Bea was in stasis: her mind was rooted. Ordinariness had seeped out of it — she was filled with the heavy stillness, and with the shock of aftermath. The stillness of the day’s first breath and the riot of those last foul minutes with Leo. The riot, the tempest! The violence that Iris had brought on with a finger, innocently, tentatively — that one high thin cry — she had discharged with the whole vengeful weight of her shoulders. She had put her body into it, sinews and spine and belly, the power burst out of her groin, the dinosaur crash, the rapturous meaninglessness of it! The sound was a horror. What had she done? What gave her the right to do it? But Leo had said only, “So that’s it and that’s it.” He said it like a wind-up figure with a speaking mechanism inside. He had daughters, he was the father of daughters. She drowned them in that babel of noise, she swallowed them up with the smashing of her hands on those comatose keys; she smashed them alive, the black and the white.
Far across the grass she heard a chirp. Not a bird. A hinge. Someone was opening the door of Marvin’s house. A young woman came out, wearing a cape that covered her torso. Her legs were bare. An older man followed, naked except for a pair of briefs. It was clear that she knew the way — she led him to a flagstone path that wound through a lattice of shrubbery, through which Bea could glimpse the rectangle of green water. They were headed for the pool. As she walked, the young woman plucked off her cape. Her waist was small, her hips narrow. Her hair was pinned behind her ears. Tiny earrings seized the sun. The carpet of curls on the man’s chest was white, the hair on his head still black, but sparse. The black and the white. Bea had never imagined Marvin as balding. He looked fit and robust and not unhappy.
A shout — the woman’s voice. A splash. And then another.
The spy in the Ford drove off.
25
October 20, 1952
Bea:
Why you didn’t let on you were going over there after all, I’ll never for the life of me be able to figure out — and after the hard time you gave me, how you couldn’t leave your grease monkeys, etc. Well, if you wanted to knock me over with a feather, you’ve done it, and if you want to have me on my knees, all right, I’m grateful. As far as it goes. Your airmail arrived this morning — I suppose it means you’re back home by now. You mention you’ve put in a week or so there, but where in hell is THERE? You haven’t told me anything worth a damn, so what’s the point, what’s the good of it, a building with a concierge, very nice, but you don’t let on WHERE he’s living, not even that — NO ADDRESS, not a word about when Iris is getting back to school, and then when it comes to Julian — this girl, hasn’t she got a name, who is she, what’s it all about? You were planning to take them out to dinner, I suppose the so-called girlfriend too, is that all you have to say about it? You can’t tell whether some fly-by-night skirt is roping him in, don’t you have eyes? What was the use of the whole business if you’ve come back empty-handed?
And there’s something else. Margaret seems to be worse. I went to see her yesterday, there’s been some problem with her therapy, they wouldn’t say exactly what. I’ve always thought all that healing-through-art business was a crock anyhow, I don’t pay them for trying to turn my wife into a female Picasso, and now they’ve got her doing some sort of nonsensical weaving — they tell me the painting got her over-excited. The trouble is she’s been hallucinating. She claims she saw you — you, of all people, it’s been years! — and that you told her Julian’s gotten fat and, believe it or not, married! It’s horrible, she insists on it, I imagine she’s got marriage on the brain because she’s been so angry at me, I don’t know why. The thing is, never mind all that weaving crap and man-in-the-white-coat voodoo, I feel she’d snap out of it for sure if she could see Julian in the flesh. I’VE GOT TO HAVE MY SON BACK, that’s the bottom line. For Margaret’s sake. I don’t care anymore what he wants to do with his life, let him tootle on a whistle if that’s what he wants. And Iris — my God, you’d think Iris would at least write! What does she look like, is she healthy? And what are the two of them living on over there — air? Bea, I’m in agony, I’m losing my mind, I’m alone in all this, what’s happened, what’s going on, tell me!
