A Citizen of the Country

by Sarah Smith

  “Yes,” said Uncle Gilbert.

  You know, she thought. You’re lonely too. I suppose we’re all lonely.

  “How long will you be here?” he asked.

  “This is my last day,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said, a long drawn-out ohhh.

  She should have said that she would change her ticket and stay. She didn’t have the money for it. She could have got money somehow. Not from Uncle Gilbert. “Why are things going so badly?”

  “It is my fault, it is I, I should try harder with Harry. I really believe I say more to Elphinstone than to Harry.”

  “I don’t mean Harry, Harry can climb a tree, I have no patience with him.— I mean the three of us are not together and we should be. Alexander misses you and he won’t write to you. And if I go back to Paris now, with things—as they are here, what shall I do, Uncle Gilbert? I shall be thinking of you always.”

  “You must not think of me. It isn’t your fault, my dear.”

  “I ‘must not’; but I will; how shall I help it?”

  “My dear,” Uncle Gilbert said, “I know what Alexander feels. He wants to save your boy from what happened to him.”

  “But from you?” Perdita said. “Not from you.”

  He took her hands. “You will save him. You have grown to be such a good and kind and loving woman, my dear. You will be his family.”

  No, I won’t, she thought. I’m the one who loves America and leaves Alexander deserted in Paris because I want to play the piano. I’m not good enough. I don’t always want to be good enough.

  “I can’t be all his family by myself! I need you. Why don’t you at least write to him?” Do it for me, she thought. Write us. Come to see us. Visit us in Paris. You would like it. It would scare Harry half to death and perhaps he’d start being nice to you. She took a breath, about to say Don’t just write.

  “I am Alexander’s bugaboo,” Uncle Gilbert said. “Do you remember how everyone said he and I look alike? When he was here in America, he used to say, ‘At least no one can see you in Europe where I live.’”

  “He was being cruel.”

  “No,” Uncle Gilbert said. “Only truthful. I feel—sometimes, still—haunted by Father. So does Alexander. He said, we cannot do that to the boy.”

  Gilbert is doing what Alexander wants, Perdita thought. And I am supposed to do the proper thing too, to support Alexander who won’t take support from me; to support him in doing the wrong thing? Oh, we’re so proper, so dreadfully polite, all of us; how can we ever depend on each other when we don’t dare to talk about what we feel or ask for what we need? We silence each other.

  “Here, my dear.” He pressed something into her hand. A little box. “I wish that it were more; but when I heard that you were coming, I felt it was to say goodbye ... and that should be,” he hesitated, “celebrated, I hardly like to say celebrated, but I believe that you are going to where you will live happily. And I have seen Toby,” he added softly. “Thank you for that. Thank you.”

  There is a difference in the hand between cheap jewelry boxes and good ones. This was thin cardboard, covered in paper that was peeling away on one corner. She held it in her hands, puzzled.

  “Alexander told me a story once,” Uncle Gilbert said quickly, nervously, apologizing with his tone of voice. “When he was about to run away from Vienna with his first wife—his family disapproved of her, you know—he bought her a pin because they were going to get away. It was not an expensive pin, but it had value for them; they were going to escape. You have escaped. You and Alexander and your boy. I am glad for you. This is for you. There is a letter with it for Alexander.”

  No, she said to herself as if she were going to say it out loud. That’s not the point. There are situations that it is worthwhile not escaping from.

  She opened it, at his urging, and felt it and held it close to her eyes. It was a silver-colored pendant, thin base metal, lumpy on the back, decorated with three big staring rhinestones and some smaller ones. She felt something flaking away, the silver color or a bit of glue. It was shaped like an oval with a point on the bottom: a heart, but a disguised heart.

  “Wear it for my sake,” Uncle Gilbert said. “Show it to Alexander with the letter. Tell him that I shall never bother him and that I remembered the story of how he escaped. I shall not disturb him. I only wish him very well with Jouvet. Here, here, put it on.”

