Sister Age

by M. F. K. Fisher

  The procession of these human castoffs was steady in the beautiful, enormous apartment on the Rue des Forges. Sometimes a maid would last for two or three days. Then the orders of Madame about what plate to pick up and from which side, or the ill-tempered and loud mocking of Josephine, or the patent disgust of a boarder over a ruined dress or jacket would send her with hysterics to the kitchen, and she would vanish into her own swampland of country misery again.

  Once, there was a feeble old Polish woman. She spoke almost no French. She crawled slowly up and down the great staircase, carrying buckets of ashes to the trash cans on the street and loads of coke and kindling up from the cellars. I had to set my teeth to pass her, but if I had tried to help her she would have cowered against the wall in a hideous fear of my motives or my madness. She did not stay long. She was too feeble even to dry the glasses without dropping them.

  There were many Spanish refugees in Aix then, and one of them, Marie-France, lasted long enough for me to remember her as a person instead of a sick symbol. She was sturdy and almost gay, and she and Blanchette alternated laughter and passionate hatred in their relationship, for they had to sleep together in the van Gogh attic, and eat together in the dark, dank kitchen, and in general cope in the most primitive way with the exigencies of living in an ancient house with several other people, archaic plumbing, and gigantesque rooms heated by drafty marble fireplaces or by tiny porcelain stoves, which were set up like teapots every late autumn after everyone was either in bed with severe colds or wrapped in all available shawls, sweaters, lap robes, and tippets. (For dinner, Madame often wore a finger-length cape of thick, long monkey fur, which her husband had given her in Monaco in 1913.) Marie-France was cursed with eyes so near blind that finally they were her undoing. She stumbled willingly about the apartment, knocking over little tables and leaving a thick film of dust and crumbs, which, fortunately, Madame herself was a little too nearsighted to notice. Blanchette stormed after her on the bad days, and yelled jokingly at her on the others, and between the two of them there seemed a general air of fellow-endurance, until, on one of her days off, the little Spanish maid ran her bicycle straight into a large truck—perhaps seeing it as an inviting continuation of the highway she felt fairly sure she was on—and a car, in trying to avoid the zigzag truck, hit it and then her, so that she was badly crushed. We felt sad. Her weak eyes were blamed on the hardships of her refugee childhood, and the motorists were dismissed as men whose driving undoubtedly had been influenced by the liberating Yanks and Tommies in ’44.

  There was one very strong, coarse woman who, for a time, had at least physical energy to give to the ménage, although Blanchette shuddered often and volubly over her foul language. She was completely of the streets—not necessarily in her morals, which were as blunt and sturdy as she was herself, but in her skill at survival. Every city evolves such people, in its most evil districts. They are built in a special way, with bodies like brick walls, and with cruel eyes and mouths, and stunted, bowed arms and legs. They are as tenacious of life as it is possible to be in this world, and after plagues, famines, and wars they reappear from the holes in which they have managed to exist. They are not loyal or sincere, the way cats are not that. They are capable of unthinking devotion and tenderness, though. And, unlike the more sensitive and highly organized people, they seem almost incapable of being hurt in their spirits. If they have not bred out their own spiritual nerves, they have, at least, developed through the centuries of travail a thick skin to protect them from weakness and, above all, from fear. Claire was one of this breed.

  I had never lived so closely with her kind, and I was glad to, for she was not at all unpleasing. Her manners were not uncouth with me, any more than a dog’s would be, or a parrot’s. Once, she asked me if she might take my mending home, and I agreed gladly, but she would not let me pay her. Like many charwomen in the world, she lived alone in a mean room in one of the ghettos that every old town hides. Perhaps Aix could admit to more than its share of these sores, many of them sprawling behind some of the world’s most elegant and beautiful façades, and I knew the quarter where Claire slept. It was miserable, with litter in the doorway and from far down its dank hall a sickening whiff that drifted out almost as tangible as sulphur gas into the street.

