NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (20 page)

“I think,” Burton panted, dragging blanket, pillows, oranges and books onto the pebbles, “that it’s still a little early for regular bathing. It’s so sheltered up at our house that we don’t even realize what a strong wind is blowing. It might even be dangerous to plunge in.”

“Oh, I don’t think so! I don’t think so at all!” Victoria pushed her hair into her cap and ran away from him to the green and white sea, blue farther out beyond swimming distance, but within range of the eye and the heart.

Within the week Burton asked his wife to make arrangements for the return voyage. “We’d best take care of it early,” he said, fingering his pipe. “When we have a firm date and the petty details are taken care of, we can relax and enjoy the last part of our year. I wouldn’t trouble you with all this, but it
does
take some of the household load off me, and you seem to have a talent for detail—for learning irregular verbs and such-like odd things.”

It was this last gratuitous remark that hardened Victoria’s spirit. He knew, then, what she had been doing while he had been collecting his little data and writing his little articles, and it rankled. Did he suspect the true reason for it? She thought not; and she said nothing to him, partly out of a lack of resolve that was not cowardice but a genuine apprehension that she could be doing wrong and that it was not too late for there to be a change.

But there was no change. She sold their car at a good price; she bought ship accommodations on the date which Burton requested, and at the scale which he had indicated; she went down and got the man to come up and read the gas and electric
compteurs
and paid his bill when it was presented; she assisted the
gérante
with the
inventaire;
she addressed labels until her arm ached and stickered them neatly on luggage and crates; she made a list of all purchases so that Burton would have no trouble clearing customs in New York. And then, the night before the ship was to sail, they sat out on the terrace smoking and saying goodbye
to the French fireflies, and Victoria told her husband that she was not going back with him.

He looked at her petulantly, but seemed unable to see her clearly, for he took off his heavy glasses, blew on the lenses, and wiped them with the end of his sports shirt. “That’s a hell of a thing to joke about.”

“I’m not joking. Look in your passport case—I put the single ticket in there.”

Burton reached into his pocket and then stopped. “Say, what is all this? Are you planning on running off to Paris or Majorca with that idiot sand painter?”

“There isn’t anybody else.”

“No, I guess not. But why, Victoria? What’s happened?”

From the reasonable tone of his voice, Victoria could tell that it had not yet sunk in. He heard, but he didn’t believe—or if he did, it must have seemed to him like one of those family spats which could be patched up later as the sheets warmed or at worst could be laughed at in the clear morning air after the argument had been reduced to its proper dimensions.

She said coolly, “I’ve come to the conclusion that we don’t have enough in common to stay together. It took me all year to decide, so please don’t think you can talk me out of it tonight. You can’t.”

“But…” Suddenly his face crumpled. He said jerkily, “I don’t understand. I really honest to God don’t understand.”

“I’m not sure that I do, either. I think maybe we both expected the wrong things from each other.”

Burton jumped up and lunged out with his foot, narrowly missing the cat, which leaped over the garden table to the wall. “If you’re serious about this crazy business, have you given any thought to me at all?” His voice rose. “How do you expect me to come home without you, as though you’d died or something, and face my family and your family and—and my colleagues, and our friends. …”

Victoria covered her face with her hands. She spoke through her palm. “That’s exactly why you’re going to have to. For asking a question like that without even thinking to ask what
I’m
going to do, how
I’m
going to get along, what
I’m
going to write to my
family. For being concerned not with me, not even with us, but only with your piddling little career.”

“But supposing I hadn’t gotten the Fulbright. Supposing I hadn’t brought you here …”

“That’s why I’m not angry with you at all, Burton. That’s why I’m as grateful to you as I’ve ever been to anybody, for bringing me here and showing me what another kind of life could be like. You did more than that. You took the greatest gamble in the world—showing yourself to me against an entirely different background from what I am used to, and before I was
so
used to it that I was blind. Well, you lost.”

Burton blew his nose heavily, like a middle-aged man. “What are you going to tell your parents?”

“That I like it here, more than I like being with you. That I love it. That I’ve learned the language, after a fashion, and that I’m going to try to make a living here and a life here.”

He turned his back on her. After a moment he said, “I suppose you’re going to stay here, in the village. I suppose you’ve talked about the whole thing already with your gang.”

“No, I haven’t,” Victoria hesitated. “I don’t know what I’m going to do, maybe move to Nice and look for a job there working for Americans. Burton…”

“Yes?”

“I put the
aspirine
—you know, the ones in the little metal tube—in your trench coat pocket, in case you should need them tomorrow, what with all you’ll have to do before you’re settled in your cabin. I think you ought to try to get some sleep now—it’s going to be a rough day.”

