Sister Age

by M. F. K. Fisher

  He looked almost regretfully at the girls and then slowly at her and said, “Well, Ma’am, I already am. Uranium.” He grew almost embarrassed, and muttered, “I just happened on it. Really looking for something else. Then he raised his voice and said, “Well, shall I see you folks tomorrow, same time same place? No tackle this time. I’ll show you something new.” He looked a straight blue look at the woman, and said, low again, “Think it over. Please think it over. Adios.”

  In spite of herself she did think it over, feeling this way and that but with a general sense of disbelief, while luck came back for the children and they caught more than enough fish and gave a few to their favorite old men, and while she fried their share for lunch, and then she opened the windows wider and they all took a nap. For a change, Mr. Henshaw had not been mentioned at the table, as if in a tacit moratorium, but she kept hearing words he had said—about loving the children and being a loner and thinking her a fine woman. And about being a millionaire. Sometimes the whole episode seemed a fantasy, sometimes that part floated into her thoughts like a mist of venality, until his calm blue look swam back into focus. She knew that he was harmless and that they were fortunate it was he they had met in their flight, and not some stupid, harsh boatman who rented himself out by the half hour and made noisy jokes and charged a set fee, doubled on weekends and holidays. She settled into a sweet sleep saying, “Better a gentle madman than a slob.”

  The next day, the Last Ride, there was a plain air of solemnity in Susan and Holly, and each took a drawing down from the wall and rolled it with a rubber band, to give to Mr. Henshaw. Susan’s was an ambitious but recognizable view of the pier from out on the bay, with the bait shack, the old men fishing, the Clara tied up waiting. Holly’s was of many smooth jade pebbles. Withal, they were happy in the brisk, bright air, and there was no strain as they stepped into the little boat and headed out.

  “Today I’m going to give you a short ride, honeys,” Mr. Henshaw said, “and it may be a bit dancy. So I want you to hang on, hang on hard. We’ll all be all right.”

  “Mr. Henshaw,” Mrs. Allen cried, her voice sounding high and thin. “We’re not going outside the breakwater, are we? I … really I don’t like open water.”

  “Just a taste of it,” he said mildly, without looking at her. The Clara roared toward the mouth of the inlet, and the woman was filled with a great fear and horror as the bay turned into churning currents and choppy swells, and the boat rose and fell in growing wildness. They skittered and dropped into hollows and then shot in seconds to the tops of waves that looked as high as Heaven itself. She clung to wood, to canvas. In front of her the two little girls hung on with both hands to their sides of the Clara, their hair plastered across their faces, and they were laughing like drunken banshees, but she could not hear them.

  At the helm Mr. Henshaw leaned with the pull of the waves, his face jubilant. The rougher the water got, the more like a wicked god he looked, and she felt trapped, doomed. It was a plot. They were going to drown, all four of them together, and he had planned it and was doing it in revenge, for what it did not matter. He was a monster. He was killing her beautiful children because they were not his. He was drowning her, too, and she had always hated the thought of that first lungful of water, no matter what euphoria was rumored to follow it. He would go down with them, as he wanted to, and perhaps that was a form of love, she decided wildly in a flash between two deeper troughs of water that spun the Clara up like a cork.

  Then everything was nearly calm. They were in the Pacific Ocean. “Wow!” the children yelled, and then turned to her, grinning.

  “Hold on,” Mr. Henshaw shouted at them. “It’s still rough, kids. Just hold on. She’s all right. We’ll head in.”

  “No,” Mrs. Allen screamed, but nobody heard. She was so horrified at the thought of getting back over that passage and through the inlet that she prayed for them all to die, die now, sink now, breathe the water now and get it over. But her hands were clamped as if in rigor mortis to the sides of the boat, and she must stay with the girls.

  The Clara made a wide turn.

  “Look at the Rock from here! Look at it from here!” the children cried back to her like sea gulls, but she could only see the impassive hideous beauty of the old man’s face, and pray to him and hate him for having done this.

