by Lily Tuck
“But we can have lunch, right?” Arthur says.
The memorial service for Gaby takes place in August in the church on the island in Penobscot Bay and Liliane takes two days off from work to go. She will fly up to the nearest airport, then take a taxi to the ferry terminal. Before she leaves, however, she has to pick up Gaby’s cremains from the funeral parlor. She has promised Irène that she will bring them on the plane.
Gaby’s cremains are inside a brown paper shopping bag that is taped shut. The bag is surprisingly heavy and, as Liliane walks back to the apartment, she holds it out, not letting the bag touch her side. She also hopes that she will not run into anyone she knows, afraid the person might ask, What’s in the bag? In spite of herself, the thought makes her giggle.
On her way, Liliane walks by a dress store—a sign in the window announces a sale—and she goes inside. The dress is white linen with a scooped neck and dark blue piping around the neck, the armholes, and the side seams, and when she tries it on in the dressing room, the dress fits perfectly.
“Is it for a special occasion?” The saleslady wants to know.
“Yes, a wedding,” Liliane lies.
After several blocks walking home again, holding the package with her new dress inside it, Liliane, all of a sudden, realizes that she has left the bag with the cremains on the floor of the dressing room. Breaking out into a cold sweat, she runs back to the store.
What, she thinks, if someone found the bag and threw it out or, worse, took it and what, she also thinks, will she tell Irène?
Fortunately, the bag is still where she left it and, relieved, Liliane starts to explain to the saleslady. “I’m sorry, I forgot—”
Forgot what? Her stepfather.
The church is packed. Gaby was a well-known and well-liked summer resident on the island. He sailed, played tennis and golf; he was a permanent member of the yacht club committee. Relatives have come from all over the country to attend the memorial service, including Irène’s sister Barbara, who has come from Newport, Rhode Island.
Sitting in the front row pew, Irène is dressed in black and looks elegant. Next to her, Liliane is wearing her new white dress. Earlier, afraid that Irène might object to the dress and find it too showy, Liliane tried to reassure her by saying, “In many countries, white is considered the color of mourning.”
Irène’s distant ancestor, Mary, Queen of Scots, wore white after the deaths of her father-in-law, her mother, and her first husband, Francis II of France. Deuil blanc (white mourning), as the custom was called, was the color of the deepest mourning for European queens—purple was worn by kings. White is also the color of mourning in India, Vietnam, and South Korea; traditionally, too, white clothes and hats are worn by the Chinese at their funerals. The color white—as opposed to black, associated by early Christians with the color of the universe before God created light and with ignorance and paganism—evokes the paleness of death, celestial light, and everlasting life according to certain cultures who believe in the immortality of the soul.
Gaby’s service begins with the minister reading: “I am the resurrection and the life,” says the Lord. “Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”
Barbara is sitting on the other side of Irène; she wears a plain navy blue dress. When the service begins, she reaches over and takes Irène’s hand in hers and holds it.
Standing up, the congregation sings:
Holy, Holy Holy! Lord God Almighty!
Gaby’s nephew, a boy of twelve, walks to the front of the church and stands behind the lectern and, in a trembling voice, reads Psalm 23.
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
he leadeth me beside the still waters.
Two of Gaby’s closest friends one after the other go up to the lectern to speak. Men much like Gaby in background and upbringing, each has known Gaby since he was a small boy, in the case of one of the men, since Gaby was born—here on the island and elsewhere. They each tell amusing stories about Gaby—mishaps involving alcohol and automobiles at school and at college—how Gaby misbehaved but got away with it. They speak of his charm, his wit, his generosity, his courage during the war—the incident when Gaby’s ship the USS Ingraham collided with the oil tanker Chemung in thick fog off the coast of Nova Scotia and how Gaby and a half dozen other men survived for thirty-six hours in a lifeboat before they were rescued—his love of sports, sailing especially, his love of life, his love of family: in particular, his beautiful wife, Irène, as well as his stepdaughter, Lillian.
