Bad Characters Read online

  It took longer than a jiffy even though Mr. Borglund applied himself to the problem assiduously. On telephoning the miscreants’ landladies, he learned that their lodgers always went away for the weekend but had never named their destinations. Throughout the next week, although he watched them and tried to trick them out individually with leading questions, he accomplished nothing. Both of them seemed preoccupied and a little drowsy, as if they were coming down with colds. On Saturday morning he was at the bus depot at eight o’clock, hoping that like laboratory white rats they had acquired conditioned reflexes. He parked in ambush across the street in an alley; he wore a cap, a large one, and looked a good deal like Mr. Toad. He had to wait two hours in the cold and several times he wondered how reliable Amelia Peppertree was; she was inclined to be flighty and, as a Life Drawing teacher, bohemian. All the same, at ten o’clock he was rewarded for his patience. He saw what Miss Peppertree had reported she had seen and he followed the jade and her reprobate.

  He followed them over roads he had never traveled or had known existed, through country so wild and forlorn that he felt he had left his own dimension and was traversing the moon; they would go along the river for a while and then they would strike out cross-country over faint lanes through the middle of tobacco fields.

  Malcolm and Victoria, half-frozen, were warming their hands around glasses of mulled claret before the fire when Ray Borglund came into the dining room of the hotel. They gasped and gaped when they saw the civic-minded Swede and sotto voce Malcolm said: “I’ll kill him.”

  “My stars!” cried the sociologist. “Of all places to run into a couple of people I know! I got so cold I had to stop—I was on my way to Lakeville.” Since Georges Duval’s Mill was off all beaten tracks and since Lakeville was in exactly the opposite direction, he made his point very clear whether he meant to or not. He rubbed his hands gleefully and came up to the fire. “Mind?” he said and, leaning down to sniff at Victoria’s glass, he went on, “Mmm, that smells good. May I join you in a glass of it? That is, if I’m not interrupting something?”

  He joined them in two glasses of hot wine and he joined them at lunch and, because they were in so ticklish a spot, they spilled all the beans about Georges Duval’s Mill, cravenly giving him to understand that they were collaborating on a historical-ethnic-anthropological-ideological-linguistic study of this perfectly preserved fossil town. They did not need to go into so much detail (needn’t, for example, have mentioned the witch) but out of embarrassment they did and, appalled, they watched Mr. Borglund’s interest rise and inundate them. First of all, he was obviously persuaded of the asexual nature of their collusion and obviously relieved, and then he was drawn to their facts; next he was fascinated and finally he became so fanatic that he blew scalding coffee into his face.

  “I don’t know what’s the matter with us vets at Alma Hettrick. I thought we were on our toes, but it takes you newcomers to show us what’s been under our noses the whole time,” he said. “Why, we never thought of this town as anything but a wide space in the road. Oh, maybe a little French still used but that’s not uncommon along the river. But now I see it’s a real find. Why, right here in this one area we’ve got material for a school-wide project. Why, good Lord, I can see how there could be a tie-in of all the divisions. Maybe not the Personality Clinic—but maybe so. Maybe they have some interesting native costumes. Maybe they still use old-time recipes for hand lotion.” He went on in this fashion until the sun began to set, and when at last he left them he did so only because, as he said, he wanted to “contact President Harvey at once so that we won’t waste a moment’s time in setting up the Georges Duval’s Mill Project.”

  The Papin sisters had not liked Mr. Borglund and the grouchy mayor had hated him. Malcolm and Victoria wanted to explain and apologize and enjoin the town crier to broadcast a warning that snoops were planning an invasion of these innocent precincts. But they did not know how to go about it. And they were so sick at heart at the threat to their bower that momentarily they forgot they were in love. After dinner, unable to speak, they started to read, but Malcolm suddenly threw his big book to the floor and said: “I don’t know what they’re talking about, this A. N. Whitehead and this Bertrand Russell.” Later, they remembered that they were in love and they were happy, but the edge was off and that Sunday they stopped at the Red Coach and drank boilermakers and fell in with a Fuller Brush man who gave Victoria a free-sample whisk broom.

  * * *

  Now at Alma Hettrick a new attitude developed toward them. Their claque applauded the seriousness with which they had undertaken their investigations of this dodo of a town, while their detractors called them selfish and said that as members of the Alma Hettrick crowd they had no right to stake a claim on such a gold mine. The former were sorry that their earlier surmise had been wrong (that Malcolm and Victoria were in love) and glad that their second had been wrong (that they had had a quarrel) and proud that they had such trail blazers in their midst. The opposition said they were grinds and prudes and had no red blood in them.