  Of course they got back into the bay again, and shipped only a minimal amount of water, and the girls kept laughing like loons, and she was sure as the waves smoothed under the Clara that she would never be able to stand up. Once more she could hear the motor, and loosen her hands, and brush the salty water from her face. The girls were still laughing, but more like people than like wild creatures. Mr. Henshaw went in gently, and by the time he docked Mrs. Allen could stand up straight and feel the joints of her body behave as she had lately known they never would again. Inwardly, though, she was blown empty by a giant breath, and while they stood waiting for Mr. Henshaw to tie up the Clara she knew that she would never be the same poor, ignorant woman of an hour ago. She would be poor, all right, and she would be ignorant and she would be a woman, but never in the same ways.

  “Wow!” the girls shouted blissfully, as he came up to them. “What a ride! That was wonderful, oh wonderful!” Susan cried. And suddenly they threw themselves around him like two passionate young animals, clinging to him, embracing him through their wet hair, wet clothes. He knelt down, and put his arms around them closely, and then untangled them gently and stood up. Mrs. Allen reeled where she stood watching, caught in a desire almost forgotten, in a need to embrace this man and follow him for the rest of her life. But he wants them, not me, them not me, she thought hopelessly.

  “That was to show you how brave you really can be, Marnie,” he said straight to her, and then he kissed each of the children and they all parted silently, muted by a common exhaustion.

  The next morning they left before dawn for the south. In the girls’ sweater pockets, still damp with spray, they found the drowned drawings they had meant for Mr. Henshaw, and they tore them into soggy confetti and tossed them slowly from the car windows onto the freeway. As far as their mother knew, his name was never spoken again.

  The Second Time

  Around

  In most college towns in America, there are widows of professors, and even retired female teachers, who hold on to their emptying family homes by renting suitably discreet lodgings to other people in their own strata. As far as I know, though, France has a much better social climate than the United States for people who must find lodgings with another congenial family. On every level, board and rooms are offered. Almost any empty room in no matter what kind of dwelling, hovel or mansion, is put to use; it helps pay the taxes, of course, and it salves the instinctive guilt any good Gallic citizen feels about waste of food, space, energy, and waste, most of all, of what can be called the sense of humanity, or, more plainly, the basic and instinctive need of people for people.

  I have lived with several families in France. More often than not while I was with them, I fretted and even raged at the strictures of sharing my meals and my emotions and my most personal physical functions with people almost as strange to me as spiders or nesting egrets. In retrospect, I understand that they shaped such strength as may be in me as surely as ever did my inherited genes and my environmental mores. Of course, they had these to build on, for I did not meet my first landlady until I was in my early twenties. She was a born Dijonnaise, who lived down the street from the university because she liked to rent rooms to students—not because the rooms she rented were beautiful or otherwise desirable to them. She liked students. She liked to feed them and talk with them and play Chopin for them and occasionally sleep with ones that pleased her enough. She did all this with ferocious amusement. She was a kind of explosion in what had been until my first meeting with her a safe, insular, well-bred existence. From then on, I was aware.

  She has been followed by decades of less robust but equally subtle relationships with Frenc
h landladies. Now I know that I can live almost anywhere, with almost anyone, and be the better for it. I also know that every landlady I ever met was part of preparing me for Mme. Duval, of Aix-en-Provence. My mother would understand and accept my feeling that this old lady had almost as much to do with my development as did she, and would not ask for any explanation. It is at once an admission that I matured very slowly and a proof that people can grow at any stage in their lives. My mother would be pleased that I could still grow.

  I was nearing fifty when I first met Mme. Duval, and well past it when last I saw her. It is improbable that I shall be with her again, for she is old and seven thousand miles away, but I feel serene and sure that if that happened I would be stronger to surmount the admiration, exasperation, impatience, ridicule, and frustration that she has always fermented in me.

  The first landlady in my life happened as swiftly and irrevocably as a bullet’s flight: I went to the students’ office at the University of Dijon, the small elderly secretary gave me a list of boardinghouses, I walked two hundred feet down the first street on the right, I rang a doorbell, and I became part of a household for two shaking and making years of my life.

