Parenthesis

by Jay Neugeboren

  We didn’t always talk. In fact, for the first time in my life, I was able to sit in a room with friends—none of us saying anything—and not mind the silence. In the childhood and adolescence of my own Brooklyn-Jewish home, or during evenings spent—in New York, Bloomington, Palo Alto—with friends, I had, instinctively, always felt uncomfortable—had always assumed something was wrong if nobody was speaking. Silence was hostility.

  Betsey and I could spend two or three hours together in our kitchen—preparing a meal, eating it—without saying a word, and without, we would realize afterwards, minding the fact. (Though Betsey—she’d grown up in a small Indiana town—had never minded silence, had always been somewhat overwhelmed by the verbosity of my New York family and friends.) The same with friends: we enjoyed spending time with those people in whose physical presence we felt good, at ease, comfortable (a person’s most important quality, we all agreed, was that he or she be ouvert—open, unguarded, direct, vulnerable)—not with those who, by their ideas or achievements, were “interesting.”

  What made our life especially rich, though, was that our friends were—even in their ideas and work—more than interesting; and it was chance (bonne chance) which brought us all to Spéracèdes at the same time.

  Nancy Cusack and her husband Ralph had settled there fifteen years before we arrived—they had had to leave Ireland and settle in a Mediterranean climate because of Ralph’s health—and they had bought a small farm on one edge of the village, where they raised jasmine (for selling to the perfume factories in Grasse), grapes (for making their own wine), fruit and vegetables (for themselves). Ralph had been a well-known painter in Ireland, a novelist (Cadenza—published in England and America), and a journalist (for The Irish Times)—and he and Nancy had been in business together in Ireland, selling bulbs for wildflowers. Ralph had died two years before we arrived in Spéracèdes, and Nancy continued to take care of the farm with the help of the five Cusack children (ages fifteen to thirty). By about our third month in Spéracèdes, Betsey and I were seeing Nancy every day; when our own house was rented for July and August, we lived with her for almost a month, camped under an apricot tree.

  It was in her kitchen more than in any other place in Spéracèdes that I felt at home, at peace. Every afternoon during the school year, toward five, when Nancy’s youngest daughter, Annabel, would arrive from the lycée in Grasse, Nancy would serve tea and hot currant bread which she made from sour milk. Her kitchen was always full, overflowing—cats, kittens, paintings, books, baskets of fruit, clothes for washing, pots and bottles of jams and preserves, tables overrun with dishes, cloth napkins, magazines, bowls of old bread (we kept the old bread we didn’t use for our own breadcrumbs, stuffing, and soupe à l’oignon in a cloth sack and brought it to Nancy when it was full; she made a mush with it which she fed to her chickens), records, music scores (Nancy was a fine cellist and every summer and Easter, when her brother and sister-in-law visited from Geneva, they would play piano-violin-cello trios together), the day’s meals, and dirty dishes. There were rarely less than seven or eight for tea.

  Although we saw Nancy every day—and talked endlessly (about cooking, food, books, music, art, Spéracèdes, Ireland)—it was at least six months before we realized that her cousin Sam in Paris, from whom she’d receive notes from time to time, was Sam Beckett. And it was not until shortly before we left Spéracèdes for a 9,000-mile camping trip (at the end of July) that she referred at all to her childhood in Dublin—to family friends such as W. B. and Jack Yeats, James Joyce (who was always borrowing money from her father—and who, according to some scholars who’d visited Nancy and her brother, had modeled Bloom after Nancy’s Jewish grandfather), and Brendan Behan. Behan had visited Nancy and Ralph in Spéracèdes six months before his death—they were close lifelong friends (he mentions Spéracèdes in Confessions of an Irish Rebel)—and his visit, during which he’d drunk his way from door to door, and had performed a mock mass in the village square, in front of the bistro—was legend to the villagers. When, somewhat awed by the fact of these friendships, we made some remark which indicated the extent of our wonder, she had only said, somewhat embarrassed: “Oh, Dublin’s really a small place, you know—all the literary people knew one another.”

