Iris
36
BEA GRIPPED THE half dozen sheets in a surge of anger — clearly there was a crime in progress, but whose? She had read the girl’s letter over and over, seven times, eight. It sickened her. How like Iris to evade confrontation with her father, and to thrust it all — again! — on Bea’s shoulders. Aunt Bea the postman: but the postman hadn’t yet emptied his pack, and its burden was undelivered. The crime was Bea’s own: all these weeks she had told Marvin nothing. She was letting him dangle unslaked and ignorant in his suffering. To put off the blow was only to increase its force; and still she deferred. Marvin’s outcry, the edges of its envelope damp and curled up, languished on her bedside table in the drying puddle of a spill from a glass of water in the night. The hard blow, the bitter poison: Marvin’s disappointment, his pain. His ego, his bristling amour-propre. His proud expectations denied — as if he were a god who, having sent forth his seed, could mold his creatures as he pleased. The wayward immature son, and now the daughter, still half a child, who imagined herself in love with a charlatan, a seducer, even a kind of kidnapper — there was the real criminal! Taking the girl on as a servant without wages, an adoring little slavey, a sex slave in fact, dragging her all over Europe until she bored him and he dropped her, alone in some faraway city, unprotected. And wasn’t it protection she was searching for? The letter was speckled with dad, dad, dad. She was invoking Marvin even as she reviled and repudiated him. Only see how it is a blessing to have no children! Or an affliction to have them. Leo and his daughters: They live away. Marvin’s children too lived away. They could not live with their father — he had driven them off. The girl was inflamed. She had inserted herself into the unstable lives of her brother and his wife, a couple entangled nightly in sex. He is a man — so had Lili, old in the ways of bodily congress, spoken of the boy she had aroused; and there lay the girl in a nearby room, listening, inflamed, alert to hints of hidden erotic longings, ripened and open to the charlatan, the false doctor who fed her potions and enlisted her in the stirring of cauldrons, turning her cold to the brother she had come to solace. Julian had disappeared into the nowhere, exactly as Margaret envisioned it. Margaret, who emptied her body of its malodorous fruits to daub smudged fecal fields . . .
It was senseless to be scandalized — sickened — by this childish letter; childish; cynical; importuning. And Marvin: she’d been keeping him too long in the dark. She could hardly influence him, and even if she could — influence him how, influence him to do what?
This burning in the throat, this grinding under the heart. It wasn’t the letter, Iris wasn’t to blame! She had been sick and irritable for days — in her classroom with the biggest boys and their antics, and with Laura in the teachers’ lounge, where they had gone one afternoon to protest the imposition of loyalty oaths, but in the end had signed them anyway, hectored by the principal’s threats. On the question of loyalty oaths he was not so easygoing. They are designed to shield our soldiers from internal espionage, he announced, we must be vigilant, in Korea it already looks as if the Communists are winning . . .
All that morning, in a fit of futile aspiration, she had been force-feeding Shakespeare to her seniors. It was Macbeth: since they’d liked the guillotine so much, perhaps they’d like the gore.
— The little rise of nausea, just below the breastbone, inching upward. The stale canapés in the teachers’ lounge, some sort of fish paste left over from a party for a shop supervisor soon to retire, a Mr. Elkins, who would have preferred beer and pretzels. Was it the fish turned bad, or was it the guilty roil of her own dereliction? The dereliction had long preceded the fish. She owed Marvin what she knew, and what she knew was an unholiness — how vile a butchery it is, to be the one who wields the knife fated to eviscerate a brother’s bowel. Cain and Abel, tossed out to Iris in the Broadway dawn. But Marvin was no peaceable Abel, and Bea was no butchering Cain. What she was obliged to convey was a commonplace, children gone wrong, life gone wrong, love traduced, hope rotted, how ordinary, how banal, how easy to get it said. They live away. It is their intention to live away. It could be recited in a telephone call, in a neutral word or two, without the Sturm und Drang of primal sin. And why not the telephone, after all? Writing was safer — a hiatus mercifully intervenes before the answering explosion. But phoning was quicker, and the cost of a long-distance call all the way to California would keep it short. Marvin would insist that she reverse the charges, he would insinuate some nastiness about her pathetic schoolteacher’s salary, he would offer to call right back at his own expense — anything to press and press, to have it out, to finger the suppurating wound. She would resist, she would be adamant: let it be short and quick, get it over with! If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly. The tomfoolery of her boys groaning over Macbeth, undone by all of it, cackling at the bloody hand and hooting at the creeping greenery. Hey, Birdie, that’s like camouflage uniforms, ain’t it? Soon many of them would be in Korea as mechanics and drivers, and what was she to say when they argued that Lady Macbeth was useless to men under fire?