Although she has begged Irène that she does not want to, that she is shy, that she is not a good public speaker, and, finally and, perhaps, most compellingly, that she does not like the Tennyson poem—which, she declares, is sentimental and maudlin—Liliane cannot dissuade Irène, and she is next. Standing at the lectern, Liliane reads Gaby’s favorite poem:
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea.
The congregation recites the Apostles’ Creed, then the Lord’s Prayer; the minister gives the Blessing; they sing one more hymn, “Amazing Grace”; and, at last, the minister offers the Nunc Dimittis:
Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace: according to thy word
and Gaby’s memorial service is over. Irène, Barbara, and Liliane walk out together to the rousing organ sounds of Charles-Marie Widor’s Toccata from Symphony no. 5.
A reception in the summer house follows. Local island people are hired to help out—a bartender and two maids to pass hors d’oeuvres and clean up afterward. It is a bright sunny day—almost a fall day, the air is clear and crisp—and, drinks in hand, people spill out onto the lawn. At first the conversations and remarks stay muted, quiet, but then as people drink and eat more—cheese puffs and little crabmeat sandwiches—they relax and talk louder, tell jokes, laugh. Soon the reception sounds like any other island cocktail party and Gaby, it would appear—or his death—seems to be momentarily forgotten.
Liliane talks to Christine and Porter. Porter spent the winter in Aspen working as a ski lift operator—according to what he tells Liliane and Christine, he is still trying to find himself. Carlton has joined the Marines and will be killed a few years later on New Year’s Eve, when his helicopter gunship is shot down and crashes in the Quang Giao rubber plantation, about four kilometers from Bình Gia. Missy got pregnant and had to get married. The baby, a boy, was born two weeks ago, Christine tells Liliane, and weighed ten pounds. Phyllis is hitchhiking through Europe by herself. Christine is engaged to Jackson, who is in law school. Putting out her left hand, she shows Liliane her ring—a small emerald with a baguette diamond on either side of it.
“Emeralds are highly included,” Christine says. “I have to be careful and take the ring off when I do dishes and stuff.”
Holding a glass of tomato juice into which she has poured a shot of vodka, Liliane goes outside. She is looking for her aunt Barbara. She finds her sitting on the grass by herself, smoking a cigarette and looking out to sea.
“It’s beautiful here,” Barbara says when Liliane—hesitating at first, as she does not want to get grass stains on her new dress—sits down beside her. “No wonder Gaby loved this place so much.”
Looking over, Barbara asks, “Are you all right? I mean about Gaby.”
For a moment, Liliane is tempted to tell Barbara how, a few summers ago, Gaby would come into her room at night and lie on top of her.
“Can I have a cigarette?” she says instead.
“A bad habit,” Barbara says, handing Liliane her packet of cigarettes and her lighter.
“Here, have some of this,” Liliane tells Barbara, offering her the glass of vodka and tomato
juice.
“But you look wonderful,” Barbara says after she has drunk a little of the tomato juice and vodka. “I’ve never seen you look so well and that is such a pretty dress,” she adds.
“You must be in love,” Barbara says with a smile.
To try to make up for lost time her senior year, Liliane attends classes, does the reading, writes papers on time, and gets good grades. Every afternoon, she studies in Widener Library. The Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library was built in 1915 to commemorate the death of Harry Elkins Widener on board the Titanic. Harry, his mother, Eleanor, and his father, George, along with Eleanor’s maid, Amalie Gieger, and George’s valet, Edwin Keeping, were returning from a book-collecting trip in London when the ship hit the iceberg. George and Harry accompanied Eleanor and Amalie to a lifeboat, then chose to take their chances and remain on board, where, along with Edwin, they perished. As soon as she was back home in Philadelphia, Eleanor gave Harvard two million dollars to build the library in memory of her son, Harry. The building houses over fifty miles of bookshelves and more than three million volumes, including copies of the first folio of Shakespeare and the Gutenberg Bible.