  It was very different in 1954. I went to Aix for six weeks, or at most three months. I was alone in Europe for the first time in my life really; always before, I had been the companion of someone well loved, who knew more than I did about everything, even things like tickets and moneys. I had been younger, too, and full of confidence. Now I was single, with two small daughters, and a world war and some private battles had come between the two women of myself, so that I felt fumbling and occasionally even frightened. Perhaps it was a little like learning to walk again. I must try hard to trust my weakened muscles, my halting tongue, and, most of all, the dulled wits in my greying head, so that my children would not suspect me and lose confidence. I went at it doggedly. Instead of the three months I had planned, I stayed in Aix well over three years, in two or three periods, and partly it was because of Mme. Duval, and I have been back since, partly because of her. I found her in a roundabout way—not at all bullet-like.

  In my first interview with her, she taught me the French meaning of the word “neurasthenic,” which American friends in psychiatric circles frown upon, so that I am careful not to use it anywhere but in Aix. I had not spoken French for several years when I sat in the autumn sunlight in her drawing room on the top floor of 22 Rue des Forges. I shaped my words carefully, listening to my rusty accent with resignation. “I have been told, Madame, that occasionally a room is available in your home,” I said.

  “Who told you, may I ask?” Her seeming question was politely direct, like a police query.

  I told her, and her firm, rounded old face was as impassive as a Hindu postcard of Krishna.

  “Why do you not stay in a hotel? There are many pleasant small hotels in Aix,” she said, without any real interest—not asking me anything for her own information but as if she were telling me to question myself.

  I took my first lesson, there in the thinning but still intense September sunlight, in speaking the kind of French that Mme. Duval expected of anyone who addressed her. It was a test I met passionately whenever I saw her during the next seven or eight years, and, even this long since, my accent in dreams is better when I am dreaming of her. “Madame,” I said, “I am very well installed in the Hôtel de France, where I was sent by M. Bressan, the concierge of the Roy René—”

  “I know him well,” she interrupted. “A good man. A very reliable, courageous man.”

  “He seems so. He saw that I did not like to keep my children in a hotel—”

  “It is not the life for children. It is also expensive.”

  “Yes, Madame. So we went to the Hôtel de France until the children could go stay with Mme. Wytenhove and her family, apart from me, while they get firmly into the language.”

  “Yes, I know her. Her sister-in-law’s mother occasionally comes to my Afternoons. Your children will be subjected to a fairly good accent, vaguely Alsatian but better than Aixois. Mme. Wytenhove has had a sad experience. Her husband died of cancer. Unfortunately, her children speak like Spaniards after living in Spain while their father was an engineer there, but basically they are fairly well bred.”

  “I do not like living alone in a hotel,” I plowed on. “It is too impersonal. I miss my children. I hate the sound of the Vespas revving up in the garage on the Place des Augustins. I have no place to be except in bed. I hate to eat alone in restaurants. I feel unreal when I walk down the Cours at night from a movie, where I have gone because otherwise I would have to go to bed.” All this suddenly sounded very voluble but logical and necessary to me, and my accent was forgotten in the relieving gush of words.

  Madame looked dispassionately at me. We were sitting across from each other at a beautiful small table piled with her account books, bills, and correspondence, which I soon learned was cleared every night for cards or games. I do not know where she put all the papers, but they were out again in the mornings. “Madame,” she said as coolly as any medical diagnostician but more frankly, “you are neurasthenic. Your surroundings are making you so.”

  I protested, for the English connotation of the word was not at all the way I thought I was. I thought I was bored and lonely, but not at all neurasthenic in the dictionary sense: worried, disturbed in digestion and circulation, emotionally torn, tortured by feelings of inferiority. “Oh, no, Madame,” I said. “I am very stable. I am very healthy.”

  “You are not mentally ill,” she said. “You are simply moping. I have a small room—cold, ill-heated, formerly for a maid during the time when Mme. du Barry used this as her town house. I will show it to you. It is now occupied. But until it is free you may lunch and dine here.”

  I followed her across the tiles of the drawing-room floor and down the long dim corridor that split her apartment into halves, one sunny and spacious and elegant, the other small, with low ceilings and cramped space—made for servants, and filled with people like me, who lived there more happily, perhaps, than any varlets had.