The telephone stood on a small square table across the room, under a window — where, in different weather, a carafe of iced tea had awaited an unknown niece. It was an indulgence to walk barefoot over the carpet, one of the comforts of living alone and unseen. A clovery softness under her toes — crooked embarrassing things they were, a hammertoe among them. Leo, attempting once to pluck the discordant digit into conformity, had gleefully named it a diabolus in musica. In the Middle Ages, he told her, the offending foot with its dissonant tritone would have been excommunicated as the work of the devil. Well, so much for that. A fresh lurch of the stomach, and the return of the crinkle of acid. The grand was gone, and wasn’t the last of Leo and his hurtful dazzlements out of her life?
The carpet had originally been an autumnal beige, now grown many shades paler from years of afternoon bleachings by a lazily lingering western sun. It had been installed wall-to-wall, a postwar fashion, and Bea’s one concession to what in her hemmed-in rooms could pass for luxury; it traveled consolingly through the tiny vestibule and on toward the windows. She pushed into its warm grassiness and went to fetch the little book of reminders she kept in her purse, where she’d left it on the bedroom dresser. Of course she had never learned Marvin’s number by heart; in that long silence between them, what need of it? Marvin’s voice on the telephone, could she endure it? The fury and the sneers.
Halfway to the bedroom, she stopped and looked down. Here, here was the sickness! She had been treading on it day after day, a darkness before her eyes. Not Iris, not Marvin, not the fish paste, not those prancing howling boys — the sickness, the lurch and the acid, was here. Her naked toes were swamped by it. The blemish, the shape, the muddy dark. A brown estuary flooding the threads of beige. Where Leo’s piano had planted its legs, under its broad black belly where the sun hadn’t reached to drain out the color, the grand’s bleeding silhouette persisted. It persisted, it bled, its edges were as undefined as a cloud of brown dust. In the dictionary of clouds, it was the sickest.
She lifted the telephone, and early the next morning — out, damned spot! — three burly men, wearing jackets with the company logo stitched into the pockets, arrived to rip up the carpet and scrape and varnish the wood floor beneath.
But she hadn’t phoned Marvin, and on second thought what would be the good of it? To hear him rail? Or was it because, for the pity of it, she could not bear to hear him rail?
37
BARON GUILLAUME de Saghan, a distant cousin of Marcel Proust (unfortunately on the Weil, or maternal, side), had founded the Centre des Émigrés out of conscience, and on the understanding that it was to be a temporary service: when its task was completed, it was destined to dissolve. He had set the place up out of conscience certainly, though out of something else as well. It was perhaps true that he had had some unsavory connection with Vichy — or perhaps not. Such a rumor was difficult to verify, and what d
ifference did it make in the present circumstance, since he was clearly doing good? Besides, if even so much as an atom of fact adhered to the charge, then it could be said that the establishment of this charitable office was a felicitous act of atonement. At the same time, it was true (or was not) that he was overly conscious of his relation, however remote, to Mme. Proust, the daughter of a Jewish stockbroker, and was thereby, as his critics put it, “taking care of his own.” Taking care of their own was what all those other agencies and relief organizations, pouring in from New York after the war, had done, harrying the displaced willy-nilly onto ships headed for Haifa and whatever other dingy ports lay along the newly Hebraized Levantine littoral. He didn’t know, or wish to know, the geography of La Terre Sacrée: he had been made to learn it as a boy, and remembered only Golgotha, a hill in Jerusalem, and the river Jordan, which roared in his imagination as a rushing cataract — never mind that nowadays it was described as only a shallow narrow stream. Yet might it not have dried up in the long centuries between the appearance of the Saviour on earth and our own time?