  She clasped the chain around her neck because he had asked her to wear it. Women are so pliable, she thought. I am to be your last letter to Alexander. You are to stay here; you are not to escape; and I am not to think of you. She was having trouble with the clasp; her fingers were shaking. A little part of her simply hurt because he had given her something ugly. It was not the money, though anything having to do with Uncle Gilbert took on an air of money. She wondered whether he thought she would not notice, but that was so unlike him, and then whether he had thought giving her something too good would make Harry jealous. That worried her. All the time, she thought, all the time in Paris I shall be thinking of you and those letters you never got. What good will that do Alexander and me?

  She unclasped the necklace and put it down on the table between them. “No,” she said. “I will not. I cannot do it. You must write to him. No. You must come to Paris and tell him yourself.”

  Elphinstone makes a suggestion

  AFTER PERDITA HAD GONE, Gilbert Knight walked slowly and tiredly back to his house with Elphinstone and went upstairs to the library, where Harry and Efnie never came. His eyes were blurred. There were two chairs by the window; he sat in one of them.

  In the chair across from him he saw a ghost of Alexander, a ghost with haunted eyes saying I am not Richard. We simply look alike.

  I will not haunt you, Gilbert thought. Though she asked me to—

  Father’s ghost-voice echoed through Gilbert’s heart. You have wasted your life, Sir. You have failed all who love you. At least show a little spirit now. Do your duty! Stay at your post. Here.

  Alexander looked at Father in tired exasperation, snapped his fingers like a scornful magician, and melted away, in charge of his own disappearance.

  Elphinstone came into the room, holding his leash in his mouth. “Yes, let’s,” Gilbert said. The house was full of ghosts.

  They walked down Commonwealth Mall. Elphinstone kept close to Gilbert. But when it came time to turn around, Elphinstone tugged to go farther.

  “We must go back.” It was almost dinnertime. Harry and Efnie might be there for dinner. He must try with Harry. He had been trying for years. “Come now, Elphinstone, come.”

  But Elphinstone wanted to go on. They crossed the street to the Public Garden, past the Frog Pond and the swan boats. Elphinstone tugged at the leash; even farther, across Charles Street, into the Common.

  How can Perdita ask me for help?

  And then suddenly Gilbert stooped and picked up his dog, and, holding Elphinstone over his shoulder like a baby, he began walking, striding in a way he had never really done before, across the Common and down past Washington Street. At his bank he took out quite a lot of money. He felt guilty, sick, exalted, as if he were robbing someone.

  South Station has public telephones. Gilbert carefully cleaned the earpiece and mouthpiece and called his housekeeper. “Tell Cook I shall not be home for dinner.” Across from him, the New York train was chuffing on the metal rails, which stretched out beyond the station, past the horizon, dizzyingly far, forever.

  “I do not know when I shall be back.”

  André's birthday; Dotty and Milly at the Necro

  JULES INVITED REISDEN TO the Necro for André’s birthday. “There’ll be a party after the show,” Jules said. “Sabine will be there.”

  “André invited her?” That would be an interesting change.

  “I invited her,” Jules said, sounding uncertain. “You should bring a guest. A woman, you know, someone Sabine can talk with.”

  Reisden brought two, Milly and Dotty.

&nbs
p; No two women in Paris were less alike than Milly and Reisden’s cousin Dotty. But they shared a single precious trait: they disapproved of everything and everyone else at least as much as of each other. It followed that they never lacked conversation. Dotty had never been to the Necro before; she gazed at the mummy and the carved skulls with a distant, horrified fascination. “My G-d,” she murmured. “But, darling, my G-d.” Milly arrived just at midnight, vivid in newly hennaed hair, wearing her Russian peasant jacket, a red skirt slit up the side, and strings of amber. Nick-Nack trailed resignedly behind her.

