by Lily Tuck
“You did, didn’t you? And, please speak English,” Irène told Barbara.
“Of course, I didn’t sleep with Rudy,” Barbara says, close to tears. “Oh, Rehlein, you must believe me.”
“I am not sure I do,” Irène said. Shrugging her shoulders, she sat down again as the front door opened and Gaby came in.
“Good evening, ladies,” he said. “How is my lovely wife and my lovely sister-in-law?” He sounded a little drunk. “I’m sorry I’m late, but I stopped off and had a drink with a client.”
“Dinner is ready,” Irène told him, “and I’m hungry. Come,” she also says, holding out her hand to Barbara by way of apology, “you must be hungry as well.”
Her freshman year in college, Liliane lives on campus in a large women’s dormitory. An only child, she is not used to communal living. She resents having to do kitchen duty (hosing down greasy plates full of leftover food and carrying heavy trays) and the lack of privacy in the bathroom (often toilets are left unflushed and hairs clog the drains in the tubs), but the noise is worse: the constant shouting and screaming of overexcited girls on the stairs and in the hallways. Worse still, the public phone on Liliane’s floor is right next to her room and it rings and rings and rings at all hours of the day and night and no one picks it up. Often, incapable of ignoring the sound any longer, Liliane goes out into the hall and, without answering it, takes the phone off the hook and lets the receiver dangle in the air.
Hello, hello, is— Liliane hears the faint sound of a male voice that is both hopeful and grateful that the phone at last has been answered and she takes a grim satisfaction knowing that he will be disappointed.
Although Liliane has gone to several social mixers and on a few dates, she does not yet have a boyfriend. The college boys she has met so far seem young and immature and she feels both superior and lonely. She does not like the rainy, cold New England weather and, except for the pretty houses along Brattle Street, she finds the town of Cambridge gray and dreary. Her principal mode of transportation is a bicycle and already she has gotten her wheel caught in a trolley track and, more dangerous still, has had a car door open brusquely in front of her. Once as she walks through the Cambridge Common to her class, a man sitting on a bench next to the commemorative plaque that marks the spot where George Washington is said to have stood when he first took command of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War exposes himself to her.
Her classes are mostly core courses and required. Her least favorite is Natural Sciences 3, taught by Professor I. Bernard Cohen. The class of more than three hundred students meets twice a week, at nine o’clock in the morning in a vast auditorium. Professor Cohen is famous for his books on Benjamin Franklin and Isaac Newton; he is also famous for conducting experiments in class. The most memorable class demonstration involves sending a brass ball on a wire swinging between the heads of two teaching fellows to show the periodicity of a pendulum. Galileo Galilei was the first to observe that the bobs of pendulums nearly return to their release height, Professor Cohen explains. The time for one complete cycle, a left swing and a right swing, is called the period. A pendulum swings with a specific period that depends on its length. When given an initial push, it will swing back and forth at a constant amplitude. . . . After attending the first few lectures, Liliane does not bother to attend again. The midterm exam consists of multiple true and false questions and Liliane checks the answers arbitrarily—true, true, true, false, false, true, true, true. She fails the exam.
One night, when Liliane is already in bed and nearly asleep, the telephone starts to ring again. This time she is determined to try to drown out the sound by putting a pillow over her head. After a while, the phone stops ringing, then she hears someone knocking on her door.
“Lil,” the person who is knocking calls out, “the phone is for you. It’s your mother, she says it is urgent.”
Rudy has had a massive stroke. The Italian doctor does not expect Rudy to live for more than a few hours. If Liliane wants to see her father alive, the Italian doctor says, she must come over right away. “Subito, subito” the doctor repeats, and Liliane is reminded of how, years ago, the maid, Maria, spoke to call her a taxi.
