The Great and the Good

by Michel Déon

  They kissed like brother and sister, but in the hallway she called him back.

  ‘You know I don’t go in for sentiment much, but I liked what we had. And giving you Key Largo was me being generous in a way that’s not really me. What I’m saying is, I look at myself and I’m pleased with myself. Let’s stay the way we are; it’s rare for people of our age. And don’t come and see my play; I have a feeling you won’t like it.’

  ‘I’m going to come.’

  ‘You do like taking risks …’

  She stroked his cheek with her fingertips.

  ‘Mind how you go in the next few weeks. You’re not cured yet. When you are, you’ll see … it’ll be your turn to do the breaking up.’

  His appointment with Brustein was not till the end of the afternoon. He emptied drawers and cupboards: a suit, a sheepskin jacket, underwear, books for his classes and his preparatory notes, Augusta’s sari that would carry her scent until the end of time. He presented Captain Morgan’s officer’s trunk to Mrs Paley: it was too big, heavy and impractical. He bought himself a kitbag instead, which he deposited at the left luggage office at Grand Central Station. Towns think that we love them. This is a major misapprehension. What we share with them is our moods. Arthur’s mood was simultaneously light-hearted, critical, and close to despair. Somewhere in this termite heap of concrete, steel and glass, Augusta was breathing, resting her forehead against a windowpane and watching, without seeing them, the first autumn russets of the foliage of Central Park. From Columbus Circle Arthur made his way to Broadway and in two hours walked down as far as Battery Park. Here, all through the summer, at daybreak, he had run, breathing steadily, thinking he was breathing the air of the open sea. Isn’t everything an illusion? The trees had shrunk, the lawns had been worn threadbare. On benches moribund figures threw bread at pigeons. A sticky easterly wind blew waves of unidentifiable decay over him. Oil-stained seagulls skimmed at ground level along the dockside, screeching like children whose throats had been cut. Erect on her island, lapped by black water, Bartholdi’s Liberty, idiotically victorious, held up her pistachio ice-cream cornet. After his run he would buy some croissants at an Italian bakery where he was served by a girl with a mop of platinum hair and a lisp. ‘Two croithants or four croithants?’ When it was four croissants it meant he had someone to share his life with, and she would laugh. Croissant crumbs in the bed, and then the last croissants they had eaten together on the pavement, with the taxi waiting: ‘… Arthur and Elizabeth ate croissants in Rector Street and said goodbye to each other after a night of love.’

  Had it been his fault he had lost her? Not imagining that Elizabeth could be vulnerable, he had not known that he could be so vulnerable either. On this autumnal late afternoon, everything suddenly seemed extraordinarily painful. He turned round and headed back towards Broadway. He was walking twenty paces behind a tiny old woman in black, her shoulders rounded, her back stooped by the weight of years, when two boys on roller skates overtook him, flanked the old woman, knocked her down, and snatched the shopping bag she was trailing in the dust of the path. The skaters raced away with long strides. She shook her mittened hand at them.

  ‘Mascalzone! Mascalzone!’

  Arthur helped her to her feet and dusted her down. She wrenched her elbow away and threw him a look of hate.

  ‘Vai affanculo!’

  Other passers-by ran or limped up to them.

  ‘What are you doing to her? Can’t you see she’s just a poor old woman? Leave her alone.’

  ‘Some hoodlums stole her bag.’

  A fat, vulgarly made-up woman said, ‘Did she only have one bag?’

  The tiny old woman carried on shouting and waving her fist.

  ‘Mascalzone! Mascalzone!’

  More pedestrians arrived. They were laughing. A young man in a Davy Crockett jacket and a Stetson took charge of her.

  ‘I know her. There’s nothing in her bag. She’s crazy and her son looks after her. He has a bakery on Bridge Street. Come on, Signora Perditi, you need to go home now.’

  ‘La mia sporta! La mia sporta!’

  ‘You should have run after those hoodlums,’ the fat, over-made-up woman said to him.

  ‘You try chasing kids on roller skates, lady, then tell me what it’s like.’

  ‘There are no real men left, you’re all losers.’

  The man in the fringed jacket shrugged, took the little old lady’s arm, and led her, still grumbling, towards the park’s exit. The fat woman made her way to a bench shaded by a copper beech and sat staring out at the estuary, her patent bag firmly gripped across her bulging thighs.

  Arthur followed the unsteady couple at a distance. Stopping outside the Italian bakery, he saw the owner take his old mother’s arm and thank the man in the Stetson and fringed jacket. The girl behind the counter watched her boss with an amused smile.

  ‘Do you have any croissants left?’ Arthur asked.

  She smiled happily when she recognised him.

