by Lily Tuck
At the top, Irène, as an afterthought, asks, “But didn’t Jacqueline go to the Lycée Janson?”
“Fortunately, a few years later, the lycée allowed girls,” Claude says.
“We should start back,” Irène says then, “or Liliane will worry.”
Growing up, Liliane does not spend a lot of time with Gaby. He works on Wall Street, investing other people’s money, and he comes home late. Immediately on opening the front door and taking off his coat, he goes to the little table in the living room that is set up as a bar and mixes himself a bourbon and water.
“Irène!” From her bedroom, Liliane hears him calling. “Where’s the ice?”
“There’s no ice in the ice bucket,” he repeats. “Why is it that every night when I come home—”
“I know, I know. I’ve told Helena a million times,” Irène says, as she comes running down the hall. “She always forgets.”
During dinner, Gaby drinks a second or perhaps it is a third bourbon and water, Irène drinks a glass of wine, and Liliane drinks nothing at all. After they have finished their soup, Helena, the cook, places their meal—lamb chops, creamed spinach, and roast potatoes—on top of the sideboard on a hot plate so the food won’t get cold.
Getting up, Irène asks Gaby, “One or two lamb chops?”
“One,” Gaby answers. He eats little.
“And what about spinach and potatoes? The potatoes look delicious,” Irène says, putting both vegetables on his plate.
“That’s too much,” Gaby says, taking another drink of his bourbon and water.
Irène shrugs. “It’s good for you.”
“Please don’t tell me what is good for me.”
Liliane helps herself to only the spinach.
“Chérie!” Irène says to her. “Is that all you’re going to eat?”
“I’m not hungry,” Liliane answers, looking down at her plate.
In an effort to befriend her, Gaby offers Liliane one dollar a week if she will shine his shoes—a whole array of them in his closet: black, brown, lace-up oxfords, loafers, boots. He shows her how.
“First, you pull out the laces,” he tells her, “then you take this brush and brush off the dirt, especially around the soles. After you’ve done that, you take a rag and dip it into the shoe polish—black or brown, depending—and cover the shoe with polish. And don’t forget the tongue. Now, if you want to get a really high polish—a spit polish”—Gaby is holding up one of his shoes to show Liliane—“don’t worry, you don’t have to spit,” he says, trying to make it a joke. “Soldiers spit if there is no water around but we have plenty of water. Then, using the rag again, you mix the polish with water, just a little like this, and you rub it on the shoe again. You rub and rub”—again, Gaby stops to show Liliane—“until you get a high shine. Do you understand, Lillian?”
Liliane nods.
But she cannot thread the laces the way Gaby has shown her—the zigzag “ladder lacing” he learned in the navy—and, one time, not paying attention, she puts brown polish on a black shoe. Worse, she cannot achieve the high polish Gaby has in mind.
“It’s okay, Lillian,” Gaby tells Liliane, after a few days. “I’ll polish them myself. But, here,” he adds, handing her a dollar, “this is for trying.”
Often, after dinner, while Liliane is in her room doing her homework, she can hear Irène and Gaby begin to argue. She tries not to listen to what they are saying but their voices carry.
I told you that we had to go out for dinner. They are important clients.
You didn’t tell me.
I told you last week.
You never told me.
Don’t argue with me, Irène. Gaby’s voice becomes louder, angrier.
So does Irène’s. You never told me!
I did so tell you, damn it!
Very often, the door to Irène’s bedroom slams shut. Then there is silence and Liliane goes back to her homework:
2(3x – 7) + 4(3x + 2) = 6(5x +9) + 3
During the war, Gaby was in the U.S. Navy; he was a lieutenant. He was stationed in London and on the way over, his ship, the USS Ingraham, escorting convoys between the United States, Iceland, and the United Kingdom and carrying much needed supplies to the Allies, collided with the oil tanker Chemung in thick fog off the coast of Nova Scotia. The depth charges in the ship’s stern exploded and the Ingraham sank. Gaby and a half dozen other men were able to climb into a lifeboat and survive the collision. But due to the fog and the rough seas, they were not rescued for thirty-six hours and by then, they were wet, cold, and suffering from hypothermia.
