In Partial Disgrace

by Charles Newman

  “My husband,” the Princess offered as an icebreaker, “is a disgusting fellow.”

  The swimming hole marked the edge of the first Stone Age settlement in 6000 BC. At that time a riverine ledge extended completely across the Mze, a natural ford and the future site of a Roman bridge. But the attraction here for the mentality of mankind’s first predatory age was not the crossing so much as the whirlpools just beneath the ledge, which churned up vast amounts of nutrients and attracted carp, tench, loach, pike-perch, and sturgeon. The votaries discovered in this settlement’s burial pits were human heads with fish lips, as well as cave paintings depicting trained dogs diving into the tawny river to retrieve live fish, as they believed the whirlpools to be bottomless. The river and their dogs gave them everything. There was no need to bait a hook, cast a net, or sharpen a spear. The Mze washed away every little miserable existence, and its banks provided water chestnuts, sloes, field pears, rose hips, cornel cherries, wild plum, and crab apple. Yet the site was soon abandoned, and it was this ledge, now exposed at low water for the first time in anyone’s memory, that Topsy and her pedagogical duo traversed until they came to the Roman central arch, where the remainder of the ledge had been blasted away in the early nineteenth century for massed boat traffic. From the broken arch, a slatted rope bridge enjoined the far cliffs, and Father carried Topsy this final third.

  From my vantage on the chapel promontory, I could see far downstream, across the ledge and bridge, past the bathing beach, and well onto the old mill where the Mze bent double and disappeared. There I was taken aback to spy my Waterman, lying beside the drying riverbed, leaning secretly, silently, invisibly upon his elbow. His hair was matted, and runnels of water ran from the hem of his green overcoat into the disappearing Mze, like muddy tributaries to the sea. In the streaming weeds and waters of his face, he was smoking one of Father’s innumerable lost and waterlogged pipes, with an acrobat’s smile. And in his lapel, a bright green leaf sprouted from his gray, storm-broken trunk.

  The Mze was ebbing away. The Mzeometer, a calibrated Roman well at the old mill, could have confirmed this, but we disdained even this most elemental of scientific measures. The river was doing its best to flood, to no avail. The pastures were no longer striped. Where streamlets, subterranean aquifers, and proud torrential brooks once entered the river, now were only baked gulches, deep and narrow as saber cuts. The effervescent runnels in the banks had quit, and the receding waters revealed tin pots and the carcass of a laced boot, as well as rusty culverts discharging waste from god knows where. The true self-forgetfulness granted by the contemplation of water was no longer possible. There was not enough left to pray to.

  High above the ladies, cresting the bluffs on the far side of the river, the two men strode through grass up to their waists. At first submerged, Topsy started to leap up dolphin-like from the sea of lime, until they reached the bald, which had been cut through with gravel allées to an abandoned folly, slippery for men and painful for animals—another French idea. Suddenly a cold breeze had come up.

  “The time has come to transfer the lines of force, my friend,” Felix said. He slipped the cord and passed it behind his back to the Professor’s clumsy hands, and the two figures staggered out upon the bald like a hung-over couple who just met at a New Year’s party and cannot decide whether to go to a hotel or a coffeehaus. Topsy did not test him out of pity, and the Professor was reluctant to press what seemed an overly tactile advantage, recalling with embarrassment his ineptness at vivisection and even the most cursory minor surgery.

  “Stocks and bonds,” Father said, “that’s how you must learn to think about this. We’re the bond boys: we decide when to leave the house and when to return. But once underway, the animal is free to lead or lag. We can move in opposite directions for a while, but we can never be decoupled, even if we wanted it. That is what is so hard for human beings to understand. We are tethered not to our own, whom we abandon on a whim, but to animals, as to the market, by an unknown sentiment.”

  The Professor at first was silent. He did not mind Felix acting like he had an ace up his sleeve, but he did not like him acting like God himself had put it there.

  “Can it be that nature is so bourgeois?” he asked.

