The Eighth Day (39 page)

“Then who'd do it?”

“Well . . . ? There are enough doctors who are paid to do it. Somebody's got to do it, but not
you
, Marianne.”

Marianne drew circles on the ground with the tip of her parasol. Presently she rose. “Let's go home, John. . . . ? John, sometimes I think that you're just plain ignorant—or rather that something was left out of you. You haven't any—
imagination!
You haven't any—!”

That eliminated Marianne Schmidt.

Lottchen Bauer had a beautiful speaking voice and was a famous cook. One day he took her skating on the
Turnverein's
rink. They skated together with such elegance that the crowd left the ice to watch them. When at the end of the afternoon he was taking off her skates he looked up and found that she was weeping.

“Why, Lottchen! What's the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell me!”

“Life's awful! I had an awful quarrel with Father and Mother this morning and
I'm going to have another one tonight.
—John, you said you thought I sang beautifully.”

“You do. You're the best home singer I ever heard.”

“Well, I want to be an opera singer and I'm going to be an opera singer and nothing in the wide world will stop me!”

“But, Lottchen!”

“What?”

“I don't think you'd have a very good family life, if you were an opera singer. I mean: you'd have to be away evenings a lot. And I guess they must have to practice on the afternoons before the show.”

Lottchen wept some more, but from prolonged laughter. That eliminated Lottchen Bauer.

He was taken to the annual concert given by the pupils of Hoboken's foremost teacher of the piano, Mrs. Kessel. Music, application, and composed nerves came naturally to these girls. Pupil followed pupil. The evening drew toward its close with exhibitions by the more advanced students, including the three Misses Kellerman. Ashley had seen these young ladies, but had never met them. Their mother Clotilde Kellerman,
geborene
von Diehlen, regarded herself as superior to the other matrons in the town and held her daughters in closer rein. Beata played last. Ashley had no way of discerning that her performance was the most brilliant but the least innately musical of the evening. It reflected not her beauty but her stony advance to the piano and her withdrawn salute to the audience. In the middle of it—
her memory failed her.
The public was electrified. This was a scandal and a disgrace and would be talked about for years. Ashley was more electrified by what followed. Beata did not recommence the work; she did not grope about among the keys for an issue. She gazed tranquilly before her, her hands raised. Then she rose and bowed to her listeners, unabashed. She left the stage with the carriage of a world-famous artist who has exceeded all expectations. The applause was generous, but did not cover the indignant comments of Ashley's friends.

“She did it on purpose!”

“Her mother will
die!
”

“She's an awful stuck-up girl and everybody knows it! She hasn't got any friends and she doesn't
want
any.”

“She did it to spite her mother. She's
impossible
to her mother.”

“No, she didn't do it on purpose. When she recited on Schiller's birthday she forgot the words, too.”

What was it in Beata that so strongly attracted Ashley from these first moments? Was it her fortitude and imperturbability? Did he have sufficient imagination to capture in the air the cry as of one shipwrecked and drowning? Was his attention quickened toward her because of the malicious glee in the audience? (He was tending to believe that community opinion is
always
wrong.) Did he see himself as a Perseus and St. George whose mission it had been to rescue a beautiful maiden in distress? Or was it in his nature to seek a girl who—for reasons in her nature—would love him all-absorbedly, him alone?

He stalked her. The family generally attended church in New York and spent the whole Sunday there. They seldom patronized the entertainments in Hoboken. He learned that in school she had been a formidably bright student; she knew “oceans” of German poetry by heart; she and her sisters spoke impeccable French (their mother directed that only French be spoken in the home on Fridays—which left their base-born father out in the cold). She was widely disliked. She was cruelly teased by her brothers and sisters—for her aloofness, for her disdain of boys, for her large feet. The matrons lowered their voices with assumed sympathy to declare that she was “unmarriageable.”

