Mrs. Engels (16 page)

I blink up at his shadow. “What's the matter with you?”

“We're to marry. This week, we're to do it.”

“I told you three months.”

“And I'm telling you, Lizzie Burns, I'm finished with your tricks and your tests. We're getting married or we're calling it off.”

“All right,” I says, “all right,” for his whimpers are those of a man who'll not be any further pushed, and they'd frighten the insides out of you.

He caves onto me, more out of relief than longing, but he's soon going at it full peck, and what touches me is not the sopped words he leaves on my neck but the effort it costs me to show him proper feeling in return. My heart's hard against him, and the more he gives way, the harder it grows.

“It's the proper thing,” he says afterwards. “I couldn't live on like this, it goes contrary to my morals.”

I tell him he's right, all along he's been right, I was only being silly and afraid, and that sends him off into his snores. Leaving me to stare into the thought that there'll never be light for me locked into this Irish lie.

XIV. The Franco-Prussian War

Jenny has grapes, real grapes, in her hair. She's drawn me over to the sideboard and is poking furious at a display of green boughs.

“I don't know what to expect,” she says.

“I'm sure they'll be charming,” I says.

“They are French, most of them. Escapees from the siege in Paris. It worries me.”

“What does?”

“Them. I do not know how they will be. We
are
Prussians, after all.”

At a loss—why are we whispering?—I look back into the room. Karl is treading the length and breadth, glancing at the clock and grumbling. He's had his beard brushed out and locks curled up special, and is making great efforts not to touch them and put them out of place. Frederick is fidgeting by the chimneypiece. Bare through the door and he's already on his second vodka. Christmas Day in Jenny's parlor, and I don't think Joseph himself was as fretful as this, waiting for the virgin birth.

She tugs on my elbow and I turn back.

“You must think I am being silly, Lizzie.”

“Nay, not a bit of it.” I give her my best face.

“If they are coming here to dine with us, it must mean they have embraced Communism and are free from that blasting curse of national prejudice, which at the end of the day is nothing but wholesale selfishness.”

What has them so nerved up? As far as I'm concerned, you've dealt with one frog, you've dealt with the whole pond.

Outside, the sound of wheels. Karl moves to the window and checks up and down the road.

“This must be them.”

He sends Nim down to pay off the cab. I go to the mirror to make some last revisions. In the glass now I see Nim coming in, looking wan. No one appears behind her. She speaks something in German. Exclamations fly. There's a rush for the door.

“What's wrong?”

“Oh, forgive us, Lizzie,” Jenny says. “We have to go straight down to the dining room. One of the men has an injury and cannot get up the stairs. How could we be so thoughtless?”

“Not thoughtless,” I says, shaking my head, “not a bit of thoughtless,” and a part of me feels sorry she'll not have her pageant processing down, two-by-two, the biggest animals first. She looks forward to such affairs and it will damper her mood to have it passed over.

Nine men stand in the hall. In any other house they'd be crushed, but here they've room to stand in a line crossways and to bow. I'm not the only one shocked as to their number. Nim's pallor has gone to green, and Jenny has a croak in her voice when she says, “Gentlemen, the season's greetings to you all.”

The injured man is balancing between two ashplants. In his aspect the good lords over the bad, though he isn't a man you'd ask for a direction with any faith you wouldn't be cursed at. What I suppose to be presentations are made. When my turn comes, Jenny switches to the English.

“And this is Frederick's dear spouse, Lizzie. An Irishwoman.”

They dip a final bow in my direction before being led into the dining room.

Nim has to run around and reset the table before we're put sitting down. Jenny fills the time by making a theater of deciding who to put where. I make myself busy lighting the candles that have been blown out by the draft we bring in. The table is laden—dishes of tomatoes and strawberries and grapes and greengages, bowls of nuts and savories, a Russian salad—but I know that Jenny likes to keep her courses spare, and I'm curious to see if there'll be enough to sate the extra stomachs. (Spiv in the kitchen won't be happy, but at least Pumps might do as she's told and not put a foot higher than the scullery step, for she won't want so many men to see her dressed as she is, in the dreariest bonnet I could find in her wardrobe.)

I'm glad to be sat at the corner, away from the horror of making myself understood. Frederick is put on my right, Karl at the head to my left. The wine has been taken from their dandy green bottles and put into dull-looking jugs. Nim pours from these now. Once all our glasses are full—it takes an uncomfortable time for her to get all the way round—Karl bellows out a toast. At the other end, Jenny makes to stand, but remembers the wounded man's condition and sits back down. We touch glasses from where we are.

