Other Men's Daughters

by Richard Stern

  Mademoiselle Seville is their landlady. With her dogs, Julot and Zephyre, she lives below the little villa in a wooden storage cellar. The fires terrify her. Coming back from her shopping trips to Nice, she closes her eyes when the bus rounds the turn at Boule-sur-Mer. “If there is no excitement, I open them. But every night, I dream the bus will turn, I will hear ‘Mon dieu.’ I will open, and see my propriété in smoke.”

  Mademoiselle is tiny, dark, always scurrying, her skin is the color of the dry ground, brown inlaid with olive and yellow. “She’s like an exhausted gold mine,” says Cynthia.

  Twice a day, Mademoiselle drags a hose over to the stone cistern and waters the acre she gardens. “Though what can a single woman do?” Headshake, gloom, a crooked little arm sweeping overgrown fields. “La terre reste inculte.”

  Two weeks before, they drove up the stony path the first time. She’d stood on the terrace, grinning, holding a welcoming bowl of fresh raspberries, the seedballs glistening with sugar crystals. “What huge teeth you have,” muttered Cynthia. The dogs jumped on the little quatre chevaux Peugeot they’d baptized “Screed.” (After the Apostle’s Creed: The first article of Screed’s Credo was “I believe in regular gas.”)

  “Oh God,” said Cynthia. She’d gotten out of Screed and looked around. Fruit trees, a grape arbor, the white villa gripped by red vines, roofed with blue clay tiles, and below, slope lapping green slope with shivery slices of the Mediterranean poked between. And in the air, country noises. In the school cahier he bought the next day in Nice, Dr. Merriwether wrote the first of his summer observations: The air is one great motor: flies, midges, frogs, crickets, bees, humming birds. Plus scooters with musical horns (“Never on Sunday”).

  Every morning, he sits on a beach lounger under the shredding timbers of the grape arbor, picking from a bowl of plums and writing away at sights, sounds, thoughts. He wears nothing but shorts Cynthia scissored from a pair of blue jeans.

  Four days a week, he works in the laboratory of the Faculté des Sciences at the University of Nice; Tuesdays he takes part in the Conference on Motivation which the University and the Fondation Rothschild sponsor at the Rothschild villa in St. Jean. Early mornings, he writes in the notebook. Poor Robert. Not enough flies in his joy ointment. (The early entries were often self-indictments.) I practice the golden mean: gold for me, meanness for others. Why do I suck the grape meat and complain about the bitterness of the skin?

  Every morning their eyes open on a bough of yellow plums. Says Cynthia, “It’s as if they’ve been eating moonbeams all night.” Cynthia lies on the other side of the great bed. Small jaw and coppery little nose peer out of the gold hair. Dr. Merriwether wakes up, puts on his blue shorts, a sport shirt, moccasins, washes up, and walks two hundred yards downhill to the épicerie for the morning loaf, butter, jam and cheese, then back up past church and post office (shut for July) for a pre-breakfast breakfast with his cahier in the grape arbor. The dogs nuzzle him; Zephyre, a police bitch shaved in ribs and belly, and Julot, a cataract-blinded terrier. Dr. Merriwether dislikes the two nuzzlers. They do everything in slow motion, even humping each other or hoisting legs to urinate on Screed’s tires.

  Merriwether watches a bee dive from flower to flower, nerve-rich threads sinking toward the sepal, body somersaulting in the ruby stamen. The bee scrapes, emerges, gold-dusted with pollen, dives next door, scrapes, returns to the ruby. Only men lead double lives. The bee’s decisions were made a million years ago. (Imagine a bee who didn’t want to dance out the location of his honey. Impossible.) Lucky single-mindedness of animals. The bee scrambles by a gold pistil, ascends it, then—an oddity—holds up. For rest? For goodby? Sunning itself? More likely getting a reading. Their internal clocks synchronize with polarized light. Dr. Merriwether dissolves in the joy of observation, speculating, remembering, lets himself become what he hears: gnats, ticks, blowflies, dragonflies, swoopsail butterflies, a trillion flying parts, marauding, raging, courting, laboring in flower mines; antenna, wings, tymbals, mandibles, whirring, crkkking, chrrrping, humming, buzzing. Insect mind is insect action.