Once a year—sturdy Protestants though they were—the brewers of Hoboken gave a great pre-Lenten ball (their
Fasching, their Mardi Gras
) in honor of King Gambrinus, the inventor of beer. John Ashley, the hunter, attended with the Gruber family. He never failed to be attentive to the mothers and it was through Mrs. Gruber that he was introduced to Beata, who had been dancing with her brothers. She refused his invitation to dance. An hour later he sat down by the great Mrs. Kellerman. He talked of the weather and of the band. By luck he happened to mention that he had recently crossed the river to attend a performance of
Der Freischütz
at The Academy of Music. The Kellermans had held a Saturday-afternoon subscription to the opera for twenty years. Mrs. Kellerman unbent. She invited him to dinner on the following Thursday night. She wanted him to meet her sons, one of whom was thinking of enrolling in the engineering school. Ashley again asked Beata to dance and was refused. (Later she told him that she had been aware of his following her and that she had “hated” him.) On Thursday evening, Beata was indisposed and did not join the family at dinner. Her father and brothers thought him uninteresting; her sisters thought him ridiculous. Mrs. Kellerman liked him very much. He had beautiful manners. He liked her. He listened appreciatively to her account of her childhood home in Hamburg, the great balls she had attended, the royalties to whom she had been presented. Two days later he went to New York and bought a keepsake edition of Heine's
Buch der Lieder
, bound in coral velvet, stamped with forget-me-nots. He had consulted his German professor on this important matter. He brought it to her door. Hunters leave cakes of salt in the forest. For three weeks he received no reply. Despair defends itself. Finally he was invited to coffee. That thicket of briars through which Beata groped her life away vanished into thin air.

Why? How?

He made no jokes. He didn't allude to anything in mockery. He spoke of her loss of memory at the piano. He said he understood that perfectly: that beautiful music was one thing, but that a lot of people sitting in little gold creaky chairs listening to their relatives play was
another.
He bet that she played perfectly when she was alone or with just one or two people she trusted. Ashley, who so seldom talked, talked. He told her he planned to leave the East Coast and to work in the West where he didn't know anybody. He lowered his voice to confess that he loved his father and mother, but they didn't really have the same ideas that he had.

He dropped into German: “I get along pretty well here. I get along pretty well wherever I am. But I have the feeling that I want to get away from everything that I've known. I want to start a whole new life. Do you sometimes feel like that?”

Beata was unable to speak.

“The Constitution of the United States says that we have a right to be happy. I've been happy—whenever I stayed at my grandmother's farm in upper New York State. But she died. I could be happy with you. You could make me happy. I could try to make you happy.”

She gazed at him unblinkingly—blue eyes into blue. A hoarseness came into her beautiful speaking voice. She said, “I couldn't make anyone happy.”

He smiled. Slowly a smile filled his face that so seldom smiled.

“Well,” he said, “we could think about it.”

Here begins a history of the maternal grandparents of the notorious Ashley children.

There is a theory—the folk wisdom of many countries has condensed the observation into a proverb—that gifted children inherit from their grandparents, that talents skip a generation. Some maintain that that is all nonsense: energy of mind (for good or ill) in persons and nations is primarily the result of a mixture of contrasting traits in the inheritance—a turbulent clash. The Ashley children and the Lansing children certainly had energy of mind, but the Ashley children had something more: a quality of abstraction, an impersonal passion. Where did that come from—that freedom from self-reference?

Friederich Kellerman and his bride Clotilde,
geborene
von Diehlen, arrived in America from Hamburg twenty-five years before this beautiful and soundless morning in Hoboken. Kellerman had risen from apprentice to journeyman to master in the art and science of brewing. He was stout, amiable, pusillanimous, and musical.

