by Mary Gordon
“But she might have been with people who were not kind, not kind at all. How can she always be opening herself up as she does? She creates no shelters for herself. She’s as vulnerable as a newly hatched chick. It’s disgustingly easy to hurt her.”
“Another vulnerable creature it is your responsibility to protect. Like your son. Like me.”
“No, not like you. You, Laurent, I never think of as a child.”
“And yet, of course, always in need of extravagant attention. Like a child.”
The real child in the house cries out, and she is happy to go to him, knowing how easy it is to provide him with the necessary comfort.
OCTOBER 11, 1942
Genevieve is struggling with the perambulator, awkwardly carrying it down the four front steps, when her eye falls on Mlle Weil, making her way down the street towards her. She had not said she would be coming, and Genevieve is taking advantage of the last hours of light in this October, when light is increasingly precious, increasingly another commodity which seems to need rationing. She wonders what Mlle Weil would have done if she had rung the bell and found no one home. Walked away to another destination? Or planted herself on the stairs, perhaps taking a book from one of her wide, deep pockets, lighting a cigarette, just sitting, waiting, not knowing how ridiculous she looked.
Genevieve hadn’t been outside all day, so she decided to be safe, to put a sweater on the baby and a hat. She often puts sweaters and hats on him when he doesn’t really need them, because all of Howard’s female relatives seem to have worn themselves out knitting hats and sweaters. She is not ungrateful. They have taken her in. A French woman, a non Jew. Howard had told her the name for a non-Jewish woman. Shikse. An ugly word, she had thought, like spitting on the sidewalk. She had never heard any of the family use it, but she doesn’t know if they do when she’s not around. She chooses to believe that they are kind people, and do not.
Of course, Mlle Weil doesn’t help with the baby carriage. She is looking up at the sky, lighting a cigarette.
“I’m afraid Laurent won’t be home until late tonight,” she says.
“Oh, no, it’s you I wanted to see. And now we can go for a walk. Excellent.”
Not asking if Genevieve wanted her company. Genevieve is annoyed and yet secretly pleased: “It’s you I wanted to see.” The old allure still in place, still in force. Genevieve condemns herself for an immature impulse. She is a grown woman, a wife, a mother. And yet the words “It’s you I wanted to see” still make the skin on her forearms ripple like the skin of a horse in a light breeze.
The late sun sparkles on the river. She has not given up the habit of trying to find the right words for the color of the sky. Pearl grey, she thinks, and then changes from pearl to oyster, the inside of an oyster shell. And all at once, there is something like a rip in the matte greyness, and light pours through, as if someone had slit a grey cloth bag of sugar, and the sugar had spilt out. Only one tree is singled out by the light, and that one called a sugar maple. It amuses her to say to herself, “The sugar light falls on the sugar maple,” and then she wonders if she thought of sugar because of rationing. She believes that she spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about the food she can’t have. She has been told the sacrifice is honorable, and she believes it is, and is glad to do it. Only sometimes she yearns, ashamed, for the taste of sugar.
Mlle Weil says: “The tree looks like a torch thrown down by an angel.”
Once more, in relation to Mlle Weil, Genevieve finds herself abashed and feels she must accuse herself. She is thinking of angels and I of sugar.
“I very much like New York. If France’s situation didn’t obsess my memory, my stay in New York would be pleasant and interesting. The skyscrapers are like cliffs and crags; I like the chaotic quality of the beauty: it is a new way of thinking about beauty. Whether the streets are beautiful or ugly, I always find them attractive. Especially Harlem. I attend a Baptist church in Harlem.”
Genevieve cannot imagine what the Negroes in the Baptist church would make of Mlle Weil. She has almost no contact with Negroes, but some Sundays when she is walking with the baby she has seen whole families making their way to church, beautifully dressed, the women resplendent in dramatic hats. What do they think of this scarecrow of a white woman with flapping trousers and, instead of a beautiful hat, a not entirely clean beret? Or perhaps, she thinks, because their lives are difficult and they must have seen many things, they welcome her as respectable white churchgoers would not. Genevieve hopes that they do; once more, she feels she needs to worry for her.
