Bad Characters Read online

  Daddy praised Frau Professor Galt to me as an exemplary woman with a heavy cross to bear, her burden being her husband who was not only an infidel but was reported to be a scoffer as well and who had, moreover, seduced his children to his own position. On the eve of my first emancipation from Daddy these limnings of the Galt household did not engage me, and I was relieved when she wrote that she regretted she could not lodge me in her own house but that she had found a respectable pension an easy bicycle ride from the university. When Daddy and I parted at the Gare de l’Est with a short and manly hand shake, he said, “I am going to be in touch with Peris Galt and if I hear from her that you are drinking whiskey and are falling into the habits that go with it, I warn you I shall take steps. You will go to a Cistercian retreat house for a long, long time, and there won’t be any hole-in-corner monkey business there.” For, kithless except for Daddy and the spinster aunts and lonely all through childhood, I had recently been consoled and caressed by whiskey given to me by beaux, and often had come home to our flat reeling and reeking and shamelessly gay—at which times Daddy, a teetotaller, deplored the Irish in me as if he himself had not been conceived in County Clare. On the train to Germany I had a compartment to myself and half the night I drank the brandy that I had bought one day on the sly; I nestled and postured in my daydreams until I slid into dense sleep.

  Frau Professor Galt met my train and drove me from the station in a miniature automobile so small that I, accustomed only to American cars, did not think at first that it would go. But it went, it went like the wind, careering up the narrow Hauptstrasse, hugging now the blue flanks of the trolley and now the curb where other baby cars like hers were parked together with bicycles and horse-drawn carts. The impetuosity that compelled her to drive in this fashion (we narrowly missed a policeman’s dog and once seemed headed for the door of a hairdresser’s shop) was nowhere evident in the calm of her person at the helm of this wild machine, nor in her pleasant inquiries about my father and my aunts and my journey. She was in her middle forties and she was firm and ripe like an autumn fruit; her heavy, lustrous hair was sorrel and she wore it in a coronet that further added to her stately altitude. Her pedigree was manifest; it showed forth in her well-made and canine nose, in her high eyes, her long lip, her stalwart Massachusetts jaw. She was plain, but she was constructed on so chivalric, so convincing a scale, she was so shapely and so evidently wrought to last that I could not begin to imagine, just as my aunts had not been able to, why she had come a cropper in Boston; she looked to me exactly like the purposeful matrons in black Persian lamb marching down Beacon Street on their way to lunch at the Chilton Club.

  I knew at first glance that Frau Professor Galt had done well at field hockey at the Winsor school and I knew, further, that ever since that time she had kept fit in order to preserve intact the business-like organism into which she had been born; she would be a great walker, she probably skiied; she would rise early; she would be intolerant of illness, idleness, or intemperance. She wore good, gloomy tweeds, a stout pair of driving gloves, lisle stockings with a lavender cast and common-sense oxfords with heavy soles. I recalled hearing her spoken of by another of my father’s friends—one of the fashionable New York ladies with whom he associated in fashionable apostolates and retreat houses, the ladies who displayed fine editions of Bossuet on the tables in their libraries and rejoiced in quoting the sharp witticisms of Monsignor Ronald Knox—who said, “I’ll never forget the day I met Persis Galt in the lobby of the Adlon. She was quite impossible to seize in that doubtful German costume of hers. Her hat, I declare, was an act of treason. She was quite anonymous, quite thoroughly Berlin in the worst sense. I felt I wanted to mark her with a big red crayon so that I wouldn’t confuse her with someone else. And at tea, I must have taken leave of my senses for a minute because without thinking, I said, ‘Aren’t the women of Germany exactly like grouse in their protective coloring? You can’t tell where the cobblestones end and their stockings start or find the point at which their collars leave off and their muffinish hats begin.’” The description had been accurate, but I had the feeling that Frau Professor Galt knew what she was up to and that this was not her only style; she had had her reasons for being a frump at the Adlon as she had for giving me this first impression. All the time we were exchanging trifling information we were appraising each other and doing so as if we were contemporaries. I stopped feeling like a girl and felt like a woman; an immediate antipathy between us made me wary and adult. Never before and never since have I known this sheer and feral experience of instantly disliking and being disliked by another woman for no reason more substantial than that we were both women.

  I was dry and full of aches from the trip and the brandy’s punishments and I was disoriented by having been obliged to change trains before dawn at the border station, so I was downhearted to learn that Frau Professor Galt was not going to take me directly to my pension, but to her house. I would have protested if I had had the chance, but there was no breach in the soliloquy she had begun; she touched upon a multitude of subjects: my father must be induced to come and hike through the Schwarzwald with her; my aunts were dears and she was glad that they were alive and well; Paris was detestable; it was the worst sort of luck that Hitler was not a practicing Christian since there was no denying his qualities; now we were passing the Altesgebäude of the university (“Just a little like S.S. Pierce, don’t you think?” I did not but replied that I did); and here was the library on our right where at this very moment her son August was more than likely studying one of his dry-as-dust books on fertilizer and ensilage for he meant—I was not to ask her why since God alone knew—to be a scientific farmer; it was possible that her daughter Paula was there too, reading something even worse since she was a medical student and had a passion for acquiring information about such things as blood.