His wife was of another metal. She had a straight back, the carriage of a royal guardsman. Her intimidated neighbors said she looked like a weather vane, or like the figurehead on a ship—allusions to her high coloring, to her red cheeks, tufted orange eyebrows and braids, eyes of sapphire
en cabochon.
She entered public gatherings like a beadle directing a state funeral. She had been brought up in a household where parents and children (and their grandparents before them) were breathlessly absorbed in improving their social position. Her father had held a position on the administrative staff of Hamburg's Marine Institute, without being
Professor
or even
Doktor
; he was merely paymaster and superintendent of buildings and grounds. At some time in the eighteenth century—when many were doing it—his family had picked up a
von
to which they were not entitled. The von Diehlens were occasionally given cards to academic and municipal balls at which Exalted Personages were present. Young Clotilde had laid her eyes on royalties and had made her “
Knix.
” She and her sisters had been taught by their mother with a sort of ferocity to imitate those Exalted Personages. They were made to ascend and descend staircases with Beethoven's
Sonatas
or atlases on their heads, to rise from a curtsy without an audible cracking of their knees, and to waltz entire evenings without reversing. Snobbery is a passion. It is a noble passion that has gone astray amid appearances. It springs from a desire to escape the trivial and to be included among those who have no petty cares, no tedious moments, among those whose very misfortunes are lofty. On starry nights the geese around the ponds below our barns hear in the upper airs the song of their migrant cousins. They imagine that all
their
diversions are magical;
they
never experience self-distaste and boredom. Clotilde's marriage to Friederich Kellerman had been a disappointment to her family and was soon to be one to her. She could not forgive herself for having married a brewer, for having followed him to a remote continent where her quality was seldom discerned, for having been betrayed by love into joining her life with that of a handsome young workman possessed of a resounding baritone voice and an easy assurance that he would be a success—one who spoke a deplorable German and one who would never, never, look well on horseback. Clotilde Kellerman, however, held her head high and looked straight ahead. She sustained the pretense of deference to the head of the house. Her children were not deceived. Perhaps the principal reason for Beata's revolt against her mother was that lady's tacit but sufficiently evident disparagement of the man she had married.

Clotilde Kellerman had other passions, too, or tended other altars. She loved her family collectively, while being in a constant state of exasperation with each individual in it. They were
hers.
She would have walked into a wall of fire for any one of them. Housekeeping, for her—like the aspiration to a higher social rank—was invested with moral values. Her aim was perfection and it took its toll of those about her. Beata was to remember all her life the occasion when her mother gazed for a moment at the roast which her maid had placed before her at the Sunday dinner table, then had seized it in both hands and hurled it to the floor. Her gesture was forceful, her voice was contained: “Tell Käthe we shall have scrambled eggs.”

The von Diehlens transmitted a third passion from generation to generation, though it reached Clotilde Kellerman in an attenuated form. To them music, nightly in the home and at least twice a week at concerts, was essential to existence. Neither Clotilde nor her daughter Beata was musical, but they did not know that. They thought they were. Many color-blind persons are unaware that the world they see differs from that seen by their neighbors. They wept at slow movements; they recognized well-defined themes and rejoiced at their recurrence. Beata's father, however, had an ear. In Hoboken he was long the president of the best (of four)
Sängervereine
until he could no longer endure the banality of its programs. He grew tired of hearing forty obese men proclaim the joys of a hunter's life and bid passing birds report their breaking hearts to their beloved. He took his family to the opera in New York and wept unashamedly through the works of Wagner. His wife was very pleased to be there, though she gave little attention to the performance. She was handsome and she knew it, and very well born; it was her duty to be present and it conferred a (five-hour) privilege on those who beheld her.

Friederich Kellerman was deeply attached to his children and particularly to Beata, but his wife held strong views on parental relations. She was quick to intercept any demonstrations of tenderness. They rendered boys unmanly and girls vulgar. At mealtimes the children stood behind their chairs until their parents were seated; on going to bed they kissed their parents' hands. At heart Clotilde Kellerman had a low opinion of girls. God sent them into the world for the perpetuation of the race, but the most one could do for them was to inculcate a spine of steel, a royal carriage, a thorough knowledge of cooking, bedding, and cleaning, and to find them a husband from an estimable family. It should not be forgotten, however, that Clotilde had also acquired the merits, real or imagined, of aristocrats: never, in the presence of her children, did she say a malicious word about her neighbors. (She had other ways of conveying disapprobation.) Though she could cast a platter to the floor, she never raised her voice nor permitted her children to do so. She let it be known that she was guided by her own opinion rather than by those of her neighbors. She did not permit any discussion of the relative wealth or poverty of their friends. If her husband had entered the house one day and told her that he was bankrupt, she would have uttered no word of complaint. She would have moved to a slum and improved the tone of the neighborhood.