She complained because the other girls did, but there was nothing she didn’t like: washing her hair in icy water, the bread crusts abrading her gums. The crisp impersonal sting of Sister Luke’s cane said, You are real. You exist. She loved the concept of mortification, which the girls were warned against. It was the first time she’d heard it suggested that the body mattered, that it wasn’t merely the filthy birdcage of the soul but the shining temple of the Holy Ghost. The priest at home hadn’t known about the body coming from God or had decided to keep it secret.
Lou had spent her life so far being told not to run. But now Sister Francis ordered her to hurry and join the girls sprinting around the track. She’d run to escape from her brother but never to get ahead. As she approached, the others sped up, their faces contorted with the fury she would have felt for a new girl who came out of nowhere and won.
She had no friends, but she wasn’t lonely. All night she lay in the dark, listening to the fluttery breath of the living girls and the rattling sighs of the dead ones. The snoring of the night nun was the all-clear signal freeing her to slip out of bed.
There was plenty to see in the convent when everyone was asleep. The leaves on the trees in the cloister garden spread like furry splotches of ink. The moonlight found the dying Christ and striped his bony knees across the chapel wall. Twice she saw Sister Luke knock on Sister Benedict’s door, then wait, then knock harder, then go away in tears.
Miss Frost had promised to write her, but she sent only one curt note saying that Lou’s parents had fired her without a cent of severance pay. The first winter Lou was away, Papa wrote that her grandma had died. In Mama’s next letter she explained that they had put Robert in a place for boys like him, a hospital in Paris.
One night, she watched an owl fly down the arched arcade, chasing a mouse that skittered into a crack in the stone wall. As the owl hid in the cornice, she heard the squeaky prayers of the mouse. The owl swooped down and snatched up the mouse and flew away to behead it.
The door to Sister Francis’s cell was open just wide enough for Lou to see a slice of her back as she mumbled over her prayer book.
The owl reappeared in the cloister, and Lou followed it, thinking of a holy card she’d gotten from Grandma and cherished until Robert threw it into the fire. On the card a trio of butterflies led two pretty blond children along a flowered path. The Good Shepherd walked behind them, looming over them like a giant trained bear. Lou and Robert were the children. The butterflies were owls. God wasn’t gently guiding them but pushing them over a cliff.
The night nun found Lou in the cloister and took her to the Mother Superior’s office. Lou dragged her feet like a prisoner en route to the guillotine. The headmistress didn’t seem angry as she asked why Lou wasn’t asleep. Lou replied that she’d been awake since she got to the convent.
It turned out that the headmistress was an insomniac, too. We are, she said, a special breed, chosen to keep watch for the comet that will destroy us. She said: the angels sing to us when no one else is listening. She said: the holiest saints lived their whole lives without sleep. She said: we alone remember the night before God ladled us out of the bubbling stew of chaos. She said: Adam only fell asleep once, and look what happened to him. She recommended meditating on the Last Supper, moving down the table from apostle to apostle, recalling every detail about each disciple. In this way, sleep will sneak up on you before you get to Judas, whose betrayal will wake you, and you will have to start over.
Lou thanked her and went to bed, knowing that it wouldn’t help her sleep to imagine thirteen bearded men in robes eating lamb at a table. She pictured the owl, her father’s car, the swing in her parents’ garden, her mother’s demitasse cups. The images cascaded and fell like a deck of cards. She concentrated on remembering her brother’s licorice smell. Confusion made her sleepy, or else it was a sign that sleep had sneaked up and overtaken her before she knew it.
Anyway, she could sleep during class, doze off and dream about the hands on Sister Francis’s stopwatch, dreams punctuated by the girlish squeal that the sports nun made when Lou ran the track faster than she had the day before. Lou was jolted awake by fear that she would be called on and mocked, though the teaching nuns never mocked her and she was hardly ever called on.
