A heavily edited version of Grippes’ answer appeared in Le Figaro, under the heading “A Painful Affair: Further Correspondence.” Mr. Prism had neglected to mention the date of Miss Pugh’s transfer to the nursing home: 10 May, 1968. Clouds of tear gas. Cars overturned in Paris streets. Grippes’ long-awaited autobiographical novel, Sleeping on the Beach, had appeared the day before. His stoic gloom as he watched students flinging the whole of the first edition onto a bonfire blazing as high as second-story windows. Grippes’ publisher, crouched in his shabby office just around the corner, had already hung on the wall the photograph of some hairy author he hoped would pass for Engels. The glow from the bonfire tinged bogus Engels pink, investing him with the hearty tone that had quit the publisher’s cheeks when, early that morning, a delegation representing what might well turn out to be a New Order had invaded the premises. Grippes, pale trenchcoat over dark turtleneck, hands clenched in trenchcoat pockets, knew he was aging, irreversibly, minute by minute. Some of the students thought he was Herbert Marcuse and tried to carry him on their shoulders to Le Figaro‘s editorial offices, which they hoped he would set on fire. The melancholia that descended on Grippes that evening made him unfit to help and sustain an old lady who was said to be spending all her time sulking under a bedsheet and refusing to eat. He managed to be with Miss Pugh at the end, however, and distinctly heard her say something coherent about the disposal of her furniture. As for Sleeping on the Beach, it was never reprinted, for the usual craven reasons.
Prism says that even before the Pugh Investment Trust filed its bankruptcy petition before a Paris court, the dismantling of Miss Pugh’s house had been completed, with the wainscoting on the staircase stripped and sold to a tearoom and what remained of the silver, pictures, and furniture brought under the hammer. (Grippes and Rosalia had already removed some of the better pieces, for safety.) Her will was so ambiguous that, to avoid litigation, Miss Pugh’s brother and the Trust split the proceeds, leaving Prism and a few other faithful friends of hers in the cold. Grippes is suspected of having gold ingots under the bed, bullion in the bathtub, gold napoleons in his shoes. The fact is (Grippes can prove it) that Miss Pugh’s personal income had been declining for years, owing to her steadfast belief that travel by steamship would soon supersede the rage for planes. “Her private investments followed her convictions as night follows day,” writes Grippes, with the cats for company. “And, one day, night fell.”
Prism discovered that some of the furniture removed for safety was in the parlour of Rosalia’s son, permanent mayor and Mafia delegate of a town in Sicily. He at once dispatched an expert appraiser, who declared the whole lot to be fake. It may have been that on a pink marble floor, against pink wall hangings, in a room containing a bar on which clockwork figures of Bonaparte and Josephine could be made to play Ping-Pong, Miss Pugh’s effects took on an aura of sham. Still, the expert seemed sincere to Prism. He said the Boulle chest was the kind they still manufacture on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin, scar with bleach, beat with chains, then spend years restoring.
About a month after the funeral, a letter appeared in Le Matin de Paris, signed “Old-Style Socialist.” The writer recalled that some forty years before, a Miss Pugh (correctly spelled) had purchased from an antique dealer a wooden statue said to represent St. Cumula, virgin and martyr. (A brief history of Cumula followed: about to be forced into marriage with a pagan Gaul, Cumula painted herself purple and jumped into the Seine, where she drowned. The pagan, touched by her unwavering detestation of him, accepted Christian baptism, on the site of what is now the Paris Stock Exchange.) Miss Pugh had the effigy restored to its original purple and offered it to the Archbishop of Paris. After several coats of paint were removed, the carving was found to be a likeness of General Marchand, leader of the French Nile Expedition. The Archbishop declined the present, giving as his reason the separation of church and state. “Old-Style Socialist” wondered what had become of the carving, for even if General Marchand stood for nineteenth-century colonial policy at its most offensive, history was history, art was art, and it was easily proved that some persons never ceased to meddle in both.