After some murmuring and shifting, Karl drops his eyeglass and clears his throat. All heads turn to this end. He speaks loud and in the French. During his pauses, his mouth makes that sarcastic curl that Frederick says makes his enemies quake. Hair like wire pokes out from his ears, long and strong enough for a bird to land on. He's wearing his usual broadcloth. Poor Frederick, meantime, has gone all out with the silks. It can't be chance alone that his necktie matches the runner on the table.

While Karl speeches, I can't help handling the silver, which has been shined to blinding. The china has been rubbed to white by time. Invisible on the linen, it is, and brittle as the host, though it probable cost a sum nonetheless. I see my fiddling has been noticed, so I take my hand away. Folding and unfolding my napkin under the table, I wait for the soup.

With Frederick's help, by the time the second broth is cleared and the fish arrives, I've put names on some of the Frenchmen. The thin, raw-boned one is Lenoble. The one with the ragged pair of worsted gloves tucked under his plate and the busy gob tucked under his nose is Boyer. The stern one, strong-made, is Pernaudet. Ottlick isn't French at all but a Magyar. He's my first glimpse of his race, and it's a letdown, though the patch on his eye is fair and impressing. The wounded man is Bouton. He has been silent since we sat down, keeping watch. He catches my eye now and smiles like he knows what I look like out of my shimmy. I look away. Give my flush to the wall.

Frederick does most of the speeching during the meat course, which isn't long, for it contains a turkey that looks much less massive now it's cooked and put in the center of this crowd. While Nim carves, Jenny fiddles with the cuff of her blouse and, by her staring, tries to will more meat off the bone. I do my bit by refusing more than a smitch. I can fill myself up with water, I think, and reach for the third glass on the right (you only make a mistake with finger bowls once).

With pudding—fruitcake, custard, jelly, ices, nuts, and cream cheese—Nim also brings bread and butter and seed cake and macaroons and wafers in case anyone is still hungry. No one dares touch any of it, except the Frenchmen, who larrup in, but they have the excuse of being strangers.

Talk about the war starts up. Anxious that I not be ignorant of what's passing, Frederick speaks in the English about the manifestations in London in favor of British assistance to France. Jenny—in a voice far more foreign than I know it to be—tells the men that her daughter, too, is across the Channel, working with her husband, Mr. Lafargue, to end Prussian occupation, and then, of course, to bring about the final Revolution. Karl says that a German victory, and a carving up of France, would end by forcing France into the arms of Russia, followed by a new war of revenge, which would act as a midwife to revolution in the East. The men listen and have opinions of their own, which they give out in the French.

Where there is now a lull, Lenoble gives Nim a nod and she brings him two parcels he has given her to put away. The crumpled brown bag, he holds out to Jenny. She clutches her chest and cries out. Only when he insists does she take it and look inside. More yelling.

“What is it, Frederick?” I whisper.

“Dried apricots,” he says. “They would have preferred to bring a bottle of something French and good, but times are bad.”

To Karl they give the gift covered in newspaper.

Frederick nudges me. “They have wrapped it with one of my articles about the war, do you see?”

At first Karl is careful not to tear the paper, but the French jeer him till he rips it open. A book. He reads the title and everyone laughs.

“What is it, Frederick?”

He starts to explain, but soon stops and calls across the table.

“Mr. Lenoble, if it doesn't displease you, can you explain in English what the book is, for my wife's sake?”

Lenoble bows an elegant bow. “Madame Lizzie, the book is called
Confessions of a Breton Seminarist
and it tells of all the ways the religious men and women in France misbehave themselves.”

“We used to read about the Empress,” snickers Boyer, “now we read about the nuns!”

Roars of laughter. Jenny yelps and claps her hands. I sip and bide for the noise to die down before I says, “Is it true? What it says in the book?”

Lenoble wipes his mouth. “When it comes to the religious orders, Madame Lizzie, truth is worse than fiction.”

I can't be sure what he means, only that it's of a familiar persuasion. I let it go.

A discussion follows about the refusal of religion by the working classes, and now about the need to abolish marriage as a next step. I open my fan and beat some air into my lung. What puzzles me is why it's oftenest married people who want marriage abolished, while the unmarried ones, like myself, want it kept safe, in case one day we might need it.

