The Carnavalet is my favorite museum in Paris. One usually has it to oneself. Wandering through the lovely rooms where Madame de Sévigné entertained her witty and congenial friends, gazing at the pathetic relics of the revolution, the copybooks of the poor Dauphin, the slippers of Marie Antoinette, the fatal cease-fire order of the king to the Swiss Guard, I have a thrilling sense, in that dim silence, of the muffled roar of an angry mob from the streets outside and the clangor of a tocsin.
Felix paid particular attention to the portraits of the revolutionary leaders. Here is what he talked about. (I am acting like his research assistant again. Already!)
“It was a fantastic time.” This before a portrait of the beautiful Saint-Just. “And its leaders were fantastic men. For once in her history, France escaped the straitjacket of her fetish about la gloire. These men had a brilliant vision of a human society run by reason and equity. For this they were willing to make a clean sweep of the past. But they differed from the dreary socialists and communists of our time in that they were romantics. They loved art. They worshiped beauty. Saint-Just was a poet, if a very bad one. Of course they bogged down in blood. They were so excited about what they were doing that they persuaded themselves that only a few heads stood between them and Utopia. And then the good burghers of France saw their chance to get rid of them by branding them as monsters. La gloire, the friend of their pocketbooks, came back to rule the roost with Napoleon. But if it’s blood you’re worried about, compare the few thousand that died in the Terror with the millions who perished in the little Corsican’s campaigns!”
“I’d hate to have been guillotined.” My only comment!
“Would you rather have frozen to death in the retreat from Moscow? Death in the Terror at least was stylish.” And then this, before a portrait of Madame Elizabeth: “Do you know what the other ladies in the tumbrel did when they learned that they were to have the privilege of dying with the king’s sister? They each made a deep révérence to her as they stepped out of the cart to the scaffold! What do you suppose the stinking, gaping mob made of that?”
April 8. Felix and I went to Versailles today. He was at his brightest, full of paradoxes, contrasting our government in Washington with the absolute monarchy of which this great palace is the symbol. He insists that President Truman, like Louis XVI, is the victim of red tape, that his seemingly vast prerogatives dwindle to helplessness before a bureaucracy based on tenure.
“The tragedy of the American president is that he is always being described as the most powerful man in the world. So, naturally, people expect him to solve all their problems. But can he halt one antitrust suit? Can he abate one tax? Can he fire one general? Can he remove one picketing student in front of the White House? No! He can only smile and smile and be a president. Of course, if he controls his party, like FDR, he has that power. But the White House, in itself, is very little.”
At lunch, in the glass terrace of a restaurant near the gates of the palace, he startled me with this proposal:
“When you’ve found yourself, Fiona, and are ready to come home, why don’t you come back to your mother and me? I promise that you’ll be absolutely free. You’ll have your own little apartment in our house, and we’ll build you a studio. I assure you that I shall respect your desire for independence!”
I was horribly agitated.
“Why do you want me?”
“It’s more than just wanting you. It’s needing you. You’re always so sane and sound. You balance your mother. She’s much better when you’re in the house.”
“You want me as a buffer against her.”
“But only in everyone’s best interest. I want her to have the benefit of you, and you to have the benefit of us. We do lead a fairly interesting life, you know, Fiona.”
“But I don’t want an interesting life!” I was almost in tears now. “I only want my own!”
He was obviously disappointed. “Well, then, I guess that’s that.”
I have been in a dither ever since, all day. Could it really be my duty to go back and live with them? Is it simply selfishness that makes me want to be on my own? Do I owe it to the world to make life pleasanter for a great man like Felix so that he may be more at ease to write his books and columns?
He reminds me of Thoreau. He pretends to need so little in in life: his brain and the world to observe. But just as Thoreau claimed that he was living off the land in his humble cabin by Walden Pond, whereas he was actually going home whenever he wanted a good meal or a comfortable bed, so Felix claims to live a life of austerity while he has servants and luxuries and people at his beck and call. And now he needs a poor stepdaughter to keep his wife out of his hair. No, it’s too much. Really and truly, it’s too much!
