If it is not overstepping myself, I would greatly appreciate your telling me if you find being a nun very satisfactory, in a spiritual way, of course. Frankly, I have been studying various religions as a hobby ever since I read volumes 36, 44, 45 of the Harvard Classics, which you may be acquainted with. I am especially delighted with Martin Luther, who was a Protestant, of course. Please do not be offended by this. I advocate no doctrine; it is not my nature to do so. As a last thought, please do not forget to advise me as to your visiting hours, as my weekends are free as far as I know and I may happen to be in your environs some Saturday by chance. Also please do not forget to inform me if you have a reasonable command of the French language, as for all intents and purposes I am comparatively speechless in English owing to my varied and largely insensible upbringing.
I mailed my letter and drawings to Sister Irma around three‑thirty in the morning, going out to the street to do it. Then, literally overjoyed, I undressed myself with thick fingers and fell into bed.
Just before I fell asleep, the moaning sound again came through the wall from the Yoshotos’ bedroom. I pictured both Yoshotos coming to me in the morning and asking me, begging me, to hear their secret problem out, to the last, terrible detail. I saw exactly how it would be. I would sit down between them at the kitchen table and listen to each of them. I would listen, listen, listen, with my head in my hands—till finally, unable to stand it any longer, I would reach down into Mme. Yoshoto’s throat, take up her heart in my hand and warm it as I would a bird. Then, when all was put right, I would show Sister Irma’s work to the Yoshotos, and they would share my joy.
The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid. Mine started to seep through its container as early as the next morning, when M. Yoshoto dropped by at my desk with the envelopes of two new students. I was working on Bambi Kramer’s drawings at the time, and quite spleenlessly, knowing as I did that my letter to Sister Irma was safely in the mail. But I was no where even nearly prepared to face the freakish fact that there were two people in the world who had less talent for drawing than either Bambi or R. Howard Ridgefield. Feeling virtue go out of me, I lit a cigarette in the instructors’ room for the first time since I’d joined the staff. It seemed to help, and I turned back to Bambi’s work. But before I’d taken more than three or four drags, I felt, without actually glancing up and over, that M. Yoshoto was looking at me. Then, for confirmation, I heard his chair being pushed back. As usual, I got up to meet him when he came over. He explained to me, in a bloody irritating whisper, that he personally had no objection to smoking, but that, alas, the school’s policy was against smoking in the instructors’ room. He cut short my profuse apologies with a magnanimous wave of his hand, and went back over to his and Mme. Yoshoto’s side of the room. I wondered, in a real panic, how I would manage to get sanely through the next thirteen days to the Monday when Sister Irma’s next envelope was due.
That was Tuesday morning. I spent the rest of the working day and all the working portions of the next two days keeping myself feverishly busy. I took all of Bambi Kramer’s and R. Howard Ridgefield’s drawings apart, as it were, and put them together with brand‑new parts. I designed for both of them literally dozens of insulting, subnormal, but quite constructive, drawing exercises. I wrote long letters to them. I almost begged R. Howard Ridgefield to give up his satire for a while. I asked Bambi, with maximum delicacy, to please hold off, temporarily, submitting any more drawings with titles kindred to «Forgive Them Their Trespasses.» Then, Thursday mid‑afternoon, feeling good and jumpy, I started in on one of the two new students, an American from Bangor, Maine, who said in his questionnaire, with wordy, Honest‑John integrity, that he was his own favorite artist. He referred to himself as a realist‑abstractionist. As for my after‑school hours, Tuesday evening I took a bus into Montreal proper and sat through a Cartoon Festival Week program at a third‑rate movie house—which largely entailed being a witness to a succession of cats being bombarded with champagne corks by mice gangs. Wednesday evening, I gathered up the floor cushions in my room, piled them three high, and tried to sketch from memory Sister Irma’s picture of Christ’s burial.
I’m tempted to say that Thursday evening was peculiar, or perhaps macabre, but the fact is, I have no bill‑filling adjectives for Thursday evening. I left Les Amis after dinner and went I don’t know where—perhaps to a movie, perhaps for just a long walk; I can’t remember, and, for once, my diary for 1939 lets me down, too, for the page I need is a total blank.
