Boston Adventure

by Jean Stafford

  Recognizing the source of his position, I said, “Oh, I forgot to tell you. I’ve been reading Confessions of a Young Man.”

  “By that I assume you mean to imply that I picked up my ideas about matrimony from George Moore,” he said with a sneer. “The presentation of your charge is grotesquely naïve. My integrity obliges me to correct you: I am, to be sure, very similar to Moore, but the similarity antedated my reading of the Confessions. I have always been a citizen of the world, a pagan, an iconoclast, and from time immemorial my motto has been Ars longa est.”

  “Are you going to be a writer, Nathan?”

  “Of course,” he replied simply and his voice was surprised that I should ask the question. “I am a satirist.”

  “What are you going to write? Poetry?”

  “I will not choose my form until my soul is ready. My knowledge is vast but inchoate. At the moment, I am collecting experience. That is why I sought you out tonight. You interest me and when I say I love you, I am not using the word in its conventional sense. In a way, the word is almost synonymous with curious. I am curious to know what sort of person has emerged from that amazing combination, Hermann Marburg and Shura Korf.”

  “Have you found out?”

  “No, but I have a clue.”

  I remembered, from long ago, the words of this boy’s mother: “So your kid is half Rooshun and half German, half Hun as they say.” I said, “Do you think I’m more like Mamma or like my father?”

  “I can’t tell yet. If you got to be like your father, I’d want you to live with me—for a while at least. He was the most sensitive man I ever knew.”

  “Did you know my father very well?”

  “I know him better now than I did then, of course, because when we used to take those walks together, I didn’t know as much as I do now about what had soured him. But looking back, I can see that he was crucified. Why, God! His conscience was hammering the nails in every minute of his life, and because he couldn’t reason well—he didn’t have much mind, you know—he figured that that eminent monument to filthy lies, the Roman Catholic Church, was right and he was wrong.”

  “I wonder if he ever went to confession after he left us.”

  I began to muse upon my father. How immediate before me were his crude bones, refined by the sunburned flesh! How directly did the wintry eyes advance! The face retired, and instead, I saw myself kneeling in the road to tie my boot lace. My loneliness was spatial and atmospheric, implanting in my heart a sadness which had not been there when the fact of his leaving stood alone. And as I saw that figure of myself in the uninhabited landscape where, in the leaden sky, the sun seemed slowly to fade rather than to sink, like a light-globe with weakening filaments, there came again that disturbing half memory which had eluded me as I knelt down and felt the salty breeze in my face.

  “And that is why I love you,” Nathan was saying and I realized with a start that I had not been listening to him.

  “Why?”

  He looked me full in the face. His eyes alone were distinct in the misty darkness. “Which one of them were you thinking about? Your father or Ivan?”

  As he spoke, six horns, one after the other, lamented Ivan with a single, prolonged moan. Nathan took my hand as the sound died. “How wonderful it is in the fog,” he said, “when you can’t see Chichester and you can’t see Boston and ergo, if you have any gifts, you are, as I said, a citizen of the world.”

  “I’d rather be a citizen of Boston.”

  “You’re not that stupid.” His head hovered over mine, swaying down and withdrawing as if, preoccupied with his thoughts, he had started to kiss me and then had forgotten. “Really, you’re not that stupid, Sonie. Don’t you know you don’t fit into the pattern?”

  “I don’t know what the pattern is.”

  “I don’t know either, but you don’t fit into any pattern, not any more than I do.”

  “Oh, but I’m not intellectual like you, Nathan.”

  “I should say you’re not. Still, that doesn’t keep you from being intelligent, does it? For instance, you don’t have to know the theology of the Catholic Church to know that your father was persecuted, do you? And you don’t have to know psychology to know that your mother is . . . well, to know what your mother is like.”

  “What did you start to say about her?”

  “Nothing.” But his arm pressed hard against my shoulders. “Freedom is the first thing you’ve got to get. Think of the Confessions. That was the primary requisite for him, and it’s the same thing for us.”

  I was seduced by the memory of the Parisian apartment and in that moment, when Nathan’s proximity lent me strength and when, moreover, Boston was visible only as a line of murky lights, I promised myself that I would have the best, whether that was to be had across the bay or across the ocean. I said to Nathan, “Now I know what you mean.”

  “Do you?” he cried. “If you do, I’m mad with joy! But you must know independently of me, you see, Sonie.”

  “Oh, I do. I see it quite apart from you.”

  And I did, because in that vague but luminous and intricate future, that tree-filled and fragrant garden, I did not see Nathan more clearly than I saw any other of the witty and sensitive and handsome people. What I saw was myself, that activating principle which set my feet upon a boulevard, and simultaneously made me love, sense loss, hear, now in Chichester, a final foghorn, that law or theorem of nature for which the term “Sonia” and its variant “Sonie” had arbitrarily been chosen.

  Nathan stood up. “What happens next,” he said bitterly, “is that we do what everybody else does. We fall in love and then it goes bad, but that can’t be helped. You are in love with me, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  He ran down the steps. I could hear his feet quickly crunching the sand as he withdrew into the fog. I sat still a little while. His kisses, like echoes, were repeated on my skin. From the points where his lips had touched, sensation rayed out until my whole face throbbed. But although I felt as brilliantly branded as he was himself, I was aware, not so much of the maturation of my love for him as I was for the achievement of knowledge: the knowledge that my father had deserted me forever and that forever Ivan would be dead.

