The Liar's Wife

by Mary Gordon

  She begins humming to cover her unease. Il était une bergère, et ron, ron, ron, petit patapon.

  To her astonishment, Mlle Weil joins in. Il était une bergère, qui gardait ses moutons.

  And Genevieve thinks: As long as we are singing, it will be all right. It will be possible. Her hair is a disaster of tangles. Panic. Breathe in, breathe out. She thinks of the difficult things people are doing at home in France, the difficult things Howard might be doing. Soldiers facing horrifying explosions, corpses, bloodied in ditches. Surely she can untangle Mlle Weil’s hair.

  “My hair drives my mother wild. I am very grateful to you.”

  Genevieve pretends she’s Joe and snips the tangled hair: if she cuts through the tangles, the process might be easier.

  “It is my pleasure.” Another lie, a kind of lie Mlle Weil would never think to tell.

  Genevieve offers her a mirror. She barely looks at herself. “It’s fine,” she says and covers her still wet hair with her black beret. “But now I have another favor to ask you. I don’t own a lipstick. May I borrow yours for just a day, just the day I must go to the consulate?”

  What Genevieve wants to say is no, no, no, you may not have my lipstick. I haven’t much left and when it’s gone it may be difficult to get more. It is never predictable, in wartime, what will be difficult to get. You’ll probably lose it or use it in some way so that it will have lost its goodness. No, you may not have my lipstick.

  But how can she say that to someone who is on her way to make plans for the formation of a group of nurses, parachuting into battlefields, most likely to death? Including her own.

  “Of course.”

  “Genevieve, you are a very good friend.”

  She wants to say, No I am not. I am good not out of friendship but because I fear your disapproval as I did when I was just a girl. Now I am a wife and mother. But you bring me back to being the girl I was. She thinks that Mlle Weil was never a girl. Or never girlish. A daughter, yes. But a girl? Never, perhaps.

  She goes into the bedroom to get the lipstick. She uncaps it, screws up the fingertip of solid red; Cherries in the Snow, the lipstick is called. She puts some on her own lips, then twists it down, carefully, recaps it, feels the cool gold in her palm, then caresses it, as if she were petting a beloved animal she was consigning to extermination. A lamb to the slaughter.

  She hears Laurent’s key in the door and hears from his greeting, “GeGe, lock up your jewels, it’s a dangerous burglar.” He is in a good mood. He greets Mlle Weil enthusiastically, and asks her if she’d like to test out a new set of blocks he’s experimenting with.

  “Only if you’ll let me smoke,” she says.

  “Ah,” he says, “we have come to the limits of your asceticism.”

  “Laurent, do not be cruel to me,” Mlle Weil says. Her tone is almost playful. “Come on, then, let’s get started.”

  And Genevieve thinks: Perhaps she does not always want to die.

  OCTOBER 25, 1942

  It’s the first time she’s left the baby with anyone else, and she’s doing it for what she knows may be a frivolous reason: she’s going to the movies. Joe had planned everything. He has a friend, a piano player, who told him about something he calls a gig. Tonight, he is doing the piano accompaniment for a showing of Chaplin’s Modern Times that a church in the Bronx is putting on as a fund-raiser to get money for Christmas packages to send to their relatives overseas.

  Lily will babysit (she doesn’t want to go to the Bronx, she hates being anywhere near it, he says, and of course Genevieve knows why: the Bronx is where Joe lives with his wife), and he’s brought rye bread and salami, which he knows Laurent loves. And besides, Joe says, Laurent (he pronounces it “Lorront”) isn’t the kind of guy who cares that much about what he eats.

  How wrong you are, Joe, she wants to say, but of course does not, because she will not betray her brother. And because she knows he will like the bread and the salami, and he likes Lily, and, although she feels a bit guilty, she will be happy to have an evening out.

  The doorbell rings. It can only be something to interfere with her pleasure; she doesn’t know who or what, but the doorbell can only indicate an obstacle. The university. The War. She will have to stay home.

  She is only half relieved to see that it is Mlle Weil.

  “I don’t want supper,” she says. “I was just passing your door and I thought I would say a quick hello.”