  Claire admitted to being sixty-five, Blanchette announced mockingly the morning there was nobody to help her serve the trays. Where was she? On her way to Spain with a man. She had left a note. Blanchette read it harshly: “Hi, old girl … I’m off on a voyage d’amour … he’s young and handsome … see you in Barcelona? Wow!”

  Madame reached automatically for her list of domestic last resorts and said mildly, “Perhaps a proof that while there is life there is hope.”

  Blanchette shrugged bitterly and closed the salon door without a sound behind her, but slammed the one into the kitchen with the report of a cannon.

  The maid I remember most sadly in this procession of bedraggled, broken women was the first I met there. Her name was Marie-Joseph, and she walked with the shuffle of an old, weakened, exhausted person, although she could not yet have been twenty. Some of her teeth were gone. Mostly, she was unconscious of the world, so that she had to be told several times to pick up a dropped fork, or close a door. She used to exasperate Josephine to the explosion point, but Madame never allowed her daughter to scream at the little maid as she did at her own mother, and often Josephine would leap up from the table and run down to her room, sobbing frantically. Marie-Joseph never blinked at these outbursts, but they left the rest of us less interested in the amenities of the table, which were observed to their limits by anyone in Madame’s presence.

  One night, perhaps a few weeks after I had moved into my little chambre de bonne in the beautiful old house, I was propelled out of deep sleep and bed itself, and was into the dim hall before I knew that a most terrible scream had sent me there. It still seemed to writhe down toward me. Two American girls who were staying for six weeks on their way to the Smith College course at the Sorbonne came stumbling to their door. One was weeping and chattering with shock. There was another long, dreadful scream. It came from up in the attic, where Blanchette had to share her bright décor with the current slavey, and already I was so imbued with the sinister spirit of the big woman that a logical sequence of unutterable crimes, crises, attacks flicked through my mind as I stood waiting. The door to the salon opened and Madame was there, calm in a grey woollen dressing gown and the kind of lacy headgear I had not seen since my grandmother died in 1922. I think it was called a boudoir cap.

  There was a great crashing of heavy feet on the wooden stairs to the maids’ room, and Marie-Joseph ran out into the long tiled corridor. She was almost unrecognizable. Her eyes were alive and blazing, her hair stood out wildly instead of lying dull and flat, and she moved as fast as a hunted animal down to where Madame stood. She threw herself on the floor there, sobbing, “Save me! Help me!” and a long babble without words.

  The American girls were crying.

  Madame frowned a little. “Tell them to calm themselves,” she said to me. “Get up, Marie-Joseph. Stop that noise. Blanchette, come down at once.”

  Blanchette was halfway down the stairs, pulling her hair up with pins. She seemed as forbidding as ever, but not upset. She looked at Madame with a bored shrug. “Here we go again. This is the last time, you understand?” she said, and gently picked up the half-conscious girl and carried her, as firmly as any strong man could, up into her garish room.

  Madame sighed. “We must retire. Thank you for being patient. That poor soul was cruelly tampered with when she was a child during the Occupation, and she stopped growing. Now and then she comes alive and remembers, and it is terrible. Good night.”

  In spite of myself, I reached out my hand to her arm. Perhaps it was because I was still hearing the first scream and then the second and I, too, was shocked. Mme. Duval moved away from me with almost imperceptible reproof, and I turned from her with a polite good night and went al
ong to my room, feeling chastened, reduced to clumsy childhood at my ripe age.

  Marie-Joseph was sent back to her farm; Madame respected her family as one sorely tried by the state of their daughter, but she knew that no patience from her could make the poor thing into even a slavey, and we started the long stream of nitwits, sick old whores, and dipsomaniacs again.

