In Partial Disgrace

by Charles Newman

  Encouraged by Mother, the lady (who had somehow escaped formal introduction) began a story of how during the recent hostilities, when groceries were not plentiful, she would procure unpasteurized milk on the black market for Drusoc and herself, boiling it as a precaution. But occupied as she was with matters of an intellectual nature, she would invariably allow the milk to boil over, transforming it into a great insipid froth—not affecting its nutritive value, perhaps, but quite spoiling the taste. “And having no alternative”—this phrase was drawn from her bosom with considerable elaboration—she and Drusoc would drink the froth from the same saucer!

  It was a charming story, and the Professor said so, striking his left forearm with his walking stick for emphasis. She took the interruption in stride.

  “As it happened,” she continued, Drusoc disappeared one night during an artillery raid, having gone out to the roof to relieve himself, where he become preoccupied with the flares bursting over the city. (It was unclear in which city they were or whose shells were falling, only that the lady was capable of great acts of courage, kindness, and dignity.) He had obviously returned, as his obdurate presence testified from the corner of the moonroom. But the point, she concluded, was that during the time she agonized over the loss of her companion, believing him dead, she never once allowed the milk to boil over! And there the story ceased with great emphasis, her lovely lips parting on a lost definite article. All her facial orifices were ovuline, as if to give shape to her formless tale, and as the last aspirant syllable floated away, she glanced up at the large mirror to review her finale.

  The Professor, nodding vigorously in assent, exclaimed, “There! Remarkable, is it not!”

  My dear parents’ faces were full of genteel stupefaction, while the Professor’s eyes were half-closed, as if in infinite reverie. I will say this: no matter how garbled or inconsequential the story, no one ever forgets such a face, such hair, such flared nostrils, such hands fluttering about such a mouth. That beautiful gash of lips, smeared with lipstick on the outline of her muzzle, so that her mouth seemed slightly off center, like a ventriloquist’s doll’s, now issued a single sibilant, indecipherable word, which sounded like “unk” or “uck”—a pig’s word in sow’s purse.

  Father’s knee was pumping up and down like an adolescent’s. “Would you like to see the American electric Bickford plough,” he broke in desperately, “or perhaps shoot some hares?”

  “So this,” Mother interrupted cheerfully, as always insisting upon a certain narrative momentum, and gesturing grandly toward Drusoc’s somnolent form, “this is what got you through your time of troubles. Forgive my husband, he is no politician. He sometimes doesn’t read a newspaper for a week.”

  “My dear,” Felix countered, “kindly dedragonize yourself. Why, just yesterday I read how the new discovery of graffiti scrawled upon a vomitorium at Pompeii demonstrates how the Visigoths breached with such apparent ease the Roman defense on the Rhine.”

  No one knew what on earth he was talking about, but Drusoc turned three-quarters, like a faucet, nodding to Felix while slightly opening one drooping, red-hawed eye, offering the merest yet distinctive echo of affirmation.

  “Or perhaps you would like to spend an hour watching Drusoc learn some tricks,” Father finished haplessly. But his attempts to restore a subject matter to the conversation, or plan a diversion from it, fell equally on deaf ears.

  To hear the lady tell it (and there was no stopping her now), Drusoc was also apparently prepotent and promiscuous beyond all reckoning, and during my forthcoming travels, I would see his issue everywhere—phenomes of nullity, who, curled up in the corner, back-assed to you, are willing to absorb your most fearful and incoherent speculation into their ugly bodies and blow back something like a kiss. Drusoc, the no-problem pet, does more than take you on your own terms. He veritably eats them up, and deposits them later without detection on somebody else’s roof, a condition not to be confused with whatever we infer about the noble aloofness of the cat, who is in fact not diffident at all but just looking, longing for a place that is eternally without shit.

  But of course it was Drusoc’s neurasthenia, not his vast powers of accommodation, which had brought him to our unlikely corner of the earth, and as the Professor and his lovely colleague unraveled the etiology of his illness to Father (whose jaw sank gradually into his clavicle, eyes straying sideward like a nervous horse’s) they constantly interrupted one another, spending most of the conversation apologizing for their interruptions.

