By Any Name

by Cynthia Voigt

  “According to Bernard Baruch, we aren’t,” Mumma reminded him from her position at the outer edge, adding, “And I personally think that’s maybe lucky for everyone else in the world.”

  “Oh?” Professor Court looked around him with a conspiratorial smile before turning to put her in her place. “You’d better be careful where you offer opinions like that, my dear,” he advised her. “You know what people will think.”

  “Think,” said Mumma. “Ha!” She always enjoyed a conversation with substance. “People don’t think. That’s why we have laws.”

  “I’d say, rather, that that’s why we have a representative government,” Professor Court riposted. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, with a mane of white hair and bright blue eyes, a type everyone would recognize as the noble judge or professor, wise and kindly, a part written for Spencer Tracy.

  “Congress,” said Mumma. “Ha! They’re about to pass this Mundt-Nixon legislation, do you know that?”

  “I rather hope they will and I certainly think they should,” the professor said. “The Communists are taking advantage of America’s constitutionally guaranteed freedoms to infiltrate our institutions so that they can set about destroying this country from within. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought it’s to protect the citizens that the Committee on Un-American Activities has been created.”

  “I’ll tell you what I think is un-American,” Mumma said. “Telling people what they can’t believe in. I always thought that was a founding principle of this country.”

  “Religion isn’t the same as political belief,” Professor Court asserted. When Mumma opened her mouth to expostulate “Ha!” for the third time, he forestalled her. “You have heard of the principle of separation of church and state, haven’t you?”

  At this, his listeners permitted themselves a little ripple of laughter, but Mumma, being in pursuit of an idea, was undismayable. Or maybe she simply didn’t notice. “All right. So. If they pass this bill, and you’re a Communist, I mean a real one, not one of these theoretical people, these fair-minded liberals who don’t rule out anything, like a lot of people around here are, so careful to think things through that they can defend any position. Like what they said about Socrates in Athens, do you remember that?”

  “Your point is?” he inquired.

  In case he had forgotten, or never known, the precise charge, Mumma reminded him. “‘He makes the worse appear the better cause,’ that’s what they said about him. Because if I was a real Communist about the last thing I’d do is register myself as one. If you see what I mean. I wouldn’t even consider obeying that law. So the law will only catch the people who respect it, and live by it, and all the people the law wanted to catch will evade it. Maybe that’s American, but it doesn’t seem too smart to me. So why do you want them to pass the bill?” she asked, and waited with interest to hear his argument.

  Into this conversational mayhem stepped Jonquil Cartenbury, who saw that none of the law students felt ready to do so, although every one of them was aware that the redheaded young woman was well beyond the pale. This aggressive young woman—whose wife was she, exactly?—didn’t seem to understand how to speak with professors, that is, the art of asking a question in the response to which a professor would appear both well informed and witty, sometimes even benign as well. Jonquil Cartenbury took Mumma by the arm (“and she almost blinded me with that hat of hers, the rim almost sliced my eyeball in half”) in a fondly repressive gesture that also managed a wordless apology to the great man for whatever discomfiture this awkward person might have caused him, at the same time assuring him that of course everybody was aware that someone like this person could never really trouble someone like him.

  “I’m perfectly sure,” Jonquil Cartenbury said in her velvety voice, “why, I’m practically positive not a one of us would ever be a Communist. So what is there to worry about? Here? In this place, where—Why, it’s been here since 1636, and that’s three hundred and twelve years if my subtraction is correct, although I was always terrible at carrying,” she admitted prettily. “I know Rida didn’t mean half of what she said,” Jonquil confided to Professor Court. “She just loves to argue. Argue, argue, she’ll argue all day long with you if you give her a chance. I sometimes think she should be a lawyer,” Jonquil suggested with a light laugh. “But I think Spencer was looking for you,” she told Mumma.