  All this intimacy with the raw wounds of war was doubly intense with me—perhaps because I was alone, and middle-aged, and scarred from my own battles since last I had lived in France. At times, I felt myself almost disintegrating with the force of the incredible vitality of the people I was with. They were wasteful and mistaken and hysterically overt, and yet, buffeted as I was by all the noise of their will to survive, I could not but admit in my loneliest hours that I was more alive with them than I was anyplace else in my known world. I was apart. I was not accepted except as an inoffensive and boringly polite Paying Guest. But the people who blandly took what they needed from me, which was openly nothing but money, were teaching me extraordinary things about myself and my place in this new knowledge. I learned much from the warped, malnourished drudges of Madame’s household that year.

  The physical climate of the Duval apartment was almost as erratic as the emotional, with dramatic fevers and chills from everyone and at unexpected times.

  One night, Minet the tom would let out a gurgle from his suppertime position on the dining-room sideboard and flip off onto the floor. Josephine would scream and rush to pick him up. Blanchette would dash from the kitchen across the corridor and cry out, “No, no, do not touch him, I implore you! He is plainly mad! He will bite you!”

  Madame would look in a mild way over her shoulder and say, “Leave him alone, both of you. He has perhaps a small stomach ache. Blanchette, you may serve the caramel custard.”

  Minet would lie on the floor, while Josephine gobbled viciously at her pudding, her eyes red with tears and anger. We all knew that after dinner she would slip out of the house to the Deux Garçons, the nearest public telephone, and call her vet. While she was thus secretly away, Madame would carry Minet to her couch, and give him half an aspirin.

  Josephine herself was, inevitably, a mass of neurotic symptoms. They were, of course, unknown and inexplicable to any of the countless doctors she had consulted in her forty-odd years of world-sickness. They involved mysteries as yet unplumbed—at least, by the medicos—and her fear of psychiatric help was almost frantic. She had monumental hiccups now and then, which called for deep sedation. She had fits of dreadful weeping. She had dolorous shooting sensations in this or that part of her fundamentally very strong body. All of these attacks were as close to the rest of us as this morning’s coffee, and as inescapable, and her medical pattern added a kind of rhythm to our lives.

  So did Blanchette’s periodic “liver crises.” They usually meant that for at least one day we made short shrift in the dining room. This was basically agreeable—Josephine became helpful and almost pleasant, and Madame seemed to be less graciously remote. The laborious and genteel clatter of changing plates and silverware diminished, and we lingered over two or three courses instead of five or six.

  Now and then, Madame herself succumbed to human ills, and they always seemed especially poignant to me, for, except in dire trouble, she insisted upon continuing the serene pattern of her privately frenzied efforts to keep the family head above water. She would walk slowly to the table at noon, her face suddenly small and vulnerable under her carefully combed white hair, and the conversation would lag a little in her general apathy, but when she finally walked away we would know that she most probably would be there again in the evening, ignoring boldly the fact that Dr. Blanc had told her to keep to her bed.

  Once, she had to stay there with a bad pleurisy. For the first and only time, the salon was openly admitted to be her bedroom, since there was no other place in the big apartment to put her. I wanted to offer her my room, and finally did so, but I was snubbed with exquisite tact for such presumption: it was a family problem, not to be shared with an outsider.

  Any such illness was complicated by Madame’s insistence that the household try to function as it would have done fifty or a hundred years before, when there were five servants or even ten. It was insane. But it served to bring all of Blanchette’s ferocious courage into full splendor, and we ate in muted satiety while, in the beautiful room next to the long airy dining room with the crests over the doors and mantelpiece, Madame lay wheezing as quietly as possible.

  Once, she had a bad attack of sciatica. She hobbled gamely about, but gave up her trips to market. My room was next to the bathroom, and one day I heard her sitting there in a steam tent made of old towels, trying to warm her poor aged muscles, and she was groaning without restraint, although I had seen her a half hour earlier looking almost as always, if somewhat preoccupied.

