Yours the postmaster,
JOHN GATES
P.S. The accident was in new car and all knew Mr. MacLaren was not a slow driver.
Yrs.
J.G.
Beddoes sat quietly for a long time. Outside the windows, partly open, an occasional taxi tooted, and, inside, the little glowing tube of the electric fireplace glowed like a scar against the wall. He felt, without thinking about it, as if he had in the last few days or minutes lived more than a thousand years. The letter lay like a grimy leaf upon his knee, and he looked dispassionately at it and at his hand beside it—his hand still firm and strong. He thought wearily of Mac and Sarah, and of the cold toast on the blue plate, and the whiskey and the music.
“O.K.,” he said at last. “All right, Tom. Come on. My wife and I …”
The Reunion
Professor Lucien Revenant felt almost light-headed to be up and about again, after a tedious illness. For two days now it was as if he had taken a new lease on life, he decided with a prim little smile. Suddenly, exactly forty-six hours ago, he had begun to feel better instead of worse, well instead of ill.
He looked carefully at the weather outside before putting on his winter topcoat and his brown plaid scarf. That was one of the boring things about being very old, the preoccupation with wind and cold … and of course he must be especially careful, now.…
He could not afford to lose any more time on his thesis, which he had been polishing and rewriting for enough years to become almost legendary in the small American college where he had taught since he was a comparatively young man. His habit was to get everything ready to send off once more to the printers, and then, to the delight and exasperated amusement of his colleagues on the faculty, withdraw it again, to change, they swore, a comma here and a semicolon there. Work had come to a painful standstill with his illness, and he had spent most of the time since the sudden cessation of its weak exhaustion and pain in putting his big study-table into good order again, ready for hard concentration tomorrow. Meanwhile, he was going to give a little party, here in his familiar shabby lodgings.
It would be a kind of reunion, of five dear people he had neglected as they all grew older and more preoccupied by their own dwindling powers. It was the damnable weather, surely, that most hindered the senescent: the constant fear of drafts and of slipping on wet pavements or bathroom floors, the hazardous burden of breathing into cold winds. We sit by our fires, he admitted regretfully. But today he defied this creaking coziness that seemed to envelop them all. He had arranged everything by telephone, after a busy morning. Everyone could come, and the new strength in his own voice seemed to imbue them with quick liveliness, so that Rachel Johnson had sounded almost like a girl again, and Mrs. Mac too.
There would be four men, then, and two ladies: a reunion of classical proportions, almost Greek, he told himself as he closed his door on the new tidiness of his bed-sitting room and walked carefully down the carpeted stairs of the old boarding house.
Outside it was colder than he had guessed from his warm inside view, but he pulled his hat well down over his shiny head, and walked more briskly than for many years toward the shopping district of the little town. There were few people on the streets. He recognized a couple of his graduate students, but they hurried past him, their faces buried between their shoulders against the chill wind.
He would go first to the Buon Gusto. He remembered that faculty wives had told him, before he grew too tired to accept their invitations to dinner, that the best little cakes in town came from this small bakery. It was too bad, he thought in a remote way, that he had never taken time enough from his classes and the thesis to learn such details personally: he might have had a few tea-parties himself, with some of his prettiest students nibbling and tittering in his chaste room. He smiled again primly.
The shop was delightfully warm. He stood looking seriously at the glass cases piled with cakes and cookies, and felt the welcome air against his dry cold skin and even in behind his ears, until a solid black-browed woman by the cash register asked how she could help him. He cleared his throat. It had been some time since he last spoke with anyone, face to face.
“Oh yes,” he said hastily. “Yes. I need some little cakes. For a tea-party this afternoon, that is. That is, not tea exactly, but there will be ladies. In fact, it is a rather special occasion, and I wish the best you have, which I can see is excellent.”