  Ten years after the Liberation, French people were still steadying themselves. I became increasingly conscious of this the first time I lived in Aix. Anecdotes—some half laughing and apologetically tragic—came willy-nilly into almost every conversation, and little marble plaques saying things like “To the Memory of Six Martyrs Shot Down by the Invaders” still looked very new on the street walls. People were defeatist, and basically exhausted.

  When I returned, some five years later, there was a feeling of comparative easiness of spirit, in spite of the mounting anxiety about the Algerian problem. Women who had seemed harried to the point of masked hysteria in 1954, no matter what their social level, were relaxed and younger looking. This was true of Mme. Duval. She was on guard when I first knew her, wary but conscious of the fact that she had survived the Occupation (which was really three: German, then Italian, then American) and had escaped trouble in spite of being a staunch worker in the Underground for all its duration. She was remote and hard. She fought jauntily a daily battle against poverty and rising prices and inefficient servants and inconscient boarders. She was like a tired aging professional dancer who would not dare stumble. When I saw her next, in 1959, she was younger. A year later, she was younger still. She permitted herself to smile with a real gaiety and to make mischievous but gently amusing comments, which before had been only malicious.

  Part of this, I think, was that her daughter, Josephine, after some forty years of grudging residence at home, had moved permanently to Paris. Most of it was that she had accepted the new stresses of post-war existence, and had recovered a little from the strains of war itself. She moved somewhat more slowly, for she must have been well into her seventies, and she used a graceful little silver-headed cane on the streets, but she still supervised the marketing, and paid her calls on other ladies on their Afternoons, and went with composure and no apparent shortness of breath up the beautiful stone stairs, w
ith their wrought-iron balustrades, that rose from the street level of the Rue des Forges to her top-floor apartment.

  Generations of boarders had flowed in and out since first I met her, and instead of the cool acceptance, the remote calculation, that I had sensed in her then, she seemed the second time around to feel a deep enjoyment in them. She was warm, and I could remember—with no regret, and with real delight that she had changed—my early despair at ever having her like me, Mary Frances, the person who was me-Mary-Frances.

  Often during the first stay there, I would write home about this unaffrontable detachment. I would talk with my few friends in Aix about how I wanted Madame to accept me as another woman, and not as one more outlander who paid for her food and lodging and took as her due the dispassionate courtesy of the household that was forced to welcome her. Perhaps because I, too, was having to adapt my former ideas of the world to new necessities, I was oversensitive to this attitude of Mme. Duval. I knew that she approved of me as a person of some breeding, but there was always present an overt amazement that any American could really know how to hold a teacup, how to tell the difference between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sideboards, how to say “si” instead of “oui” at the right places. I would fight hard not to show my helpless hopeless rage when Madame would introduce me as the only American she had ever known who did not talk through her nose. “Of course, you must have taken many difficult lessons in voice placement,” she would say blandly, and when I was fool enough to deny this and to say that both my parents were from Iowa but that I had never heard them speak with nasal voices, she would smile faintly and with heavy-handed tact change the subject. I would go to my room in a fury, and swear to leave the next morning.

  This tumultuous resentment of my status lasted as long as I stayed with Madame. I never accepted the plain truth that I myself could hold no interest, no appeal, for the cool, gracious old lady. It was a kind of rebuff that perhaps Americans, very warm, generous, naïve people, are especially attuned to. I explained it to myself. Spiritually, we are fresh children, unable to realize that other peoples are infinitely older and wearier than we. We do not yet know much world-pain, except vicariously. Europeans who grow bored or exasperated with our enthusiasm are not simply feeling superior to us; there is also tolerance and understanding, which we are as yet incapable of recognizing. This is the way I talked to myself, in an almost ceaseless monologue, while I lived with Mme. Duval. It was good for me. Many things I should long since have known, about both outer and inner worlds, grew clearer to me as I learned that no matter how long I lived or how many other lives I might be able to cram into my span, I would never be as old as one of the children in the streets of Aix. I was the product of a young race of newcomers to a virgin land, and must accept every aspect of my racial adolescence.