  “Simone,” Joe says, and Genevieve stands between them so he won’t be able to clap her on the back or embrace her. “We’re on our way to the movies. All the way up to the Bronx. Your friend here is having her first night out. We’re going to see Chaplin. Modern Times.”

  “But that is my favorite film in all the world. I will phone my mother.”

  Mlle Weil automatically assumes that she is included in the invitation. Which, of course, she is, but Genevieve doesn’t understand that in the light of what she said about believing that no one wants to be her friend.

  She argues with her mother but only for a moment.

  She pushes her beret down firmly onto her head; she’s ready to leave. “I believe that Chaplin is the only really great Jew since Spinoza.”

  “Jeez, I didn’t know Chaplin was Jewish. But I’m not surprised. Ninety percent of the really smart people I’ve ever known are Jewish. Which is why Hitler is scared to death of them. He knows they could run rings around those dumb Krauts.”

  “We must remember,” says Mlle Weil, “that Germany has made enormous contributions in literature, in philosophy, most particularly in music.”

  Joe replies in song. “Grab your coat and get your hat.”

  Genevieve allows herself to wear her mother’s pearl earrings, and to use some powder. Mlle Weil never returned the lipstick, and she misses it. She’s sure if she told Joe he’d provide some, but she doesn’t know how and from where, so she doesn’t ask. It pleases her when Joe calls her pretty. But she knows she will never again be as pretty as Lily, whom she does not envy. A difficult life.

  She shows Lily how to prepare Aaron’s bottle, which she hopes he won’t need. She will wean him soon. Perhaps in the spring, when it is warmer.

  Mlle Weil is very talkative on the subway, and she is talking much too loud.

  “I love the subway, all the different faces, particularly the black ones.”

  Genevieve is embarrassed for the Negroes in the car; she hopes that Mlle Weil’s accent is so strong that they can’t understand. She goes on and on about her parachute scheme, and doesn’t notice that Joe’s eyes have closed; he has fallen asleep, for which Genevieve envies him.

  The trip takes more than an hour, and the streets are, of course, dark. Blacked out. Joe has a flashlight. He says this is his home territory and he is like an Indian in the forest, which encourages Mlle Weil to talk about some Indian myths. Something about a corn god.

  They stop in front of a large church, meant to be in the style of the Baroque. These failed imitations always sadden Genevieve. She wishes Americans would do what they do best. The Empire State Building lifts her heart.

  Sitting at a table in the church vestibule is a woman collecting “donations.” Genevieve is hypnotized by her hat: a wearable shrine to the basic food groups. Fruits are represented by a cluster of blood red woolen grapes; there is a dark purple bonbon, perhaps a petit four—can it be crocheted?—and then the meat group, solid chestnut coils. Are they wooden? Whalebone? She can only imagine they are representing sausages.

  Joe grabs her hand, and they run down the stairs to safety. They are desperate to laugh. But it isn’t really laughing, it’s giggling. And she’s back to being a girl again, but not the girl she was when she was Mlle Weil’s student, the girl giggling with her friends, that wonderful drunkenness that can be induced by almost anything in young girls: a single shoe on the side of the road, a dog that looks like its master.

  Mlle Weil has been left behind, as she was left behind when her students giggled. But no, Genevie
ve remembers, she wasn’t left behind; we were suddenly silenced when she approached. We couldn’t giggle in front of Mlle Weil. But she tells herself that Mlle Weil is no longer her teacher, and she can go on giggling with Joe if she likes.

  Except that she can’t. She finds Mlle Weil at the top of the stairs, standing at the table of the woman with the amazing hat. Like a child who has just found his mother, having lost her in a crowded store, Mlle Weil smiles an expression of pure relief, pure gratitude. Is it that she is always ready to find herself abandoned?

  Joe greets his friend the pianist and finds seats in the middle of the room. The room is overheated, smoky; the smell of fried dinners clings to people’s clothes, mixing with the smell of mothballs and some woman’s scent—lily of the valley, muguet, a scent she’d worn as a young girl but had grown tired of.

