by Mary Gordon
When their mother died, everyone—the aunts and uncles, her mother’s colleagues, Laurent’s friends—was so worried about Laurent that there was no worry left for her. The concern that trickled in her direction was just runoff from the mighty river whose source and mouth, whose whole course, was Laurent. If some concern splashed onto her—well, that was incidental. So Laurent’s professor had arranged for her to have a job as a secretary in the Department of Psychology, so she could be near to Laurent. In case anything happened. By which they meant: in case they could not cope.
Those years were difficult, although there were not many of them: only two between her mother’s death and her marriage to Howard. They had seemed much longer. When her mother was alive, the care of Laurent had seemed quite possible. Sacrifices were required, thought had to be put into things, but it had not been crushing. She and her mother were a team. Perhaps, she thought, a couple. She was, in a way, her mother’s wife, her mother, the breadwinner, the forceful one in the outside world, Genevieve not taking the lead, but following, proud of her quick ability at picking up her cues. Had she ever really been a daughter? Ever really been the child of the house? It didn’t matter; she had felt safe, they had been happy. She heard from her friends stories of quarrelsome families: brothers and sisters squabbling or involved in terrible exhausting disputes with no beginning and no end. She and Laurent never quarreled. His nature was, above all, patient. Patient but with outbreaks of acerbity. Great patience was required for him to get on with his life, to not be overwhelmed by his affliction. Patience and bravery, which, in their turn, nurtured in Genevieve and her mother, patience and admiration. Love.
They had been, as a family, afflicted. But none more so than Laurent, unable to control his hands, the muscles of his face, the thrashing of his limbs. But his words are luminous, a tongue of silver in a broken mouth. When Mlle Weil first arrived to tutor him, she had seemed not to notice his flailing arms and legs, the drinks spilled, the objects broken. She seemed not to take it in. Simply, she enjoyed him. She found him interesting, a gifted pupil whom she tutored in the Greek language, which they both loved.
Mlle Weil was only twenty-three that year, Genevieve thinks. Eight years older than I. Could I have been just fifteen then? I saw us as inhabitants not only of different countries but of different planets, different universes even, separated by a distance traversable, sometimes, in the imagination, but only with the understanding that the distance was real and not in any way insignificant. A distance made up of knowledge, wisdom, moral greatness. The heroic, radically separated from the ordinary.
Nine years later, thousands of miles away. Mlle Weil cannot control her blinking. She cannot control her garments. Her cape, the loose legs of her trousers, her beret, which she must hold against her head with one hand.
“My brother is well. He would be glad to see you. He is working at the university. Columbia. The Department of Psychology.”
She explains the outlines of Laurent’s work, which calls forth a smile. Pure. Radiant.
“When can I see him?”
“Could you come to tea tomorrow?”
“Yes, I would like that.” It had not occurred to Mlle Weil to thank Genevieve for the invitation. Well, Genevieve thinks, perhaps no thanks are required. Perhaps it is no more than her due. And perhaps it is I who should be grateful.
She wonders what Laurent will think of the prospect of having Mlle Weil to tea.
Entering the dim apartment from the blazing autumn day, she has put the baby down for a nap and, having a little time, looks in the trunk that stores what she has brought from France that is of no immediate use. She knows that among things she has brought with her are notes she took in Mlle Weil’s class. Her essay topics. And the extraordinary letter. She recalls the process of selection, what would be brought forward to the new life, what left behind. What would be brought forward included a connection to Mlle Weil, a connection she had thought she no longer believed in.
She opens the large envelope with a mixed sensation of curiosity and resentment. What is in these papers that she had saved, transported? She resents having to remember the girl she was: serious, scholarly even, with an appetite for abstract philosophy. A Platonist, she had thought of herself then. How ridiculous to apply that term to herself now. Having seen what she has seen, lived through what she has lived through, horrors she could not have imagined when she was Mlle Weil’s pupil. And now: a life composed of caring for an afflicted brother, and a baby whose very life depends on her attention to his physical needs—all this makes discussions of the beautiful, the view outside the cave seem infuriatingly beside the point. She is a cave dweller. She cannot now imagine a time when she will not be.