  On two successive Saturdays the Alma Hettrick station wagon and three other cars followed Malcolm’s Buick to the hamlet on the hill and delegates from the faculty and from the student body swarmed through the streets and lanes, declaring and querying in restaurant French. Most of the residents were apathetic; some were amazed just as the unready must have been when the Visigoths arrived. Miss Firebaugh of the Personality Clinic went into raptures over the costumes of the Mlles Papin; she asked them to turn around slowly; she exclaimed over gussets and tucks; she took photographs of them using flash bulbs and the mayor winced and said, “Allons donc! Quelle sottise!” But this was the only jewel Miss Firebaugh found; the rest of the clothes in the town had come from Sears, Roebuck.

  The Child Study Group, working with Marriage and the Family representatives, made gruesome discoveries: intermarriage and rampant disease had lowered the average intelligence quotient to cretinism; incest was prevalent and was not denied. The American History people came up against a blank wall: the only thing anyone knew about Georges Duval’s Mill was that a miller named Georges Duval had once owned this land but they did not know when, not even roughly when, and they did not know what had become of him or of his descendants. The only information to be had about the Dauphin was the sentimental testimony of the old sisters, who simply said that he had been there—else, they inquired, why would the hotel be named for him? There were no annals, no pictorial artifacts, nothing but oral and exceedingly uninteresting legends. There were no indigenous arts and crafts. Though urged and bribed, the villagers flatly refused to sing. One idiot child did a dance on the green but the priest explained, tapping his forehead, that she was making it up as she went along and there was no tradition behind it. The Political Scientists found an unparalleled dearth of politics. The Appreciation of Art people found that in Georges Duval’s Mill there was no appreciation of art. As for the deputies from the Community Health class, they wanted to report the town to Federal authorities: the lice in the children’s hair were fabulous, the barnyard filth in the streets was unspeakable, there was a public drinking cup at the well and the doctor still practiced phlebotomy.

  In the end, the only one who really profited was Mr. Sprackling. He hit upon an excellent formula for his students who mumbled or slurred. “We enunciate when we are not lazy,” said he, a man with a nimble tongue and an alert soft palate. “There is all the difference in the world between the way you young ladies say, ‘I doan know,’ and the way the poorest peasant of Georges Duval’s Mill says, ‘Je ne sais pas.’” What made him think the poor peasants were not lazy Malcolm and Victoria could not guess, for in point of fact they were largely loafers and spent most of their time staring at their shoes.

  In short order the project was abandoned. Mr. Borglund heartily said in the men’s room to Malcolm: “Well, all is not gold that glitters and one man’s meat is another man’s poison. It wasn’t a question of missing the boat—the boat
wasn’t there. Say, Kirk, are you and Miss Pinckney going on with your study of this place?”

  Malcolm said that they were; he said that Victoria, who was very keen on philology, was preparing a paper for Speculum on “The Survival of Old French Modal Auxiliaries in One Fluviatile American Town” and that he himself was working on a monograph to be called “The Periodicity of Diabolism in Georges Duval’s Mill.”

  Mr. Borglund gave him a searching look and blinked uneasily. “That seems a little overspecialized, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  The news of their true, dull nature leaked out and permeated the student body. A mature Georgia peach with a provocative scolding lock said to Malcolm, “Is it true that you and Miss Pinckney are all-out intellectuals?” and Malcolm, who had heretofore been intimidated by this girl’s voracious flirtatiousness, said, “You bet your boots it’s true, Miss Ryder.”

  Found out, they were pitied or despised. The waste! The waste to themselves and the waste to Alma Hettrick! Here they were, so good-looking, the pair of them, so young, so well equipped to put a sparkle into Freshman English and Philosophy, so well qualified for fun. And how did they spend their weekends? Grubbing away in that more than useless town, that ignorant, unsanitary, stupid town which wasn’t even picturesque. And what for? For Victoria to browse about amongst antediluvian subjunctives and for Malcolm to concentrate on a Halloween witch.

  All right: if they wanted to live in the Dark Ages, let them go ahead. But one thing was sure, their contracts would never be renewed, for Alma Hettrick was in tune with the times and that went for everyone on the staff, for every last Tom and every last Dick and every last Harry. Alma Hettrick didn’t have time to fool with your reactionary and your dry-as-dust. Right now, anyhow, they were all preoccupied: Lohengrin was in rehearsal and the Estonian had proved to be a whiz.

  Gradually Malcolm and Victoria became invisible to everyone except themselves and their aloof, accepting friends in Georges Duval’s Mill.