  It is very hard to listen to an old woman groan, especially when that is not her custom. I had to fight my instinctive feeling that I was in some way her daughter and that I must try to help her. I stood impotently in my little room. Finally, I went down the corridor and knocked at Josephine’s door. “Please excuse me,” I said, “but Madame is in the bathroom and she seems to be in considerable pain.”

  Josephine looked coldly at me. “Please do not worry yourself,” she said. “She is quite all right. She is simply making a little scene.”

  I went out for a dogged fast walk through the streets, and stood listening to several fountains to get the sounds of the old woman, and even more so of the young one, out of my head.

  One time, John Sorenson and I, two boarders for the time being, met a decrepit old nanny trying to push an empty perambulator up to the first landing of the house; one of Mme. Duval’s guests was entertaining a niece with a young baby. John insisted, in the firm, simple way of most Anglo-Saxon men, that he and I help carry the pram on up. The old woman cringed, and scuttled ahead, and for several weeks we were somewhat testily teased by Madame about this breach of etiquette; a person of a certain class—and John was unmistakably of the top level in his own country—does not assist in any way a man or woman of a lower class than his own.

  This was a flat statement, made at dinner one evening. John had betrayed his background. I, on the other hand, as a relatively uncouth American, could not be blamed for my breach of breeding and manners, but I might perhaps have learned a lesson.

  “But she was very old,” John said.

  Madame’s reply I can still hear: “I shall never forget one time I was about to cross the Cours Mirabeau. I felt very faint. I leaned against a tree. A kindly woman, very ordinary, came up to me and helped me across the street. It was most good of her, but it was rude.”

  We said, “But Madame—did you need her? Could you have crossed alone?”

  “Yes, I did need help, and I could not possibly have crossed without collapsing, but she was not at all of my station, and it was basically forward and pushing of her to offer to help me. I would have preferred to fall where I was, unassisted by such a person.”

  John could appreciate this in his own inverted way, but I was, and I remain, somewhat baffled and very much repelled by it. It was a conditioned reflex in the fine old lady, as natural to her as her need of a fish fork for fish and a dessert fork for the tarte aux abricots.

  One more question we asked, before each in his own way pushed the matter into partial limbo. “Would you not have helped this woman if she had felt ill, just as we helped the old servant with her pram?”

  “Never,” Madame said simply, and we tackled the scallop of veal.

  Letters from Madame between my two stays in Aix told of a series of ghastly operations, collapses, and maladies that afflicted Josephine in Paris, but never mentioned her own state of health, and when I saw her again in 1959 she did indeed look younger and less withdrawn.

  She was, perhaps, encouraged by the fact that she, of all her old friends, was the one who had fought through the strange profession—come so late in life to her�
��of being a landlady. “They,” she told me mockingly, lived in their moldy shawls, playing bezique and bridge and tattling over their teacups. She alone supervised her household, her table, and her social life, and she did it with a late but appealing jauntiness.

  Blanchette was gone, in a cosmic huff. She finally ran away, convinced that Josephine had become the mistress of a man in Corsica for whom Blanchette cooked during one of her summer vacations. If it was not that, it was something equally fantastic, Madame said with a shrug. Life, she added, had been a dream of tranquillity since the big ferocious tyrant had disappeared, and now things progressed in seraphic perfection under the thumb of a sallow cricket of a woman, well-spoken and as sharp-eyed as a ferret, who “lived out.”

  It was this woman who hired the continuing but somewhat more palatable flow of maids of the moment, and took care of the meals, and the accounts. She coddled Madame. She put up with no nonsense from the boarders. One had the feeling that if it was her prescribed time of day to leave the apartment and return to her own home she would step neatly over any number of bleeding bodies and be deaf to no matter what cries for help but that up until that moment she would do all she could to be a devoted and well-paid savior. I did not like her at all, and do not recall her name, but I felt thankful that in the late years of Mme. Duval’s troubled life she had fallen into the deft hands of this assistant.