Читать книгу Mending - Sallie Bingham - Страница 8

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THE DINING ROOM HUNG SUSPENDED from the arches at its three tall windows, opening onto a wintry garden. The big table in the center of the room floated in spite of its weight of wine glasses—empty at lunch, but still Jean insisted on placing them at the top right corner of the coffee-colored lace mats. The table hung from the chandelier whose candle cups held electric light bulbs that glared in the middle of the January day.

The children who were not really children but three lanky half-grown youths (the real children were closeted with their governess upstairs) lounged at their places, creaking their spidery gilt chairs. Saturdays revolved around lunch because both parents were briefly at home.

The two tall brothers clinked their empty wine glasses with their spoons; they knew something about drinking. The sister sat primly.

Jean thumped soup bowls down in front of them. The thin clear bouillon jumped.

“A little more gently, please, Jean,” the mother said from the funnel collar of her plaid suit.

Jean did not acknowledge her request, whisking away at once to the pantry, the swinging door sighing behind him. No one knew what language he spoke. He was supposed to be Corsican and had come with the house, which the Embassy had rented for the family, sight unseen. The mother had only stipulated the number of bedrooms.

“Children, you should know our ambassador to Italy has been recalled,” the father said from his pale-blue silk breast pocket handkerchief. “You may be asked about it next week at school.” He might have known that his eldest son seldom went, sleeping until the maid came, insistently, to make his bed; that the younger had failed his midterms and was kept on only out of fear of embarrassment (it was an American school, after all, an outpost in foreign if not actively hostile territory); and that the girl, sitting so primly, spoke no French and could not have answered questions from the mob of Parisian girls at her convent school. She had been transferred to the convent after seeing two boys fighting with knives at the American School—anything, she’d told her mother, would be better than that: the mucous and blood and, even worse, the sobbing.

“You are all citizens of the world, now,” their mother had announced from her pearl necklace when they had shambled onto the liner for France; nevertheless, everyone had been fearful of her going to the convent school, speaking no French, and having no religion.

(“Do they really want to go?” some petty St. Louis neighbor had asked, exhaling disapproval with her cigarette smoke, a question that should not have been asked and so merited no answer.)

Now the younger of the two brothers drawled out a question while plumbing his soup for something solid. “Why’d they recall her?”

The girl remembered that they had been talking about an ambassador.

Jean was bringing in the bread.

“She was taken ill,” the father said from his narrowly striped tie in the voice he used to close a subject.

“What was she taken ill of?” the eldest boy asked with a submerged sneer.

Their mother answered promptly, “Arsenic poisoning, from the paint that chipped off her bedroom ceiling. Poor Claire.”

Someone snorted, probably the eldest. Jean plumped the bread basket down in the center of the table where it was difficult to reach.

“Butter,” the mother asked piteously, but they all knew from the way Jean turned away that he had no intention of complying.

The girl was thinking of the name, Claire. She had read the name in a story about St. Francis. She wondered if this woman, this sick ambassador, had been some kind of helping saint.

She knew the bedroom with the paint flaking off the ceiling. It would match her parents’ bedroom with perhaps a little yellow added by the Roman sun.

She thought, Then we might be recalled, too, if somebody got really sick. But it did not seem likely. They were all, her mother said, healthy as horses.

“Didn’t do her job before the elections,” the snorter said sideways so as not to provoke an answer. “Let the Commies get back in.”

It was another statement that merited no response. They all spooned their soup. It was not very hot, and there might be nothing much coming after it. Food was still rationed, although the war had been over for five years, and the PX where the mother shopped out of necessity was more poorly provisioned—all cans!—than a bad-neighborhood market at home.

The girl was wondering if she was supposed to know what the Commies were. She had learned not to ask. She was not expected to be ignorant.

“Communists,” the younger brother whispered. He was sometimes kind.