Marvin
26
PHILLIP PARSONS (his father insisted on the double-l before disappearing) was born in Pittsburgh, the fifth of five children (and the reason, he later learned, for his father’s disappearance), graduated from the local high school, was drafted into the army, trained as a combat medic, and went through the fighting at Anzio. Muddied, bloodied, and depleted, his regiment passed through a rural village called Montalbano. The name seemed to him beautiful. A few old women came out of their low stone houses to give the Americans water in tin cups. It was well water, cold and pure; it was almost like swallowing clear light. And after that they went on to the Ardennes, where the carnage made a red mist in his eyes as he kneeled in the dirt; and after that, a delirious triumphal week in a damaged but somehow hilarious Paris — raucous bullying American laughter in the midst of the debris. At the end of the war he endured a year of college on the GI Bill, but normality had descended so swiftly all around, and so bluntly and blandly, that he felt estranged — his family struck him now as helplessly stupid. What had he to do with any of them? His mother had remarried, his four older sisters were preoccupied with their tedious lives. He remembered Montalbano and the water that tasted of cold light.
And he remembered the giddy week in Paris — whatever Paris was, it wasn’t Pittsburgh. He got a job as an orderly until he could earn enough to pay for a ticket and a little more. The hospital depressed him — not the diseases and the injuries and the dying, he was inured to those, but the terrible whiteness, the white walls and ceilings, the white sheets, the bedsteads painted white, the nurses’ white caps and shoes, his own white trousers. Only the doctors in their suits and ties escaped the whiteness; only the doctors had authority. The orderlies were despised, the nurses were disregarded. The doctors were more than respected. They were trusted and revered.
On the ship across he shared one of the cheapest cabins below, no bigger than a box, with a French-Canadian student headed for the Sorbonne. It was a three-day voyage, without much conversation: he was miserably sick most of the time, and clung to his berth with a rubber pan beside him. When the student offered him a tug at his flask and asked his name, he refused the wine with a groan and could barely stutter out four syllables: Montalbano. On the evening of the second day he was better, except for the hiccups, and chatted freely. And when they docked at Le Havre, he was already Dr. Montalbano. In Paris he almost immediately befriended Alfred, or Alfred befriended him — it was hard to tell the difference, since Alfred befriended everyone and everything, including dogs and cats and their owners — which was why he had at first taken Dr. Montalbano for a veterinarian. For a very small fee he bandaged cut paws and saved kittens from choking on foolishly swallowed buttons and soothed mange with ointments cooked up on a two-burner stove and began to give lessons in dog training. The lessons, like the ointments, were invented, and of course it wasn’t the dogs that were being trained, it was their masters. He was discovering a talent for persuasion, for instant intimacy — he felt it as a presence in some unnameable internal organ, an untried gland awaiting initiation, but he had never had a use for it, not at home with his mother and sisters, and certainly not in the war. When Alfred one night brought him a boy bleeding from a knifing, he stanched the flow and cleaned the wound and bound it up; it was easy enough, it was nothing to what he had seen in the Ardennes. The boy was afraid to go to a hospital, he was afraid they would report him to the police as a prostitute. “There were two of them,” Alfred said, “and it was me they were fighting over, I couldn’t decide which one I loved more, they’re both so sweet.” An astonishment: the boy had hundreds of francs hidden in a money belt, and before he departed, with a kiss for Alfred, he put down on the shelf over the two-burner stove the equivalent of fifty American dollars.
But Alfred was sudden
ly in tears. No one loved him really, he said, he was too ugly, people gravitated to him for what he could do for them, or because he was a figure of fun, a jester, a stupid clown, it came from the wig, from the childhood sickness that had left him hairless all over, his eyebrows, his eyelashes too — that joke about the pubic hair, it wasn’t his hair, and if he took the wig off it was horrible, he could feel everyone’s revulsion, his naked silly dome, his head like a doorknob, like a chess piece, he couldn’t stand wearing the thing, but if he burned it wouldn’t that be worse? Only the dogs didn’t mind the look of him, the dogs didn’t care. “You saw that kiss?” he said. “Didn’t mean squat.”
This may have been the moment when Phillip Parsons became Dr. Montalbano in earnest. Until then the name was fake, the ointments were fake, the dog training was fake: the man was fake. But he tore off a bit of the gauze he’d bandaged the boy with and reached out to dry Alfred’s face. He patted the gauze against Alfred’s cheek and under Alfred’s nose. Not that it mattered: the weeping went on. “You’ve got the face of a baby,” he said, “one of those babies with wings,” and he let Alfred sob on his chest and wet his shirt through. Alfred was dead drunk, cranked up with booze, he was an alcohol rag, the scratch of a match could set him on fire; but it wasn’t fakery to say that he resembled a cherub. He had the little rosy lips of a cherub, and little round ears, and round brown eyes, and a round white forehead wrinkling below the yellow wig. He was beautiful.
