Stories in an Almost Classical Mode Read online

  Noreen drank quite a bit on that visit. Marcus watched—she filled herself with bubbles; the surface of her face bubbled like paint with air in it. Noreen asked, “Is it true you want to live with Nanna?” She let slide a glass tray of laughter. She said, a good sport, “After all, you have a right to all this. It’s part of your heritage.” Her gaiety was inflexible. “He can’t make a decision. Poor Markie, he won’t laugh.” She tickled him with her forefinger, saying, “Stop being a sourpuss. Come on, Markie, let’s be happy.” She said to Nanna at the dinner table, “Markie’s been disturbed; he ought to have some religious instruction. Religion is very stabilizing for a young boy.” Nanna changed the subject. In the apartment in New Rochelle, when Noreen made breakfast, she sometimes sang in a tremulous, thin, weak, charmingly lyric voice—God, what charm there was in that tremulous voice—“Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, and smile, smile, smile.…” Noreen said, “Markie, you must tell me how you feel. I’ll help you think. I have to admit Nanna can do a lot for you.” Noreen said, “What’s best is what helps you to concentrate on your studies, to work hard and do well in school, Markie. Do you want to live with Nanna?” She turned her amusement-hungry, warm, and depthless face to him. The child Marcus saw a face bubbled like paint with air in it, saw noise and a party and someone shouting, saw a hillside with shepherds and shepherdesses—and Noreen singing—and a breeze ruffling the leaves of the chairs turned into roses of Sharon. Marcus said, “I don’t know.” Nanna and Noreen were closeted in the library for several hours. Noreen came out and kissed him goodbye. She said, “You work hard and do well in school, Markie.” She went to live and drink in sunny California—Nanna’s checks helped ease the strain of emigration—and Marcus made his home with his grandmother.

  A FLY struts jerkily in the sunlight. Marcus says, “We were talking about the movie. Where was I?” “Self-pity,” says Loesser. “Yes,” says Marcus. Noreen still held legal custody. “A formality,” Nanna said. Nanna said she was going to Florida for the winter; Marcus was to have Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter with his father and his father’s second wife and the four children he had by that second wife. “You must get to know them better,” Nanna said. Nanna said she had brought Marcus back to the family. “You are a Weill,” Marcus’s father said. “I want you to feel free to come to my house at any time.” “Thank you,” Marcus said. He was thirteen. Marcus says, “Yes. Well. These people have no self-pity. They go at things.” He makes a gesture of someone grabbing. It crosses his mind to say that they are as bold as doctors, that what they want—their habit—is to fall in love. But instead he falls silent. His father said, “Marcus, I want to say I’m glad you’re—Well, let me say a father and his son are not happily parted.” “Thank you,” Marcus said. His father said, “You never asked me about the divorce. You must have a good many questions.” “No, sir. I mean, no, thank y-you, sir.” His father said, “Marcus, I’m not doing this for my sake.” He paused, he said, “Don’t you want to talk anything over with me?” Marcus said, “It’s up to y-you, sir. If you w-want to talk, s-sir.” Marcus says, “You have any questions about the camera angles? Oskar? Jehane?” His father said, “Never mind. We’ll try again later.” Marcus was ashamed of his father. What did talk mean? Talk didn’t mean anything. Jehane cries, “Marc, c’est impossible!” The day is triste, the city, Rome, is triste, unendurable on the occasion of a death. “How can we work?” she demands. She is insistent, bitter, contemptuous. “How can we be expected to work as if nothing has happened? A woman is dead. It is a terrible thing. A terrible omen. My God.”

  Nanna said, “Your allowance will be fifty dollars a month. I expect you to keep a record of your expenditures. Someday you will have money of your own, and you must start now to learn how to take care of it.”

  Oskar, eyeing Jehane curiously, strokes his long, muscular throat. Jehane is always unsettled before starting a movie; the geometry of old age and death appalls her. Marcus says, “Our work makes us monsters.” Jehane says sadly, “C’est vrai; tu as raison.” She lifts a sugar-encrusted roll to her mouth. Marcus thinks, That will stop the rathole … nothing can slither for a moment.

  The maid announces the car is at the door. “Bon!” cries Marcus. “Allons, everyone.” He chivies them along. The immense and dusty rooms swing up, float, descend behind him.