  “How I love the Dark Ages,” said Victoria.

  “How I love you,” said Malcolm, and they smiled in the gloom of the shabby parlor of L’Hôtel Dauphin as, their learning forgotten, their wisdom rose to the ascendancy.

  A Winter’s Tale

  The long French window of my bedroom frames a scene so stylized that it appears to be deliberately composed like a tasteful view from a false stage window that is meant to be looked at only out of the corner of the eye. There is a church spire toward which four slender, hatted chimneys quizzically list; there are eleven sugar maples whose winter branches seem, from a distance, to twine emotionally together; and there is a neglected clock on a tower whose hands, since Christmas, have stood at twelve. I do not know whether it is forever midnight or forever noon.

  At dusk my prospect all is gray, overcast by the film of Cambridge and by the sad lackluster of February; it has an opaline, removed, Whistlerian complexion and it suits the mood that for some days now I have received like a speechless and ghostly visitor whenever I am alone, and especially at this still, personal time of day before the familial facts and courtesies of the nursery and the dining room restore me to the pleasures of my maturity. For what I address so assiduously is a winter of my youth, irrelevant to all my present situations, a half-year so sharply independent of all my later history that I read it like a fiction; or like a dream in which all action is instinctive and none of it has its genesis in a knowledge of right and wrong.

  I am at peace with my beyondness and the melancholy that it implies—for these memories are a private affair and I am lonely in my egocentricity—but there do come moments when I wonder if ever again I will prefer the sun of summer to this weary light. Occasionally I am chilled as well as clouded, but I am not quite chilled enough to light a fire on the hearth, although sometimes I pour myself a glass of whiskey and drink it straight, shuddering at the sudden path of heat across my breastbone. I lie in a long chair in the cool half-light, like a convalescent too bemused to read, and perpetually smoke so that the blue vapor further blurs the chimneys and the trees. Solemnly I watch myself as I remove the winding sheets from the dead days, enlarged by time, by desuetude invested with significance and with a leitmotiv. Often I am so beguiled by my experiments, so far gone in my addiction to discovery, that it is not easy for me to come fully to life when I have left my room. It is like emerging slowly and unwillingly from some adventurous, dream-bound anesthetic into a world which, however pretty and however dear, has no magic and few amazements.

  My husband, who is a lawyer and famous for his insight, and my young son and daughter, gifted with the acuity of the uninvolved, sense my vagrancy but I ignore the questions in their faces and bend, instead, to kiss the children, as surprised as they to smell the whiskey on my breath so long before the cocktail hour. Once, a few nights ago, Laurence said as he made our drinks before dinner, “You’re not really drinking, are you, Fanny, dear?” And when I told him that I wasn’t, I added, to ward off any other questions, “I’m trying to write something and I find that whiskey helps.” Poor Laurence looked ashamed and terrified; writing amongst women embarrasses him, for his mother wrote godly verses and he had a maiden cousin who perpetrated several novels, long and purple. He did not even ask me what I was writing but instantly dropped the subject and told me in detail of the plane and hotel reservations he had made for our annual visit to Bermuda two weeks from now. I know that I am safe with my brown studies and my afternoon whiskey—he’ll never ask again.

  On one of the last days of January at about this hour, at about five o’clock in the afternoon, I was up in the attic rummaging through a trunk full of clothes that have lost their style, thinking that I might find something for my daughter Nan who is at the age of liking to parody me by dressing in my clothes. At the bottom of the trunk I found a short quilted jacket with a design of blue hunters, red horses, and yellow dogs. I have not worn it since I was twenty, seventeen years ago, when I went to spend the winter in Heidelberg, sent there by my father in my junior year at Boston College to learn the language. I put the jacket on and as I did so, that year, like a garment itself, enclothed me; and ever since I have moved in its disguising folds. From one of the shallow pockets I withdrew a small sea shell, a thin and golden scoop, and immediately I heard Max Rössler’s voice saying to me, “A memento.” As if it were yesterday I remember how I bitterly expanded this to myself into, “Memento mori.” We had made an expedition to a beach near Naples and the day had been a cold fiasco. But I had taken the shell at his bidding and had thought that in later years perhaps, when I saw it again, time would have cultivated my recollection of that day into a pearl of great price. Seventeen years later, when my heart is sedate and my hair is going gray, I recall little but the discomforts of it and our dissatisfaction, so that, in order not to quarrel with each other, we had quarreled with the sea for being so gray and so interminably at low tide. There had been a muddle over the funicular tickets that had disproportionately rubbed us the wrong way; earlier at breakfast in the hotel, a menacing Dane had said in clear, frigid English to his wife, as he stared at us, that he fancied “that chap and girl” were not married. The woman was smoking a thin black cigar. Hating the Dane for the truth of what he said and hating Rössler as the sire of my cheerless, worthless guilt, I told him that I hated Europe. Momentarily it was true; I centralized my disapproval on the limp and cottony tablecloths blotchy with Chianti stains.

