Extreme Magic

by Hortense Calisher

  When he was met by his hosts at the end of his journey, they all took to each other at once. Dr. Mabie, stammering a pace behind his wife, expanded on being deferred to as “sir.” Mrs. Mabie crimsoned with understanding when Mr. Pines referred to the bus as a charabanc. As for their guest, taking note of the man’s jellyfish way with his wife, and the woman—hair right out of the flicks, and such an oddly nasal way of talking—he thought them as American as anything he’d seen yet.

  It was close to two weeks before the professor, delaying happily in conferences and libraries, returned to Pittston alone, having left Hertha for a visit in Lansing. He spent Saturday night alone by choice, in one of those reflective lulls of the closely married, and, noting a card in the collected mail, went on Sunday afternoon to the McFarlands’ opening tea of the academic season.

  It was a lovely day, both crisp and smoky with autumn expectancy, and Weil, refreshed in perspective, leaned against Mrs. McFarland’s wall with an enjoyment not yet dampened by the grapejuice-tea punch, watching the Les Sylphides advances between teacher and student, savoring a familiar, faculty-wife hat heightened inexplicably by a new feather. Then Mrs. McFarland bore down on him with a group, muttering names all round in her furry Scots. “Yeer to stay on, Mr. Pines,” she said, tapping one young man on the shoulder, and passing by Weil, of whose worldliness she disapproved.

  So this was young Pines. Listening with a pang of remembrance, Weil docketed the accent: not quite Oxford or B.B.C., but within the gates—of Knightsbridge say, Kensington, or St. John’s Wood. And could it be, yes, relaxing already into a certain Americanism? Looking, he saw what he used to think of as one of their blended faces, too browned and water-slapped for a man of intellect, too veiled for a man of sport.

  He approached him, and they exchanged amenities on the wind and the weather, and on how Pines was settling in; it didn’t occur to Weil that Pines might not have caught his name. Those around them, all students, melted back in deference to this faculty meeting. From a group across the room, Portia-Lou waved to Weil and called out an inquiry about Hertha. The young man included himself in her wave, and signaled back. “Hi!” he said.

  To Weil’s surprise, Mrs. Mabie’s nod seemed sullen. “You are quite comfortable at the Mabies’?” he asked.

  “Oh yes, rather. She’s been incredibly, well—very kind really. Yes!”

  “She seems a little—quiet,” said the professor.

  “Rather hard to take someone in, don’t you know. Privacy, and so on,” said Pines. “By the way, you pronounce it pri-vacy here, with the long ‘i’?”

  Weil nodded. “The great vowel change. Among others.”

  “Rather think I may have got her back up a bit, though. You see, I asked her to coach me in American. It was before I knew that she, er well, that she—”

  “That she was so very British?” said Weil.

  Mr. Pines began to laugh, then thought better of it. “You see—I hadn’t the faintest. You see—I offered to exchange.”

  Weil grinned. “Poor Portia-Lou. When I was in London, I always felt one had to be très bien élevé to be able to say ‘bloody.’”

  Mr. Pines smiled, eyes hooded. “There during the war?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a pause, during which Mr. Pines took a frail sip of punch, then set his cup decisively down.

  “You drink wine?” asked Weil.

  “When I can get it. But I was given to understand that one doesn’t do, here.”

  “They don’t,” said Weil. “But I do.” He smiled. “And if you play it right—I should think you could.” He saw a clear path to the door. Clapping on his beret, he shook hands in adieu. “We must have a bottle, some night. See you in the department.”

  When Mr. Pines returned to his quarters at ten in the evening, the Mabies were still up. He passed them with a greeting, and went up the stairs. Mrs. McFarland’s deafness had been rather exhausting; they had however established that his own father had once stayed at Dysart, not a stone’s throw from her own town of Kirkcaldy on the Firth of Forth, at a time when she might very well still have been there. Curious how people insistently sought out these little fraternities of time and space; at the thought he went back downstairs, carefully making a noise, and stuck his head around the living-room arch. “Sorry to barge in, but would you mind telling me the name of a chap I met this afternoon,” he said, looking at Dr. Mabie.

