Herma

by MacDonald Harris

  “What would that be?”

  “Perhaps I want to discuss the shape of Blanchot’s ears, or tell you something personal,” said Herma rather impatiently. Men! Oh, but they were dense.

  “Well, I suppose,” he said in a voice that sounded rather dubious. “I’ll explain it to him.”

  “What is there to explain? I’ll come by for you at six. We’ll go to the Café de la Paix for an aperitif first.”

  “Alors. Bien,” he said finally. Herma hung up and started deciding what she would wear.

  She took him to a small Hungarian restaurant, where they dined by candlelight while a violinist played gypsy melodies. It was the same one, she recognized, who had played czardas at the benefit at the Val-de-Grace; he caught her eye and smiled.

  Tancrède had never seen her in anything but the tailored khaki suit. Now she had changed it for a simple white gown with a red ribbon in the hem, and a matching ribbon in her hair. But he seemed not to notice, or at least gave no sign. In spite of her best efforts, the conversation fell onto Blanchot. There was some discussion as to whether they shouldn’t find a girl for him, so they could go out together as a foursome. (A quadrille, as it was called in French.) Herma knew lots of girls at the Opéra, and they were all pretty.

  Tancrède said, “He is a virgin. He’s saving himself for his wife.”

  “Is he engaged then?”

  “No, he has not found anyone worthy of him. Or as he puts it, he has not found anyone he is worthy of.”

  Herma said, “When he marries, do you think he will be fierce to his wife?”

  “Oh no. He may look fierce to her, but he will behave tenderly.”

  “That would be interesting to see.”

  “Blanchot is very complex. We are all very complex. He once found a rabbit with a broken leg in the trenches, and fixed it with a splint he made from a tongue depressor he got from the medical orderly. He took care of it until it got well. Frowning all the while, of course. I don’t know how the rabbit got into the trenches.”

  “With soldiers like Blanchot, I’m sure France will win the war.”

  “Of course it will. Who else would win?” said Tancrède with mild surprise, as though the idea had never occurred to him. Perhaps he couldn’t remember the names of the various countries France was fighting at the moment, or thought they were of no importance. They were just the enemy.

  “Perhaps Hungary will. This is a Hungarian restaurant. Look how strong the waiters are.”

  “Gypsies,” said Tancrède contemptuously.

  When she led him out of the lift and through the door he looked around without curiosity at the apartment. He seemed perfectly content to be here or someplace else; it didn’t matter to him. The curtains were open in the large window facing to the north. Only a small lamp with a rose-colored shade glowed on the table. Paris, darkened for the war, sprawled out before them in a semicircle, from the hills of St.-Cloud on the right to the Panthéon on the left, with the Eiffel Tower etched against the gray sky in the middle distance. Tancrède’s eye passed over the art-nouveau furniture, the Beardsley print, the fashionable baby grand piano, but he had nothing to say. If he’s a count, she thought, perhaps he doesn’t like all these modern things.

  “Would you like something to drink?”

  “All right.”

  “A cognac?”

  “Very good.”

  She gave him a splash of Courvoisier in a balloon glass, and took a little Grand Marnier herself. She liked it because the faint flavor of oranges reminded her of California. She sipped it, regarding him gravely over the rim of the glass. He walked around the room with his cognac, looked at everything, and then stood in a soldierly way with his feet apart, staring out the window at the panorama of Paris.

  He was a stoic creature. Probably he would have preferred to be on the battlefield, but he was too polite to say so. But, after the exasperating task of separating him from Blanchot, it was no trick at all to get him from the salon into the bedroom.

  “If you don’t like Beardsley,” she said, “perhaps you’d prefer Fernand Khnopff.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It’s in the bedroom.”

  “All right.”

  After that it was easier. He hardly glanced at the Khnopff. Of course he had no way of knowing that he was the first man other than the decorator (and Fred if you counted him) ever to behold this work of art. As he turned from the painting she heard him murmur something like “A pair of sissies.” Then, bumping up against her, he embraced her and took her face in his hands. He was not an idiot after all and he had perfectly normal desires. It was just his military dignity.