  When the lights go down, the beam from the projector traps smoke; it hangs like a heavy cloud, and then disperses, climbing to the high ceilings. This room is also a gymnasium; the smoke makes its way through the orange rims, the grayish netting of the baskets through which boys (Aaron one day?) throw those big ugly brown balls.

  Mlle Weil lights a cigarette. Joe’s friend begins playing the piano. “Smile though your heart is aching. Smile even though it’s breaking.”

  She has lost her father, her mother, her country, but her heart has not been broken. If she loses Howard, it will break. And Laurent. And Aaron … she will not even think of it. But so many have had their hearts broken in this war.

  The images appear on the screen. First sheep, being blindly herded. Then workers getting out of the subway. Then they are in a factory. She finds the equipment is rather lovely, in the way that the Empire State Building is lovely: modern, clean, free from the irregularities of natural life. But there he is, the tramp, and soon everyone can see that it is all too much for him, much too much, the boss, who can see everywhere (the eye of God?), keeps insisting that the assembly line go faster and faster. Who can keep up? Now he is in the mechanism of the gears. Now they have the machine that will make lunchtime unnecessary. The machine shoves food in his mouth, spills soup on him, covers his face with whipped cream. There is one mechanism that is meant to serve as a napkin. Every few seconds it wipes his mouth, and every time that happens, she laughs, thinking no, it won’t happen again, but it does, again and again, and Genevieve covers her mouth with her hand, afraid that her laugh is too loud and someone (her dead mother?) will be embarrassed. But Mlle Weil is not laughing. She is smoking; she is eating up the screen with her weak eyes.

  Mlle Weil’s presence is distracting. Genevieve doesn’t want to be thinking about her; she just wants to watch the movie. She just wants to enjoy it, to enjoy herself. She wants to be happy for the tramp and the lovely young girl, with whom, she wants to believe, he can be happy. Why is she always barefoot, this beautiful young girl? Perhaps Paulette Goddard has very beautiful feet. When he falls, Genevieve wants to believe he won’t be hurt. When he’s in jail, she wants to believe that his cell is comfortable. When he sings in his made-up language, she wants to believe she understands him. For a little while, she doesn’t want to be thinking about the War, and the lives of everyone in France, she doesn’t want to be wondering what has become of her friends who may have been taken God knows where. Does God know? Just for a little while, she wants to laugh with these other people who are laughing, in the dark; she wants to be taken up in this cloud of cigarette smoke and the heat of the machine, a cloud which allows her to leave her worries on the doorstep as Joe’s song suggested. She doesn’t want the lights to go on, because then Mlle Weil will begin talking. She hasn’t laughed once.

  She feels a tightness in her breasts and a spurting, and she worries: Will I leak through my clothes, will I become an embarrassment? She touches the front of her blouse. Dry. Thank God she put two handkerchiefs into each cup of her bra. Does this mean Aaron is crying for her, crying for his mother, who is sitting in the dark, laughing? Now she can’t wait for the movie to be over so she can rush home. And she is distracted worrying what she can serve everyone when they get home. Crackers and some pickles. Better than nothing.

  Mlle Weil of course does not take a cracker or a pickle. She starts talking as soon as she has sat down.

  “You know that I have worked in several factories,” she says, refusing, for the second time, the plate that Lily is passing. “I felt I had no business speaking about the rights of workers if I hadn’t worked as they had worked.”

  “What did you do?” Lily asks, and Genevieve is surprised because Lily rarely enters conversations.

  “You must help me translate,” she says to Genevieve and Laurent. “I don’t know the words for ‘metal press’ and ‘bobbins.’ ”

  “Bobbins,” Genevieve says, and Lily says, “What kind of bobbins? Like for sewing?” Genevieve doesn’t know what Mlle Weil means by “bobbins” but she probably wouldn’t have asked.

  “When I was working on the bobbins there was a time I didn’t know how to avoid the flames, and for several months, I was marked by burn scars. I often exasperated the people I worked with because I made many mistakes, partly because I am not well coordinated, and then my hands, I’ve been told, are unusually small.”

  “I noticed that,” Lily says. “It’s the kind of thing I notice, the number of manicures I’ve done.” She takes Mlle Weil’s hand and Mlle Weil recoils, pulling her hand back as if Lily were the furnace whose flames had scarred her. Genevieve sees tears coming to Lily’s eyes.