At Logan Airport in Boston, Liliane buys a ticket on the next flight to Rome. A TWA flight. Her seat is next to the window and looks out over the wing of the plane. It is early evening and already dark and Liliane, who does not like to fly, closes her eyes during the noisy takeoff. The plane is barely up in the air when Liliane hears what sounds like an explosion, then the woman seated behind her screams. Looking out her window, Liliane sees that one of the plane’s engines has caught on fire. Orange flames light up the night sky. Across the aisle from Liliane a woman starts to cry softly; the rest of the passengers on the plane, however, are strangely quiet. Silently praying, Liliane stares out her window until the flames go out.
After several long minutes, the pilot’s voice is heard reassuring the passengers that the fire has been extinguished and that every plane is equipped with a built-in firefighting mechanism to deal with just such a situation. As for the noise the passengers heard, the pilot explains—he speaks with a slight western drawl—it was caused not by an explosion but by the sudden vacuum created when the engine stalled. He then goes on to inform them that they will have to circle for a while over the Atlantic Ocean in order to dump fuel before they can safely return to Logan Airport and land.
They circle over the Atlantic Ocean dumping fuel for nearly an hour; then, when the plane has lowered its wheels and is getting ready to land, the pilot’s laconic voice is again heard telling the passengers—“only as a precaution,” he says—to place their pillows on their laps and put their heads down, for the women passengers to take off their high-heel shoes and for those wearing glasses to remove them. Again the cabin is quiet, except for the woman across the aisle from Liliane who starts to cry softly. The plane lands with an abrupt lurch and a squeal of brakes and when Liliane lifts her head from her pillow and looks out the window, she sees that the runway is lined with fire trucks.
Six hours later, Liliane is on another TWA flight to Rome. This time the plane flies smoothly in an almost cloudless light sky, the steel-gray ocean miles below. Again, Liliane has a window seat, but now she pulls down the window shade and closes her eyes. She would like to sleep and not to be afraid.
Not only his health but Rudy’s film career has taken a turn for the worse. His co-productions starring the bodybuilder Steve Reeves as various biblical and mythological figures such as Hercules, Aeneas, and Goliath in what are mockingly referred to as sword-and-sandal epics proved a financial disappointment. (Reeves’s career, too, was also brought up short when, while filming the remake of The Last Days of Pompeii and accustomed to doing his own stunts, he ran his chariot into a tree and dislocated his shoulder.) In addition, instead of saving his money, Rudy has either spent or given it all away. As a result, he has to play cards for a living and has, he claims, a standing game of gin rummy at Bricktop. But because of his failing eyesight and his swollen fingers, Liliane guesses, Rudy can no longer hold up the cards properly or see them clearly enough to win. This more than anything else causes her to already grieve for him.
By the time Liliane arrives in Rome, it is afternoon and too late; Rudy is dead.
XI
At Easter, during her junior year of college, Liliane drives from Cambridge to Ithaca to visit Emilie. It is the first time she has driven a long distance—330 miles—by herself and although she is a little apprehensive about getting lost, about getting a ticket for driving too fast, which she does, or worse, about perhaps denting a fender of her boyfriend’s red MG, she also feels free. She could, she tells herself, keep driving—drive all the way to the West Coast or to Canada, to places she has never been. She also likes the feeling that no one—not her parents, not her friends, and, especially, not Mark, her boyfriend—knows precisely where she is at this moment.
; Emilie no longer lives in her Stewart Avenue apartment, but lives in a nursing home. She is going to be ninety-three years old next month and she is very frail; this may be the last time Liliane sees her.
“Edith,” Emilie says when Liliane walks into her room.
“No,” Liliane answers gently, “it’s me, Liliane, your granddaughter.”
“Yes, I know,” Emilie says. “Only sometimes I confuse things.”
In a plain room in the nursing home, Emilie is lying in a hospital bed. The side bars are raised so she won’t fall out. On a tray attached to the bed is a half-empty glass of water with a bent straw sticking out of it, a box of Kleenex, and a little worn-looking black book. A prayer book.
The other bed in the room is empty and, following Liliane’s gaze, Emilie says, “The woman died a few days ago. She was colored. A nice lady,” Emilie adds. “They asked me if I wanted to move,” Emilie continues, “the bed is next to the window.”