She would break yesterday’s record and beat the teams from the other schools. Her teachers would be proud of her and allow her to stay. The other girls would respect her despite her low marks in class. She would see the admiring faces she recognized from her dreams of landing the airplane she piloted by flapping her arms. Girls would creep into her bed at night like they crawled into each other’s.
The girls talked about their bodies. They made growing up into a race. When two nubbins popped out on her chest, Lou’s first response was relief at not having been the last to get them. But once she had breasts she didn’t want them. They grew and became unwieldy. She tore a bandage from a pillowcase and bound her breasts so they didn’t bounce when she ran.
She was slow to start bleeding. She hated it when she did. The harder and longer she exercised, the less regularly it happened.
One day a ferocious Irish girl jumped Lou in the washroom and pushed her up against a wall. Lou was stocky and solid, but the Irish girl was twice her size. She had been one of the runners whom Lou outran, early on. Lou fought back, protecting herself, but she was distracted by the muscles squirming inside the arms that pinned her down. When the Irish girl lowered her head and butted Lou in the stomach, a peculiar melting sensation traveled up the length of her thighs, a warmth she hadn’t felt since Robert nearly killed her, on the swing.
As the two girls grappled, a crowd of students gathered. How strange that Lou could be fighting for her life and still hear what they were saying: Was it true that Sister Francis had a penis? How would Lou know what Sister Francis had beneath her robe? Was this what these girls thought about, in this holy place?
As she ground her fist into the Irish girl’s eye, the minutes slowed, and the screams of the girls recalled the giggles of Mama’s maids explaining why she couldn’t wear Robert’s trousers. Lou used to enjoy fighting with Robert. It was like catching a fish in your hands, which she’d once seen him do.
Luckily, it was Sister Francis who broke up the fight. Sister Francis washed the Irish girl’s face and sent her to her bed without supper, then wiped Lou’s eyes with the handkerchief she kept tucked in the sleeve of her scratchy brown robe.
It was chilly. Late autumn. The corridor smelled of mold and rotting leaves.
The nun led her down a flight of stairs. She unlocked a door and turned on a lamp, illuminating a large room, bare except for several huge contraptions for extracting confessions under torture: metal racks and leather horses, pulleys and pedals and bars, a rope ladder strung against the wall, iron balls and wooden clubs. Sister Francis smiled like a wolf. Fear sizzled up and down Lou’s spine until she understood what she was seeing.
From then on, in the afternoons, she ran the track, jumped hurdles, and practiced with the teams. Then she and Sister Francis went down to the makeshift salon de sport and, in the unheated basement gym, built Lou’s strength and endurance. And so began one of the blessed, brief intervals in the life of Lou Villars when she could enjoy the gifts God gave her to compensate for what was denied her, and for what would be dangled in front of her and then cruelly taken away.
Dispatch to the Magyar Gazette
PARIS, AUGUST 23, 1925
A Hero in Chains
WITH HIS EYE patch and mane of ermine hair streaked with black, Prince Gyorgi Perenyi carries himself like a true Hungarian hero disguised in the rags of a prisoner of the French state.
Accused of masterminding a plot to flood the market with counterfeit francs, Perenyi is languishing in a Paris jail. In the worst miscarriage of justice since the Dreyfus affair, the authorities have charged him with trying to destabilize the French economy. But why would a man with the prince’s resources and reputation stoop to such a
scheme, even if his fortune has been decimated by the French under the hateful recent treaty that parceled out our homeland?
The prince insists he has nothing against the French, that his soul has been purified by love for his native land. In an exclusive interview he told this reporter, “When this misunderstanding is resolved, I will return to my castle to see the newborn cub fathered by the bear that was my childhood pet. For generations my family has been present for the birth of the bears, but I will not be so fortunate. I must accept my fate.”
Making sure no guards are listening, he added, “I am an artist. The bank notes were my art. I intended to paper the walls of my mistress’s bedroom. The pain of being an artist is worse than the pain of losing an eye in battle. I am one of the few who have suffered both and can compare them.”