Usually she could find something in a word that helped her to its meaning—an echo of another word, perhaps. But this time she ran through the possibilities without learning anything: come, communal, union. She began to perceive that this was another of those words no one discussed because they all feared it. It was like a disease no one mentioned because that might make it contagious. Fear, their father had said in one of his speeches, fear is the greatest menace to what we are trying to accomplish here, in France, and the girl made the connection: to mention something dangerous is to spread it, like the plague. She felt, for the moment, satisfied.

“I thought they’d keep her in Rome because of her friendship with the Pope—she’s an RC, children,” the mother explained. The girl knew the initials were a kind of soft drink, and once again she was baffled.

“The Pope’s turned out to be a weak reed,” the father explained, “absolutely useless to us in this case, as he was during the war.”

The girl had seen a portrait of a pope at the convent school—a stretched-out, greenish figure in a red robe—and so she could imagine quite easily that under that robe there was only a reed.

“I don’t know what Henry Luce will make of it, though,” the father went on to the mother, privately, this time, since the three could not be expected to understand. “He was awfully set up by her appointment.”

“Maybe his rag will turn against the Dems,” the snorter said rashly.

The father turned to stare at him. “It couldn’t be turned any further than it already is.”

The snorter was abashed, and began to wipe his mouth with his napkin as though, the girl thought, he could wipe away his unwise words.

“They’re both quite common,” the mother concluded, “like their magazine,” and signaled to Jean to take the soup bowls away.

He rattled them onto a tray perched precariously on a corner of the table. On other Saturdays, Dominique in her small white apron had helped him, but Dominique was gone for reasons the girl imagined although she kept them to herself. Once, in the kitchen, she’d seen Dominique sitting on Jean’s knees.

That provided the clue. Common was a certain kind of behavior, and in a moment of wild imagining, she saw the sick American woman perched on the Pope’s red knees.

Jean hauled in a heavy silver platter with a mound of meat on it and slid it across the table to land in front of the father. He asked something no one could understand, then offered the father a long leather box, opening it to reveal a knife and fork of superior size.

The father stood to carve, turning up his white cuffs, but the meat was obdurate and made him sweat. He swiped at his face with his blue silk handkerchief, then bent to the task again while Jean stood to one side, watching. The father tried to slice, then went to hacking, and the portions Jean passed around the table were rough and ragged. It was lamb, nearly red, a strange sight.

“I’m writing my menus for them in French, with the dictionary,” the mother said. “It doesn’t make a bit of difference. They fix what they want to fix.” The girl remembered seeing the cook, a column standing over her stove. It did not seem likely written words could reach her.

The meal ended quickly and they all went their ways, the tall house absorbing each one. Upstairs, with the governess, someone was crying.

The girl found her roller skates in the closet under the stairs—the stairs where she’d seen her parents’ dinner guests, going up and down. She carried the skates out to the sidewalk. The iron gate clanged behind her and she dreaded ringing later to rouse the concierge to let her back in, but there was no way around it. She had to get out, into the air.

It was still foreign air, gray and dense.

Since they had always lived in the country, she’d never had a place to learn to skate; dirt roads wouldn’t do. Now she lurched and stumbled, her eyes on her toes. The skate wheels made a fearful noise on the rough cement. At the corner, she nearly collided with a couple and felt their stares. She was too old, she knew, to be learning to roller-skate.

She pushed on toward the massed dark greenery of the great park. Its depths held a lake where she’d once rowed the children in a wooden boat rented for the occasion. She had never rowed before, but she learned quickly although the rough wooden oars blistered her palms.

She planned to skate all the way to the lake. Stares pursued her as she stumbled across the avenue.

In this country, she was strange, as was the rest of the family. They were not strange, at home. There were loungers there, like her brothers, sad children, and even a few tall, thin, pale asparagus-girls, devoured by unanswerable questions : what is life?—that kind of thing.