  ‘Two or four?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘You got lucky, there’th jutht two left. So you’re on your own today?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘I’m like you, I don’t like being on my own.’

  From the back of the shop came the old woman’s piercing cries.

  ‘Due mascalzoni! Due, mi ascolta, figlio!’

  ‘Sì, Mamma, ti sento!’

  The girl smiled.

  ‘I’th not the firtht time. Are you on holiday?’

  He paused and then decided not to tell her his life story, pleasant as it was in this gigantically swollen city to feel as if you lived in a village where everyone knew everything.

  The working day was ending at Jansen and Brustein. Brustein saw him in his office.

  ‘I don’t have much time, I’m afraid. Porter told me. Those things are beyond words. If you come at Christmas, call me. We spend the holidays in New Jersey. Begonia has decorated a little house there very nicely. She’ll be thrilled to see you again. You made a terrific impression. Once you pass that difficult exam of yours, the door’s always open. Excuse me for being so hurried. I’d given up expecting you. At Christmas we’ll tell each other everything.’

  He saw him to the office door, then held him back.

  ‘By the way, I must tell you … do you remember? … Something funny happened. The Amazonian company we sold to that de Souza … well, of course there was no oil. No. Not a drop. But what there was, was extensive emerald deposits. An absolute fortune. Mr de Souza cashed in. It’s what we call a good play. We can’t complain. We’re looking after his business now. Well, weren’t we his inspiration? Funny guy! A head like an eagle. He phoned me yesterday to say he was getting married, in style, in Acapulco. The way movie stars do, or crooks on the run. But how dumb am I! He must have invited you. He owes you, does he not—’

  ‘It must be an oversight.’

  ‘Sure, be patient. He’s chartering a plane for his guests, and everyone will have a week in a hotel, he says. He’s marrying a Brazilian.’

  ‘It’s impossible anyhow. My classes start again in a week’s time.’

  ‘Look, let’s keep in touch. Take Zava with you on your way out. I have an idea she’ll be happy to talk to you. She’s an exceptional girl, got a great future. It’s a shame she’s a bit … awkward physically. Don’t bother with the others. They’ve already forgotten you.’

  He was right. In the round room, where they were tidying their workspaces and switching off their phones and telex terminals, his former colleagues hardly recognised him. One said anxiously, ‘Are you coming back?’

  ‘No. Don’t worry.’

  Zava was on her last phone call. She made a sign that he should sit down opposite her. A pink late-afternoon light washed the New Jersey horizon, reflected in the dark waters of the Hudson. Zava hung up.

  ‘Brustein told me you’d be coming by before you went back to Beresford. I heard … I feel so sad for you—’

  ‘How did
he know?’

  ‘Allan Porter often calls. Almost every day. You weren’t there when it happened?’

  ‘No! I’ve given myself enough regrets to last me the rest of my life.’

  ‘I’m so sorry. I suppose you’d prefer not to talk about it. Even though, right now, it won’t interest you very much, I want to tell you that I’m going to have my operation next month. The surgeon told me I can pay over three years. It’s an opportunity I can’t turn down. When are you coming back to New York?’

  ‘The end of October, to see a play a friend’s putting on.’

  ‘I’m certain we’ll see each other again.’

  The good news was that Getulio was not at Beresford. Theories circulated. Had he stayed on the beach at Acapulco, roaring drunk, after his sister’s wedding? Or had the university authorities got wind of his brief prison visit, which had, after all, been for a reason most of his fellow students would have viewed as harmless? To say he was missed would be an overstatement. Many remembered card games that had been more than dubious. No one had ever caught him out, but there was a generally held conviction that his luck had all the hallmarks of a pact with the queen of spades. His elegance had dazzled them, his wit intimidated them, his pretensions exasperated them, and his professors had shown him considerable indulgence as, with all his youth and gifts, he had squandered his talents and used his expensive studies to support his lazy life. Like all curiosities, however, he faded quickly enough, and within two weeks of the new term no one talked about Getulio Mendosa any more, or his superb 1930 Cord, his Inverness cape, his sister and Elizabeth Murphy, whose appearance at the ball had earned him so much prestige. Arthur was content. After the fortnight at Key Largo and the drama of going back to Paris, he had a blank slate. He buried himself in work with the feeling that, in work at least, he was capable of turning the tables on events. He knew that he had much long and slow reflection ahead of him about the serial sincerities of women. An inexhaustible subject.

  At the end of October he got on a train for New York after a short phone call with Elizabeth, who tried again to dissuade him from coming to the play she had been rehearsing for months in such secrecy. He called Zava at Jansen and Brustein with the idea of getting her to share the ordeal with him. Someone told him that her operation had surpassed expectations, that she was recovering at the Brusteins’ house in New Jersey, and would be back at work in mid-November.

