Foreign Bodies (26 page)

I’ve written again to dad to warn him that there’ll be a delay before I can get a flight home. I had to fudge it a bit, I couldn’t say my airfare has to wait for Phillip to come back — he seemed awfully concerned about this particular client — he said he wants to make it up to her for what went wrong. Well, I expect now I’ll never see the Uffizi or the Alps or the Parthenon or Lake Como or anything like that. And I’ll be giving up my own little studio place too, to stay with dad and try to make him happy. He’ll be pleased if I go back to the lab and get my degree, and I guess that’s what I’ll have to do. Maybe someday when I’m old I’ll take one of those tours, with a guidebook and a map. — Aunt Bea, would you mind if I keep on writing to you now and then when I’m back in L.A.? Not just to make amends for all those bad things from before, but to find out what it’s like to be on one’s own for the rest of one’s life. To be honest, I never realized it until only a while ago, but I think you’re terrifically brave!

Iris

I
N AMERICA
on Thanksgiving Day it is always easy to travel, especially on trains and planes. Everyone heading home for a family reunion or to a festive gathering of far-off friends has already arrived, and will hardly be ready to depart until two or three days after the holiday. This in-between time found Marvin the sole passenger in the curtained first-class forward section of his Pan Am flight to Los Angeles, anticipating an enforced two-hour wait in Dallas. The blasting roar of the four propellers brought on a muted but constant shrieking in his ears, the familiar sensation of internal sirens that he knew was bound to outlast the trip, hanging on long afterward like the whistlings of angry spirits. He had picked up a news magazine in the terminal at LaGuardia and thumbed through it desultorily: in Korea this battle and that, Eisenhower defeats Taft for the GOP nomination, cave paintings of Irish elk discovered in the south of France, Mau Mau depredations in Kenya, Soviet Jewish poets doomed . . . He waved the stewardess and her tray of drinks away, though he had ordered his usual pair of gin and tonics not three minutes before. He had slept badly in the doughy softness of his hotel bed. Between yawns, and between the two rivalrous coasts of the continent, it felt as if he had not slept at all. And still he was aware of a habitual swell of potency, an expenditure of elation, as after a hard-driven round of negotiations leading to triumph over a competitor, or the not infrequent pleasure he took in outthinking his teams of chemists and engineers. His brain was good in a crisis: he could resolve the intractable.
As always, there was a lesson in it for the vanquished. Marvin’s science — that meager aspect of it nearest to the psychological — was rooted (so he might have put it himself) in Mendelian genetics. He was the son of a strong mother, which clearly accounted for his own energies — but he was also the offspring of a weak father, the shopkeeping son of a shopkeeper, an unaspiring pushover given to reclining during business hours on an antiquated settee wearing his eyes out in heaps of unrealistic bookish claptrap; and this unforgiving heritable wastefulness had unhappily shown up in Julian. Surely there was a lesson in it — not for his boy, the luckless carrier of a predetermined deficiency, but for his daughter. What precisely was the lesson for his daughter, he could not be certain — it hung before him, but dimly, behind a veil. She had sought out her brother; she had, in inscrutable fact, decamped to live with him and the woman, and what did it mean, what could it portend? A better head on her shoulders than her brother, thanks to Mendel and his sweet peas, and thanks also to that ancestral tea kettle; Margaret too had a part in it. Iris had grown into a sound young woman. Tender pragmatist that she was, her motive in bolting after Julian may well have been to denounce without renouncing, as if old intimacy could keep its influence. A job markedly different from Marvin’s rush to New York: the quick clean cut. A lesson not for the boy, no! (the boy was ruined beyond repair), but for this industrious bright girl, a steadfast mind like his own. Iris would see the justice of what he had done — the calculated businesslike balance of it — repudiation without abandonment. There was a lesson in it, a lesson for his daughter, but it was slipping away, he nearly caught hold of it and then again it eluded him . . .

He rang for the stewardess.

“Where’s my gin and tonic?”

“I brought it, you said you didn’t want it —”

“Well I want it now. And bring me some eyeshades, will you?”

