Tender Is the Night (40 page)

“Excuse
me, Franz,” said
Kaethe
before he could speak.
“Excuse me,
dear,
I had no right to say that. I know
my obligations and I am proud of them. But there is a bad feeling between
Nicole and me.”

“Birds
in their little nests agree,” Franz thundered. Finding the tone inappropriate
to the sentiment he repeated his command in the spaced and considered rhythm
with which his old master, Doctor
Dohmler
, could cast
significance on the
tritest
platitude. “Birds— in—their—nests—AGREE!”

“I
realize that. You haven’t seen me fail in courtesy toward Nicole.”

“I see
you failing in common sense. Nicole is half a patient—she will possibly remain
something of a patient all her life. In the absence of Dick I am responsible.”
He hesitated; sometimes as a quiet joke he tried to keep news from
Kaethe
. “There was a cable from
Rome
this morning. Dick has had grippe and is
starting home to-morrow.”

Relieved,
Kaethe
pursued her course in a less personal tone:

“I think
Nicole is less sick than
any one
thinks—she only
cherishes her illness as an instrument of power. She ought to be in the cinema,
like your Norma
Talmadge
—that’s where all American
women would be happy.”

“Are you
jealous of Norma
Talmadge
, on a film?”

“I don’t
like Americans. They’re selfish, SELF-
ish
!”

“You
like Dick?”

“I like
him,” she admitted. “He’s different, he thinks of others.”

—And so
does Norma
Talmadge
, Franz said to himself. Norma
Talmadge
must be a fine, noble woman beyond her loveliness.
They must compel her to play foolish
rôles
; Norma
Talmadge
must be a woman whom it would be a great privilege
to know.

Kaethe
had forgotten about Norma
Talmadge
, a vivid shadow
that she had fretted bitterly upon one night as they were driving home from the
movies in
Zurich
.

“—Dick
married Nicole for her money,” she said. “That was his weakness—you hinted as
much yourself one night.”

“You’re
being malicious.”

“I
shouldn’t have said that,” she retracted. “We must all live together like
birds, as you say. But it’s difficult when Nicole acts as—when Nicole pulls
herself back a little, as if she were holding her breath—as if I SMELT bad!”

Kaethe
had touched a material truth. She did most of her work herself, and, frugal,
she bought few clothes. An American
shopgirl
,
laundering two changes of underwear every night, would have noticed a hint of
yesterday’s reawakened sweat about
Kaethe’s
person,
less a smell than an
ammoniacal
reminder of the
eternity of toil and decay. To Franz this was as natural as the thick dark
scent of
Kaethe’s
hair, and he would have missed it
equally; but to Nicole, born hating the smell of a nurse’s fingers dressing
her, it was an offense only to be endured.

“And the
children,”
Kaethe
continued. “She doesn’t like them
to play with our children—” but Franz had heard enough:

“Hold
your tongue—that kind of talk can hurt me professionally, since we owe this
clinic to Nicole’s money. Let us have lunch.”

Kaethe
realized that her outburst had been ill-advised, but Franz’s last remark
reminded her that other Americans had money, and a week later she put her
dislike of Nicole into new words.

The
occasion was the dinner they tendered the Divers upon Dick’s return. Hardly had
their footfalls ceased on the path when she shut the door and said to Franz:

“Did you
see around his eyes? He’s been on a debauch!”

“Go
gently,” Franz requested. “Dick told me about that as soon as he came home. He
was boxing on the trans-Atlantic ship. The American passengers box a lot on
these trans-Atlantic ships.”

“I
believe that?” she scoffed. “It hurts him to move one of his arms and he has an
unhealed scar on his temple—you can see where the hair’s been cut away.”

Franz
had not noticed these details.

“But what?”
Kaethe
demanded. “Do you think that sort of
thing does the Clinic any good? The liquor I smelt on him tonight, and several
other times since he’s been back.”

She
slowed her voice to fit the gravity of what she was about to say: “Dick is no
longer a serious man.”

Franz
rocked his shoulders up the stairs, shaking off her persistence. In their bedroom
he turned on her.

“He is
most certainly a serious man and a brilliant man. Of all the men who have
recently taken their degrees in neuropathology in
Zurich
, Dick has been regarded as the most
brilliant—more brilliant than I could ever be.”

“For shame!”

“It’s
the truth—the shame would be not to admit it. I turn to Dick when cases are
highly involved. His publications are still standard in their line—go into any
medical library and ask. Most students think he’s an Englishman—they don’t
believe that such thoroughness could come out of
America
.” He groaned domestically,
taking his pajamas from under the pillow, “I can’t understand why you talk this
way,
Kaethe
—I thought you liked him.”

“For shame!”
Kaethe
said. “You’re the solid one, you do
the work. It’s a case of hare and tortoise—and in my opinion the hare’s race is
almost done.”

“
Tch
!
Tch
!”

“Very
well, then. It’s true.”

With his
open hand he pushed down air briskly.

“Stop!”

The
upshot was that they had exchanged viewpoints like debaters.
Kaethe
admitted to herself that she had been too hard on
Dick, whom she admired and of whom she stood in awe,
who
had been so appreciative and understanding of herself. As for Franz, once
Kaethe’s
idea had had time to sink in, he never after
believed that Dick was a serious person. And as time went on he convinced
himself that he had never thought so.