  Once the uniform was off he seemed to change into another person. He wore only a light bandage around his chest now to protect the wound from the friction of his clothing. He removed this and Herma caught a glimpse of a small scar, exactly where a medal would have been if he had been wearing his uniform. When he took off his shoes there were tiny tufts of hair growing on the top of each foot, giving him a quite innocent and yet goatlike quality, as though this small trace of the Dionysian sprang out of him in spite of his best efforts to repress it. The sherry-colored body gave off a faint sheen, almost silvery. Even though he was stocky and powerfully built there was not an ounce of fat on him. His abdomen was concave and the bones of his pelvis showed clearly through the skin. The small tuft of hair at the bottom of his stomach was as neat as his mustache. Perhaps he trimmed it too with the same scissors. Herma had spread the bedclothes back in advance, before she went out to meet him for dinner, but if he noticed this he gave no sign.

  In the throes of love, Tancrède managed to retain to the end his two incompatible qualities, his slight amusement and his embarrassment at anything personal. Perhaps he really is a god, thought Herma, and he is afraid we mortals will discover his secret. Then she didn’t think anything at all for a while, because he was not only passionate and considerate but very skillful—he was one of those gentle and taciturn men who knew how to do things—the sort of man that Herma had been drawn to and desired ever since she was a child. Their keen and sweet common desire mounted gradually in steps like an aria, fell back and mounted again, and finally swept them both away in a high tremolo, so to speak, with crashing chords from the orchestra. Then Tancrède, drawing away from her and looking at her with his little smile, as though taking a curtain call, was persuaded to do an encore, repeating the same aria with equal warmth and no perceptible diminution of vigor in the finale.

  Separating herself at last from him, content and exhausted, Herma turned over and pressed her face into the pillow. After a moment she said, “Wow.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That’s American for ‘C’est formidable.”’

  She got up. They sat cross-legged on the bed then, he at one end and she at the other, and looked at each other. It was only at such times that you really noticed the other person; before the thing happened your vision was blurred by desire. With his usual air of grave amusement he examined her boyish young American body, apricot over lemon. Her attention centered mainly on his scar. In the center was a red rosette, the size of a pencil eraser, and radiating from it were the four arms of a cross, thin red lines as though traced with a fine pen.

  “They had to go looking for the bullet with a knife. That’s when they made the star.”

  “It isn’t a star, it’s a cross.”

  “Well, please don’t attribute stigmata to me. It was an accident. If you get in the way of a bullet that’s a misfortune, not an honor.”

  “May I touch it?”

  He had no objection. She set her fingers lightly on the place. There was only a small depression, as though something had made a dent in the skin. Nothing at all could be felt along the crossed red lines. The surgeon was very skillful.

  “But your heart is all right?”

  “Yes. You may be misinformed as to where the heart is. It’s not where you lay your hand when you’re declaring somethi
ng. It’s closer to the center.”

  “Let me listen.”

  “What a curious creature you are.”

  But she laid her head against his chest—at the place indicated, not far from the center of his body—and listened. She heard a steady muffled bump, like a regimental drummer playing through a sheet of felt.

  “It’s very slow.”

  “To have a slow pulse, you must be in good physical condition. You know, if you go on brushing my chest with your hair that way, the whole thing is going to start over again.”

  She drew away and went back to her cross-legged position on the bed.

  He asked her, “How is it that you know so much?”

  “I know so much?”

  “You seem to know—what a man wants.”

  “Don’t all women?”

  “I haven’t met all women,” he said, coloring a little, but still smiling. He was silent for a moment, and then after a thought he asked, “Are all American girls like this?”

  “No,” said Herma a little crossly, “and I’m not like this either except with you.”

  “I have the impression that—you chose me.”

  “How impressionable you are.”

  He thought for a moment. “According to old-fashioned morality, that’s not quite correct. However, it’s quite pleasant.”

  “It’s the way of the future. Wait until you see how your grandchildren behave.”