She opens the envelope. The heading on the first sheet she comes to: “ESSAY TOPICS.”
What are the main forms courage takes? Do they have anything in common?
How does Plato define justice in the Republic?
Attention is what above all distinguishes man from animals. Is it something which belongs to the mind or the body?
Is it possible to know oneself and how?
What is there in common between the self of a year, a month, a day, an hour ago? Is there a fragment of the self which continues to exist from one moment to the next? What is lost in doing away with the self?
She wonders: Were these questions that any teenager should be expected to answer? Were they too far above us, way over our heads? Was Mlle Weil mad to demand a response to these kinds of questions from young girls? And yet, she thinks, I believe we rose to the occasion.
She had not saved any of her own essays, but she remembers getting them back from Mlle Weil, covered with her small handwriting, the corrections clearly an immense labor of attention. She had been honored by the attention: it inspired her to give her utmost.
She sees, on another page, some notes she took from Mlle Weil’s lectures.
All belittling of oneself is bad. Sacrifice is related to suicide. It is always something bad to injure one’s power of thought, since thought is the condition of all that is good. Any ability which is not directed towards conscious thought (even philanthropy) must be condemned.
The general character of human misery and greatness. One has the impression of being sometimes at the center of the world, and sometimes of being nothing in contrast with it.
An artist creates a state of silence for himself and so the soul’s forces are marshaled together, but he is not responsible for the inspiration itself: it is this instance of suspense that it creates.
Genevieve experiences the sensation of seeing someone from a great distance, through a thick fog; she knows that this is her handwriting, that she, Genevieve, wrote these words, or rather took them down. But just as her handwriting has changed (it is smaller now, there are fewer loops and curlicues), she has changed fundamentally. She is no longer the person whose mind would seriously engage with these kinds of ideas. And yet, the question: what is there in common between the self of the present moment and the self of a year, a month, a day, an hour ago—this question seizes her as she sits in the soft chair beside her bed. What she has lost: the faith that such a question is answerable. Or perhaps, more accurately, answerable by her.
Inside there is another envelope, a smaller envelope, with her name and address written in Mlle Weil’s tiny handwriting. It is the letter. The extraordinary letter.
My dear Genevieve:
As regards love, I have no advice to give you but at least I have some warnings. Love is a serious thing and it often means pledging one’s life and also that of another human being forever. Indeed it always means that, unless one of the two treats the other as a plaything, and, in that case, which is a very common one, love is something odious. I can tell you that when at your age, and later on, too, I was tempted to try to get to know love, I decided not to, deciding myself that it was better not to commit my life in a direction impossible to foresee until I was sufficiently mature to know what, in a general way, I wishe
d from life, and what I expected from it. I would add that love seems to me to involve an even more terrifying risk than that of blindly pledging one’s own existence. I mean the risk, if one is the object of a profound love, of becoming the arbiter of another’s human existence. My conclusion (which I offer to you solely for information) is not that one should avoid love, but that one should not seek it, and above all when one is very young. At that age it is so much better not to meet it, I believe. What matters is not to bungle one’s life.
To bungle one’s life.
Has she bungled her life? She, Genevieve, who had been given a life. To do … what … with?
“Bungle,” a luxury word. A peacetime word. Useless now in a time of war, a time of horror. Although she remembers Laurent and Howard laughing at a word newly invented by soldiers, snafu. An acronym: Situation Normal All Fucked Up. It was Laurent who said aloud the word “fucked.” Howard is too embarrassed to use that word in front of her. But “snafu” suggests a jokey situation, a shared understanding of an almost comically omnipresent chaos. To bungle, however: that is a solitary act. Bungle, as if, at the mouth of hell you worried if your hat and gloves were quite appropriate. Bungle. It suggested a faux pas, a minor error, a clumsiness, a malfeasance. As opposed to a devastation. Her world had been devastated. By history. By the forces of evil. Her life had been overturned, uprooted. By history. By the accidents of disease. It had not been her doing.
