More and more, Iris was feeling the difference in Julian. The brotherly barbs and teasings were waning, and the mocking angers flew out only now and then. How he had scalded Aunt Bea! Iris too had stung her, mercilessly and meanly; but it was because of Lili — because Aunt Bea had seen Lili huddled into Julian, and Aunt Bea would inform her father, and her father . . . what would her father do? It was weeks since Iris had come. She had come to succor and protect her brother, and had found Lili doing both. Lili was a nurse, a mother — but what was she really? Was she the protector or the protected? Julian was building a fence around Lili — there were silences Iris must never penetrate. She was not to ask about the dead husband and the dead child. Julian had given her all she was to know — that the husband was called Eugen, that the child, three years old, was called Mihail, and that was enough, that was all. As for Lili’s arm inside her sleeve, it was always there, Iris had glimpsed it many times, its bulging depth and pucker, like a toothless mouth that has swallowed a bone. It meant what it meant. It told too much; there was nothing to say.
And Lili was always carefully kind. Her talk was careful and bookish and stilted and slow. She was often nervous. It was her work with those luckless people, Julian said, or living in a stranger’s place: she distrusted Dr. Montalbano. But Iris thought, Suppose it’s me. Was Lili wishing her away — was that why Lili was nervous? She went every day on the bus to sit in that old boucherie with the hooks for carcasses still on one wall, and those wretched importuners with their pleading eyes. The doves of the Marais have pleading eyes — Iris had read this in that Paris magazine Julian had sent home, the thing that had inflamed her father to boiling contempt. And what was her father thinking now? She hadn’t so much as written him a note. It was too cruel, but she couldn’t, she wouldn’t! She was relying on her aunt (and how cruel she’d been to Bea!) to tell him his daughter was well, she was safe, she was with Julian. With Julian and Lili! What would her father say to that?
Meanwhile her money was running out. It wasn’t an emergency, her ticket home was secure, and Lili’s small earnings filled the larder uncomplainingly. But the money she had brought for Julian was gone. It horrified her: he had spent it nearly all at once, he was profligate, one day a dozen blouses for Lili (all of them, she saw, longsleeved and frilly and awful, had he found them in a flea market?), then night after night flowers and fruit and puddings and cheeses and cakes and bottles of wine. First it was the wedding party they’d never had, and next it was a birthday marked but annulled — if the boy had been allowed to live, he would have been . . . Lili put a hand over his mouth. The number was a fortress, it was not to be broken into. The three of them lifted their glasses while Lili wept. Her tears fell into the wine; she left it untouched, and Iris drank it instead, the wine and the salt. It was the first true craving of her life: a danger was in it, things never before imagined. She had never before known anyone whose child was dead. Something of Lili was creeping into Julian. While Lili was away he brooded over a notebook. He declined to tell what was in it, but he was willing to say what wasn’t. He had given up the immorals. It was plain to Iris that her brother was changed; little by little he was becoming another Julian. The old babyish drama was still there — look how he’d wasted all those dollars! But he had married a woman who was teaching him the knowledge of death.
28
The Suite Eyre Spa
October (I do not know the date)
Dear Beatrice,
Though I am repeatedly frustrated these days, your visit has left me angrier than ever. I am certainly not to blame if you arrived and departed unannounced, thanks to carelessness on the part of the staff here! These people are too frequently careless. For example, my easel has been missing for more than a week and they claim it cannot be found. (Do I suspect theft? Indeed. The chief therapist here is a devious creature.) Your visit was far from pleasant, and I have no wish to communicate with you further, yet circumstances demand it. It was difficult enough to persuade my husband to let me have your address. He insists it is futile, perhaps you will not reply. And also he believes it to be an impulse that I will soon forget. He is often right, even when he is not perceptive. My husband is not a perceptive man. It would not be an exaggeration to say that he considers me untruthful. A better way to say it is that he is convinced I am the dupe of my imagination.
This is why, despite my distaste for it, I must approach you. I write now with a request. Kindly inform my husband that you did in fact come into my rooms here, and that you did in fact give me news, impossible news, of my children. It may be that you lied. How can what you told me not be a lie, if my husband knows nothing of the sort about my son? I thought at the time that you were lying out of malice over my marriage to your brother, or out of some other motive. But lately it occurs to me it is likely my husband has all along known what Julian has done, and wishes to shield me because he believes I am ill. For some little while I have been aware that there is something deceptive in my husband’s nature. This deception is not a kindness. When my son returns, I will greet him with joy no matter what he has done. As for my daughter, I have faith in her self-sufficiency. In this she is like her father. I take it to be one of the better Jewish traits.
I ask you now to be my witness that I am entirely in my right mind.
Sincerely,
Margaret B. Nachtigall
29
IRIS SAID FINALLY, “I’m thinking of leaving.”
Julian looked up over the notebook’s red margins. “All right. Where to?”
“I guess home. Where else? Back to the lab.”
“Will you like it?”
“I don’t know. It’s not too bad. I left all those crystals growing, and sometimes it’s exciting. If I could be really interested, it’d be exciting.”
