Tender Is the Night (34 page)

“Think
how you love me,” she whispered. “I don’t ask you to love me always like this,
but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I
am to-night.”

But Dick
had come away for his soul’s sake, and he began thinking about that. He had
lost himself—he could not tell the hour when, or the day or the week, the month
or the year. Once he had cut through things, solving the most complicated
equations as the simplest problems of his simplest patients. Between the
time
he found Nicole flowering under a stone on the
Zurichsee
and the moment of his meeting with Rosemary the
spear had been blunted.

Watching
his father’s struggles in poor parishes had wedded a desire for money to an
essentially
unacquisitive
nature. It was not a
healthy necessity for security—he had never felt
more sure
of himself, more thoroughly his own man, than at the time of his marriage to
Nicole. Yet he had been swallowed up like a gigolo, and somehow permitted his
arsenal to be locked up in the
Warren
safety-deposit vaults.

“There
should have been a settlement in the Continental style; but it isn’t over yet.
I’ve wasted eight years teaching the rich the ABC’s of human decency, but I’m
not done. I’ve got too many
unplayed
trumps in my
hand.”

He
loitered among the fallow rose bushes and the beds of damp sweet
indistinguishable fern. It was warm for October but cool enough to wear a heavy
tweed coat buttoned by a little elastic tape at the neck. A figure detached
itself from the black shape of a tree and he knew it was the woman whom he had
passed in the lobby coming out. He was in love with every pretty woman he saw
now, their forms at a distance,
their
shadows on a
wall.

Her back
was toward him as she faced the lights of the town. He scratched a match that
she must have heard, but she remained motionless.

—Was it
an invitation?
Or an indication of obliviousness?
He
had long been outside of the world of simple desires and their fulfillments,
and he was inept and uncertain. For all he knew there might be some code among
the wanderers of obscure spas by which they found each other quickly.

—Perhaps
the next gesture was his. Strange children should smile at each other and say,
“Let’s play.”

He moved
closer, the shadow moved sideways. Possibly he would be snubbed like the
scapegrace drummers he had heard of in youth. His heart beat loud in contact
with the
unprobed
,
undissected
,
unanalyzed,
unaccounted
for. Suddenly he turned away,
and, as he did, the girl, too, broke the black frieze she made with the
foliage, rounded a bench at a moderate but determined pace and took the path
back to the hotel.

With a
guide and two other men, Dick started up the
Birkkarspitze
next morning. It was a fine feeling once they were above the cowbells of the
highest pastures—Dick looked forward to the night in the shack, enjoying his
own fatigue, enjoying the captaincy of the guide, feeling a delight in his own
anonymity. But at mid-day the weather changed to black sleet and hail and
mountain thunder. Dick and one of the other climbers wanted to go on but the
guide refused. Regretfully they struggled back to
Innsbruck
to start again to-morrow.

After
dinner and a bottle of heavy local wine in the deserted dining-room, he felt
excited, without knowing why, until he began thinking of the garden. He had
passed the girl in the lobby before supper and this time she had looked at him
and approved of him, but it kept worrying him: Why? When I could have had a
good share of the pretty women of my time for the asking, why start that now?
With a wraith, with a fragment of my desire?
Why?

His
imagination pushed ahead—the old asceticism, the actual unfamiliarity,
triumphed: God, I might as well go back to the
Riviera
and sleep with Janice
Caricamento
or the
Wilburhazy
girl.
To belittle all these years with something cheap and
easy?

He was
still excited, though, and he turned from the veranda and went up to his room
to think. Being alone in body and spirit begets loneliness, and loneliness
begets more loneliness.

Upstairs
he walked around thinking of the matter and laying out his climbing clothes
advantageously on the faint heater; he again encountered Nicole’s telegram,
still unopened, with which diurnally she accompanied his itinerary. He had
delayed opening it before supper—perhaps because of the garden. It was a
cablegram from
Buffalo
,
forwarded through
Zurich
.

“Your
father died peacefully tonight. HOLMES.”

He felt
a sharp wince at the shock, a gathering of the forces of resistance; then it
rolled up through his loins and stomach and throat.

He read
the message again. He sat down on the bed, breathing and staring; thinking first
the old selfish child’s thought that comes with the death of a parent, how will
it affect me now that this earliest and strongest of protections is gone?

The
atavism passed and he walked the room still, stopping from time to time to look
at the telegram. Holmes was formally his father’s curate but actually, and for
a decade, rector of the church. How did he die? Of old age—he was seventy-five.
He had lived a long time.

Dick
felt sad that he had died alone—he had survived his wife, and his brothers and sisters;
there were cousins in
Virginia
but they were poor and not able to come
North
, and
Holmes had had to sign the telegram. Dick loved his father—again and again he
referred judgments to what his father would probably have thought or done. Dick
was born several months after the death of two young sisters and his father,
guessing what would be the effect on Dick’s mother, had saved him from a
spoiling by becoming his moral guide. He was of tired stock yet he raised
himself to that effort.

In the
summer father and son walked downtown together to have their shoes shined—Dick
in his starched duck sailor suit, his father always in beautifully cut clerical
clothes—and the father was very proud of his handsome little boy. He told Dick
all he knew about life, not much but most of it true, simple things, matters of
behavior that came within his clergyman’s range. “Once in a strange town when I
was first ordained, I went into a crowded room and was confused as to who was
my hostess. Several people I knew came toward me, but I disregarded them
because I had seen a gray- haired woman sitting by a window far across the
room. I went over to her and introduced myself. After that I made many friends
in that town.”