Or was it better, perhaps, to say: to have survived means you had not bungled.
But there was more, much more to her life than to say she had not bungled.
She had loved greatly and been greatly loved.
She had her child.
Ashamed that Aaron has been so long out of her thoughts, she goes to him, straightens his blankets, risks waking him. By doing this she has traveled very far from the place she was when she was reading Mlle Weil’s letter. Aaron’s mother is no longer simply Genevieve. She is Aaron’s mother.
And Howard’s wife.
Mrs. Howard Levy.
Not Mlle anybody anymore.
It was an extraordinary letter to write to a sixteen-year-old girl.
She can no longer remember who it was that she wrote Mlle Weil about.
Why had she asked Mlle Weil’s advice about love?
Because she had adored her. Because she had believed her the font of all wisdom, the source of all true knowledge, knowledge that could be trusted to be absolutely true.
Whom had she been in love with then?
She can no longer remember even a single feature, to say nothing of a complete face. Or a name. And yet at that time it must have seemed of the utmost importance. Or she would not have written to Mlle Weil.
Genevieve knows this of herself. From her first awareness that she was no longer a child, she had been in love with someone or other.
Someone or other. As appropriate to call them someone or other as to give them proper names, individual names. Because the truth is, they were interchangeable. They must have been, or she would be able to remember at least one face.
It must have been love she loved.
The idea of love.
I HAVE LOVED GREATLY AND BEEN GREATLY LOVED.
Had she, defying Mademoiselle’s advice, sought love?
Or had it sought her?
Had she met love?
Or had it met her?
And if, as Mademoiselle said, it would have been better not to have met love, had she done wrong in meeting it, in allowing it to be met?
Love sought me.
Love met me.
She smiles to herself, at her use of the words of a cheap song. The words are cheap. Mlle Weil’s questions are absurd.
I HAVE LOVED GREATLY AND BEEN GREATLY LOVED.
These words are not cheap. Nothing about them is absurd.
She thinks of Howard’s body. Possibly in terrible danger. Possibly shattered. Possibly not even in this world.
Sitting in her bedroom, beside their bed, in the middle of New York, in the safety of America, she thinks of her husband’s body, which is not safe. Of his body, beside her in the bed.
I HAVE LOVED GREATLY AND BEEN GREATLY LOVED.
She hears Laurent’s key in the door. He is fumbling it. It is taking him a good deal of time to get the door open. This means it is one of his bad days. But she knows better than to try to help him. An important part of her life is pretending she is not seeing what she sees. Pretending that Laurent’s hands and limbs aren’t being taken over by tremors, pretending that he isn’t failing at a simple task. Because tomorrow he might not fail, tomorrow it might be different, and they can only have the kind of life they want if they live this way. She wonders what Mlle Weil would think of this, she who is so devoted to the truth. This willed blindness. This evasion of the real.
And what would Mlle Weil think of the love she has for her son, that she would strike to the death anyone who raised a hand against him? She would do so without even a thought. Without a single thought.
Maternal love, she wants to tell Mlle Weil, makes a mockery of the idea of universal love. Of the idea of impersonal love. She would like to ask Mlle Weil if she thinks that maternity disqualifies a mother from participating in what might be called the moral life.
Or does the category of the moral life need to be expanded to include maternity?
These are things she will never ask Mlle Weil. Among other reasons: the echo of the conventional, the official woman. The proper woman. The kind who Mlle Weil imagined would tell ardent girls, tell all of us: Don’t read, don’t study. You were born for only one thing: mother love.
And so she will not speak of it. Perhaps she will whisper it into Aaron’s ear. Perhaps in the form of a song. But that will only be possible until he understands. After he understands, she will go silent.