  “If it’s a student, they’re all so like,” said Mrs. Mabie.

  “Oh no, no, no—a don.” He thought the term might please her, but her regard remained cold. “Short, round sort of chap. Little Jew, with a beret.”

  “Why, that’s Hans, Hans Weil. He’s in your own department.”

  “Oh, that’s Weil, is it? Stupid of me. Thank you very much.” He turned to go.

  “He may happen to be a Jew,” said Mrs. Mabie, rising from her chair. “He’s also very distinguished. And a refugee. And our very good friend.”

  “Charming fellow, very,” said Mr. Pines. “Good night.”

  When he had gone back up the stairs, and she had listened for the sound of his door shutting, she turned back to Ernest. “I knew it. I knew there was something about that guy. All that going on about wonderful America—he’s what they call smarmy. Maybe what they call a spiv—or worse.”

  “N-now, now,” said Ernest.

  “Well, if he’s so top-drawer, what’s he doing over here?”

  “He never said anything about what he is,” said Ernest, losing his stammer. “It’s you. He just wants to be polite. And I think he’s very straightforward.”

  “Oh-h—you. You didn’t even have the spirit to stand up for Hans.”

  Upstairs, Alastair, whose frank estimate of himself would have been no closer to Ernest’s than to Portia-Lou’s, was looking in a mirror at his tongue. Yes, it had a boil on it, from the food here—not quite what Americans abroad had led him to expect. He touched the spot with iodine, then took out a pocket notebook in which, after chewing his pencil for a minute, he wrote, “Can’t refer openly to origins, as we do. Affronts them.” He was snoring by the time Mrs. Mabie, nudging Ernest, who had also begun to snore, wanted to know the name of that girl, the earl’s daughter, the one who had fallen in love with Hitler.

  A few days later, Weil, catching sight of Mr. Pines chatting with the pretty stenographer in the outer office, invited him for lunch.

  “Righto. ’Bye, Janice.”

  “’Bye, Mr. Pines.”

  “Ah now, remember,” said Pines as they left. “Just call me Al.”

  They found a table in the cafeteria on the floor below. “Pretty girl,” said Mr. Pines. “She don’t mind teaching me American.”

  “Careful you don’t teach her anything else,” said Weil. “This is a pious campus.”

  “Not likely. Still, women are so much more irreligious than men, don’t you think? Shocking, what some of them will do.”

  “Mm,” said Weil. Though still liking Mr. Pines, he was beginning to place him rather more accurately than had the Mabies. “And how are you getting along in your quarters?”

  “Oh, that’s another cup of tea. Perhaps you can set me right on that, sir. Mrs. Mabie, would she be—a bit on the barmy side?”

  “No-o. Just—exaggerated. Why?”

  “Well, the last few days she’s got very chatty, in a very odd way. I don’t mind her wanting me to natter on about myself, where I’ve been, what I’ve done, politics and all that, but—it’s as if she’s trying to catch me out.” Pines hesitated. “With what we’ve been told at home about things here—do you think she’s trying to make me out a Communist?”

  “Are you?” said Weil.

  “No. Labor. But surely that—?”

  “Oh no, you are safe. Each visitor here is allowed certain national idiosyncrasies. That one happens to be yours.”

  “Well then, I wonder, I do,” said Alastair. “You see, although I don’t like to say this, I’m rather certain she’s been going throu
gh my things.”

  Later, sometime after nine that evening, the Mabies and the Weils faced each other over the latter’s dining-room table. Portia-Lou, sitting tall in the fullness of confession, had just refused a proffered slice of Nüsstorte.

