“I hate Italy,” pronounced Bonnie. “I like it better in France.”
“How do you know? You’ve just got here.”
“The Italians are very dirty, isn’t it?” Mademoiselle reluctantly parted with an unclassifiable facial expression.
“Ah,” said the landlady, smothering Bonnie in a vast convex embrace. “Mother of God, it is a beautiful child!” Her breasts hung over the stunned little girl like sandbags.
“Dieu!” Mademoiselle sighed. “These Italians are a religious people!”
The Easter table was decorated with lugubrious crosses made of dried palmetto leaves. There was gnocchi and vino da Capri for dinner, and a purple card with cupids pasted in the centre of gold radiations resembling medals of state. In the afternoon they walked along the pulverized white roads and up the steep alleys gashed with bright rags hung out to dry in the glare. Bonnie waited in her mother’s room while Alabama prepared for rehearsal. The child amused herself by sketching in the rocker.
“I cannot make a good likeness,” she announced, “so I have changed to caricature. It is Daddy when he was a young man.”
“Your father’s only thirty-two,” said Alabama.
“Well, that’s quite old, wouldn’t you say?”
“Not so old as seven, my dear.”
“Oh, of course—if you count backwards,” agreed Bonnie.
“And if you begin in the middle, we are a very young family all round.”
“I should like to begin when I am twenty, and have six children.”
“How many husbands?”
“Oh, no husbands. They shall, perhaps, be away at the time,” said Bonnie vaguely. “I have seen them so in the movies.”
“What was that remarkable film?”
“It was about dancing, so Daddy took me. There was a lady in the Russian Ballet. She had no children but a man and they both cried a lot.”
“It must have been interesting.”
“Yes. It was Gabrielle Gibbs. Do you like her, Mummy?”
“I’ve never seen her except in life, so I couldn’t say.”
“She is my favorite actress. She is a very pretty lady.”
“I must see the picture.”
“We could go if we were in Paris. I could carry my silver sac de soirée.”
Every day during rehearsals, Bonnie sat in the cold theatre with Mademoiselle, lost under the dim trimmings like rose and gold cigar bands, terrified by the seriousness and the emptiness and Madame Sirgeva. Alabama went over and over the adagio.
“Blue devils,” gasped the maîtresse. “Nobody has done that with two turns! Ma chére Alabama—you will see with the orchestra that it cannot be!”
On their way home they passed a man ponderously swallowing frogs. The frogs’ legs were tied to a string, and he pulled them up again out of his stomach, as many as four at a time. Bonnie gloated with disgusted delight. It made her quite sick to see; she was fascinated.
The pasty food at the boardinghouse gave Bonnie a rash.
“It is ringworm from the filth,” said Mademoiselle. “If we stay, Madame, it may turn to erysipelas,” she threatened. “Besides, Madame, our bath is dirty!”
“It is quite like broth, mutton broth,” corroborated Bonnie distastefully, “only without the peas!”
“I had wanted to give Bonnie a party,” said Alabama.
“Could Madame suggest where I might get a thermometer?” Mademoiselle interjected hastily.
Nadjya, the Russian, unearthed a little boy for Bonnie’s party. Madame Sirgeva incalculably furnished a nephew. Though all of Naples was covered with buckets of anemones and night-blooming stock, pale violets like enameled breastpins, strawflowers and bachelor’s buttons, and the covetous enveloping bloom of azaleas, the landlady insisted upon decorating the children’s table with poisonous pink-and-yellow paper flowers. She produced two children for the party, one with a sore under its nose, and one who had had to have its head recently shaved. The children arrived in corduroy pants worn over the seat like a convict’s head. The table was loaded with rock cakes and honey and warm pink lemonade.
The Russian boy brought a monkey which hopped about the table tasting from all the jams and throwing the spoons about recklessly. Alabama watched them under the scraggly palms from the low sill of her room; the French governess tore ineffectually about on the outskirts of their activities.
“Tiens, Bonnie! Et toi, ah, mon pauvre chou-chou!” she shrieked without pause.