April 10. What a day! I called on Mother in her Ritz suite and found her “in all her states,” as she literally translates the French phrase. She had just discovered, she told me, that Felix had not, as she had supposed, spent the day before yesterday at the American embassy.
“He must have been seeing somebody! Who do you suppose he can have been seeing? There’s that French girl he had an affair with twenty-five years ago, but he told me she was dead. Who could it be?”
The unbelievable thing was that at least twenty minutes must have gone by before I realized that Felix had been with me! And then I was so paralyzed with astonishment that I could not tell her.
Good God, what can this mean?
The look of hate in Mother’s eyes, directed not at me but at some imaginary woman, is still vivid to me tonight. I had never imagined that she could feel so strongly about anything. She is a dangerous woman, a terrible woman. She could kill me! What can I do about this ludicrous, hideous situation?
April 11. I have stayed home all day. Neither Mother nor Felix has telephoned. Perhaps if I do nothing, this whole madness will go away. What, after all, has really happened? I’ve been to a couple of museums with my stepfather! But why didn’t he tell her that he had been out with me? Because, I suppose, she didn’t ask him. She’s watching him, spying on him, and he doesn’t know, perhaps doesn’t care. Why should I, then? Oh, Good Lord, I must be a poor thing. I am scared of literally everything.
April 12. Felix arrived at my door this morning to announce cheerfully that he was taking me to lunch. When I protested a bit hysterically that I couldn’t possibly go, he explained that he had cleared up the misunderstanding with Mother, so the next thing I knew we were seated at a banquette at the Tour d’Argent, eating oysters and sipping a heavenly dry white wine. The relief was as stunning as the anxiety!
“What neither your mother nor I can understand is why you didn’t tell her you were with me. Did you perhaps take a certain malicious glee in her discomfiture? I wouldn’t blame you in the least. It was outrageous, her suspecting me like that!”
“Oh, Felix, I’m so ashamed! I don’t know what I was thinking. It suddenly seemed as if life was just too much for me. I suppose I was scared.” Was there ever such a ninny as I? “Because Paris was suddenly hard and wicked. A place where my own mother would scratch out my eyes for her mate! Was that the world of grownups, of the able-bodied, that I had wanted? I guess I’d better get back to my childhood.” Here I think I laughed bitterly at the pathetic collapse of my whole little European adventure. “I’d better go home with you and Mother, after all. And jump back into the old bed of my past and pull the covers over my head.”
Felix was wonderful! He took my hand in his. “No, Fiona. You’re going to stay in Paris. You’re going to find out what it is to be Fiona Satterlee. And you’re going to discover that Fiona Satterlee can be a most interesting person.”
“Don’t be so nice to me! You’ll make me cry. What about you and Mother? Won’t you need me?”
“Never mind about your mother. She’s taken up quite enough of your life as it is. It’s high time we concentrated on you. I want you to promise me that you will stay here and be you.”
“I’ll try.”
“No, that’
s not enough. I want you to promise that you will.”
“Very well, then, I promise.” Here he raised his glass to touch it to mine, and we both drank. “But, Felix, will you be all right? Will your writing be enough?”
“You mean to make up for your mother?” Yes, he said it, he said it! Just that way. So matter-of-fact. There is nothing he can’t face. “I have always been happy, Fiona. It takes very little, really, to be happy. When Henry Adams defined his ambition in the Education, he might have been speaking for me. It was about his history of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison.” I looked up the quote in my copy tonight. Adams wanted “to satisfy himself as to whether, by stating, with the least possible comment, such facts as seemed sure, in such order as seemed rigorously consequent, he could fix, for a familiar moment, a necessary sequence of human events.” Felix says that if a man can do that, what more does he need?