I know, though, why the page is a blank. As I was returning from wherever I’d spent the evening—and I do remember that it was after dark—I stopped on the sidewalk outside the school and looked into the lighted display window of the orthopedic appliances shop. Then something altogether hideous happened. The thought was forced on me that no matter how coolly or sensibly or gracefully I might one day learn to live my life, I would always at best be a visitor in a garden of enamel urinals and bedpans, with a sightless, wooden dummy‑deity standing by in a marked‑down rupture truss.
The thought, certainly, couldn’t have been endurable for more than a few seconds. I remember fleeing upstairs to my room and getting undressed and into bed without so much as opening my diary, much less making an entry.
I lay awake for hours, shivering. I listened to the moaning in the next room and I thought, forcibly, of my star pupil. I tried to visualize the day I would visit her at her convent. I saw her coming to meet me—near a high, wire fence—a shy, beautiful girl of eighteen who had not yet taken her final vows and was still free to go out into the world with the Peter Abelard‑type man of her choice. I saw us walking slowly, silently, toward a far, verdant part of the convent grounds, where suddenly, and without sin, I would put my arm around her waist. The image was too ecstatic to hold in place, and, finally, I let go, and fell asleep.
I spent all of Friday morning and most of the afternoon at hard labor trying, with the use of overlay tissue, to make recognizable trees out of a forest of phallic symbols the man from Bangor, Maine, had consciously drawn on expensive linen paper. Mentally, spiritually, and physically, I was feeling pretty torpid along toward four‑thirty in the afternoon, and I only half stood up when M. Yoshoto came over to my desk for an instant. He handed something to me—handed it to me as impersonally as the average waiter distributes menus. It was a letter from the Mother Superior of Sister Irma’s convent, informing M. Yoshoto that Father Zimmermann, through circumstances outside his control, was forced to alter his decision to allow Sister Irma to study at Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres. The writer said she deeply regretted any inconveniences or confusions this change of plans might cause the school. She sincerely hoped that the first tuition payment of fourteen dollars might be refunded to the diocese.
The mouse, I’ve been sure for years, limps home from the site of the burning ferris wheel with a brand‑new, airtight plan for killing the cat. After I’d read and reread and then, for great, long minutes, stared at the Mother Superior’s letter, I suddenly broke away from it and wrote letters to my four remaining students, advising them to give up the idea of becoming artists. I told them, individually, that they had absolutely no talent worth developing and that they were simply wasting their own valuable time as well as the school’s. I wrote all four letters in French. When I was finished, I immediately went out and mailed them. The satisfaction was short‑lived, but very, very good while it lasted.
When it came time to join the parade to the kitchen for dinner, I asked to be excused.
I said I wasn’t feeling well. (I lied, in 1939, with far greater conviction than I told the truth—so I was positive that M. Yoshoto looked at me with suspicion when I said I wasn’t feeling well.) Then I went up to my room and sat down on a cushion. I sat there for surely an hour, staring at a daylit hole in the window blind, without smoking or taking off my coat or loosening my necktie. Then, abruptly, I got up
and brought over a quantity of my personal notepaper and wrote a second letter to Sister Irma, using the floor as a desk.
I never mailed the letter. The following reproduction is copied straight from the original.
Montreal, Canada June 28, 1939 DEAR SISTER IRMA, Did I, by chance, say anything obnoxious or irreverent to you in my last letter that reached the attention of Father Zimmermann and caused you discomfort in some way?
If this is the case, I beg you to give me at least a reasonable chance to retract whatever it was I may have unwittingly said in my ardor to become friends with you as well as student and teacher. Is this asking too much? I do not believe it is.
The bare truth is as follows: If you do not learn a few more rudiments of the profession, you will only be a very, very interesting artist the rest of your life instead of a great one. This is terrible, in my opinion. Do you realize how grave the situation is?