  “Ah, how many times have you invoked that phrase, Herr Doktor? Let us not, if you please, rush to the cupboard of concepts so quickly. Dear friend, the bottled members of the bourgeois are more difficult to grasp than the profoundest of geniuses. It’s much easier to deal with a Franz Schubert, than, say, that ‘cheese of a man’ over there. And what is the essence of bourgeois thinking?” Felix wagged his finger. “Preparing for the eventuality when the romance is over. The dog does not anticipate that he will lose his love. On the other hand, he behaves because the friendship might end. He is aware that it can end at any moment, yet he makes no contingency plans. So with animals, the foolish human cycle of romance, rejection, and reconciliation is collapsed to a workable order. There is no forgiveness after the fact, which is just as bad as punishing after the fact—bad with men and catastrophic where females are concerned. But this is what gives us room for movement and maneuver, and upon which we must now capitalize!”

  And with that Father sat down upon a pink granite plinth, his head cocked slightly to one side to watch his charges. The man and dog moved tentatively across the bald.

  “Loosen your gait, Professor. Heftig, wuchtig, you haven’t been drafted, you know. And this is no funeral!”

  And indeed, as the Professor allowed his ankles to loosen, his spine to sway, Topsy picked up her feet with a bit more merriment. “Kraftig, nicht zu schnell!” They had reached the line where a graveled track crossed the grass. With their backs turned, they stopped and stared across the broken path as if it were a wild Russian river.

  But they had stopped together, without so much as a tremor between them, and that was the point. Topsy sat down gently, her golden cape settling about her haunches, and the Professor’s shoulders seemed broader for a moment, almost athletic. Father nodded approvingly.

  “Anything diagonal across the body relaxes it,” he said. Then the Professor’s hand dropped tremulously to Topsy’s muzzle.

  “So schmart,” he crooned, “so very schmart.”

  “Cantabile, Professor, non troppo lugubre, if you please,” Father said. “Now turn and take care not to get tangled, sehr langsam.”

  The Professor accomplished a cautious half-circle in front of her nose, and then as the couple headed back toward Felix, Topsy pirouetted on her butt and they moved as one, a perfect arc of affective slackness in the cord—arm in arm, so to speak.

  “Schmart, sie schmart,” the Professor chanted softly, but then self-consciously he broke his stride, and the cord suddenly drew taut. Topsy resisted, and the grace note fell away flat. Both master and pupil looked mournfully to Father, who, walking quickly toward them and taking up the cord, took Topsy through a quick series of snappy turns, in order that she finish strongly. Then, as he released her to run, he said over his shoulder:

  “Walk the walk, Professor, then talk the talk. It’s moves that make views, not the other way about.”

  At the ford, a furtive, boney stag with a broken rack and patchy coat appeared, pawing at the water. But as he pricked up his ears and crossed, there were no splashings, no white-fringed wavelets about his fetlocks. Here was a river that could be stepped in twice and twice and twice again, the Heraclitian riddle broken: no flow, no flux, no exchange—only stasis. Left foot, right foot, still he could not step into the river, even once. I saw that my little aesthetic trick, my devotion to the precious pause and the language of omission, was a flimsy thing, for in this world the basic constant is not change, despite its many apologists. What goes unremarked is that, without any reason, things just stop. For nature loves to hide, and history is mostly stillness.

  My Waterman seemed quite content, even louche, out of his element, constantly lighting and relighting his sodden pipe, and pouring a stream out of a fig
ured urn into the blackening marsh. Fish occasionally stuck their heads out of the water to stare at him, as they will sometimes do for sick men.

