Charles Delahaye, when he picked up the receiver, sounded as if he had been waiting for my call ever since he had received Olivier’s letter. He urged me to pack my bags and come over straightaway. Dinner would be waiting and the spare room. He omitted to mention anything else.
The apartment was in the Nineties, just off Riverside Drive, a squat stone building with a lurching elevator which bumped its way to the fourteenth floor. When he opened the door, Charles Delahaye was all French charm, exaggerated as it can only be, after years of living abroad. Dark hair, flashing eyes, a silk ascot round his neck, he embraced me a little too firmly and kissed me on both cheeks, before introducing me to his wife and children. I hadn’t been aware of the existence of either and it would probably have been better for everyone if that condition had persisted.
The children, a boy of eight and a girl of six, grudgingly said ‘Hi,’ and then returned to an argument which entailed chasing round the large sitting room to the loud but unheeded reprimands of their mother. It was evident from the first, that after an initial survey of my appearance, Edith Delahaye Rosen was hardly overjoyed to see me.
Dinner was a bizarre affair with Charles preening and chatting away to me in French, while Edith occasionally interrupted resentfully or rebuked him for not tending to the children. As the evening progressed in fits and starts, which the liberal addition of wine couldn’t quite lubricate, it became clear to me that my hopes of instantly registering for a degree at Columbia University had been grounded in crass naivety. Even if Charles pulled strings to overcome lateness, there was the hurdle of what to my French eyes were astronomical tuition fees; nor as a non-resident could I immediately qualify for one of the state colleges.
By the time the children had been tucked into bed and we were sitting sipping coffee on gargantuan sofas in the sprawling sitting room, the solution which to everyone but me had obviously been evident from the start, was voiced. Until I found my feet, perhaps even a scholarship - Charles dangled this like a juicy carrot - I would live with the Delahayes as their au pair, do a little cleaning, pick the children up from school, speak to them in French, baby-sit, and of course, audit as many courses as could be arranged for. And voilà, Charles clapped his hands like some circuit magician whose hat has finally produced a rabbit, my life in New York would be taken care of for the time being at least.
My first instinct was to run from the house, abandon my bags for greater ease and go. Just go. But I sat there, paralysed by the sense that Olivier and Charles had planned this out between them, aware that everything that was being said, made sense. I even nodded politely when Edith asked with exemplary curtness, ‘You do know how to clean, I presume?’
And so, like a victim of one of Louis XV’s lettres de cachets, my fate was sealed. My prison may not have had bars, but Edith, whom I thought of as my keeper, encircled me with so many rules and chores, that it may as well have had. Her dislike of me was not even particularly personal, I later realized. She simply hated me for being young, pretty, unmarried and childless. Which of those counts was the most serious, I don’t know, but together they constituted a major felony. I was put to clean three hours a day, given a few hours to attend courses, and then the children were all mine. The excuse was that she was busy writing her thesis, but I suspect she liked the little terrors even less than I did.
None of this in retrospect would have been so dreadful, except that I could do nothing right in Edith’s eyes. My dresses and clothes were wrong, my hair was wrong, my sorting through of a thousand toys was wrong, my vacuuming was wrong. Her every contact with me was a rebuke - to the point where my dreams took on a persecutory flavour. I would wake gasping for air in the middle of the night, not certain of who it was who had clasped my throat, or put gags in my mouth, or locked the bathroom from the outside.
Edith’s rebukes only stopped when they merged into lectures. These had one theme with many variations and I suppose they were parts of the thesis I could never hear her typing. The theme was oppression, to be more precise men’s oppression of women through the ages: the sins of patriarchy. Much of this was interesting. The problem was that while Edith talked about the wrongs of men and the rights of women, I had the sense that I alone was the target of her bile. A woman like her, I was nonetheless at fault. I was to blame. So that I would emerge from these lectures not so much feeling wronged, as feeling that I was contemptible, at once object of hatred and self-hatred.