Prism believes Grippes might have had some talent to begin with but that he wasted it writing tomfool letters. He thinks a note that came in the mail recently was from Grippes: “Dear Ms. Victoria Prism, I teach Creative Journalism to a trilingual class here in California (Spanish/Chinese/some English). In the past you have written a lot of stuff that was funny and made us laugh. Lately you published something about the lingering death of a helicopter pilot. Is this a new departure? Please limit your answer to 200 words. My class gets tired.” The letter had an American stamp and a Los Angeles postmark, but Prism has known Grippes to spend days over such details.
Grippes says that Prism’s talent is like one of those toy engines made of plastic glass, every part transparent and moving to no purpose. The engine can be plugged in to a power outlet, but it can’t be harnessed. In short, Prism symbolizes the state of English letters since the nineteen-fifties.
“You ought to write your memoirs,” Grippes said to Prism at Miss Pugh’s funeral. Prism thought Grippes was hoping to be provided with grounds for a successful libel action. (He concedes that Grippes looked fine that day: dark tie, dark suit, well brushed – he hadn’t begun collecting cats yet.)
Actually, Prism is pretty sure he could fill two volumes, four hundred pages each, dark-green covers, nice paper, nice to touch. A title he has in mind is Bridge Building Between Cultures.
Grippes started his own memoirs about a year ago, basing them on his diaries. He wouldn’t turn down a Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition, about a thousand pages of Bible-weight paper, fifty pages of pictures, full Grippes bibliography, appreciative introductory essay by someone he has not quarrelled with, frontispiece of Grippes at the window, back to the light, three-quarter profile, cat on his shoulder. He’d need pictures of Miss Pugh: there are none. She loathed sitting for portraits, photographs, snapshots. Old prints of her house exist, their negatives lost or chewed by mice. The Pugh Memorial Committee donated a few to the Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions, where they were immediately filed under “Puget, Pierre, French sculptor.”
“Research might have better luck at the University of Zurich,” writes Grippes, at Miss Pugh’s Louis XVI period table. “A tireless Swiss team has been on the trail of Miss Pugh for some time now, and a cowed Swiss computer throws up only occasional anarchy, describing Pugh M. M., Pullman G. M., and Pulitzer J. as the same generous American.”
Prism’s quiet collaboration with Zurich, expected to culminate in a top-quality volume, Hostess to Fame, beige linen cover, ended when he understood that he was not going to be paid anything, and that it would be fifteen years before the first word was transferred from tape to paper.
Grippes says he heard one of the tapes:
“Mr. Prism, kindly listen to the name I shall now pronounce. François Mauriac. The thin, sardonic gentleman who put on a bowler hat every morning before proceeding to Mass was François Mauriac. Right?”
“I don’t remember a François.”
“Think. François. Mauriac.”
“I don’t remember a bowler hat.”
At the centennial commemoration, Prism stood on a little dais, dressed in a great amount of tweed and flannel that seemed to have been cut for a much larger man. Grippes suspects that Prism’s clothes are being selected by his widowed sister, who, after years of trying to marry him off to her closest friends, is now hoping to make him seem as unattractive as possible. Imagining Prism’s future – a cottage in Devon, his sister saying, “There was a letter for you, but I can’t remember what I did with it” – he heard Prism declare he was happy to be here, in a place obligingly provided; the firm’s old boardroom, back in the days when Paris was still; the really fine walnut panelling on two of the; about the shortage of chairs, but the Committee had not expected such a large; some doubtless disturbed by an inexplicable smell of moth repellent, b
ut the Committee was in no way; in honour of a great and charitable American, to whom the cultural life of; looking around, he was pleased to see one or two young faces.
With this, Prism stepped down, and had to be reminded he was chairman and principal speaker. He climbed back, and delivered from memory an old lecture of his on Gertrude Stein. He then found and read a letter Miss Pugh had received from the President of the Republic, in 1934, telling her that although she was a woman, and a foreigner, she was surely immortal. Folding the letter, Prism suddenly recalled and described a conversation with Miss Pugh.
“Those of us who believe in art,” Prism had started to say.
Miss Pugh had coughed and said, “I don’t.”
