The Epicure's Lament (30 page)

“Why are you going to school on a Saturday?”

“It's Friday.”

“What's wrong with Sonia?”

“She doesn't feel well,” said Bellatrix obtusely.

“Maybe she's just got a hangover.”

“You maybe shouldn't say things like that about my mother in front of me.”

“Well, Uncle Dennis would certainly agree.”

“I'm not saying that because he said it, I'm saying it because nobody ever likes to hear bad things about their mothers.”

“You can say whatever you want about mine,” I retorted darkly. “She was much worse than yours.”

She shifted from foot to foot, eyeing me tentatively, as if gauging her chances. “So will you drive me to school?” she asked.

“Maybe you should stay home,” I said. “Kids like to stay home from school—at least normal kids.”

“I have to go,” she said without wheedling, stating a fact. “It's the last day before winter vacation. We have a test.”

I noticed then that her hair was up in a sort of droopy, anemic waterfall-like ponytail high on her head.

“What did you do to your hair?” I asked her.

“Why do you care?” she asked matter-of-factly

“Because I'm not your father,” I said, nodding. “I see your point. Well, it looks nice.”

“No it doesn't,” she said. “I had to do it myself because Mama's sick, and I know it looks stupid, but we have gym today and I don't want it flopping in my face.”

“All right, Bellatrix, let's go,” I said. “You've won my sympathy, but I honestly have no idea how. Wait for me in the truck; I need another cup of coffee.”

We drove along the river and crossed the bridge. Bellatrix directed me along the roads, and otherwise we didn't talk. The truck smelled old and musty today. I was conscious of this because children didn't often ride in it, and I have always suspected that children have acute senses of smell, like dogs, that get wrecked through the years by pollutants, cigarettes, the blunting effects of time, and the general ongoing decay of all the bodily senses and vital organs.

“My school is right here,” she said finally. “Turn in the parking lot and I'll get out by that fence over there.”

I did as she told me; I had no real reason not to, although something I couldn't put my finger on made me want to drive right into the side of the nearest building. Something about the adults I saw as we pulled into the parking lot. The kids all looked normal enough in their bright jackets and backpacks, but every adult I saw, and there were a lot of them milling about herding children, gave me the willies of one kind or another.

“Bellatrix!” brayed a tall, broad-shouldered frau in a frumpy dirndl of a skirt and a baggy purple sweater. She had shoulder-length white hair, a pale moon face—oddly wrinkle-free, like those of witches in fairy tales—and an unnaturally high, loud, German-accented voice.

“Mrs. Appelbaum!” called Bellatrix, waving madly. “My teacher,” she announced to me, flushed with a suspicious kind of manic energy she'd never shown the slightest hint of around me before. “Thanks, Hugo, see you at three o'clock,” she said in a rush, and flung herself out of the truck and onto the ground.

Mrs. Appelbaum was staring curiously at me in the manner of a small-town busybody, so I gave her a jaunty little fuck-you wave that was actually the universal go-away gesture. Smiling with something that was meant to appear to be warm friendliness, she gave a big wave back at me and then headed toward me, Bellatrix flapping at her heels as if to forestall her at all costs.

I rolled down my window to see what the hell she wanted.

“So you're Bellatrix's father,” said Mrs. Appelbaum with a didactically eager smile that hinted at black, simmering, repressed puritanical anger somewhere not too far below the surface. Behind her bright, clenched smile, her round blue eyes bored into mine with an intensity that reminded me of hatred. Up close, she smelled like lavender. I was afraid for Bellatrix, having to spend every day with this woman. I wanted to drive away as fast as I could and if at all possible spray gravel on her dull, gray woolen skirt as I did so, but I stayed put: Bellatrix was waiting for me to answer the question.

“Actually…,” I said with a smarmy little grin. From behind her teacher, Bellatrix looked beseechingly at me. I added in a false tone, “I've been meaning to come and see her school for quite some time.”

“Well, do come in, then!” cried Mrs. A. “Come and see our classroom!”

She led me through a before-school, milling assemblage of children of varying ages and sizes being marshaled by a willowy young man in a sweater-vest with a bobbing Adam's apple and medieval haircut; another middle-aged Teutonic Brunnhilde, with iron-gray braids and the same scary blue drilling gaze as Mrs. A.'s, who likewise reeked of lavender; and an ungainly but preternaturally perky young woman in a flowing purple scarf and long, shapeless blue corduroy jumper-dress. All these people wore Birkenstock sandals over thick woolen ankle socks, as if this were the prescribed faculty footwear, which it may well have been.

