What is a father? You never ask. There’s a word for it…if you ever ask. From his first breeze over my cradle, my father’s success was that almost to the end of his life I never saw him except emotionally. He had a great, dripping bundle of experience in his hands, and as we talked or walked together, he never failed to break off a piece and give it to me, sometimes a berry, sometimes a thorn. Either way, I had to grasp it. And behind him, he had a house invisible, but not made of cards or of glass or any of the other corruptibles, not even of biblical rust—see Ecclesiastes. We walked through its rooms without ever speaking of it; its contract was never mentioned, yet every day we paced its boundaries and defined. By the time he was an old man and I saw him with my intellect—the bundle bare and the house gone—it was too late; he had already given me them. Fathers are where the dreams are.
And the art of failure, what is it? For in terms of the men my father shared a courtroom morning with, or a brownish winter afternoon on “the street,” or even, as he used to say, “a flossy dinner at Mouquin’s”—to all those Carters and Choates he never chummed with or took by the coattails either but had to see almost daily in the way of business—he must have been merely one of those non-bankrupts who never made either a legal or financial success. In their eyes, surely that was failure. But I never could tell, with him. Perhaps that attitude’s a hereditary strain in us somewhere—though my father went on working till he died.
But inaction helps make a man a poet if he’s able; he has to gather together the loose ends of his sensibility—or the kernels—and dare to say to the world, “Here! Value this!”
Yet even in men of action there were great storytellers in those days—mainly because there were great listeners, used to hearing the world made habitable by talk. My father was always in this second group—in spite of all the young men who used our house as a hall. And emulating him—though it wasn’t my nature but only my age—so was I. Now, being a father, I can tell you the story, and you may brood on the word for us. Or words.
Before I was born, my father had already built up a part-time practice in Paris, at first as one of the many in attendance on the Bering Sea arbitrations between Great Britain and us. Look it up, that late-century tea party—almost the last of the great Anglo-American disputes. Did Great Britain have the right to kill seals in water adjacent to their breeding ground—islands held to be our domain under the Alaska Purchase? We lost—but for international law it meant a new turn. For my father—it brought him into the world, if not the society, of James Carter, counsel for our government, of Lucius Choate, the “great cross-examiner,” who later wrote Carter’s memoirs, and eventually much more of the same company, where—quite possibly for lack of talent alone—he didn’t belong. It’s not a familiar role, the Jew who isn’t smart enough for a particular milieu or group of Christians, and it’s certainly not a favorite one with our people, but it exists. Maybe it broadened and gentled him, but somewhere it must have dampened and muted him too—my father-in-law Mendes, that old Spanish hawk among hawks, would never have understood him.
To me, my father was always smart enough. If the young clerks, junior partners, and now and then even students who sought the house did so mostly for their own inter-jangling charms, I wasn’t too young myself to observe that a word from him, however modest and hostly, nevertheless fell hypnotic on their abstract struggles—and in silence I measured this. Under pact of said silence, I had been allowed up—from the time I was nine—to learn what I could, plus the habit of oral memory as well. By then the Bering Sea business was long over—settled in 1893, when I was three. But it was always recurring, of course; one of the great aspects of the law is that its conversations go down the ages at will—and of course I was learning that too. For to me, the very words Bering Sea and the seals’ breeding ground—or that curt, sea captain’s phrase off the Pribilofs—were also an entirely other kind of island music. Even later, when I was studying for the bar exams—which if done alone, as we often used to, is like learning the separate names of ten thousand matchsticks—even then I could still hear it, and for its sake go on. It taught me that no matter how far the law recedes into infinite holding companies of itself, at sea bottom, it takes in the natural world. From there I wasn’t far to seeing, if I hadn’t seen already, how from the meadow to its owner, from a man’s riparian rights to the water-music he listens to—the law takes in the invisibles of men.
I wonder, do you get that at Harvard—or Columbia? In the nineties, we could still study for the bar on our own—or with an office-father. That’s why I don’t mind your notebook. To know people, you should know about houses. And a father knows—though he can’t always tell you what is a house.