  In my attic, on looking back, I saw that his giving me the shell—I did not forget that his doing so had made me angry as well as bitter; I thought there should have been some ritual, however small, to mark the beginning of the peremptory end—had been a valiant gesture, really, a stroke of policy as humane as it was clever, for it said, “Remember the moment of this otherwise unmemorable day when I put the sea shell into your hand as a souvenir of our love affair; and remember of it only that we were in love.” Even so, even after all these years, I stood among the trunks and hampers with a hardened and unforgiving heart
, recalling his scornfully bad Italian (he spoke it perfectly as he spoke all languages, but in Italy he was driven, by some obscure caprice, to taunt), remembering his heretofore unknown gluttony for food and drink, his waywardness when we went sailing in the Bay of Naples without a mariner and climbed Vesuvius without a guide. On the Friday of our wretched holiday he had proposed a hideous trip to Sorrento on motor bikes and I had said, “If you must kill yourself, I wish you’d do it alone.” He had shrugged and slowly, insouciantly had beheaded the violets he had bought for me.

  To say that I have never thought of Heidelberg or of Max Rössler in all these years is not accurate; the town has come back to me when I have smelled certain smells—oriental tobacco returns to me the interior of the Cafe Sö and the American bar at the Europaischer Hof; I see the snug Konditorein sometimes when I smell coffee in the middle of the afternoon and then I see myself, ashen and enfeebled after a day of lectures, and ravenously hungry, selecting a cake from the glass case in the front of the shop; church bells in the very early morning make me think of the monastery near my pension and of the tranquil Benedictines I sometimes encountered, reading their breviaries as they idled along the Philosophenweg. But until now I have not thought about anything except the data that my senses acceped and recorded; I know that the shock of the rest of it is finished; I’m safe from injury; I can reflect and chronicle. (Surely this rage I feel at the thought of my terror in that little boat on the rabid Bay of Naples is only an echo, is no more than an involuntary reflex that continues briefly after death.) And I must look back. I have given myself a deadline: I’ll be finished with this recapitulation before our plane takes off for the pink beaches and the southern sun.

  2

  My father, widowed by my birth, was an ascetic Boston Irishman, austerer and more abstinent than the descendants of Edwards or the Mathers. Wickedness engrossed him and its punishment consoled him; he looked on me, not without satisfaction, as his hair shirt, and my failure to receive a vocation pleased at the same time that it exasperated him. My junior year in college coincided with his sabbatical from the Jesuit school where he taught Latin, and he felt it would be instructive for us both to go abroad. He remained in Paris, brooding darkly on the venality of the French clergy and writing a scandalized account of his impressions of the city, while he sent me on to Germany. He had elected Germany for me instead of France or Italy because, while it was largely Protestant, he admired its thrift and discipline; and he had chosen Heidelberg because he had a friend there who would act as my surrogate parent. This was Persis Galt, a Bostonian and a convert, married to an atheist Scot who taught Anglo-Saxon at the university. I had never seen Frau Professor Galt—for, having been completely Teutonized, this was how she liked to be addressed—but I had heard her legend from my aunts and from their friends who joined them at high, protracted tea. In Boston, Persis Brooks, born well, born rich, presented to society with care by trusting parents, had been a singular failure, and by that I mean she had got no proposals of marriage that had suited her, a situation ceaselessly puzzling to these kind Irish ladies who observed that she had had every qualification necessary to a match with a lawyer from State Street or a doctor from Commonwealth Avenue. They were sorry, my aunts Patty and Eileen and the Mesdames O’Brien, Malloy and Killgallen, that she had given up and gone to Europe to marry this man Galt who was known to be acidulous and cold. Her conversion had come later on, after she had taken up permanent residence in Heidelberg, but Daddy and his sisters and their friends had known her earlier, before her flight, when, perhaps to spite the graduates of Episcopalian boarding schools who had not married her, she attended lectures given by Catholic apologists, went to visit the co-operative society at Antigonish, made retreats, and became a habitual browser in the bookshop of St. Paul’s Guild at the top of the Hill. They could never stop regretting that she had not stayed on in Boston to set an example to her dissenting breed.