He drank, and the thickness of his neck became overwarmed, the fatty nape and the fat all around his Adam’s apple, and the sirens in his ears diminished (but only a little, ghostlike); he could not sleep.
What was the lesson, and if he could retrieve it — it drifted almost, almost at the penumbra of his thought — would the girl recognize it, would she embrace it, would she live up to it? What were his children’s grievances, how had he offended them? His son and his son’s wife were the offense! While Iris, a steadfast mind like his own if a trifle more yielding . . . he had lost one, had he lost the other?

Many hours later, as Marvin labored up the path to his house in the depleted fatigue of sleeplessness, he was surprised to see the heavy door with its stained-glass fanlight wide open, and the whitehaired housekeeper standing there in her street clothes gripping her washing bag — she had long ago acquiesced to Margaret’s insistence on a maid’s uniform, and commonly carried it away for a twiceweekly laundering. A much younger man — a motorist asking directions? — was displaying what appeared to be a dirty scrap of paper. The housekeeper cried out and tapped the man on the elbow to get him to turn to her approaching employer.

“I was just this minute leaving for the day,” she called, “and God help us it’s from the police.”

Afterward Marvin recollected, however pointlessly, that the offi-cer too was in street clothes.

M
ARVIN ON THE PHONE
the morning after Thanksgiving, hoarse, haranguing, accusing, what on earth was he telling her? A confusion of elements, impossible to sort out. A lawsuit, he said, he’d sue them out of their imbecile brains, out of their last cent, a dereliction of duty if he ever saw one, he’d found out anyhow this wasn’t the idiot’s first time falling down on the job, she’d been warned before, supposed to monitor people’s comings and goings, sign in visitors, et cetera, they’d fired the woman on the spot what good was that now? And no shoes, her feet were bleeding, it was ghastly, the goddamn driver, sue the bus company won’t let them get away with it, murder pure and simple, and that letter they took out of her pocket, soaked in blood, out of your mind to send a sick woman a letter like that, rile her up and barefoot, my God, barefoot in the middle of the freeway, murder pure and simple!

Marvin, suffering. The scraped voice, the headlong anguished fury. “You’ll have to tell my kids, you’re the one to do it, I can’t do it myself, I can’t, I’m not up to it, even if I knew how to reach them, not a line from Iris all this time, and my son — well, it’s all over with Julian. But he has to be told, Margaret would want it —”

And Margaret: sick or sane? A little of each. Sanity it surely was to resist Marvin, to see into him, even to deny him; and to see into him was inevitably to deny him. But what did it matter now if Margaret had seen, resisted, denied? A broken body on a California road.

“And how is it your business to be sending my wife that inane little
note, Julian’s got himself married, he’s on his way home, exactly the things it so happens she’s been babbling about in these lunatic delusions she’s been having, you never knew Margaret anyhow, you’ve never had a thing in common with her, how would you, you’ve lived practically your whole life like a goddamn nun, and if you ask me it’s you and your goddamn little note that’s killed her —”

Bea said feebly, contritely, “I thought it would make her happy.”

“Happy! Bea, she’s dead, my wife is dead.”

And then the electric silence of the miles between them.

But again he had left her with one of his inescapable imperatives: it fell to her — again! — to be emissary to Marvin’s children. Inescapable? She was already a master of betrayal — what Marvin didn’t know, what she’d concealed from him! He didn’t know she’d been to see Margaret, he didn’t know she’d spied on that girl in the cape, he didn’t know she’d burned up his check. He didn’t know his daughter was in thrall to a crook! Bea counted it up, she turned it over, she weighed the consequences of confession — suppose she were to confess these things to Marvin — in the end it would all amount to the same. Margaret was dead. Dead, whether exonerated of delusion or not. Marvin a likely adulterer. Julian exiled by his father; there would be no reprieve. And Iris . . . In all this Bea saw herself as blameless: she had come to side with the party of the far horizon. As for the ashes in the sink, she had thwarted Marvin’s unreason with sanity: sanity it was to thwart Marvin! Money frees, yes — she might have freed Julian altogether, she might have given the son his inheritance without revealing the father’s stipulation. But money is also bondage — if Julian were tempted to take it, or could be persuaded to take it (by whom? by Lili?), the money would always and forever burn with his father’s imperium, his father’s contempt. In the logic of her betrayal, she had released Julian from the vise of Marvin’s spite. Freedom! In order to liberate, expunge! No last vestige of attachment, no last link . . .