It was not so different from the seminar in women’s studies, led by a friend of hers, she had fixed up for me to audit at Columbia. Here too, a long sequence of victimized, embattled women and heroines paraded before me, crushing me under their very weight as the injustices of patriarchy had crushed them. Once when I was elicited to speak, I said I found it hard to think about these stifled Victorian women. I had been brought up with strong, competent characters, women like Shakespeare’s Portia or Lady Macbeth or Madame de Pompadour or Madame de Stael, who had saved lovers and friends from the revolutionary guillotine. A thick silence followed my words and for once I wished that my mother were here to explain things more lucidly. For of course, she had marched, once even alongside Simone de Beauvoir, for women’s rights. But as I remembered it, her emphasis had always been on what was to be gained, not on the male enemy whose victim one was and from whom any gain had to be wrested.
Anyhow, in that silence which followed my one classroom intervention, I realized they didn’t like my dresses either.
Charles’s lectures on eighteenth century France, which I attended as well, were better. They made me feel neither powerless nor despised and I made some friends amongst my fellow students. But the material was largely what I had already studied, and when he invited me to his office to discuss my plans and possible scholarship applications, it became clear that he liked my dresses a little too much. He would smooth my collars, or straighten a shoulder, or find a button I had apparently missed. Gradually, too, it dawned on me that he always managed to be at the door when I emerged from the shower in the morning, or in the hall when I passed so that he could brush against me. Perhaps none of this would have bothered me quite so much if I had felt the least attraction for him. I was not, after all, a prude. The problem was that where I saw Charles, I also saw Edith, as if they had melted into one monstrous being.
Towards the end of my second month in New York, Charles asked me to meet him in his office, so that we could have lunch together and discuss my future in a more relaxed way. But there was nothing relaxed in the atmosphere which greeted me when I opened the door to Charles’s office. His hair was dishevelled as if he had spent hours passing his hands through it. His eyes were intent, too bright, and as he ushered me in I heard the turn of the lock in the door behind me. Before I could sit down, he put his arms around me and tried to place a moist kiss on my lips. It landed on my cheek and as I wriggled away, he coiled me in language, wreaths of words telling me how beautiful I was, how he couldn’t resist me, how he had fallen hopelessly in love with me, how he had the afternoon free, how there was a little hotel downtown he knew, next to a restaurant.
I still remember the sense of suffocation I had, the struggle to break through it and then the words which came to me in icy French. ‘Tu es fou.’ You’re raving.
They must have been accompanied by a glare for Charles abruptly stopped his barrage and in the sudden silence, I unlocked the door and walked from the room, walked straight back to the apartment, packed my bags, and only then confronted Edith who was tucked away in her study at the far end of the hall.
‘I’ve told you not to bother me in the middle of the day,’ she glowered at me.
‘I thought you’d want to know that I won’t be bothering you at all any more. Say goodbye to the kids.’
I was rude, I know, and I savoured the rudeness. I didn’t stop to answer her spluttering why’s and what’s. I gave no explanations. But I think in another minute I wouldn’t have been able to resist betraying her husband’s little misdemeanour, particula
rly when she hurled words like ‘ungrateful’ at me.
It wasn’t that I thought that Charles had behaved immorally. I don’t think I reflected on his behaviour very much at all. I simply knew that I wanted nothing to do with him. With either of them. One thing about me. I don’t remember ever having gone to bed with a man I didn’t want to go to bed with. I know these days received wisdom has it that men are beasts and incapable of taking ‘no’ for an answer. That hasn’t been my experience. Perhaps my no’s always sound definitive. Or perhaps men are simply afraid of beautiful women. It’s the plain ones they think they can do what they like with.