By the time I was sixteen we were all in Paris together; my father’s practice there had never diminished so far that he couldn’t find something to take him there at least twice a year, though this was the first time we’d been there as a family, on my mother’s insistence that the girls and I learn French. That little picture of all of us crammed into a dogcart, our heads as flat forward as if we had no rear dimension, is of that time, taken during the vacances—mine, from the school I loathed. At that time I’d already attained almost my full height. My father, a six-footer himself, never seemed to mind one whit that his only son took after the maternal side, my mother herself being an ordinary five-foot-two, but with a known strain of dwarfism in the family, which I’d just barely escaped. Otherwise, he was quite impersonally prepared to believe that my bad odor at school—and bad French—was all due to my being an American—since he’d been born in England himself. At the same time, he trusted me implicitly because I was his—and since I so admired him, even at that bloody school I couldn’t do less than act as if I was. What invaluable guidelines to conduct there used to be, from unpsychologized parents! For meanwhile I knew that if anything really serious ever went unfairly against men down there, he was capable of thrashing the offender, student or master, in the event that I was right. I’d given him this allegiance ever since, the winter before, he’d thrashed me because I was wrong.
But that year abroad, because he knew I was unhappy at times, he gave me a lot of his time—and because it was also a duty he enjoyed. Since we were both “collectors,” we were particularly pleased with each other’s company when making the rounds of the dealers and the museums. For the first time for me, Paris seemed to have more sunny days than gray ones; the shopkeepers’ singsong became funny instead of nasty. I bought a number of “classic” reproductions—I was reading Keats and Macaulay as a mark of defiance against Bossuet and Racine—but found no Daumiers. My father bought a drawing he persuaded himself was a Boucher, and a sly little fan by Conder—the sum got for it after his death never ceased to surprise my mother, who thought no decent family ought even to have such goods to sell. She wasn’t entirely Philistine; her own parents had bequeathed us some respectable Dutch works which today would bring infinitely more. But I often think that, if sold today, my father’s hodgepodge of airy nymphs with powdered hair, and errant bodices, or not-quite-abandoned fêtes galantes in Barbizon greenery, or coy sub-Titian call girls with pink behinds as large as suns, could be billed as an intact example of a certain brand of taste of the nineties—of the well-to-do, French-oriented gentleman whose pictures were as much a part of sensuous indulgence as his wines, and who therefore would have nothing to do with the taste of the Victorian squires on the other side of the Channel—with what my father always called the “cow-colored” pictures of the English. At least this saved him from the Burne-Joneses; I once heard him mutter in front of one, “Can’t anybody see from his women that what the man really loves is mares?” For to him of course, art wasn’t a lovable pursuit except in a major phase of it that the world’s almost forgotten for the moment. Art to him was the adjunct of the boudoir.
The morning I speak of was sunny, and the last day of my vacances. One of the few words I could say with a good accent, on this morning it rang in my head like the sad shriek
of myself drowned. Next morning at dawn, I’d find myself bound for those comfortless, gray schoolyards, on a train with my other high-collared colleagues, and wishing myself at least as graphically miserable as they; my time there was never hell but merely an itching limbo, owing to what always ended by getting me in trouble—that I lacked the capacity to be bored. And perhaps because it was the last day and because it was the gloriously lighted kind which has no moral to it even in memory—my father was especially restless. At times during the past two weeks, he had been this way in spite of all our fun, and now and then at dusk, if our excursion hadn’t taken us out of the city, he left me abruptly, to meet again later at the home dinners for which he was always prompt these days, altogether unlike his habit in the States. This couldn’t be because of any Parisian cookery at home, since my mother had found a bonne passive enough to do as she wanted. She was happy in this, and in the possession of a German crony to whom she could deplore the perversions of the country—scent instead of scrubbing, rank butter, gamy meat. I had never seen her so tranquil. The truth may have been that my father was sleeping with her, out of a duty motive which will become clear. I knew his moodiness wasn’t due to me, unless it was the regrets of an old age nostalgic at the sight of me—he was then forty-nine. We don’t think of our parents as present people. Mothers in a way may not be—they have the race to think of. My father was surely enjoying my presentness—to him I was a schoolboy, but also youth on the verge. Like one old teacher I had later, he never talked down to me, and for much the same reasons—he respected my soul. And if he’d never yet talked of women with me, it was only because as yet I likely had none worthy of the name; on sexual matters in general he was thoroughly decent with me, rightly assuming that, at least in the head, I knew everything.