Such properly Christian ruminations reassured him. He was doing good. The unseemly remnants of these persecuted tribes had not all been carried off — he saw every day how Paris still teemed with them and their polyglot garble and the melancholy hungers in their alien faces and their strange fits of inquisitive exuberance, as if they would not be denied. Denied what? Normality, he supposed, everything they had been deprived of. But here they were not normal; they could never become normal, like those old-line Sephardim, French nearly to the bone, who had been sojourning in France since the fifteenth century, and were by now as acceptable as anyone else. He had put his money into the Centre solely that it might disintegrate itself: in five years there should not be a foreign Jew left in Paris. And he had situated it in the Marais because that is where the foreigners lingered.
He rarely visited the place. He had an active distaste for it: he fancied that it kept its old smell of ritually slaughtered meat, though he acknowledged to himself that this was a foolishness, and even a prejudice, unworthy of his generosity and his public compassion. The running of the Centre he left to his manager, a Pole named Kleinman, himself one of the displaced, who hired and trained the staff, which consisted of five men and two women. It was Kleinman who had devised the plan of the cubicles, so that each interviewer might provide privacy to each woeful applicant. There were often sobs behind the partitions. The more these people wailed, the sooner they were likely to vanish. The difficulty, of course, was not so much in getting them out of Paris as it was in getting them in somewhere else. La Terre Sacrée, the part of it in the hands of the Jews, had open doors and welcoming arms; yet it was beyond reason why any normal person (these people were not normal!) would want to live under a withered Golgotha and beside a dried-up Jordan. Still, many had swarmed there as to a benison bestowed by their worn and half-forgotten god. Many, but not all: the most stiff-necked among them were also the most given to hallucinations of sentimental reunions with ghostly kin scattered all over the resisting earth. They stood patiently in the long queues and entered the cubicles grasping torn bits of paper, somehow preserved though decades old, inscribed with superannuated far-off addresses of obscure family relations faintly recalled from childhood. Did these dreamlike relatives actually exist? It happened on occasion that some putative cousin, or the cousin’s offspring, could be excavated out of Buenos Aires, or Cincinnati, or Stockholm, or Melbourne, or Santo Domingo, or who knew where. Kleinman, as obstinate as these hopeful seekers, had had his few successes. And if not, there was always Palestine, the part held by the Jews, to fall back on. The main thing was to hack through the babble of the queues; to achieve this, Kleinman had found, in the mottled streets of the Marais, his many-tongued crew. He could not keep them long — they too had their hearts set on elsewhere. Kleinman himself had already given notice, and was soon off to, of all queer places, San Antonio, which ought to have been in Spain, but was, absurdly, in the American State of Texas.
At half past five this Monday afternoon, the Baron had come for the latest figures. Kleinman tallied them: in the last week alone, twenty-three to Rio de Janeiro, eighteen to Rome (but only as a step-pingstone), fifty-one to Israel. And to New York how many? The usual lot.
It was the end of the workday; the staff had departed. Kleinman put on his hat. He had stayed on to sweep away the fragments of crumpled paper that littered the floors, thrown down in despair — too many of those ancient street names were dead ends. The Baron surveyed the gaunt man in the hat: it made him look like an ordinary citizen. It was awkward that his employee was as tall as he, if several inches more slender at the waist, and that his eyes were as gray as any Frenchman’s, and that his hat had the temerity of looking nearly new, and on the Baron’s francs, no doubt. In fact, sir, Kleinman reported, the queues were beginning to thin out, and Lipkinoff, his valued Russian and Georgian speaker — remarkably, he also knew Kivruli — was one of those lucky ones headed for New York. That left six to man the cubicles when, truth be told, five would surely be enough, at least for now.
“Then let one go,” the Baron ordered. “I won’t have my payroll fattened to no purpose.”