In any case, I found a cab and on the spur of the moment asked to be taken to the Gramercy Park Hotel. It was the only address on the other side of Manhattan that came to me. I stayed there for two nights and then thinking of my limited finances moved into a cheaper rooming house on the other side of the square. Within two weeks, I had found a grimy studio in the East Village. I had also danced away nights in clubs, smoked a few joints, chatted to people. And sent off some seventy letters in response to job ads in the papers.
Each time I put a batch of these letters into the mail box, I shut my eyes tight, screwed up my face and made a wordless wish.
-9-
I cannot sleep. I lie in the four poster bed and stare up at its canopy of tiny golden stars. I am thirty-three years old, that ‘mezzo del cammin di nostra vita’, as Dante defined it. What shall I do with the rest of the road? I have already buried two lives and now meet only their shadows. And beyond the shadows, what then?
When I left my first life, I didn’t think about the ‘then’. I merely plunged. Now I think, but the thoughts take me round in circles, like the spiralling circles of hell.
I leap out of bed to rout the self-pity which has taken hold of me. These elegant rooms in this city of dazzling spectacle are no papered-over hell. I am simply hungry, I tell myself. I have forgotten to eat.
The misty green fridge reveals the remains of a chicken I bought yesterday, ready broiled. I place it on the old pine table and pick at it, straight from the bag. I gnaw at legs, dismember the carcass, nibble the wishbone clean. The wishbone. I twine my little finger round one of its prongs and stare at the upside-down V. Suddenly those quiet, mellow brown eyes I encountered in the street are opposite me, but they are lodged in the face of a little girl. Two thick blonde plaits fall over her shoulders. She stares at me, stares at the wishbone, then closes her eyes so tightly that her whole face is creased with the intensity of it. She is wishing. She is wishing so well that I know her wish will come true.
My mother stands on the other side of the kitchen table.
‘That’s right, Beatrice,’ she says softly. ‘Now you make your wish and tug. You, too, Maria.’
I look at Beatrice and imitate her gesture, but I know there is no point. I cannot mimic the frenzy of desire Beatrice has put into her wish.
There is a little crack as the bone splits and then the sound of my mother clapping. ‘Beatrice has it. You will have your wish, Beatrice. But you musn’t tell what it was.’
‘Thank-you, Madame.’ Beatrice’s face has resumed its more customary expression, which is one of calm bordering on resignation. Her eyes, which have huge liquid dark centres, rarely seem to move or blink. She looks like one of those saints a book on my mother’s shelves depicts. A knife may be digging into the folds of her dress, but her face, her gestures, betray only a serene gratitude.
I am fascinated by Beatrice the very first day I see her at school. I am coming onto nine and it is the beginning of the winter term. She is new to the class and she sits at the end of the front row. As the teacher introduces her to us, Beatrice sits precariously near the edge of her chair, tipping it forward. Her hands are tightly clenched on the desk, but her face is tranquil. There is a stillness to her which bears no resemblance to anyone else’s in the class. Her face is not a particularly pretty face, rather plain really, but there is something about it which I have never seen before.
The other children feel it too. In the playground, they shun her for days on end. Even the most raucous boys don’t pull her plaits. She stands at the edge of the courtyard and simply stares into space. But she doesn’t look wistful. It is as if she is oblivious to the rowdy tumbles and shouts which make up recess. She doesn’t seem to want to play. She is self-contained.
On Friday, I leave my noisy little group and walk over to her. I stand beside her for a while without saying anything, then I ask, ‘Would you like to play?’
Beatrice looks at me as if my words have come across a distance of oceans and are muffled by waves. Then her lips curl slowly into a smile. The smile has a purity about it, like a single ray of early spring sunlight.
I put up my hands and motion for her to do the same. I begin one of the pat-a-cakes that has been making the rounds.
My father runs a grocery
My mother bakes the bread
Come the summer holidays
They’ll both go to bed, bed, bed..’
With laborious seriousness, Beatrice learns the words.