Mlle Weil is standing now under the blazing tree. She lifts her hand, and spreads her arms out, as if she were ready to take flight. She closes, then opens her eyes. She seems almost young. The worn look, the look of tired discouragement, the bent skeleton—they’ve disappeared. And then she says, “The presence of beauty in the world is the surest sign of the presence of God.”
The words are shocking to Genevieve. When she knew Mlle Weil as her teacher, God had not seemed important to her unless it was the abstract God of Plato. When the question of God was raised in class, she refused to discuss it “on the grounds of insufficient data.”
In that world, the world of left-leaning intellectual Frenchmen, the use of the word “God” as she used it would have been rejected with derision. Genevieve wonders what Laurent would make of it, both she and her brother priding themselves on being “pagans” among the “unbaptized.”
Genevieve longs to ask her, why she had begun speaking in this way. But she feels she has no right. She can only think of Mlle Weil as her teacher.
They sit on a bench looking at the river. All Genevieve can think of is that in a few weeks, at this hour, it will be completely dark. She dreads the coming of winter, the four o’clock fall of night, a knife blade dropping straight down to the cold stone. She can’t get used to New York winters. She worries for the baby.
Mlle Weil is staring into the pewter-colored river. “The suffering of the world, particularly now in these terrible times, obsesses me and overwhelms me to the point of annihilating my faculties. I suppose you wonder why I can invoke the concept of God in this case.”
Genevieve says nothing. She isn’t sure if Mlle Weil is talking to her, or to herself, or to the air or the river.
“I believe there are two paths to God, seemingly divergent but in fact closely related. The soul is pierced equally by beauty and by affliction. Only when the soul is pierced in these ways can God enter.”
Genevieve can no longer keep silent; her curiosity is stronger than her humility.
“Do you believe in God, Mlle Weil?”
“I don’t know what it is to believe. I know only that I was pierced in my soul by the presence of God. I have felt him take possession of my body.”
Genevieve is embarrassed, as if she had been given details of an amorous encounter, details she would prefer not to know.
“That’s why I had Joe read that English poem, which is not, to me, a poem, but a prayer. I was at the abbey of Solesmes with my parents; we had traveled there to hear the Gregorian chant, for which it was famous. It was Easter. I was suffering particularly from headaches. Each note of the chant hurt me like a blow. I was able to rise above my body, to leave it to suffer by itself heaped up in a corner and to find perfect joy in the chanting. The Passion of Christ entered my being once and for all.”
How can this be happening? How can she be speaking in this way? Genevieve remembers the pictures on the wall of their maid Louise, the one time she visited her house after Louise’s funeral. High-colored prints with bleeding wounds, contorted faces, Jesus half naked, clutching a pillar, leering brutes whipping him till his flesh was shreds. And a single candle in a red glass dish in front of a tearful Jesus pointing to his red heart, the shape of a pimiento or a tongue.
“It was at that time that I met my English angel. I saw him coming back from Communion and he was truly angelic in his radiance. He gave me the poem, he wrote it
out in his own hand.”
It is getting worse and worse. Now she is using words that could come from the trashy novels Genevieve sees in the drugstore. “My English angel … in his own hand.”
Suddenly, awkwardly, Mlle Weil takes her hand, probably the first time she has ever touched Genevieve. “I don’t speak to people about these things. I’m always afraid people will misunderstand, purposely misunderstand, out of a mysterious desire I arouse in people to do me harm. But I believe you have no desire to do me harm. It’s not that I think other people wish to harm me from malice, only from the well-known phenomenon that makes hens rush upon one of their number if it is wounded, attacking and pecking it.”