Jenny rises and opens a hand in the direction of the sofas: time to remove ourselves there. Pumps stokes the fires and lights the candles on the tree. Nim pours tea and coffee into cups on the occasional table. Frederick looks after the gin and whiskey. Karl passes round the cigars. I find myself beside Ottlick.

“In France,” he says, “men and women separate after dinner.”

“Oh, I think it's the same here,” I says. “Only we're not the kind to go by.”

More talk about the war. More speeches in the English. As far as I can tell, the only one who fails to offer something is Bouton. The longer he stays mute, the more blistering my curiosity for him grows. Perhaps he doesn't have the language to grasp what's being said, or has gone so separate in his head that he can't even hear it. Perhaps he's one of these soldiers who can no longer see the beauty in anything, on account of all the death he's witnessed, and cares least for speeches and words. Perhaps he's just biding the good moment to put in. Perhaps all he needs is a push.

“Your leg looks very sick,” I says.

The room goes quiet. Jenny bulges at me over her fan.

“I hope you're having it seen to proper. We know a good doctor if you're in need.”

He covers his heart and leans down into a bow.

I raise my glass to him. “To life and surviving it.”

A silence now takes command, a silence made of swallowings and sighs. Out of it, Bouton's voice rises a rumble.

“Madame Lizzie, you are a tradeswoman,
n'est-ce pas
? A worker?”

“I am. Spent most of my young years in a cotton mill in Manchester, and not a bit ashamed of it.”

“A cotton mill,
oui,
this is what I've been told. Is it also true that your, ah, your husband here
owned
the factory you worked in?”

“Monsieur!” Frederick is up quicker than a lady-do-naught sitting down. He disguises his haste by taking an ashtray and holding it out for Bouton to tap his cigar on. “Mr. Bouton, you speak on a complicated matter and, moreover, one that is now past. Myself and my wife now live away from Manchester.” He puts the ashtray down, stabs his own cigar into it. “It is no secret that I come from a family of capitalists. Bourgeois and philistine, those were the unfortunate circumstances I was born into.”

I can't help being impressed by Bouton's sharpness, his knowing precise where the weak point is, but I pity my Frederick more. It's not uncommon that he has to answer to this charge, not uncommon even though the world knows he worked in that mill to keep Karl and the Movement afloat. And knock me acock if I ever see
Karl
having to defend himself in this way.

“Believe me, Lieutenant,” Frederick says, moving back to his chair but not sitting on it, “I never lost sight of the contradictions of my situation. I managed the mill because I had to. Destitute, I would not have been much help to our Cause. Be in no doubt, it was a hard time for me. I occupied a position I did not enjoy, and I occupied it for twenty years. What sustained me was the knowledge that my profits were also the Revolution's.”

Bouton hearkens without cutting in, but he makes sure to show himself unpersuaded. Karl stares at his feet. Jenny offers the wafers round.

“I would also like to say, so that the record is clear,” Frederick says now, flicking out the skirts of his coat and sitting down, “I would also like to say that in Manchester I made a point of
not
socializing with the bourgeoisie and of devoting my leisure hours to intercourse with plain working—”

“I heard you were quite the fox hunter,” says Bouton, his tone as easy as a sea breeze.

I wince at the clout of it. The colors rush to Frederick's face. He throws a leg over one way and now the other. Cups his hands over his knee. Jigs up and down. The quiet is complete enough to hear the rustle of my dress as I run my palm down my thigh to dry it. I look at Bouton. I can tell by the stones of his eyes that, in spite of his flippant manner, it doesn't pleasure him to be contrary like this. He's not doing it for fun or high spirits, but rather is doing what he thinks a soldier must when he finds himself among parlor men. He's saying the truth of real things.

“In Manchester,” says Frederick, “I discovered poverty and degradation among the working people worse than in any civilized place on earth. But I also discovered a proletarian culture of significant intellectual elevation. The laborers devoured Rousseau, Voltaire, and Paine. Byron and Shelley were read almost exclusively by them. On Sunday evenings thousands filled the Hall of Science to hear lectures by their working brothers on political, religious, and social affairs. And I was there with them. I was there to hear those men whose fustian jackets scarcely held together speak on geology and astronomy with more knowledge than most bourgeois paper-shufflers possess.” He tucks his hair back. Runs a finger over his lip and smiles. His esteem is recovering. “I can assure you, all of you, that even when in the service of cotton capitalism, I was never anything but devoted to the International.”