by Mary Gordon
“Did you make any friends in the factory?” Laurent asks.
“This was a great disappointment. I had thought there would at least be moments of fraternity. But the pressure to produce more and more at greater and greater speed, that very pressure that makes the person an object, also makes it impossible that you take notice of the person next to you. I thought that after the day was over the workers would commiserate, on the way home. But they would not meet each other’s eyes, especially the women. It is their pervasive sense of shame and humiliation that makes them withdraw into themselves, far from any possibility of comradeship. I cannot explain how strong this sense of exile is. We all felt ourselves exiles, because of our hatred and loathing for the factory, the place where we were forced to spend our days.
“Once I saw some women standing in the pouring rain rather than taking shelter in the factory before the whistle blew. I’m sure that these same women would enter any home to keep out of the rain. But they felt they had no right to enter the factory before the whistle blew. Before they punched their time cards.”
She looks at her watch, and jumps up in alarm. “Speaking of time cards,” she says, “I must get home. My mother will be frantic.” She runs out the door, not even saying goodbye.
Lily begins crying.
“Lily,” Genevieve says. “Please don’t be offended by Mlle Weil’s acting as she did when you took her hand. It’s just that she doesn’t like to be touched by anyone.”
“That’s not why I’m crying. It’s that she’s so frail; when I felt the bones in her hand, even for a few seconds, I could see how frail she was. She won’t live long,” Lily says, “even without the War, she wouldn’t live long. I could see it in her hand.”
Joe is unhappy. He never wants Lily to be distressed. “So now you’re a palm reader. Okay, my little gypsy, let me take you upstairs and you can show me your golden earrings.”
Genevieve is glad to be alone with Laurent, because she needs him to help her understand what Mlle Weil has just been talking about.
“We have to understand what Mlle Weil doesn’t understand, that her experience in the factory wasn’t typical,” Laurent says. “That she was always under a kind of strain that they weren’t, the strain of having not to think. I’m sure that the men in the factory met for a drink from time to time, celebrated the birth of a child, the wedding of a sister, maybe shared cigarettes. I wonder if she thought to share her cigarettes. We have to understand that her story is not a worker’s story, but the story of an intellectual in a factory. What would the workers have thought if they knew she was applying aesthetic theories to the way they operated their machines?”
“Don’t talk like this, Laurent. She’s taken all her learning, all her philosophy, her love of poetry, and applied it to factory work. She’s taken the most abstract contemplation of time and brought it to the world of metal presses, of bobbins, of men who have never even heard of Plato, for whom the concept of metaphysics is as alien as life on the moon. She’s brought the desert to the factory, and made both real. She is the great poet of workers’ lives. I am humbled to have her in my home. Whatever else she did, she put her body on the line, as we have not.”
And Genevieve wishes she hadn’t said it, because of course it isn’t a thing he could ever have done.
NOVEMBER 4, 1942
Mlle Weil rings the bell. The weather is unpleasant. Genevieve has always disliked the month of November; she dislikes it particularly in New York. The blackout shades make everything worse; cutting out all the light, when so little light has been offered. Or more quickly snatched away. Daylight saving time—a wonderful idea, she thought—has been randomly revoked: so daylight is no longer saved but squandered. The brilliance of an American autumn is completely gone now, the angel’s torch, the spilt sugar, all long gone. The brown leaves pile up, dry, lifeless; the bare branches speak too clearly about death, which is what is always in the backs of everyone’s minds in these terrible days of war. She has begun to wake in fear now, not knowing whether she will see Howard again, imagining him coming home an invalid, imagining herself having the care of not one but two crippled men. She does not pray, but she allows herself to make bets with fate: I am willing to tend two crippled bodies, just send my husband home alive.
Laurent is home, nursing a cold: and as always, this brings an anxiety, not the new anxiety of the War but the old anxiety of his vulnerability to microbes. At night his cough worries her. And then, sometimes, wakened from sleep by it, she is annoyed and, in her annoyance, troubled, guilty, thinking in her half sleep: I am not a good person. Sometimes I wonder if I am even capable of love.
