I'm Dying Laughing (66 page)

‘That’s just talk. What I know is that Christy has gone and $500 monthly has marched out of the house with him.’

Blue papers began to come in, bills, debts, summonses. Stephen went over the accounts with Emily. Repairs, cleaning, laundry were not done at home; most of their personal and house linen was too fine to send to an ordinary laundry and had to go to specialists who did fine work. Emily had lent $200 to Violet, she said, and sent $1,000 to some communist friends in New York who feared investigations and were about to quit the country for Mexico. Thus she explained the calls on their bank account. In reality the money had gone to Dr Kley.

‘It’s little enough, and it salves a little of our consciences,’ she said firmly, when Stephen stared at her angrily.

They had to put aside $1,000 for Anna’s visit; and everything had to be thoroughly gone into and set right if possible, for Anna had threatened to investigate their situation. She had never pressed them about the extra quarter’s allowance she had given them on their departure.

‘But that is the last, the very last cent you will ever see out of her. She’d come and visit us in debtors’ prison, look through the bars and push the scene away into her thinking cap, for future reference; that’s all she’d do. She can’t understand animals like us. To her we are not human.’

Emily went to work again, struggling against her illness, despair and vice, her loneliness and Stephen’s insults. She always felt she could make money; but he was beginning to lose faith in her. At present he refused to even consider the Marie-Antoinette project.

‘I have no time to do the research. It has to have something original and it would take too much consultation now. I have to get a job. If I am working when Anna comes, I can face her, point at my prospects.’

But though he tried and consulted all his friends, what could he do? He was not a toughened journalist, with hard work behind him and a name. Someone held out hopes of a job in Eastern Germany; but he thought that with this his passport would be cancelled; and he would be in his nightmare, ‘the man without a country.’ He refused to consider a Marshall Plan job.

‘No cold war job! I won’t go on record as working against the Soviet Union. They’ll be indicting me as a spy next.’

All this time in their own country the political investigation, the so-called ‘witch-hunting’ was getting worse, they had no hope of returning there, unless willing to face investigation; and at the same time through their madcap life and wild talk they were alienating foreign communists; indeed now that they looked back at their life in Paris they groaned and saw that the communist party had taken no interest in them; that only Vittorio, and Wauters, and Suzanne, a few good-natured Resistants had taken them up.

Stephen said in a fit of despair, ‘We used to be intimate with Browder and Company and here we have not once been invited to meet Jacques Duclos. We’re out of it. They’ve humiliated us. I have no luck. I’ve had no luck since I came abroad. I’ve written to the heads of all the European Parties offering my services. I received one or two cold answers, mostly none. Perhaps some of the letters were opened or did not get there. But no man was ever in a more miserable situation. And they’re right. What can I do? I’m not a worker. I can’t work with workers. At what? They don’t want me. There are enough of them. They wouldn’t know what to do with me if I went crawling on my hands and knees, salt water pouring from my eyes. I don’t speak their kind of English or American or French or anything. I can’t think like them. Their sufferings upset me and I can’t do anything about it. I don’t really believe that if I see five people starving to death on a minimum salary in one room in a slum in the suburbs that I can do anything now or ever by writing a squib about housing. That cuts me out. I’m on the sidelines. The question is what can I do on the sidelines? For us it’s just spectator sports, the whole damn social idea.’

‘We are being persecuted,’ said Emily.

‘Yes, we are being persecuted over here too. Some of our friends must have got in their jack-knives, via the mails.’

‘Oh, how can we live through this life of madness and pain? We’re on a desert island, everyone sees our flag of distress and everyone says, “Drop dead”’, said Emily.

Emily, with her illness and her multifarious works, had not yet finished a Mrs
Middletown
book she was working on; and editors were slow to answer about work she had sent in.

‘Our reputation’s muddy, no one knows where we stand,’ said Emily. ‘They only want a letter from us.’

Stephen grumbled, ‘You know I will not write that letter. Too bad. I will not say that I’ve given up, denied the Party. I always hear a voice saying, Before the cock crows, you will, Peter; and so I’m damned if they’ll ever get me to. I’ll starve first.’

‘Oh, why are you so slow and unsure—what does it matter what you tell them? You are a brave and true man; I know it and you know it. It is for them, the blind and deaf and stupid, but the ones who give us bread. Before the slaves revolt haven’t they the ideas that they revolt with? But when Massa says, “Are you a good man, Sammy?” Sammy says “Yes”; though tomorrow he’s going into the house to get them.’