  For a while after that, Mumma dragged Pops around the party, visiting with some of the other couples from the classics department who were, in part, friends, although Mumma never felt they gave Pops the respect he deserved. As far as she was concerned, this gathering was a waste of a sweet spring afternoon, when she could have taken her family for a picnic by the Charles. Mumma was just waiting until they could leave, and Pops at a party was always killing time until he could go home. Then Jonquil Cartenbury came up to join them. She ignored Mumma but took Pops confidingly by the arm. “I am always so glad to see you, Spencer. You are just a breath of fresh air,” she said. “And I am so looking forward to seeing you in full regalia at Anne’s wedding, because what girl doesn’t like looking at a handsome man in his tuxedo? And speaking of the wedding, Rida? I’ve invited Professor Court and his wife to our little rehearsal dinner. He was telling me that he’s never been out to Cape Cod, and how he’s heard so much about it from some of his students, about their summers on the Cape. He just sounded so wistful, like a little boy, I couldn’t stop myself from asking him, and he is so excited, it’s quite flattering to you all. I’m sure Mrs. H will be pleased to meet him. She’ll have heard of him, I’m sure. He’s a distinguished jurist, very well known.”

  “You did what?” Mumma asked. “You can’t do that. It’s a rehearsal dinner, immediate family, members of the wedding party.”

  “But I’m not immediate family. I’m not a member of the wedding party, either, and we’re invited, so it can’t be all that strictly private. Is it, Spencer?” She smiled up at Pops.

  “I don’t know anything about these things,” Pops said.

  “I don’t either,” Mumma acknowledged, “but I do know he wasn’t on the guest list Dorothy gave me. You’ll have to dis-invite him.”

  “My goodness, Rida, I can’t do that. You can’t invite someone and then uninvite them. My goodness. Anyway, it’s too late, it’s a fait accompli.”

  “A what?”

  “That’s French,” Jonquil Cartenbury informed Mumma with pretty patronage. “It’s French for something that’s already been done, so it’s too late to stop it. Like,” she added, as if she thought Mumma could be blackmailed, “if instead of this big old fancy wedding they’re having, Anne and her handsome Johnny had decided to elope and present Mrs. H with a done deed, they’d call it a fait accompli.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “Yes, but I don’t think—Correct me if I’m wrong, and I know you will—I don’t think you ever studied the French language?”

  “I have to disinvite him. That’s what you mean.”

  “You can’t. No, really, Rida—it would be—everyone would think—and it means so much to Francis, to be able to do this little favor for Professor Court. I know he’s probably going to get the clerkship anyway—”

  “Then that’s not a problem,” Mumma told her.

  (“You don’t think she really did that, did she?”

  “According to Mrs. Cartenbury she did.”

  “You asked Jonquil?”

  “You call her Jonquil?”

  “Good for Mumma,” I said. “And what about the clerkship—did Mr. Cartenbury still get it? That’s what I want to know.”

  “Maybe he didn’t and that’s why Jonquil kept thwarting Mumma’s ambitions. Do you think?”

  “When did you start calling her Jonquil?”)

  Mumma didn’t just abandon Pops to Jonquil Cartenbury, who always made him a little nervous, which he concealed behind an impenetrably elegant formality. Before setting off to tell Professor Court that he was no longer invited to dinner, she
gave Pops a subject to talk about. “Spencer had a brilliant idea about the ablative case. Explain it to Jonquil, Spencer, she’ll be so interested, she’s quite the linguist, you know. She studied French at college, she’ll understand it much better than I can.”

  “I’m sure Jonquil doesn’t—”

  “I’d surely love to hear all about it, Spencer, but right now Francis needs me. Well, it’s just a look he gave me, but a wife knows when her place is at her husband’s side. You’ll tell me about it some other time, won’t you? You promise, now.”

  “I promise,” Pops said, and then to her back, “although it’s not nearly as long and tedious as Rida would have you think, and not difficult at all to grasp. It’s just an insight,” he called, as she got farther away. Then he turned to Mumma. “You shouldn’t pick on her, Rida. She’s a lost soul up here among all you bluestockings. And you know she’s not very bright. It might do her a kindness if you could befriend her,” Pops suggested.