The sixth-grade classroom smelled of beeswax and Christmas. The reason for this became obvious: stumpy brown candles were arrayed on one scratched oak table in a far corner, and pine boughs were draped all along the upper moldings of two walls. A small table against the far wall under the windows was covered in a purple cloth, on top of which, it appeared, reposed relics from the natural kingdom: shells, primarily, with the occasional smattering of colored stones and pine cones. The gleaming wooden shelf above it was neatly lined with twenty or so recorders, those shrill wooden flutes my mother played so ir-ritatingly so many years ago. My mother would, in fact, have loved everything about this creepily wholesome room and Mrs. Appelbaum, who went back out to the playground to oversee her charges, and left Bellatrix to give me the grand tour.

“This is my desk,” said Bellatrix, bustling over to a wooden desk with a hinged top like all the others in the room, and opened it to show me the contents: paper, pens, colored pencils, etc. All very neat and tidy, and right in the front row, which had always struck me as a crazy place to choose to sit; I myself preferred to lounge, doodling and heckling under my breath, near the back. The kids who sat up there were invariably the ones who gaped pacifistically from the sidelines at
recess while the rest of us beat the hell out of a tetherball or smashed the foursquare ball into each other's quadrants with intent to kill. The front-row sitters were the ones who volunteered whenever anything needed doing, seemingly suicidally as if to cement their life-threatening unpopularity: blackboard cleaner, hall monitor, taunted in-charge flunky during the few minutes the teacher was called out of the room.

“And this is my painting,” she added, pointing. I peered obligingly at a wall of identical quasi-abstract watercolorish renderings of the same two fuzzy shapes, one yellow, one green, with swaths of blue and red surrounding it all. “St. George and the dragon,” she prompted. “Mine is the second from the left.”

“Very nice,” I said insincerely, and was rewarded by a skeptical glance from the artist.

“St. George,” she said, “fought with the dragon and killed it.”

“Why did he do that?” I asked, yawning.

“Because he had to.”

“Why did he have to?”

“Because the dragon was bad,” she answered.

“What are they teaching you in this school?” I asked, laughing jovially (possibly not jovially; possibly with some hostility). “That doesn't sound very ecoconscious to me, to kill a rare animal because it's considered bad. By whose standards was the dragon bad? According to the dragon? I doubt that.”

“I can't believe you don't know about this,” she said with scorn. “Didn't you learn it in school too?”

“I didn't go to a religious school,” I said.

“This isn't a religious school,” she said back.

“Well, St. George is a saint, and I bet you eighty bucks that dragon is some medieval stand-in for Satan.”

“Satan?” she said, laughing.

“Anyway,” I said, “this is a fascinating subject, Bellatrix, and
I'd like to take it up again, but now I have to go home and smoke my morning cigarettes.”

She made a strangled sound of disgust, the closest written approximation of which might be “ugh.”

I made my way from the classroom; she bustled behind me. I felt her hand on my elbow, and turned.

“Don't go yet,” she said. “Please. Let me just introduce you to some friends, really fast. I'll just say you're my dad, okay? They always ask who my dad is.”

A dragon would have been swayed.

“Friends!” I said. “I never pass up a chance to make new friends.”

“Not your friends,” she said, beaming, “mine.” And so I was trotted round the schoolyard, posing as a kindly, dadlike personage, to smile and nod to various schoolchildren with names straight out of a play about elves and village maidens: Saskia, Cornelia, Sabina, Rosemarie, that sort of thing. Rosemarie, it appeared, had her own father in tow, a tall, upright fellow. His eyes twinkled at me. He wore corduroy trousers and a home-knit pullover. I assumed my best man-to-man expression as he shook my hand.

“Otto Froelich,” he said, I surmised by way of introduction, in a deep German-accented voice.

“Hugo Whittier,” I offered in return. It developed that we were going to take a little fatherly get-to-know-you stroll together, along toward the back of the school, down a gravel path. I pulled out my cigarettes and offered him one, then lit us both up.

“Bellatrix has been to our house,” he announced without inflection. “She's a good girl. A good musician. Very impressive. You are musical as well?”

