Bad Characters Page 18
At the back of the dais, where several deans and heads of departments sat, there was an arrangement of leaves and maidenhair ferns designed by the joint efforts of the Botany Club and the Flower Arrangement Hobby Group and made known as such by a large placard attached to a basket of sumac. It seemed to Victoria a setting more appropriate to a xylophonist or a bird imitator than to a college faculty. This, however, was less unusual than the housing of the general assembly, a week later, of the staff and the students: because of the greatly increased student body, they could not meet in the auditorium or in the gymnasium and they convened, instead, in a circus tent pitched on the quadrangle; the endorsement of its owner was printed boldly in red on the side: Jim Sloat Carnival Shows.
Malcolm and Victoria became inseparable. Under other circumstances they might not have known each other or they might have known each other in a more recreational way. But these singular circumstances produced an infrangible bond; they clung tottering together like unarmed travelers, lost from their party, in a trackless jungle inhabited by anthropophagists. Or they were like soldiers whose paths would never have crossed in civilian life but who stood shoulder to shoulder in profound fraternity in time of war. Their enemy, the entire faculty and all the students, down to the last instructor of cosmetics in the Personality Clinic, down to the last ambulatory patient in Mr. Sprackling’s infirmary, was not aware of the hostilities that were being waged against him by these two or the plans that were being laid for sabotage: Victoria was thinking of requiring all her classes in Freshman English to read Finnegans Wake and Malcolm was considering delivering a series of twelve diatribes against Edward Bok, whose Americanization of he was obliged to teach in his course called “Philosophy of Life.”
On the contrary, the enemy found the newcomers shy but cooperative and never dreamed that instead of being shy they were sulky and that they were obedient only because they had both hands tied behind their backs. So the enemy (in the persons of Rosemary Carriage, a great maudlin donkey of a senior; Miss Goss, secretary to the Dean of Extracurricular Activities; Mr. Borglund, who taught Marriage and the Family; and Sally-Daniel Gallagher, who ran the faculty coffee shop) observed with—depending on their ruling humor—complacence, with malice, with a vicarious thrill, that the fall term had started exactly as it should, with a love-at-first-sight romance between the two youngest teachers. These detectives and publicists who presented their data and then their exegesis in the dining rooms knew that each day after their last classes Miss Pinckney and Mr. Kirk went driving through the country in Mr. Kirk’s car, that almost every night they dined at the Chicken-in-a-Basket at the edge of town, that they graded their papers together in a tavern on the highway to the city.
What the voyeurs did not know, because they were not close enough to be eavesdroppers as well, was that the exchange, over the drumsticks in the Chicken-in-a-Basket, over the beer and cheese popcorn at the Red Coach Inn, over the final cigarettes in front of Victoria’s rooming house, that this exchange, which ran the gamut from gravity to helpless laughter, had nothing whatsoever to do with love. It might occasionally have to do with medieval prose or with symptoms (both of them thought they were starting ulcers), but for the most part what they talked about were the indignities that were being perpetrated against their principles by Butch Harvey’s pedagogical fiddlesticks. For they were far too young and their principles were far too vernal for them to rise above their circumstance; their laughter was not very mirthful but was, really, reflexive: now and again they were whacked on the crazy bone. They did not really believe that Alma Hettrick was an actuality, although, as they often said, they couldn’t possibly have made it up. Whoever heard of anything so fictitious as the production of Lohengrin that was currently under way with an all-girl cast, directed by an Estonian diva, Mongolian of countenance and warlike of disposition? “An Estonian diva has no provable substance,” said Malcolm categorically. “Such a figment belongs to the same genus as the unicorn, the gryphon and the Loch Ness Monster.”
Victoria, demure and honey-haired, and Malcolm, a black-haired, blue-eyed Scot, muscular and six-foot-four, were, said the vigilant campus, made for each other. The fact was, however, that they had assigned to each other no more of sex than the apparel. And such was the monomania of their interlocution that they had never happened to mention that they were engaged to be married to two other people to whom they wrote frequent letters, often by special delivery.
