Nine Stories (20 page)

When
it came time to join the parade to the kitchen for dinner, I asked to
be excused. I said I wasn't feeling well. (I lied, in 1939, with far
greater conviction than I told the truth--so I was positive that M.
Yoshoto looked at me with suspicion when I said I wasn't feeling
well.) Then I went up to my room and sat down on a cushion. I sat
there for surely an hour, staring at a daylit hole in the window
blind, without smoking or taking off my coat or loosening my necktie.
Then, abruptly, I got up and brought over a quantity of my personal
notepaper and wrote a second letter to Sister Irma, using the floor
as a desk.

I
never mailed the letter. The following reproduction is copied
straight from the original.

Montreal,
Canada June 28, 1939

DEAR
SISTER IRMA,

Did
I, by chance, say anything obnoxious or irreverent to you in my last
letter that reached the attention of Father Zimmermann and caused you
discomfort in some way? If this is the case, I beg you to give me at
least a reasonable chance to retract whatever it was I may have
unwittingly said in my ardor to become friends with you as well as
student and teacher. Is this asking too much? I do not believe it is.

The
bare truth is as follows: If you do not learn a few more rudiments of
the profession, you will only be a very, very interesting artist the
rest of your life instead of a great one. This is terrible, in my
opinion. Do you realize how grave the situation is?

It
is possible that Father Zimmermann made you resign from the school
because he thought it might interfere with your being a competent
nun. If this is the case, I cannot avoid saying that I think it was
very rash of him in more ways than one. It would not interfere with
your being a nun. I live like an evil-minded monk myself. The worst
that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you
slightly unhappy constantly. However, this is not a tragic situation,
in my opinion. The happiest day of my life was many years ago when I
was seventeen. I was on my way for lunch to meet my mother, who was
going out on the street for the first time after a long illness, and
I was feeling ecstatically happy when suddenly, as I was coming in to
the Avenue Victor Hugo, which is a street in Paris, I bumped into a
chap without any nose. I ask you to please consider that factor, in
fact I beg you. It is quite pregnant with meaning.

It
is also possible that Father Zimmermann caused you to stop
matriculating for the reason perhaps that your convent lacks funds to
pay the tuition. I frankly hope this is the case, not only because it
relieves my mind, but in a practical sense. If this is indeed the
case, you have only to say the word and I will offer my services
gratis for an indefinite period of time. Can we discuss this matter
further? May I ask again when your visiting days at the convent are?
May I be free to plan to visit you at the convent next Saturday
afternoon, July 6, between 3 and 5 o'clock in the afternoon,
dependent upon the schedule of trains between Montreal and Toronto? I
await your reply with great anxiety.

With
respect and admiration,

Sincerely
yours,

(signed)

JEAN
DE DAUMIER-SMITH

Staff
Instructor

Les
Amis Des Vieux Maltres

P.S.
In my last letter I casually asked if the young lady in the blue
outfit in the foreground of your religious picture was Mary
Magdalene, the sinner. If you have not as yet replied to my letter,
please go on refraining. It is possible that I was mistaken and I do
not willfully invite any disillusions at this point in my life. I am
willing to stay in the dark.

Even
today, as late as now, I have a tendency to wince when I remember
that I brought a dinner suit up to Les Amis with me. But bring one I
did, and after I'd finished my letter to Sister Irma, I put it on.
The whole affair seemed to call out for my getting drunk, and since I
had never in my life been drunk (for fear that excessive drinking
would shake the hand that painted the pictures that copped the three
first prizes, etc.), I felt compelled to dress for the tragic
occasion.

While
the Yoshotos were still in the kitchen, I slipped downstairs and
telephoned the Windsor Hotel--which Bobby's friend, Mrs. X, had
recommended to me before I'd left New York. I reserved a table for
one, for eight o'clock.

Around
seven-thirty, dressed and slicked up, I stuck my head outside my door
to see if either of the Yoshotos were on the prowl. I didn't want
them to see me in my dinner jacket, for some reason. They weren't in
sight, and I hurried down to the street and began to look for a cab.
My letter to Sister Irma was in the inside pocket of my jacket. I
intended to read it over at dinner, preferably by candlelight.

