And Julian’s hands on her breasts.
Lili was answering calmly, “Iris sends you? But Julian is all right, yes? Already last night he was almost well.”
How matter-of-fact she was; how formed and finished; how unperturbed and unsurprised. She was used to everything, and ready to expect anything. The world was as it was.
“How can I tell how he is? And nobody knows I’ve come looking for you, Iris has nothing to do with it. She won’t let me see him. Not for days.” She was breathless; open to quarrel. “If I don’t get to see him, then I’ve wasted my time, there’s no point to any of it —”
“Come,” Lili said, “sit.” Behind the partition she turned on the lamp. A typewriter, stacks of sheets, something resembling a ledger. A small ticking clock. “They are like excitable children, they hide their secrets.” She tugged a little on the cuffs of her sleeves — as if her blouse didn’t fit at the wrists — and looked steadily at Bea. “I hide nothing.”
“What sort of place is this? I saw the sign, what do you do here?”
“It is to go out, only to go out. This man, you see how broken, in his home once a scholar of Goethe. Das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn, you know this? There they open willingly.”
Bea said, “Then you speak German?”
“Whatever is needed we speak. So many laws in so many countries, it is not always possible they will permit. So many will not permit, and when one permits . . .” She wrinkled out a quick ephemeral frown. “Your nephew, he makes it romantic, he makes it noble —”
This was scarcely the conversation Bea had counted on; she did not entirely understand it. The furry accent, the too considered English — stiff, more than a bit off. And she thought again: tasteless, in mild weather those long sleeves.
“But if you have him living with stories of people like that, that man with the terrible fingers,” she protested, and burst out: “Julian’s too young to be made so sad.”
“Julian sad, no! Theatrical, you saw how theatrical. Also his sister. He is like a boy in a play.”
“A play? His family thinks it’s time he became serious.”
Marvin-ventriloquism. Or not: plain on the face of it, the boy was all anarchy.
“His sister is not so serious. A wildness, a wild bird.”
“Don’t you like her?” The instant it was out, Bea felt it as something only a tactless American would ask.
“She should not have come. She makes a complication. Also you should not have come.”
“Especially if I can’t get to talk to my nephew. Days and days gone by, and I’ve seen Julian for a quarter of an hour, if that. Not that I can blame him.” An unforeseen glimmer of candor: how could she blame herself for an identical disregard? “We don’t know each other,” she admitted.
“A nephew who is for you a stranger. And still you speak of family.”
Bea said lamely, “New York and California are a continent apart.”
“Have you no husband, no son, no family of your own? If you do not know your nephew, why do you run to him, why have you an interest in him?”
“I’ll ask you the same.” And dared it: “What is it you want from Julian?”
Lili dipped her head. A few threads of gray at the crown. “I had once a husband. I had once a son.” Up rose her chin, a warning, a wall. She would go no further with this. “Today I have Julian.”
A husband, a son. People like that, one of those. There was no innocence in this woman.
“Next to Julian,” Bea said, “you seem . . . old.”
“I am already one hundred years, yes! But I am for him. I do him good, is this how you say it? I do him good.”
“And what possible good can he do you? A boy in a play! The two of them, you call them children —”
“He becomes less and less a boy. At the same time he is a man.”
“Oh, in that way —” It was her worst so far.
“In all ways. Do not mistake him. He is a man.”
“A man,” Bea repeated foolishly.
“You see now why you should not have come. Your niece tells you this. Also I tell you. And you see for yourself. It is done. It was not my wish, Julian wished it, he wished it and wished it. And so.”
Unthinkable. Unconscionable. Done? Then the boy was in for it. He was beyond rescue, beyond even punishment. He was lost to fathomless incoherence.
Lili stood up; her hand went to the lamp. But it stopped midway, with a palm open to judgment — Bea made it out almost to be an appeal.
“You must believe me. I do him good,” Lili said. “Now nothing is hidden, you see?”
It came to Bea then that the excitable children’s secret was out. Lili had once had a husband. Now she had another.
16
Iris stood in the doorway: a sentry on the alert.
