Madame Pedroti, unrebuked, though she knew Gertrude was holding back on her, took a platinum cigarette case from her black bead bag, extracted a cigarette, and inserted it delicately between her lips.
“There are matches on that dish on the bookshelves.”
“I have my lighter, thank you.” Madame Pedroti put her pudgy hand into the bag again and drew out a lighter to match the cigarette case.
“As for Monsieur Fielding,” Madame Pedroti continued, “he may not be handsome, but he has a—” she held her fingers up-as though she were holding something precious—“a certain something.”
“Oh?” Gertrude said. “Kaarlo and I like him very much.”
“And such a nice boy he has. A pity that big blond girl had to be here to take him right out from under the little Bowen’s nose. Not a very attractive child, I’m afraid. Much too thin and that straight red hair—”
“She’s at a bad age now,” Gertrude said, “but she’ll be coming into her own when Mimi’s overblown and thick about the hips. I don’t imagine her mother was much good as an adolescent.”
“Ah, Madame Bowen,” Madame Pedroti murmured, “so polite and so serious. And always so controlled that it makes one think she must not be happy. You know her so well, dear Madame de Croisenois. Do you think she’s happy?”
Gertrude shrugged. “In a dull sort of way.”
Madame Pedroti smoothed down the shiny black material of her skirt. Any material would immediately look shiny stretched over those drooping thighs, no matter how expensive. “I fear it is worse than that,” she said piously.
Forgetting herself for a moment, Gertrude said, “Yes, I think Emily’s miserable. I think when that kid died everything about their marriage went to pieces. Of course I don’t think Courtney’s too exciting, so I may be prejudiced. The only times Courtney and I are gemütlich—” she said the German word with a side-long glance at Madame Pedroti—“are when we’ve both had too much to drink. Which Emily doesn’t like one bit, I might add.” Then she shut her mouth abruptly.—Betraying your best friend, now, are you? she asked herself.
There was a knock on the outer door and she called, “Come in,” and looked up, waiting, until Dr. Clément came in through the shed, the kitchen, into the big room.
He smiled at Gertrude, bowed formally to Madame Pedroti, saying, “I would know you anywhere by your odor, Madame Pedroti, and not your expensive perfume, but your cigarettes. Egyptian tobacco is not easy to come by.”
“I have my few little connections,” Madame Pedroti said modestly, running her hands again over her thighs which lapped like cushions over the side of her chair.
“And surely you must know that I prefer people not to smoke when they are visiting Madame de Croisenois?”
With a gesture that was at the same time delicate and brutal, Madame Pedroti crushed out the glowing end of her cigarette. “I’m so sorry. I’ll try to remember.” She smiled coyly at Dr. Clément.
For a moment he stood looking at Gertrude, stood leaning against the bookshelves, looking tired, as though he needed the support, only his eyes alert as he looked from Gertrude back to Madame Pedroti.
Madame Pedroti rose, gave a small quiver as though to slide her bulk into its proper mold. “But I must be off! At once! With all my duties at the hotel I can ill spare the time for these visits, delightful though they are. But I do feel that dear Madame de Croisenois must not be left alone and if her old friends don’t stand by her who will!”
“Old friend, my Aunt Fanny,” Gertrude said as Madame Pedroti left after her usual over-long, over-fulsome farewells. “If she feels that way why does she come?”
“Why?” Clément asked, sitting by the hearth. “Does she want something from you?”
Gertrude shook her head. “No. To give her credit I think it’s something more subtle than that. Clément,” she demanded, “why am I sliding so swiftly towards perdition?”
“I think you only think you are. Or is it that you want to? Which, Gertrude?”
Gertrude shook her head. “I’m tired. Tired in all the nooks and crannies of my body. And in my soul, too. Pedroti always succeeds in upsetting me even when she doesn’t say anything upsetting. But I’ve been behaving, I really have.” She looked at him pleadingly. But one of a hundred patients she was to Clément, so how could be know how she listened for the sound of his footsteps almost as she listened for Kaarlo’s?