  The gist of it was this: Drusoc had apparently come to believe that every series of steps ought to end with the right foot; therefore, each morning he would have to begin the day with an extra step, in order that his pairs of steps throughout the day would add up to an uneven number. This obviously pointed to a fundamental semantical confusion, and not at all the sort of thing one would expect of a rat terrier.

  “You’re certain you didn’t try to hypnotize him?” Father queried the Professor.

  “I never even looked at him! I swear it. Not so much as a glance!”

  Father agreed that while Drusoc’s condition was indeed intrinsically fascinating, it was not a problem he was put on earth to conquer.

  But this was not all, the guests went on, tumbling over themselves. It seemed the dog also had a phobia for all plant life, every kind of grass and flower. He had no fear of any human or the wildest dog, nor the terrors of the city, and he could apparently distinguish between natural life and its representation. He would gladly curl upon the gaudiest flowered chintz, for example, but pluck a real daisy anywhere near him and he would be overcome by howling.

  “If a bird should alight upon a bush, he sounds out a timorous bark of warning,” the grand lady exclaimed.

  “But if a ball should roll from the pavement to the grass, he considers it a total loss,” the Professor appended, glancing at his bootlaces, which seemed to be unraveling themselves even as he spoke.

  Father listened, nodded, and knocked out his pipe, spewing embers down his shirtfront, as he averred that he had never come across a case in which morbidity extended to all plant life. But then he announced that he must withdraw from the project, for even to contemplate this peculiar resistance for more than a few moments placed them all in jeopardy of mental injury. Then he suggested, somewhat drily, that we could take our drinks out on the terrace, and there on the slate pavers—the safe surface of the mineral world—introduce Drusoc to ferns and mushrooms one by one, though this fell rather flat.

  Mother arose to replenish the tea, and as she vacated the sofa, the Professor, seizing the pretext to be nearer the ashtray, moved to her emptied place next to the lady, all the while expostulating, “How extraordinary, befreundeter colleague—extraordinary,” touching her once on the forearm and then on the elbow, like a basso entering an opera with his single line, signifying only the proximity of intermission.

  Father had put on a saturnine but rather forced smile. My mother, with her overdeveloped sense of propriety, returned with a fresh pot, and interposing herself between the guests on the divan, held one hand of each while she poured, supplying both connection and restraint. Drusoc assumed his recumbency in the corner, and I curled up beside him in the hope that my peculiarities might likewise be subject to their scrutiny. I noticed that the lady had very large lips, crater-blue eyes, and auburn hair frizzled at the ends, like a fox backing into its lair. I wanted to lick her all over.

  The Professor was more affectionate with us than I had ever seen him, telling jokes, gesticulating broadly, as engaging as Father was increasingly stiff and formal. Mother was not disconcerted but simply alert and curious, rather like Lidi, our prize bitch, who greeted strangers by acrobatically walking along the topmost rail of the kennel fence. Then, as Mother poured the tea, the Professor began to stretch and yawn, praising the quality of our hospitality, the featherdown coverlet under which he had passed so many nights, the infinitely wide range of pillows, the nonpareil comfort of the horsehair m
attress, unavailable since the breach with Italy, and then, pulling out his watch, which was now entangled with the virgin Dresden ringlets, opined that they would never make the last steamer. “I have never felt so safe in my life as in Cannonia,” he finally sighed to his companion.

  Father shot him a glance that would turn a bear. The Professor suppressed a slight blush, but it was the lady who sensed the severity of his warning. Drusoc, by now barely an epistemological fact, regarded them with one almost kindly, pale albino eye.