It is possible that Father Zimmermann made you resign from the school because he thought it might interfere with your being a competent nun. If this is the case, I cannot avoid saying that I think it was very rash of him in more ways than one. It would not interfere with your being a nun. I live like an evil‑minded monk myself. The worst that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly. However, this is not a tragic situation, in my opinion. The happiest day of my life was many years ago when I was seventeen. I was on my way for lunch to meet my mother, who was going out on the street for the first time after a long illness, and I was feeling ecstatically happy when suddenly, as I was coming in to the Avenue Victor Hugo, which is a street in Paris, I bumped into a chap without any nose. I ask you to please consider that factor, in fact I beg you. It is quite pregnant with meaning.
It is also possible that Father Zimmermann caused you to stop matriculating for the reason perhaps that your convent lacks funds to pay the tuition. I frankly hope this is the case, not only because it relieves my mind, but in a practical sense. If this is indeed the case, you have only to say the word and I will offer my services gratis for an indefinite period of time. Can we discuss this matter further? May I ask again when your visiting days at the convent are? May I be free to plan to visit you at the convent next Saturday afternoon, July 6, between 3 and 5 o’clock in the afternoon, dependent upon the schedule of trains between Montreal and Toronto? I await your reply with great anxiety.
With respect and admiration, Sincerely yours, (signed) JEAN DE DAUMIER‑SMITH Staff Instructor Les Amis Des Vieux Maltres P. S. In my last letter I casually asked if the young lady in the blue outfit in the foreground of your religious picture was Mary Magdalene, the sinner. If you have not as yet replied to my letter, please go on refraining. It is possible that I was mistaken and I do not willfully invite any disillusions at this point in my life. I am willing to stay in the dark.
Even today, as late as now, I have a tendency to wince when I remember that I brought a dinner suit up to Les Amis with me. But bring one I did, and after I’d finished my letter to Sister Irma, I put it on. The whole affair seemed to call out for my getting drunk, and since I had never in my life been drunk (for fear that excessive drinking would shake the hand that painted the pictures that copped the three first prizes, etc.), I felt compelled to dress for the tragic occasion.
While the Yoshotos were still in the kitchen, I slipped downstairs and telephoned the Windsor Hotel—which Bobby’s friend, Mrs. X, had recommended to me before I’d left New York. I reserved a table for one, for eight o’clock.
Around seven‑thirty, dressed and slicked up, I stuck my head outside my door to see if either of the Yoshotos were on the prowl. I didn’t want them to see me in my dinner jacket, for some reason. They weren’t in sight, and I hurried down to the street and began to look for a cab. My letter to Sister Irma was in the inside pocket of my jacket. I intended to read it over at dinner, preferably by candlelight.
I walked block after block without so much as seeing a cab at all, let alone an empty one. It was rough going. The Verdun section of Montreal was in no sense a dressy neighborhood, and I was convinced that every passer‑by was giving me a second, basically censorious look. When, finally, I came to the lunch bar where I’d bolted the «Coney Island Red‑Hots» on Monday, I decided to let my reservation at the Hotel Windsor go by the board. I went into the lunch bar, sat down in an end booth, and kept my left hand over my black tie while I ordered soup, rolls and black coffee. I hoped that the other patrons would think I was a waiter on his way to work.
While I was on my second cup of coffee, I took out my unmailed letter to Sister Irma and reread it. The substance of it seemed to me a trifle thin, and I decided to hurry back to Les Amis and touch it up a bit. I also thought over my plans to visit Sister Irma, and wondered if it might not be a good idea to pick up my train reservations later that same evening. With those two thoughts in mind—neither of which really gave me the sort of lift I needed—I left the lunch bar and walked rapidly back to school.
