Sister Age

by M. F. K. Fisher

  It was soon plain that I would stand a better chance of the acceptance I craved with Mme. Duval than with any other of the people of her education and breeding who took boarders like me. They were more violently cynical and exhausted than she about the changes in their ways of living and the wounds of Occupation. Some of them were openly resentful of my ambiguous state. I was too old to be a student, yet obviously not qualified to be a scholar or a professor. I called myself a writer, but what did I write and for whom, and even why? I was obviously middle-aged, and yet the mother of two young girls, whom I did not even live with. Neither fish nor fowl.

  Mme. Duval, in spite of her deliberate detachment from her boarders as people, was unswervingly courteous and thoughtful. She remained unruffled through the maddest domestic upheavals, which occurred more frequently in her house than in any other place I have ever lived. She remained in full control of herself, a real lady, even at midnight with a maddened serving girl whooping through the hall and down the corridor, her brain wild with nightmares of what the invaders had taught her. There was never any feeling of hidden frenzy in the old lady.

  This was not true of other women I met, that first time in Aix. In a kind of insane denial of reality (many of them saddled with senile husbands or horribly mutilated sons or unfortunate grandchildren kept as much as possible out of sight), these exhausted women, much in background like my own aunts and their friends, tried to keep their homes running for “paying guests.” They tried, and doggedly, to pretend that it was really intimates they were sharing their homes with, bathed in an utterly false atmosphere of well-being and charm and interesting meals. One, a Mme. Perblantier, was their archetype. Her name was given to me by the head of the Girls’ High School, a friend of an old friend from Dijon. Mme. Perblantier would take two or three guests into her home. Perhaps I could rent a better room there than the cubbyhole at Mme. Duval’s. I should arrange an interview with her. I did.

  Mme. Perblantier lived on the Avenue Ste.-Victoire, in a big house, nondescript from the outside, flush with the bleak street—very much like Spain. All the living rooms, the bedrooms, and the dining room faced toward the southwest onto a beautiful garden that descended gently to the edge of a little tributary of the Arc. Inside, the house sparkled with that particular waxen clutter of the upper French bourgeoisie—varnished cabinets filled with Sèvres teacups, fans spread out in crystal cases, embroidered footstools from faraway military campaigns, a few minor etchings in recognizable styles from the eighteenth century, speckled in their heavy frames. There were flowers. The sunlight poured in through the beautiful windows and stripped Madame’s face like a scalpel, seeing viciously into the essence of her, the skin within the skin. She was, like most of the other women of her class, used to a much easier life and was accepting bitterly, bravely, with muted noisiness, the new ways. Probably she had been raised as the child of a high official of landed, if small, gentry. She had inherited or been given as dowry this large, elegant, undistinguished house, with fireplaces and back stairs and all the other necessities of wellrun domestic slavery, and now the rooms were almost empty of family, thanks to death and taxes, and there were no more slaves.

  Mme. Perblantier invited me to come to dinner, for a kind of mutual and of course unmentioned inspection: perhaps I would do? I arrived (Mme. Duval had approved my invitation in a discreetly noncommittal way, in which I could sense a tinge of professional curiosity) bolstered by an armful of flowers, which were accepted almost absent-mindedly, as if anyone would have known enough to bring them.

  The evening was ghastly, because Mme. Perblantier, like all the other women of this level whom I had met in Aix, was incredibly stubborn and brave and wearied. The dinner was, in its way, as elaborately presented as was every meal at Mme. Duval’s—plates changed from four to six times, with the gold fruit knife laid this way and not that way over the steel cheese knife and the pearl-handled fruit fork, even if it took some three hours, twice a day, for the retarded or deformed little maid of the moment to stumble around behind us and then finally serve the beautiful, artfully mended bowl of grapes and pears. After the endless ritual of coffee, Mme. Perblantier sat like a death’s-head, her eyes frantic and her speech witty and stimulating, and she and I knew that she had been up since before daylight, dusting the countless opulent gimcracks and waxing the beautiful tiled floors; and that she had gone halfway across town to the open-air markets and carried home heavy baskets of carefully chosen and delicious fruits and vegetables, and flowers for the sparkling rooms; and that she had supervised a laundry and had done all the planning and part of the cooking. She was dying, literally dying, of fatigue, I thought—and years later she would still be dying of it, although much less plainly as the strain of the war faded.