He was astonished to hear himself so wordy. It must be the sudden convalescence, the quick recovery, perhaps the warm shop after that cold wind. To cover his vague embarrassment, he rattled on, while the woman looked patiently and kindly at him. It was lucky the shop was empty, she thought: he was one of those talky old fellows, liking to take his time.
“I had in mind something decorated,” he said, frowning. “It is a kind of reunion we are having, after a long absence. All of us are so busy. In fact, we may even start a little club this afternoon, and plan regular meetings.”
“That would be real nice,” she said. “Ladies like these little petty-fours.”
“Petits fours!” he exclaimed. “Precisely! I used to buy them in Paris for my dear mother’s ‘afternoons.’ Thursdays, always. Very old ladies came, it seemed to me then.” He laughed a little creakily, being out of practice. “But of course we are rather elderly too. Not you, of course, Madame, but my friends this afternoon. Yes, petits fours are what we need.”
“They are easy to chew, too,” she said. “No nuts.”
Professor Revenant chuckled in an elaborately conspiratorial way which amazed him, but which was very enjoyable. “Ah yes,” he almost whispered. “I understand what you mean, exactly! Geriatric gastronomy, eh?”
She smiled (a real nice old gentleman, and such a cute accent!), and opened the case that held the tiny squares of cake covered with fancy icings: rosebuds on pistachio green, white scrolls on chocolate, yellow buttercups on orange and pink.
“These are our specialty, pure butter,” she said. “How many?”
The professor discussed with her the fact that there would be only six at his party, but that they appreciated good food when they saw it and would no doubt be a little hungry.
“Count four apiece then,” she decided for him, and in a few minutes he went out with the box of cookies dangling carefully from a solid string looped over his thick woollen glove. He felt buoyant (a very pleasant young woman, and so helpful and understanding!), and his feet hardly seemed to touch the ground.
He turned toward the liquor store nearest his house, so that he would not have to carry the bottle too far: the air hurt his chest a little, and he wished to be at his best, later on.
Somewhat regretfully he asked for a bottle of good port. With Rachel and Mrs. Mac as feminine guests, it was indicated. What was it his dear mother always offered to the occasional old gentleman who came to her afternoons? Marsala? Madeira? It was brown and sweet, he remembered from what he used to steal from the bottoms of the glasses.… Then recklessly he asked for a bottle of good Scotch as well: it would please old Dr. Mac. In fact, it would taste very good to anyone who wanted it, as he himself did, suddenly.
“Sure we can’t deliver this, sir … uh? It’s kind of heavy.” The clerk looked worriedly at the old man.
“Thank you, no,” Professor Revenant said with firmness: he must keep all these supplies under his control.
He walked more slowly than before with the two bottles carefully pressed under one arm, and the box of little cakes dangling from his hand, and by the time he reached the boardinghouse and walked up the familiar wooden front steps he felt a little hint of his late fatigue creep into him. He shook himself in the dim hall, rather like a bony old dog, and went one at a time up the stairs to his room. An inner excitement reassured him: this would be a good party, worth all the effort and expense, all the weariness.
As he hung his coat neatly in the closet, with his scarf in the right-hand pocket where it had been every winter for almost forty years, and his gloves
in the left-hand pocket, he looked approvingly at the big round study-table, cleared now of most of the papers and bulletins and publishers’ catalogs that had piled up during his wretched illness. He had brushed all but the ink-stains off the dark red cover, and had brought up six wineglasses from the back of his landlady’s cupboard where she kept them for christenings and wakes, and a big hand-painted china plate.
He would put Rachel facing the door, in a faint subtle effort to make her know that if he had only had enough money and had managed to finish the thesis, he might well have asked her to be his hostess and share her life with him. Even before it could be, it had seemed too late. He sighed: too late, indeed only some forty-eight hours ago, he had realized that nothing need be too late. Rachel had sounded young and warm and sweet on the telephone.…
On one side of her he would put Dr. Mac, the old reprobate. Anyone who had sailed on as many ships and lived in as many foreign ports as he had would break the ice of even their long dull separation, just so that he did not drink too deeply of the ceremonial Scotch. But Mrs. Mac had a way with her, deft from long practice, of keeping an eye on the bottle.