  “Ah, I don’t expect to have any grandchildren.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  But he wouldn’t say anything more about it. He changed the subject. “Do you remember that conversation we had with Blanchot?”

  “About what?”

  “About America, and the war. You’ve paid us back yourself for General Lafayette.”

  “That’s probably not necessary. I imagine the American girls paid off General Lafayette on the spot.”

  “Ah, mon dieu. What a creature. You’re very nice. It’s too bad. We’re leaving tomorrow. We’re going to rejoin our regiment on the Somme.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why … didn’t you tell me?”

  “Oh, that sort of thing always involves a lot of sentiment.”

  “Then I won’t see you anymore.”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “Then perhaps we’d better get back in bed one last time,” said Herma.

  12.

  The rest of that winter Herma was very busy. In December she went on a tour of the provinces, singing at benefits in Toulouse, Bordeaux, and Pau. At Christmas she was back in Paris again—she and Lloiseaux celebrated at LaRue’s with an austere wartime dinner, a simple filet of sole with haricots, and a bottle of 1913 Moët et Chandon from LaRue’s last case—there wasn’t anymore champagne after that because the country it came from was now a battleground and Reims was in ruins. Then she went away again, to entertain the troops in the training barracks at Orléans, and came back to prepare for a concert performance at the Salle Pleyel of La Forza del Destino—the same opera that had been scheduled for the autumn when the war began, but now without costumes and sets. The government evidently believed now that it was better to keep people entertained and pretend that everything was normal. Tancrède wrote once or twice. Once he sent a photograph showing the two of them—himself laughing, Blanchot frowning—in front of a house that had been blasted flat by shells and consisted only of a window held up by a few stones. She stuck this into the edge of the mirror in the bathroom. Then, for some reason, she took it down and hid it away in the top drawer of her bureau, under the underclothing. It was stupid. It was that—she didn’t want Fred to see it.

  It was evident now that the war was not going to be a short one. “Out of the trenches by Christmas”—nobody thought about that now. The newspapers were not very pleasant reading, even though they tried to gloss over the facts and you had to read them twice and then study the maps to see what was happening. The Central Powers and the Allies were locked in a death grip on the Western Front, from the Swiss border to the Pas de Calais. The British were deployed on the left, along the Channel coast, and the French on the center and right, from Gambrai to the Swiss border near Basel. The Germans were well dug in and well supplied. Neither side could gain the initiative. Sometimes a thousand lives were paid for a scrap of land the size of a cemetery, and the next day the territory would be lost again. The fighting was particularly savage in the Somme sector and on the Meuse, around Verdun. It was a bitterly cold winter. Rains filled the trenches with water and vehicles bogged down in the mud. The poilus, living in a mixture of mud, excrement, and corpses, caught typhoid and died. There were rumors of gas, used only by the Boches of course.

  In Paris there were real shortages now. When Herma went out she saw long lines in front of the butcher shops, and stray cats began to disappear from the streets. Almost every night the electricity was cut off for an hour to two, trapping people underground in the Métro and causing a new shortage, that of candles. Coal was in short supply too and houses and apartments were cold; people wore their overcoats indoors. The music halls in Montmartre were still full, and the cafés around the Opéra and on the Champs-Elysées were crowded, mostly because cafés were warmer than apartments. In St.-Denis a pervert murdered a little girl and cut her body into pieces. People were horrified by this and discussed it for days, in order not to talk about the greater horrors that were taking place on the Western Front.

  It was early February. Herma came home from her rehearsal at the Salle Pleyel about four o’clock and was crossing the entryway toward the lift when the concièrge came after her and gave her a telegram. She got a lot of telegrams, offering her engagements or discussing arrangements for tours, and usually she left them for Fred to take care of. She went up to the apartment, took off her fur cap and cloak and threw them onto a chair, and lifted her hair with her hands. Then she slit open the blue envelope with her fingernail.