  “She’s not my kind of person,” Mumma told him.

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, then. But I thought—I thought Mother told me—and you gave that shower together.”

  “She’s more your mother’s kind of person,” Mumma explained, and then she went to tell Professor Court that he wasn’t welcome after all. She was usually willing to explain things to Pops, which is more than she did for the rest of us.

  THE REHEARSAL DINNER

  Mumma offered no explanations to Grandmother about the rehearsal dinner. She listened to Grandmother’s suggestions, she read Emily Post, and she went her own way. She also talked with Giancarlo about what his mother would have served on such an occasion, and she was probably instrumental in arranging to have the senior Ruscelli present for his son’s marriage, which he was proud, happy and able to be, much to the chagrin of Grandmother and the distaste of Grandfather. But Giancarlo rejoiced.

  Massimo Francesco Ruscelli took a train from Padua to Bologna, Bologna to Milan, Milan to Paris, and from there a boat train to London, where he boarded an airplane for New York. Giancarlo and Anne met him there and drove him north to Cape Cod for his first introduction to the Spencer-Howlands. This took place at Mumma’s rehearsal dinner.

  Introductions between people who do not speak one another’s language tend to consist of handshakes and smiles, followed up by regular smiles and nods, to indicate goodwill. When the children of the two parties are about to get married, a little extra effort seems appropriate. Signor Ruscelli had made that effort and could greet these American in-laws-to-be in a clumsy and limited English—’ello, ’ello—and say tanks you and express his happiness about the occasion and the forthcoming child, “Is to me very please.” If he wanted to say more than that, Giancarlo translated for him, probably accurately, although how accurately he translated to his father what the Americans were saying Mumma didn’t know. She was pretty sure he omitted the more offensive (that source primarily Grandfather) and insensitive (most of the rest of them, at one time or another during Signor Ruscelli’s brief stay) things the family had to say.

  Of course Mumma and Giancarlo’s father got along famously, despite having no common language. They communicated without words. (“He was half in love with me. A ladies’ man for sure, like all those Italians. Jonquil wanted to horn in but she made the mistake of trying to teach him English words. Poor Jonquil, she never did understand men.”) Mumma called him Capo Max, convincing him that Americans had a way of giving pet names to people, as they had to his son, as acts of welcome. In return, he called her Contessa Rida. “Contessa?” he offered her a glass of champagne, and “Capo,” she accepted it, then patted the place beside her on the sofa. He sat there, content to talk and not be understood. When Giancarlo joined them they could speak of one thing and another, but they were quite happy to be silent side by side, two shoe people, his pointed leather toes polished to a black brightness, her heels high, and red.

  At the dinner, she kept Capo Max on her right and Giancarlo on her left. “But you can’t,” Jonquil Cartenbury told her, explaining that Mr. Brooks should be on Grandmother’s right and Grandfather on Mumma’s, that Giancarlo and Anne had to be seated together, the bridal couple, at the center of the long table. “That’s the way it’s done,” she said, offering herself in place of the absent Mrs. Brooks for Mumma’s left and Mrs. Cartenbury for Grandmother’s left, since “She’s the oldest. The best man sits on the groom’s right, the maid of honor on the bride’s left, and where do you want to put Spencer? Let’s seat Francis with Ethan, don’t you think? Because Francis flew over Italy, you know, and bombed them.”