  There we all sat in the luster of this insane bright shell—her pettish elderly husband, sneering with thinly veiled ferocity at something she twittered about Montaigne or Voltaire to the young American engineer; the two English girls, tittering over their cigarettes behind the Directoire writing table; the old poodle, going desperately into the corner and making a mess on the tiles because there had always been a valet de chambre to trot him out before bedtime and now Madame was simply too bone-weary to do it (and dared not ask it of her embittered, feeble old husband, who had never been himself since his legs had been broken in several places in the course of an “interrogation” during the war); the sound of the slavey’s feet shuffling heavily between dining room and kitchen with piles of dirty dishes down the long corridor, toward the last-century sink; the beautiful flowers—there we all sat, and I felt a child’s fear and dismay. I was caught with a blind woman fighting with courage and stupidity to hold on to shadows.

  I returned with eagerness to the imperturbable remoteness of Mme. Duval and her pattern, which suddenly seemed less mad to me, although still criminally wasteful of her spirit.

  Just as this spiritual extravagance in the upper-class landladies of Aix depressed me, so did their deliberate self-dramatization exasperate me. Screams, shrieks, vituperation, tears, passionate embraces of reconciliation were the daily music at Mme. Duval’s—over a broken cup, a few sous’ cheating on the coal bill, a letter that did or did not arrive when expected. Through all the hullabaloo, Madame herself was the storm center, impassive and impregnable, and as I found myself growing fond of her in spite of her detachment toward me, I decided that she deliberately collected about her a group of near-maniacs whom she used as tools; they would scream in substitution for her, and haggle in her place, and strike people she would like to punish with her own whip. I also came to believe that one reason she kept me at a safe distance was that on the surface, at least, I, too, had been schooled to maintain something of her own calm and detachment.

  All the time I lived there on the Rue des Forges, I floated on a hysterical flood of personal clashes, which involved the boarders, the servants, the tradespeople, Madame’s one child—Josephine—and even her two cats, who were perhaps the only creatures in the apartment with whom Madame permitted herself to be openly tender. They slept with her in the salon on the couch, which she made up at night into her bed after we had all decorously left her; that way she could rent one more room. Sometimes I would hear her singing and murmuring to them, when she thought she was alone, as she attended to her accounts at the card table by the windows.

  They were very handsome, big cats, always lazy except when Minet would yowl for a night or two of freedom. This excited Josephine and the maids, who obviously felt more desirable in an atavistic way at the direct approach to sex of the tom. He would pace in front of the wide windows that opened onto the garden far below, and then, practiced as he was, he would station himself by the carved wooden door to the apartment and at the right moment evade every effort to catch him and streak down the great stone staircase and into the staid street. In a few days, he would return, thin and weary, and revert to his cushions and his voluptuous naps.

  This blatant maleness, a never-ending titillation to the
younger females of the house, interested neither Madame nor Louloute, the other cat, and they seemed oddly free and happy when Minet was on the town. Often Louloute would care for Minet after one of his escapades, and wash him gently and play with him as if he were a kitten. He accepted this as his due, plainly. Once, he returned with a bronchitic cough, and everything in the apartment—conversation, bickering, dishwashing—would stop while he wheezed and hacked. Another time was the most dramatic, for all of us: Minet came home drenched and shivering, and that same night developed pneumonia. A vet was called. For three weeks, the tomcat must be confined to quarters—not just the apartment but one small cupboard that led off the seventeenth-century toilet of Josephine’s room. It was straight melodrama. Conversation at meals hinged largely upon Minet’s temperature, his chest rattle, and his appetite. The three weeks seemed longer than usual.