“Were you frightened?” Liliane is not sure what to say.
“I tried to stay warm and to stay sane. One of the men in the lifeboat took off all his clothes and threw them overboard.”
“Why?” Liliane asks.
“Apparently the muscles contracting blood vessels relax in extreme cold weather and cause blood to flow to the extremities, tricking the person into believing he is hot.” Gaby adds, “Or so I have been told.”
“And did the man die?” Liliane persists.
Gaby doesn’t answer right away. Then he says, “Lillian, I’d rather talk about something else.”
When he finally got to London, Gaby joined the headquarters for General Dwight D. Eisenhower under Admiral Harold R. Stark, the commander of naval forces in Europe. “Known as Betty,” Gaby tells Liliane. “Only we did not call him that to his face. Poor fellow, he was blamed for not sharing intelligence about Pearl Harbor, but he turned out to be a real hero—with three navy and one army Distinguished Service Medals for his part in D-Day.”
Irène is in Tanganyika, visiting her sister, Uli, for two weeks, and, except for Helena, the cook, who may have gone out or gone to bed already, Gaby and Liliane are alone in the apartment, after dinner.
“Stark was responsible for overseeing the naval buildup for the invasion,” Gaby continues. With Irène away, Gaby seems more relaxed and less combative and Liliane, who is studying World War II in school, wants to take advantage of his good humor and ask him questions.
“What did you do? Were you busy gathering secret intelligence?” She is half joking, half serious.
“No, nothing like that,” Gaby answers. “Mostly, I shuffled papers in an office, but I have to admit—despite what was going on, the war and all—I had a hell of a good time in London.”
Liliane frowns slightly. “Where did you live?”
“At Brown’s. The hotel was full of characters, like in a novel,” Gaby gives a laugh. “Including Winston Churchill, who came to Brown’s regularly after work for a drink. I can still see him sitting hunched over at the bar and I remember the bartender, too . . . what was his name? Damn, I know it as well as my own.” Gaby pauses to take another sip of his drink. “But you, miss, with your nose buried in a book all day, might appreciate this—Rudyard Kipling wrote The Jungle Book at Brown’s. There were other writers who stayed there, too, but I forget who. Anyway, everyone stays at Brown’s. Either at Brown’s or at Claridge’s,” Gaby says.
“And there were plenty of nightclubs with great music and dancing,” Gaby adds.
“Did you dance?” Liliane asks.
A few times, when everyone is out and Liliane is alone in the apartment, she takes out Gaby’s navy uniform, which is wrapped in plastic and hangs in the back of his closet—a smart double-breasted blue jacket with two gold stripes and a star on the sleeves and shiny copper buttons and matching navy pants—and examines it. Once, she goes through the pockets but finds nothing; another time she tries on the jacket. Wearing it, she stands in front of the closet mirror and, saluting herself, she does a little jig.
No doubt, Gaby, as a young man, cut a handsome figure in his uniform. Although short—in heels, Irène stands taller—he is good-looking in a compact, robust way; in college, he boxed competitively an
d won his bouts. Liliane can picture him walking in fashionable Mayfair, wearing his white officer’s cap and saluting left and right to stylish ladies—Fiona, Clarissa, Edwina.
“Who was Edwina?” Suddenly curious, Liliane asks.
“Lady Edwina.” Gaby leans back in his chair and lights a Cuban cigar—a forbidden cigar, because Irène claims the smell gives her a migraine. “She was quite a girl, that Edwina.”
Smiling, Gaby starts to reminisce. “She was a looker, too—not as good-looking as your mother, but still . . .”
Liliane pictures Gaby and a dark-haired, slender Edwina dancing cheek to cheek to a quick fox-trot in the dim basement of a nightclub, ignoring the air raid sirens, then ignoring the falling bombs.