Here, families were tight knots, and each twist and turn of each knot was like all the others. And they were dark—so dark! Not dark-skinned, of course; that was at home. But dark-haired, their sleek, soft short hair often covered by scarves, veils, tight hats. They had dark eyes that were peering, intent, and did not reward curious glances. Their clothes were dark, too, shriveled-looking, the women’s skirts not even covering their pale, pointed knees.

She knew they had seen things and done things she could never imagine. She remembered the bullet-pocked walls of the government building that ran along the Boulevard of the Saint in the Fields, and the bunches of flowers, left beneath inscriptions where people had been shot. MORT POUR LA FRANCE. She could almost see the bodies lying along the sidewalk as she skated, but not really. She had never seen a dead body. It seemed a grievous lack.

Lately she’d begun to understand why the girls at the convent school teased her, or simply stared. She was too yellow and gold, and she knew nothing. Sometimes they gathered around her in the muddy courtyard and asked her questions she couldn’t answer, so she said yes, or no, at random; she knew those two words, in French. Usually her answer drew a trail of laughter.

She entered the deep foliage of the park, skating toward the pond. At the school, Mass was said twice a day, morning and evening—a mysterious meal. The students hurried to the chapel across the courtyard in the freezing dawn and dusk. Inside, they were shepherded in waves by a nun to the altar; when she clapped her hands, the wave, briefly, knelt. The girl glared in concentration at the girl nearest her, imitating each move. “You must pretend,” her mother had told her. “You must fit in.”

Next each wave was herded onto benches facing the altar, where a priest intoned. He stood with his back to them; she seldom saw his face. His eyes were fixed on the big gold crucifix with the naked man nailed to it; she tried not to look at the blood, glittering in the light of many candles.

The words were in Latin, a language she understood a little, gratefully, from school at home: Gallic wars. This was of course different. At one point, they all lightly struck their chests. Then the priest raised a disk and a gold cup.

The chapel air was dense, stuffy; a cloud of nuns breathed at the back. Not the scrubbing sisters in their long coarse aprons, but the queen nuns in tall white headdresses and long, rustling skirts. Sometimes the girl felt so faint she thought she was dying—the plumes of incense seemed to smother her—but she never fell down, as some did. Her pride sustained her; she would not be carried out. And the business never lasted very long. Afterward they were herded back into the blue dawn or the gray twilight.

Now she was skating past a great white statue of a naked man. Sooty rain had streaked his shoulders and thighs; he wore a massive grape leaf. His meaty hands, dangling by his sides, reminded her that she was very hungry; the lunch had been even less satisfying than the lunches at school—the only meal she ate there, since she was not a boarder. Her mother had drawn the line at that. How grateful she’d been, after catching a glimpse of the file of beds in the dormitory, the freezing bathrooms with their battery of sinks, and tubs in closets.

But she did eat lunch there during the week, or at least she tried to, at a long table in the refectory while a nun read aloud to the clink of spoons. Lunch was usually soup with things floating in it. Baskets of torn bread were passed savagely up and down; at four o’clock, more bread appeared, layered with slabs of bitter chocolate. While eating, they were not allowed to talk, a great relief.

She saw the pond through a break in the trees. After one look, she turned back. Without the children, she realized, the pond held no attraction. Now she began to skate faster; the light was going down, and she remembered that she was expected to go to the dentist that afternoon. She didn’t remember what time.

Skating back, faster and smoother now, the vibrations from the wheels on the rough sidewalk ran from the soles of her feet to the crown of her head. She was flying, faster than she had ever imagined going.

In front of the iron gate, Jean stood waiting, his hands on the top of the big black American car that had come across on a freighter. (French gas was too weak to power it up hills, and when it quaked and wavered, her father cursed under his breath.) She wanted to apologize to Jean for keeping him waiting but had no words. She clattered into the back seat—he’d opened the door without looking at her—then bent down to unfasten the skates with the key she wore on a string around her neck.

The car moved forward.