On Rachel’s other side would be Harry Longman. Rachel liked eccentrics, and Harry was one, for fair: a well-adjusted garage mechanic with a degree in engineering and a Ph.D. and a history of countless liaisons behind him, even in his ripe old years, all with young girls who worked in candy stores. It was the sweets he loved, he always boasted, and he was as round and sane as a butterscotch kiss himself, and very funny and as sane to be with.
Then Mrs. Mac would sit between Harry and Judge Greene, and he would sit next to Dr. Mac. It suddenly seemed important to him to let Rachel be the hostess and not to be the host himself, facing her boldly across the red tablecover and the glasses and the little cakes. And that way Mrs. Mac could keep an eye on the Doctor and still flirt a little with the Judge, who was the kind of austere man who said very witty things in a low detached voice.
Professor Revenant put the petits fours in diminished circles on the dreadfully hand-painted plate, as soon as his own hands had unstiffened in the warm room. The colors looked pretty: the little pastries in their stiff white fluted cups were like flowers, and he made a centerpiece of them. He uncorked the bottles, and debated whether to put two glasses with the port for the ladies, and four glasses with the Scotch, and then decided against it: Harry might like port because it was so sweet.…
For a minute he was sobered to realize that he had only five chairs, counting his bathroom stool and his work-chair. Then he slid the table toward his couch-bed, so that he could sit there. It looked, he concluded rather breathlessly, quite Bohemian.
It was almost time. He was beginning to feel the excitement like wine. What a fine idea of his, to call them together again, after such a long dull dropping away!
He thought of how years ago they had used to meet often at the jolly hospitable Mac’s, all of them perhaps hiding from outside strictures as he himself was hiding from the faculty dinners … Rachel’s ancient mother, the Judge’s drear empty house, even Harry’s sweet-sick diet of lollipops.…
It might be a good idea to pour himself a little nip, a drop, to warm him before the fire of life took over again. He looked with another smile, not prim this time, at the pretty table waiting for the reunion, the beginning of a better, warmer time with his long-absent but still dear friends, and he considered first the bottle of port and then the bottle of Scotch.
He decided to eat the top cakelet on the little waiting centerpiece and then pretend not to be hungry when they came.
He had not seen the Macs and Harry and the Judge, and the sweet waiting Rachel, since their funerals. His own, that morning, had been boring: only the priest and an altar boy and the head of the French department.…
He would clear off the empty plate and glasses tomorrow, and get to work on his thesis, this time definitively.…
The Oldest Man
In my life, I have known two very old men. The oldest one I didn’t know really, for I never even spoke with him. For a time, he lived across the street from me in Aix-en-Provence, so placed that I could look over at him from my room on the fourth floor. He was one hundred and four, and when he died the funeral procession was very long, from his house to the church and then to the cemetery, made up of people who only knew of him because he was the oldest man in Aix and perhaps in Provence, and because they felt a kind of personal pride or vindication in that. Dead, he must have been tiny, judging by the size of the coffin I looked curiously and sorrowfully down upon from my peephole on the fourth floor. Alive, he seemed merely small and light, sitting in a wing chair reading, with white mittens on his hands. At mealtimes, he wore a large white bib, but his manners were slowly meticulous, and he smiled and talked in a lively, twinkling way with his ancient daughter, who pottered about him and served the food on his small wheeled table. I missed him when he died and the shutters were closed in his room and through them shone the dim light of the candles at his head and feet. I had never heard his voice, or touched his hand.