It was eleven o’clock in the morning, dewy fresh outside. The shop we were in, though in a fashionable street, with silhouettes of women passing the window clear as colored goblets—here an anise, there a rose, there an oyster-pale water—had the antiquarian’s divine mustiness. “They keep it that way so you’ll think you’ve discovered something,” muttered my father, but the dealer was servile, my father was flush, and the day had to be ratified somehow. At the moment, we were looking at a cigarette case of superb enamel—from the workshop of Falize, the dealer murmured, done by one of the men there who did these pieces on the sly—“for relaxation” was the actual phrase—and had a talent for them. He did. Whenever I see the thing in my drawer now, that airy joke with its upflung blue and white skirts, I think of it as the epitome of his era’s taste in such matters—never quite pornography, often far short of art, but usually in the end settling for life, if in the preferred tones of peach and amethyst. The case’s lid was painted on both sides; on the outer one a girl, curtsying toward spectator and her own knees, flung up her skirts from behind. Reverse of course, one saw the buttocks, just as in any postcard, but it was the conception saved it, no pantalettes, only the naked body and legs, exquisitely and strongly drawn. Though the dealer, like almost all in that quarter, must have had his “special” pieces hidden away, this case was with the regular art objects. Gaiety had saved it, and workmanship; it was like a choice moment out of a love affair—only an affair of course; it had an affinity to those passing, dreaming silhouettes.
Just then a man my father knew quite well entered the shop, one we’d been encountering here and there in our tours—once in the Louvre and once in the Musée de Cluny, with both of which he had some honorary post—and a third time I couldn’t recall precisely where, only remembering that at each recognition he and my father were more excessively polite. Their acquaintance dated from the old Bering Sea days, when this man had been on the staff of the French arbitrator, the Baron de Courcel; my father always referred to this man as “the baron,” whether in fact or jest I never really knew. If he wasn’t a nobleman, he certainly affected the rich airs of one, all the way from his art interests to the hunt; he was reputed to be master of a private one on his own lands. For he was one of those Frenchmen who perennially find it fashionable to imitate the style of the English, in tailoring, haircuts and epithets, all down the line. By contrast with my father—whose mottled-gray pompadour, lean suitings of striped caramel, buff shoes and silver cravat, all slightly qualified by the military carriage some modest men adopt, still looked as French a dandy as any—the baron’s head was grizzled square, his shorter figure announced itself in checkers as loud as a country lord’s, the blond-bearded cheekbones had gone hearty with veins, and his French was so full of English that even I could understand it.
“M’sieur Mannix. Ca va?” Without waiting for a reply, he nodded brusquely to the dealer, his grass-green eyes, obtuse with the habit of purchase, taking in our situation. From our last two encounters, I knew that although my father had offhandedly introduced me the first time—“This is Simon”—the baron wasn’t likely to greet me, even affecting not to see me in my absurdly tight and braided schoolboy dress, of which my father had suggested I lay aside the ridiculous cap. But I already knew French ways with the young, grown accustomed to being ignored even more than was done at home in those days. My father had also explained to me certain other French distances not only with foreigners but among themselves, how a man might be very close to you in a business way, eat with you in restaurants, even fraternally share your after-midnight pleasures, yet never speak of his family, much less invite you home. Meanwhile among my own schoolmates there, I’d observed that the young middle or upper class Frenchmen, even when they approved of their fathers, openly talked of supplanting them, with a fierceness which an American, even if he knew he felt it, would do everything to conceal. Of course this was 1906. But it was therefore no wonder to me that elder Frenchmen looked at boys my age with a certain enmity. The Baron’s entry merely cast a momentary, disapproving shadow over my father’s intimacy with me—which to the baron would look so rawly American—and reminded me that tomorrow was school.