“Stay away from me, Simone. I wouldn’t want you to catch my cold.”
She jumps back, as if he’d touched her with a hot iron. She sits on the other side of the room, far from them, threatened, vigilant, as if she sat across from someone holding a loaded gun.
“And what have you been up to, Simone?” Laurent says. This is the kindly brother, Genevieve thinks, gratefully, wanting to put someone at ease.
And, distracted by the chance to report the staggering amount that she has done, Mlle Weil relaxes.
“I have been taking a course in first aid in Harlem. And of course writing endless letters, to bureaucrats and politicians, here, in England, in France. I have written two articles in English; I will leave them for you.”
Stepping gingerly, not knowing what parts of the room might be contaminated by Laurent’s cold, she drops two pamphlets on the coffee table. Genevieve picks them up and reads the titles. “The Problems of the French Empire.” “The Treatment of Negro War Prisoners in France.”
Of course she is interested. But it feels like a homework assignment, and, like a balky schoolgirl, she resents the prospect of having to read what her teacher has ordered her to read.
“If I had not been able to get to England, I would have gone to the South of the United States to work among the Negroes. I have a very great affinity for them. But at last, I will be leaving. I’ve made a connection in London through an old classmate. The Commissioner of the Interior and Labor in the National Committee of de Gaulle’s Free French movement has taken me on to work in the division of propaganda. In three days I will be gone.”
Genevieve prepares the tea, knowing it will be their last. They settle down to it, in the dim, fading light of the November afternoon. In a way, it seems so ordinary: three old friends drinking tea in the approaching darkness. They are silent, and the silence is comfortable, as if they were resting in a light hammock, being rocked by a light wind. But then the silence is broken by the baby’s cries. Genevieve brings him into the living room, and Mlle Weil reaches out to hold him.
“I have made arrangements for a very intelligent priest to come and speak to you in order to arrange for the baby’s baptism, as I know you are unconnected to a church here.”
Genevieve doesn’t even attempt to hide her shock. “We hadn’t thought of baptism.”
Mlle Weil takes on her most imperious tone; imperious, but mixed with condescension, as if she were speaking to a recalcitrant student, not one of the best, who has questioned the importance of studying Plato.
“There cannot be any possible objections. He won’t in any way regret having this done for him when he reaches manhood. It could possibly do him good, above all socially, and in any event cannot do him harm.”
With a heat whose source she can’t recognize or name, so rarely has it been hers, Genevieve says, “It could do harm to his father and his grandparents, who are Jews.”
Mlle Weil takes no notice of her tone, perhaps even what she’s said, and goes on, slowly, patiently explaining the obvious to the dull student.
“It will be no problem unless he turns in adulthood to a fanatical Judaism, which isn’t probable, but if he turns to Christianity, having been already baptized, it will be a great convenience. If he marries a Jew, his baptism won’t be an inconvenience; he won’t be responsible.”
It cannot be p
ossible that Mlle Weil is using these words, “do him good … socially,” “convenience,” “won’t be responsible.” This cannot be Mlle Weil speaking. Perhaps because she believes a different person, different from her old teacher, is saying these words, Genevieve has the courage to speak out.
“It is not a matter of inconvenience. It would be a betrayal of his father’s people, particularly now, when they are under threat of extermination.”
“Yes, exactly. With the anti-Semitic legislations that are sure to become more prevalent, it would be of great advantage to be a baptized half Jew.” And then she says, “It would be nice to take advantage of these things without his having to feel he’d done anything cowardly.”
Can she possibly be using the word “nice”? Everything that Mlle Weil is saying is so wrong that Genevieve feels emboldened to lie: given the wrongness of all her words, the wrongness of a lie seems insignificant.
“Howard and I intend that Aaron will be raised a Jew.”