She liked looking at the streets through the thick glass windows that seemed to strain out detail. Hardly anyone was walking under the empty trees. Buses rolled by lighted up like aquariums, faces floating in the cool, inside glow. And the strange little cars were scurrying along like beetles; she rode high above them.

She heard Jean’s deep sigh as he mashed the brakes at an intersection; then he said something under his breath, probably a curse. She knew what was wrong: the chauffeur, Phillippe, had been given the day off in order to get married. That seemed reasonable; he would be back on duty early the next morning. But Jean was not pleased. He wore Phillippe’s black visored cap at a strange angle, pushed back on his head.

On the big avenue that led to the arch with the flame, they stopped at a red light. A few walkers crossed in front of them. One turned back. A face was pressed to Jean’s window, a thin face, very white. Fingers flailed against the glass and the mouth was shaping words.

Jean snapped his head around, frowning at the face. The light changed and they started forward. The woman dropped away like a rag.

She wanted to ask what the woman had said. This was not the first time a stranger had approached the car, and she knew it had something to do with the license plate and the small, bright American flag planted above it.

She’d overheard her mother complaining, “We saved their necks during the war, but now. . . .”

“It comes at a price,” her father had said. “In the end nobody really wants to be saved.”

Not sure of the link but sensing its relevance, she remembered the conversation at lunch about the American ambassador in Rome, and wondered if she looked as dark and solid as her father’s colleagues, standing shoulder to shoulder, drinks in hand, under the living room chandelier. But that look depended on their suits, the shoulders stiff and long with padding—women didn’t wear such clothes—and on their barking laughter that penetrated to her blue octagonal room on the second floor.

Because it had been a dressing room, the blue room was meant to share her parents’ bathroom, but that would never do. Instead, she hurried across the marble hall, morning and evening, to the loungers’ disorderly bathroom, rushing in and locking the door. Often one of them began to pound before she was finished, and they claimed she left unmentionable things on the floor.

A darker quarter of the city closed around the car after it passed across a bridge guarded by marble horses. Jean stopped before a narrow house in a narrow street. Elaborately, he climbed out and opened her door. She was grateful not to look at him, not to have to see his displeasure.

Her mother always told Jean when he should come back after her fittings. Her French was equal to that. But the girl didn’t know how to say anything. She made a face at Jean, imploringly, hoping he would wait, but he had already turned away and was looking over the top of the car. Then he closed her door with a smart snap, climbed in and sped off.

She searched her pocket for the scrap of paper with the dentist’s name. When she took the scrap out, she felt her five coins, cool and reassuring.

His office was on the second floor of the silent little house. She rode up in an elevator like a cigarette box. It stopped on the second floor, and she waited for the gilt gate to open, finally realizing it was waiting for her to open it herself. It had a powerful spring that pressed against her as she passed. She kneed it aside as she would have kneed an unruly dog.

She rang, and a young woman in a black dress swiftly opened the door. She took the girl’s coat, and then led her into a room with a window and a dentist’s chair.

She sat down and began to wait for the dentist to appear. He came in the door without speaking. She watched his white cuffs as he arranged his instruments on a small tray. Finally she looked at his face. He did not look back. She understood that her mother must have told him she spoke no French. His face was as closed as though she was dumb, rather than wordless.

He was supposed to see how her teeth were doing now that her braces were gone. The orthodontist at home had snatched them off because, he said, there was no one in France who would know how to attend to them. (Attending to them meant having them tightened, excruciatingly, every other Friday.) He said the French were very backward about correcting teeth, as the girl had observed every time one of them opened his mouth. Their teeth hardly looked like teeth, yellow and crooked as kernels of corn—something to do with their wartime diet, her mother had said. The orthodontist had insisted that all his work would be undone if the girl went to France, but her mother had refused to be swayed by that. “After all, teeth are not the only consideration,” she had said, leading the girl to speculate about the others.

Now the French dentist was examining her teeth with his little metal probe. Her head was comfortably fitted into the padded brace, and the big chair enclosed her like a shell. She closed her eyes, contented. He didn’t hurt her.