Something extremely out of the way happened to me some fifteen minutes later. A statement, I’m aware, that has all the unpleasant earmarks of a build‑up, but quite the contrary is true. I’m about to touch on an extraordinary experience, one that still strikes me as having been quite transcendent, and I’d like, if possible, to avoid seeming to pass it off as a case, or even a borderline case, of genuine mysticism. (To do otherwise, I feel, would be tantamount to implying or stating that the difference in spiritual sorties between St. Francis and the average, highstrung, Sunday leper‑kisser is only a vertical one.) In the nine o’clock twilight, as I approached the school building from across the street, there was a light on in the orthopedic appliances shop. I was startled to see a live person in the shopcase, a hefty girl of about thirty, in a green, yellow and lavender chiffon dress. She was changing the truss on the wooden dummy. As I came up to the show window, she had evidently just taken off the old truss; it was under her left arm (her right «profile» was toward me), and she was lacing up the new one on the dummy. I stood watching her, fascinated, till suddenly she sensed, then saw, that she was being watched. I quickly smiled—to show her that this was a nonhostile figure in the tuxedo in the twilight on the other side of the glass—but it did no good. The girl’s confusion was out of all normal proportion. She blushed, she dropped the removed truss, she stepped back on a stack of irrigation basins—and her feet went out from under her. I reached out to her instantly, hitting the tips of my fingers on the glass. She landed heavily on her bottom, like a skater. She immediately got to her feet without looking at me. Her face still flushed, she pushed her hair back with one hand, and resumed lacing up the truss on the dummy. It was just then that I had my Experience. Suddenly (and I say this, I believe, with all due self‑consciousness), the sun came up and sped toward the bridge of my nose at the rate of ninety‑three million miles a second. Blinded and very frightened—I had to put my hand on the glass to keep my balance. The thing lasted for no more than a few seconds. When I got my sight back, the girl had gone from the window, leaving behind her a shimmering field of exquisite, twice‑blessed, enamel flowers.
I backed away from the window and walked around the block twice, till my knees stopped buckling. Then, without daring to venture another look into the shop window, I went upstairs to my room and lay down on my bed. Some minutes, or hours later, I made, in French, the following brief entry in my diary: «I am giving Sister Irma her freedom to follow her own destiny. Everybody is a nun.» (Tout le monde est une nonne.) Before going to bed for the night, I wrote letters to my four just‑expelled students, reinstating them. I said a mistake had been made in the administration department.
Actually, the letters seemed to write themselves. It may have had something to do with the fact that, before sitting down to write, I’d brought a chair up from downstairs.
It seems altogether anticlimactic to mention it, but Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres closed down less than a week later, for being improperly licensed (for not being l
icensed at all, as a matter of fact). I packed up and joined Bobby, my stepfather, in Rhode Island, where I spent the next six or eight weeks, till art school reopened, investigating that most interesting of all summer‑active animals, the American Girl in Shorts.
Right or wrong, I never again got in touch with Sister Irma.
Occasionally, I still hear from Bambi Kramer, though. The last I heard, she’d branched over into designing her own Christmas cards. They’ll be something to see, if she hasn’t lost her touch.
Teddy
I’LL EXQUISITE DAY you, buddy, if you don’t get down off that bag this minute. And I mean it,” Mr. McArdle said. He was speaking from the inside twin bed—the bed farther away from the porthole. Viciously, with more of a whimper than a sigh, he foot‑pushed his top sheet clear of his ankles, as though any kind of coverlet was suddenly too much for his sunburned, debilitated‑looking body to bear. He was lying supine, in just the trousers of his pajamas, a lighted cigarette in his right hand. His head was propped up just enough to rest uncomfortably, almost masochistically, against the very base of the headboard. His pillow and ashtray were both on the floor, between his and Mrs.
McArdle’s bed. Without raising his body, he reached out a nude, inflamed‑pink, right arm and flicked his ashes in the general direction of the night table. «October, for God’s sake,” he said. «If this is October weather, gimme August.» He turned his head to the right again, toward Teddy, looking for trouble. «C’mon,” he said. «What the hell do you think I’m talking for? My health? Get down off there, please.» Teddy was standing on the broadside of a new looking cowhide Gladstone, the better to see out of his parents’ open porthole. He was wearing extremely dirty, white ankle‑sneakers, no socks, seersucker shorts that were both too long for him and at least a size too large in the seat, an overly laundered T shirt that had a hole the size of a dime in the right shoulder, and an incongruously handsome, black alligator belt. He needed a haircut—especially at the nape of the neck—the worst way, as only a small boy with an almost full‑grown head and a reedlike neck can need one.
Nine Stories Page 14