She stays in the bedroom until she hears that Laurent has settled himself in his chair, until she hears the rustle of the newspaper. And then she cannot wait. She is impatient as a girl to tell him. “I have seen her, right here on Riverside Drive. I have seen her. I have seen Mlle Weil.”
“Here? On Riverside Drive?”
“She’s coming to tea tomorrow.”
“It must be as if you’d just run into Marlene Dietrich. Or Mrs. Roosevelt. At one point she was the center of your life. You loved her very much.”
“No, Laurent, it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t like that at all. I wanted to run away from her. I was hoping she didn’t see me. I dread having to spend time with her. It brings back too much. Too much I’m not strong enough to think about. A person I no longer recognize whom I have, somehow, to understand is still myself. I think I will be a very great disappointment to her when she learns about my life. I didn’t pursue my studies. I can hardly remember a word of philosophy, to say nothing of mathematics. My days are spent trying to make sense of my ration books, studying various ways of curing colic.”
“Caring for your brother, a helpless cripple.”
“Laurent, I hate it when you talk like that.”
“My bitterness, Mama called it. She would say, ‘Bitterness curdles the digestion, Laurent.’ ”
“You aren’t often bitter. You are very good.”
“I am not very good. I am, however, often a good actor. Unlike you, I have no mixed feelings about seeing her. She was an extraordinary teacher. When she was with you, you felt you had the attention, the complete attention of an incandescent mind. She was tremendously patient. And when she would quote the Iliad, her face—which I never, I must confess, thought beautiful—was also incandescent. I knew what it meant when people said a person was lit up. But you, my God, GeGe, you worshipped her.”
“It was very long ago.”
“It was a different world.”
“She’ll be very interested in your work. She has no small talk, and I don’t think she’ll care to hold the baby. So I will make tea, try to find something for her to eat—although as I recall she almost never ate—and I can disappear an
d leave her to you. Bring the board home tomorrow. It will give you something to talk to Mlle Weil about. So I won’t have to think about it.”
OCTOBER 8, 1942
Genevieve knows she is spending more time than it is worth considering what to serve Mlle Weil. It will be tea rather than coffee; coffee is severely rationed, and Laurent absolutely needs his morning coffee. She decides that she will serve peanut butter on crackers; this will be an entirely new food for Mlle Weil, and, when she is told they are eating peanut butter as part of the war effort, she will be enthusiastic. Genevieve will take special care making the tea, in the way that an English friend once taught her. She will use her best china. She is very aware that it is likely Mlle Weil will notice none of this.
Laurent has arranged for one of his students to help him home, to carry “the board.” The young man sets up the easel on which the board rests; he places it in the direct center of the room. Like a god to be knelt to, worshipped.
The student, whose name Genevieve doesn’t know, goes out to the hall and brings in a wooden box of wooden blocks. She’s met him before and, knowing that she should know his name, can’t ask it again, and so she doesn’t address him, just nods and smiles like a simpleton. Perhaps he thinks her English is very bad. Well, let him think that; that would be better than his believing she is rude, or knowing that she has forgotten his name. He has not taken off his hat, and he tips it to Genevieve and then backs out of the room, uneasily, as if he were ashamed to have entered the private quarters of the Master. The student has been gone less than five minutes when the bell rings.
“Mlle Weil at the gates. En garde,” says Laurent.
She is wearing exactly what she wore the day before. Her clothing gives off an unfresh smell. She takes off her beret and cape and hands them to Genevieve without a word, without even a greeting. She heads directly for Laurent, her hand outstretched. Genevieve wonders if she notices the spasms that are racking his body, whether she will acknowledge it in shaking his hand, or in withdrawing her extended hand because of it. But no, she seems to be unaware of the tremors. Or she is a very great actress indeed. But Genevieve knows that is impossible; dissembling, dissimulation are simply not things that would occur to Mlle Weil. It must be that she is unaware. Unaware of her unawareness. Always. Yes.