As he scraped her teeth, only her tongue was uncooperative, blocking his tool now and then.

After she spat and rinsed her mouth, he motioned her up out of the chair. The woman appeared, handed her her coat, and escorted her to the front door. Behind, the dentist was smiling; she felt it, even though her coat. Somehow, even without words, she had pleased him.

The little elevator was waiting for her.

Downstairs, she pushed open the door and went out into the fading afternoon. She had no idea how long she’d sat in the chair.

Standing on the sidewalk, she looked around. The narrow street was walled with small buildings, two or three stories high. She couldn’t tell for sure, but they seemed to be houses. However, no one came, or went, through the front doors and there were no lights in the windows. She began to wonder if the houses were deserted.

The air smelled grainy with coal soot.

Half a block away, on the corner, a green awning stretched part way across the sidewalk. There was writing on the awing, and she realized that it must be some kind of shop.

As she waited, the streetlamps came on with a flash that settled into a dim glow. The ornamented tops of the buildings melted into the darkening sky. The streetlight above her head was humming to itself in a rising and falling tone, almost like a song.

A light came on in a window across the street. She imagined a woman inside, beginning to cook dinner. She would lay out carrots, turnips, and onions and begin chopping. The carrots would still have their earthy beards. Water would begin to boil on the stove. She remembered a visit they had paid to a French family; those children had had plain water in their soup bowls. Seeing that, she had wanted to cry out, and stand up from the table; her bowl was full of vegetables in a thick broth. But she had gone on spooning. “Family hold back,” her father had explained, later. There had not been enough soup for everyone, and guests always came first.

She began to shiver. Darkness was falling, solidly. The sky above the rooftops had turned black.

Hearing a metallic rattle, she looked down the block and saw a man lowering a grille over the shop window.

Panic seized her suddenly with its iron claw. She ran toward him.

He turned, surprised. He was a round cabbagey man in a long apron.

Her hands fluttered up, her mouth opened. Then she rushed in the shop door before he could close it.

A sparrow woman sat on a high stool behind a counter with a cash register and a pyramid of glass ashtrays. She stared at the girl.

“Please—”

The man in the apron came in behind her. He stood with his arms folded.

It was some kind of café. She saw a few tables, all empty.

The woman asked her something. The girl shook her head and spread out her hands.

Then she said, “Perdue. Je suis . . . perdue.” They were her first French words.

They conferred briefly, and then the man in the apron waved her toward the door. She thought he was going to lock her out but he nodded and smiled, reassuring her.

He followed her onto the sidewalk and began to gesture and speak. Eventually she understood that he was pointing at a sign with a picture of a bus on it. She’d noticed them all over the city and seen the big groaning overloaded buses pulling up.

She ran across the street and stood by the sign in a circle of yellow light from a streetlamp. He watched her for a moment and then went inside. Later he came out with the woman, locked the door, and went away with her, arm in arm.

Planting herself, she began to wait. Buses come. Buses always come. She felt in her pocket for her coins.

Finally, at the end of the block, a bus came lurching. She realized it might not stop for her and stepped into the street, holding up her hand. It was a gesture she’d seen the men in dark suits make, to interrupt each other.

The bus wheezed to a stop in front of her and the doors opened. She climbed up, fumbling for her money.

The bus was packed with dark forms.

The driver turned his face to stare at her. His hand, on the long lever, closed the door behind her and the bus started, with a jerk. He nodded at the coin box.

She dropped all her money in. He looked at her oddly.

She wanted to sit down, she wanted to fold herself into the dark mass of strangers.

The driver was still looking at her.

“Rue,” she said. “Rue Alfred Deodangue.”

He nodded, and handed her back two of her coins.

As she sat down, she remembered the poison paint flaking off the bedroom ceiling in Rome, sending the American woman home. With a stab of shame, she remembered that she had hoped they might also be recalled. Now, settling into her seat and beginning to study the street signs, she knew she did not want to be recalled.