  2

  The fog was dispelled on the next day; all traces of the snow were gone save for small pyramidal drifts in the corners of steps and in the crotches of leafless vines on the wall of the Catholic church. And the sun, in the vivid sky, warmed the wind, disclosed again the waves and the broad, shining shingle. It was one of those days that come as a surprise in the middle of winter, like a gift sent on no anniversary, so that the pleasure takes us unaware.

  Early in the morning, hunger had awakened me. But as I dressed, my desire for food faded and I felt a little sick, for I remembered, seeing the empty space where Ivan’s bed had been, that last evening I had been unfaithful to him by greedily snatching at Nathan’s praise and affection. I made myself a cup of tea and as I sat down to drink it, I heard the Kadishes’ door slam and through the window saw my lover running, hatless, his shirt tail streaming out behind him, with a book in one hand and a cinnamon roll in the other. He did not seem ludicrous. I half rose to call out to him, but remorse arrested me, and I deliberately looked away, whispering my brother’s name as I bent my bead: “Oh, Ivan, Ivan, Ivan,” but the invocation was futile.

  My mother kept to her bed all the morning and in the early afternoon she called me in. At first, when I sat down on the edge of the bed, she only stared at me. In these past months, her eyes had made me uncomfortable; I was afraid when a look from her demanded one directly from me, for it was as if she spun out a thread connecting with me which some vague superstition prevented me from breaking. If I came in from school and found her huddled into the old wrapper, staring at the oven door or gazing out the window, removed in a world as private as sleep, yet obliged by habit to make a
transition back to the world that contained my presence, she would carry her stare to my face and, after a time, would see me. “I didn’t hear you,” she would say, for her senses were confused. Actually, she had heard me, but the sound of the door and of my footsteps were only now related to the sight of me. So now she regarded me for long minutes before she spoke. Her eyes, in another setting, might have made her look perpetually feverish, but because of her high color, they were the domestic and innocent eyes of a healthy animal. And yet there was something added to them; they, like the lines of her face, had been touched up, refined, perhaps by some ancient drop of Oriental blood. It was not hard for me to understand, seeing her this morning, how Nathan could be in love with her.

  “He’s drowned,” she said. “You can’t imagine what it looks like when they take it out of the water.”

  “Hush, Mamma, you go to sleep now.”

  But she would not be quieted. She gave me a sly smile. “Let me tell you what happened to me once, Sonie. Okay?”

  “No! I don’t want to hear.”

  “Please! It’s not about Luibka, darling.” Knowing that if I did not hear the story now I would be obliged to later, I sat down. She held both my hands tightly and her eyes never left my face.

  On a feast day, when the summer was at its hottest, she had gone in the evening with four friends to the river to swim. They had to pass by the cemetery at the Devitschiepol convent where tents had been pitched for the feast and where kwass was sold at little pavilions along the paths. Each of the five girls carried a white sheet to wrap herself in when she came out of the water. On the way they had been joking, calling them their shrouds and winding sheets.

  A group of Cossacks, a little drunk, were standing beside a booth, listening to a fair-haired Pole who, in a piercing, sorrowful voice, was singing this song:

  They shout the loud alarm,

  My war steed paws the ground;

  I hear him neigh,

  O, let me go!

  One of his companions cried out, “And what does the girl say to that, eh?” And so he sang again:

  Let others rush to death

  Too young and gentle, thou

  Shalt yet watch o’er our cottage home;

  Thou must not pass the Don.

  Laughing, the girls went on, and one of them paraphrased the last line of the soldier’s song, “Thou must not swim the Moskva.” Already they could feel the cool water on their hot, dusty bodies and they hastened on through the crowds into a quiet lane that led to the river bank. One by one, as silently as fish, they slipped under the still, black surface. How good the water felt when they floated on their backs, letting their unbound hair be soaked to the roots! They called to one another: “Isn’t it splendid, Dounia?” “Are you cool yet, Varenka?” “Look at Shura! She is going under the water!”

  Afterwards, they sat for a while, wrapped up in their sheets, listening to the remote, enchanting voices from behind them in the town. Across the river they could see the fires of night fishermen. A trout leaped like a silver tongue. Someone began to sing the Cossack’s song, but all at once broke off and cried, “We’re not all here! Shura? Marfa? Dounia? It is Varenka who is missing!”

  With the tails of their sheets flying behind them, they ran in their bare feet up and down the grassy bank, calling to their friend, but there was no answer save for the sleepy murmur of the river and the bumbling of the city. They called for half an hour until their throats were sore and then, crying, clutching at one another, they fled back the way they had come. The festival was as lively as ever, and the Polish soldier, drunker than he had been before so that his voice was deeper, slower, and more melancholy, was singing still as if he had never left off;

  Let others rush to death

  Too young and gentle, thou

  Shalt yet watch o’er our cottage home;

  Thou must not pass the Don.