In fact, she and Howard have never discussed Aaron’s religious upbringing, both of them being entirely irreligious.
“No, no, you must not do that, above all you must not. Raising Aaron as a Jew would be a very grave error. You must see,” Mlle Weil says, “that the tradition of the Hebrews has only been disastrous for the mind of Europe. It is a tradition of bloodshed and exclusion. Yahweh, like the Roman gods, is a god of punishment and force. The worship of force comes to us in the West from the Jews and the Romans. In choosing them, over the Greeks, we have defiled the best of the past. This is why I cannot define myself as a Jew; I have allowed nothing in Judaism to mark me, and so I have not been so marked.”
Genevieve is too appalled to speak, but Laurent has not been struck dumb. Quietly, he says, “But, Simone, you and your parents had to flee France because you are Jews.”
She doesn’t seem to be distressed by what could be interpreted as an accusation. She leans forward in her chair, as if she wanted to be closer to him, sitting so far from her across the room. “I do not consider myself a Jew,” she says. “I have inherited nothing from the Jewish religion. I have never even stepped in a synagogue. I learned to read from Racine, Pascal, and the writers of the seventeenth century. My spirit was formed at an age when I had never even heard talk of Jews. I am a Frenchwoman, not a Jew.”
Genevieve moves closer to Laurent, afraid of what has entered the room. A darkness greater than the dark created by the blackout shades. She holds the baby closer. She takes Laurent’s hand. He squeezes her hand three times, their old signal for “keep quiet now.”
Mlle Weil looks at her watch and says she must leave. “I only came to say goodbye,” she says.
She waves at Laurent from across the room, and as Genevieve moves to show her out she kisses her on both cheeks. Genevieve is not sure she wants this kiss. Which of us, she wonders, is Judas, and which Christ? Genevieve feels Mlle Weil’s bones, so painfully sharp through the black wool of her cape. “Frail” is the word that comes to her mind.
“I’ll be seeing you,” Laurent says, almost jauntily.
“No,” Mlle Weil says. “You will not see me again. This is goodbye.”
When she closes the door Genevieve throws herself into Laurent’s arms. What this means, really, is sitting next to him, laying her head on his chest, knowing that at any moment he might have a spasm and she’ll be thrown off her spot of comfort. Strange to feel comforted being held by a body that twitches and flails, arms that can only embrace her for seconds at a time, and then become a victim of their own uncontrolled movements. But she can only be the little sister now.
“I’m glad she’s gone. I’m glad she’s gone.”
He pats her back. “GeGe,” he says, “petit la-pin.”
“What she said was terrible, it was terrible, and I was terrible not to tell her so.”
“There is no point. She is very close to death, and in relation to the dying, some things are unnecessary.”
“I don’t know how to speak about it, how to understand it. What is the right way to describe what she said: mad or evil?”
“It would dishonor her to call her mad. And the way she lives shows she cannot be evil. No, she is a person terribly wounded, yet possessed of extraordinary gifts.”
“How is she able to say these things; how did she become the way she is? She comes of a loving family.”
“In the same way that it would dishonor her to call her mad, it dishonors her to look for causes in what we would call ordinary life. It’s as if she’s made of some excessively porous material so she absorbs more than most people. Including the greater part of French culture, including its poisons. A maimed genius. Think of a great dancer with a crippled arm. You can enjoy the breathtaking leaps as long as you don’t allow your eye to rest on the deformed arm. Then your eye follows the unlovely limb, the broken line … but that’s the only line that deformed limb can make. But then you can’t resist looking at the beautiful legs, the breathtaking leaps.”
“Deformed,” she says, separating the syllables. “De-formed. What would Plato make of that?”
“There are horrors in Plato, too.”
“I have betrayed my husband and my son.”
He kisses her forehead. “No,” he says, “you attended to the reality of the weakest person. Your son didn’t suffer from what was said about the Jews, nor did your husband or your in-laws. But to have castigated her in her present state would have been to have fallen on a wounded bird.”