And Dr. Montalbano had found his method. His method was his calling. Who is not in need of a mirror? The healer becomes the mirror, and permits to be seen what is wished to be seen: the practice of shamans, who believe in themselves. But do they? Perhaps. Dr. Montalbano also saw, in the francs the boy had left on the shelf over the two-burner stove, that his calling might do for the improvement of his dinners. Alfred was beautiful, the world itself was beautiful, and innocent and ripe for persuasion — one had only to be a mirror, one had only to add a therapeutic nostrum or two. For such an elixir it would be simple enough to cook up the ingredients, though he would need a deeper pot and, while he was at it, a bigger place to receive clients. Alfred brought him his first clients, and soon these brought others, until it seemed necessary to advertise a set of proper credentials. This he did via the alphabet. It struck him as prescient now that his runaway father had doubled the l in his name as a herald of a future doubling of the p, so that (along with the flourish of a final francophile e), he became a kingly Phillippe. And to the majestic Phillippe Montalbano he attached a long serpent’s tail of scientifically redolent acronyms, so that his card, and later his flyers, bespoke higher degrees and arcane laboratories:
Docteur Phillippe Montalbano, RFEAI,1 ABN,2 SFPA,3 PFO,4 MBFES,5 ADC,6 LOH,7 AVR,8 etc.
1 Diplomate, Raw Food Equity Analysis Institute
2 Chancellor, Academy of Botanical Nutritives
3 Founder, Society for the Prevention of Aging
4 Professor of Functional Organics, University of Natural Healing (est. 1950, Pittsburgh, USA)
5 Consultant, Mind-Body Foundation for the Elevation
of the Spirit
6 Chairman of the Board, Anti-Dairy Commission
7 Vice President, League of Oxidative Health
8 Executive Secretary, Alliance for Vedic Respiration, etc.
The list increased as his clientele grew, and his clinics in three cities swelled into suites of rooms at respectable addresses. And while his clients were restricted to bulghur wheat and carrot mash, Dr. Montalbano feasted on roast beef and heavy cream. Not every hedonist is a hypocrite, and Dr. Montalbano did not consider himself a charlatan. His work, as it spread south to Lyon and still farther south to Milan, was notably charitable. His fees were reasonable, and he saw indigent clients for free. People swore by him, and some called him better than Lourdes, though no cripples threw away their crutches and the seriously ill went on dying — but with smiles of gratitude on their lips. And meanwhile the row of credentials was obliged to change shape and content from time to time, in order to satisfy the investigations of officials suspicious of unlicensed medical activity. Yet Dr. Montalbano never claimed to be a physician. He was, he said, a kind heart, a giver of commonsense advice, an ingenious cook above all. He was, in fact — what rings more Parisian than this? — a chef! His clinics were more kitchens than surgeries. On occasion, with a wink of make-believe complicity, he was even willing to name himself soothsayer. Not that he could see into the future — but certainly there is an inherent logic in things, you can tell in advance how an embattled marriage will turn out, you can predict a divorce, you can sniff out who will recover and who will not, and as for lovers: their fates are written in the stars, and Dr. Montalbano was at home with the proclivities of astral bodies. Venus was one of his specialties. He could stir up a potion for potency (this required a double boiler), though he never had a need of it himself: he was a magnet for girls. For this purpose he worked hard at his Italian, the northern dialect. His French too had become almost flawless, except for its Pittsburgh inflections, which he could never get rid of.
When Alfred brought Julian to him, Dr. Montalbano was preparing to leave for Milan, where a certain Adriana, a former client, was waiting for him. He had cured her of a wart on her breast by applying to it weekly an acidic salve of, as usual, his own concoction. The resulting scar was minor, and the breast, after this repair, was pinkly plump and appealing. Alfred listened sullenly; he wasn’t interested in some wop broad’s tit, he wanted to tell about his friend Julian, thinks he’s a poet, something like that, he’s got this strange old broad he’s stuck on and needs a place to stay in until she drags him away to who knows where, Jerusalem or Constantinople maybe, some Bible heap like that . . .
“I wouldn’t want my furniture broken up,” Dr. Montalbano said. “Does he drink?”
“He’s a kid from L.A., they drink sunshine and milk.”