It was a witch’s incantation. What magic philter was the woman brewing to be drunk by the passing years? Alabama’s senses floated off on dreams. A sharp scream from Bonnie startled her back to reality.
“Ah, quelle sale bête!”
“Well, come here, dear, we’ll put iodine on it,” Alabama called from the casement.
“So Serge takes the monkey,” Bonnie stammered, “and he th—r—o—ws him at me, and he is horrible, and I hate the children of Naples!”
Alabama held the child on her knee. Her body felt very little and helpless to her mother.
“Monkeys have to have something to eat,” Alabama teased.
“You are lucky he has not bitten your nose,” Serge commented unsolicitiously. The two Italians were only concerned about the animal, rubbing him affectionately and soothing him with dreamy Italian prayer like a love song.
“Che—che—che,” chittered the parakeet.
“Come,” said Alabama, “I will tell you a story.”
The young eyes hung suspended on her words like drops of rain under a fence rail; their little faces followed hers like pale pads of clouds beneath the moon.
“I would never have come,” declaimed Serge, “if I had known there wasn’t going to be Chianti!”
“Nor I, Hail Mary!” echoed the Italians.
“Don’t you want to hear about the Greek temples, all bright reds and blues?” Alabama insisted.
“Si, Signora.”
“Well—they are white now because the ages have worn away their original, dazzling——”
“Mummy, may I have the compote?”
“Do you want to hear about the temples or not?” said Alabama crossly. The table came to a dead expectant silence.
“That’s all I know about them,” she concluded, feebly.
“Then may I please now have the compote?” Bonnie dripped the purple stain down the knife pleats of her best dress.
“Doesn’t Madame feel that we have had enough for one afternoon?” said Mademoiselle in dismay.
“I feel sick, a little,” confessed Bonnie. She was ghastly pale.
The doctor said he thought it was the climate. Alabama forgot to get the emetic he prescribed at the drugstore and Bonnie lay in bed for a week, living on limewater and mutton broth while her mother rehearsed the waltz. Alabama was distracted; Madame Sirgeva had been right—she couldn’t do two turns with the orchestra unless it slowed up. The Maestro was adamant.
“Mother of women,” the girls breathed from the dark corners. “She will break her back so!”
Somehow she got Bonnie well enough to board the train. She bought them a spirit lamp for the voyage.
“But what will we do with it, Madame?” asked Mademoiselle suspiciously.
“The British always have a spirit lamp,” explained Alabama, “so when the baby gets croup they can take care of it. We never have anything, so we get to know the inside of many hospitals. The babies all come out the same, only later in life some prefer spirit lamps and some prefer hospitals.”
“Bonnie has not got croup, Madame,” Mademoiselle reproved huffily. “Her illness is the result solely of our visit.” She wanted the train to start to extricate herself and Bonnie from Neapolitan confusions. Alabama wanted also to be extricated.
“We should have taken the train-de-luxe,” said Bonnie. “I am in rather a hurry to get to Paris.”
“This is the train-de-luxe, snob!”
Bonnie gazed at her mother in impassive skepticism.
“There are m
any things in the world you don’t know, Mummy.”
“It’s just barely possible.”
“Ah,” fluttered Mademoiselle approvingly, “Au ’voir, Madame, au ’voir! And good luck!”
“Good-bye, Mummy. Do not dance too hard!” called Bonnie perfunctorily as the train moved off.
The poplar trees before the station jingled their tops like pockets full of silver money; the train whistled mournfully as it rounded a bend.
“For five lire,” said Alabama to the dog-eared cabdriver, “you must take me to the Opera House.”
She sat alone that night without Bonnie. She hadn’t realized how much fuller life was with Bonnie there. She was sorry she hadn’t sat more with her child when she was sick in bed. Maybe she could have missed rehearsals. She had wanted her child to see her dance the ballet. In one more week of rehearsal she would have her debut as a ballerina!
Alabama threw the broken fan and the pack of picture postcards that Bonnie had left behind in the wastebasket. They seemed hardly worth sending after her to Paris. She sat down to mend her Milanese tights. The Italian toe shoes were good but Italian tights were too heavy—they cut your thighs on the arabesque croisé.