  Two boats rode at mooring in front of Nanna’s beach, which gardeners raked free of shells on Mondays and Thursdays. It was forbidden to swim or take out the boats on Sunday morning. Almost everyone in Scantuate went to church. “It is not polite to desecrate the Sabbath of others.” To be late or unwashed at mealtimes meant eating in the kitchen. One wore a jacket to dinner during the week, and a jacket and tie on weekends. The only permissible way to dress was in the casual, local, escape-from-the-city style. A daughter-in-law foolish enough to attempt chic would be greeted with “I love red silk at the seashore. So suitable.” Nanna’s sarcasm, politely uttered, continued until the offender was submissive. Anger or sulkiness or a son’s trying to persuade her—“Be more reasonable, Nanna”—would lead her to say, “It would seem I am not free to enjoy my own house.” Her son then admitted he was wrong or gathered his wife and children and left—so the family joke went—on still another of the flights of the Jews. As her children grew older and more prosperous, they came to visit Nanna for shorter periods of time and more formally. The worst thing Nanna could say was, “This is boring. This is so boring.”

  Alliat, the cameraman, talking of emulsions, lenses, says, “In Rashomon …” Nanna’s voice mocks: “Panchromatic! Emulsion! Egg tempera sounds so much nicer.” “Not really, Nanna. Listen—egg tempera …” Nanna rarely went to movies. Oskar, Jehane, Loesser, and Alliat climb into the black Lancia; the sunlight beats down on the white stones of the driveway, the nearby bushes; the atmosphere, Marcus thinks, is exactly that of a funeral—the tension, the unease, the constraint. It is always the same before a movie begins.

  Marcus has said in interviews and to disciples that a movie is a face. “People go to movies to spy on a face. If a movie gallops, only children are amused. A true film advances from gossip to weeping. In Camille you see Garbo first as a demimondaine, a very simple, very glamorous piece of gossip, but scene by scene the gossip becomes more complex, more details are added—she practices falsity, is ashamed of her body and herself, has a neurotic longing for honesty. Suddenly you get this breath, this sensation, My God, she really is a whore; she really does love that young man; he mustn’t marry a whore; oh, my God, how awful. And then you cry.”

  WHAT HE imagined Nanna’s expectations of a boarder to be caught like cobwebs at Marcus’s eyes and throat. (Marcus in the car traveling in the line of traffic on the Appia Antica places his hand on Jehane’s thigh, near her stomach; he folds his large hand over her flesh.) Marcus suffered from a form of asthma and breathed noisily. Nanna made much of the manners of Marcus’s half-brothers and half-sisters, who were soft-voiced and reserved, the children of the English Jewess his father had married two months after his divorce from Noreen. They were better-mannered than he was, but not as interested in pleasing Nanna. Doctors had said Marcus’s breathing was a physical affliction. Marcus was careful. He learned. He breathed quietly. Nanna said, “You see, the child’s not asthmatic.” Nanna did not always look at him; sometimes it seemed to him she imagined he was someone else. The school had written, “Mark has the capacity for brilliance but is eccentric in execution.” “In feeling, too,” the teacher had added when he spoke to Marcus’s father. At the moments when Marcus stammered, his mouth, awry with strain, resembled Nanna’s. He said, indicating the wicker furniture, the heavy sideboards, the Chinese bronzes, Japanese chests, and Corots his grandfather had collected, “This room has the r-richness of the Orient.” Nanna sighed. “Jews are often called Oriental. Do you know what fatalism is? It leaves out the will. I disapprove of that very much.” The minnow eyes struggled with momentary confusion. “What was I saying? Oh, yes. I loathe fatalism.” M
arcus said, “The wind is rising. Look at the spray. The sea has crinkly, Jewish hair.” “I dislike poetic conversation,” Nanna said. Marcus asked, “What c-color were the P-Pyramids when you and Grandf-father were in E-Egypt? Was the sun very bright? Was the sand white or brown? Did your sit-upon h-hurt from riding on the camel?” Nanna said, “I did not know I remembered so clearly.” Marcus, in his desire to please, tended to mimic the grownups he was speaking to. He was small for his age (but he grew twelve inches in his first sixteen months with Nanna), and his mimicry unsettled adults. He would say, “Have you licked the crabgrass problem this year, Dr. Poore?” His voice was changing, and he was excitable and nervous. He saw that at the dinner table others made straight-angled and orderly remarks that were like toy wooden blocks. But he could produce nothing so regular, geometric, and gay; his conversational throat was a cave, and what came out was an overgallant compliment from his reading—“I’d g-give the g-golden apple to you, Mrs. Tredwell,” he said to one of Nanna’s guests, and blushed—or he spoke and Nanna lifted a hand to her hair as if to protect it against a bat Marcus had released to flitter around the dinner table: “People not t-talking about money is like people not talking about sex. I bet they don’t want to g-get excited in public.” He blurted once, “Do all women go cuckoo at menopause?” Nanna’s minnow eyes flickered and took refuge in distance. “Medical matters are not discussed at table, Marcus.”