  During the three and a half weeks we lived with her in the summer of 1968, Betsey would get up early—at sunrise—and spend five or six hours tieing up jasmine plants with raffia. I typed away in a room above the kitchen (Ralph’s paintings around me); there was not a time during July when there were less than ten people for lunch or dinner. Friends from Ireland, England, other parts of France, Switzerland, Germany (having fled Ireland in the twenties because of their revolutionary IRA politics, her family had settled in Germany—only to flee again in the thirties) were always arriving and leaving.

  Memory: the look on the face of an American man who—with his wife and daughter—had rented the house next to Nancy’s for the summer. They were from North Hollywood, California. His own wife had, on her first day, inquired about services—someone to watch her girl, someone to help her with cooking and cleaning (the house they rented at $600 a month was four years old), someone to pick up and deliver laundry, etc. Seeing Nancy in the fields tieing up jasmine, seeing her feed the chickens, noting (the wife with a look of anal-retentive horror) the utter chaos Nancy’s kitchen was always in, they had, obviously, taken her for one of the local “peasants.” We smiled with great pleasure then, when the man’s jaw literally dropped at the sight of the meal which Nancy was, at lunchtime on that day, serving to thirteen people: homemade pizza (with olives and anchovies), blanquette de veau, homemade apple pie, wine, fruits, cheeses—he looked from the table to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the table, agape, wondering, obviously, how such food could ever have emerged from such chaos and (Nancy’s own word at times) “filth.” (Nancy had a wood-burning stove which she used only in winter, and a three-burner gas stove which worked at half-strength and at one speed.)

  During July, Betsey designated herself Nancy’s apprentice and after long lunches eaten outside under a grape-hung trellis, we’d often go to a nearby stream at St. Cassien for an afternoon swim.

  Nancy was happiest, I think, during the moments when she would hear footsteps and know someone was arriving; the back door to the kitchen would swing open (it came from the cave where Nancy made and stored her wine—the center of the stone farmhouse, according to several maçons from the region who had repaired part of it, was between eight hundred and a thousand years old) and some of our friends, heads bent to avoid knocking them, would enter. Nancy’s eyes would sparkle then, and more often than not she would say—“I had a thought that you would be coming by today—”

  Her greatest delight—when they would leave a few hours later—would be in saying, as she did most times: “Jacques [or Bill or Jeannot or Jim] seemed in good form today, didn’t he?”

  Several mornings a week, as I was finishing breakfast, Bill Wiser would stop by our house and the two of us would walk to the post office together. We had come to Spéracèdes through Bill, who’d been living there for two years with his wife, Michelle (Belgian), his four-year-old son, Eric, and his daughter, Ann-Karine (who had been born in Grasse in January, 1967). Bill was “the other American writer” in Spéracèdes, and I’d been introduced to him through our literary agent, who, knowing I was going to Europe for a year, had suggested I write to him. (I did, inquiring about the area, and receiving in return letters with drawings of available houses—complete with pictures of chickens, chicken coops.) Michelle had first known the region when her family had fled there during the Nazi occupation of Belgium. Like Betsey, Michelle was a painter—she and Bill had met aboard ship when she was returning to Belgium after having spent a year in America, studying art on a Fulbright; Bill was on his way to Paris—to live, travel, write.

  Bill had grown up in Georgia and Kentucky, brought up for the most part by a bachelor uncle, and he had never gone beyond high school. He’d joined the Navy a
t eighteen, had drifted from job to job—factories, libraries, hotels, restaurants—and had only begun writing seriously in his late twenties (he is almost forty now)—at first publishing “filler” items in rural magazines and newspapers, and later publishing stories and articles regularly in places such as Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, Playboy, The Reporter, Cosmopolitan, and Carleton Miscellany.