She did not believe in art, only in artists. She had no interest in books, only in their authors. Reading an early poem of Prism’s (it was years since he had written any poetry, he hastened to say), she had been stopped by the description of a certain kind of butterfly, “pale yellow, with a spot like the Eye of God.” She had sent for her copy of the Larousse dictionary, which Rosalia was using in the kitchen as a weight on sliced cucumbers. Turning to a colour plate, Miss Pugh had found the butterfly at once. It turned out to be orange rather than yellow, and heavily spotted with black. Moreover, it was not a European butterfly but an Asian moth. The Larousse must be mistaken. She had shut the dictionary with a slap, blaming its editors for carelessness. If only there had been more women like her, Prism concluded, there would be more people today who knew what they were doing.
Grippes says that, for once, he feels inclined to agree. All the same, he wishes Prism had suppressed the anecdote. Prism knows as well as Grippes does that some things are better left as legends.
Larry
Some men give their children sound advice about property and investment. The elder Pugh had the nerve to give advice about marriage – this to the son of a wife he had deserted. He was in Paris on a visit and had come round to see what Larry was up to. It was during the hot, quiet summer of 1954.
Larry was caretaking for July and August. He had the run of sixteen dust-sheeted rooms, some overlooking the Parc de Monceau, some looking straight onto the shuttered windows of other stone houses. Twice a week a woman arrived to clean and, Larry supposed, to make sure he hadn’t stolen anything.
He was not a thief – only a planner. His plans required the knowledge of where things were kept and what they amounted to. After a false start as a sculptor he was trying to find an open road. He went through the drawers and closets left unlocked and came across a number of towels and bathmats and blankets stolen from hotels; pilfering of that sort was one of the perks of the rich. A stack of hotel writing paper gave him a new idea for teasing Maggie, his half sister, who also lived in Paris – near the Trocadéro, about eight Métro stops away.
The distance between Larry and Maggie was greater than any stretch of city blocks. He saw it as a treeless plain. It was she who kept the terrain bare, so that she could see Larry coming. He had to surmise, because it would be senseless to do anything else, that Maggie failed to trust him. He wondered why. Total strangers, with even more reason to feel suspicious, gave him the keys to their house. When he looked in a mirror, he felt he could trust himself. A French law obliges children to support indigent parents and, in one or two rare cases Larry had heard of, siblings – a sister or brother. Maggie probably lived with the fear of seeing Larry shuffling up to the front door, palm up. Or carrying a briefcase stuffed with claims and final warnings. Or ringing the bell, in a tearing hurry, with a lawyer waiting in a taxi. Or that she would be called to his bedside at the American Hospital in Neuilly, with an itemized statement for intensive care prepared at checkout. She might even be afraid she would have to bury him, in the unlikely event of his dying first. Maggie’s mother, but not Larry’s, had been crowningly rich. Larry’s generation would have said that he and Maggie had different genes; Maggie’s would have taken it for granted they had different prospects.
Fiddling around with the hotel stationery, he sent Maggie letters from Le Palais in Biarritz, the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo, Le Royal at Évian-les-Bains, Le Golf at Deauville. Some carried the terrifying P.S. “See you soon!” From the Paris Ritz he counselled her not to mind the number of bills he was having referred to her from Biarritz and those other places: he had made a killing in Portuguese oysters and would settle up with her before long.
He wondered if the tease had worked, and if she had bothered to look at the postmarks. He had sent all the letters from the same post office, on Boulevard Malesherbes. The postmarks should have shown Maggie that it was just a prank, not an operation. But then she probably thought him too old for practical jokes and wholly unsuited for operations. A true trickster needed to have the elder Pugh’s clear conscience – his perfect innocence.
Paris was hushed, eerie, Larry’s father said. That was what he noticed after so many years. He’d gone back to America long before the war. For some time now Maggie had been paying him an allowance to keep away. She lived in Paris because she always had; it did not mean that she kept open house. Larry was here for a different reason: he had been at the Beaux Arts for as long as he could stretch the G.I. Bill. He was just wavering at present: stay or go.
He told his father why Paris was silent. There was a new law about traffic horns. His father said he didn’t believe it.