  The show was to be performed in a condemned former customs warehouse on the bank of the Hudson. A team of volunteers had cleared out the sinister-looking building, whose expanse was strewn with rubble, machine tools and rusting crates. Steel girders supported a corrugated-iron roof that screeched at the slightest gust of wind. Inside, garden chairs and benches were arranged in a semicircle around a primitive stage hidden by a curtain made of two sheets crudely sewn together and splashed with paint. Off-Broadway theatre was so fashionable that year that the space was full for the first and – as will be seen – last night. The audience, half café society, half Greenwich Village avant-garde, quickly became impatient, and as they started to stamp their feet they raised a clinging cloud of dust that had an ancient smell of rotting fish and hung in the air as the curtain, not without difficulty, opened on the set of a hospital room – bed, chair, armchair, and, for reasons that never appreared in the script, a candlestick. Elizabeth, who had written and directed the play, had also given herself the leading role, of a psychopath whose doctor was analysing her in hospital. A number of gasps were heard at the crudest parts of the script. After an hour the audience was yawning at the torrent of clichés. Arthur recognised the character of the doctor or analyst: it was the young black man in the pink jacket he had glimpsed in the street outside Elizabeth’s apartment. When his wise words appeared to be inadequate to the task of calming his psychopathic patient, Sam – his theatrical name – ordered her to strip off. This was the part the audience had been waiting for. They had hardly stumbled down to the gloomy dockside for an ordinary theatrical performance. They were here for something new, something earth-shattering, shocking, ‘sublime’, and the level of expectancy was so great and so fixed in their minds that when the doctor, apparently tired of being rebuffed by the wall his patient had set up, pushed her, naked, back onto the camp bed, the expectancy gave way to relief, as if people were at last going to find out why they had come. Their wishes were about to be granted, because this was the point of the play: a scandal in the name of the divine rights of the theatre. Arthur had felt uncomfortable at Elizabeth undressing, and he closed his eyes to keep his memories of her more modest undressing at Rector Street and her apartment intact. He opened them when the audience let out a gasp of shock. The doctor had opened his white coat to provide his patient with a radical cure, in this case a male member of unusual dimensions and a pinkness reminiscent of an elephant’s trunk, which he then proceeded to plunge between his patient’s thighs, which were openly on view to the audience. Elizabeth apparently had little difficulty in acting out her pleasure. For its part, the audience quickly overcame its embarrassment to start beating time to the accelerating rhythm of the performance until the curtain fell, which it did lopsidedly, so that the right-hand half of the stalls enjoyed the unscripted sight of Elizabeth standing up and wiping herself, pulling her knickers back on, and offering her partner a towel.

  The reactions of the Greenwich Village set were as divided as those of café society. There was applause and whistling, and some scattered boos. Arthur kept his composure sufficiently not to react, and he was conscious in any case that his interpretation of what he had seen was too personal. Some of the audience seemed unaware of the derelict customs shed on the brink of collapse, the poverty of the set, the tedium of the psychoanalysis and the clumsiness of the actors, and spoke of genius. Arthritic chairs scraped and benches were overturned at the press of fans hurrying forward to shake hands with Elizabeth and Sam, who had come offstage in dressing gowns to mingle with the audience. Arthur overheard a few remarks that softened his foul mood. ‘I haven’t seen anything quite as beautiful since I saw Larry Olivier play Hamlet.’ ‘What’s tedious about it is that it’s really tedious.’ ‘The moment she takes off her knickers is what you call a “theatrical moment”.’ ‘We never knew Elizabeth had such a pretty p——.’ ‘Well, that is a lot more effective than a vibrator.’ ‘A production that cares about its audience ought to distribute Dr Sam’s phone number.’ ‘If I’d known it was so pornographic I’d have brought my grandmother and my fiancée.’ When he was finally able to get close to Elizabeth, he asked her if she was responsible for the sets too. He had really found them marvellously bold and simple. She turned her back on him.

  The number of audience members who had actually been shocked by the play’s outrageousness was fairly minimal. Everyone was afraid of seeming unenlightened. They were now doubtless waiting for some undeniably explicit follow-up, anything at all as long as it was more daring and tomorrow would relegate this evening’s show to the level of a chamber piece for emancipated actors. As the audience left, their return journey along the dark dockside, stepping cautiously to avoid the train-track sleepers, tank wagons, bulk containers, and the looming dinosaur-like outlines of cranes and mechanical shovels, must have added considerably to the pleasure of the evening’s adventure.