‘I’m not a brave and true man; I’m a man in doubt and misery. And I’m not a slave. This epoch is full of suffering for us all. No one wants what I can do, the people don’t want my services, my mother despises me and has taken my son from me. My life is in collapse. If I had any true and brave manhood, I’d cut my throat.’

‘And leave me?’

‘Oh, you’d get Vittorio or someone else.’

‘Oh, Stephen—you don’t love me. You’re throwing me to the wolves. You’re selfish. Like all melancholics you’re a soul-murderer. You’re killing my heart, my only hope.’

‘And you’re Tyl Eulenspiegel. You die today and get up fresh as paint tomorrow.’

‘That’s heartless. You’re shuffling off your responsibility to me as a husband and friend. I’ve always said to myself that you were that, a friend. You’re not. I’m dismally alone. My heart is howling.’

They had a savage scene; and they went to separate beds, the first time they had done so.

The next morning a packet arrived for Stephen, from his mother. In it he found a sheaf of letters written by Emily to various members of the family and sent on to Anna when she began asking for news of them. These letters revealed Emily’s irresponsible prattling, robbing Peter to pay Paul in flattery, her insolent jeering at them all, her feelings for leftists and radicals wherever she went, apparently genuine, and their relations with communists and Resistants abroad. In some, to show Stephen’s determination to get a job, she had even detailed his recent letters to ‘heads of Parties’.

‘Why did you tell them all that?’ he said, terribly angry.

‘I don’t know Stephen, I wanted to show our good faith. Oh, I know it’s a weakness; but I like to trust people. They’re your people. Why should they do things like this to us?’

‘You have brought all these misfortunes on me—Christy’s going, Anna’s anger. Why are our affairs of interest to everyone? Why can’t you leave our miserable confusion and absurdity in a decent obscurity?’

‘We are not private people. We never have been private people, even before we were married. We had made our way, separately, before that and after we were married, we never left the footlights. What we do is, unfortunately, of interest to too many people. Who but us left the Party in the headlines of the metropolitan press? Rather than be misrepresented I’d say what I think in a symbolic representational truth, I’ll mislead them, I’ll put it any way, or at any rate, what is suited to their understandings. We’re not going down the drain for the Howards. Let them burst!’

‘Yes, we lie to them. All right! But you have a different lie for each one and lined up in front of the footlights as you say, they make a motley collection of grinning death’s-heads. And listen to what you have pushed into Anna’s head. She thinks there’s going to be a revolution here and that Christy, that very precious youth, must go to Switzerland where he can prepare for the Sorbonne; otherwise dear old tattered England, where they will prepare him for Oxford or Cambridge. … This comes of your buttering Anna and telling her what a genius Christy is. But we know, no matter what we say in public, that Christy is too far behind and that he is too mediocre ever to get into any of the brain-shops. We must stick to the idea that the best and surest place for him is the Sorbonne. I think it’s a dream; but we must stick to it. Christy’s the dream-boy of the Howards. We must play this carefully. More—Anna is going to call the tutors and Suzanne together when she comes here and find out what Christy has done.’

‘Oh, Jehosaphat!’ said Emily, startled.

‘We’ll immediately call the tutors and Suzanne in secret conclave. You talk to Suzanne and get them together as soon as you can. We must tell them not to discourage the dope, too. Otherwise that will be in the next mail to Anna.’

That day lessons were cancelled for Christy and there came to the house, Suzanne, Monsieur Jean-Claude, who taught Latin and ancient history, and Monsieur Laroche who taught mathematics. Suzanne interpreted and Stephen and Emily put the questions.

Emily said, ‘Monsieur Laroche, you know that your pessimistic and unfair report on Christy a few months ago upset us so much that we were obliged to report to his grandmother, who had just arrived in Paris to see to his studies. I am sure you have changed your mind by this.’

Stephen said, ‘We want to know how far the boy has got. What grade is he in compared with a French boy of his age?’

Monsieur Laroche said, ‘It is no use disguising the truth. The boy is too far behind to catch up and his brain is not active enough to catch up even if he had seven more years to study.’