According to popular legend, Eleanor Widener’s donation rested on the condition that all Harvard men and women know how to swim before they graduate—the ability, she no doubt thought, might have saved her son’s life. Liliane, along with her fellow freshmen, were required to take a swimming test. The test was easy—a few laps back and forth in a pool—and not a problem, but she also had to have her photo taken nude. At the time, except for feeling embarrassed, she had not thought much about it and it was not until many years later that objections were raised about the practice.
The purpose of the nude posture photos taken from the 1940s through the 1970s of all incoming freshmen at certain Ivy League colleges was ostensibly to gauge the occurrence and severity of rickets, scoliosis, and lordosis in the student population. However, the project, which was overseen by William Herbert Sheldon, a psychologist and numismatist, and Earnest Albert Hooton, an anthropologist, was in fact designed to support their theory on how body types can reveal intelligence, moral value, and future accomplishment.
“From the outset,” according to Hooton, “the purpose of these ‘posture photographs’ was eugenic. The data accumulated will eventually lead on to proposals to ‘control and limit the production of inferior and useless organisms.’ Some of the latter would be penalized for reproducing . . . or would be sterilized. But the real solution is to be enforced better breeding—getting those Exeter and Harvard men together with their corresponding Wellesley, Vassar and Radcliffe girls.”
The questions remain: Were the colleges at the time complicit or were they duped by that posture photo study? And what happened to all those photos? And more troublesome still is the thought that the Nazis, not so long before, made similar studies, amassing photographs and analyzing them for racial and characterological information in order to justify the eventual murder of six million people.
Sitting in Widener Library’s immense reading room, Liliane tries to rework her novel about Heathcliff. Instead of having the narrator and Heathcliff live together in the desolate English countryside, now—inspired by Mark’s letters from the Far East—she has them travel to India.
The voyage from Liverpool to Calcutta takes forty days. During that time they encounter all the extremes of weather: frigid cold as they navigate around the Cape of Good Hope, tossed violently about by both the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, and intense suffocating heat as, twice, they cross the equator—along the west coast and again on the east coast of Africa. The ship is foul; the food nearly inedible—dried pork, rotted potatoes, moldy raisins—the crew surly and mutinous. I am seasick during most of the voyage, but Heathcliff seems to thrive on salt air and squalls. Even during the worst of them, he stays out, his feet firmly planted on the deck, his body braced against the mast, and laughs.
Mark writes Liliane from Tokyo and Kyoto, from Hong Kong and Saigon—on American embassy stationery—and most recently, from the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok. His letters are well written and descriptive. From his hotel window, he describes how he can watch the boats going back and forth across the Chao Phrya River; he also writes how the Bangkok streets are lined with flame-of-the-forest trees, frangipani and bougainvillea; how graceful and attractive the Thai people are—always smiling—and how hospitable. Including Jim Thompson. Already, Mark has dined at his house twice—sitting out on the terrace and watching the silk weavers across the klong—klong, Mark writes, is the Thai word for “canal.” Jim Thompson has suggested that they go up-country together to explore caves that are reputed to be filled with statues. “This country,” Mark writes, “as you can imagine—for I do credit you with an imagination, even though you persist in saying that you have none—is full of wonderful opportunities, unexplored regions—”
Pausing, Liliane reflects how, instinctively, perhaps not to alarm Mark with her intellectual pursuits or goals, she has never told him that she is writing a novel and that she reads poetry for pleasure.
“What are you thinking about?” Mark, from time to time, asks her. No doubt, he intuits that Liliane is concealing something important from him.
“Nothing,” Liliane tells him.
The letter continues: “I think of you being here a great deal and spend long periods imagining how both of us would feel. I hope very much you will decide to come to Bangkok and I don’t think I will be dragging a pair of sore feet around or that you will be any sort of burden.”
Fifty years earlier, on their honeymoon, Mark’s newlywed aunt and husband rode from Bangkok to Rangoon on elephant back. It took them three months.