  The ladies had known of each other since childhood, but heretofore had seen one another only from a distance. Through the turn of the century, the Cannonian royal family had left their wooden palace at Umfallo to vacation at Semper Vero for the summer, as the nether-reaches of our acreage were still technically part of the royal hunting grounds. It had been the decision of Zanäia’s father, King Peveny, to live as the people do for the best part of the summer, for it was well-known that rough as a peasant’s life might be, they invariably looked out upon beauty, even while locked in a starving carnal embrace. Every member of the court changed into peasant clothes for the season, living in elegant Turkish tents and small portable cottages brought in by oxen. Princess Zanäia herself resided in a small gabled treehouse, a portion of whose parlor still remained in the crotch of a huge beech, which could bear the weight of her many surreptitious nightly visitors, though by now the view had lost much of its charm. But the court kept its distance from the gentry, suspicious of any intercourse with the upper middle classes, and as the gentry themselves of course felt morally superior to the aristocrats, they got along quite well. To underline the simplicity of the royal summer, a large scaffolding had been erected between the trees, suggesting some kind of pagan sacrificial platform, and around this stood supercilious servants in frock coats, each standing with a flaming taper by a satin footstool. There were as well some large and rather unconvincing life-sized dolls, impaled on tritons for Scythian effect, as the royalty liked nothing so much as to remind themselves that they, too, had once been classified as barbarians. This mise-en-scène was framed with long wafts of diaphanous silk trailing down from the beeches, making a kind of osmotic proscenium. It was as if they could only accept the view if it were made commonplace while you were looking out and pornographic while you were looking in, creating a kind of allegory, though suggestive of what it was hard to say, except that the traditional invasion route had been turned into a kind of slow-motion debauche, particularized by large potted plants, beautiful young city boys, angelic peasant girls, petards, and Vaseline.

  King Peveny himself was a strange man, given to visiting exhibitions in Cannonia about foreign lands, then writing speeches giving the impression he had actually traveled there. Once, when bouncing his darling, curly-haired Zanäia on his knee, he had looked at her sideways, saying, “You know my sweet, if you were in a brothel, you are not the one I’d pick.” In their most recent hysterical quest for a ruler, the Astingi had sent out feelers to all the royal houses, magnates, and grofs without privilege, even unmarried daughters of the higher nobles. But nothing remotely like a prince would consider them, except one Grof Peveny, “Falconer of the Hereditary lands,” who, tired of hunting rats in Poland, was enticed by the promise to take unlimited Cannonian forest pig from horseback. But despite the unprecedented game potential, he reluctantly withheld his candidacy for a time, as he perceived the ancient hermit kingdom to be a troubled place. Yet times were such for the minor nobility that he was finally forced to accept the regency. So in 1875, Grof Peveny moved his loyal retainers, sporting chums, knockneed horses, and scruffy dogs to the wooden castle with no stairway and a leaking roof at Umfallo, where to polite applause, and with only a single assassination threat, he summed up his feelings in his acceptance speech: “My people are neither handsome nor gay, meseems. They are neglected, superstitious, and ignorant. But they are indescribably picturesque, and I have learned to love them.” And then they all stood round and sang the new national anthem, a reorchestrated Astingi revel.

  Over the creation of thy beauty,

  There is a mist of tears

  Oh my poor strange land

  How long have I kept watch with thee . . .

  Princess Zanäia and Count Zich had been heavy petters of a sort since thirteen, and the Count had been credited as her lover, an improbable distinction. Each of them liked nothing better than to take the Eroica Express anywhere. That famous train was twice as long as any in Europe, its double-hinged steam engine running wildly as if in terror of itself, hauling its notorious Cannonian first-class sleeping coaches, in which all the bedrooms were adjoined by secret inner doors, and each car in turn bracketed by ornate buffet and smoking carriages. Theirs were intermittent and compensatory attentions in later life, consoling one another with infinite tenderness and solicitude during those intervals when the other had driven away another lover, due to a gross instability and selfishness which they knew better than to practice on each other. It was noted in Father’s daybook that had they been joined in matrimony and publicly practiced the management science and cosseting they adopted when the other was most forlorn, they might have shrewdly ruled the Central Empires, and entirely sidestepped the horrific detour of the twentieth century.

  The two women regarded each other evenly. It was the first time they had been this close. The Princess was in remarkably good fettle, Mother thought initially. Her skin was ivory with no crowsfeet or créche at the neck, but as her slip settled about her wet body, Mother noticed the Princess was a veritable web of scar tissue, sutured expertly to be sure, as if one had taken a vellum map of Cannonia at its greatest extent in the Middle Ages and superimposed upon it the late-nineteenth-century railway system. There was a much-repaired main spur across the bridge of her nose, crescents beneath each ear and jowl, trunk-lines beneath the breasts, and a strange, serpentine freight-changing yard at an angle to her navel.