I
walked block after block without so much as seeing a cab at all, let
alone an empty one. It was rough going. The Verdun section of
Montreal was in no sense a dressy neighborhood, and I was convinced
that every passer-by was giving me a second, basically censorious
look. When, finally, I came to the lunch bar where I'd bolted the
"Coney Island Red-Hots" on Monday, I decided to let my
reservation at the Hotel Windsor go by the board. I went into the
lunch bar, sat down in an end booth, and kept my left hand over my
black tie while I ordered soup, rolls and black coffee. I hoped that
the other patrons would think I was a waiter on his way to work.

While
I was on my second cup of coffee, I took out my unmailed letter to
Sister Irma and reread it. The substance of it seemed to me a trifle
thin, and I decided to hurry back to Les Amis and touch it up a bit.
I also thought over my plans to visit Sister Irma, and wondered if it
might not be a good idea to pick up my train reservations later that
same evening. With those two thoughts in mind--neither of which
really gave me the sort of lift I needed--I left the lunch bar and
walked rapidly back to school.

Something
extremely out of the way happened to me some fifteen minutes later. A
statement, I'm aware, that has all the unpleasant earmarks of a
build-up, but quite the contrary is true. I'm about to touch on an
extraordinary experience, one that still strikes me as having been
quite transcendent, and I'd like, if possible, to avoid seeming to
pass it off as a case, or even a borderline case, of genuine
mysticism. (To do otherwise, I feel, would be tantamount to implying
or stating that the difference in spiritual sorties between St.
Francis and the average, highstrung, Sunday leper-kisser is only a
vertical one.)

In
the nine o'clock twilight, as I approached the school building from
across the street, there was a light on in the orthopedic appliances
shop. I was startled to see a live person in the shopcase, a hefty
girl of about thirty, in a green, yellow and lavender chiffon dress.
She was changing the truss on the wooden dummy. As I came up to the
show window, she had evidently just taken off the old truss; it was
under her left arm (her right "profile" was toward me), and
she was lacing up the new one on the dummy. I stood watching her,
fascinated, till suddenly she sensed, then saw, that she was being
watched. I quickly smiled--to show her that this was a nonhostile
figure in the tuxedo in the twilight on the other side of the
glass--but it did no good. The girl's confusion was out of all normal
proportion. She blushed, she dropped the removed truss, she stepped
back on a stack of irrigation basins--and her feet went out from
under her. I reached out to her instantly, hitting the tips of my
fingers on the glass. She landed heavily on her bottom, like a
skater. She immediately got to her feet without looking at me. Her
face still flushed, she pushed her hair back with one hand, and
resumed lacing up the truss on the dummy. It was just then that I had
my Experience. Suddenly (and I say this, I believe, with all due
self-consciousness), the sun came up and sped toward the bridge of my
nose at the rate of ninety-three million miles a second. Blinded and
very frightened--I had to put my hand on the glass to keep my
balance. The thing lasted for no more than a few seconds. When I got
my sight back, the girl had gone from the window, leaving behind her
a shimmering field of exquisite, twice-blessed, enamel flowers.

I
backed away from the window and walked around the block twice, till
my knees stopped buckling. Then, without daring to venture another
look into the shop window, I went upstairs to my room and lay down on
my bed. Some minutes, or hours later, I made, in French, the
following brief entry in my diary: "I am giving Sister Irma her
freedom to follow her own destiny. Everybody is a nun." (Tout le
monde est une nonne. )

Before
going to bed for the night, I wrote letters to my four just-expelled
students, reinstating them. I said a mistake had been made in the
administration department. Actually, the letters seemed to write
themselves. It may have had something to do with the fact that,
before sitting down to write, I'd brought a chair up from downstairs.