Then he went on: “You hear a great deal of talk as to what is wrong and what is right in this world, but I think the only thing that rational men everywhere would agree upon is that it must be wrong to waste one’s life. There are basically only two types of people: those who waste it and those who don’t. The latter are all more or less the same sort. It doesn’t really matter how much of life they don’t waste, so long as it’s a recognizable chunk. Join me in the good category, Fiona!”
Then we had more wine, and I looked out the windows at the Seine, at the spring, at April in Paris, and I was happy, very happy. Yes, Felix can give a person happiness. Oh, of course, he can take you over, smother you, but if you once let him see that you want to be free, want to live, like him, not just exist—if you let his extraordinary intellect encompass your problem—then he can bathe you in the sparkling stream of an understanding that is greater than any kindness.
I keep thinking tonight of what he said about our being equal: the non-wasters. It is very generous of him, but it is also true. It makes me determined to live up to my promise. Tonight I bless God for both of us!
Roger Cutter (6)
GEORGETOWN, in the District of Columbia, has always represented to me the outpost, perhaps the last bastion, of aristocracy in a capital dedicated to the popular, the democratic. It has been in this northwestern district of Washington that the rich, the diplomatic, the appointed (as opposed to the elected) members of our government have congregated, finding not only congeniality in taste and good manners, but also a certain sympathy with high ideals of government not always to be found in those favored by the popular vote. The houses of Georgetown, sometimes very small, sometimes, indeed, former negro shanties, have been rebuilt and repolished and redecorated until this portion of our national capital, multicolored, neat, vivid, sparkling, has come to suggest a brightly lit town square in a Restoration comedy.
Only the cognoscenti, in 1950, would have known how much wealth was represented by a simple, three-story, oblong brick house presenting only two windows to the street. Only they would have known that the tan cottage with Doric columns surrounded by half an acre of gardens represented one of the country’s great fortunes. In dwellings such as these resided the richer cabinet officers, retired ambassadors, members of the big Washington law firms, and sometimes mere millionaires attracted by the glamor of the capital. There were also a few elected representatives of the people, but these were apt to be of famous political dynasties, such as the Tafts. Georgetown, with its intense, highly articulate and well ordered social life, might have been a patrician Roman suburb in the late empire under the shadow of Visigoth generals, or a legitimist Parisian faubourg in the reign of one of the Napoleons. It had brains and charm and even importance—but it was still not what it believed it was entitled to be.
As the second trial of Alger Hiss approached its verdict in New York, Georgetown cast nervous glances to the north. There was a tendency, even on the part of those who were by no means convinced of the defendant’s innocence, to identify his cause with their own. After all, he was a Harvard man, a secretary of Justice Holmes, a high State Department official who had been with FDR at Yalta and, by all accounts, a gentleman and a charming one. Innocent or guilty, would his conviction not give the demagogues of Congress, growling at their gates, the chance to shriek that such conclaves as Georgetown were mere gilded cesspools of treason? Joseph McCarthy would not for another few months make his speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, denouncing the whole State Department as red, but smart observers were already aware of him. Did it not behoove the civilized to close ranks regardless of the truth or falsity of the Hiss charges?
Felix and Gladys Leitner had established in a yellow Georgian house on a prominent corner, and Gladys had filled it with gold-framed mirrors surmounted by eagles’ heads, spindly-legged extra tables, marble-topped consoles and American eighteenth-century primitives. As usual, she had been recklessly extravagant; she was determined to be the first hostess of Georgetown, and by the time I arrived in Washington she had virtually succeeded. Felix’s semiweekly column was syndicated in hundreds of newspapers; he was one of the most quoted journalists of the nation. President Truman had invited him on several occasions to the White House, and he was consulted by the secretaries of state and defense. At sixty he seemed to have achieved the summit of his ambition.