  Outside the dining-room windows, Crimson Glory and Maréchal Niel and Peace roses (a staining of pink along the lips of their ivory petals) grew around a reflecting pool. Nanna ordered the roses thinned, ordered speech lessons for Marcus. The roses prospered. Marcus did not stammer anymore.

  Charities. Reforms. The will to do. Improving Marcus. “Conversation should be light and pointless and yet have a point—but by surprise, like scent in a sweet and pretty flower.” “Yes, Nanna.” The minnow eyes moved in, away, not quite regarding him. “Like posies?” he asked, drawing the minnow eyes out of the shadows to laugh. “Like poesies,” he said. “Poses.” The minnow eyes moved away. He had gone too far.

  The car pauses at the traffic light in front of the bastion gate of San Sebastiano. Its two towers guard a narrow gate set in the rose-pink walls, folded stiffly along a tussocked rise. Traffic moves through San Sebastiano one way, out of the city. The Lancia turns left, past a row of suburban apartment houses, beyond which appear distant fields. The country, le paysage, passage everywhere; a city is precise about passage. Reasonably safe. Nanna was never drunk.

  Guests at Nanna’s table were honored by her invitation and worked to be amusing. She was well served by her tradespeople and her servants; the dowagers of Scantuate treated her with respect. Marcus sat, taking care not to slouch, and reported his progress with his boxing lessons; Nanna admired the ability to protect oneself. Nanna listened. Her minnow eyes swam over his face, his posture. She was lonely. She did not get along well with her children. Her friends were ill or dying. Arthritis clenched her fingers. She was old.

  Through a modern gateway (two croquet wickets, one twice the size of the other) cut into the wall, the car enters Rome.

  Marcus’s father said to Nanna, “It must be difficult for you.” Nanna was a chauvinist. She said, “Marcus is a genius.” Marcus walked with Nanna before dinner on the bluff above the harbor. Nanna spoke of Europe; the children of the family usually went to Europe before they came of college age. Marcus, pretending to be unshaken, said Europe sounded very interesting. Nanna said they would think about Europe; he was becoming very gentlemanly; he was a dear boy. Marcus burst out into his imitations. Formerly, he had done imitations of animals—lions, roosters, rabbits—the wit of which had resided largely in the abjectness of his performance. He had adapted his repertoire to doing people as animals—Franklin Roosevelt as an otter, Ethel Barrymore as a lemur, Gamma Foster of Scantuate as an elk in the rain forest; his imitations sometimes jolted with a queer penetration and induced painful, unhappy laughter. Nanna did not approve. She laughed and changed the subject; she spoke slightingly of certain Massachusetts politicians. Marcus, beside her, glanced out over the harbor, the silken water of high tide, moored boats with masts like splinters rising into the quivering, yellow-powdered air, the uneven bluffs and wandering frame houses across the pipe bowl of the bay, neatly pretty and calm, peaceful, a scene glazed on a plate; he walked beside an almond-chinned Manchu empress; he wore a Chinese court costume of brilliant red and blue; the frame houses were pagodas.

  “It is interesting,” Oskar says, “that the trees in Rome are not so many or so tall as in Paris. I think the average rainfall here must be less. I think this is truly a more tropical climatological region.”

  The pedantry in Oskar’s voice belongs to Willi—the German tourist who has an affair with Jehane in Rencontre du Voyage. Since rehearsals began, Oskar has become less certainly Oskar; he has become Oskar-Willi; it is difficult to make out when Oskar is Oskar and not Willi. Oskar himself no longer clearly knows. If an actor holds too strongly to his image of himself, he will seem sly to his audience, clearly an imposter; the audience will think they do not want to have anything put over on them, and they will not be amused. Oskar is in earnest about his art and deludes himself.