As though he could see into her he said, “I’m sorry I couldn’t come at my usual time.”
“I suppose you had an emergency.”
“It has been a day of emergencies. And I’ve just now finished in the operating theatre. Everything—aside from Madame Pedroti—is all right with you?”
Gertrude shrugged. “This is the best of all possible worlds. Every day in every way I’m getting better and better. Into each life some rain must fall. Oh, sure Clément, everything’s just dandy.”
He came over from the hearth and sat down on the couch beside her, his fingers closing firmly over her wrist. “Have you taken your temperature today?”
“What’s the use? You know what it’ll be.”
“However I asked you—and you promised—to keep a daily record for me. We will take it now.”
As he looked at the thermometer she said. “When you go take that overblown bag of fruit Pedroti left and throw it away for me, will you? She brings me the stuff that’s gone too rotten to be used at the hotel.”
He nodded, but did not get up to leave. Instead he continued thoughtfully to study her.
“When am I going to be allowed to live like a human being again?” she asked.
“When your body is ready.” His voice was, as always, patient and quiet with her, no matter how often she asked the same questions. “And you can get well, Gertrude,” Clément went on. “You can even do it here at the chalet, though you would do it in considerably less time if you would come into the sanatorium.”
“Why can’t you leave me alone about it!” Gertrude cried. “You know I won’t! I can’t!”
“Won’t, perhaps, but you can.”
“Shut up, Clément, shut up! Let’s change the subject. Let’s talk about you. Aside from your beautiful wife, of course, and in the full realization that I am not your type, what kind of woman is?”
He raised his eyebrows. “No particular type, my dear Gertrude. Just certain individuals.”
“Well, what individuals? Name one. And don’t tell me it’s none of my business. I know it. Be a nice guy and satisfy my curiosity and name one anyhow.”
“I can’t think of anyone you might know,” he said lightly, “except perhaps our friend Mrs. Bowen.”
“Emily!” Gertrude said incredulously.
“Emily.”
“The nice, quiet, monogamous, stable one, eh, who’ll never kick over the traces? Not unless I know Emily a lot less well than I think I do. One thing I have discovered since I’ve been ill, though, is that nobody ever knows anybody, and maybe least of all the people who are closest to them. Sort of a business of not being able to see the trees for the woods. We all live in the little isolated prisons of our own bodies and there’s no real contact with any other human being. That’s what sex is, in a way, isn’t it, a desperate striving for contact? With which cheerful Thought For Today I will bid you good afternoon.”
Michel Clément laughed, the sound coming fresh and alive into the room. “You’re quite a girl, Gertrude. Put your talents to getting well, will you?” He bent down, patted her hand, and left her.
One leaves Mimi and Sam alone, Virginia thought, leaves them standing, warmed by the exciting fires of discovery, in the cold corridors of the hotel, surrounded but somehow not touched by the steel cold air of midafternoon with night already seeping like black fog into corners and crevasses. And then perhaps they will move down the vestibule again with every intention of going after Virginia, but stopping there, just outside the door of the suite, standing there, their coats touching, though their hands, their lips are
not yet ready, standing there with life bursting out from them, so that people leaving and entering, coming out of or going in to the hotel rooms, must surely feel it and take warmth from it, as the seed underground, trapped by the frozen winter earth and the weight of snow pressing from above, still feels the warmth of the sun, and stirs, preparing for life.
And Virginia goes down in the elevator alone, asking for the rez-de-chaussée, hemmed in by the four walls, the confining descending rectangle, terrifyingly small—And why has she always been afraid of elevators, as though when she left them the entire world could have changed, become distorted, disappeared, so that when the door with no seeming assistance from the operator (by what malignant magic?) slid slowly open as the elevator stopped, she might look out into blackness, into nothingness, with the stars receding, smaller and further, dimmer and more distant, expanding madly from the dark core which was the elevator with Virginia perched precariously on the edge.… It stemmed from a childhood game, played with Alice, long since forgotten and therefore doubly horrible, so that even in New York in the familiar tiny olive-green elevator with the iron-grill inner door in which she had once so badly pinched her fingers, even there she would stand, hurrying home from school and starting to tremble imperceptibly as she entered the elevator and pressed the button, and catch her breath with relief as the door opened and there was the familiar buff hall and the red door at the far end that was her door and beyond which lay safety, the family and safety.