So my visit with this artist-patriot ended, and our hero returned to his cell with such composure and courage that one couldn’t help seeing him as the latest in the line of heroic Hungarian martyrs.
Dear parents,
I’m enclosing my latest story for the Magyar Gazette, with my original ending. The cheapskate editors, paying me by the word, cut my piece at “native land” and refused to print (or pay for) the final paragraphs, my favorites. I admit I went overboard about the martyrs and the Dreyfus affair, about which our country is still divided. And the information about the mistress and the counterfeit bank notes is not precisely what they want in a Hungarian family paper.
Promise me that you will burn this letter as soon as you read it. But who else can I confide in?
I invented the story. The interview never took place, because the prince has been put under twenty-four-hour surveillance. He’d been caught smuggling out a fortune (in counterfeit francs) in a botched escape attempt.
I did attend the trial’s final session. I got a good look at the man, who is exactly as I described. And I feel sure that he would have said the words I took the liberty of putting into his mouth. I am especially proud of the passages about the bear cubs and the wallpaper.
I suppose I am boasting, though underneath Mama’s chuckle, I can hear her disapproval of any lie, however small. While Papa must be shaking his head at my pandering to the Francophobia that grips our homeland, a sentiment responsible for so much heartbreak for Papa, who wanted to be an artist in Paris but, in order to support Mama and me, was forced to teach the sons of the provincial bourgeoisie. How grateful I am to live out the dream that was denied him!
I have included the “interview” as an example of what I am doing to survive. I suppose I would be unhappier if this trash were closer to my art, if I were a writer, prostituting my talent, like my American friend Lionel Maine: the most honest, eloquent, passionately life-loving egomaniac I have ever met. Like me, he is in love with Paris, and Paris loves us both: the rare romantic triangle that inspires no rivalry or resentment. When he joins me in my nighttime rambles through the city, I feel that he is trying to put into words what I am trying to show in my photos. It makes me doubly grateful that my gift is for the visual image and not the written word as I crank out jingoist trash for the Magyar Gazette.
I hope you will not misinterpret this letter as a complaint about the generous allowance you continue to send. I feel nothing but love and gratitude as I kiss you,
Gabor
PS. To protect your privacy and mine, I have adopted a pen name: Tsenyi. That it means genius is an immodest little joke that may amuse our fellow Hungarians.
From The Devil Drives: The Life of Lou Villars
BY NATHALIE DUNOIS
Chapter Two: A Stranger Arrives
ONE MORNING, A tall man with a cane arrived at the convent. The man had thin, fox-colored hair and a wispy, ragged beard. His gray eyes, behind wire-rimmed spectacles, were hooded but alert. Word spread that the visitor was Sister Francis’s brother. The girls watched, as if at a magic show, as the stranger flipped a lever that turned his cane into a stool on a tripod with pointed legs. He stabbed his chair into the ground beside the hockey field and sat down.
Lou knew he was watching her. She made one goal after another until the other team quit and stalked off the field, inspiring Sister Francis’s familiar lecture about sportsmanship being the love of Christ in practice. Then her brother caught her eye, and she said, “Class dismissed.”
A short time later, Lou was working in the gym with Sister Francis, scrambling down the rope ladder when she looked over her shoulder and saw that the brother had set up his cane-stool and was sitting there, watching Lou. She began to tremble.
Sister Francis waved her over. “Mademoiselle Villars,” she said. “This is my brother. Dr. Marcellus Hadrian Loomis.”
Dr. Loomis shook Lou’s hand and motioned for her to sit on the balance beam. He joined his hands in front of his chest, hunching his shoulders and interweaving his fingers so his elbows flapped against his sides as he spoke in slow, ungrammatical French.