  A flash of yellow: Cynthia, with an armful of shirts and shorts. “Hot lavender,” she calls, hoisting a pair of his undershorts. “Mint, savory, marjoram, posies of mid-summer; that’s for my sweetie.” Merriwether did the wash last time, agreeing, at times in theory, always in practice, that house chores be shared. The new age. “My shorts ‘stand in the level of your dreams.’” They have read Winter’s Tale out loud. “It’s too crazy,” says Cynthia; he found it magical. But no more servile Hermiones. No more Mademoiselles.

  Every day they get more of her melancholy history, along with petits cadeaux: baskets of tilleul leaves for infusions, lavender stalks heavy with sachet, bowls of blue plums, raspberries, medlars. Tiny, toothy, lordotic, she peers into the kitchen through the plastic strips. “Tomatoes?” Hour after hour, comma turned caret, she picks the golden bloodballs hung from the propped plants.

  “She looks like a mourner in an Indian village,” says Merriwether. The plants are propped like wigwams.

  “Like hell. That back comes from bending over Julot.”

  Cynthia and Merriwether have waked up to moaning. “Love calls.” “Elle fait le soixante-neuf avec le chien. How do they say ‘make the beast with two backs?’”

  “You mean the table with five legs.” Cynthia sketches that in his cahier. “I was going to leave my papers to Widener.”

  “This’ll show you have heart.”

  For the most part, Merriwether is content. Now and then Cynthia suffered one of the depressions he’d first encountered in the spring after her move to Cambridge. He’d found what he thought was a safe apartment for her in the Commonwealth Apartments on Mellen Street, an apartment-hotel for old ladies run by old ladies. “Why didn’t you stick me in a nursing home? Or a cemetery?”

  It was his idea to get her out of the Harvard mainstream, though not too far from her classes. The place was clean, safe, hermetically proper. There was a maid to clean up and change sheets daily. “Are the old ladies so dirty?” It was—in its way—furnished: huge lamps squatted on flimsy end-tables by a coarse-grained, cigar-colored sofa and cigar-colored chairs. Part of a cigar-colored family whose cousins were in the lobby. Dr. Merriwether bought a used television set from the offerings on the Holyoke Bulletin Board, Cynthia put up her pictures, her jewelry tree, her books, laid shawls and Indian rugs over the chairs, stuck her bottles and statuettes on the tables. In a day she made it her own. But the circle of old ladies who sat day-in-and-out in the lobby rotted her patience. She passed under their eyes with trepidation and then hatred. “I thought suttee only came after death. Or is this some Merriwether rite of living burial we simple folk don’t know about?” Dr. Merriwether had thought she’d feel more secure here. “You could have put me in your deposit vault,” she said. “That’s probably the heart of the matter.” She sank from anger to silent misery.

  In St. Vetry, it went better. Merriwether did not feel like Judas, nor Cynthia a pariah. They became easier and easier with each other. Her intelligence and wit delighted him. So many years he had been uncomfortable, sometimes miserable at Sarah’s incomprehension. Partly, it was that Sarah played the fool. “You wanted it that way,” she told him later. He hadn’t. Yet he preferred the Old to the New Sarah who corrected everybody. The Universal Expert. “I have a right to an opinion.”

  “It’s not a question of opinion.”

  “That’s your opinion.”

  “You know the function of the liver or you don’t.”

  “Everybody has common medical knowledge.”

  “But the liver does not filter waste products. Maybe you were thinking of the kidney.”

  “I said the kidney.”

  “Ah. I thought you’d said the liver. That’s what I was talking about with Esmé.”

  “If you’d listen to me once in a while, you’d know I said the kidney.”

  “Mommy,” said Esmé, “I think you said the liver.�
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  “I meant the kidney. It’s not worth this barrage. There is no point in acting smug about what one’s been trained for.” Exit in fury. His corrective calm infuriated her.

  Cynthia too resented his calm in the face of her anger. “You’re so cold.” But somehow they were equals. They argued as equals. And they could argue about anything. Driving up from Nice, they debated Hilbert’s postulates. “Connection, congruence, continuity and,” she came up with “parallelism,” he, “symmetry.”

  “Stoopid. You’re sooo stoopid.”