The main floor door slid open and there, across from her, was the desk with the concierge and the mailboxes and the green-shaded light and she leaped out of the elevator, across the crack between elevator and floor, the crack which had not expanded to become the void.…
She left the hotel alone and started rather forlornly up the path to Gertrude’s and Kaarlo’s chalet, because that was where they had been going when they met Sam at the entrance to the hotel, and surely it would not be long before Mimi would join her there, and home was no longer a place to which she wanted to go. And Madame de Croisenois could never have been afraid of an elevator and a crack widening and overtaking everything with nothingness, a crack that must quickly be leaped across because, if one did not hurry, the chance for safety might be lost, and one must pursue safety by jumping off the highest diving boards in summer and skiing down the steepest slopes and being the last one in crack-the-whip in winter and jumping over the crack between elevator and floor at all seasons.…
She knocked gently at the chalet, opened the door, calling softly, “May I come in, Madame de Croisenois?”
There was no answer and she went on in, softly, and Gertrude was lying on the couch under the bright plaid of the steamer rug, one thin hand dangling loosely against the floor. Just as Virginia was about to beat a retreat she opened her eyes, but there was a count of fully thirty seconds before she smiled, a blankness during which she returned from wherever she had been.
“Hello, Madame de Croisenois,” Virginia said hesitantly.
Now the smile was more assured. “Hello, Vee.”
“Did I disturb you? Were you asleep?”
“No. Just resting. Madame Pedroti was here and then Dr. Clément, and he left just a few moments ago. Sit down, Vee. It’s nice to see you. I do count on you and Mimi, you know.”
“We count on you, too,” Virginia said solemnly, and suddenly her eyes widened with wild speculation that here at last was someone she could ask about her mother and Mr. Fielding, because surely Madame de Croisenois would know, surely Madame de Croisenois, the heroine, had the answer and would not be grudging in giving it.
“Last night—” Virginia said slowly, not going further into the room, not sitting as Gertrude had asked her to, but standing, rigid, with her back to the partly open door—“last night Mimi and I went into the village for some ice cream for dinner, daddy said we might—”
“That was noble of Courtney,” Gertrude said.
Virginia did not hear. “And we were walking back with the ice cream,” she said, and began to shiver. She walked quickly to the zebra-striped chair and sat down.
“I can’t see you,” Gertrude said.
Virginia got up out of the zebra-striped chair and hitched a stool over to the couch.
Gertrude, not hearing the urgency behind the girl’s meaningless words, rolled onto her side, saying, “Your little face is all pinched with cold. Where’s Mimi?”
“At the hotel, talking with Sam,” Virginia said bleakly.
“Ditching me for young love, eh?” Gertrude asked.
“Oh, she’s coming right along,” Virginia said. “We just happened to meet Sam on our way here. He didn’t go climbing with his father today. He stayed home to take a couple of skiing lessons. So we went up to his hotel room. He wanted to show Mimi a picture of his mother. So I just thought I’d sort of leave them alone for a couple of minutes. The way things are, they don’t get much chance.”
“So it is love?” Gertrude asked.
“Um.”
“So you’re left out in the cold and the tip of your nose gets white and your lips blue. Or is it simply the weather and are you in love, too?”
Virginia shook her head.
“Nobody madly pursuing you, eh?”
“Oh, I’m being pursued, kind of.”
“How can you be pursued, kind of?”
“Well, there’s this boy,” Virginia said, looking down at her feet in the clumsy ski boots with the cuffs of the heavy white socks (borrowed from Emily) turned down over them. “Snider Bean. But as Sam says his father says, Snider’s snide.”