  “So,” said the professor. “So Mr. Pines has skis from Garmisch, and his camera is an I.K.G.—as mine would be if I still had them. So he has, among souvenirs from Tangier and Castellammare, also some from Nüremberg—and among his billets-doux a bundle calling him Putzi. Ach, Portia! So during the war he flies over the Alps—and during the occupation he skis over them!” He flung up his hands. “So that makes this—this R.A.F. Spitzbub’—a Nazi?” He pushed his cup toward Hertha for more coffee. “Excuse me, I would laugh, if I could yet laugh at that word.”

  “But Hans, it’s not just that—it’s…other attitudes,” said Portia.

  “Ah, so, you are still sore at him because he does not act the way you expected. Excuse me again from your attitudes. I know them. Arrières pensées, ten or fifteen years behind the times. Like the Paris styles, by the time they come to Posen.”

  “Na, na, Hans, halt dein Mund!” said Hertha.

  “Ernest,” said Weil, “you will understand. We cannot have this gossiped in the college, on no provocation. Hertha and I have talked it over this afternoon. He will come to us, here.”

  “Oh, no!” said Portia. “Not to you, of all people. Tell them, Ernest.”

  “N-now, honey,” said Ernest. “You’re just building something up.”

  “Well then, I’ll tell them. I’d hoped not to have to. But they can’t let themselves in for that.”

  “For what, Portia?” Weil said.

  “Your Mr. Pines. He’s an anti-Semite.”

  Weil put a hand over Hertha’s, which had just begun to tremble. “You have proof?”

  “Something he said. About you.”

  “Hans,” said Hertha. “Hans.” Her hands gripped the table.

  “Du wilst gehen, Liebste?”

  “Nein, nein. I will stay.”

  “Repeat it then, Portia,” said Weil, holding his wife’s hands in his. “Repeat it exactly.”

  She repeated it.

  “So,” he said. “So.” He got up, tucked the afghan around Hertha, and walked over to Portia. “Look at me.” He leaned over her. “I am short, not? I wear now and then a beret?” He extracted two nods from her. “And I am a Jew?” She nodded again, head down.

  “Ah,” he said, “the muscles are a little stiff. So it is insult then, to be called a Jew.” Drumming on the table, he brought his palm down flat. A cup turned on its side, spilling a stream of brown that seeped into the cloth. “Ja, the insult is there. Not in his mind. In yours.”

  He waved aside Ernest, who had moved to mop up the coffee. “The Jew is so sensitive, hah, and you want to be so sensitive too. So you will take special care not to notice what he is.” He blotted at the coffee with a napkin. “I like better your Mrs. McFarland. She refuses me her house, because I drink wine. She is not afraid to include me in her prejudices, as she might any other man.”

  He went to the door. “Excuse me. Ernest. I am sorry. But maybe the evening is over.”

  When he had seen them out, he came back up the stairs to Hertha. “T-t-t,” he said, “was für ein Esel bin ich. I make everybody cry.” He sat down beside her. “Come, laugh. You know what she said to me at the door? She said, ‘Hans, I wouldn’t hurt you for the world. You of all people.’” He put his arms around her. “Na, na, it’s all right. We are all here together.” He pressed her head on his shoulder. “Come, it was no tragedy, just a little comic opera. Only—me—I still think I am Heldentenor.” He rocked her back and forth. “I spilled no blood, hein?” he said, rocking. “Just a little Kaffee.”

  On the following Sunday, one of those honey-warm fall days that brought out summer habits like chilled bees, the professor and Alastair Pines sat over a bottle of wine in the Weil garden, a small high terrace overlooking the main highway that ran below. Alastair, member of the household for the past week, had already formed a gourmet’s alliance with Hertha, who had taken to producing in triumph at dinner the Wienerschnitzel or Knödel over which Alastair would have reminisced so charmingly the day before. Now Weil uncorked the wine and set the bottle on the table in the middle of the picnic lunch—roast duck and beetroot Salat, that Hertha had left with them before going to Lansing.

  “We let the wine breathe a little first, it will be better,” he said, and sat back, thinking of how long it had been since he had said that to someone, and of how pleasant this was, this pause so male, so European.