Besides their fidgets of outrage and unrest, besides their fits of ferocious giggles, Malcolm and Victoria had another mood, an extemporaneous mood of melancholy that immediate time and place determined. By the languid St. Martin River, on whose banks the bracken was turning brown and on whose sallow surface gold leaves rode, they often sat in the triste dusk of autumn, talking with rue of the waste of their lucubrations. Their woe betook them too on Sunday evenings when they were driving back to the college after spending a long and private day in a little town they had discovered early in the term. On Sunday, until the sun went down, they were in a world that was separate and far and they were serene; but when the docile Buick headed home, wrath rose and set their jaws.
Built on the crest of a kind, green hill so that its inhabitants could look far up the river and far down, this town, Georges Duval’s Mill, was scarcely more credible than the Estonian diva, but unlike the other chimeras of their lives it was endearing and they loved it dearly.
The twentieth century had barely touched Georges Duval’s Mill and, indeed, the nineteenth had not obliterated altogether the looks and the speech of the original settlers of the region, who had been French. There was a Gallic look in the faces of the townspeople, their cuisine was peasant French and most of them were bilingual, speaking a Cajun-like patois. Some, better educated, like the mayor and the priest, spoke as befitted their station. And there were, as well, the Parisian formalities and fillips and the niceties of syntax used by two aged maiden sisters, the Mlles Geneviève and Mathilde Papin, who once, scores of years before, had gone to school in France and who now ran L’Hôtel Dauphin and were persuaded that some time the luckless son of Louis XVI had lived in the town.
Chickens and geese, ducks and goats and sometimes cattle and swine roved and waddled and mooed and quacked through the cobbled main street. The cats were fat and were collared with smart ribbons and bows and they sat imperiously on sunny sills, festooning themselves with their congratulatory tails. There was a public well—there was little plumbing—in the middle of a green, and here the gawky adolescents flirted, shyer than violets and bolder than brass. Through open windows came the smell of bouillabaisse and coq au vin. The children were verminous and out at the elbows; all the women save those over seventy were pregnant. The priest was lymphatic; the mayor was driven by cupidity and hindered by gout; the doctor was as deaf as a post; the town crier was also the village idiot; and the teacher was usually drunk.
It was not the quaintness of Georges Duval’s Mill that attracted Malcolm and Victoria, for neither of them had a drop of sight-seer’s blood. In passing, to be sure, they were pleased by the surprising survival and supremacy of a foreign language spang in the middle of the Middle West. And they enjoyed the rituals: the mannered courtship by the well in which the buckets seemed to play a part; the entourage of children that followed the priest from the church to the rectory, led by two altar boys who carried the chalice and the ciborium in string shopping bags; the countless alarms and excursions of indeterminate origin that would suddenly catapult the whole populace into the street, still wearing their dinner napkins tucked into their collars, still holding a fork or a mug. They liked all this and they liked it, too, that there was a practicing witch at the edge of town who had been seen in the shape of a wolf tearing sheep by the light of the full moon.
But what made the village really precious to them, really indispensable, was that in almost every particular they could name it was the antithesis of Alma Hettrick. Looking at the candles and the gaslights in L’Hôtel Dauphin (the
old ladies disapproved of electricity and spoke cattily of their neighbors who had it), seeing roosters emerge from parlors, seeing toddlers being given vin ordinaire to drink, the teachers were oblivious to modern times and modern education and modern girls. They basked in backwardness.
Apparently they were the only visitors who ever came to Georges Duval’s Mill. They had not been able to find it on any map and they were sure that none of their colleagues, especially in the Social Studies Division, knew of it or they would have come armed cap-a-pie with questionnaires and Kodachrome and Binet-Simon testing equipment.