“Tomorrow evening? Is this about dinner again? We’ll think about it. Can’t you just put it off a bit longer? Julian needs another couple of nights to recuperate, at least — that awful cough, not that it’s not on its way out, Lili’s eggnogs maybe. He’s really getting on, it’s only that his mood’s so bad. You won’t want to come in,” she persisted, “he hasn’t had much of anything to eat, and he’s cranky —”
Boorish, piggish to be packed off, time after time, day after day, like a peddler, like a beggar!
“We haven’t once had a proper visit, or even talked a little. He snubs me —”
“Because you’ve got to give dad his report, that’s why. Interrogation at headquarters, isn’t that the idea? Look, Julian’s fine, he can do without anyone’s supervision, you can tell dad that.”
“And what do I say about you?”
Iris rolled her eyes. Boorish, piggish! And something telltale, fumelike, on her breath.
“Don’t you get it, that you’re just another leash? We don’t need it, we’ve been on a leash all our lives —”
“A leash? When for years I’ve had nothing to do with either of you —”
“Exactly. And then you show up here, and tug at the rope.”
“It was you who came to me,” Bea said.
“I was sent.”
Mulish! — the two of them. These coddled Californians, with no inkling of endurance. They had lived without winter. And if anyone had Julian on a leash, hampering his future, stopping up his youth, wasn’t it Lili? Oracular, too alien to comprehend. But unwilling to lie.
A blank day, then. Bea had it before her. An hour to change her return ticket, and afterward what? Another go at the Louvre, why not? — it was inexhaustible. A fake reprise of the summer, when she’d been no more implicated in these foreign intrigues than the usual tourist, a vacationing unmarried teacher (have you no husband, no son?), a triteness, and not . . . whatever she was now. A leash. A leech. They didn’t want her, they were wary of her — possibly they would indulge her enough to let her pay for a meal, and good riddance. They were afraid of her: she was a messenger, an emissary. They took her to be Marvin’s surrogate. They knew what Marvin was capable of.
The dazzling length of the Galerie d’Apollon, a gold-encrusted hall, and then on through the vastnesses of those brilliant corridors opening into still more brilliant rooms, Etruscans, Greeks, Romans alive in their marble veins and thick marble necks where pulses once throbbed, and on the old walls kings and warriors and highborn ladies in fluted silks, and pastoral riders shadowed by the weighty crowns of trees. A thousand resurrections, Magna Graecia becoming Naples, goddesses brought low, kitchen jugs venerated. Dust-unto-dust spited. She saw an embossed ebony cabinet, vines, leaves, fruits, beasts, niche within graven niche, every inch carved, curled, figured. She saw, in a small vitrine, a tiny polished lion, crouching, one paw extended: the gilded claws glittered. She looked and looked and looked — her eyes thirsted. In all this proliferation, paint dried centuries past, stone knees of dead monarchs, every object made, hardwon, it was humanity, it was civilization . . .
An empty bench; she sat down gladly, wearily, before a Flemish tapestry that s
tretched from one end of the gallery to the other. A million colored threads, faces, hands, topiary, minutely pebbled paths, a stream. Little fishes in the transparent water. She imagined Marvin beside her, gaping all around and seeing nothing. Belittling what he couldn’t plumb. Amnesiac America, America the New. What’s new is good, workable, efficient. Engineered.
But what he was capable of!
17
“THE LAST SUPPER,” Iris said. “That’s what Julian called it when I got him to come. For dad’s sake, not that he cares.”
The last minute, the eleventh hour. Bea had booked a midnight flight. In her odious room two floors above, her bags were packed and ready.
“He thinks you’re going to crucify him,” Iris said. “Fatten him up for the slaughter, serve his head on a platter.”
Her ears had reddened; she was emptying glass after glass — it was soon evident that the three convivial bottles Bea had ordered wouldn’t suffice. Julian, his mind on his meat, went on feeding as if he had been famished for months. The boy was a carnivore, the boy had an appetite! And beside him Lili, half screened by the heavy curtain that secluded this corner of the dining parlor and overhung the heaped-up bowls and bubbling sauces and tubs of dumplings and trays of tarts sent parading around them. Fragrances of what was yet to come flowed in from the kitchen. Bea had been extravagant!