Genevieve is repelled, but at the same time fascinated. She both does and doesn’t want to hear more. She sees, more vividly than she would like, the wounded hen that is Mlle Weil. She remembers going to Chinatown with Joe and Lily once and watching something called the dancing chicken. You put a quarter into the slot and the chicken danced. She found it grotesque, humiliating, beneath the dignity of any animal. And yet she could not take her eyes away. Only later she learned that the chicken wasn’t dancing but hopping to avoid electric shocks. When she thinks of it, she is ashamed that she looked for even a second, that she was complicit in a kind of torture. And for what? To look at something she should not have been looking at. She should probably tell Mlle Weil not to speak to her about these things. But she does not. There is something she feels she has to ask.
“Have you, then, become a Christian?”
“I will not be baptized, but I believe that I have always been a Christian; my conception of life has always been Christian. I have always had the Christian idea of love for neighbor, of the spirit, of poverty, the ideal of purity.”
Genevieve doesn’t say what she wants to say: But you are a Jew, as my son is, as my husband is. This is why you and your parents are here, in America, because Jews in Europe are unsafe. And she is glad she didn’t say it, because Mlle Weil says, “You have always been kind to me, Genevieve; there are very few people whom I can always rely on for kindness.”
Once again she is the schoolgirl, given high marks by her teacher. That quick rush. That delight.
“I remember the time I put my sweater on backwards. You were my protector then. It was only your kindness that kept those schoolgirls, who are well known for being cruel, from being terrible.”
“No one wanted to be cruel to you. We adored you. To the point of idolatry perhaps.”
She is no longer in New York City, at the Hudson River, a mother pushing her sleeping child in a pram; she is a girl again, in Mlle Weil’s classroom in Le Puy. Mademoiselle is speaking to her students about Plato. The Timaeus. The class is united: a single flame of desire for understanding, for wisdom, to please Mlle Weil, who is wise and full of understanding and demands more than anyone has ever thought of demanding of them, more than any of them believed, before her, they had it in them to give.
No one sleeps much that year; dark circles under the eyes are a badge of honor, prized as once long legs and round breasts had been prized. Everyone’s mother is issuing warnings: you’re wearing yourself out. But the girls know what the mothers really mean: they don’t want their daughters to turn into Mlle Weil, who is the very embodiment of the idea “unmarriageable.” They want their daughters to be pretty, to be pleasing, to walk up and down the stone streets making clicking noises with their heels, tossing their hair back and forth to capture some boy’s attention (but do not act like a flirt!), not carrying a fifty-pound sack of books to teach the workers Greek and geometry.
Genevieve recalls with pride that her mother was not like other mothers. She misses her mother, she misses her with a sharp longing. If only she had lived to see Aaron. No, she thinks, my mother did not fear that I would become Mlle Weil. Perhaps because she knew I didn’t have it in me. That giftedness. That greatness of mind. Was it a kindness to me, her insistence that because I was pretty, “jolie,” that I need not worry: men would always love me.
It had given Genevieve an almost sickening joy to know that she was Mlle Weil’s favorite, when she praised her for her attentiveness to Laurent. “Attention,” she had said again and again, “is the true end of all school study.”
But here she is, nine years later, blinking, smoking, saying that people wanted to hurt her, that she always had to be afraid.
“I am sure that you have had strong friendships.”
“I always fear that any friendship is a mistake or an act of kindness that has nothing to do with me, that has taken place in spite of me.”
Genevieve bends over to tuck the blanket around the baby because tears are forming behind her eyelids. That this great woman feels she is unworthy of love. She puts her face closer to him, doing the unthinkable, trying to wake him up. What kind of mother does that? But she needs him, she needs his help: she can’t face Mlle Weil’s eyes, the eyes of someone who feels herself unworthy of love. “I’ll make it up to you,” she whispers in his ear.
“You shouldn’t think that I haven’t been loved by my family. I love my parents dearly, they love me with all their hearts, and this is why I agreed to leave France with them, because they wouldn’t have left without me. I have a horror of causing them pain, but I know I will, it is inevitable, because I can’t stay here in safety while so many in Europe are in danger.”
She lights yet another cigarette. She is never not smoking.
“I have only this one life. If I had another, I would stay here, giving my life to my parents, but I have only this one life. The only way I can relieve myself of the obsession of the suffering of the world is by getting a large dose of suffering and hardship for myself.”