The exorcism of Leo Coopersmith. The exorcism of the ashes in the sink. Merged in a single night.

On the other hand — oh, the torment of that eternal other hand — hadn’t she expunged Julian’s chance to choose, to take the money if he dared? To take it even if he were made to understand the condition of his taking it? In the absence of choice, where is liberty? And Marvin’s horrendous indictment — was it true? Was there the faintest breath of truth in it? It couldn’t be true! Grief is nightmare, grief is gargoyle: the shock of fresh bereavement must be stirring up such grotesqueries of criminality. Out of a highway accident! Or, God forbid, a suicide. In that sumptuous vacuous mausoleum for the living, how harshly she’d spoken to Margaret — yet how was it possible for a little bit of paper, sent in recompense and remorse, to kill?

B
ECAUSE THE BARON
had jabbed the foot of his stick against his breastbone — that patch of outraged manhood where his most unspoken intuitions were stored — Kleinman knew he must go to Lili tonight. The fault (the sin!) was the Baron’s; he felt defiled by that humiliating poke. But Kleinman too was culpable; he had been servile, a bystander to Lili’s maltreatment. He had allowed the Baron to harangue him, to jab him with his stick, to mock him, and through it all he stood servile and afraid. Afraid to call Lili back — he had let her go, he hadn’t so much as called her back, even for the half week’s wages that were rightfully hers. And Lili was ill, it was plain she was ill. Ill and driven out, like Hagar, into some uncharted trouble of her own — but Hagar had the consolation of Ishmael her son, and poor Lili was childless. Or perhaps . . . Kleinman had once seen her with a boy who seemed to have come expressly to meet her, a tall plump boy in American-looking sandals, unlike anyone in the queues. Kleinman didn’t pry into the hurtful lives of his staff. Their stories were bound to be melancholy.

In his record book — he kept it admirably, the figures scrupulously ordered (the Baron would not have been able to dispute a line of it) — he discovered where Lili lived. The neighborhood was unfamiliar, and took him by surprise. His people, Lipkinoff, for instance, and Kleinman himself, took rooms in one or another of the overcrowded crannies of the Marais. But
this
— the stone façade of a fortress, these tall windows with rounded tops, the heavy doors and
their carvings — this was an edifice! He had brought with him a thin packet: the handful of francs owed to Lili, and a rush of sentences he had hastily set down, remorse and regret, shame and apology (he was complicit, he had let her go with no more than the feeblest cowardly protest), he meant her to know how his inmost faith, his faithfulness, was
with
her, he had not ever intended to shunt her off like some discarded Hagar, the sin was the Baron’s, not his! He had no power to console, he was childless himself, and wifeless besides, but if ever she was in need . . .

The sentences stretched on and on, and he understood that sentences such as these had been written thousands of times in the history of the world, and in truth carried no redeemable coin, and would be blown like vapor into nothingness. The wilderness of Texas lay before him (
bamidbar,
the desert, he too had Hagar’s destiny), and for Lili, what, where? Their journeys diverged, he to the west, she to the east . . . she had spoken of an uncle, would she go now to that uncle? And in the meantime, how was it possible that these few francs could permit an establishment of this grandeur, the luxuriantly carpeted foyer, a gilded cage of an elevator, a sour-faced concierge whose accent was as uncongenial as his own?

From behind a marble barrier the woman held up a hand to halt him.

“What do you want here?”

“I’ve come to see a friend.” How else should he say it?

“You’re one of those, aren’t you?”

She had already appraised him; she knew instantly what he was. All over Paris they knew. They could tell it even from a corner of the eye. Would it be the same in Texas? Why not, it was the same everywhere.

“Not that he’s open for business yet, as far as I can see,” the concierge said. “He’s just back, there’s only the one girl up there now. And that squatter boy’s gone too, not that I could ever figure out was he a Jew or not, never mind he had the name.”

Kleinman blanched. Was he being taken for a visitor to a brothel?

“
Sixième étage,
it’s that chap Montalbano you want. As long as I get my tips it’s none of my affair —”