  Having started later, his attitude toward writing was—outwardly, at least—easier, more philosophic than mine: he worked slowly, steadily, and saw himself hitting his stride as a writer sometime in his late forties or early fifties. He imagined that he would by then, still be pursuing the same daily routine. We would talk on the way to the post office (he and Michelle teased me—as all our friends did—about my mail obsession: I could distinguish, for example, and would stop walking when I did, the sound of the postal truck motor from a quarter mile away); we’d wait, cramped in the three-by-five-foot space on this side of the counter for Georgette or her mother to give us our mail (they sorted much of it on an ironing board); then Bill—his lunch packed in his briefcase—would begin his daily mile and a half walk to Cabris, the village perched above Spéracèdes (the climb was at a steady 45-degree angle)—where he worked in a single room which he rented for ten dollars a month.

  Most afternoons—toward five—he’d stop by on his way home for a drink (scotch) and we’d talk again—about the day’s mail, about the replies we’d written, about the letters (from our agent) we hadn’t received, about publishers, about the day’s work (“did my three pages again,” Bill would say), about books, politics, New York, the declining short-story market, the quality of typewriter ribbons, the French character (what Bill loved about France was that, he often said, like himself, “it wasn’t made for the twentieth century”), our life in Spéracèdes, the future.

  Betsey and Michelle would often spend mornings and afternoons painting together, and we’d spend two or three evenings a week with them. (In the corner of their living room-dining room was a sloping old French couch, on which each of us was obliged to lie whenever we began talking about our mothers, our families.) After dinner Bill would read Eric his bedtime story (when Michelle had returned from the hospital after he was born, Bill had gone at once to the bookcase, had taken down his Complete Shakespeare, and had begun reading to Eric from Hamlet), and then the four of us would sit around the fireplace and talk. What I remember most about evenings spent with them is that we seemed to always be laughing. Bill was generally shy—but when the four of us were alone he would let go: special renditions of old-time songs (“If I Give Up the Saxophone Will You Come Back to Me?”); stories of his monastic existence in cold-water flats on the Lower East Side; tales of his days as a bellhop in Miami Beach: glass of wine in one hand, he would recreate the bow he executed to guests arriving at the Seville Hotel, and would describe for us the waist-pinching toreador costume he wore.

  Like Betsey and me, Jacques and Nadine were at home almost all the time—they worked together in one half of their bedroom (converted to studio)—making lampshades. Jacques traveled from village to village, finding antiques, buying them, selling them, turning them into lamps. Like Bill, he had held dozens of jobs, and like Bill, he was a born storyteller: endless tales of his days as a salesman on the island of Corsica, of the time he and Nadine (and Jeannot and Jacqueline) had been part of a mad commune run by a former concentration camp victim (who, as Jacques now analyzed it, was trying to turn every community he became part of back into the German camp of his childhood), of the years during and after the war when he had not come to terms with the fact that he was Jewish. The discovery, when he was in his late twenties, of his Jewishness had become a central part of his life, and we talked often of Jewish history and traditions, we made—that spring—a Passover Seder in Jacques’s house, the first one he’d ever been to.

  Jacques’s mother had died in Auschwitz, and he had been brought up in the Vichy part of France during the war. I remember him telling me one story about a German officer who had tried—for what Jacques remembered as an entire afternoon—to get him, with bribes of money and candy, to read to the officer from a text which, since it was in Hebrew, Jacques had honestly found unintelligible.

  As a merchant and salesman, Jacques was a master—and he often (though less and less during our sixteen months in Spéracèdes) related this to his Jewish origins, telling marvelous jokes about Jewish trickery, cunning, avarice. The great—the magical thing, he once said, was that—even before he’d known the full truth about his background—he had always imagined that the ideal profession for any man was the following: “You get a car and you go into one village. There you buy some goods, cheap, and travel to the next village where you sell the goods at a higher price, and buy new goods. Then….” In this way, Jacques said, you could see the world, be your own boss, earn a living, and bring happiness to people. (Jacques was often proudest that—merely by entering the antique shops of his clients—he could make them smile.)