“And the woman?”
“Not a kid. Something funny with an arm. One of those.”
Dr. Montalbano ruminated.
“I wouldn’t mind a couple looking out for the place while I’m gone — that cockney witch of a concierge, lets herself in behind my back and gets her fill of snooping around, thinks I’m running a brothel. But I’d need to see the kid first, I don’t want any of your hooligan pals throwing up on my rugs —”
Julian, who knew his soul was built on a last different from his father’s (but did his father have a soul at all?), was nevertheless not without his father’s judging eye. He saw at once that Dr. Montalbano was a bit of a fraud (all those letters after his name!), and Dr. Montalbano saw just as quickly that Julian was soft — he wasn’t one of Alfred’s hooligans, he was a marshmallow kid who believed he owned a soul. It seemed to Dr. Montalbano that his tables and chairs would be safe.
“But you didn’t bring your girlfriend,” he chided.
“She couldn’t come. She’s got a job.”
This was even more reassuring.
“There’s only one thing,” Dr. Montalbano said, “when I get back the two of you will have to clear out — I mean right away. What do you say to that? Do you have somewhere to go?”
“It’s fine,” Julian said. “We’ll figure it out.”
So it was arranged.
27
AWAKENED BY CRIES, Iris thought at first of animal squeals. Then, as unsound sleepers ripped into sudden full consciousness are wont to do, she remembered where she was, and took in the unlikelihood of wild birds and street cats indoors in the middle of the night. The half-bottle of wine she had swallowed the evening before — it was intended to help her sleep — instead drew her to an insistent clarity. The wine was a discovery: it made her see. In this foreign city she had begun to comprehend everything that had gone before — those long strivings, the dogged classroom years and the noxious discipline of the laboratory, the solitary drive for perfection, for goodness, for her father’s praise. She was perfect and she was good. She had earned prizes and fellowships. W
hatever she did, she did diligently and well. But here — here she threw her stockings in the air and let them dangle for days from picture frames! Here it was normal to drink wine — people drank it daily with their meals, it was as ordinary as water on the table at home. And the wine found its own reasons: it was for pleasure, it was for digestion, it was for sleep, it was for . . . other things. For getting free of being good. For not caring what you said, or to whom. Like a cave, like a labyrinth, the wine had its secrets. You could step into its mouth and then, little by little, wind gingerly on; the deeper you went, the more wine-drenched the walls, painting themselves brighter and brighter — as when eyes shut against the sun are left gazing at their own red blood.
The noises were coming from two rooms away. It was not their lovemaking. She was familiar with their lovemaking, the murmurs and echoes that gained and slowed and gained again, and then broke with the crystal crack of an eggshell, and the orange yolk spilling blindingly out. Their lovemaking seemed incessant, and tragic, like some terrible thirst, more Lili’s than her brother’s — the wine told her so. The wine was a teacher. She was listening for the pangs and blows of their bodies. These high strained cries weren’t the bleats of their lovemaking, no: they belonged to the dreams. Bad dreams: even in childhood Julian had cried out in his sleep: he was falling, falling out of some great vulnerable vessel into a fire. The falling and the fire and the smell and the burning frightened and woke him. But it wasn’t the falling into the fire, it wasn’t the lovemaking. It was Lili. Lili’s bad dreams made a strange piping, and sometimes a harsh grim grunt, or even a metallic click, like the cocking of a trigger. Lili’s dreams were deadly. Only Julian knew why. And while Lili would laugh in the morning at Julian’s bad dream — “Poor Julian, papa Freud pulls him through the womb again” — there could be no mention of Lili’s pipings and grunts and clicks. The wine begged Iris to inquire, but Julian forbade it. Lili’s dreams were wounds. Sometimes they were terrifying resurrections: of her mother, her father. Her father had been a linguist, a professor at the university; he had begun teaching her German and Russian and French when she was very little, as a pedagogical experiment. In Lili’s dreams her father was speaking in no known language — savage syllables and crazed chatterings. Her mother in the dreams was always on the point of disappearing, like a drawing faintly inked. Or the animal sounds were whimperings, and the whimperings were Mihail’s last flailings after the last shot, or they would twist themselves up into words — Eugen’s clear words called out across a gray field, from a distance; yet they could not be retrieved or remembered. And Iris was not to ask.
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