Dick
told Nicole an expurgated version of the catastrophe in
Rome
— in his version he had gone
philanthropically to the rescue of a drunken friend. He could trust Baby Warren
to hold her tongue, since he had painted the disastrous effect of the truth
upon Nicole. All this, however, was a low hurdle compared to the lingering
effect of the episode upon him.

In
reaction he took himself for an intensified beating in his work, so that Franz,
trying to break with him, could find no basis on which to begin a disagreement.
No friendship worth the name was ever destroyed in an hour without some painful
flesh being torn—so Franz let himself believe with ever-increasing conviction that
Dick travelled intellectually and emotionally at such a rate of speed that the
vibrations jarred him—this was a contrast that had previously been considered a
virtue in their relation. So, for the shoddiness of needs, are shoes made out
of last year’s hide.

Yet it
was May before Franz found an opportunity to insert the first wedge. Dick came
into his office white and tired one
noon
and sat down, saying:

“Well,
she’s gone.”

“She’s
dead?”

“The
heart quit.”

Dick sat
exhausted in the chair nearest the door. During three nights he had remained
with the scabbed anonymous woman-artist he had come to love, formally to
portion out the adrenaline, but really to throw as much wan light as he could
into the darkness ahead.

Half
appreciating his feeling, Franz travelled quickly over an opinion:

“It was
neuro
-syphilis. All the
Wassermans
we took won’t tell me differently. The spinal fluid—”

“Never
mind,” said Dick. “Oh, God, never mind! If she cared enough about her secret to
take it away with her, let it go at that.”

“You
better lay off for a day.”

“Don’t
worry, I’m going to.”

Franz
had his wedge; looking up from the telegram that he was writing to the woman’s
brother he inquired: “Or do you want to take a little trip?”

“Not
now.”

“I don’t
mean a vacation. There’s a case in
Lausanne
.
I’ve been on the phone with a
Chilian
all morning—”

“She was
so damn brave,” said Dick. “And it took her so long.” Franz shook his head
sympathetically and Dick got himself together. “Excuse me for interrupting
you.”

“This is
just a change—the situation is a father’s problem with his son—the father can’t
get the son up here. He wants somebody to come down there.”

“What is
it?
Alcoholism?
Homosexuality?
When you say
Lausanne
—”

“A little of everything.”

“I’ll go
down. Is there any money in it?”

“Quite a
lot, I’d say. Count on staying two or three days, and get the boy up here if he
needs to be watched. In any case take your time, take your ease; combine
business with pleasure.”

After
two hours’ train sleep Dick felt renewed, and he approached the interview with
Señor
Pardo
y
Cuidad
Real in good spirits.

These
interviews were much of a type. Often the sheer hysteria of the family
representative was as interesting psychologically as the condition of the
patient. This one was no exception:
Señor
Pardo
y
Cuidad
Real, a handsome
iron-gray Spaniard, noble of carriage, with all the appurtenances of wealth and
power, raged up and down his suite in the
Hôtel
de
Trois
Mondes
and told the story
of his son with no more self-control than a drunken woman.

“I am at
the end of my invention. My son is corrupt. He was corrupt at
Harrow
,
he was corrupt
at King’s College,
Cambridge
.
He’s incorrigibly corrupt. Now that there is this drinking it is more and more
obvious how he is, and there is continual scandal. I have tried everything—I
worked out a plan with a doctor friend of mine, sent them together for a tour
of
Spain
.
Every evening Francisco had an injection of cantharides and then the two went
together to a reputable bordello—for a week or so it seemed to work but the
result was nothing. Finally last week in this very room, rather in that
bathroom—” he pointed at it, “—I made Francisco strip to the waist and lashed
him with a whip—”

Exhausted
with his emotion he sat down and Dick spoke:

“That
was foolish—the trip to
Spain
was futile also—” He struggled against an
upsurging
hilarity—that any reputable medical man should have lent himself to such an
amateurish experiment! “—
Señor
, I must tell you that
in these cases we can promise nothing. In the case of the drinking we can often
accomplish something—with proper co-operation. The first thing is to see the
boy and get enough of his confidence to find whether he has any insight into
the matter.”

—The
boy, with whom he sat on the terrace, was about twenty, handsome and alert.

“I’d
like to know your attitude,” Dick said. “Do you feel that the situation is
getting worse? And do you want to do anything about it?”

“I
suppose I do,” said Francisco, “I am very unhappy.”

“Do you
think it’s from the drinking or from the abnormality?”

“I think
the drinking is caused by the other.” He was serious for a while—suddenly an
irrepressible facetiousness broke through and he laughed, saying, “It’s
hopeless. At King’s I was known as the Queen of Chili. That trip to
Spain
—all it
did was to make me nauseated by the sight of a woman.”

Dick
caught him up sharply.

“If
you’re happy in this mess, then I can’t help you and I’m wasting my time.”

“No,
let’s talk—I despise most of the others so.” There was some manliness in the
boy, perverted now into an active resistance to his father. But he had that
typically roguish look in his eyes that homosexuals assume in discussing the
subject.

“It’s a
hole-and-corner business at best,” Dick told him. “You’ll spend your life on
it, and its consequences, and you won’t have time or energy for any other
decent or social act. If you want to face the world you’ll have to begin by
controlling your sensuality— and, first of all, the drinking that provokes it—”