  Dotty and Milly exchanged air-kisses. Milly sat down and looked admiringly at the ceiling, where winged baby skeletons held festoons of withered leaves.

  “Chou-ette, look at all the money he’s spent!”

  “So utterly vulgar.” Dotty raised her mother-of-pearl opera glasses to examine Cyron and Sabine, who were sitting together front and center. “Where did she get that dress?” Dotty whispered. “Dear heavens. It has fringe.”

  “That old—Cyron wants her to play Madame Mabet,” Milly said. “What idiots men are. Do you suppose he’s sleeping with her?”

  “Darling, she has to sleep with someone, doesn’t she?”

  Reisden held out his hand for the opera glasses.

  With Cyron, in the intimate ring of the opera glasses, Sabine was a different person. Cyron was exerting his grumpy charm on her and she was blushing with happiness. Beaming too, Cyron patted Sabine’s hand.

  “No,” Dotty said decidedly. “Father-in-law. He likes her too much to love her.”

  “But she has been sleeping with someone,” Milly said. “Look at her sit with her legs apart, some man’s started her bread rising.”

  Dotty took the opera glasses. “Yes, I do think she is harboring a little treasure.”

  “Poor booby.”

  “Do you think it’s André’s?”

  “Don’t,” Reisden said sharply, “either of you. They have enough troubles.”

  In the interval, he took the women up to meet Sabine and Cyron. Dotty took Sabine aside for women-talk; Sabine gazed at Dotty’s exquisitely plain dress and opened her eyes even wider when she learned that Milly acted in the movies. Cyron smiled suspiciously at Reisden. Reisden smiled back, thinking Wait until you hear André wants to exhume his parents.

  The play after the interval was Obsession, which André had written a few years ago. Jules was Henri, a young engineer, the father of a small boy. Henri is haunted by the idea that he will kill his son. Henri is a decent and responsible man. He talks openly, desperately, to his doctor, and then to a specialist in mental diseases. “But I feel this, as if I must do it,” Henri says, bewildered, spreading his hands helplessly. “Should I have myself committed?” Yes, people actually shouted from the auditorium. No, all the onstage authorities reassured him cheerfully. “But I know what I must do,” Henri said despairingly when he was alone. Reisden went out into the bar; he wasn’t going to watch this.

  Dotty joined him and accepted a glass of white wine. They sat at the near-corner table. The corner table was occupied by one of André’s decorations, a pair of cobwebbed skeletons holding hands over drinks. Dotty ostentatiously turned her back. “I don’t know why I come to these things,” she said.

  “For my sake.”

  “Is André a case, darling?”

  He shrugged, meaning You know I couldn’t tell you if he were, he always has been, something like that.

  “Sacha. Dear. One hates to be discouraging, but— Look at the poor girl, depending on her father-in-law to make her welcome in her husband’s theatre.”

  “Something happened to André that put him off family life; but now he’s got a family, like it or not, and I mean to teach him to like it.”

  Dotty shook her head. “You are pursuing the difficult for its own sake, darling.”

  “Actually,” he said, “for their child’s sake.”

  “Is her little treasure really André’s?”

  “Don’t make mischief, Dot,” he said.

  “Sacha. Dear. And how are your wife and baby?”

  The transition was pure Dotty. “No, I am not,” he said.

  “Darling?” Innocently.

  “Recommending marriage and children to everyone because I love mine.—To answer your actual question, Perdita writes me she is enjoying herself in New York. By now she should have given a concert for the benefit of the Women’s Suffrage League. I am very proud of her.” He sighed. By now she should have seen Gilbert in Boston. She hadn’t written about it. He took a photograph from his wallet. “Toby in Central Park,” he said. “Perdita sent it. Look at him smile.”

  Dotty’s face softened as she looked at it. “How can you bear to be apart from him?” she said. “They go away to school so quickly.”

  “I count the days until he’s back.”