  Nuggets of shore light below them in the mild air; at Boule-sur-Mer, perfume from a wall of jasmine.

  “I may be stoopid, but you’re wrong.”

  “You’re stoopid and wrong. In you, they’re congruent, connected, continuous and parallel.”

  “They can’t be parallel and connected. But,” as if remembering, “as a matter of fact, I am wrong.”

  “All right,” she said. “You’re just stoopid. Sometimes you remember a fact or two. I mean if you’ve just read it in the noospaper or something. Not something you read too long ago, of course. Twenty-four hours is a long time for my sweetie.”

  She was so tan now, any twist of her face made flash points in her teeth and eyeballs. Within the bleaching hair, the small, flashing face was exceptionally lovely. Lots of ruffled feeling could be smoothed by that.

  Their French day began at breakfast with the night’s dreams. She was a beautiful dreamer. An electron was trying to get through the dusty layers of the moon, the moon was a proton, the proton a plane. The electron flew it.

  “That’s you flying me.”

  “Creep.”

  “You’re one of those people who live to dream.”

  “At least I’m on my own there. Awake, I have to depend on you.”

  Sunday was a day to fill. Swimming was out. Cynthia was used to empty shore beaches. The Riviera beaches stank and were full of stones. (On every stone reposed a huge hunk of adipose tissue. The biggest deposits were American. In cafés, she and Merriwether guessed the nationalities of rear-ends. She was right. American girls, from fifteen on, had fat rear-ends. Her own, much worried about, was almost French in firmness.) They drove to Renoir’s house in Cagnes, to a perfume factory in Grasse, to Vence to see Matisse’s chapel. Mostly they walked in the hills, but of late Cynthia tired easily. For a girl who’d been a dancer, acrobat, tennis player, a rider of horses and motorcycles, it was unsettling. Her breath got choppy, her system sluggish; it was not just low blood pressure. He worried about her. Is it a kind of imitative senility, he asked his cahier. To equalize us?

  He also worried about his children. Letters weren’t enough. He wanted to kiss them, talk with them. When he missed them like this, he grew numb with anxiety, the sun gave black light. He could be finishing up some terrific fishstew in the old market of Nice, listening to one of the wandering musicians playing some heartbreaking Fritz Kreisler song, when the thought of George and Esmé, and then Priscilla and Albie would fix him where he sat. Cynthia would pick up the bad vibes, and within ten minutes there’d be an argument which was not playful. They would drive home in silence, his heart a rock, feelings anesthetized.

  “You’re an ice-man. You’re inhuman.”

  “It’s the way I am.”

  He’d sleep alone in the small bedroom. Or wouldn’t sleep. One look, one word activated an arc of misery in her. “The way I am,” the way she was. Which put them in separate beds. Knowing her state was rockier, deeper, more miserable than his, he forced himself over his coldness to kiss her, to say he loved her, to make funny noises. Five minutes, and she melted. The waters ran back, and he felt the love he had pretended.

  The first day he drove down to the Zoological Laboratory, the Rector, Dieudonnet, showed him around.

  “I wish we had more space for you,” said Dieudonnet. He was stiff, dark-eyed, ironic. Square-feet-of-laboratory-space was a professional caste mark. “We do offer you an assistant who knows your work. And knows English as well. Though I see that is superfluous.”

  The ironic play in the Rector’s face prevented Merriwether from knowing whether or not his French came up to snuff.

  “You’re extraordinarily generous,” he said.

  Merriwether’s assistant was Georges Pecile, a solid, handsome, in-drawn man of twenty-three. Merriwether sat on a table and told him what his project was, what he needed, what he hoped to do. Pecile understood perfectly, even seemed interested in the work. They got along. Not perfectly, for there was the tension of two intelligent researchers, twenty years apart, one enjoying privileges, the other serving what he regarded as unnecessary apprenticeship.

  Pecile was from Nice. He said he’d show Merriwether the city.

  “That would be fine. I’m here with a friend.” The “e” of amie is silent, but the look and tone were clear. “We would like to see what’s going on.” Though even saying it, he felt a constriction. Cynthia was Pecile’s age, Pecile was attractive and intelligent. Merriwether wanted no strain. They drove down to a café near the old market, and sat talking for two hours over coffee. They talked in both languages, often in the same sentence. Shop talk. Very pleasant. “You claim maturation is there for the asking?” said Pecile.