Within two weeks, Beatrice and I are fast friends. We sit in the canteen together and I slip her all the bits of food I don’t like. She eats everything dutifully. She doesn’t talk much, but my patter makes up for two. At playtime, I make certain she is part of my group, though my last term’s best friend makes fun of her, laughs at the patches on her clothes. So do the others. I like the fact that Beatrice’s clothes are even more tawdry than mine and I stick up for her. Since the other girls are a little afraid of me, since I already tower over both girls and boys, they gradually accept her.
I bring Beatrice home with me after school. She is shy. She looks at my mother with astonishment when she sits down to have hot chocolate with us and talks to us about our school day.
‘And what about homework?’ my mother asks. ‘Why not get it over with and then you’ll have lots of time to play?’
The table is scrubbed clean and we bring out our plastic bound notebooks. My mother looks over Beatrice’s shoulder for a few moments and then she says to me, ‘You might give Beatrice a hand, Maria. I think she has a little catching up to do.’
I help Beatrice with her long division, but I grow impatient. She is slow, doesn’t understand. My mother takes over while I go off to my room and dig out cards, set up an elaborate game of spit. Beatrice, when she finally joins me, is not too quick to grasp this either. It occurs to me that she may never have played cards and I explain the sets to her and sequences of kings and queens and valets.
‘I’m glad you’ve made a friend of Beatrice,’ my mother says to me when she comes to tuck me in for the night. She pauses. ‘She’s a sweet girl.’
I bridle a little at this. My mother has never told me that I am a sweet girl. But then she adds, ‘And you’re so clever. You can help her. Her last school couldn’t have been much good.’
I like this better. I help Beatrice. She comes home with me after school two or three times a week, occasionally with another friend, and sometimes comes round on weekends as well. My mother takes us to see movies or we go to the Louvre and look at pictures of people with a lot of clothes on or women with none at all.
One week I have flu and am away from school for some days. When I get back, I notice that Beatrice has a huge bruise on her cheek. I ask her how she got it.
‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ she raises her hand to her face. ‘I fell.’
At playtime, my other best friend, Rachel, asks me, ‘Have you noticed how Beatrice smells?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ I am angry with her.
‘It’s true. Natalie says so. And Simon. And they sit next to her.’
‘How did Beatrice fall?’ I change the subject.
Rachel shrugs, then giggles. ‘Ask Simon.’
I don’t need to ask Simon. I know his tricks. He has a leg that mysteriously finds itself entangled in other people’s feet.
I realise that the magic which initially kept Beat
rice apart from the classroom fray has faded. Without my protection, she is prey to all and sundry.
‘We’ll get even with them,’ I tell her after school.
But Beatrice demurs. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she murmurs. ‘It’s nothing.’ Then she asks me how my mother is.
‘Fine,’ I mumble and then somehow manage to put the question, ‘Would you like a bath when we get back to my place?’
‘Oh no,’ she says, but I convince her, tell her I want one too.
That evening I mention to my mother that it seems a little odd to me that Beatrice has never invited me home to her house.
My mother looks at me with her especially patient expression which signals a comment on life in general. ‘Not every one is as fortunate as we are,’ she says. ‘I think Beatrice is probably quite poor. She may not want to show you where she lives. People are like that sometimes. And she probably doesn’t have a room of her own. She has a little sister, she tells me, and a brother.’
She hadn’t told me, but I let it pass.
My mother rushes on. ‘I am glad you’ve become such fast friends. Beatrice is a good person.’
The way she says this loads it with importance. I begin to see just how good Beatrice is. When she stays for dinner, she leaps up with alacrity rather than hanging back when it’s time for the washing up. She listens to every word my mother says, then nods and smiles. She says please and thank-you and ‘Oui Madame’ a lot. Her notebooks are of a tidiness mine can never hope to match. She can plait her own hair neatly in two minutes flat and it never spills out of its bands the way mine does. Then, too, she never gets angry and never talks back. And she never wants revenge, even when the other children are horrid to her. Beatrice is a good person.
A Good Woman Page 6