The arm of the stranger next to her was solid and still. After a while warmth began to seep into her side.

Let us stay a long time, she prayed, until I can put it all together—the words, the streets, the woman with her face pressed against Jean’s window.

It might even be possible to ask questions now that she had some words. She imagined asking one of the jeering girls in the convent schoolyard why she hated her, what she had done. Perhaps it would turn out not to be hate at all but only some kind of game. If it was a game, any kind of question could be asked, because games were always about asking questions: “Red Rover, Red Rover, who will you send over?”

She had always been good at games, chasing the ball across the half court and lobbing it into the net or sprinting down the soccer field ahead of everyone else.

Thinking about games, she prepared herself for her stop, recognizing the avenue the bus was rolling along. She stood up, leaving the still presence beside her. Stepping to the front of the bus, she waited for it to ease almost to a stop at the sidewalk. She’d seen how it was done—this jumping down from a bus that hadn’t quite stopped. She primed herself and jumped.

Well, she fell, but it didn’t matter. She got up at once as the bus wheezed off.

It was just a question of learning their rules. At school, she would remember to wear white gloves the next time grades were announced and to stand up from her desk with her arms folded on her chest when her mispronounced name was called.

Running home—it was late after all, and dark—she considered the question of asking questions. She sensed an opening, as though her French words had breached a low, solid wall.

The concierge let her in, looking at her curiously.

“Bon soir,” she said. There were two more.

The big stairs seemed to reach for her, as though they had been waiting. She ran up, her footsteps muffled by the thick runner that was held at each tread by gold bars.

At the top, she nearly gave up and went into her blue room as she always did. But she was still aware of the opening, although it already seemed to be closing. She wondered briefly if it could only exist outside the house.

As long as it was still possible, she pushed her way through the dimness—lights hadn’t been turned on yet—and knocked on her parents’ bedroom door. It seemed unlikely that she’d ever done that.

She heard her mother’s startled voice and went in.

That lovely lady, her mother, was sitting on the satin stool in front of her dressing table, decorated like an altar with candles, silver boxes, and trays. She turned, looking alarmed, and the girl saw her silken leg in the opening of her dressing gown. She was getting ready to go out—her evening dress lay on a chair—and the girl knew she had very little time.

“I took the bus,” she said, and gasped with surprise at herself. “Jean didn’t come.”

“Well, that is something,” her mother said, smiling. “That is really something.” The girl didn’t know whether she meant that Jean had not come or that she had taken the bus.

“I was thinking of a question,” she said, twisting her hands. Her mother had turned back to the mirror and was dusting her nose with a feathery thing that shed powder everywhere.

“What question, Darling?” her mother asked.

“How was that woman, that ambassador, poisoned?”

Her mother laughed. “You’re still thinking about that?”

“I really want to know,” the girl said desperately. There was so little time. Soon her mother would rise, drop her dressing gown, and lower the big dress over her head. Then she would pack her little purse, slide on her shoes, and leave.

“Lead in the paint that flaked off her ceiling,” her mother said. “I thought you heard that.” She was applying a coat of red lipstick.

“But I don’t understand,” the girl said, and now she knew she was talking about many thing. “Did she sleep with her mouth open?”

Her mother smiled. “She may have,” she said sagely. “She may have, for all we know.” Then she stood up to get on with the rest of her dressing.

The girl went away. She didn’t particularly want to watch her mother don the big dress although she knew she would look beautiful in it.

She went into her blue room and turned on a lamp. Above her head, the paneling of the octagonal walls reached into the darkness, topped with swirls. She stood studying that. The room had been designed for something else, something she would soon understand.

“It is hardly a room for a child,” her mother had objected when they moved in.

“A boudoir,” her father had said quietly.

There was no other room available.

I will stay here until I understand, she thought, sitting down on the bed. I will stubbornly stay until I find all the words and all the connections and all the rules of their game.