“Listen, Froelich,” I said briskly.

“Otto, please.”

“Otto, then. I can't help wondering what this place is about. This school, I mean. Everyone seems a little… enthusiastic, for so early in the morning. A little bubble-headed, frankly. As if they were all under some sort of mind control.”

He said with furrowed brow, “Actually, it's a very sound method of education; however, I do think sometimes, to people unfamiliar with the methods and philosophy, it might seem a little…”

“Fruity,” I offered.

There was a brief pause.

“Why, then, did you send Bellatrix to a Waldorf school?” he asked with calm good manners.

“Her mother sent her,” I said.

“You're not familiar with Rudolf Steiner's views on education.” It was not a question.

“Rudolf Steiner,” I repeated with foreboding. “Oh, for God's sake. Don't tell me he's behind all this. My mother was under his sway when I was a kid. We almost died of malnutrition and lack of medical attention, my brother and I, thanks to his mumbo-jumbo, him and Madame Blavatsky and a couple other mystical fruitcakes. And what is this George-and-the-dragon business? What the hell? It's a Christian fable of some kind, a didactic fairy tale, as I recall. The dragon was a stand-in for Satan, or man's baser nature, and George was light, good, truth, that sort of dichotomy, am I right?”

“St. George,” he said. “Yes, it is considered a Christian story, but it reverberates much more deeply than that, and many ancient cultures have a story that's similar in some way. The story goes that a dragon was attracted to a village by the smell of its hoarded gold and silver. The village is said to be Uffington, in England; there's a shrine to St. George there. The dragon lived above the village on a hillside, breathing terrible fire that stank of brimstone and sulfur, and demanded live sacrifices every
night. It consumed all the livestock, night after night, as the villagers offered first their chickens, then their sheep, then their cows, until none were left. Then they drew straws amongst themselves every day to see which of them would have to go to the dragon's lair that night and offer himself up as a sacrifice.”

“Women and children too?”

He cast a look at me. “Yes,” he said. We shared a puzzled look about this. “At any rate, the king's daughter drew the straw one night, and there was a lot of fuss and terrible grieving throughout the land.”

“Weren't the peasants secretly glad? The princess having to take her turn along with everyone else?”

“No,” he said. “She was beautiful.”

“Of course she was.”

“A symbol of purity and goodness for a terrorized people. They didn't want to lose her.”

“I see,” I said. “The ray of hope. So off she goes to be swallowed by that fire-breathing beast, and then along comes George at the eleventh hour on his white horse to kill the mighty fearsome beast and win her hand? He smote the dragon with his sword, and after a great battle he slew it? When the dragon was finally dead there was much rejoicing?”

“Exactly. Some versions of the story end with the village's conversion to Christianity, their enlightenment and salvation. St. George is the patron saint of England, and of soldiers, and some diseases. Historically, he lived in the third century
A.D.
and was a tribune in the Roman imperial army. It is also said he was beheaded by Diocletian for protesting the persecution of Christians. However, there is absolutely no historical proof one way or another.”

“At the moment,” I said, “my sympathies lie squarely with the dragon. There didn't seem to be any other dragons around. He was without others of his kind, crouching outside the
village on a wet hillside, frightening and alienating everyone with his fiery breath and insatiable appetites. And if they hadn't hoarded so much gold and silver, they wouldn't have been in such a predicament, it seems obvious to me. The moral of that story seems to be, Spend your money right away, don't hide it under your bed, where the dragon will smell it.”

We paused on a wooden bridge over a small, endearing brook. Dead leaves bobbed and floated on the surface of the water and snagged against rocks. The water smelled fresh, wintry.

“You are familiar with the Book of Revelation?” Otto asked, smiling. “The Archangel Michael with his sword and scale?”

He pronounced it “Mee-ka-el,” which made me suddenly queasily suspicious that he was going to try to convert me. I lit another cigarette off the butt of my old one, then offered him another, which he declined. The butt of my old one found its way into my trousers pocket; I was tempted to toss it off the bridge into the water, but didn't want to litter in front of Otto, who exuded rectitude from every pore, and whose butt had found its way into his own pocket. Even though there is nothing that I know of in the Judeo-Christian tradition that prohibits littering, polluting, or befouling the natural landscape in any way, this was arguably school property, and there were no doubt grave proscriptions against besmirching those.