  They spoke of surgeries, their mutual fear of microbes and loathing of physicians, not to mention the men who you have to teach to comb their hair and eat with a fork, and who then deceive you. “Marriage is an entombment,” the Princess whispered hoarsely, carrying out the general line of argument she had begun, “but my husband is the only man who will love me to the death.”

  Mother refused to be drawn into this. “My husband brought me out of childhood without pain,” she said. “He freed me from the gods of the riverbanks. I can never forget that. And in all relationships, everyone enjoys in different ways, and different times, the position of the master.”

  “But what, my dear, do you like about him?”

  Ainoha thought this over for some time. “Well, he remembers what he reads.”

  “You can’t say so!” the Princess exclaimed.

  “And he makes no claim on feelings he doesn’t feel.”

  “Extrordinaire!”

  “Yes, and there’s this: he suffers over real things.”

  The Princess appeared downcast as she studied her faux-tigerish nails, registering the boredom of a triangle player in a symphony.

  “But isn’t it odd,” she blurted, “how resentments start to build even the very first day?”

  “My only regret is that there was no one to steal him from,” Ainoha averred. “That would have made it perfect! In any event,” she went on, depetalizing a daisy, “the problem is neither of the marriage yoke nor one of equality. The issue is how to be superior, or so I’ve always thought.”

  “How well you put it,” the Princess laughed, her absentminded expression dissolving for a moment.

  “And the problem with superiority,” Mother mused, “is how to show it without being unfaithful.”

  “Ah, yes,” the Princess cawed. “I may love my country, mais mon cul est international!”

  The ladies’ frank talk was interrupted by coarse shouts across the water. On the towpath on the far bank, thirty pairs of horses, interspersed by an odd brace of water buffalo, were towing a ship upriver, the craft itself still concealed around the bend. Preceding the ship in a dugout canoe rowed by four men, the pilot called out to the driver managing the straining animals on the bank, and while ropes twanged, horses whinnied and zillions of frogs and birds began to scream, he cursed them through a speaking tube: “Heave, you cuntbitten crawdons, you dodipal shit-a-beds, heave on!” Just then, around the bend appeared a small three-m
asted frigate, Count Zich’s Penelope III, green sails lashed to her mast, its twenty-four rowers straining furiously at their portholes. At such moments Ainoha loathed the river, a ditch of universal filth and violence beside which sat women deflecting the desperate glances of men looking up from work of which they had little comprehension except its difficulty, and no aim but to escape it in their arms.

  “Heave, you ninny lobocks, heave you turdy membertoons!”

  As few boats were worth towing on the arduous journey up the Mze, no passengers were ever carried on these return trips upstream, only the most profitable cartage. Generally, the ships were abandoned downstream, broken up at Therapeia, and sold for scrap. Through her opera glasses, which she was never without, even in the water, Ainoha could make out the bulky cargo lashed to the deck between the leering sailors. It was an Astingi theater set. The Penelope III carried the sky, the earth, a bower of roses, a dungeon, a town’s spires, many swords and spears, as well as the sun, the moon, and a great sheet of winking stars—Astingi props, being towed against all the forces of history and nature.

  The horses stepped in the wake of the others like a caravan of camels. The drivers ran among them, keeping the towropes from entanglement, alternating lashings with gifts of oats. The towpath often disappeared and the horses went up to their bellies in the foaming muddy water. The sailors, dressed in Venetian garb, ran to and fro on the deck, bidding sweet farewell, saluting, and finally gesturing obscenely toward the two unblushing, unmoved women on the foggy shore.

  In the half-hour it took for the Penelope III to pass, the Pilot was the only man on the river whose back was to the women. Ainoha saw the captain on the fo’c’s’le, his spyglass trained upon her. She raised her glasses to the bluffs, where Father and the Professor strode back and forth, occasionally waving their arms at each other, totally absorbed in Project Topsy. She could see the hair in their ears and the sweat on their brows.