  Alastair leaned back, stretching his arms. “Soft berth, this,” he said, smiling. “Very. You’ve both been so kind. Perhaps now you wouldn’t mind telling me what was at the bottom of that business at the Mabies’. Not, of course, unless you want to.”

  “Not at all,” said Weil. “It is very instructive.” He explained some of Mrs. Mabie’s suspicions.

  “I say!” said Alastair. “How amazing! But I say, she can’t be typical.”

  “Oh, no, no, she’s a silly woman. One can’t generalize about this big a country. Still, so often these unilateral fantasies about others. After two wars, still such an island.”

  “Hasn’t done us all that much good,” said Alastair. “To know all about the other fellow’s cooking.”

  “Oh, they are very intelligent, very sensitive, the natives.” Weil smiled, waving a hand vaguely at the highway. “Only sometimes the silly ones say what the smart ones, the nice ones do not even know they feel. She was for instance very hurt because you refer to me as a Jew.”

  “But, my word—you are, aren’t you?”

  Weil stretched his arms in a great, yawning arc, and brought his hands down together on the neck of the bottle. “Precisely. Let’s have some wine.”

  He poured the wine and they sipped it.

  “Jolly good.”

  “Moselle. Too light to travel very well. But then, nothing exports the same.”

  “Suppose I shall find that out, eh,” said Pines, twirling his glass.

  “You are planning to stay exported?”

  Over a second glass of wine, a third, Pines confided his plans, some of his ruminations on the bus.

  “Oh, no, no,” said Weil. “My dear fellow, you will allow me to tell you something? Take out citizenship, yes, after all, it is owed. But don’t study so hard to be American. Stay echt—you will have far more success.”

  “I suppose people do rather resent the expatriate.”

  “Naturlich. But here it is something more. Especially for an Englishman—they like you to stay as you are. They laugh a little but they admire. Maybe because they are not yet so sure of what they are.”

  “Ahha,” said Alastair. “And is it the same for you?”

  “With a difference. You see, you would be an émigré. I am a refugee—I have perhaps a few special privileges for humanity’s sake.” Weil laughed suddenly. “You know perhaps Mark Twain’s angry essay against missionaries? On ‘Extending the Blessings of Civilization to Our Brother Who Sits in Darkness’?” He poured some more wine. “I often think that for them I am a little ‘the person sitting in darkness.’” He shrugged. “So, even in Pittston, I have my Moselle.”

  Alastair raised his glass. “Cheers.”

  “Cheers.”

  Suddenly Weil began to laugh again. “‘The clicks of the Hottentots,’” he said. With some difficulty, he stopped laughing, and explained.

  Meanwhile Mr. Pines opened the second bottle, and poured. “T’ the Hottentots!” he said.

  “To the Hottentots.” The professor looked through his glass at the sun. “Maybe you will marry one, ha?”

  “Oh, I’ve a sort of understanding with a girl at home—nothing restrictive. Joyce is very un—understanding. Good thing too, with all these—is it drum girls?”

  “Drum majorettes.”

  “T-t. On the High Street, too. ’Straord’n’ry.”

 
; “Mm. But don’t fool yourself you are at the Windmill Theatre. You may be, but they are not.”

  They drank to the Windmill.

  “‘A night out on the tiles,’” said the professor. “Still say that in London?”

  “Mmm.”

  The professor leaned back and dreamed, thinking obscurely that a traveler always brought to a foreign place something that wasn’t really there. If he lived there long enough, he found that out. But luckily he hadn’t lived long enough for that in London. So he might still dream on it. So he might still dream on it in yet another way, letting it bear the weight of all that he must no longer give to Dresden, to München, to Köln.

  After a while he roused himself and sat forward, looking intently into the landscape. “Alastair—I may call you that?”

  “Mmm. Call me Alastair. Definitely.” The young man sat forward also, following Weil’s glance, his lock of hair flopping down on his forehead. The two of them remained so for some minutes, staring at the same median point in the distance.

  “Whatever you do, be firm,” said the professor suddenly. “Don’t give in. Even when you see the whites of their eyes.”