Mark ends his letter by again urging Liliane to join him: “I want you to come very badly, Lil. Thailand is a marvelously warm and distant place.”
Bangkok is one of the hottest cities in the world. From March to May, the temperature soars to 105 humid degrees Fahrenheit. The tar roads in the city melt and are littered with stuck shoes pedestrians have left in their hurry to cross.
Rereading the last lines of Mark’s letter, Liliane packs a small suitcase in her head: a few skirts, two or three T-shirts, jeans, a pair of sturdy sandals. She will travel light and not be a burden.
Liliane’s favorite class is taught by Professor Paul de Man. Born in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1919, Paul de Man immigrated to the United States after the war (and after he translated Moby-Dick into Dutch) and taught first at Bard College before he obtained a junior fellowship at Harvard—a prestigious award given to scholars whose work holds exceptional promise. His class is a graduate seminar on allegory in the French poets: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. (Given her lackluster college record, Liliane is not quite sure how she was admitted to this exclusive class, except, perhaps, for the fact that she speaks fluent French.) Blond with Teutonic good looks and remarkably bright blue eyes, Paul de Man is mild-mannered and soft-spoken. He begins the seminar by quoting Blaise Pascal, “Quand on lit trop vite ou trop doucement on n’entend rien”—When one reads too quickly or too slowly, one hears nothing.
“Allegory,” de Man continues, “as we all know, is a literary figure where one thing refers to something else. A dove is the classical example. In a poem a dove is an allegory of peace but the reader also right away recognizes that a dove is a bird although in the poem it refers to something else. All narratives are allegories because of the gap that occurs between what the narrative does not say and what the reader does not say—a gap, in other words, between reference and referent. This gap leads to a misreading and misreading is an integral part of meaning. Meaning, in fact, relies on misreading; meaning is always plural.”
The seminar meets once a week for two hours in a classroom on the third floor of Sever Hall. It is made up of ten students—most of them graduate students and most of them male—all of whom are ambitious, immersed in their work, and pay no attention to the
undergraduate Liliane. Busy taking notes—she can’t write fast enough—Liliane does not notice them either. For class, she reads Baudelaire’s dark confessional ruminations of Les Fleurs du mal, Rimbaud’s rebellious, deranged verse of Le Bateau ivre as well as the exhilarating and confounding prose poems of Illuminations.
Instead of an exam, the students in de Man’s seminar are required to write a term paper. Liliane chooses to write a paper on Mallarmé’s three “Éventail”—Fan—poems. Working on it for weeks, she steeps herself deeply into the text, examining the French words, calice, fiole, the rhymes, plonge, mensonge the homophones, apparaisse, sans paresse. “The subject of the first “Éventail” poem,” she writes, “is Mallarmé’s wife’s fan and it begins with the line Avec comme pour langage—With as for language—and it is those three linked prepositions that will establish the relationship between the language and the beating of the fan.” In the second stanza, the poet sees the beating reflected in a mirror, and through the process of reflection sees it become solidified into a wing. “The fan,” Liliane writes, “is a reflection and not a real fan, and the beating is the Idea of beating and not the beating itself.”
“How does one distinguish literary language from ordinary language? And when does journalism become literature and when does memoir become literary?” de Man asks the seminar students as he walks over and leans on Liliane’s desk to make his point. “The specificity of language rests in rhetoric. Rhetoric is the classical art of eloquence; it is associated with false and flowery language—tropes, metaphors, similes, and so forth. A rhetorical question is a question that does not require an answer and is therefore not a serious question. My point is that I believe all language—whether literary or ordinary—to be rhetorical, and rhetoric, by its very nature, deconstructs any presence of authenticity or reliability in the text.”
Paul de Man is standing so close to Liliane that if she were to move her arm just a fraction she would touch his. She can also smell his aftershave, a vetiver scent, and a faint trace of tobacco—Gauloises, she imagines—and something else she cannot quite place that makes her think of starched shirts. Keeping her head bent, she does not dare look up at him as he talks, afraid it will distract her from understanding what he is saying:
