The Lone Pilgrim

by Laurie Colwin

  You did not greet Delia’s father in any ordinary way. There was some proper, formal European way in which to salute him. I always extended my hand and flicked my heel in a faint imitation of the curtsey I had been taught as a child.

  He took my hand. “Ah,” he said. “It is Georgia Levy. What lovely names your parents give you. These names intrigue me very much.”

  His eyes were hazel, and they glittered like reptile eyes. He lit one of his cigarettes. The tin box they came in was red, white, and gold. How lucky for Delia to have a father who smoked such wonderful cigarettes and probably gave her the boxes to keep her bobby pins in. It was clear that he was waiting for someone. He said: “You must forgive me this moment of emotion. I am very sentimental about wild animals.” He took my hand—you shook hands with Delia’s father upon greeting and leaving. The encounter was over.

  When Delia said “my father” our hearts fluttered that such an exotic creature could be captured by such a homey term. Our fathers were not seen in zoos or museums once their children reached puberty. They did not meet in bars, but at their clubs. They did not loiter in public places waiting for people. When you saw them they gave your shoulder a squeeze or thumped you on the back in greeting. Our fathers did not look as if they had just woken from some drugged, sexual sleep. Their eyes did not have the glittering, mysterious light that made the heart of a teenage girl flop like a freshly caught fish.

  Our social life was arranged for us. It included hot chocolate after skating, going to the movies in groups, studying together for exams, and inviting friends for dinner—friends who of course invited you back. When Delia came for dinner we were embarrassed by everything: by the big, uninspired American rib roasts and baked potatoes, by the insipid grapefruit and watercress salad, by the fact that a colored lady (whom we called by her first name) served us, and by our boring fathers and mothers trying to figure out what to say to a child whose parents they had not known forever, especially this child whose father was a roué, whose mother worked, and whose responses were the soft, correct, hidden responses of a European child, not the loud, forthright manners they knew.

  When we were invited to the Schwanteses our mothers said things like: “Oh, dear, don’t you think it will be an awful chore for Mrs. Schwantes to feed you after working all day?”

  You changed your clothes before you went to Delia’s for dinner. We had servants but they had formality. You stopped at the florist’s and charged (at your mother’s instruction) half a dozen sweetheart roses to your parents’ account.

  The meals you were served by the Schwanteses were wonderful—nothing like the tame lamb chops and crown roasts we were used to. Out of a glazed brown crock Mrs. Schwantes served some fragrant stew made with wine. Even the potatoes in that house tasted different—more of earth than of starch. The salad had a dressing we thought of as grown-up, not like the sweet boiled dressing we had at home. For dessert there was fruit and cheese. We never rememberd the name of the cheese, but if Mrs. Schwantes wrote it down for us and we asked our mothers to buy it, it never tasted the same in our dining rooms. We were given watered wine to go with the meal and after were served coffee in demitasse.

  Every now and then Delia’s much older sister Vanessa would appear. She was certainly the most beautiful girl any of us had ever seen. She had lived in Paris and now worked for a French designer in New York. She chain-smoked like her father and spoke rapid-fire French to her mother. Her shiny reddish hair was worn in a mop of curls, and her clothes’ were a more dashing edition of what her mother wore. Our sisters were by comparison very boring. Vanessa’s life, we thought, was like one of those Japanese paper flowers that expands into a beautiful shape when put into water.

  Vanessa made a point of ignoring her father. This piqued him—even we could see that. He hated that a beautiful woman—even his own daughter—did not pay any special attention to him or let him pay special attention to her. She poured him a glass of wine without looking at him. “Thank you, my darling,” he crooned. How could she have resisted him? He spoke to her but she did not speak to him. All her remarks were directed to her mother, and her silence in his direction was full of contempt. In Vanessa’s presence, he crumbled a bit. His eyes got a little dull, like a prize cat just beginning to get sick. Puzzlement about women was something he was not used to contending with, even in small doses. It wore him out. Delia and her mother simply behaved around the situation, and a less fanatic Schwantes watcher than I might never have known that Vanessa addressed not one word to her father.

  This would never have happened in our households. If our sisters had frozen out our fathers they would have been taken aside by our mothers and given a lecture on not misbehaving in front of guests. Our sisters came home from college with politics and fought with our fathers because our fathers were rich, or if they brought home an odd friend they complained that our fathers were snobbish, or if they were entertaining some new idea, they were furious because our fathers were boring. But everything was out in the open. Doors were slammed. Meetings were held in various rooms. Threats were leveled. This was the American way. American children were expected to be rebellious: it was healthy and it didn’t last very long.

  After one of those dinners at the Schwanteses our parents seemed as sturdy and well designed as hotel china. Generations of American air, money, food and water, the milk of Holstein cows, and the democratic process had made them strong and forthright, with a steadfast, childlike belief in the security and correctness of their lives. But the Schwanteses had been fed on something subtler, less secure and more rarefied. They were delicate. They had depth and patina like nineteenth-century pottery. Their apartment had a dark, murky golden light which suited them. Everything about them was special.

  We felt that Delia and her mother must have had some special bond. Often, they walked to school together. The sight of them was very poignant to us. We were truly separated from our mothers. Our school lives had nothing to do with them and what they did all day was of no interest to us. When our fathers left for work in the morning it was as if they had disappeared into thin air. Adult life, in our lives, was symbolized by a man and a woman dressing (she in the dressing room, he pulling his clothes out of the cedar cabinet and dressing in the bedroom and bathroom) to go out for dinner on a Saturday night. Adult life was jokes and references you did not understand, food (like iced coffee, martinis, and rare steak) that tasted awful to you, and ideas beyond your comprehension, like money.

  In this milieu, the Schwanteses were our first taste of adult life. We saw the actual mother of a friend at work every day. We saw the friend’s father, independent of the friend. We never ran into anyone else’s father.

  On the weekends, our fathers drove up to Westchester to play golf. Or they worked in their studies at home. But Mr. Schwantes, for whom the weekend was probably the best time for the sort of work he did, gave himself entirely to his family on the weekends. When the weather was fine they went on picnics—we were sometimes asked along—with a big wicker basket of sandwiches and bags of watercress, covered dishes of potato and sausage, and a spirit lamp to brew coffee on. They liked to drive to an historic place, or to see the leaves turn, or to some pretty or interesting town. On Sundays Mr. Schwantes walked Delia and her mother to the little Catholic church nearby and sat in a restaurant to have his breakfast. He himself never went to church. Then the family piled back into the car and they drove into the countryside for lunch.

  The car was an old car with grey felt seat cushions, in which the Schwanteses took the sort of summer trips we thought only poor people took: car trips of America. We were sent to camp, or to France to live with a nice French family, or on a bicycle trip of the Lake District with Teens of All Nations. But the Schwanteses toured their adopted home. Mrs. Schwantes sat in the front tatting or doing crewel embroidery. Delia sat in the back with one of her French cousins: Lillian, Sylvie, or Marie-Luc.

  The Schwanteses took seriously many of the things we took for granted. For exam
ple, music. It was part of female social life to attend the symphony. In the winter time we referred to these concerts as “the fur watch” as we saw our mothers and grandmothers and aunts and all their friends greet one another in sable, ranch mink, and seal. In the world’s greatest music they seemed to find a form of relaxation: they liked a good performance of a conservative program—nothing they really had to listen to. Every once in a while a mutation in the form of a real music lover would spring up. I was one and Ellie Meyer was the other. Ellie’s grandmother, in fact, had been allowed to study at the conservatory in Paris before she came dutifully back, married Ellie’s grandfather, and set about producing Ellie’s father. One night at a school function old Mrs. Meyer had met Delia’s mother and father. From then on, she shared her tickets with them. She took Delia’s mother to the opera and Delia’s father to concerts. It was a pleasure to see him with Mrs. Meyer who was quite beautiful and formidable, with brilliant white hair. They were the first adult pair we had ever seen who were together for reasons having nothing to do with sex or family or money. They flirted and teased and conversed. When the topic of friendship was given to us for our tenth-grade essays, old Mrs. Meyer and Delia’s father was what I pictured.

  Most of us—Delia was the exception—lived rather casually out of one another’s houses. We were comfortable wherever we went, since anywhere was just like home: the same silk curtains, good oil paintings in heavy gold frames, big pantries and good food, chinz sofas, colored cooks and walnut coffee tables, Persian rugs and big glass ashtrays. When things broke in our households, they broke with a loud crash.

  We picked each other up and walked to school together, but to pick up Delia you had to make what almost amounted to an appointment, or she asked you.

  The Schwanteses lived further over East than any of us, on a tree-lined street we found quite charming. Where we lived there were nothing but houses or apartment houses. But on the Schwanteses’ block was a French hand laundry, a second-hand book shop, an antique dealer, and a dressmaker. The building they lived in was actually a converted tenement, with tile floors and painted tin ceilings. Unlike the rest of us who had extra rooms, the Schwantes apartment fit the family exactly: a living room, a dining room, a small kitchen, and two bedrooms. They had five different coffee pots, each of which brewed a different sort of coffee. In the kitchen was a pan for making crepes, a pan with an ornamental bottom for making some sort of waffle, and jars of dried herbs and petals for making tisanes.

  Since they had no kitchen table, the Schwanteses took their breakfast in the dining room. That struck us as very elegant and old world. If you picked Delia up, you could see the remains of their meal—the two white bowls out of which Delia’s parents drank their café au lait, Delia’s juice glass and little coffee cup, the glass plate with the two rusks left on it, and a pot of jam. Our cluttered breakfast tables showed the remains of a big meal shared by an extended family—brothers and sisters, a guest, an aunt or a cousin. In the light of early morning you could see by their breakfast table that the Schwanteses had only each other.

  We got our news about Delia’s father from upperclassmen whose sisters, now in college or married, had (or had friends who had) spent afternoons with him. We learned that he took girls he met on buses or in museums for coffee at Hildegard’s Tea Room, or the Petite Trianon. He met older women—Jane Dalsimer’s mother was said to be one—for drinks at the Russian Bar or the Carlsbad Café. It made sense to us that he did things like that. Our fathers were not the stuff of romantic heroes—who would want to go to a café with one of them? But Delia’s father was. You could not imagine him having anything as ordinary as a profession or a job. Spy was the closest we could get to a suitable occupation for him. We could see him smoking a cigarette and wearing a beret—standing at a train station, in the shadows. These images came from the novels we read and the foreign movies we went to see on Saturday afternoons. Our fathers had been in the war, but Delia’s father had fought in the Resistance, which was quite another thing.

  Our dealings with the opposite sex included infantile crushes on boys from one school or another whom we met at dances. When one of these boys liked you, he took any occasion he could to bump you. If you liked him back, your response was to slap him.

  But to go for a drink, to sit in a banquette, to have a man light a cigarette, or light yours. The closeness of legs under the table. The whole thing seemed electrifying.

  Mr. Schwantes liked girls like Mary Shiller or Grace Herbert, Vivvie’s sister. These were the great beauties of our school, girls who were asked out to dinner by famous playwrights and bankers. He saw girls when they graduated from college, after their first marriages, their second babies, their divorces. He was fond not only of grown-up school girls but of rich women who lavished so much money and attention on themselves that they gleamed. He liked interesting- and ravaged-looking European women who wore beautiful, severe clothes—older women. He liked interesting-looking girls—some of them Vanessa’s friends, no wonder she hated him—who wore trousers, smoked too much, and pouted. He liked big, windblown former debutantes who always looked nearsighted and skinny models with silvery blonde hair. When he was with his wife he looked subdued and solicitous, careful as he took her arm. He held her just close enough to make the hearts of his other conquests jump, should they ever run into him when he was with his wife. That closeness announced a bond understood only by the two of them, but the fact was that nobody understood anything about the Schwanteses.

  For a long time I thought that my friends and I were all alike, even Delia, that perpetual foreigner. I thought we had identical hearts under our plaid uniforms, but I was wrong. I learned this just before my eighteenth birthday.

  My classmates sat like good docile girls taking exams, but I could hardly sit still. I saw going away to college as an adventure. They saw it as one of the steps you take toward adulthood after which you settle down and get on with the business of life. I had never missed a school day except for sickness, but to give myself a taste of the freedom before me, I took a day off from school and spent it by myself. It was a warm, early spring day with that soft pale light that seems to be filtered through a haze of pollen and falls sweetly on your shoulders. It was a perfect day to wander aimlessly. I ambled in my favorite streets to see what they were like during the weekdays and had a happy, solitary lunch at the Lillian Candy Shop, a place that sold chocolates in the front and sandwiches in the back. It made me giddy to see, for once in my life, what a day would bring me instead of having it all nicely organized. What it eventually brought me was Delia’s father.

  By the time we met it was late afternoon, and the streets were gloomy in the blue light. A voice behind me said: “It is so difficult to recognize the friends of one’s daughter when they are out of costume.”

  There he was. His lidded eyes glittered. His rich hair was combed straight back. He wore a turtleneck sweater, a camel’s hair coat, and he was smoking a cigarette. It could be said that this was an accidental meeting but, in actual fact, this was his turf, the part of Manhattan that is filled with bookstores and cafés and spice shops. This was where Delia’s father entertained—the Russian Bar was around the corner and the Petite Trianon was up the street. It would not be quite correct to say that I was looking for him, but I must have known that it was not all that difficult to run into him if I wanted to.

  Nevertheless, the sight of him threw me into a panic. He was so physically near. I was so confused I did not even shake his hand. I felt that Delia’s father could see right into me. He took my arm as if it were assumed that I was going to walk with him.

  “It is clear that you have not been in school today,” he said. “What have you been doing?”

  I could hardly speak. I blurted: “What you do.” By which I meant promenading. He threw back his head and laughed a deep, smooth laugh.

  “I very much hope that you do not do what I do,” he said. “You are a schoolgirl and I am a life waster. Now come and redeem my wasted d
ay by taking the last part of my walk with me.”

  Every girl I knew would have said, without a moment’s hesitation: “I’d love to take a walk, but I’ve got to get home. Nice to see you, Mr. Schwantes. Bye-bye.” It would never have occurred to them to say anything else, and they would have meant it, too. But the idea of a walk with Delia’s father thrilled me. I was exhilarated and terrified, and nothing in the world would have gotten me to say no.

  He walked me to the river and down a flight of steps to the promenade. There was no one by the river. The sun had gone down, and the sky was just beginning to darken. My shoulders shook slightly, from the chill, I thought.

  Delia’s father lit another of his cigarettes, and the smoke from it made me almost dizzy. He had been talking, and I had paid no attention. I hardly heard him. I heard the sound of my footsteps and my loud heartbeat. When he finished smoking, he turned to me. His small, beaked features seemed to have been made only for seduction and observation.

  For some people life divides undeniably into childhood and adulthood, and I knew I was one of them. Delia’s father took my arm as if we had been dancing and simply spun me into him. I was rather tall, so we fit. His eyes glittered and he smiled. He moved me a step or two closer to the promenade wall, and there he kissed me as I knew he would. I kissed him back.

  That Eros is depicted as a chubby baby with baby wings and little toy arrows, as we had learned in the History of Civilization, struck me as a terrible irony. To the virtually untouched girl I was, Eros reared up like a bobcat, clawing at its cage with great, strong claws and dangerous teeth.

  Delia’s father kissed me again. I kissed him back. The smell of that smoke, that cologne—of him—made my knees rattle.

  Children are a tribe, and childhood is their tribal home. One false move and you lose everything. The tribe moves off without you. You forget your tribal language, and when you meet one of your former playmates they cannot understand or recognize you.