But a fiasco, all of it. A futility from beginning to end. She was glad enough to be on her way. Goodbye to their mysteries, their entanglements, their concealments — she had been drawn in and kept out. In the subdued light Lili dwindled into a fragile little old woman in a shawl. Bea saw again that double crease etched in her forehead: two cut-off railroad tracks. She was picking at a lone lettuce leaf. Glancing over, Julian ladled out a large potato and set it on her plate. Steam, and the honeyed scent of some unfamiliar herb, spiraled upward.
“Madame Bones,” he said, “eat.”
And to Bea, abruptly: “Do you know how my mother is?”
These were the first words he had spoken to her.
“Your father tells me she’s in a rest home.”
“A rest home? You mean a storage bin. An asylum.”
Iris said, “She agreed to it, Julian, I told you. The place is absolutely posh, with all the amenities. She was perfectly happy to go.”
“He put her there. Dumped her.”
“She was sleeping all day, she didn’t know what time it was. She was getting sort of . . . confused. You don’t have to bring this up now —”
“Why not? He’s the one who makes her crazy, isn’t he?” And once more to Bea: “He’ll make you crazy too. What’re you going to tell him?”
“That his son is a stubborn loafer,” Iris said.
“No, really,” he pursued, “when he starts grilling you. You’ll have to say something, right?”
“What would you like me to say?”
But Lili — disquiet in her quiet — intervened. “You should say what you know.”
“What Bea knows,” Iris said, “is that we got away, we’re on the lam. Like Hansel and Gretel. Only we never intended to drop any idiot crumbs.” Belligerent. Erratic. Erratic? The girl was smashed!
“Iris, you’re having too much wine,” Julian said.
“Julian, you’re having too many cakes,” she answered.
The nettling, the bickering, the ingrained impatient intimacy (Bea could hardly tell one from the other) went back and forth between them, while Lili sat gazing at the drenched potato in her dish like an augur reading a fate. She seemed as distant from these American offspring as that ebony cabinet in the Louvre, with all its little hidden compartments. Lili herself was obscurely recessed and crannied — and was it collusion, or else some mystical tie between them, that compelled the brother to lash out a charge as biting as his sister’s? Interrogation at headquarters. And what would Bea tell Marvin, and what might come of it? Was this the incessant worry of the house almost from the hour Bea broke into their lives? Surely they murmured together, they turned it over, they pecked at the possibilities; what would she tell Marvin? They asked it uneasily, they asked it urgently, because Julian was homeless and jobless and reckless and rash. Did they hope, if only Bea could deliver a fitting story, that Marvin would soften and shower his capricious boy with money? Was some clandestine chance of it couched in the darkling groove between Lili’s eyes?
Lili said sharply, “She knows.”
“How, how?” — Iris’s wine-dyed mouth a red hole. Julian staring, sweating in the folds of his neck.
“She knows,” Lili said again.
When Bea left them there among the teacups, and went up to her room (good riddance too to the trough in the bed and the hose in the bath) to fetch her luggage, it was understood — though no one voiced it aloud — that Julian’s lot was in Bea’s hands. What the brother and sister had feared to disclose, Lili had laid open: the boy had a wife. His father took seriously the care of a wife; his own, even when ill, he had placed in the lap of luxury. Then it was at least thinkable, for the sake of the boy’s having a wife, that the money would follow: it all depended on Bea. She should not have come, no — but since she had, and knew what she knew, it might be all to the good. Thus did Lili instruct the brother and sister.
In the plane, Bea put down her book — the cabin lights had dimmed — and played it out. It was probable, it was likely. The boy’s naïveté, the pointless years away, how he dallied, how he looked for amusement, how easily he was beguiled . . . Doubtless Lili had taken his measure: he had no means of making a living, and no evident ambition either. But his father was rich. A boy with a wife was a man, and a man with a wife could not be left to drown. Accustomed in her cubicle to opening gates that were inclined to be shut, Lili had turned a key. The key was Bea. It was probable, it was likely. It accorded with Marvin’s predictable suspicions: inexorable Marvin, who had logic on his side. It was in his nature, he had founded a business, he comprehended greed, he was steeped in the knowledge of bad faith.