  We began to ascend a steep hill paved with brick, and the Frau Professor told me that she lived in the house almost at the top, one with a green gambrel roof and iron balconies. As we drew nearer and I caught my first glimpse of the ruined castle through tall trees and saw in the distance the bend in the river, I exclaimed, “What heavenly views you must have!”

  Frau Professor Galt replied, “When one views heaven, all views are heavenly,” and she gave me a quick, orderly smile.

  “I’m so glad you came on the morning train instead of the evening one,” she said as we passed through her garden gate where the snobbish legend Cave Canem was posted, “for now you will be able to meet my guardian angel at tea this afternoon. My own private monk, my Dom Paternus, my heaven on earth.”

  “How very nice,” I said, and, appalled to think of having to stay through tea time, I added impudently, “I don’t believe I’ve ever known a monk socially before.” A cloud of reproach passed over my hostess’s face, but she delivered me again that official little smile and said, “Then you have something in store for you. There’s far more mingling in Europe than in Boston.” Thus by opposing a whole continent to a single city she proclaimed herself inalienably Bostonian, however Popish her metaphysics, however Bavarian her walking shoes, however firm her resolution never again to see the swan boats and the public tulips in the Public Garden. She continued, “One of the nicest things about the pension you’re going to, by the way, is that it’s so near the monastery at Stift Neuburg you’ll have no trouble getting to daily mass. And how those Benedictines sing! Dom Paternus’s Kyrie is divine.”

  During this girlish speech (her vocabulary puzzled and even shocked me a little for it seemed profane to call a living monk divine; moreover, her voice altered to accommodate her extravagance in a higher key and one that was not appropriate to her stature and her general design), she had led me across a chilled, bare vestibule, up a flight of stairs carpeted in thick, grim brown and into a room familiar to my imagination; it was a room in any house on Beacon Hill where in the late afternoon a lady would celebrate the ancient rite of tea with silver and Limoges or where, being alone, she might
make spills of last year’s Christmas wrappings. The brilliant brass hearth accouterments were there, the fender and the Cape Cod lighter and the tools, even though the logs were counterfeit and the fuel was gas; and the chinoiserie was all in place, the matching Ming vases and the glass tree sous cloche, and Frau Professor Galt told me at once that the painting of a family group over the mantel was a doubtful Copley. But besides these plausible and predictable things (I liked them all and this was the sort of room in which I would have liked to spend my afternoons) there were religious objects everywhere, dreadful to the point of disrespect: figurines of St. Sebastian pierced by far too many arrows, of the Little Flower unduly dimpled and unduly vacant, of St. Francis looking like a sissy schoolboy; there was a miniature in polychrome of the grotto at Lourdes, a crucifix of bird’s-eye maple with a corpus of aluminum, and a dim, bromidic print of the “Sistine Madonna.”

  Before the gas fire stood my breakfast table, the food kept warm by quilted cosies. Frau Professor Galt perfunctorily introduced me to my meal and then, pursuing the subject that she had not relinquished, she said, “If I lived at the Pension Haarlass, I’d begin my day with matins.” She stood towering above me while I poured pale coffee into my cup and thought with gloom of the dark chapels of priories where, making a retreat, I had knelt beside Daddy at matins, shivering, sick for the sleep from which I had been wrenched. I hesitated, but I did not wish her to be misled and I said, “I’m afraid I don’t even go to daily mass.” This was not altogether true; I did not go to daily mass except when I was under the same roof with my father.

  The Frau Professor chided me flirtatiously, “Oh, you Sabbatarian cradle Catholics! But I should think that you with your father and your aunts—dear Fanny, you have disconcerted me.”

  When I told her I was sorry I partly meant it, for there had come to me the image of my merry, plump-cheeked aunts, busier than belles with their sodalities and their novenas; their pleasure in confession and their homely use of churches as places in which to meet friends before a Wednesday matinee or in which to rest their feet during long shopping trips; their standing jokes with priests. They lived for and they lived in the church, but theirs was a natural condition; they were too secure to care a thing for polemics; they loved embroidering altar cloths, harvesting indulgences, offering prayers for the sick and the dead.

  The Frau Professor rose above her disillusion. “I know you’ll forgive me for treating you straight off as a member of the family,” she said. “You won’t think me too beastly for leaving you alone for a bit? I retire now to my chaste cell to read the noon office—for you see, I’m not like you, not born to the purple, not able to take all these riches for granted. I shan’t ask you to join me because I know you’re tired and you’re—we don’t really see eye to eye, do we? Would you like a rosary? Or will you simply meditate?”

  “I’ll meditate,” I said, and drank disgusting coffee.