  Mumma overruled. Not only did she seat people as she thought best—notably both Ruscelli men next to her and Grandfather at the most distant end of the table, with Anne next to him and the best man on Anne’s other side—but she also served a dinner menu that had been advised by the grocers of the North End. “A person should feel at home when he eats,” was Mumma’s theory of foods. “What would an Italian family serve if the son was getting married?” she had asked, and then, “Is there a cook I can hire for an evening?” Mumma’s meal had many courses, presented one after the other: two pasta dishes, grilled chicken with rosemary, grilled lamb chops, broiled fish, sautéed chard, eggplant with tomato sauce, roasted potatoes, roasted leeks, followed by fruits, cheeses, nuts, with two dolci to conclude, one a traditional torta della nonna with pine nuts, the other a dense chocolate budino, and after that a chilled Vin Santo served in small glasses, for which course little plates of warm cantucci, for dipping, were scattered around the table, and small bowls of chocolates and nuts. The two Ruscellis were delighted, and some of the other guests were dubious only about one course or another, while a few people disliked the whole unfamiliar thing. Jonquil Cartenbury remarked to everybody near her that this was typical Italian food, she was sure of it, and wasn’t it clever of Rida to serve it? She herself would never have had the courage, but wasn’t Rida original?

  “Goddamn Guinea food,” Grandfather announced, putting down his fork, ignoring the glass of wine in favor of his glass of gin. “What’s the point of whipping them if we have to turn around and eat their goddamn food?”

  “Oh, Mr. Howland, you are just the most terrible man,” Jonquil Cartenbury laughed, and removed his hand from her arm, or thigh, wherever it had landed. “You like spaghetti, don’t you?”

  “It would be just like a wop to serve spaghetti when he’s marrying my daughter,” Grandfather said, and his voice carried into one of those unpredictable silences that can fall over a large dinner table, the ones that people explain by the position of the hands of the clock, twenty before or twenty after the hour. His voice fell into a silence and squatted there, and it took the table an endless long minute to displace it. (“That did it for me, I can tell you. That man almost ruined my rehearsal dinner, and he wouldn’t have minded if he had. Mine and Giancarlo’s, and I wasn’t sure at that time that Giancarlo could look out for himself. Which he can.”)

  After they had risen from dinner and removed to the living room for a final burst of conviviality before dispersing, Mumma bearded Grandfather. Grandmother stood beside her husband, and Jonquil Cartenbury was chattering away at them, but that didn’t stop Mumma from laying down the law. “Those things you say, the names you’re calling them,” she began. “I mean the Ruscellis.”

  Grandfather smiled unpleasantly and looked to the two tamer women for support. “Now what’s the matter with her?”

  “You know what I mean,” Mumma said.

  “Such a lovely dinner, Rida,” Jonquil Cartenbury was saying, and, “Surely this is neither the place nor time,” Grandmother was saying. Mumma ignored them both. “You know exactly what I mean. You’re not that drunk, not any drunker than usual.”

  “You have no sense of humor,” Grandfather told her. “That’s the trouble with the girl, she has no sense of humor,” he repeated to Grandmother, and snaked an arm around Jonquil Cartenbury’s waist. “I don’t know what’s getting you so hot and bothered,�
�� he told Mumma. “It may have escaped your notice, but the man doesn’t speak one word of English,” which struck him as a very funny remark.

  Mumma ignored him, too. She had something to say and she had a plan. “If you don’t stop, I’m warning you. I’ll be putting ipecac into your drinks. Whenever I feel like it, I’ll put drops in. I have plenty of ipecac, for the girls, a mother does. If you don’t know what effect ipecac has you can ask Dorothy. And that goes forever. I don’t mean stop just today, or just this wedding, or just this particular name-calling. I’ve had enough of it and don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. You should know by now I mean what I say.”

  “Rida, I think that waiter is trying to get your attention to ask you something, maybe out in the kitchen,” Jonquil Cartenbury said. “She doesn’t mean it, Mr. Howland. I’m sure she doesn’t.”

  Grandmother knew better. “I’m sure she does mean it, and I can’t approve.” She hesitated, then added, “Of talking to your father-in-law that way, Rida.”

  “Somebody needs to,” Mumma maintained.

  “That is your opinion,” Grandmother said.

  “I don’t know what my son was thinking of, marrying you,” Grandfather said. “I know what you were thinking of. Anybody with an ounce of sense could tell us that.”

  “Just remember, I warned you,” Mumma repeated, before heading off for the kitchen where, as she knew as well as Jonquil Cartenbury, there was nobody needing her to offer an opinion.