Here, near the park, in midsummer, there was no traffic to speak of. In the still of the afternoon they heard the braking of a bus across the empty streets. Shutters were bolted, curtains drawn on the streets with art names: Murillo, Rembrandt, Van Dyck.
Larry’s father said, “I suppose you found out there wasn’t much to art in the long run.” From anyone else it would have been wounding. His father meant only that there were better things in life, not that anyone had failed him.
Larry took the dust sheets off an inlaid table and two pink easy chairs. The liquor cabinet was easy to pry open; he managed with a fork and spoon. They pushed their chairs over to a window. It was curious, his father remarked, how the French never wanted to look out. Notice the way salon furniture is placed – those stiff little circles. People always sat as if they weren’t sure what to do with their ankles and knees.
The drawing room was pale in colour, and yet it soaked up the light. Larry was about to ask if his father had ever seen a total eclipse, when the old man said, “Who lives around here? It was a good address before the war.”
Before the other war, he meant – before 1914. He was fine-looking – high-bridged nose, only slightly veined; tough, kindly blue eyes. He seemed brainless to Larry, like Maggie, but a stranger might not have noticed. His gaze was alert as a wren’s, his expression one of narrow sincerity. If there were such a thing as artistic truth, his face would have been more ingratiating; about half his plots and schemes had always died on the branch. He must have seen the other half as enough. Unlike most con men, Larry’s father acted on sudden inclinations. It was a wonder anything bloomed at all.
Larry did not think of himself as brainless. He did not even consider himself unlucky, which proved he was smart. He was not sure whether his face said anything useful. It was almost too late to decide. He had stopped being young.
His father had no real age; certainly none in his own mind. He sat, comfortable and alert, drinking Larry’s patron’s best Scotch, telling Larry about a wonderful young woman who was dying to marry him. But, he said, probably having quite correctly guessed that Maggie would cut his funds at the very glimmer of a new wedding, he thought he’d keep the dew on the rose; stick to untrammelled romance; maintain the constant delight and astonishment reserved for unattached lovers. She was attractive, warmhearted, and intelligent; made all her own clothes.
Larry refrained from asking questions, partly out of loyalty to his late, put-upon mother. Dead or alive, she had heard enough.
“Marriage is sex,” said his father. “But money is not necessarily anything along that line.” In spite of his wish not to be draw
n, Larry could not help mulling this over. His father was always at his most dangerous, morally speaking, when he made no sense. “The richer she is, the lower the class of her lovers. If you marry a rich woman, keep an eye on the chauffeur. Watch out for unemployed actors, sailors, tailors. Customs officers,” he said, as though suddenly remembering. He may have been recalling Maggie’s mother. He sighed, though not out of discontent or sorrow, and lifted his firm blue gaze to an oil portrait of a woman wearing pearls Maggie’s mother would have swum the Amazon for. “I was never really excited by rich women,” he said calmly. “Actually, I think only homosexuals are. Well, it is all a part of God’s good plan, laid out for our pleasure, like the flower beds down there in the park.”
Larry’s father was a pagan who regularly prayed for guidance. He thought nothing of summoning God to smile on His unenlightened creations. Maggie, another object of close celestial attention, believed something should be done about the nature of the universe – some tidying-up job. She was ready to take it on and was only waiting to be asked. Larry lived at about eye level. He tried the Catholics, who said, “What would you like? Jam for breakfast? Eternal life? They’re yours, but there’s a catch.” The Protestants greeted his return with “Shut up. Sit down. Think it over.” It was like swimming back and forth between two crowded rafts.
“I met your mother just before I lost most of my money,” his father said, which was a whitewashed way of explaining he had been involved in a mining-stock scandal of great proportions. “Never make the mistake of imagining a dumb woman is going to be more restful than a smart one. Most men crack up on that. They think ‘dumb’ means ‘silent.’ They think it’s going to be like the baaing of a lamb and the cooing of a dove, and they won’t need to answer. But soon it’s ‘Do you still love me?’ and that can’t be left in the air. Then it turns into ‘Did you love me when we got married? Did you love me when I was pregnant? Did you love me last week? Do you love me now?’ ”
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