“It would be a pity,” Kleinman said in his Polish-accented French. “They are all so needful.” He pronounced the r of pauvre with a machinelike trilling of the tongue against the palate. The Baron was disgusted — that repulsive Slavic noise was one of the several reasons the Centre des Émigrés had been brought into being: to clean out all such offenses. Generations, he believed, were required to produce the purity of French, and Paris, let alone France itself, was being sullied by these ugly frictions and betrayals.
Out of one of the darkened cubicles came a low sound, something between a purr and a hiccup.
The Baron moved his feet to make an irritated little circle. “I thought,” he said peevishly, “your people were released for the day.”
“They were,” Kleinman said.
“Are you sure? I hear something.”
They both listened. The Baron’s gaze seemed to penetrate the fragile partitions that marched in geometric rows all the way down to the rear wall, where the rusted butcher hooks protruded like scythes.
“A straggler perhaps,” Kleinman said. “Sometimes —” But the sudden flush of his employer’s face stopped him.
“What do you mean, a straggler? The property is to be cleared for the night, that is your responsibility.”
Kleinman struggled: but in five weeks he would be greeted by a certain Mrs. Davis, the elderly sister-in-law of a newly discovered great-aunt, long deceased. Mrs. Davis had signed a paper on his behalf, and never again would he be accountable to the Baron. He said, “Sometimes, sir, when they are newly arrived in the city, when they are adrift and have no bed to sleep in . . . I do keep a blanket to soften the floor, and what harm if —”
“So you are running a hotel in my Centre?”
“No, no, only sometimes to offer a roof, which hardly contradicts the purpose —”
“This is not a mission house for vagrants!” the Baron bawled, and turned again in the ring his feet were following, and saw the woman standing in the opening of the farthermost cubicle, weeping.
“Lili,” Kleinman cried, “did something happen, are you all right? What is it, are you sick? Tell me!”
But the Baron began, “If this is one of your people —”
She said nothing. She was wearing her coat. The collar was wet.
“Then this is the one you will let go,” the Baron pronounced.
“Sir, she is excellent in every respect —”
“This woman was hiding. What normal woman hides? And blubbering. We don’t want a weeper, she will incite the queues, and then comes a flood” — here the Baron smiled — “and no Noah. I am not anyone’s Noah, Kleinman, and this place is not an ark, n’est-ce pas?”
Kleinman thought, no, not an ark. A chute. A siphon. Before the war, before the onslaught, he had been a sta
tistician for a well-known insurance firm, with a wife and two daughters. Now he was alone. Mrs. Davis had promised him the position of bookkeeper in her grandson’s dental office. In his youth, before his marriage, before the war, before the onslaught, he had relished all those cowboy movies, the cattle, the cactus, the horses, the sky. Already he knew the possibilities of Texas.
38
LILI SWITCHED OFF the lamp and got into her coat. November at the close of the day was bringing on a northern chill. All around, the chattering of goodbyes, the shufflings, the hurryings, a sneeze or two (the usual contagions in progress), momentary whiffs of street air. And now the whooshing of Kleinman’s broom. They were all gone, all but Kleinman and his broom. Still she could not leave; she would not. She fell back into her chair and pressed her cheek flat on the desk, unwilling to stir. Her head felt as fixed as waxworks, or stone, or some fallen meteorite. She thought to call out: she feared Kleinman would lock the place up and trap her inside. Yet what if he did? She knew where he kept the blanket — a tattered old perene, really, a down quilt leaking its feathers. There were worse ways to live through a night; she had lived through far worse, when a perene would have been paradise. But to go home . . . where was home? The rundown room Julian had found for them? Julian — a boy, only a boy, homeless, helpless!
The sweeping had stopped. Voices, the native one with its syllables sliding like oil down the gullet of a glass jar, and Kleinman’s deferential murmur; and then, though she fought to resist it, a stinging behind the eyes, half suppressed, as if something volcanic was about to erupt. A heaving sea brooded in her head. She lifted it, and a thicket of tears swam into her mouth, and a latch gave way, she could not force it shut again, and a noise sprang from her, and she knew she was discovered.
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