“Officially, I am a doctor, but in fact I am a researcher. Years ago I heard a colleague say, in a public forum, that the female body was not designed to bear more weight than a baby or a frying pan. Never both at once. Our girls must be crated and packed away, like fragile porcelain teacups, until they are ready to marry and reproduce. But that didn’t sound correct. I began to look into the subject, to conduct my own studies, and do you know what I learned?”
Lou shook her head no, as did Sister Francis, though the nun must have heard this before.
“Our madhouses are full of girls whose minds have been twisted and shattered by society’s refusal to help their blood reach their brains. The TB wards are crowded with girls hemorrhaging to death for lack of exercise and fresh air. Our slums seethe with the physical slackness that leads to decadence and Bolshevism, all because of insufficient oxygen and physical training.”
He thrust his folded newspaper at Lou, pointing to the front-page photo of a man in a helmet and goggles. “Do you recognize this man?”
“Monsieur Lindbergh,” Lou said. He was a hero among the girls.
“Very good,” said the doctor. “I am not a gambling man, but I’ll bet that, when you were a child, you imagined you could fly.”
Lou gripped the balance bar. What other secrets did he know?
He said, “If you are willing to work really hard, my sister and I can help you conquer gravity without leaving the ground. Are you willing to work hard?”
“Yes,” Lou said. “I am.” Finally, someone had asked.
Dr. Loomis moved into a cottage near the convent and attended every training session, race, and game. Sister Francis surrendered the stopwatch, and now he was the one who called out the times and told Lou how to move, how to breathe, where to put her knees and elbows. It was pleasant to discuss her body in that distanced way, as if she were a new machine they were perfecting. Dr. Loomis said that athletics were the hope of the future, along with speed, the automobile, and loyalty to one’s country.
One afternoon, the literature nun was reading aloud from Racine when Lou was called out of class. She found Dr. Loomis and Sister Francis waiting for her in the Mother Superior’s office. She assumed she’d done something wrong. But Sister Francis and her brother were telling the Mother Superior that Lou’s achievements would reflect well on the school and attract talented students whose enlightened parents shared the convent’s modern ideas about education. They’d come to persuade the headmistress that everything should be done to encourage and nurture Lou’s gifts.
Lou’s bed was moved beside the window, which Dr. Loomis insisted be kept open. When the others complained about the draft, she got a room of her own. Special shoes were ordered so her feet could grow. Her ankles got their own regimen of hot water baths and massages from Sister Francis. She ate food that was different from what the others ate: raw vegetables, whole grains, stewed fruit, but no meat and not the sweets that the girls enjoyed on birthdays. She didn’t miss the puddings and cookies, especially when Dr. Loomis bought her blood oranges from Sicily in the dead of winter.
She spent hours on the stationary bicycle they called the Gymnasticon. Her calves and thighs became muscular and hard, and it seemed to Lou that an alien, stronger self was being born inside her. In the evenings she paced the corridors with a medical textbook balanced on her head. Once, when the book fell, the circulatory system tore loose and skittered across the pavement. Dr. Loomis said it was important to excel at a range of sports; each would develop a different set of reflexes and muscles. She was only mildly surprised when he produced a punching bag and announced that her training would now include the skills required to become a champion boxer. Flailing away at the bag, she thought dreamily of Robert.
They began to travel to distant parts of France, in steamy second-class compartments smelling of garlic sausage and soggy diapers. Lou took part in athletic contests and attended meetings of local women’s sports clubs, groups of female athletes whose eyes blazed with the light of a holy mission and who admired Lou’s talent and hard work. She kept in touch, by mail, with a discus thrower from the Auvergne, a high jumper from Provence.
One night she tiptoed through the convent and, lurking in the doorway of Sister Francis’s room, spied on the nun and her brother. They were speaking English. The only words Lou understood were Lou and the Olympics.
Soon after, Lou was informed that they were going to Paris, with the Mother Superior’s blessing and with the consent of her parents, who sent word that they wished Lou all the best.
From Make Yourself New
BY LIONEL MAINE
Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 Page 3