is a smell of fish and wildness as I kneel on a rock, as she does, and plunge my head in the water. Bubbles of soap dance in place, as if rooted, then the roots stretch and break. In a delirium of happiness I memorize ferns, moss, grass, seedpods. We sunbathe on camp cots dragged out in the long grass. The strands of wet hair on my neck are like melting icicles. Her “Never look straight at the sun” seems extravagantly concerned with my welfare. Through eyelashes I peep at the milky-blue sky. The sounds of this blissful moment are the radio from the house; my cousin opening a ginger-ale bottle; the stream, persistent as machinery. My mother, still taking extraordinary notice of me, says that while the sun bleaches her hair and makes it light and fine, dark hair (mine) turns ugly—“like a rusty old stove lid”—and should be covered up. I dart into the cottage and find a hat: a wide straw hat, belonging to an unknown summer. It is so large I have to hold it with a hand flat upon the crown. I may look funny with this hat on, but at least I shall never be like a rusty old stove lid. The cots are empty; my mother has gone. By mistake, she is walking away through the goldenrod with the guest, turned up from God knows where. They are walking as if they wish they were invisible, of course, but to me it is only a mistake, and I call and run and push my way between them. He would like to take my hand, or pretends he would like to, but I need my hand for the hat.
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