The oldest man I really knew was Pépé Connes. My two teen-age daughters, Anne and Mary, and I visited him in his hundredth year; for four days, we actually lived with him. Before our visit, I had met Pépé several times at the home of his son Georges, in Dijon; Pépé spent half of each year with Georges, the other half with a daughter-in-law in Normandy. I had known Georges for forty years. He was Dean of the Faculty of Letters at the university, and I had once gone to school there, with Georges as my professor. After that, I visited him and his wife, Henriette, in that Burgundian town, but I saw little of Pépé. I was shy of his remote courtesy and his great age. Every night, he played bezique with his son, and at meals he pulled out my chair for me and then served with ceremony and skill some special little dish he had bought on his long afternoon walk: a terrine of pâté from Strasbourg, a tin of white tuna from Nantes. He ate with the slow nicety of a fastidious old man, and as he kissed both my cheeks when I left for Aix I noticed that he smelled fresh and powdery.
Anne and Mary had met him, too. I had presented them to him in Dijon—a quick meeting that they remembered because he bowed low over their hands and told them without a smile that he regretted having lost all but one tooth, because he liked to be “well appointed” when he met charming ladies. It was five or six years after this meeting that Georges invited the three of us to visit him and Pépé in their natal village, Le Truel, in the Aveyron, where the two men went every spring as soon as it grew warm enough. Henriette, busy with her teaching at the Girls’ Lycée, remained in Dijon. The visit was planned well over a year in advance, the details of our meeting requiring an arduous schedule of letters. Georges was to meet us in Montpellier, and he instructed me fussily about trains and buses from Aix to that city. Then I looked closely at my Michelin map of the Aveyron and decided that I could not stand the prospect of a ride as long as from Montpellier to Le Truel with Georges, for he is probably the most eccentric driver I have ever ridden with. So I hired M. Lov’ in Aix to drive us in his taxi, and I picked a small town called Lodève, hours nearer Le Truel as Georges would drive, and told him that friends were driving us and would leave us at the bus stop there at a certain time. Georges was plainly overjoyed, and I could understand why when we made the eight-hour hop from Lodève to Le Truel; it would have taken him at least twelve hours, each way, had he met us, as he first so generously suggested, in Montpellier.
M. Lov’ picked us up in his second-best taxi after lunch one Friday in May. We took two large suitcases along with us, and a big basket full of cherries and cheeses—Camembert and Gruyère, which Georges had once told me were hard come by there in the Roquefort country. We stopped at an inn in Lodève overnight, and the next morning, after breakfast, we carried our bags and the large smelly basket down the road a few yards to the bus stop. We sat half out into the road, so that Georges could not miss us. It felt fine to be in the shade and sun of the pale trees, and we did not feel we had been waitin
g too long when, around eleven o’clock, he drew up in his dusty 2 CV. Before he had even killed the engine, he announced that we must do a few errands in town. Ceremoniously, and with the extra pomposity that for Georges marks unusual emotion and perhaps nervousness, he changed his big beret for a hat, his espadrilles for shoes, and his knitted jacket for a surprisingly loud tweed one. He handed us some baskets from the back of the car and then carefully fitted our things into place, meanwhile scolding us for bringing cherries when his trees were full of them, and cheeses when it was a foolish extravagance.
We tagged along after him about a mile to the covered market, where he asked me to choose “a fine fat chicken,” and I pretended to and then pretended not to see his look of abject dismay when across the street he saw a caterer’s shop full of prettily roasted ones, and on to the économat, where he bought four tins of quenelles de brochet with a seignorial air of disdain. “These cost too little to be good,” he said loftily to the huge old woman waiting on him. Then we went to three tobacco shops, where, finally, in the piles of magazines about dream interpretations and movie romances, he found a copy of Les Nouvelles Littéraires. Then we went to a pastry shop, where he bought two very dry-looking large cakes, one a local specialty of brioches curled and pressed and glazed into a form to imitate a pan of baked apples. (These two cakes turned up at every meal but breakfast for three days, and we finished them both off before we left, in a cloud of crumbs.) And then we straggled back to the car, and we packed ourselves and the tins and the chicken and the cakes here and there in it and jounced and jolted away.
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