My own career had been less illustrious. I had published a volume of poetry and had had a one-act play produced by a university theater. I had worked for three different publishing houses, two magazines and a book club. I had resigned from the latter after a bitter argument over its selections policy, and at thirty-five I was out of a job, with a more or less deserved reputation of being a “floater,” with a tendency to quit over what I termed compromises. I decided that it would be as well to disappear from the New York literary scene for a while, and where did I ever go, at loose ends, but to Felix? He gave me a part-time job as his research assistant, and I found a room only a few blocks away from his house. The job was all that I wanted, but Felix had limited it to a year. He always insisted that I had to lead “my own fife.” As if I had any!
It did not take me long to perceive that all was not well between him and Gladys. It might have seemed to some observers that the latter had all a woman could want: a famous, faithful, still handsome husband; a beautiful house; an unchallenged social position. But Gladys’s temper was even shorter than when I had first known her, and she had developed the unlovable trait of habitual complaint, which contrasted unfavorably with Felix’s continued air of benign equilibrium. Their relationship put me in mind of one of those inlets on the rocky Maine coast where the surf is sucked into a cavernous recess and makes a booming sound before being disgorged. Felix was the cavern; Gladys the ineffectual boom.
Her daughter, Fiona, was with them that winter. Her health had taken a turn for the worse, and she had been urged to give up her apartment in New York and move in with the Leitners, where there were two maids to help her. The arrangement was only temporary. Fiona was planning to settle in Arizona. In the meantime she was a quiet, tactful but always observant guest. She and I had some revealing chats about her mother and Felix.
“Why can’t your mother be happy?” I put it bluntly to her once. “Maybe she paid a high price for Felix, but now it’s been paid, and her life is full of blessings. Why doesn’t she try to enjoy them?”
“She may not have quite as many blessings as you think, Roger. Take yesterday’s column about cronies in the White House.”
“It was a masterpiece. The way Felix ran the gamut of favorites from Queen Victoria’s Scotch gillie to her granddaughter’s Rasputin! It was devastating.”
“Its devastation is just what I mean. Can you imagine its effect on the president? Truman, you know, is not only sensitive, he can be extremely vindictive. I should be very much surprised if Mother got another glimpse of the White House interior while he’s in office. Unless she goes on the public tour.”
“Oh, well.” I shrugged. “You know about omelets and eggs.”
“Of course I know. But the point is
that Felix subjects Mother to a pretty steady diet of omelets. And she finds her life distressingly spattered with egg shells.”
“She knew she was marrying a columnist. She took that risk.”
“It’s not just the columns. How do you think Washington’s would-be number one hostess feels when she has put together the perfect dinner party to introduce, say, the chief justice to the secretary of defense, and finds her husband telling one that he’s playing politics and the other that he’s violated a treaty? Suddenly, she sees her dream evening a shambles, and red-faced, angry guests getting into their coats at nine o’clock!”
“Oh, come now, Fiona. That never happened!”
“That never happened, but plenty of other things have. Mother’s like Katharina in The Taming of the Shrew. Succulent meals are spread before her only to be snatched away when she tries to take a bite.”
“But how often? That’s the point. Of course, Felix occasionally angers people. But usually things go off smoothly enough. Too smoothly, I sometimes think.”
“But Mother never knows when it’s going to blow! She has no security. That’s the irony of her life. She could always count on Daddy, but he never attracted the lions. Now she has Felix, and he twists their tails. What she really wants, I suppose, is Daddy in Felix’s shoes.”
“But that’s outrageous!” I exploded. “To want to turn a great man into a social puppet for her parties! And when I think how she used to criticize Frances for not letting Felix be what he was! Poor Frances. At least she had a noble goal.”
“You’ve always been hard on women, Roger. You expect them to submerge themselves in their mates. But they have to do their own thing. Frances Leitner wanted to live for the poor and benighted. Mother wants to live for parties. You will say it’s superficial of her. But Felix knew that when he took her away from Daddy.”
The House of the Prophet Page 22