Her son does not let Genevieve down: he howls. She is freed of the responsibility. The responsibility of response. She walks up and down, trying to comfort him.
And then she sees her.
The woman whom she hates.
The woman who has taught her what it is to hate.
Genevieve sees that she is pregnant. She nods to the woman, who nods back, having, like Genevieve, no wish to speak.
She wants to turn away from Suzy, towards Mlle Weil, run the few feet towards her, tell her about Suzy, the woman she hates. But she is afraid to. What could she say? “That woman broke my brother’s heart.” Once more the cheap words from cheap novels or cheap songs. “My English angel” … “She broke my brother’s heart.” How can it be that sometimes these words seem the only ones that serve?
Suzy, the beautiful deaf girl Laurent worked with in his study of the use of language among the deaf. He takes her to dinner, to museums. He brings her home to dinner. Genevieve sees that he is in love, and that she, too, is smitten. But her parents interfere. They come to the apartment when they know Laurent will not be there, “to speak frankly,” they say.
“Surely, Mrs. Levy, you agree, you must agree,” they say. Agree that Suzy can do better than a man with a twisted, deformed body?
For a little while she is silent, taken over entirely by rage. And then she says simply, “Now you must leave my house.”
And they turn silently and simply leave.
She did that thing, she banished them from the house. That was not enough, and always afterwards she regrets her own cowardice. But, of course, she could not have done what she really wanted to do: strike them violently, beat them and beat them until they lay on the ground in their own blood, take a whip to their smug faces, to raise it high over her head and bring it down across their self-satisfied features, cutting deep into their flesh so as to leave a lasting mark. As the younger sister of a crippled brother, she has never hit another person. But at that moment she understood bloodlust. She wanted to hurt them; she wanted to see their blood. She wanted to see it on the floor of her home. It was a powerful feeling, almost sexual. A lust for violence. Her body shook. She had to sit down and grip her hands together. She was afraid to go near the baby.
She never told Laurent. Later she thought that
perhaps she should have, because he was devastated when Suzy told him they could no longer see each other. She married someone else: Genevieve did not know who. Was he afflicted in some way, or was his intact body deemed acceptable? Did he even have a mind?
Now Suzy is going to have a baby.
She hates Suzy, but she didn’t want to hurt her, as she did her parents. Because she was one of the wounded, one of the afflicted. She had been hurt; she could not be, in the way that they were, self-satisfied. She would always know herself somehow lacking. Nevertheless, Genevieve could only hate her. Perhaps for all time, perhaps for eternity.
But she will not wish her ill. She could never wish ill to someone who is carrying a baby. She wonders: Does that mean I wish her well? No, she cannot really wish her well. She broke my brother’s heart. The cheap words that somehow serve: for she could see it; something in him broke. He took to his bed, as he never did, except for a serious illness. For two days she brought him his meals in bed. And then he said: “It’s over. We will not speak of it again.”
When she thinks of telling Mlle Weil about it, she is afraid that her old teacher would say it was a good thing, that Laurent was too fine for ordinary love, that ordinary love was a compromise, a danger, and that he was a pure soul. But Genevieve is already too disturbed by what Mlle Weil had said about her body being pierced. And she could only have spoken about it if she also spoke about her hate, about her desire to shed blood, to leave a lasting mark. And she doesn’t want Mlle Weil to know about that.
Perhaps Mlle Weil senses that she no longer has Genevieve’s attention, because, without a word, she raises her hand in farewell and heads uptown.
Genevieve has no intention of saying anything to Laurent about seeing Suzy, but she is eager to tell him what Mlle Weil said in the park. She wonders if she will always feel that no experience is ever fully hers unless she shares it with Laurent. But of course, that isn’t true; she doesn’t share her life with Howard. Nevertheless, to have shared a childhood, a happy childhood, though marked with grief … this makes a connection like no other. One night, as they were having supper, he said to her, “No one but us knows what our places were at the dinner table. No one but us knows what our mother’s hands looked like when she shuffled the cards before we played a game.”