Probable? Likely? But Bea did not believe it.
18
WHEN SHE WAS gone, they lingered awhile. The emptied bottles lolled on their sides. Lili’s uneaten potato lay cold and congealed on her plate like a guillotined head. Where Julian had dribbled gravy, an oily patch went on spreading through the cloth. Lifting her chin over the debris, Iris said, “You think dad will make her crazy? She’s crazy already. When I was in New York — this tiny apartment she’s got — she offered me her own bed —”
“That’s because she’d stuck a pea under the mattress,” Julian said.
“— and just before that, I thought she wanted to kill me. There was this enormous thing, with brass feet, claws, you’d expect to see a piano like that on a stage, and all I did was touch it, just one note really, it was strange seeing it there, it took up nearly the whole room —”
“Wasn’t she married once? To some sort of musician?”
“— one finger, I put one finger on it, and she froze up and looked ferocious, I mean almost violent, with crazy eyes. As if I’d ruin it, or it could fall apart, or if you hit a wrong key lightning would come out of it. As if the thing was holy. — And then right after, as nicely as could be, she said I should take her bed.”
“The better to strangle you in the middle of the night,” Julian said. “So did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Take her bed.”
“I did, why not? Instead of that ratty davenport. With those silly claws practically under your nose.”
Lili said, “In that house you made perhaps a sin.”
“Because I let her sleep on her own ratty thing? What I really wanted was a decent hotel, but still, dad’s sister, do the family honors, it was only for overnight and I was getting her to help —”
“Iris at her saintliest,” Julian said.
But Lili said, “A sin to touch a holy thing, is it not?”
19
IN THE TERMINAL, waiting to board, Bea was attempting to finish the l
etter to Marvin, discarding one wary blunder after another. Either she was telling too much, or — this was certain — she was telling too little. The exertion strained her wrist; the flimsy hotel stationery went skittering over the flanks of her valise — a makeshift and unsteady surface — and she worried that her fountain pen might run dry. She surrendered finally to the old abandoned abruptness and left it at that: There’s no use my staying any longer. Iris is a riddle, and your son won’t budge. She dropped the envelope into a mail slot; they had begun to call her flight. The overseas stamp was big and showy. It would be postmarked Paris, as it must be. To take the letter with her, to send it from another city, was perilous.
She had exchanged her ticket for an earlier date — but also for a different destination. Marvin was not to know this; it was a recklessness. A whim. Or not a whim; it drove her. A handful of days remained before she was obliged to breathe the fetid airlessness of her classroom — Laura impatient, chafing, waiting to be freed from those hulking students with their long sideburns and beginning mustaches, how they must be hooting at Madame Defarge and her knitting, caterwauling in staccato falsettos It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done, swiping their necks, and how was Laura handling it? — Mrs. Bienenfeld, show us how it works, the guillotine, come on, show us, show us on Charlie! Poor Laura, was she pulling it off, staring down that mob of overgrown boys cavorting in their seats?
Paris had been hurtful; they had treated her badly. Their rebuffs and mystifications. But Bea knew now what Iris knew; they knew it together. A secret no more — Bea was carrying it with her. She had the power to divulge it or not to divulge it: either way, it was power.
The windows were black, the shades pulled down. Many of the passengers were asleep, their faces turned childlike under the dim cabin lights. The body of the plane vibrated like a tuning fork, obedient to the pulsing of the great engine quartet. In a matter of hours they would be escaping the night, outrunning it to cross into the ruddy seam of late afternoon. The shades would snap open, a dawdling finger of sun would wake the sleepers, and far beneath, as the plane’s belly lowered, a famous ocean would rise toward them — not the homebound Atlantic, at whose lip lay New York. They were landing in California.
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