“Do you want to?” Liliane asks.
Emilie shrugs. “Is there anything to see?” Then in a stronger voice, she asks Liliane, “Do you know the story of the two soldiers?”
Pulling up a chair, Liliane sits next to Emilie’s bed. “Tell me,” she says.
“During the First World War, two wounded soldiers share a room in the hospital. The soldier who has the bed next to the window keeps regaling the other soldier with what he sees. He says he sees beautiful women walking by, and he describes what they look like—blondes, brunettes, redheads—and, of course, the soldier who is lying in the bed that is not next to the window becomes jealous and he, too, wants to be able to look out. So, one night, when the soldier who is in the bed next to the window takes a turn for the worse and begs the other soldier to fetch help, the soldier in the bed next to him ignores his anguished cries and lets the poor soldier die. The next day, after the body has been taken away and the nurse has made up the bed again, the soldier asks to be moved to the bed next to the window and when he finally gets to look out the window, do you know what he sees?”
“No,” Liliane says, shaking her head.
“A brick wall.”
After a moment, Liliane asks, “Is this a true story?”
But Emilie’s eyes are closed and she does not answer.
Only then does Liliane remember the sepia photo she once saw of an unsmiling Emilie and several other women wearing nurses’ uniforms, standing among a group of German officers.
When Emilie opens her eyes again, she says, “You know what I regret most in my life?”
“No,” Liliane answers. “What?”
“That I let my mother die alone in Hamburg—remember I told you about Fides. Her real name was Friederike but everyone called her Fides.”
Liliane remembers the story of Fides laughing when Rudolf fell off his horse and how he vowed never to see her again, yet he married her.
“It was so cruel,” Emilie says. “I think about it all the time—how frightened and abandoned poor Fides must have felt.”
“But if you had stayed in Hamburg, who knows what might have happened to you,” Liliane says. “You might have been sent to one of the camps.”
Instead Emilie picks up the worn-looking little black book on her tray and holds it out to Liliane. “Will you read me a prayer?” she asks.
Crying as she backs Mark’s MG out of the parking lot of the nursing home, Liliane does not see the oncoming van. Both a fender and a taillight are smashed.
Liliane first noticed Mark in Professor Perry Miller’s class on Moby-Dick because he is tall and good-looking; at the same time, she dismisses him as a jock. Although she plans on reading Moby-Dick, she does not bother to attend many of the classes, but Mark, to his credit, does. He, too, has noticed Liliane and first approaches her as she is sitting in Hayes-Bickford, the coffee shop in Harvard Square, reading—not Moby-Dick but a book of Robert Lowell’s poems: a first edition of Lord Weary’s Castle, given her by a fellow student named Fred. In time, Fred, too, will become a well-known poet; at present, he has written a love poem comparing Liliane to a seal and another called “The Love Letter,” which ends with:
The mailman took the letter—
only at each step, under his broad chest
his lungs, as under a sidewalk, shook
like an unrecovered bomb, menacing everyone.
The boy went back to sleep.
The girl was a thousand miles away.
“I haven’t seen you in class much” is how Mark begins.
Barely glancing up from her book, Liliane answers, “That’s right. I haven’t been.”
“You should hear Professor Miller read,” Mark continues, ignoring Liliane’s tone. “He could be Captain Ahab.” Then, standing in front of her in the coffee shop, he raises his arms in the air and begins to recite in a loud voice, “Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but un-conquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee— Damn, I forget the rest,” Mark says.
Putting aside the Robert Lowell poems, Liliane laughs and Mark, without waiting to be asked, sits down next to her and orders a cup of coffee.
Liliane likes his lack of inhibition, his energy, his spontaneity—all qualities she feels she lacks. She also likes driving in his red MG with the top down. Some nights, they go into Boston for dinner—besides being tall and good-looking, Mark is rich—or, if the night is warm enough, they go to Revere Beach, where he parks in a secluded spot and, after they have spread out the plaid blanket he keeps in the trunk of his car, they make hurried love on the beach.