“I didn’t get to London until 1943 and, by then, the Blitz was over,” Gaby says, nearly reading Liliane’s mind, “and it was not until the following year that the Germans began attacking again. Then it was almost worse because they used V-weapons or flying pilotless bombs. It took the missiles five minutes to get to London from Germany or from Belgium, where they were launched, and radar wasn’t quick enough to pick them up. And you couldn’t hear them coming. You only heard the sonic boom after the blast. Thousands of Brits were killed or injured.” Gaby pauses a moment. “Edwina was one of them. She had just come out of Selfridge’s, where she had gone Christmas shopping, and one of the bombs fell as she was crossing Duke Street.”
“I’m sorry,” Liliane says.
“I am, too,” Gaby says. “She was a great gal.”
“Edwina had her dog with her,” Gaby says after a while. “A little black cairn. The cairn survived.”
“What happened to him?” Liliane asks.
“Her. I took her for a while—until I could find a proper home for her. A little rascal. She made my life hell.” Gaby laughs. “She bit the chambermaid, she chewed my one good pair of Lobb shoes. Her name was Winnie. Named after either Churchill or Winnie the Pooh. Or both.” Again, Gaby laughs.
Liliane, too, laughs.
“But maybe I am boring you with all this?” Gaby says. “My wartime exploits.”
“No.” Liliane says. “I like hearing about them.”
“My exploits,” Gaby repeats softly, shaking his head, before he takes another puff of his Cuban cigar.
“Donald,” Gaby says all of a sudden. “I just remembered. Donald—the name of the bartender. He was Irish.”
Did you meet Winston Churchill? Liliane wants to ask, but does not. Did you have drinks with him at the hotel bar?
And Claude—did you meet him?
VIII
A summer morning in Rome, too hot, from sunbathing on the terrace, and Maria is out marketing, Liliane, with nothing better to do and not sure what she is looking for, goes to her father’s desk and starts to riffle through the drawers. She finds letters—letters from Emilie, her grandmother (those are easy to recognize because Emilie types them on her old German typewriter), letters from Fritz, whose handwriting is small and nearly illegible, letters from Irène, whose writing Liliane knows well, and letters from women, she guesses, she does not know, all neatly stacked together. Jammed in the back of one of the drawers, she also finds a book, Histoire d’O, and, lying next to it, the key chain with the four-leaf clover charm she gave her father one Christmas years ago.
Sitting at her father’s desk, still dressed in only her bathing suit, Liliane puts aside the letters and begins to read Histoire d’O.
Deux mains soulevèrent sa cape, deux autres descendaient le long de ses reins après avoir vérifié l’attache des bracelets: elles n’étaient pas gantées, et l’une la pénétra de deux parts à la fois, si bruquement qu’elle cria. Quelqu’un rit. Quelqu’un d’autre dit: “Retournez-la, qu’on voie les seins et le ventre.” On la fit tourner. . . .
(Two hands lifted her cape, two others—after having checked to see that her bracelets were attached—descended the length of her back and buttocks. The hands were not gloved, and one of them penetrated her in both places at once, so abruptly that she cried out. Someone laughed. Someone else said: “Turn her around, so we can see the breasts and belly.” They turned her around. . . .)
That year Liliane’s father’s mistress is Francine; she is colored and from Jamaica.
The summer before it was Claudia. A brunette, Claudia wore her thick hair in a single French braid. Obsessed with Claudia’s braid, Liliane spent hours in front of the mirror trying to plait her fine hair into one like Claudia’s. Portuguese, Claudia sang fado—heartbreaking songs of romantic disillusionment and longing. One evening, Rudy drove Liliane in the silver Lancia to Belvedere delle Rose, a popular outdoor nightclub outside of Rome, to hear Claudia sing. What impressed Liliane most about the evening was not Claudia’s singing but the act that followed hers, a striptease, and how at the last possible moment when the stripper leaned over to take off her top, she turned out to be a man.
In her early twenties, Francine is both glamorous and friendly. She once had a role playing a slave in Quo Vadis. She described how, nearly naked, she was made to stand for hours holding two tame cheetahs on a leash—only, according to Francine, the cheetahs were not tame—while the scene was shot over and over again and how, finally, the scene was cut from the film. Until now, Liliane had never met a colored person—there are no colored girls in her private school and Gaby and Irène have no colored friends. Walking down the Via Veneto with Francine, everyone looks at them. Not just the men; the women, too, look. And although Liliane knows that the looks are not directed at her (except now that she is older Italian men do look at her and call out, Bambola—doll), she feels special. She is proud to be in Francine’s company.
