That night there was a full moon. Bonnie woke up suddenly as if she had become conscious of a thief in the room; but it was only Flor, wearing the torn bathrobe she had owned since she was fourteen, and that Bonnie never managed to throw away. She was holding a glass of water in her hand, and looking down at her sleeping mother. “Flor, is anything wrong?”
“I was thirsty.” She put the glass on the night table and sank down beside her mother on the floor.
“That Wishart,” said Bonnie, now fully awake, and beginning to stroke Flor’s hair. “He really takes himself for something.”
“What is he taking himself for?”
Bonnie stroked her daughter’s hair, thinking, My mermaid, my prize. The carp had vanished from the dream, leaving an iridescent Flor. No one was good enough for Florence. That was the meaning of the dream. “Your hair is so stiff, honey, it’s full of salt. I wish you’d wear a bathing cap. Flor, have you got a fever or something?” She wants to tell me something, Bonnie thought. Let it be anything except about that boy. Let it be anything but that.
•
At dawn, Wishart, who had been awake most of the night, buckled his suitcase. No porter was around at that hour. He walked to the station in streets where there was still no suggestion of the terrible day. The southern scent, the thin distillation of lemons and geraniums, descended from the hills. Then heat began to tremble; Vespas raced along the port; the white-legged grub tourists came down from the early train. Wishart thought of his new hostess, academic, a husk; she chose the country behind Grasse because of the shades of Gide and Saint-Ex; ghosts who would keep away from her if they knew what was good for them. He climbed into the bus and sat down among working men who had jobs in Grasse, and the sea dropped behind him as he was borne away.
In the rocking bus his head dropped. He knew that he was in a bus and traveling to Grasse, but he saw Glad, aged twelve, going off at dawn with her lunch wrapped in an apron. What about the dirty, snotty baby boy who hung on her dress, whose fingers she had to pry loose one at a time only to have the hand clamp shut again, tighter than before? Could this be Wishart, clinging, whining, crying, “Stay with me”? But Wishart was awake and not to be trapped. He took good care not to dream, and when the bus drew in at Grasse, under the trees, and he saw his new straw-thin hostess (chignon, espadrilles, peasant garden hat) he did not look like a failed actor assailed with nightmares, but a smooth and pleasant schoolmaster whose sleep is so deep that he never dreams at all.
4
FOR ALL the reaction he was getting he might as well have been alone. When he spoke, no one replied. So far, no one had said, “How thoughtful of you, George,” although it was he who had chosen the table in the bar, where they could be quiet and alone, instead of the crowded dining room. Dinner was over. The waiter leaned on the bar, adding up the check, counting, as though he couldn’t believe the total, the bottles of wine and rounds of brandy. The bartender read a spread-out newspaper. George’s Aunt Bonnie was pushing herself into a bolero of monkey fur; she had irritably waved away his offers of help. There was a third person at the table, his aunt’s son-in-law, Bob Harris. Harris couldn’t see Aunt Bonnie’s struggles: his elbows were on the table, his face behind his hands. George observed, as part of a still-suspended opinion, that Harris wore two rings, one that was modern and gold and matched his cuff links, and a small onyx, squeezed onto the little finger of his left hand. It looked like a woman’s ring. Perhaps it had belonged to Harris’s wife.
“It’s f-funny,” George began again. He was trying to say that there was a funny light over the Louvre, as if beams of warm, theatrical color were being played from somewhere behind—from the rue de Rivoli, for instance. The windows of the Left Bank bar where they had dined gave on this sight, which was nothing more than the last blaze of day. George had been looking for themes of conversation and he was now trying this. Nobody cared.
“This dinner is on me,” said George, despairingly, to Harris’s still hidden face.
At that moment the waiter sprang to help George’s aunt. Twisting, craning, waving her thin arms, she wrestled with the bolero. Now it was inside out. The waiter removed it, shook it, guided Aunt Bonnie’s groping hands. “Merci. Now what did you want, Georgie dear?” But by now it was night. Nothing remained except a vanishing saffron cloud.