  “OUR FRIEND DIED GLORIOUSLY FOR THE FATHERLAND LEADING ATTACK ON BOCHE MACHINE GUN NEST FONTAINE-LES-CROISELLES SOMME SECTOR 0600 HOURS TUESDAY X COMMANDING GENERAL HAS RECOMMENDED CROIX DE GUERRE X VIVE LA FRANCE X BLANCHOT.”

  She had not expected it. He was so full of vitality and so cheerful, he seemed life itself. But he had known. “I don’t expect to have any grandchildren.” She went into the bedroom and lay down fully clothed on the bed, her face in the pillow. A kind of spasm formed inside her and wanted to break loose, but she held it back. I will not cry, she told herself. A man would not cry and so I will not. And she didn’t; she only felt dry and broken. Instead she lay there for a long time, until the gray light of afternoon turned to twilight and, on the hill on the other side of Paris, the lights came on one by one against the dark sky.

  Then she got up and went into the salon to look out the large window, her eyes blurry and her lower lip held tightly in her teeth. The lights on the hill above St.-Cloud might have been stars. The city was deserted, its inhabitants invisible. There was no one she could call on or go to. Lloiseaux, Bella, Marcel, a few friends at the Opéra—no, there was nobody. She felt all at once surrounded by infinite space, infinite darkness. Surely everyone is not so alone, she thought. Surely there was someone. And then it came to her who it was that she wanted above all to be with her, to comfort her—an American like her, with his boyish enthusiasm, his brashness, his cheerfulness, his optimism—someone she could talk to like herself. They would trade insults, throw pillows at each other, and finally he would make her smile a little. But he was on the other side of the mirror. Unlike Alice in the story, she couldn’t go there. “I have the impression that you chose me,” said Tancrède. But there was one who was forbidden to her.

  13.

  It was the next fall, a year and a half after the death of Agostinelli, before she saw Marcel again or heard anything from him. Then he telephoned unexpectedly and asked her to dinner at the Ritz. “Reynaldo will be along. It’s perfectly correct,” said his reedy, slightly affecte
d voice over the wire. There would be music afterward; he didn’t specify what. “We will come by for you. It’s in avenue Wagram, isn’t it?”

  “No, 78 avenue Klebér.”

  “Ah, avenue Kléber.” He hung up.

  The taxi was an ordinary rented one; evidently he hadn’t acquired another Agostinelli. No one discussed Agostinelli or mentioned him during the entire evening. Marcel seemed emaciated; the rings around his eyes were darker, and when he laughed—which he still did now and then, unexpectedly—it came out as a harsh helpless cackle. In the taxi he imitated Clémenceau, Diaghilev, and Oscar Wilde. He was witty in a new and artificial, rather macabre way. Reynaldo was in uniform and was about to join his regiment. He seemed his usual self, although he didn’t say much. He hummed, drummed his fingers, and looked out the window, not laughing at Marcel’s imitations.

  It had rained earlier in the evening and the streets were wet. The taxi went on through the almost deserted city, its lights glittering yellowishly on the pavement. At the Ritz they were shown into the private room and Marcel sat down, a pale bearded fur-coated figure on a little gilt chair. He didn’t seem to recognize the waiters and didn’t call them by their first names anymore.

  The Ritz was exactly as always, except that they too were short of coal and the rooms were a little chilly. They still had some 1913 Moët et Chandon; evidently they had had a better stock than LaRue’s, or they had paid illegal prices for it. They dined splendidly, except for the cold room. As usual Marcel took no wine but drank endless cups of black coffee. Now and then he took out his handkerchief and coughed into it, in a rather unconvincing and theatrical way.

  Reynaldo took up the cue. “I don’t think this cold room is good for you.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  “We ought to leave.”

  It was eleven o’clock. Marcel paid for the dinner and tipped everybody with his usual carelessness. The doorman found them another taxi and they got into it. Reynaldo gave the driver an address that Herma didn’t recognize. Marcel, in the dark corner of the taxi, murmured to himself, “Ah! Quand refleuriront les roses de septembre!” He seemed to have turned into a parody, a vaudeville satire on his old self. Then he sat up, smiled at Herma, and said in a perfectly normal tone, “And now for the music.”