  Jacques and Nadine (they were in their early thirties and had three children: Marie-Lise, Sarah, Emmanuel) earned a good living—better every year, and the more they earned the less they worked. This was Jacques’s philosophy, secret, morality. More money meant more free time: to read, to talk, to go horseback riding, to discover new interests, to travel. During our time in Spéracèdes, his work went so well that the number of days per week that he worked diminished from five to three. While we were there, he and Nadine took trips to Ireland (where they stayed with one of Nancy’s friends), to Paris, to the Ardèche region of France. (The latter trip being paid for, Jacques proudly recounted when he returned, by the purchase of antiques, which, on the way home, he sold at a profit in Aix-en-Provence.)

  The happier one was, Jacques maintained, the less one needed: I would, he often told me, if my life were good enough, eventually lose the need to write, the need for words…something which, toward the end of our stay in Spéracèdes, almost seemed to be coming true.

  Eating, sleeping, visiting with friends, gardening, walking—why do any more? And often, during the last month or two of our time in Spéracèdes, we didn’t. Our group had grown by then—a Canadian writer and his family (wife and four children) had, through a mutual friend, settled in a house above the village; the son of one of Nancy’s friends had settled on Nancy’s property (Bene was twenty-two, his wife Tania twenty; they had two children) where we all helped him—over the course of several months—build his own house; Jeannot and Jacqueline moved across the road from us with their three children and set up a silk-screening studio in their attic; we all became closer with Georgette and her husband Jo (a chef in Cannes), and often listened to her tell us of what Spéracèdes had been like twenty-five and thirty years ago, when she had been a little girl growing up there.

  I had come to Spéracèdes in order, for the first time in my life, to have nothing to do for a full year except write fiction. Once in Spéracèdes, however, I found that certain events (from America) were with me continuously—unless I dealt with them directly, I felt, they would continue to haunt, they could invade my fiction in ways I would, I knew, be unable to control. Rather than try to fictionalize my political experiences—something I had no desire to do—I would come to terms with the material, would (the word I used) exorcise it by writing about it, dealing with it directly. Only when I had accomplished this would I be able to get on with what was—still, always—most important: the writing of fiction.

  By the time I’d finished the bulk of the narrative, however, I found that I was feeling, for the first time in over ten years, little desire to write fiction. Jacques smiled knowingly, said nothing. I was able, for several months in the winter of 1968–69 to do no writing whatsoever and—also for the first time in my life—not to be bothered by the fact. I still rose early, I walked into town for the day’s bread, I ate breakfast, I went upstairs, I read books, I wrote letters, I talked with Betsey while she painted, I did the day’s shopping, I stopped in the bistro, I helped prep
are our meals, I worked in the garden, I took long walks, I visited with friends. Our daily life seemed full enough, complete enough. My past writings were—this also for the first time—suddenly bringing in enough money for us to live on.

  Like other American writers, I’d originally left the country in order to write a novel. Instead, I wrote these reflections and found myself returning to America when they were done, when I didn’t have to return. I thought the reason for going back had to do, not with things political or with any events that were taking place in the U.S., but with my writing, with my desire to be a writer. Though I didn’t mind the fact that I wasn’t writing, I laughed at myself, at the writer still inside me who made me want to alter this fact; i.e., I still had the desire not to lose the desire to write the novel I’d originally left the country to write.

  The writing I’d done in Spéracèdes—most of the narrative which follows—had dealt, in a literal way, with my life in America, with what I thought had been a specifically political journey which had begun at twenty-two, when I was a junior executive trainee for GM, and which had ended at twenty-nine, when I’d left America. I knew I would return to the writing of fiction, though, only if I went back, touched home, saw my city, and felt again those things which had previously—always—fired my desire to put words on pages.

  TWO: North from Brooklyn

  “Forward, forward,” shrieked Mahmoud Ali, whose every utterance had become a yell. “Down with the Collector, down with the Superintendent of Police.”

  “Mr. Mahmoud Ali, this is not wise,” implored the Nawab Bahadur: he knew that nothing was gained by attacking the English, who had fallen into their own pit and had better be left there; moreover, he had great possessions and deprecated anarchy.

  —E. M. Forster. A Passage to India.