When they arrived at about noon on Sunday, Malcolm parked his car (it had a klaxon and from the front it looked like Barney Google) under a vast copper beech in a sylvan dingle behind the green, and then they walked through mud and over the cobblestones to the hotel, where Mlle Mathilde, having seen them coming, was already pouring the water into two glasses of Pernod that stood in saucers on a round marble-topped table in one of two oriels in the dining room. The other oriel was occupied by the mayor, a widower, whose poor gouty foot was propped up on a stool and was being daily worsened by piquant sauces and rich wines. After they had drunk a good deal of Pernod and could feel that they were on the mend, Malcolm and Victoria had a subtle meal. The cook’s daughter, Emma, put a white cloth on their table and a Benares vase of carnations made of crinoline and wire, a pepper mill and a salt mill and a carafe of white wine. Sometimes the soup was onion and sometimes it was leek and potato and once—and they would never forget it—it was chestnuts and cress; and then they had an omelet made with mushrooms, with delicious chanterelles that Mlle Geneviève had gathered in the summertime and had dried. With the omelet they had a salad with chervil in it, brioche, sweet butter and Brie. Their dessert was crème brûlée. And then they had coffee and with the coffee, brandy.
By now they were sleepy—the mayor was more than that, he was asleep among his chins—and they moved in a haze of contentment into the parlor, where they gradually woke up under the influences of the disciplinary horsehair sofa and the further coffee and the perky gossip of the old sisters in their nice black silk dresses trimmed with passementerie braid. While they excavated the doctor’s secrets and explored the garden paths down which the grocer had led many a girl, the ladies worked at gros point, very fast. They were witty and spry and their eyes were clear but they were, as they admitted, extremely old and after a little while they excused themselves to go and take their naps. Now Victoria stretched out full length on the narrow sofa with a mass of round pillows at her shoulders and Malcolm established himself in a Morris chair. For several hours they read and smoked and drank the cool, strong coffee in the china pot. On Sundays Victoria liked to read The Canterbury Tales, while Malcolm, mindful of the Ph.D. he longed to get, worked away at the Whitehead-Russell Principia Mathematica, sometimes sighing and at other times nodding in discernment and saying quite spontaneously to himself, “Oh, I see. Oh, of course.”
At half past four the innkeepers reappeared, wearing small velvet hats, for after tea they would go to benediction. They had tea and petits fours and fruit and then in the twilight they all left the hotel and shook hands and said goodbye on the steps. The ladies went quickly downhill toward the church, whose bell was ringing, and Malcolm and Victoria made their way much more slowly back to the dell and the Buick, which loomed up in the gathering dark like a moose in a rock garden. They were so heavy-hearted that they had to stop on their way home at the Red Coach and buck themselves up with whiskey at the bar.
One Sunday early in November when the first snow was flying in great melting stars aginst the windowpanes in L’Hôtel Dauphin and the mayor was sitting with his back to Malcolm and Victoria, toasting his swollen foot before the fire in the hearth, they fell in love. Their hearts had evidently been synchronized precisely because at the same moment they both stopped eating and met each other’s astonished gaze. The hands that a moment before had been spooning up crème brûlée reached across the table and clasped; Victoria quaked from head to foot and Malcolm’s mouth went dry. What had led up to it? They could not remember. They were never able to recall what they had been saying just before: had they been discussing St. Augustine as a heretic? Or had they been voicing their essential indifference to the Orient? They could not say. It was like a concussion with amnesia covering all events immediately preceding the blow.
“Vicky,” murmured Malcolm. The diminutive announced his state of mind. “Why, Vicky, why, my God, Victoria!”
He clapped his free hand to his forehead and in doing so he knocked over the brass vase of artificial flowers. He is very awkward, thought Victoria, how I love him! The mayor, disturbed by the noise of the vase clattering to the floor, turned around and disapproved of them with his moist, alcoholic eyes and said fretfully, “Quel tapage.”
“Do you know what I mean, Vicky?” said Malcolm, leaning over to pick up the scattered flowers but keeping his eyes on her. “Do you know what has happened to me … darling?” She nodded, scarlet.
It was difficult for them that day to follow the adventures of Mlle Mathilde’s octoroon governess; they could not tell whether she had run away with a pirate or a forger and whether she had stolen a cabochon brooch or had kept a capuchin as a pet. They thought the old ladies would never leave, but at last they put their tapestry needles back into their strawberry emeries and left in a swish of silk and a zephyr of sachet, and Malcolm and Victoria began to kiss.