“Duty calls, you’re doing it for dad —”
“I’m good at what I do.”
“Chip off the old block. So’s dad.”
“He runs around.”
“He’s always been on the move, he goes where the money is —”
“No, I mean with . . . you know. Distractions.”
“What, women? While mom’s in storage?”
“Girls, sort of.”
“It’s nothing to me what he does. Only mom —” The swelling in the neck. “How come you’ve never said this before?”
“I haven’t been thinking about it. It’s just that going home, if I go home . . . I’ve got my own place anyhow, dad let me have it.”
“So he could bring in girls after kicking mom out?”
“It’s only once in a while, it’s not a lot of the time. And maybe it’s because she’s been so mad at him.”
“Marvin the philanderer, why not?”
“Don’t say that, Julian, it’s not right. Poor dad, it’s just not like that. You don’t know . . . before she got sick, or maybe it was part of being sick, a sign of it, how it started to show . . . mom would say things.”
“What things?”
“Things.” Iris struggled with it. “That . . . she’d married a Jew. And that on account of him you and I —”
“All that’s old news, isn’t it?”
“But the way she said it. It was the way she said it —”
“She took dad’s name, didn’t she? A long time ago. And gave up her own family.”
“They gave her up. Maybe she feels it even now.”
“Well, I don’t. Especially since they’re mostly all dead or got themselves killed and we never knew any of them anyhow.”
“Or any of dad’s. Except for Aunt Bea, and only because . . . I wonder how he’s taking it. If she told him —”
“About Lili and me? Why should I care?”
Iris said cautiously, “Because you haven’t any money. Because you haven’t got a place to live. Or any way to make a living. You can’t live on that —” Her eye was on the notebook.
“Go ahead, finish it,” he said. “Say the rest of it, that I can’t keep on living on Lili. But L
ili can’t keep it up either, she’s just about worn out. All those miserable people day after day, it eats into her. She’s thinking of trying for translating work —” His look wandered off a little. “Or something else. She talks of getting out of Nineveh.”
“Out of what?”
“Out of Europe altogether. At least mom would know, they sent her to Sunday school. A rotten city in the Bible.”
“Paris is beautiful,” Iris said. “Europe is beautiful. And old. I love it that everything’s old over here. I wish I could see every bit of it, places like Italy and Greece.”
“It’s all Nineveh to Lili. And anyhow we’ve got no choice, we’ve got to get out — I’ve had a letter. Phillip’ll be back in two weeks.”
“Julian! What will you do?”
“I suppose find a room somewhere and tread water for a while. I can always go back to waiting tables.”
“Mr. Flotsam and Mrs. Jetsam, what a plan! What does Lili say to that?”
“My wife wants to get on a ship and sail to Jaffa and sit under some sort of gourd. I looked it up. Interesting book, that Bible.”
It was the first time Iris had heard her brother utter “my wife.” It jarred her, it baffled: how incongruous it was, Lily the stranger, no different from the people who were wearing her out.
“But what will you do?” she pressed.
“No idea. Sitting under gourds in the Middle East heat isn’t for me, and Lili knows it. Even if I am half a Jew.”
They ended it there. It was turning into a quarrel of cross purposes, the kind of quarrel Iris believed, from long habit, it was better to avoid — it was her practice to fend off such spats with her father. And then why leave now? Why not delay a little? Dr. Montalbano was returning, he was coming from Milan, from Italy! From Milan you could see the Alps! And meanwhile, in the notebook with the red margins, Julian was feverishly copying psalms. It made him feel close to his mother — he had lately discovered he was missing her terribly. By now he had got as far as number seventeen, and if Iris had looked into her brother’s notebook, she would surely have judged him cracked.
30
“THANK GOODNESS you’re back,” Laura said. “How was the trip?”
“Complicated,” Bea said. “How did you make out with my guys?”
“Well, they kept calling me Beanie, I suppose that was the worst of it. Not to mention the noise. Your crew is even tougher than mine, Bea, but you won’t believe it — they actually went for A Tale of Two Cities, they liked it! And one day I found a pair of knitting needles on my desk. Look —”
She pulled out an elongated woolen mass from a canvas bag and displayed it. “A scarf, ready for winter. I started knitting it, five inches for every chapter, a race to the end, and they beat me, they won!”
Laura triumphant: comically, ingeniously.
And still it was the return to the quotidian; to the life before. Before what? Bea contemplated it. She had journeyed out as a kind of ambassador, she had turned into a spy against every ingrained expectation, and it was true: sometimes an ambassador serves as a spy, sometimes a spy is appointed ambassador. She had gone roving for Marvin, to begin with — for Marvin, yes, but was it only for Marvin? Something had altered. She had a stake in it, she was embroiled. It was no longer Marvin’s need. The world was filled with need — wherever she looked, need!
She thought: I will change my life. Other lives were changing (“I do him good,” said Lili), why not hers? Paris was the hinge. However uncongenial the visit had been — however spiteful the brother and sister — she had witnessed shiftings, mutiny, young rebels in flight. The crisis of the untried, the past defied. Turnings!