II
“D’you have a good time?”
David met Bonnie under the pink explosive apple trees where Lake Geneva spread a net below the undulating acrobacies of the mountains. Opposite the Vevey Station a bridge of pencil strokes clipped pleasantly over the river; the mountains braced themselves out of the water on the Dorothy Perkins stems and thongs of purple clematis. Nature had padded every crack and crevice with floral stuffing; narcissus banded the mountains in a milky way, the houses tethered themselves to the earth with browsing cows and pots of geraniums. Ladies in lace with parasols, ladies in linen with white shoes, ladies in tangerine smiles patronized the elements in the station square. Lake Geneva, pounded for so many summers by the cruel brightness, lay shaking its fist at the high heavens, swearing up at God from the security of the Swiss Republic.
“Lovely,” replied Bonnie succinctly.
“How was Mummy?” pursued David.
Dressed in a catalogue of summer, even Bonnie noticed that his clothes were a little amazing, suggesting a studied sartorial selection. He was dressed in pearly gray and he looked as if he had stepped down inside his angora sweater and flannel pants with such precision that he had hardly deranged their independent decorative purpose. If he hadn’t been so handsome he could never have achieved so speculative and tentative an effect. Bonnie was proud of her father.
“Mummy was dancing,” said Bonnie.
Deep shadows sprawled about the streets of Vevey like lazy summer drunkards; clouds full of moisture floated like lily pads in the luminous puddle of the sky.
They mounted the hotel bus.
“The rooms, Prince,” said the sad, suave hotel man, “will be eight dollars a day because of the fête.”
The valet carried their luggage to a white-and-gold encrusted suite.
“Oh, what a beautiful sitting room!” ejaculated Bonnie. “There is even a telephone. Such ‘élégance’!”
She spun about, switching on the lurid floor lamps.
“And I have a room to myself, and a bath of my own,” she hummed. “It was nice of you, Daddy, to give Mademoiselle ‘vacances’!”
“How would the royal visitor like her bath?” said David.
“Well—cleaner, please, than in Naples.”
“Was your bath dirty in Naples?”
“Mummy said ‘no’——” said Bonnie hesitantly, “but Mademoiselle said ‘yes.’ Everybody gives me much contrary advice,” she confided.
“Alabama should have seen to your bath,” said David.
He heard the thin treble voice singing to itself in the tub, “Savez-vous planter les choux——” There was no sound of splashing.
“Are you washing your knees?”
“I haven’t got to them yet—’à la manière de chez-nous, à la manière de chez-nous’——”
“Bonnie, you must hurry up.”
“Can I stay up till ten o’clock tonight?—‘on les plante avec le nez’——”
Bonnie tore giggling through the rooms.
The sun winked in the gold braid, the curtains blew softly in the ghostly breeze, the lamps glowed like abandoned campfires under their pink shades in the daylight. The flowers in the room were pretty. There must be a clock. Round and round the child’s brain raced contentedly. The tops of the trees outside were shiny blue.
“Didn’t Mummy say anything?” said David.
“Oh, yes,” said Bonnie, “she gave me a party.”
“That was nice; tell me about it.”
“Well,” said Bonnie, “there was a monkey, and I was sick, and Mademoiselle cried about the preserves on my dress.”
“I see——well, what did Mummy say?”
“Mummy said if it weren’t for the orchestra she could do two turns.”
“It must have been very interesting,” said David.
“Oh, yes,” Bonnie compromised, “it was very interesting. Daddy——”
“Yes, dear?”
“I love you, Daddy.”
David laughed in little sharp jerks like a person making tatting.
“Well, you’d better.”
“I think so, too. Do you think I could sleep in your bed tonight?”
“Of course not!”
“It would be very comfortable.”
“Your own is just the same.”
The child’s tone changed to sudden practicality. “It’s safer near you. No wonder Mummy liked sleeping in your bed.”
“How silly!”