* * *
Of course it could not have happened like this: falling in love is not an abrupt plunge; it is a gradual descent, seldom in a straight line, rather like the floating downward of a parachute. And the expression is imperfect because while one may fall one also levitates. Nevertheless, Malcolm and Victoria enjoyed the conceit of suddenness. Forgetting all that had drawn them together, ignoring the fact that they were uncommonly attractive and intelligent (for all their schoolishness) and humorous and good-humored (for all their jeers), they pretended that at one certain moment they had been knocked galley-west by this thunderbolt out of the blue; they pretended that they had seen stars; they behaved as if there were balloons over their heads containing the word “Zowie!” And in their delirium they gave the whole credit to Georges Duval’s Mill, which they personified as a matchmaker. It never in the world occurred to them that Alma Hettrick’s machinations long antedated those of the town.
If they had been asked (as they might well have been if a pollster from the Alma Hettrick Social Studies Division had been around), “Which in your opinion is more important, the reading and consumption of hard books, such as Principia Mathematica, or the direct observation of behavior patterns in college females?” they would have replied, “Neither amounts to a hill of beans. It’s love that makes the world go around.”
That night they did not need to stop at the Red Coach but went directly home. A few days later a fiancée in Denver and a fiancé in Bath got air mail letters containing regretful, remorseful, ashamed, confused but positive and unconditional goodbyes.
In the next weeks the partisans of the attachment between Miss Pinckney and Mr. Kirk were worried and the critics of it said: “I told you so. That much propinquity will willy-nilly breed contempt.” For Malcolm and Victoria were seldom seen together. They quit the Chicken-in-a-Basket; Victoria ate at the Faculty Club and Malcolm ate alone in the Blue Rose. The eccentric Buick now was never parked in the cinder drive of the Red Coach and those afternoon rides were apparently a thing of the past. Miss Goss, who had mothered her three motherless sisters and had got them married off and who, through habit, was doomed to mother and marry off everyone, said in the faculty coffee shop: “What can have happened? They were so well-suited.” Sally-Daniel Gallagher, at the cashier’s desk, said: “If you ask me, it’s just as well. With those kind of carrying-ons day in and day out, to say nothing of night in and night out, something is bound to happen and it wouldn’t do to have it happen on campus.” Ray (Marriage and the Family) Borglund, saddened but ever construc
tive, was moved to give an open lecture on “Snags in Courtship and How to Avoid Them.”
Puzzled and disappointed, or smug and malign, the campus watched the estranged couple out of the corner of its eye.
The couple, so afflicted with delight, so feverish and crazy with bliss, had agreed at the start that they did not want their treasure to be public property. On the evening they had opened their oyster and had found therein the pearl of great price, Malcolm had said to Victoria when he took her home: “This is one commodity that’s not going on the market. Let’s keep this luxury item under our hats.” And Victoria, fingering the leather patch on his elbow as if it were the most beloved object in the world, replied: “I don’t think it has any consumer value at all. I think it’s sui generis.”
While Alma Hettrick speculated, the Papin sisters were overjoyed that their young patrons now came to L’Hôtel Dauphin for the whole weekend. They were as sly as foxes in their departure from the college town. Victoria took a cab to the bus station and Malcolm picked her up there; and then they took a circuitous route to Georges Duval’s Mill. Victoria wore dark glasses and a hat.
Alma Hettrick, however, was slyer than they were and one Saturday morning one of its agents, Miss Peppertree of the Art Department, who was catching a bus to Chicago, saw Victoria in her thin disguise get into the Buick carrying a suitcase. She just had time to call Miss Goss before her bus left. By noon the word had spread through all the college personnel who had not gone away for the weekend. Mr. Borglund frankly did not like the sneaky looks of it at all; the word “strait-laced” could never be applied to the policy at Alma Hettrick but propriety was mandatory. Sally-Daniel Gallagher said “Aha!” Miss Goss said “Oh, no!” But Mr. Borglund, rallying after his initial shock, said: “We’ll set things straight in a jiffy.”