  “The baby girl has her 200,000 ova in her, the enzymes are all there. Who is to say that the physical theater of the chemical play isn’t significant? If the theater’s too small, the temperature, the actual velocity of command-response must differ.”

  Pecile is surprised by this American with the mild face. An alert type, yet filled with Anglo-Saxon wind. Hands expressed French disgust with metaphysics; Pecile knew the proper boundaries of discussion.

  Merriwether did have a recent passion for the metaphysical. (And wondered if this meant his scientific menopause.) “It’s my dessert,” he said.

  He drove up the hill.

  The sun is boiling color out of the flowers. Cynthia was in the garden in her yellow bikini, reading Fort Comme la Mort. They kiss, he tells her about Pecile, she tells him that the painter has just fallen in love with his mistress’s daughter. “Disgusting,” says Dr. Merriwether.

  He changes into his shorts, pours two glasses of white wine and reads Nice-Matin: Eddy Merckx is humiliating his Tour de France competitors; a firebug is arrested in Villefranche; there is trouble in Nigeria; new films. He goes for his cahier and sketches the villa, the flowers trained over the eaves, the bird-cage lamps, the wood strips glued on the stucco, the scalloped roof, the porcelain urns, Cynthia reading near the medlar tree, feet, ankles, knees, thighs, the strip of yellow cloth. He crosses out the sketch, takes up a Que sais-je book, Sacred Scriptures of the East (Cynthia’s choice), and returns to a passage he thought of using as epigraph for his Conference paper. A Genesis story: The Primeval Being, Aditi, Thirst, which moved over No-thing until it created ar-ka, Sanskrit cousin of aqua. “What was neither existent nor inexistent, out of darkness concealed in darkness, born from the force of contemplation, out of which rose Kama (Desire), the Germ of Mind.”

  Amidst the tiger-colored bees, the humming birds, the blazing flowers, five yards from his beautiful companion, Merriwether melts with this antiquity. These beautiful texts survive by miracle. The Genesis story had been carved on a grindstone. Grains of millet were found in the cuneiform grooves. The fragility of what’s precious, “Cynthia.”

  She looks up, sees him looking at her, smiles, stretches her legs, sticks out her tongue.

  The other American at the Conference was John Brightsman of the University of North Dakota. A student of mosaic and regulatory propagation in molluscs, Brightsman did pioneer work that had been disregarded for many years. Soured to the point of mania, he showed up at conferences, but his papers were badly phrased and organized. Very few understood what he was getting at. He, in turn, sneered at men who went on doing work his own made redundant. He became more and more of a troublemaker, burst out during the presentation of papers, corralled authors in the lobbies and told them they o
ught to take up plumbing. On the other hand, he was generous about work which pleased him. Merriwether had once received a wonderful note from him, full of praise and useful suggestions.

  After the first session of the Conference, he came up to Merriwether. “Remember me? Met you in Detroit.” He wore a Palm Beach suit, rope-soled sandals, no socks.

  “Glad to see you.”

  Brightsman suggested they have supper together.

  Merriwether said he’d like to, but he was staying way back in the hills with a friend who expected him.

  Brightsman’s diction and syntax were irregular, even shattered, as if he were gathering thought bits in broken containers. “I get you,” he said. “I guess I get you. Or maybe I got you.”

  One evening, eating with Cynthia at an Alsatian restaurant on the Rue de Suisse, Merriwether spotted him looking at them through the window. Caught, he smiled and waved. Brightsman came in. He was wearing a dark tweed suit, the only one in sight not in summer clothes. It was like a coffin coming through a circus. “You been hiding this,” he said. “Where did you keep it?” The eyes, mottled and glittering, rolled back as if summoning Cynthia into his cranial cave. “Such a sly boats. Well, we gottcha.”

  “Have you eaten, John?”

  “More more than less.”

  “We’re finishing.” There was coffee, cheese and fruit to come.

  “I’ve got nothing better in the chute.”

  “Will you take a little of this?” Merriwether held up a bottle of Anjou rosé.