Harris sat back with his hands on the table, smiling faintly, so full of himself, so smooth, that George wondered if the grieving movement had not been something dreamt. Often in his childhood he had been assured that a dramatic moment clearly seen and heard had never taken place. Harris nodded at the waiter: “There’s your bill,” and the waiter bent over George with the check folded on a plate, and a pencil so that he could sign. Harris seemed to enjoy using English expressions such as “bill.” The dark clothes he wore gave him a grave, foreign air, and he appeared older than his age, which was twenty-six or seven. He had a dark, soft face, and might have been a Greek or a Persian educated in England, if one took the sum of his face, his manner, his rings, and his clothes. In a letter home Aunt Bonnie had said that her son-in-law looked like a suburban gangster. To George, Harris was neither foreign nor gangster, nor suburban, nor entirely respectable. He was familiar in a distinctly American way, but he was not the kind of American George had been brought up to know well. In strange Paris, he was as complete in familiarity as someone from George’s own world might have been, although different in quality—urban, sharp. He watched George’s troubles without offering to help. George was grateful for that. The spurt of assurance that made him demand a table in the bar, and insist dinner be served there, had damped out. His stammer was back. He was not sure of his French. For a minute he had been decisive, representing the male element in Aunt Bonnie’s family. The minute ended, he was George again, with everything being George implied, at least to himself. He had to explain to this waiter that he was not staying at the hotel. That he therefore couldn’t sign the bill. That he wanted to pay with a traveler’s check and be given his change in francs. He brought it off as if he had been entertaining in foreign restaurants all his life, and Harris helped by keeping out; not so Aunt Bonnie, who screamed, “We’re not really going to let this little boy pay for that meal?”
Poor Aunt Bonnie had put herself in a costume so grotesque that anything she had to say was dimmed. Her clothes must have come out of a trunk: they smelled of camphor and the dark—the fur, the sagging dress of black chiffon, the ropes of amber and jet, her pointed satin shoes, the purse with its chain handle and amber clasp. Her hair seemed to George dyed. He could not remember if his aunt had been wearing this head of hair when he had seen her two years before. The space between his having been seventeen, and at home, and being nineteen, and abroad, could not be measured by any system known to him; not even by the changes in people he knew.
Aunt Bonnie dabbed at her lipstick with an embroidered handkerchief. “You’re a real Fairlie, George,” she said. “That was a nice meal.” In spite of her grief she had eaten melon, chicken, salad, cheese, and ice cream. She had refused everyone’s cigarettes, sending out for a brand of her own, and had complained about the wines. Sometimes she let her head hang as if her neck had snapped, then she would suddenly look, and speak, and glance at George with his father’s blue eyes. As for Harris, he simply behaved as if he were alone.
George didn’t notice when Harris left the table, so easily did he slide away, until Aunt Bonnie put her powdered face next to his and said, “He’s gone to take care of the bill and get your check back for you. Now, don’t say a word when he comes back. Don’t thank him. He likes doing these things. George, I don’t know what I would do now without Bob. He was so awfully nice to her. He was just so nice to her all the time. Florence could be trying. Oh, yes, she was an angel itself, but she could be trying too. I know you don’t think so, you only saw the good side, she loved you so. But that boy was married to her, he had to live with her, just as I had to live with her, and he was just nice to her all the time.”
“You didn’t have to live with her,” George said. It was the kind of statement that went out of his mouth before it was through his mind; it was just an intention, not even a thought. He looked at his aunt in perfect dismay, as though she had said something strange; but Aunt Bonnie said amiably, “Why darling, Flor and I were so close, you know. She’d have been miserable without me, always worried. And I’d have worried about her. It wouldn’t have been fair to Bob, leaving him with this worried girl on his hands. I mattered terribly in their marriage, dear. I used to think of myself as a kind of lightning rod.”
“Nobody, nobody ever gets the better of Bonnie,” George’s father had once said. “She’s sweet, she’s helpless, she’s had some stinking deals. But nobody ever gets the better of her. This Harris had better be tough.” They hadn’t known much about Harris then, except that Aunt Bonnie didn’t like him. Florence met him on a beach or in a hotel and married him straightaway. She didn’t care what people said and she wiped out with one gesture all the care and love and planning—but those were Aunt Bonnie’s words. She had been mournful, poor Aunt Bonnie, with her only girl gone to waste; she never saw it as anything less.