  But everyone was relieved to find that the big tom’s illness acted as a kind of release for Josephine’s neurotic world-anger; she became for that time as serene as a young mother with a puling infant.

  The head of the Duval household, after Madame herself, was Blanchette—a tall, firmly stout woman of perhaps twenty-eight, who looked much older. She had a big stern face and a pasty skin that periodically turned bilious and yellow. Her position was strange, as only that house could make it; she was the servant in charge of everything, and yet she was accomplice, personal maid, and almost confidante of Madame. She was dictatorial about the continuous changing of charwomen, laundresses, and slaveys, and for the most part she was embarrassingly, mockingly servile with the boarders.

  Blanchette and Josephine were violently jealous of their somewhat similar dependence on Madame’s tranquillity, and had dreadful rows, screaming and cursing each other behind ineffectually closed doors. Madame would speak nonchalantly of nothings, with not a wrinkle on her round, noble little face, while the wild yells pierced the clear air of Aix. At the next meal, both ferocious, unhappy women would be bland and released—for a time, at least—from their helpless rage.

  A good custom in the Duval house was that breakfasts were always served in our bedrooms. This made it simpler for Blanchette, even though it meant ten or twelve trips with trays down the long corridor, and I always thought that it gave Madame a fairer chance to turn her narrow little bed back into an elegant couch again in the salon.

  Now and then, Blanchette would talk with me as she knelt in front of my minuscule tile stove to start a morning fire with the five-inch kindling it would hold. Once, she was open and without real bitterness, and showed only resignation. That was when she told me how she never went to church anymore, because of the day of cease-fire, when everyone flowed helplessly into the chapels and cathedrals of France to thank God and she cursed Him instead. “It was all a lie,” she said, without obvious emotion, “and now I am damned with the rest of us. But I am not damned for being a hypocrite.”

  And that morning she told me that she had once had a real gift for music, and had been considered very advanced in piano when her town was invaded, early in the war. Her family was killed, but she was kept on in what must have been her well-appointed home by the commander of the invaders, who chose it because of the fine concert piano in the salon. He heard that Blanchette missed her music, so, with what she called relish, he permitted her to sit for hours to listen to him play. Orders were given that if she even touched her piano she would be shot, but as one music lover to another the officer let her silently enjoy his own technique.

  I came to know Blanchette as a person so far beyond normal despair that she was magnificent. She did not even walk through the town like other people; she strode with a kind of cosmic disgust from market place to meatshop and wine merchant, a fierce frown on her dark-browed face, and her firm breasts high. She got a certain amount of money each day from her mistress for all provisions for the table, and if she could buy what was ordered for less than her allotment she was allowed to keep the difference. She marketed honestly, and we always ate well, although with an insidious monotony after the first interest wore off.

  Blanchette had a good taste for style, and often made Josephine’s clothes when she made her own. She also saw to it, in a tactful way, that Madame at her Afternoons or on her formal calls to other old ladies’ Afternoons was neatly turned out—in a way unique to places like Aix, and perhaps Paris, where such rituals are still followed. Madame’s Afternoon was every third Thursday, and on those days Blanchette was the perfect domestic, plainly revelling in her characterization. She was deft, silent, attentive, almost invisible in her correct black-and-white uniform—which was somewhat like seeing the Victory of Samothrace in livery—but not at all ridiculous. The little cakes were delicious. The tea, one of Madame’s few self-indulgences, was of the finest in all Europe, or even China.

  And usually the supper that followed an Afternoon was pure hell, with sulks, screams, and general bad temper from Josephine, Blanchette, Minet, Louloute, and a few of the boarders. Madame remained aloof, a pleased little smile on her lips to remember that the old Countess de Barzan had taken two sandwiches, and that little Hélène de Villiers was finally engaged to an elderly diplomat from Istanbul.