“So snide Snider’s pursuing you?”
“Yes. Well. Yes. Only he’s called Beanie.”
“So what’s wrong with this snide Snider called Beanie? Is he a midget? Does he weigh four hundred pounds? Is he a moron and utterly repulsive?”
“Oh, no. He’s kind of a dream boat. If I took his picture back to school the girls would all die. Only they’d all think I’d bought it somewhere. They’d never think anybody cool like that would give two looks at me.”
“So where’s the catch?” Gertrude asked.
“Madame de Croisenois,” Virginia blurted, deadly earnest, brows furrowed over troubled green eyes, gold of freckles deepening over white skin, fists clenched, “what do you think of anti-Semitism?”
Gertrude held back the laugh that started to rise in her throat. Gertrude, the all-wise, all-knowing, all-loving Madame de Croisenois must not laugh at such seriousness. “Is snide Snider, called Beanie, a Jew?” she asked gently.
“Oh, no. He’s got a hate against Jews. And the other afternoon at the thé dansant he said awful things about Mimi and I walked out on him and now he sort of keeps after me.”
“Go on,” Gertrude said, the headmistress of the school interviewing the troubled student because of course all headmistresses know all the answers to all the problems.
“Well, you see,” Virginia said, “I can’t help feeling kind of pleased and—and flattered—but I don’t think I ought to, but I don’t know exactly how to stop him—and especially I don’t know if I want him to stop. Even if I should.”
—My God, Gertrude thought, how like Emily she sounds.
Aloud she said, “He’s still pretty young, isn’t he, Vee?”
“Oh, no. I think he’s a couple of years older than I am.”
Gertrude smiled again. “Quite grown-up, then. But I think he’s still young enough to change, don’t you?”
“Are people apt to?”
“You know, Virginia,” Gertrude said, suddenly serious, “before the war I was quite thoughtlessly anti-Semitic in a casual way.”
“You, Madame de Croisenois?”
“Yes. Of the ‘some of my best friends are Jews’ school. You see, I wasn’t like your mother. Emily’s the quiet and gentle individualist, isn’t she, who goes her own way, choosing her friends for what she sees in them, not for any of their more obvious attributes of race or social position or money. Just her own private choice.
And even if I think she inclines rather towards lame ducks I admire her for it.”
The door was pushed open again and Mimi came in. “Hi, here I am. Have I missed anything passionately interesting?”
“Of course,” Gertrude said, “but we’re not going to repeat a word of it, are we, Virginia?”
“Not a single syllable.”
Mimi plunked down into a chair and sighed. “I don’t know why everybody is so abominable to me.” She sighed again. “I never used to get into these awful adolescent moods before I got sent off to school. I’m getting as bad as Virginia. Virginia’s a poet so it’s normal for her to have life sad, but it’s not normal for me. And Virginia’s so full of fears. Whenever her mother writes that she’s been skiing or gone for a climb with Kaarlo, Virginia worries retrospectively for at least a week. And now I find myself in the same category. I don’t like the idea of Sam’s going off skiing or climbing with that bad leg of his without my being along to make sure he’s all right. So what is all this worrying? Is it my adolescence catching up with me, or is it just a reaction to the atomic age we live in?”
“Other ages have been frightening, too,” Gertrude said. “There’s always something to be afraid of if you want to look for it. When firearms were discovered people thought the end of the world had come if human beings used such weapons against other human beings. War would become so terrible that it would no longer be possible. But a musket doesn’t seem like something to get into such an uproar over to us, does it? Every age has its own terrors.”
“Of course,” Mimi said. “I should have thought that out for myself, shouldn’t I? So I can’t blame it on the atomic age. Just on myself. And my height.”
“Your what?”
“My height. I’m taller than Sam. And I hate it. I never minded being tall before, but now if I thought cutting my feet off would make any difference I swear I’d do it.”
“It shouldn’t make that much difference,” Gertrude said, smiling.
A Winter's Love Page 18