  But he is afraid of not winning the love of the audience, and his voice as Oskar-Willi is wan, and sorrowful as if to say that he is not the man that he should be and might he not be pitied and understood. Oskar is self-exculpatory. Oskar as Willi has the moving sweetness of Oskar’s view of himself. Marcus thinks that Oskar conceives of time and the world as a story in which he is the hero, that Oskar is not convinced that other people are as real as he is. For the part of Willi, Oskar the man is quite right. It is Oskar the actor trying to improve on Oskar the man who does not suit the part.

  Marcus wants Willi to be savagely alive, more lifelike than Oskar’s acting allows him to be. But if Marcus goes to Oskar and says, “Oskar, look, I want you to see your own fatuity and your habits of self-delusion and use them for Willi,” Oskar will grow depressed and look for a philosophy or to psychiatry to set himself right, and since acting to Oskar means a chance to improve on himself, he will be denied access to his talent and give a wooden performance in front of the camera. Marcus must be devious with Oskar to get what he wants. He has a scheme ready to limit Oskar’s fancying up his image too much; he will let Oskar be simple and charming and then he will catch Oskar out—he hopes to have Willi, Willi as he wishes to be, Willi perhaps so real that the audience will be torn with pity and fear.

  Marcus eyes Oskar’s hands. Oskar’s hands are Willi—sinewy, ready, recognizably male; they are versatile machines. Marcus reaches out and takes Oskar’s wrist. Oskar jerks, then relaxes, as if to say, “Do with me as you will.” He is being seductive. Marcus murmurs, “Sh-h-h.” With a dry rudeness, he lifts Oskar’s hand into the light and turns it this way and that, examining it as if it were an objet d’art someone was willing to sell cheaply. He sees in the shape of the side of the palm and its continuation into the little finger the shell of a dog whelk. The gulls hunted them at Scantuate. A shell, he thinks. Marcus the psalmist. Marcus sighs at the beauty of Oskar’s hands. He looks like a Jewish peddler.

  When had he ever held Nanna’s hand? Not often, since Nanna was not demonstrative and did not like demonstrativeness in the people near her. When he was very little, five or six—his affections came quickly and powerfully as a child (and did so still, but in another context)—he’d held one of her hands with both of his, sitting on her lap while she told him a story; and once, when his Uncle David died, he was scared and wanted to be with her in her remoteness; he pretended grief and held her hand; and when he was seventeen, lying in front of the fire in the fireplace at Scantuate (September, time to go back to school), he told her boastfully, to compliment her for her labor to make him well and strong (he was not deaf to her requirements), that he was in love. He did not tell her how happy he was, or what love was like. Whenever he closed his eyes, a myriad-pointed light e
xploded; it was unbelievable—this girl, this pretty girl cared for him. Nanna was not amused by sex in the young. He was very careful in what he said. Nanna talked about “grace” in people; those who had it were like falcons in the air, chamois on a rock; love and grace were cousins, she said, joining him in admiration for Sukie Tredwell. He reached for Nanna’s hand and she let him hold it. “I can tell people’s character from their hands,” Noreen had always said. Nanna’s hands were round and firm. White. Ringless. Now dead.

  “LOOK,” he said, “as white as the flesh of dead hostesses,” and held up the note. After eleven years of silence, Nanna (aged seventy-eight) announced that she was in Paris at the Lotti and would like to see Marcus. Marcus was thirty-one then, a celebrity of sorts, a thickening, heavy-lidded young man. In a white suit that needed pressing, Marcus sat in her suite at the Lotti while she prattled—she was so oblique, the impression was of wit—about doctors, travel, the condition of Paris, indicating that she was ignoring the past, he could do as he wished. It disconcerted her whenever he looked at her; he studied the gloss of the wooden floor. He listened to her voice. It was tired and broken by little clicks. Her sense of grammar was intact. He could not remember if she had always talked so much. He heard in her light, old-woman’s sarcasm the stumbling chords of a vast boredom. She was at odds with the family. “I don’t, however, tamper with my will. Perhaps you’d like the house in Scantuate?” She was not as clever as before. Marcus saw a crooked rick of thin quartz rods, largely cracked, peeling, and broken, supporting the weight of a large rock that half rested on them. He was touched by the sight of her almond chin. She rested or slept for long hours in order to be fresh and “able” when she was with people. He introduced her—“My grandmother”—as if she had been a charwoman who had scrubbed floors to send him to college. He took her to Rubinstein’s, Braque’s, and Colette’s.