Aunt Bonnie seemed to have forgotten her old objections now. “Flor loved him,” she crooned. “Yes, she did. He was so nice to her, you see. Flor had a lot of love in her.” Abruptly she changed her tone, became matter-of-fact: “Bob went out to see her today, without me. They don’t let us see her together, I don’t know why. He said she was as loving as could be. She didn’t know his name or anything but she put her head on his shoulder and stroked his face and she made him eat little pieces of bread from her tray. You see, even now she’s full of love.” Then Aunt Bonnie drew back and cried, “I was just saying, I wish Georgie knew someone in Paris more fun than us. He’s not having a good time, he says.”
Harris had returned and stood by the table. George’s reflexes were slow. The falsehood, the outrage, the impertinence of his aunt made him stammer in his mind. As if he would have complained; as if, to these stricken people dressed in mock mourning, he could have complained. He wished Harris would look at him so that he could signal it wasn’t true.
“We could do something later,” Harris said in a neutral voice. “Whatever he wants.”
“Do,” said Aunt Bonnie warmly. “Oh, do. Florence would want you to be having fun.”
The stupidity of the remark did not make it less cruel. George put himself in Harris’s place and felt sick. He took refuge in contemplating the walls of the bar, which were papered with maps of Paris. He tried to find the names of streets. When he came back to his aunt and Harris again he saw they were looking away from each other. They seemed bewildered. Each was the witness of the other’s suffering and that must have been terrible to bear. Harris probably wasn’t taking in half the foolish things she said. He looked like a man who had come into a known station only to find all the trains going to the wrong places or leaving at impossible times: endlessly patient, he was waiting for the schedules to be rearranged.
“I’ll g-go pay the check,” said George, for something to say.
“You already have,” said Harris. “Don’t you remember?”
“Georgie thought you’d gone to pay it when you sneaked away like that,” Aunt Bonnie said. She got up and scraped together her scarf, purse, fan, and gloves and tottered toward the door. She walked like a crone; she seemed to have made up her mind to be old and tactless, and dress like the Mad Woman of Chaillot. “I want to walk home,” she said from the door. “I want to walk all the way home. You boys can come back after and pick up the car. I want to walk the way Florence used to walk. Florence loved the Paris night.”
The night Florence had loved met them with the noise of traffic. The Seine was oily and still. This was the end of summer and the city seemed depleted by the season just endured; the heart of the city was emptied by the number of strangers on the streets, the motion of cars and boats, the prying search-lights on the monuments, the pressure of hands, feet, cameras, eyes. George had instantly felt it when he arrived from London that afternoon. If London could be described as too thick, Paris was too thin. He was glad this ruined holiday was over. He was glad he would soon be going home and no longer obliged to think and compare and consider the very quality of the air he took in.
“Lovely!” cried Aunt Bonnie, turning her sharp nose up to the sky. She gave an arm to each of the men. George took the fan and gloves, Harris the scarf and purse. He seemed at ease; but George felt as if he were carrying twenty fans and eighty pairs of gloves. He thought of the White Rabbit, whom he suspected he resembled. His aunt pattered across the street, George stumbled, and only Harris managed a normal walk. They stopped on the Seine side of the Quai Voltaire and the men waited for orders. The whole thing had got into Aunt Bonnie’s hands. “I want to go along the quais,” she decreed, “and over to the right bank on the Pont de l’Alma, and up the Avenue Montaigne, and home. It’s a long walk, but Georgie should see Paris.”