  The following day Arthur met Elizabeth for lunch at Sardi’s, in the main room where, years later, her caricature would be hung with the other kings and queens of Broadway, but in 1956 she was no more than a fringe player, a stylish student agitator, a poor little rich girl who felt her rebellion was a manifestation of a new kind of art. Their overlapping conversations, a dialogue of the deaf that lasted for the duration of their lunch, were all the more acrimonious because the police and New York City authorities had banned the play that morning and condemned the customs shed where its ‘tastelessly provocative’ performance had taken place. Elizabeth virtually accused Arthur of having reported her. They parted on bad-tempered terms in Times Square.

&
nbsp; ‘I don’t give a damn what you think. I warned you. You didn’t understand anything. Go back to Beresford and your little banker’s diploma.’

  ‘You’re being unnecessarily nasty.’

  ‘Yes I am. Which is another good reason for you not to see me again.’

  They were more cross with themselves than with each other, but they found it impossible to admit it. Arthur watched Elizabeth’s slim outline grow smaller as she walked away, then hailed a cab and drove off without looking back.

  The subsequent years are of relatively little importance. Zava’s operation was a success and she no longer needed a hearing aid. She could finally cut her hair short. Following Begonia Brustein’s advice, she began to dress better. Her parents died within a few days of each other, a touching symbiosis of a couple who had never learnt how to set down roots in a new life, nor truly wanted to. Endlessly replayed, their memories eventually wore out and all they had left was a daughter from whom destiny separated them more and more as the years went by. Zava moved to Manhattan, to East 70th Street, and Brustein’s intuition was proved right: Miss Gertrude Zavadzinski was an exceptional employee. Following a particularly profitable deal whose details need not concern us, she became a partner and the firm was henceforth known as Jansen, Brustein and Zavadzinski. Zava married a law professor, of Polish origin like her. They had a son they named Arthur, after his godfather. At home the family continued the tradition of speaking French at dinner. Brustein retired as anticipated in 1965 and moved to Seville, bowing to the wish of Begonia who could not bear her life of exile any longer. He sold his shares to Zava, who was not tender-hearted and within two years had moved Jansen aside. The firm was now called Zavadzinski and Co., the ‘Co.’ standing for Arthur, who, in Paris and Zurich, handled Europe in an apparently most modest way: an office on Place de la Bourse plus two secretaries. Deeply opposed to the bondage imposed by car ownership in Paris, he used a bicycle to reach his office from his apartment on the corner of Rue de Verneuil and Rue Allent. He had risen from a life calculated down to the last cent during his university years in the USA to one it would be appropriate to describe as of considerable material comfort. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this still-young man, so shrewd in matters of business, and widely called on as an adviser, is that he had hardly changed his lifestyle. Of course he dressed better, was no longer afraid of a woman’s quick tongue the way he had been with Elizabeth or Augusta, often travelled by private jet, chartered a boat twice a year for a cruise in the Caribbean or Pacific, but most evenings he was home alone, having a tin of sardines or a slice of ham for supper. When a cruise was imminent, he turned to a kindly soul by the name of Madame Claude, whose social circle included a number of mostly very good-looking young women, whose company was enjoyable for a short time and without repercussions. He often visited Brustein in Seville, where they made it a rule to ban all conversation about business. In two rooms of his huge Seville house Brustein had reproduced the little museum dedicated to the memory of his father and the glory of Cézanne, of whom he now owned three pictures, a dozen excellent drawings, and numerous letters. Apart from Cézanne, about whom he was beginning to develop some slight understanding thanks to his friend, Arthur was not terribly interested in painting, but was instead building a fine collection of nineteenth-century first editions. A keen buyer of Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert and Mérimée, he rarely showed his face at sales, delegating the task of buying to a network of agents. Allan Porter’s invisible protection of him had continued until President Eisenhower’s departure from the White House in 1961, at which time the former naval officer and special adviser retired to Florida – to Key Biscayne – to a house with a garden that led down to the waterway where he berthed his sixty-foot cruiser, Cipher, named after his wartime codebreaking exploits. He had only just settled in when Minerva died, taking the collection at an Adventist church. He sent a short notice to those he knew: ‘No condolences, please.’ He often slept on board the Cipher, preferring its cabin to his bedroom, happy to make do with a narrow room whose only decoration was a glass case that contained his American, British and French decorations. On the night of 2 July 1965, Cyclone Amanda hit Florida, tearing the Cipher from its moorings and hurling it into the garden like a ping-pong ball, where it caught fire. All that was recovered from the debris of the cruiser’s shell was a blackened skeleton. Farewell, Porter. He had never asked for anything in return from his protégé, except that he should not forget how generous and disinterested the United States had shown itself towards him.