  The lady was no natural storyteller, as we have already determined, particularly with such tension in the room. But she nevertheless launched into several anecdotes about long walks with interesting men of powerful intellect and weak nervous systems, the coloring of various lakes at different altitudes, the heat of Berlin and the chill of Dresden. I was most impressed by these descriptions of how the sunlight is focused like a flame when it suddenly appears above the rooftops of a narrow street, of savage and sudden changes of weather, of the grand shiver you experience before a roaring fire, of how one might break a saucer and throw out the cup in frustration, of how bubbles sigh in hot cereal properly prepared, and of how certain acquaintances induce a paralysis akin to the thud of an artillery shell.

  But the more she talked the more it became clear we were headed for disaster, for just as the story became interesting and all her astonishing embroidery began to point to something, there suddenly occurred that hairball of a word, uttered at first with nods all around—an indecipherable phrase that was repeated quite often, but fobbed off in a way that would not only deflect the story but rob it of interest. Even a child could see that such a gratuitous gesture, harmless enough in the mouth of a gentle and sensitive woman or a surgical wordsmith like the Professor, could become a bludgeon of banality against we misera plebs. At first I thought this simply a vocabulary beyond my years, a kinderbuch of expressions abbreviated to spare me embarrassment, but as each loose anecdote was short-circuited by its interpretation in the wooden paraphrase, the dull glaze in Father’s eyes—a glance of disappointment which only appeared when the cook tried to foist old eggs upon us, or the game had not been hung long enough, causing the blood to congeal in some unspeakable cavity—legitimized my lacquered heart. The moonroom had become a den from which no tracks returned. It was like being in a strange town of countless religious denominations, and all the church bells begin to peal at noon, so while you know that it’s noon and it’s religious, you can’t tell one bell, one church, or one religion from the other.

  “Well, it’s a question of the uck, of course,” the wondrous lady pronounced.

  “Quite. The very sort of uck that Blederhorst denies,” the Professor confirmed.

  “He’s on to something,” she allowed, “but his is simply not a quality mind. The uck in his case is . . .”

  “Primordial, yet annulled,” the Professor interjected.

  “Exactly,” she confirmed.

  The blue cords in Father’s neck now appeared in his temples, and tiny diagonal bolts of lightning flickered across his forehead.

  “Wouldn’t you like to see the tobacco leaves hung up in the barn to dry?” he said plaintively. “Or watch the livestock choke on sunflowers? Just tell me, what would amuse you most?” And at this point of desperation, Father performed his famous conjurer’s trick, throwing two half-shuffled packs of cards into a top hat, then withdrawing one in its original order and the other fully shuffled. Our guests barely acknowledged this, though Drusoc cocked a limp ear.

  “As in America. No real uck there,” the Professor perambulated, lighting another cigar and ignoring Father’s offer.

  “Yes, but no doubt it will be repeated there,” the lady allowed. “Perhaps the uck is there,” Father queried helplessly, “even if they don’t know it.”

  “Uck repeated there, or rather identical in its oppositeness?” the lady acknowledged, opening a small fan which she had kept up her lace sleeve.

  “When they are differentiated,” the Professor said, slapping his knee, “they will ultimately express that only humanity is really dead.”

  “But this too—will it not be secondary to overreaching itself?” the lady averred.

  “Yes, ah, yes,” the Professor sighed.

  “Are you speaking of a frenzied soul, or a vague and tender heart?” Mother broke in hopefully, always aware of the costs of allowing boredom to send a crease across Father’s face, and trying to avert the storm about to break over Semper Vero. But it was too late.

  “The devil take it!”

  Father’s pipe had already shattered against the base of the fireplace, and with his own patented concatenation of boredom and rage, he leapt from his chair and stalked from the room, announcing only that their horses required preparation. Mother suggested that they have a smoke in the drive, now that the room was blue with haze. The lady seemed nonplussed, sagging everywhere but in the bust, but the Professor arose obediently and followed Father out the open front door, almost meekly, it seemed to me, without his usual bluffness, and Drusoc followed them phlegmatically to relieve himself on the wide expanse of nonthreatening gravel. As the lady passed me, she gave me a hard look and said, “You have a smile like one I saw once on a sign outside a barber shop.” Then her bustle moved out through a portal of light like a barrage balloon.

  “Please do not misunderstand me, my friend,” Father began on the steps. “But the pleasant prospect you propose is impossible, even as I presume it. You are aware that I have met your wife, and your wife has met my wife. I believe the symmetry is not lost upon you. This is my house and my laboratory, not a nightclub. Your lack of discretion is none of my business, but neither can I expense it off the books. As with all things, I admire your chutzpah, but must deplore your strategy.”

  The Professor looked down at the loosening laces of his long shoes.

  “I have been under great strain,” he murmured. “Can you imagine what resentments one feels after being kind and tolerant day after day to people who have gone off the rails?”

  “No one here is crazy, Professor. No one here is even remotely ill. Except, perhaps, this abortion of a white dog, whose main problem is that he’s gone to fat. I only want to avoid embarrassment. This is not the bridge, sir, at which I wish to take my stand.”

  The Professor looked up in the air and sniffed like a confused pointer. “It is an imposition, to be sure. I want of course to disguise the act, but also to share with her here, above the ordures of the barnyard . . .”

  My father clapped his hand to his forehead. “Perhaps I am missing something here,” he hissed beneath his breath, “but this is one subterfuge you must manage on your own, sir. Surely you can make the L’Auberge L’Espérance before dark, and their rear rooms, I believe, give onto a barnyard much like this one. If not, there is always the Desdemona’s steerage, though they often overbook.”

  The Professor, much to his credit, I thought, refused to be abashed. “I agree I am not faultless in this matter. Even the strongest character remains powerless in his pure being. Perhaps it is only that I have not availed myself of such opportunities in the past which now stiffens my resolve. But surely, if you will not find this forgivable, at least acknowledge my perplexity, cement our friendship, and accept my apology with that assent.”

  “My dear friend, it is not for me to give permission. I can only urge the usual canards about civility and common sense. It is not your urges, your appetites, at all; it’s the way you have resorted to explaining them that sends shivers up and down my spine.”

  “Naturally.” The Professor slammed on his homburg. “The business in any case has suddenly lost its taste. But there is one thing. You have complained about my visiting you with only psychotics, oddities, and a host of problems. But this dog, you must admit, is no particular bother, and the woman, though she is demonstrative, is remarkably discreet and modest in every way. Don’t you agree?”

  “From this standpoint, I am with you,” Father smiled. “Do you not bel
ieve that I wish you every pleasure of the ancients? Do you not think I am myself curious about the sex traits of such a crazed beauty? But when you cross that border, you must respect my rules, and my basic rule is this: I could not live without my wife, and I will permit nothing on this property which might cause her the slightest discomfort. My friend, in this life I have been deeply desired, and whether I was deeply loved I cannot say, but the regard of that woman has meant more to me than anything in this world. She is the only woman who has loved me disinterestedly. I am afraid that a small courtesy to her must now take precedence over a larger one to yourself.”

  The Professor attempted to look sadder and wiser. One could hear only the slop slop of the harnesses on the glistening horses’ backs. Drusoc sidled between Father’s legs, commiserated with his ankle, and gave assent to the void, keeping one wary gray eye upon the avenging lawn.

  “Never bring that dog here again,” Father said evenly. “There is no reform for anomie. As for the lady, she is always welcome. But beware disciples, Professor: they will cause you more grief than any critic.”

  “My wife is quite . . . bourgeois, you know,” the Professor spoke under his breath. It seemed a harmless remark, even a kindly one, but it threw my father into a mood for which none of us were quite prepared.

  “The bourgeois mission, my friend, is to bring beauty and science, justice and bliss, into some kind of strange, temporary equilibrium. But the inevitable cost is to dilute the erotic. Nothing worse in the world than a dead marriage. Nothing more of a secret than a good one. You have your reasons, no doubt. But listen,” and then he sidled up to him, walking as a mare does toward an acting-out foal—protectively, but finally annoyed—to whisper: “Let’s admit it, Doktor, your uck aside for the moment—there’s nothing like the love of a sane woman, is there? Without it life would be a pisspot, no?”

  The Professor lowered his gaze sheepishly.