Finding a place to make love is a challenge. Liliane lives in a small off-campus house and has a roommate; Mark lives in Eliot House and has three roommates and although he sometimes manages to arrange for all three of them to be out, Liliane is reluctant to go there. Mark’s suite of rooms is a mess—dirty clothes lie on the floor along with empty beer bottles, glasses, food wrappers—and Mark’s bed is unmade, the sheets unchanged for weeks, perhaps months. Also, she worries that a roommate will walk in on them and, nervous, while she and Mark are making love, she fakes having an orgasm. Most times with him, anyway, Liliane fakes it.
Liliane offers to pay for the smashed fender and taillight but Mark says there is no need. In a month, he will graduate from college and his parents, as a graduation gift, have offered him a trip around the world; he will sell the MG—smashed fender, taillight, and all.
“I’ll start in Japan,” Mark tells Liliane, “then Hong Kong, and from there”—Mark pauses a moment—“I want to go to Vietnam. My dad knows Elbridge Durbrow, the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, and he said he’ll write him a letter and maybe I can stay at the embassy for a couple of days. According to my dad, Durbrow is having a rough time with Diem.”
“Gaby, my stepfather, keeps talking about the domino theory,” Liliane says, wanting to sound informed. She pictures an infinite row of black dominoes toppling one on top of the other.
“From Vietnam, I’ll go to Thailand,” Mark continues.
“Siam,” Liliane interjects—she much prefers the country’s former name.
“I want to meet Jim Thompson—the American who lives in Bangkok. Apparently, he parachuted into Thailand during World War II, fell in love with the country, and never left. Besides his Thai silk business, he is supposed to have a beautiful collection of Asian art.”
“He sounds—”
“Then I’ll probably go to India,” Mark says, not letting Liliane finish. “A friend of mine knows a maharaja in Jaipur who can organize a tiger shoot. You should come with me, Lil,” he adds as an afterthought, taking Liliane in his arms. “Think of all the adventures we will have.”
In early June, Gaby collapses in the street while eating a hot dog. Apparently, he dies instantly from a massive heart attack while walking down Park Avenue. He had just come from the dentist and since he did not have time
to have lunch at his club, he had bought a hot dog from a street vendor. The attack occurred a few blocks from Lenox Hill Hospital, where he was taken to the emergency room, but according to the attending doctor, it was too late—the unchewed hot dog still in Gaby’s mouth.
“Please stay, chérie,” Irène, distraught, pleads with Liliane. “Don’t go to work. I need you.”
Her grief is genuine and intense and Liliane does not know how to try to comfort her mother. She is not glad Gaby is dead but neither is she sad.
The apartment is filled with baskets of fruits, casseroles, flowers; letters of condolence arrive; the phone rings—a constant outpouring of sympathy, but Irène is not consoled.
The funeral parlor is located a few blocks from the apartment, but Irène refuses to go. She does not want to see Gaby—she does not want to remember him that way, she says, tearfully. Instead, she chooses the clothes—a blue blazer, gray slacks, a green-and-white club tie—for him to be cremated in and Liliane takes them to the funeral parlor. Three days later, Liliane goes back again to identify Gaby—a state law apparently—before he is cremated. The coffin is open and Liliane takes such a quick look that it could have been anyone inside, she realizes later. She, too, does not want to see Gaby again.
After Irène has left the city for the island in Penobscot Bay, Liliane again stays in the apartment alone. She has a summer job working for a small nonprofit organization. Again, she files, types—she is a better typist now—and answers the phone. Arthur, her boss, is young and affable. He takes her out to lunch and they eat outdoors in the sun at the Central Park Zoo cafeteria. The lunches grow longer and longer; afterward, they go for a walk together, like a couple, and look at the animals in their cages—the hot polar bears.
“No one is in the office to answer the phone.” Liliane cannot help but be concerned.
“They’ll call back if it is important,” Arthur answers.
When, one time, he asks her out for dinner, Liliane tells him she has a steady boyfriend.