His
father had done that from a good heart—his father had been sure of what he was,
with a deep pride of the two proud widows who had raised him to believe that
nothing could be superior to “good instincts,” honor, courtesy, and courage.

The
father always considered that his wife’s small fortune belonged to his
son,
and in college and in medical school sent him a check
for all of it four times a year. He was one of those about whom it was said
with smug finality in the gilded age: “very much the gentleman, but not much
get-up-and-go about him.”

. . .
Dick sent down for a newspaper. Still pacing to and from the telegram open on
his bureau, he chose a ship to go to
America
. Then he put in a call for
Nicole in
Zurich
,
remembering so many things as he waited, and wishing he had always been as good
as he had intended to be.

XIX

For an
hour, tied up with his profound reaction to his father’s death, the magnificent
façade of the homeland, the harbor of New York, seemed all sad and glorious to
Dick, but once ashore the feeling vanished, nor did he find it again in the
streets or the hotels or the trains that bore him first to Buffalo, and then
south to Virginia with his father’s body. Only as the local train shambled into
the low-forested
clayland
of Westmoreland County, did
he feel once more identified with his surroundings; at the station he saw a
star he knew, and a cold moon bright over Chesapeake Bay; he heard the rasping
wheels of buckboards turning, the lovely fatuous voices, the sound of sluggish
primeval rivers flowing softly under soft Indian names.

Next day
at the churchyard his father was laid among a hundred Divers,
Dorseys
, and Hunters. It was very friendly leaving him
there with all his relations around him. Flowers were scattered on the brown
unsettled earth. Dick had no more ties here now and did not believe he would
come back. He knelt on the hard soil. These dead, he knew them all, their
weather-beaten faces with blue flashing eyes, the spare violent bodies, the
souls made of new earth in the forest-heavy darkness of the seventeenth
century.

“Good-by,
my father—good-by, all my fathers.”

On the
long-roofed steamship piers one is in a country that is no longer here and not
yet there. The hazy yellow vault is full of echoing shouts. There are the
rumble of trucks and the clump of trunks, the strident chatter of cranes,
the
first salt smell of the sea. One hurries through, even
though there’s time; the past, the continent, is behind; the future is the
glowing mouth in the side of the ship; the dim, turbulent alley is too
confusedly the present.

Up the
gangplank and the vision of the world adjusts itself, narrows. One is a citizen
of a commonwealth smaller than
Andorra
,
no longer sure of anything. The men at the purser’s desk are as oddly shaped as
the cabins; disdainful are the eyes of voyagers and their friends. Next the
loud mournful
whistles, the portentous vibration and the
boat, the human idea—is
in motion. The pier and its faces slide by and
for a moment the boat is a piece accidentally split off from them; the faces
become remote, voiceless, the pier is one of many blurs along the water front.
The harbor flows swiftly toward the sea.

With it
flowed
Albert
McKisco
,
labelled
by the newspapers as its most precious cargo.
McKisco
was having a vogue. His novels were pastiches of
the work of the best people of his time, a feat not to be disparaged, and in
addition he possessed a gift for softening and debasing what he borrowed, so
that many readers were charmed by the ease with which they could follow him.
Success had improved him and humbled him. He was no fool about his
capacities—he realized that he possessed more vitality than many men of
superior talent, and he was resolved to enjoy the success he had earned. “I’ve
done nothing yet,” he would say. “I don’t think I’ve got any real genius. But
if I keep trying I may write a good book.” Fine dives have been made from
flimsier spring-boards. The innumerable snubs of the past were forgotten.
Indeed, his success was founded psychologically upon his duel with Tommy
Barban
, upon the basis of which, as it withered in his memory,
he had created, afresh, a new self-respect.

Spotting
Dick Diver the second day out, he eyed him tentatively, then introduced
himself
in a friendly way and sat down. Dick laid aside his
reading and, after the few minutes that it took to realize the change in
McKisco
, the disappearance of the man’s annoying sense of
inferiority, found himself pleased to talk to him.
McKisco
was “well-informed” on a range of subjects wider than Goethe’s—it was
interesting to listen to the innumerable facile combinations that he referred
to as his opinions. They struck up an acquaintance, and Dick had several meals
with them. The
McKiscos
had been invited to sit at
the captain’s table but with nascent snobbery they told Dick that they
“couldn’t stand that bunch.”

Violet
was very grand now, decked out by the grand
couturières
,
charmed about the little discoveries that well-bred girls make in their teens.
She could, indeed, have learned them from her mother in
Boise
but her soul was born dismally in the
small movie houses of
Idaho
,
and she had had no time for her mother. Now she “belonged”—together with
several million other people—and she was happy, though her husband still
shushed her when she grew violently naïve.

The
McKiscos
got off at
Gibraltar
.
Next evening in Naples Dick picked up a lost and miserable family of two girls
and their mother in the bus from the hotel to the station. He had seen them on
the ship. An overwhelming desire to help, or to be admired, came over him: he
showed them fragments of gaiety; tentatively he bought them wine, with pleasure
saw
them
begin to regain their proper egotism. He
pretended they were this and that, and falling in with his own plot, and
drinking too much to sustain the illusion, and all this time the women, thought
only that this was a windfall from heaven. He withdrew from them as the night
waned and the train rocked and snorted at
Cassino
and
Frosinone
.
After weird American partings in the station at
Rome
, Dick went to the Hotel Quirinal,
somewhat exhausted.