“When I am married all my family will sleep together in a large bed. Then I shall be quite easy about them, and they will not be afraid of the dark,” went on the child. “You liked being near your parents until you had Mummy, didn’t you?”
“We had our parents—then we had you. The present generation is always the one without the comfort of people to lean on.”
“Why?”
“Because solace, Bonnie, is an affair of retrospect and expectation. If you don’t hurry up, our friends will be here before you are dressed.”
“Are there children coming?”
“Yes, I am taking the family of one of my friends for you to meet. We are going to Montreux to see the dancing. But,” said David, “the sky is clouding over. It looks like rain.”
“Daddy, I hope not!”
“So do I. Something always spoils a party, monkeys or rain. There are our friends now.”
Behind their governess three blond children traversed the hotel court through the thin sun pinking suggestively the trunks of the firs.
“Bonjour,” said Bonnie, extending her hand limply in a juvenile interpretation of a grande dame. Inconsistently she pounced on the little girl. “Oh, but you are dressed as Alice in Wonderland!” she shrieked.
The child was several years older than Bonnie.
“Grüss Gott,” she answered demurely, “you too have on a pretty dress.”
“Et bonjour, Mademoiselle!” The two little boys were younger. They clambered over Bonnie with the stiff military formality of the Swiss schoolboy.
The children were very decorative under the vista of cropped plane trees. The green hills stretched away like a canvas sea to faint recesses of legend. Pleasantly loitering mountain vegetation dangled over the hotel front in swaying clots of blue and mauve. The childish voices droned through the mountain clarity conversing intimately in the sense of seclusion conveyed by the overhanging Alps.
“What is this ‘it’ I saw in the papers?” said the eight-year-old voice.
“Don’t be silly, it’s only sex appeal,” answered the voice of ten.
“Only beautiful ladies can have it in the movies,” said Bonnie.
“But sometimes, don’t men have it too?” said the little boy disappointed.
“Father says everybody does,” called the older girl.
“Well, Mother said only a few. What did your parents say, Bonnie?”
“They didn’t say anything, since I had not read it in the papers.”
“When you are older,” said Genevra, “you will—if it is still there.”
“I saw my father in a shower bath,” offered the smallest boy expectantly.
“That’s nothing,” sniffed Bonnie.
“Why is it nothing?” the voice insisted.
“Why is it something?” said Bonnie.
“I have swimmed with him naked.”
“Children—children!” reproved David.
Black shadows fell on the water, echoes of nothing poured down the hills and steamed over the lake. It began to rain; a Swiss downpour soaked the earth. The flat bulbous vines about the hotel windows bled torrents over the ledges; the heads of the dahlias bent with the storm.
“How can they have the fête in the rain?” the children cried in dismay.
“Perhaps the ballet will wear their ‘caoutchouc’ as we have done,” said Bonnie.
“I’d rather they had trained seals anyway,” said the little boy optimistically.
The rain was a slow sparkling leak from a lachrymose sun. The wooden platforms about the estrade were damp and soaked with dye from the wet serpentine and sticky masses of confetti. Fresh wet light through the red and orange mushrooms of shiny umbrellas glowed like a lamp store display; a fashionable audience glistened in bright cellophane slickers.
“What if it rains down his horn?” said Bonnie, as the orchestra appeared beneath the rain-washed set of chinchilla-like mountains.
“But it might be pretty,” protested the boy. “Sometimes in my bath when I sink beneath the water I make the most beautiful noises by blowing.”
“It is ravishing,” pronounced Genevra, “when my brother blows.”
The damp air flattened the music like a sponge; girls brushed the rain from their hats; the rolling back of the tarred canvas exposed the slick and dangerous boards.
“It is Prometheus they’re going to give,” said David, reading the programme. “I will tell you the story afterwards.”
From a whirr of revolving leaps Lorenz collected his brown magnificence, clenching his fists in the air and chinning the mystery of the mountain sky. His bare rain-polished body tortured itself to inextricable postures, straightened, and dropped to the floor with the suspended float of falling paper.
Save Me the Waltz: A Novel Page 21