It
seems altogether anticlimactic to mention it, but Les Amis Des Vieux
Maitres closed down less than a week later, for being improperly
licensed (for not being licensed at all, as a matter of fact). I
packed up and joined Bobby, my stepfather, in Rhode Island, where I
spent the next six or eight weeks, till art school reopened,
investigating that most interesting of all summer-active animals, the
American Girl in Shorts.

Right
or wrong, I never again got in touch with Sister Irma.

Occasionally,
I still hear from Bambi Kramer, though. The last I heard, she'd
branched over into designing her own Christmas cards. They'll be
something to see, if she hasn't lost her touch.

Teddy

I'LL
EXQUISITE DAY you, buddy, if you don't get down off that bag this
minute. And I mean it," Mr. McArdle said. He was speaking from
the inside twin bed--the bed farther away from the porthole.
Viciously, with more of a whimper than a sigh, he foot-pushed his top
sheet clear of his ankles, as though any kind of coverlet was
suddenly too much for his sunburned, debilitated-looking body to
bear. He was lying supine, in just the trousers of his pajamas, a
lighted cigarette in his right hand. His head was propped up just
enough to rest uncomfortably, almost masochistically, against the
very base of the headboard. His pillow and ashtray were both on the
floor, between his and Mrs. McArdle's bed. Without raising his body,
he reached out a nude, inflamed-pink, right arm and flicked his ashes
in the general direction of the night table. "October, for God's
sake," he said. "If this is October weather, gimme August."
He turned his head to the right again, toward Teddy, looking for
trouble. "C'mon," he said. "What the hell do you think
I'm talking for? My health? Get down off there, please." Teddy
was standing on the broadside of a new looking cowhide Gladstone, the
better to see out of his parents' open porthole. He was wearing
extremely dirty, white ankle-sneakers, no socks, seersucker shorts
that were both too long for him and at least a size too large in the
seat, an overly laundered T shirt that had a hole the size of a dime
in the right shoulder, and an incongruously handsome, black alligator
belt. He needed a haircut--especially at the nape of the neck--the
worst way, as only a small boy with an almost full-grown head and a
reedlike neck can need one.

"Teddy,
did you hear me?"

Teddy
was not leaning out of the porthole quite so far or so precariously
as small boys are apt to lean out of open portholes--both his feet,
in fact, were flat on the surface of the Gladstone--but neither was
he just conservatively well-tipped; his face was considerably more
outside than inside the cabin. Nonetheless, he was well within
hearing of his father's voice--his father's voice, that is, most
singularly. Mr. McArdle played leading roles on no fewer than three
daytime radio serials when he was in New York, and he had what might
be called a third-class leading man's speaking voice:
narcissistically deep and resonant, functionally prepared at a
moment's notice to outmale anyone in the same room with it, if
necessary even a small boy. When it was on vacation from its
professional chores, it fell, as a rule, alternately in love with
sheer volume and a theatrical brand of quietness-steadiness. Right
now, volume was in order. "Teddy. God damn it--did you hear me?"

Teddy
turned around at the waist, without changing the vigilant position of
his feet on the Gladstone, and gave his father a look of inquiry,
whole and pure. His eyes, which were pale brown in color, and not at
all large, were slightly crossed--the left eye more than the right.
They were not crossed enough to be disfiguring, or even to be
necessarily noticeable at first glance. They were crossed just enough
to be mentioned, and only in context with the fact that one might
have thought long and seriously before wishing them straighter, or
deeper, or browner, or wider set. His face, just as it was, carried
the impact, however oblique and slow-travelling, of real beauty.

"I
want you to get down off that bag, now. How many times do you want me
to tell you?" Mr. McArdle said.

"Stay
exactly where you are, darling," said Mrs. McArdle, who
evidently had a little trouble with her sinuses early in the morning.
Her eyes were open, but only just. "Don't move the tiniest part
of an inch." She was lying on her right side, her face, on the
pillow, turned left, toward Teddy and the porthole, her back to her
husband. Her second sheet was drawn tight over her very probably nude
body, enclosing her, arms and all, up to the chin. "Jump up and
down," she said, and closed her eyes. "Crush Daddy's bag."