“That was what she said about herself. That people hurt her from the instinct of falling on the wounded bird.”
“And so,” he says, “you did not cause hurt.”
“But she trained us all to speak the truth. And this I didn’t do.”
“I never wanted the role of Pilate, but I see it is thrust on me. What is truth? The truth is, she is dying.”
And his body begins to tremble: the first sign of one of his bad spasms. She knows he wants to be left alone when this happens.
SEPTEMBER 10, 1943
Nearly a year has passed. And now Mlle Weil is dead: Genevieve learns it in a letter from a priest, a priest Mlle Weil spoke of, whom she has never met and has no wish to meet. She supposes that it is the priest Mlle Weil wanted her to speak to about baptizing Aaron. It is to his credit that he does not mention this, nor does he suggest that they meet.
It is September now, but it feels like a humid summer day. A small fan makes a noise that annoys her; she will turn it off, the annoyance of the noise is greater than the relief of the breeze it generates. Her hands are sweating. She has been gripping the letter so tightly that the ink of the words has begun to smear.
Eleven months. Since she first saw her, since the words came to her mind. “She looks ridiculous.”
But that is wrong. She is not ridiculous. She is many things. Great? A saint? A madwoman?
Genevieve supposes that she must contact Mme Weil, who is still living quite near. What will she say, what words would serve, as neither palliative nor obfuscation? Neither of which would honor Mlle Weil.
Words will not serve. But she must do something.
She must bring something to Mme Weil. An offering.
Perhaps the best thing is what custom would suggest. Well, then, she will invoke custom. Traditionally, food is brought to the grieving family.
So she will bake a cake, a cake that needs no rationed sugar, only honey, honey from the hives that come from Joe’s cousin’s farm. Or she hopes that’s where it comes from. To make the cake she will have to use this week’s ration of butter. Butter will be required. Whatever else she is, Mme Weil is a Frenchwoman. Margarine will not do.
How do I understand her? How do I understand everything she was? Genevieve asks herself, looking through a collection of wartime recipes. She turns the pages. The words repeat and repeat themselves inside her brain: I will never understand. I will never understand.
She will explain to Laurent that she is using their butter ration for a cake to bring to M
me Weil to mark her daughter’s death. He will, of course, understand.
It is, she knows, in some ways ridiculous to think of offering Mme Weil a cake to mark her daughter’s death. But what is the right way to honor the dead? Is it right to deprive Laurent of the butter he so loves to make an offering that is, perhaps, ridiculous? Is it right to deprive the living for what might very well be the wrong offering in honor of the dead? Or is the deprivation itself the honor?
How odd, she thinks, to invoke the word “honor” in relation to the making of the cake.
But then, she thinks, it is the War, and of course the times are odd. The times demand of those who live through them certain acts, gestures, understandings that they would not have come to in ordinary times. Among the most important of these: the honoring of the dead.
She will make a cake.
To do it properly, butter will be required.
Thomas Mann in Gary, Indiana
I’VE COME TO BELIEVE it’s something people say much too easily, much too quickly: “It was the greatest day of my life.” At the time, though (I was seventeen), there’s no doubt that I meant it. But what does a seventeen-year-old know of greatness—the kind of seventeen-year-old I was in 1939, in Gary, Indiana, the son of a happy family in safe America, which, though battered by the Depression, was still, if not one of the fortunate isles, at least a sheltered cove? Or perhaps it’s right to say a backwater—undevastated, well, not even touched, by Hitler or his bombs.
“You have been chosen.” Those were the first words I heard. I’d been called to the principal’s office and at first I assumed I was in some kind of trouble, though I’d never been in the slightest trouble in any of my school years. “You have been chosen as the student host for the great German writer Thomas Mann, whom we at Horace Mann High School have the honor of presenting, thanks to the Hauptmanns here … a great honor, a great honor all around.”