  “If you would like to bathe, ring for Erika,” she said. “She doesn’t speak a word of English, so you must say to her Ich möchte ein Bad, bitte.” My German was sparse but it was serviceable and I was offended that it had been impugned. When my overseer was gone and all the doors were closed and I was left to meditate, I stuck out my tongue. And then I began to move restlessly about the room, queerly scared as if I had committed some sin graver than my mild flippancies; it was not agreeable to me to dislike Persis Galt so much after so short a time; certainly it was unreasonable of me to resent her asking me, over her shoulder as she left the room, to call her by her Christian name.

  All the curtains in the room were drawn and the lamps were lighted although the sun was high in the vivid sky. One pair of heavy damask draperies, I found, covered a door to a balcony and I drew them aside and stepped out into the comely autumn. On my right rose the castle hill and for the second time I saw the sundered, rosy stronghold through the bruised leaves of the horn-beam and the lime trees that were beginning to turn; momentarily I quickened to its august antiquity and to its romantic biography of ups and downs, and realized that my reluctance to come here (I had longed to go to Florence) had been balanced by fantasies that the savory air revived. I turned from the pretty rubble and looked below at the town of gabled houses, tall and lean, that hugged the steep slopes, their chimneys raffishly askew, their leaded windows burning in the noon. I supposed that the cluster of buildings with mansard roofs would be the university, where my father had enjoined me to keep my nose to the grindstone until my declensions were letter perfect. I watched three barges pass slowly through the locks up the river, their genial flags unfurling in an easy breeze; far off, on the yonder bank, I looked on fields tilled in neat squares of violet and brown; and here and there, at their junctions, like the figures on a chessboard, stood whitewashed cottages. It was a kindly prospect, it was a tender, mothering countryside.

  Suddenly, from all quarters of the town, the church bells began to ring the Angelus; echoes loitered in the calm air to perish in a fresh shower of melody; I was charmed by this concert in recognition of high noon. For a few minutes, on the Frau Professor’s balcony in Neueschloss Strasse, my senses were infatuated with foreignness and and my antic spirits rose, delighted; to confront the world of possibilities that had opened up before me (they were vague, but my confidence in them was sure) I wanted to look my best and I started to go back into the room to ring for Erika and ask for my bath. But on the threshold I was arrested by the spectacle of a young man in a uniform coming through the door with a muzzled toy Schnauzer in his arms. Simultaneously the maidservant came through another door to greet the dog with gushes, “Ah, the good Herr Rössler brought the good dog home!” She cradled the grizzled creature in her arms. “Shall I tell the Frau Professor you are here?”

  Herr Rössler looked at his wrist watch and said solemnly, “By no means. She will be at her orisons. But when she gets off her knees, you can tell her she owes me two marks fifty for the damned dog’s bill. He had a tooth pulled.”

  “Nay, nay!” cried Erika in consternation and kissed the top of the dog’s head. “Be kind, Herr Rössler. Remember how you brought him when he was a puppy—oh, so sweet, so sweet,” and murmuring, purling, she left the room to warm some milk for the dear good dog. The man looked at himself in an Adam mirror beside the door. “Coat carrier, dog carrier, my very obliging young friend, Herr Rössler,” he said. “He flies, he’s very charming, he’ll be a catechumen yet.” Before he left the room, he opened the other door and called, “Hello! Erika! Tell her I’ll collect the two marks fifty this afternoon. And Heil Hitler!”

  3

  Persis Galt was going to greet the monks who stood in the doorway, and so absorbing was her salutation of the short and corpulent man in front, whom she greeted as Dom Paternus, that I got no clear picture of him until, twittering and exclaiming, the singular woman knelt on the floor to receive his blessing while her other guests busied themselves in looking elsewhere. I was as embarrassed as the others and the momentary obliquity of the monk’s gaze made me think he shared our discomfort. I had expected Dom Paternus to be a thin and pallid hull for the ascetic spirit of which I had heard so many dithyrambs in the few hours I had been under this roof; far from that, Dom Paternus, by twenty years older than I had imagined, was round and red. His head was perfectly spherical and perfectly bald and his small, winsome ears stood out straight. He had a bright double chin and jocose eyes and a pink nose. He was something like Friar Tuck and something like Father Lynch from St. Anne’s parish who often played two-handed pinochle with my Aunt Patty.

  I had not been at all surprised that Persis had changed from her tweeds and brogans into a less workaday costume. At lunch time she had emerged from her chaste cell in a black velvet dress with a long skirt and a tight bodice that cherished her small waist; her long arms moved beautifully in narrow sleeves that terminated in pointed cuffs extending halfway down her splendid hands; at her throat (the neck of her dress was low) she wore an ebony cross on a velvet ribbon. I was sure that her intent
ion had been pious, but the result was provocative; her chic and her decolletage at sunny midday had unsettled me; and they unsettled me even more now in her gathering of monks, of shabby students from her husband’s Beowulf class, and of bulky Storm-troopers and Blackshirts. After lunch she had invited me to have a look at the room where she prayed and I did not fail to be impressed at the sight of her kneeling at her cherry prie-dieu; she was the only decoration in the room; indeed it was chaste and more than chaste, it was sterilized.