  She contemplated the little stiff square for a moment. “The trouble with love,” she said, “it hypnotizes one. The love of children. One wants them, one wants more.... If one isn’t André. Sometimes I actually think of marrying again. I do. But, darling, all the things that are wrong with marriage, all the reasons one shouldn’t dream of marriage ... André is not meant to be a father.”

  “I thought I wasn’t. One never knows what children are like until one has them,” Reisden said. “Or who one is oneself.”

  “You will simply make two people unhappy; three when they have a child.”

  This was what she’d said about him and Perdita.

  “Four,” Dotty amended.

  “The fourth?”

  “Jules Fauchard, of course.”

  Reisden shook his head dismissively.

  “He and André are very close,” Dotty said.

  “Of course they are. André needs to know that he’s a decent, sane man. When he writes Obsession, he’s acting out both his feelings and his revulsion at them—oh, G-d, I sound like Katzmann. So he picks the sanest, most ordinary man in Paris to act his madman.— He does keep asking to be sane.”

  “Darling, how often one wants to be what one isn’t.”

  “You’ll help Sabine?”

  Dotty sighed in irritation. “Sacha, I do hate it when you push your reclamation projects on me.”

  “Take her round. Polish her a bit. Her ideal of good taste is the Samaritaine department store, and André knows better. Make her appeal to him.”

  “Little treasure and all?”

  “I know it won’t be easy.”

  “Very pale powder?” Dotty murmured. “Blue lip-tint?”

  “Be nice, dear.”

  The play ended; they went back into the theatre. Waiters moved chairs to the side of the room and brought out a buffet, which the theatre company rushed at. Milly’s Nick-Nack wriggled out of his collar and stationed himself in the middle of the crowd, yiking hopefully. Reisden saw Ruthie, hanging back shyly at the side of things. Jules toasted André’s health in champagne. “It’s not possible,” Dotty whispered pointedly. “André is almost forty years old! Do people change at that age?” Cyron sat next to Sabine. André sat next to Jules, keeping his business partner between himself and the part of the room that contained Sabine. Sabine glared at Jules when she thought no one was looking. Cyron smiled at her again, drawing her out, making her eyes sparkle, making her the happy girl André had never met.

  The theatre orchestra began playing. Cyron asked Sabine to dance. They moved around the stage, Sabine a little heavy-footed, Cyron hopping about with her until her skirts pranced like horses and she laughed.

  Nick-Nack began barking at them. Milly collected him and brought him back to Reisden and Dotty. “Bad Nicky,” she cooed at him. “How could Cyron give Madame Mabet to someone who dances like a chair, when he had me? Have some more ham, Nicky, and throw up on her shoes.”

  Nick-Nack gazed up at her adoringly and drooled on her sleeve. Milly kissed his ear; Milly liked male dogs.

  “Jules invited her,” Dotty said in an undertone, “which means that Jules knows tha
t she and André are not on good terms; and she knows that Jules knows; and now Jules has made it obvious to everyone, though he is such a dear that he could not possibly have meant it, could he? But of course she could not afford not to come, since she was invited. . . . I am translating, darling, from the Feminine.”

  “And there’s André’s Ruthie,” Milly said, “who’d throw herself into a mud puddle to keep André’s feet dry. When I finish A Woman by Herself, women like that won’t exist anymore.”

  “Darling, there will always be women like that.”

  André left and reappeared, dragging a film camera and lights. They all crowded up onto the roof, where it was just dawn. André set up the lights and filmed them as the sun rose: his whole company, then the principals. Cyron, as Mabet, fought an imaginary sword duel with Jules. Cyron described Mabet’s vision of France; Sabine applauded, an appreciative audience. Finally Cyron, Jules, and Sabine stood by the cupola, holding hands and smiling at the camera: Cyron on one side, Jules on the other; in the middle Sabine. Mabet, Méduc, and Madame Mabet. André bent his back behind the camera.