It was time to get rid of the grand.
31
DR. MONTALBANO’S TRAIN would arrive at two that afternoon. Lili refused to see him: he was not honest.
“But you never even got to meet him,” Iris protested, “it was only Julian —”
“He is not honest,” Lili said.
It was their final hours in Dr. Montalbano’s flat.
The white cards they had found strewn on surfaces everywhere, with all those degrees, or whatever they were, marching across like rows of ants — that wasn’t what she meant. Gibberish and nonsense can’t hurt, and neither can water and ale, as long as you’re thirsty enough. But once, searching in a kitchen drawer for a whisk for Julian’s eggnog (he liked to lick off the froth, and he liked the funny name she gave to it too, guggle-muggle), Lili discovered a paper. It seemed to be a kind of formula, with three ingredients: water, ale, and an indecipherable third — in one instance it looked like “cascara,” though she couldn’t be certain. At the top of the paper was written, in clear capital letters, FOR DISEASES OF THE BLOOD, and under that, FOR CLEANSING OF THE LUNGS, and under that, FOR A HEADACHE, and under that, FOR FUNGUS BETWEEN THE TOES. The third ingredient was different under each heading.
She immediately showed the paper to Julian, who was wheezing on the divan.
“Your friend Dr. Montalbano is a magician,” she said. “And this is a magician’s place we stay in.”
“He isn’t my friend, not really. He was Alfred’s friend, and Alfred swore Phillip would never harm a fly. He just shores people up when they need it.”
“This Alfred is dead.”
“Not from any of Phillip’s recipes! Phillip’s all right, Lili — look how he’s helped us out all this while. Besides, it won’t be much longer, we’ll soon have to give up the key.”
But the time to give up the key had come; and still Lili would not see Dr. Montalbano.
“Then why don’t you both leave now,” Iris offered. “I’ll wait for him here and hand it over. I’ll take care of it, I don’t mind.”
But Julian said, “You don’t have to do this, Iris. He has another key for sure, he doesn’t need this one. Put it under the little lamp. Or the concierge can let him in —”
“To find nothing and no one? After we’ve taken over his place and he’s allowed it without a fuss? My flight isn’t till six, I still haven’t finished packing, and I’ve got nothing else to do. Someone should be here, someone should thank him, don’t you think?”
“Fine,” Julian said. “You’re telling me nicely what a boor I am.” Unexpectedly he patted her on the back. “Well, don’t moon, will you?”
Was this the last time she would have her arms around him? Iris kissed him and kissed him, on his forehead, all over both cheeks, under his chin, exploding finally into his ears, until he laughed: she was excessive in everything. She made him feel he had a conscience. Her face was wet.
She watched them go, her tall brother with his unaccountably thickened neck, and small thin odd Lili. A childhood singsong jogged in her brain:
Fat and Skinny had a race
all around the pillowcase.
Fat fell down and broke his face
and Skinny won the race.
She would never see Julian again, it wasn’t possible, Lili meant to take him far away: she claimed him, he belonged to her, he would do whatever she wished. Obstinate Lili! Why should she snub Dr. Montalbano? Those nightmare imaginings, a prescription for poison on a piece of paper in an ordinary kitchen drawer! Or else, if she didn’t take him away, the two of them might stick to where they were, and when, after all, would his sister come again to this incandescent parcel of earth and its beckoning cities, unknown, sealed, glowing, never to be ventured? Great public statues pitted by age, spires, ancient bridges over ancient rivers, while ahead lay newborn Los Angeles boiling in its tropical glare, rawness cut greedily out of a wilderness of valleys periodically ravished by primitive fires. Her rightful destination, her chosen future — finish her courses, get her degree, and then . . . Imperative to finish her courses and flaunt that sheepskin! It was her life, and always had been. It was what she had always wanted. It was what her father wanted. Her father . . . she must somehow brave what was to be.
Her sweated hand was dutifully clenching the key. She set it down on one of the little tables
— just in the middle of it, where Lili had placed the vial of cough syrup weeks ago (every gesture now had its ghost) — and wandered through the familiar spaces, here and there attempting to make order, straightening the picture frames, puffing up cushions. On the rug at the foot of the divan, a dark circumference in the shape of a spreading lake: wasn’t this where Julian had carelessly spilled Lili’s eggnog? Iris put a chair over it, to hide the guilty spot. The only presence was an absence. An empty clinic, awaiting clients.
On the other side of Paris, Julian was not surprised to learn that his old room was rented out. But Mme. Duval recommended her friend Mme. Bernard, who luckily had an opening — her most faithful tenant, a neat old man of ninety-five, had recently died quietly in bed. Not to worry: the mattress was turned over and the room was clean and well aired. Though Mme. Bernard’s offerings were no more commodious than Mme. Duval’s, there was the convenience of a toilet on the same floor. (At Mme. Duval’s, you had to go down to the landing below, and then to the end of a long corridor.) Mme. Bernard had one stricture only: no cats. She was allergic to cat fur.
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