“I want to tell you first that you’re not the only one who’s suffered. I may not have said anything about it all year, but I haven’t enjoyed it, your demeaning me and my work. It’s not much fun, having your wife look down her nose at you—if I talked in terms of what my work would buy, it was only because that seemed to interest you more than the work itself.”

Victoria stared at him.

“I hoped all that would change when we got back home. But I was wrong about that too, wasn’t I?” He turned and went inside without another word.

Victoria slept in the garden on a chair. From time to time she heard Burton moving around in the house behind her, and she knew that he was not sleeping either, but she could not bring herself to join him as he stumbled about in the dark. She arose early, her back and legs aching from the unyielding chair in which she had lain as quietly as possible. She found that she was hungry, oddly enough, and almost unbearably tense.

When she entered the house Burton said, without looking at her, “I’d better start now. It wasn’t a dream, was it?”

She shook her head wordlessly.

“Well, I’d better start now to hunt up a cab, if I’m ever going to get one to come up here for our—for my stuff.”

“I’ve already taken care of that.” She glanced at her watch. “He’ll be along any minute—I told him yesterday it was a through ride to Cannes, to the Gare Maritime.”

Burton glanced up from the valise he was strapping. “You even arranged for that, didn’t you?”

For the first time, Victoria winced. “It was just another one of my chores.”

Outside, in the fresh air, there was a clear loud blast. Then it was repeated twice. “Listen,” Burton said hurriedly, “I don’t want you to go with me. Not to Cannes, not even to the corner—not if you don’t want to go all the way. Maybe you thought I’d carry you back bodily. I won’t. I’m not like that. But should I write you?”

“If you wish.”

“I’ll try to write about things besides my career. The kind of letters I might have written if we’d been separated before marriage instead of after.”

Victoria began to cry. “Goodbye, Burton.”

“Perhaps I’ll write and tell you next spring that I’m coming back, not on a Fulbright, but on my own. On my savings, or working my way across if I’m broke.”

“Goodbye, Burton.”

“Then perhaps you’ll write that you’ve missed me after all, and you’ll tell me where I can find you—how I can find you.”

“Goodbye, goodbye!”

He bent his long frame almost double to squirm into the taxi with his bags, then quickly straightened up so he could wave to his wife as the cab rattled away. Through the glass he saw her standing in the doorway with her arms at her sides, nodding her head and crying until the cab turned a corner down the hill and they were lost to each other’s seeking gaze.

THE PEACOCKS OF AVIGNON

W
ith the wind ripping at her lungs and her eyes streaming tears into the channels of her ears, Terry gunned her Vespa down the highway and onto the main streets of Avignon. It was only when at last she alighted and tried to walk casually away from this one thing in the world that was still hers, this scooter and the little valise carelessly strapped to the rear seat, that she realized how bitterly the wind had bitten at her legs beneath the wool pants and the knee-high socks. Her shins and ankles were nearly numb; she stumbled as she attempted to mount the high old curb and would have fallen to her knees if an elderly gentleman bearing an open umbrella had not been at hand to grasp her elbow.

“Je vous remercie, Monsieur,”
she said politely.

“De rien,”
the old man murmured as he disappeared down the drizzly street.

It was not actually drizzling any more, although Terry had been driving through the mushy wetness for hours and hours. It had tapered off to a thick mist, the air was not cold when you stood still, and it was likely that the crest of the flood had passed and that it would be possible to drive northward to Paris without being lost on an endless detour or drowned on the low-lying Route Nationale.

The streets were alive with cyclists, the sidewalks aswarm with pedestrians raising and lowering their black wetly glittering umbrellas as they skittered in and out from under the protection of the shopkeepers’ awnings. They were the first crowds Terry had seen since she had run away: the highways had been empty, empty, except for the ominous water gushing along at the side of the road next to her scooter, and the villages had been blank and
shuttered. She had felt like an unwanted messenger, herself stricken, bearing news of an approaching plague. But, she thought now, hadn’t the plague been inside herself, and not communicable at all?

The bonging of a dozen clocks in the window of an
horlogerie
under whose awning she stood shivering aroused her to an awareness that it was noon, that the hurrying crowds had purpose, and that she too was hungry. She had had a
croissant
and coffee hours before, and it had served to get her started, but it was not fuel enough for a healthy American girl, even one sick at heart and suicidal. Terry had not been living in France long enough to forget the tomato juice, the bacon and eggs, and the toast that used to go with the coffee back home when you were setting out on an expedition.

She stuffed her gloved hands into the pockets of her zipper jacket and walked for some blocks until she came to a working-men’s café. There, ignoring with hauteur (and fright) the stares and the accented wisecracks, she ordered the
plat du jour
and a demi of
vin ordinaire
while she observed her yellowed reflection in the peeling mirror behind the bar, captured for these moments between Byrrh and Pschitt! Perrier. Her face was conventionally pretty, but now particularly long-nosed and grief-stricken, beneath the cap of tight brown curls that had been her late father’s too. Her legacy.