  “The curse of the modern factory is that the worker has no idea what the end result of his task might be. He doesn’t know what he produces, so he has the sense not of having produced but of being drained dry. Everything is simply a following of orders. From the moment you’re clocked in to the moment you clock out, you have to be ready at any instant to take an order. Like an inert object that anyone may move about at will. And all these orders come from the mouth of a creature called the Boss; they are a product of his unpredictable will, a combination of caprice and brutality.”

  Caprice and brutality caprice and brutality caprice and brutality. The words drum themselves into Genevieve’s brain, more terrible for being yoked than they would be if they were separate. And only Mlle Weil would yoke them. Only Mlle Weil speaks the unbearable truth, the glimpse of which no one else even knows to look for. But Genevieve wishes she would stop. Now she will have to wonder with every object she takes into her hand: How much brutality and caprice have gone into the making of this?

  “When you are a worker you become reliant on orders; you even long for them because to eliminate them is to imagine an unbroken succession of identical moments. It is like visualizing a monotonous desert. A desert peopled with a thousand petty incidents is, to the mind, preferable to the prospect of an unalleviated present of monotony. What is most terrible about factory work is the combination of boredom and anxiety, because you could hurt yourself, or you could damage the machine. And this is killing.

  “This is why I love Chaplin, like a brother, because only he has communicated the full reality of the factory’s oppression with speed. Not only excessive speed, but speed without any human rhythm. Any beautiful movement implies moments of pause, that it gives the impression of leisureliness, even when very rapid. Consider the runner, who seems to glide home slowly while his rivals, lagging behind him, seem to move faster. Think of the peasant, swinging his scythe while the onlookers have the impression that he is ‘taking his time.’ Compare that,” she says, “to the wretched spectacle of a man with a machine.”

  “Consider the runner …” “Think of the peasant …” Is she speaking to friends, in an ordinary room, or is she lecturing? Genevieve begins to resent being lectured at. And yet she knows she is in the presence of great thought.

  Mlle Weil takes her glasses off, and wipes them on the hem of her shirt.

  “When you are a worker you know that you are both an object and a slave. It takes everything that you think of as yourself, all you
r bases for personal dignity, and shatters them. Everything upon which I based myself, respect was radically destroyed within two or three weeks. And after a year in the factory I was in pieces, body and soul. It killed my youth. I knew quite well that there was a great deal of affliction in the world. I was obsessed with the idea, but I hadn’t had prolonged and firsthand experience of it. As I worked in the factory, the affliction of others entered into my flesh and my soul. I had really forgotten my past, and I looked forward to no future. I found it difficult to even imagine the possibility of surviving the fatigue. What I went through there marked me so that still today, whenever anyone, whoever is in it and in whatever circumstances, speaks to me without brutality, I can’t help having the impression that there must be a mistake.

  “I woke each morning with anguish; I went to the factory with dread. I worked like a slave; the noonday interruption was like a laceration, then went home at quarter to six, worried about getting enough sleep, which I never did, and getting up early enough. The fear, the dread of what was to come pressed down on me constantly … until Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. But Sunday evenings! Sunday evenings were the worst. When the prospect that presented itself was not one day but a whole week of such days. I had to try to make myself refuse to think. Because futurity itself became something so terribly bleak, so tremendously overwhelming that thought could only sink back trembling in its lair.”

  “Sunday evenings were the worst.” Genevieve hears these words and, to her shame, recollects her childhood dread of Sunday nights: the prospect of a new week of school. But what was the source of her dread? She was not a slave, she was not brutalized, she was a privileged recipient of the learning of, on the whole, well-disposed teachers, who, however harsh, could not be called brutal and, however capricious, did not make demands that killed her soul. But Mlle Weil has invoked it—Sunday-night dread—and Genevieve is a child again, on those Sunday nights when the sun sets too early, a doom sentence, and although she is embarrassed to link herself to Mlle Weil and the brutalized workers, she has become them, both Mlle Weil and the workers, because Sunday night is Sunday night and dread is dread. She knows that Mlle Weil would not agree with her, and she would, no doubt, be right.