As I expected, his eye passed over me. “Allow me not to interrupt,” he said stiffly. “M’sieur Duprès”—that was the dealer—“has a Houdon piece I interest myself in. Lovely weather.” He spoke in English, with a yellow smile from teeth the same color as the curtains in our dormitory.
“No, no,” said my father. He gave Monsieur Duprès the nod that we’d buy. “We’ve finished. The boy here and I are just buying a present.” His smile went past both baron and me, to the day, the hourglass women going by continuously outside, and no doubt—much as he cherished our filial time together—to the afternoon’s release from me. What a dear, blithe innocent he was.
“Ah, oui. We see you two much together, these days.” The baron spoke from a rudely fixed stare which half seemed to be making up the addressed one’s words for him. As for me, I was annoyed that those teeth hadn’t the bad breath they deserved, or had sunk it in moustache pomade. I was about on their level—and how we hate elderly flesh, all our lives. Not sickness—most of us are brave. And not ugliness—even with the women, it’s not just that. Incapacity—that’s what shreds. At sixteen of course, I wouldn’t see that, only sensing that the baron no doubt had a schoolboy son like me somewhere, waiting to take over his father’s hunt.
“Here, have a look at it,” said my father. “Enameled on gold, not silver. Makes it jolly expensive.” He always fell in with anybody’s brand of speech or thinking—part of his listening, I suppose. “But from Falize. So I suppose it’s an investment.” He grinned at me, over the phrase we’d clapped each other on the back with, after each buy.
The baron leaned over to see, in spite of himself. With his long nail he pried up the lid with telltale familiarity; clearly this type of object wasn’t as rare to him as to us.
“A present,” said my father again, as if he hadn’t thought of this before, or said it. “That’s what it is. Yes, of course.”
“For—a lady?” said the baron. The cushion of his forefinger smoothed the rosy glaze of the girl’s rear.
“Oh no
,” said my father. “For him.”
My father’s eyes, looking at me, appeared to be twinkling. I had never before seen this moist phenomenon. Though I was no prodigal, I had already given him quite some trouble, from time to time. And though I saw him always as described, how can a son ever tell for sure how a father sees him? For once, I saw it. The perfect exchange of love, any sort of love, is a phenomenon also. Over the baron’s head—and the cigarette case—we performed it. We had no idea of course what the baron thought he saw. I suppose we were a queer, unresembling pair to be trotting around town, my father and I, unless one knew the relationship. And the baron, at the outset of my introduction, must not have made that connection.
One needle-sharp point of his moustache lifted. I didn’t catch what he said in French, but it had the shape of a proverb. Then he said in English, “How encouraging.” Next he said something which made the dealer retire to the back of the shop—as for me, I might as well have been underground, staring up. “An investment, M’sieur Mannix?” he said. “So then, we don’t meet for dinner this trip, you and I. Now at last I can say to myself why.”
My father guardedly returned his bow. “All the family’s here this time. My wife—and my daughters too. Though the girls are already back at school.”
“That is so wise,” said the baron. “But your wife surely consoles herself. With the beauties of Paris.”
Here my father began to look puzzled—wives must never have entered their conversations before. “As does yours, I should suppose.”
“My wife does not come to Paris,” the baron said quickly. “Unfortunately. Otherwise we would be happy to receive your—daughters.” He was carrying a kind of whipstock with handle and loops, not a riding crop but a sporting beau’s city affectation of one, and now he cracked this against his calves, as if he wore boots. “But I can perhaps—give you lunch?” He looked down at me, and away again. “If this little—gentleman—will excuse you.”
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