Emily said firmly, ‘I don’t believe this, I refuse to. The boy is different from you and me, a special, delicate, sensitive intellect. I know how to teach him, but although I can study hard, he has already got ahead of me in Latin. He can work hard, but he is dreamy, he must be forced; and as he has an excellent, yes, superb, a remarkable memory, he must learn it all by heart, every word of grammar and the textbooks entirely by heart.’

Monsieur Jean-Claude said, ‘Even if that were possible and I don’t see that it is, there are the other things; ancient history, the commentaries and things that can’t be learned by heart, the writing of original poetry, themes, unexpected pieces of translation, unexpected constructions. You know he must make a speech in Latin.’

Emily cried, ‘How stupid, how old-fashioned! There must be some way of getting past, for boys who can’t make speeches.’

‘No more than you can pass a swimming examination without swimming.’

‘Oh, pouah! I know someone who hired a boy to do his swimming for him; and we can hire someone here. There must be a way and we will find it. You see, Jean-Claude and Monsieur Laroche, this is enormously important to us, to his father, to me. We will explain the situation. We love this boy dearly, we have studied him from the very hour we got him. We understand his genius. We know the kind of patient and loving care he needs. He was taken from an unworthy mother—’

‘Emily!’ said Stephen.

‘It is so. A woman who raised her son in licentious scenes, sex and liquor, and the boy was given to us by a court. But the boy will be a multimillionaire and there is still obscene wrangling going on in spite of the court order. A woman who left her husband—’

‘No, no, cut it out,’ said Stephen.

‘Now his grandmother wants to take the boy from you, Monsieur Laroche and Jean-Claude, and from us and send him to his cold, frigid, unkind relatives in England, who are backward and eat out of trenchers, sardines and rice pudding all in one trencher, or send him to Switzerland which is out of this world, no place for a modern youth to grow up. My husband agrees with me, don’t you, Stephen?’

Stephen said, ‘God help any foreign boy raised there. They may as well live in Mars. They live in constant terror of being at war, avoiding war and yet with the one idea of profiting by war. Now I infinitely prefer my adopted son to live in France, have French sympathies, not only because I admire the French, a great, passionate and learned people, but because later on he can easily get a job in the State Department; and God knows, I want Christy to have a job, not like me. He has radical views like mine—’

‘Well, he is only a child, but we want him to be that kind of man, like his father,’ said Emily.

‘His views are mine exactly, only he has no theory and what worries me more than anything else is that if Christy goes to a fashionable school either in England or Switzerland they will knock all that out of him like Giles and you know the boy’s a goddamn fool—’

‘He is not, Stephen. He’s brilliant.’

‘I don’t fool myself, Monsieur Jean-Claude, I know you don’t. The boy has no political brains. You know better than I whether he has any other sort. Let’s hope so. Otherwise, it’s a dull outlook for us all. He has one argument for him I beg you to bear in mind, and that is the American system of education, their laxity, hatred of the brain and belief in rambling ignorance, their belief that genuine learning distorts the personality.’

Monsieur Laroche said, ‘I do bear that in mind. I understood that at once. But now I have been with him for over a year and it is not only his mathematics which are non-existent—’

‘Oh, Monsieur Laroche, he is quick and intuitive in mathematics; it is really astonishing how he sees things better than I do,’ said Emily.

‘No, Madame, giving him all the credit possible, he cares about nothing but politics; that is the only thing that arouses interest in him and in which he shows a normally good heart, the passions of a boy. But I do not think he has any mind of his own. He can reason quite well for a sentence or two on this subject, he has some experience; and then in the fourth sentence he can reverse his position completely, once more parroting members of the other part of the family. He has an extraordinary, admirable respect and admiration for all members of his family, though particularly for Madame and Monsieur Howard and his brother and sister here, in a manner of speaking. He has not a wonderful memory, Madame, but a fragmentary, superficial, transient memory. He can remember next day, perhaps for a week, not longer, what he has learned by heart. He will eventually perhaps get through some course or other at the Sorbonne, if he has tutors always with him. I don’t know why he must go to the Sorbonne. All this money is in a way wasted. There are many worthy lads of talent, even of more than talent, who need to go to the Sorbonne, boys sick and hungry, who are refused at their examinations in spite of their talent or genius because they have not even the money to buy books and there are not enough books in the library to serve all the needy students. I would gladly undertake the tutoring of any one of these boys if I could. If your idea was to help an unfortunate deserving student, I should be delighted, the work itself would be a pleasure—’