“What part of Jamaica are you from?” Liliane asks her.
“Mandeville? Do you know it?”
Liliane shakes her head.
“Mandeville is not on the coast but inland, on a plateau. It’s quite different from the rest of Jamaica. If you were to go there, you’d think you were in an English village. There’s a town green, a church, a courthouse, a library, and all the names are English: Battersea, Knockpatrick, Clover, Waltham—” Francine gives a laugh. “The weather, too, is different,” Francine continues. “It’s cooler.”
“And your parents?” Liliane asks.
“My mother works as a maid in a hotel and my father has part-time jobs, but mostly he drinks. Before that, my grandparents worked on a sugar plantation—but now the plantations are all gone.”
“Why?” Liliane asks.
Francine shrugs. “The price of sugar went way down. Instead, they grow bananas.” Again, she laughs.
“And why did you leave Jamaica?”
“As a teenager—I was about your age, maybe a little older—I was bored and I did not want to go to school so I would hitch a ride to the beach at Negril and one day a famous French photographer saw me and took my picture. He told me I could be a model. I believed him and I left Jamaica.”
“Would you go back?”
“All these questions,” Francine says. After pausing a moment, she says, “There’s an old Jamaican saying that goes, Talk and taste your tongue, which means think before you speak. I know you mean well and that you are a nice intelligent girl but, to tell the truth, talking about Jamaica breaks my heart.”
That same summer Liliane reads Françoise Sagan’s novel Bonjour Tristesse and, in part, identifies with it. But unlike the narrator, Cecile, who plots to get rid of her father’s mistress and inadvertently causes her death, Liliane, early on, recognizes the advantages of her situation. Liliane knows no one her own age in Rome—even if she did, most Italian teenagers, she guesses, would have left the city for Porto Ercole or Forte di Marme—and she must turn to Francine (and to the other young women in her father’s life—and there are many) for companionship, for friendship even. More important, the young women make it easier for Liliane to be with her father. She is no longer the
sole object of his attention or of his affection—affection not always apparent to Liliane.
But Rudy is generous—generous to a fault. Money is there to be spent, not saved, and once a week, he takes out his gold money clip, peels off huge bills—one-hundred-thousand-lire bills—and hands them to Liliane. He does not ask her how she spends it, in the same spirit, perhaps, that he does not attempt to explain his relationships. Rudy makes no embarrassing confessions or uses any subterfuges; instead, he is discreet. Liliane has not heard any compromising sounds nor seen her father in an inappropriate position; she has never seen him do anything more amorous than kiss a woman on the cheek. In the evening, after dinner, he drives Liliane home, then he takes Francine home. Most nights, Liliane is asleep by the time Rudy returns to the apartment off Via Salaria and he is always home the next morning.
In Bonjour Tristesse, Cecile’s father behaves exactly like Rudy:
Quand nous rentrions, mon père me déposait et le plus souvent allait reconduire une amie. Je ne l’entendais pas rentrer.
Je ne veux pas laisser croire qu’il mît une ostentation quelconque à ses aventures. Il se bornait à ne pas me les cacher, plus exactement à ne rien me dire de convenable et de faux. . . .
(At the end of the evening my father would drop me at our flat, and then see his companion home. I never heard him come in.
I do not want to give the impression that he was vain about his love affairs, but he made no effort to hide them from me, or to invent stories or to explain. . . . )
Nevertheless, at breakfast, Liliane looks for a sign of the previous night’s sex on her father’s face—a bruise, a swollen lip—even though she has a hard time picturing him making love and in bed with Francine. His hairy belly against her dark flat one? His blue-veined legs around her smooth black back? Or his balding head pressed in between her long slender legs? Histoire d’O has opened Liliane’s eyes to unknown and disturbing lovemaking possibilities—lovemaking possibilities that Liliane, up until now had known nothing about.