After his death eight months before from a brain tumor Terry and her mother had returned, all alone together, to the France they had known and loved when Daddy had been a vice-consul in Nice and Terry herself a hoop-rolling youngster on the Promenade des Anglais, around and around the kiosks. There had been very little money, but since Terry had just graduated from high school and wanted to study art rather than go to college, Florence, her mother, had agreed that they might live together in Paris if they were very frugal. First however there had been the Côte d’Azur for the summer, and since they could not afford Nice, they had settled in a small hillside village rather heavily populated with expatriate friends of her mother’s. They were all considerably older than Terry, and much given to alcoholic fretting about the old days, so Terry spent her time either sketching the lower Alps or
swimming in the sea and lying on the hot pebbles, thinking how much nicer it would all have been if Daddy had only lived to come back here with them. For some reason Florence was reluctant to leave for Paris, and the summer gave way to autumn.

Florence amused herself amiably enough by studying the application of glaze to ceramics with a young potter named Jean, only son of the widow Marie Bongiovanni who came in to clean and do their laundry once a week. At sixty-three—just thirteen years older than Florence, but looking thirty years older—Marie was really an old lady, sweet-tempered and courteous, but an old lady. She had a whitening beard at the sides of her chin, her face had the color and texture of a rumpled paper bag, and she stank, stank terribly, of dried, never-washed sweat. Even though she was gentle and modest, she reeked of mortality, and Terry could not bear to stand near her for any length of time.

It was not just a cultural void which separated Florence from Marie. Florence was unthickened, still slim-waisted, still fresh and pretty, and sometimes when Terry passed Jean’s tiny shop on her way to the beach and saw her mother’s blonde head bent attentively over the potter’s wheel, next to Jean’s long foxlike head with its piercing blue eyes and aggressive hooked nose, she felt as though she, at eighteen, was the worried mother and Florence, at fifty, was the vivacious young art student. Jean was big and swarthy, he had left school early and was shy and ashamed of his ignorance, his hands were always caked and stained with clay and paint, his blue and white striped sailor’s jersey and denim trousers were always spotless, and he blushed when he was teased. But Terry had no intimation of what was going to happen before he and Florence went over to the next village and got married.

“I couldn’t tell you about it, baby,” her mother said when she returned with a scrubby corsage pinned to the left shoulder of her gabardine suit and her young husband waiting discreetly outside on the street; she tried to take her daughter in her arms but Terry squirmed away, hating herself for her inability to accept the caress passively. “You’re stronger than I am. You’re reasonable and logical, like your father. You would have talked me out of it. And I didn’t want to be talked out of it. I wanted some beauty in my life before it’s too late.”

“Beauty?” Terry cried shrilly, her voice cracking. She blew her nose. “With that guy? He isn’t five years older than I am. You’re old enough to be his mother. Have you forgotten, you’re fifty years old!”

“I know it every minute of the day. Jean knows it too. You can be reasonable, baby, but don’t be cruel. Some day you’ll be fifty.”

“Maybe, but if I live that long I won’t make a fool out of myself with a small-town gigolo who can hardly read and write.”

“He is kind and sweet and gifted. Do you know what that means? And he loves me very tenderly.”

“He loves your pension and your insurance, you mean.”

Florence started to cry, wrackingly. “He knows we’re broke. He knows all that’s left is yours. He doesn’t want our few dollars. We’re going to Corsica for our … for a few days, and when we get back if you want—”

“If I want I can call him Daddy, is that it? No thanks. I’m going to Paris, and I don’t want any money or advice from you or your so-called husband.”

Furious, her mother turned on her savagely. “Did you want him for yourself, is that it? Well, he wasn’t interested in you, any more than your father was interested in me for the last fifteen years. Your father was a—”

“Don’t mention his name to me. Don’t you dare to mention his name now. I’m leaving, Florence. I think you’ll be more comfortable without me.”

In her little cell of a room she had thrown sweaters and underclothes into a zip-up handbag, knocking things off the bed and the walls in her haste to get out, ignoring her mother’s terrible cries, “Baby, I’m sorry, baby, I couldn’t help myself, baby, baby, I want you to be happy like I wasn’t, all I wanted was a little happiness, a little beauty before I get to be an old woman …”

Now, less than a day later, her mother’s voice still pursued her like the cries of the Furies. It burned, the shame of it burned within her, as she thought of pathetic, foul-smelling old Marie, of her hairy-chested young son, and of the looks on the faces not of the villagers—for they took everything in stride, wars, occupations, adulteries, misalliances, whatnot—but of the foreigners who had been their friends. She shuddered.