  The girls, half naked, their bare legs showing through the folds of their white wrappings, shivered though it was a hot night, ran into the church of the Virgin of Smolensk, and after they had told two nuns of the catastrophe, fell on their knees and prayed.

  Days later, the body was found in shallow water and brought in by a boatman. Varenka’s companions were summoned to identify the sodden, bloated parody of a human being. Faceless, livid, softened, it was a horrid spectacle. Of all the girls, Varenka had been the gayest. Only two days before, her grandfather, a rich merchant in St. Petersburg, had sent her a pair of Torjeck-leather boots and a blue silk blouse with a thousand tiny pleats. How Dounia, Marfa, Shura, Manetchka prayed for her! And yet, not one of them could remember how she had been when she was one of them, but only how she had lain dead on the counter, swollen like a fat fish and like the fish, white, shapeless as if the bones themselves had been worn thin by the water and were no stronger than those of a halibut.

  “If you had touched her, your finger would have gone in like dough, Sonie. Oh, you can’t imagine!”

  I was dazed, not by her dreadful story, but by the realization that she had hated Ivan so much that she had tried to make his burial the most loathesome she could conceive. It occurred to me to tell her the truth, but I was afraid of the cunning in her face.

  “If I could forget about him. But his head keeps floating up at me. Oh, so white and ugly!”

  In my astonished face, she laughed! She was laughing not with humor but with joy, like a young girl in love who can find no other expression for her rapture. And then it came to me with a shock that the song she had been singing last night as she went through the fog was the same one she had sung me this morning when she told me the story of Varenka, so that I knew it had all been planned and she had not just now recollected her friend.

  I looked upon my mother with sheer fright. It was as if I looked upon naked evil in the person of that woman whose beauty so far surpassed any other I had ever seen that it was almost divine, as if she had come directly from the hand of God, but had, immediately afterward, been inhabited by a ravenous and indefatigable fiend. Or perhaps she was not alive with wickedness but was dead with it: an empty vessel, or an excellent hull holding a withered fruit. I wondered how deep she was and if my own depths of which Nathan had spoken were the same.

  There was a familiar expression in her face which had taken on repose after her fit of laughing, and seeking, at last I redeemed the day Ivan had been born when her strength had rallied to give him a name. I had wondered why she had called him Ivan rather than Hermann since the latter had come to be a generic term of opprobrium to her. It was that her eccentricity, her madness, call it what you would, was shrewd. Hermann would have been too much. I had known that even in her stupor then she had hated my brother and, later throughout his lifetime, I had sometimes wondered why she had not hated him as she carried him before his birth and why she had not hated me. She had not, because she had fortified herself, long, long before, with the conviction that men were all villains and women were their innocent victims.

  She had closed her eyes. “Leave me alone now, Sonia,” she said wearily. “It is all over.”

  I stood looking down at her for a moment and I exulted in the trick Mr. Henderson and I had played upon her. Saddening as it was not to know where Ivan was buried, I was consoled by the fact that he lay in the dry ground.

  Just as I closed the door behind me, I heard a car stop on the road beside our house, and stepping to the window, I saw that it was Miss Pride’s and Mac was handing her out. Rattled as I was, I collected myself sufficiently to realize that it would not do to receive her in the house, for my mother might repeat to her the story of Varenka’s death. I went out to meet her. She was carrying a fuchsia-colored cyclamen planted in a little white pot. When she caught sight of me, she said, “My dear, am I too late?” vesting her cold voice with a gentleness
I had not heard in it before, and looking at me with a genuine compassion.

  “We buried him yesterday,” I said.

  She took my hand. “I only got your letter this morning and I came immediately.”

  The word “immediately” made me see her leaving her breakfast half eaten and her mail unopened and not waiting even to cancel her engagements for the day. Had I observed my picture carefully, I would have seen it was full of errors, for it was already afternoon and if she had got my letter in the morning post, she would have had ample time not only to finish her breakfast but her luncheon as well. Neither did it occur to me at once that she was not telling the truth and that she must have got my letter the day before.

  “It’s very kind of you, ma’am,” I said. “But I’m sorry that I troubled you.”

  “What kind of friend would I be if you weren’t free to trouble me?”

  Twice as electrifying was this second shock, this designation of herself as my “friend.” But strangely, my first reaction was not one of pleasure, but almost of disgust as for a few seconds she stood before me, not as that grand Bostonian to whose slightest favor I had aspired, but as a selfish old woman who, as a sop to her conscience, had brought me a potted plant. It seemed to me that she had aged remarkably since the past summer. Probably no change had taken place in her at all. It is difficult, in a wrinkled face, to compute how many new wrinkles have appeared in a year’s time, or to see, in white hair, all the stages of its purification. It was, rather, that I had changed and my altered feelings had turned a spotlight upon the arthritic stiffening of her fingers from which she had removed the white gloves, the desiccation and the yellow hue of her creased skin, the protuberation of her veins, the liverish patches on her wrists, the aridity of her thin lips. But a censor in me checked me before I had disarrayed her features beyond repair, and as from her small, brisk person there emanated the sharp odor of her expensive soap, she recovered her familiar and beloved shape.