  Now and then, Blanchette would cry out that she could not stand her life any longer, and that she would kill herself unless Madame let her run away. These were tense moments, no matter how often they arrived. Madame would become pale and stern. Josephine would hide in her room and clutch at passersby in the corridor, to whisper about how evil and dangerous Blanchette could be in one of her crises, which were decorously referred to as “liver spells” but obviously came at monthly intervals and involved violent headaches, nausea, and tantrums. They grew very dull, in a noisy way, but I always felt ashamed of my ennui in the face of such overt fury, and stolid and undemonstrative and therefore unfeeling.

  One time, Blanchette got so far in one of her threatened escapes as to dress for the street—which was very correctly—in hat, gloves, and high-heeled shoes. (She always looked more like a young astute madam than a respectable whore.) She was leaving. The household held its breath. We all heard her come down the narrow stairs from her tiny room in the attic, which she once showed me, and which she had painted to match a postcard of Vincent van Gogh’s room in Arles. We heard her go firmly down the corridor to the toilet and then come back and stop at the salon, where Madame was waiting, at her accounts.

  Josephine sent the maid of the moment slipping into my room. The trembling little halfwit held a big stylish handbag under her apron. She motioned me to be silent, and without a by-your-leave hid it under some papers on my desk.

  I felt like a hypnotized hen, too dazed to protest, and when the door opened after a perfunctory knock, which I did not even bother to answer, and Blanchette stood stonily inside the room, I sat numbly, watching the little maid pretend to dust the top of a table with her apron and observing that Blanchette was puffed out like a maddened turkey, with a face as yellow-white as frozen butter. She was handsome.

  “Where have you hidden my purse, you filthy sneak?” she asked the maid in a menacingly quiet way.

  I felt that she was very dangerous, and was glad my girls were not there, for I did not think their presence would have stopped this, even though she showed them more affection than anything else. When they visited me, she was always gentle with them.

  The little slavey lied too volubly, and Blanchette turned to me and said flatly, “Perhaps you will help me. I must flee this. I am desperate. I will stop at nothing. If these beasts keep me from taking what is mine—my own money, my wages—I shall kill myself. Here. Now.”

  It is perhaps as well that I have forgotten what I said, but I know it was ambiguous and basically weak—something about not knowing enough of the true situation to permit myself to be involved in it.

  Blanchette shrugged, looked once at the maid as if she were a slug under a board, and went out. I gave the purse to the maid, for Mme. Duval.

  By suppertime that night, Blanchette was back
in her black serving dress, and she had cooked an omelet with fresh chopped mushrooms that was superlative, along with the rest of the evening ritual of soup and salad and a delicate pudding. I noticed a kind of awed constraint in Josephine and her mother. The little servant trembled more than usual as she changed the plates endlessly.

  The next day, Madame said in an aside to me when I paid my monthly bill that the household was quite used to Blanchette’s crises. They were the result of the Occupation, she said. They were frightening but unimportant. Blanchette was a courageous soul if one came to know her. “And I cannot go on alone,” she added, almost absent-mindedly.

  ————

  It is understandable that a woman fiercely enough disillusioned to curse God, as was Blanchette, would find the human beings she must work with beneath her contempt. This complicated the extraordinary difficulties Mme. Duval faced in trying to find domestic help in Aix in 1954. Many people had died. Many more were maimed in one way or another. The children born during the war years were not yet old enough to work. Worst of all, from an employer’s point of view, the few adolescents whose families were willing to have them go into service, as they had done for decades, were handicapped by malnutrition and worse, and were unfit for anything demanding normal wits and muscles. Many of them were displaced persons, who had been shipped here and there to labor camps all over Europe, and who—perhaps mercifully—hardly remembered who they were or what language they had first mumbled.