George waited for Harris to object; it seemed to him an insanely long walk. But Harris nodded his head and they went on again—the oddest trio you could imagine, George thought, unused to oddity. Nothing had prepared him for this situation, in which he kept trying to find his feet. “George is so lucky,” his mother had once said. “He’s had all the good disadvantages.” His training was planned for the social rather than the human collapse. His shed youth now seemed a piling-up of hallucinations, things heard and seen that were untrue or of no use to him. He was a tall person with large hands and feet, light blue eyes, and pale brows, lashes, and hair. His expression was earnest and kind. He had the voice and manner of his father’s family and he wore the family face; it was an undistinguished sweet-tempered face that usually triumphed over admixtures. One of Aunt Bonnie’s sisters, George’s Aunt Louise, had married a man named Reed; the Reed boys—there were four—were so violently Fairlie, flax-blond, ham-handed, that the Reed parent (bony, brown) might have had no chromosomes at all and Aunt Louise’s doubled in number to compensate. George would have considered this a natural law: their features were a concrete heritage, like the rings, brooches, and cups that passed without visible friction from one unit to the next. There was a family personality—decent, generous, conceited—and they carried their upbringing like a grain of sand on the heart.
They walked slowly now, all three in step, in and out of lamplight and the shadows of leaves. “I think you’re a brave boy, Georgie, coming to Europe alone,” his aunt said. “All alone in England! Flor never went anywhere without me. Do you feel brave?”
“Actually, it was pretty lonesome,” George said. He hoped that nothing in his tone admitted how lonesome it had been; there would have been something degrading in sharing the truth that his holiday had failed. “I wouldn’t do it like this again. I liked some things in England. I liked Scotland more. But when I got here this afternoon I was so lonesome I didn’t know what to do. I went around to your place but nobody came to the door. I kept on phoning . . .” Did this sound like self-pity? He had been around to see them; nobody home. That was casual enough. Back in his hotel, he had telephoned. He heard the ringing for the tenth time and then Bob’s voice, civil, surprised, “George? Your aunt isn’t here just now, George, but I’m expecting her. Florence isn’t too well. We’ve had to take her to a place . . . a sort of rest place. Your aunt’ll tell you. Didn’t you get the telegram? I guess you didn’t. We thought maybe you shouldn’t come.” His voice was soft, for a man, full of the sounds and rhythms that meant New York. This came over to George with wild familiarity. Across Paris, the voice conveyed the existence of seasons, mornings, afternoons. The voice was not in the least like his own; the good disadvantages had been provided in a sense so that he would never sound like Bob. “Where are you, George?” said the voice. “Have you got a pencil or something?” He gave the name of a restaurant in a hotel not far from George’s own and said he would be along shortly with George’s aunt. Everything pertaining to danger and grief
flowed and settled around that talk, leaving George free to stroll by the Seine with his aunt, holding her fan and her gloves.
“Of course Georgie’s lonely,” said his aunt. “No good being in Paris unless you’re in love, eh?” and she tweaked her son-in-law’s dark sleeve.
She didn’t know what she was saying any more. That was the only explanation. She had gone crazy with shock. George heard Bob say, “Don’t worry,” as though he hadn’t listened to her in years but had an answer for her comments and complaints.
“You need to be in love,” his aunt said, so wickedly, her hand jumping now on George’s arm, that he knew it was intended for him. That meant his mother had written about Barbara Sim. It had gone on for years: for four summers. When he was eighteen it was over. It was over for him, that is; not for her. Gracelessly, she persisted in loving. One day the thought of Barbara was shadowed by the memory of Flor. Flor had nothing to do with Barbara, didn’t know she existed. But George remembered what it had been like to be with Flor just as, through a hole in time, one goes back to a lake, a room in a city, or the south. It was probably because of the bead. He had grasped it out of habit and it lay in his hand. It was the cheap glass bead from the necklace his cousin had broken when she was fourteen. He saw her hands flying outward and the burst of glass like water flying. When he thought about his cousin that was what he saw: a thin sunburned girl pulling on a string of beads and making the string break. She was frightening to him then; he was only seven. She had what Aunt Bonnie called “cold bad tempers.” No matter what had happened since (the scene of the “little pieces of bread” was a swampy horror on which his mind refused to alight) she was fixed then and now and for all his life: a wild girl breaking a necklace, the circle of life closing in at fourteen, the family, the mother, the husband to come.
A Fairly Good Time Page 40