Outside the air was a little better. Terry lit a cigarette, retraced her steps to the Square, and realized suddenly that this mighty fortress of Avignon was the old papal palace of the fourteenth century. Or was it the thirteenth? As she stood on the far side of the street and gazed contemplatively across at the towering ancient battlements, lowering before her as though they guarded not heretical remnants but the abodes of the storm gods whose cloudbursts were drowning this whole countryside and her own little family too, she fumbled clumsily in the back of her mind for the jumble of historical misinformation that lay tumbled about, gleaned from school courses, paperbacks, Michelin guides, and artist boy friends. Which popes had lived there? Hadn’t they traveled surreptitiously by water across the Mediterranean to and from that little Spanish town that she and Florence had visited a few months ago? Impetuously Terry strode across the Square and up the incline—which had surely been moated once—to the massive doors of the palace. She was not alone, there were many women coming and going with large bundles in their arms, and she was taken aback when a gendarme at the very entrance accosted her and barred the way.

His belted blue uniform was immaculate, but there were smears of dried mud up and down the sides of his leather boots, and his eyes, shadowed under the bill of his cap, were smudged with weariness. For an instant Terry thought that she might have neglected to buy a historic monument ticket, or that the palace was closed during lunch hour.

“I regret, Mademoiselle,” the gendarme said, politely but in a voice that was just the least bit clipped, “that this is an area of disaster thanks to the floods. There is a state of emergency and the palace is closed to tourism until further notice.”

Beyond his trim shoulder through the gaping doorway, Terry caught sight of two lorries, a row of bunks ranked along the walls of the great inner courtyard, piles of medical supplies marked with crosses, and some old women eating steaming potatoes off tin plates. Then her eyes met the gendarme’s, and dropped.

“I—I am desolated,” she faltered. “I did not think … Excuse me.”

She turned and stumbled down the ramp, away from the
policeman’s eyes. A tourist, she thought, just a bloody tourist. Not a girl running away from home, or a girl awash in a sea of trouble, or a girl who didn’t really want to go to Paris. Just a tourist—and a thoughtless stupid one.

She found herself trudging up a winding gravel path alongside one of the immense walls of the palace; it led, she observed, to the park, and although it was quite steep she allowed herself to be carried along with the throng of lunch-hour strollers. She wandered through well-tended gardens, formal to be sure, and made lusher than ever by the endless downpour, but desolate now in the raw damp with the blossoms crumbled and the leaves rotted. Up and up she mounted until she came to a plateau from which suddenly there opened a vast panorama of the Loire valley.

The scene beneath her, as she leaned over the parapet and gazed at the countryside hundreds of meters below, was horrifying—and fascinating. The Avignon bridge seemed to be lying on the swollen waters like a stick floating on a stream. No one crossed it, much less did anyone dance on it. Black and mute on the river that was now a horizon-stretching lake, a shallow ocean of misplaced water, it did not look as though it could ever have served for the stomping fun of the song.

Everything was very still. The water, seen from this distance, did not seem to be moving at all. It was eerie how silently and stealthily it had crept from its placid banks and worked its way across the farmlands, inundating fields, drowning cattle, leaving only gables, house peaks and spires pointing painfully to heaven. Now it lay as peaceful and apparently motionless as a mountain lake. What was missing, Terry realized, was the ominous mood music, replete with growling glissandi, with which the newsreels always embellished their aerial views of similar visitations and devastations. This was the first flood she had ever witnessed with her own eyes, but she had been prepared for something like it by the filmed records of countless similar acts of God and man, and in consequence what was most awesome about the flood was not its unexpectedness or its lack of any parallel in her previous experience, but the stunning absence of portentous musical accompaniment, indeed of any sound at all save for the beating of her own heart.

Leaning on the back of a clammy bench with her cheeks in her hands, Terry felt that a fantastic kind of human courage must surely take life in the very teeth of these catastrophes, that vanity, fear and cowardice flourished only in the
expectation
of disaster and were replaced after it had struck by a stubborn will to go on and render life manageable no matter what stood in the path—flood, fire, pestilence or bombing. Surely the people who lived in those half-submerged houses and farmed the drowned earth were already scheming and striving to retrieve their homes and belongings and to reclaim the land for their plow and their seed, just as these people of Avignon in the very park around her munched and strolled on their lunch hour as though the waters had never risen about their neighbors on the farms around their city.

Then why is it, she wondered, that I still sit here and burn, that the fire of shame still burns in my face whenever I think of my mother? Now that it has happened, now that it is as final and real as the flood, why can’t I adjust myself to the idea of my mother and that man and go ahead and make my own life? But the truth was that she could
not
adjust herself, that she felt betrayed and soiled, that her mother and even her dead father were degraded—because she could see no sense, no order, no rationality in the awful thing her mother had done, nothing beyond a momentary upheaval of middle-aged lust like the last ugly tongue of flame in the dying fire of a collapsed house.