Bad Characters Read online

  Now she got to her feet, warmly clasped the hand of the other monk, and turning to me with her arm outstretched to Dom Paternus as if to a dumb beast, she said, “Here is a pretty American who has come to be your neighbor at the Haarlass. You must take her in hand at once because she says she doesn’t go to daily mass.” The monk forebore to judge me on these grounds and did no more than affably acknowledge the introduction. The Frau Professor told me—and told the whole room—that I would find my pension absolute heaven. In the beginning, she explained, it had been the house where the oblates had been shorn before they entered the monastery, hence its name. Herr Pirsch, the landlord, was a devout man and the cook, Gerstner, despite a somewhat cretinous look, had the soul of a saint and often took surprises to the monks, surprises, that is, that did not interfere with their laws of fast and abstinence. Dom Paternus and the younger brother, Dom Agatho, listened gravely and with infinite patience like the indulgent husbands of women addicted to telling twice-told tales. She went on to say that I must not get the impression that there was anything worldly about her brothers; on the contrary, they could not be more pious, but there was a heartening liaison between them and a certain section of the Heidelberg laity of which, it was clear to me without being told, Frau Professor Galt was the leader.

  There were other conversations in the room and there were, as well, the sounds of spoons on teacups and the gush of fizz water into glasses and a drift of street noise, but these were only a blurred background for the cascade of speeches from the leading lady’s lips. She had returned to her tea table and had assumed a presidential posture, erect and magnanimous; she seemed to be bowing to the applause of her constituents when she said, “I should have been born in the middle ages.” This was evidently meant for me since the declaration seemed new to no one else. She went on to say that her husband (he was late as usual, the wretch) and her children (late, too; how like him they were!) could have lived at no time in history but these very days. “I love them, the darlings,” she said, “but alas, alas, they’ve missed the whole point of life. My poor abandoned Paula and her awful preoccupation with the pancreas! I’m sure St. Francis never knew about his enzymes—what’s the good of all these new acquisitions of the body, I should like to know. August is a little less absurd with his agriculture—one should love the land, but I know that you, Dom Paternus and Dom Agatho, didn’t learn your farming in laboratories.”

  “Speaking of the land,” said Dom Paternus, a merciful man, “that gorgeous Spanish chestnut on the Kuehruhweg has begun to turn. I went up this morning to look at it.”

  “After lauds or before?” She was indefatigable; I thought the Benedictine sighed. He did not answer; he picked up a tea caddy and said, “Your tea is so good.” But Frau Galt was not to be put off and she repeated her question. The younger monk answered for Dom Paternus, “Why, afterward. It’s too cold and dark nowadays at the hour we get up to go for a botanical ramble. It was bitter this morning. Dom Placid came to breakfast wearing a red sweater—I dared not look below his waist to see if he had decided his rheumatism had entitled him to any other dispensations.” Persis frowned, not liking this frivolity—the intramural humor left her out of things—but the monks and I smiled at the mild joke. And she took the conversation back, repeating what she had told me at lunch (an abominable meal of steamed eel and unsalted dumplings), that she and I would bicycle to see the cathedral at Speyer, a building that had always induced in her great peace of mind; since my birthday came on the Dedication of St. Michael the Archangel she would give a lunch party in my honor after the last mass; we would possibly make a pilgrimage on foot to some shrine or other. Then, addressing me, she said, “I forgot to tell you that we play bridge every Tuesday at the Europaischer Hof. I hope you’ll join us there as often as you have the inclination.”

  Having been chilled to the bone by her other plans I accepted this invitation with relief, and even with enthusiasm, although I was afraid that “we” would be the monks (armed with pastoral dispensations to accommodate their secular sister) or members of that top flight laity into which I felt I was being drawn willy-nilly.

  Abruptly she stopped talking; I followed her sidelong glance to the door and saw entering it the young man who had been here earlier with the dog; now, though, he was in civilian clothes and he was through with his sulks, smiling agreeably. Persis Galt said, “I am monopolizing my guest of honor. Didn’t I introduce you to Mellie Anderson, Fanny? She’s that sweet little thing over there by the Schnaaps; August’s girls always seem to be near the Schnaaps. Speak to her, won’t you?”

  I left her side and so did the friars; we were replaced by Herr Rössler and the Frau Professor’s voice ceased to be audible. At the same time the tension in the room relaxed and there was even laughter. On my way to Mellie Anderson I was several times detained, once by a sad, grubby girl in octagonal glasses whose eyes all afternoon had followed Persis worshipfully and who told me that in another year she was going into an order of German-speaking nuns in the Rocky Mountains. “Persis is wonderful,” she said reverently. “If I didn’t have a vocation, I’d like to be exactly like her.” Poor soul! Emotion leaked from her strained eyes; she was the dismalest sight on earth. Again I was halted by a heavily decorated army officer who told me irrefutably that he had met me in Berlin at the Olympics when I was staying with the Gaisenströcks and when I denied this, saying that I had arrived in Europe only ten days before, he asked me if Giselle Gaisenströck had had her baby yet. And Dom Agatho with an ingratiating grin told me that his uncle had been born in Cincinnati.

  Mellie Anderson and I had everything in common; she, too, had been sent to Persis Galt, but by a zealous mother instead of father, and she, too, was lodged in the Pension Haarlass. She had been here for a month, the longest month of her life, she said, eyed constantly and chided constantly by Persis Galt, who had spies everywhere, among the servants at the Haarlass and at the Europaischer Hof. Mellie felt sometimes that she was going nutty the way her slightest aberration from the straight and narrow boomeranged; Persis wrote voluminous letters to her mother and her mother wrote back threats—Mrs. Anderson was evidently much like Daddy. Mellie had taken up with August Galt, though she detested him for the rowdy and rambunctious Nazi he was, in the hope that Persis would ease up on her vigilance; the hope was dashed, for Persis openly and even ostentatiously disliked her son and now Mellie was stuck with him. The fact was, she said, that Persis loathed all her family and they all loathed her. Then why didn’t they leave one another? I asked.

  “She has the money,” said Mellie. “She has money enough to buy something better to drink than this peasant slop. Have some?” The smell of the Schnaaps was worse than the taste; we drank from wineglasses. Mellie went on, “It all has to do with money. Even in my case it does—and it will in yours too probably. If my mother stopped my allowance, what would I do? So I go to mass at seven every morning no matter what I’ve been doing the night before—I am sure the chambermaid keeps a report card for me—and come here to let her explain the Epistle of the day and refrain from making irreligious jokes and show up on bridge night—and when I think of how I looked forward to this year! I was naïve enough to think that Mother was giving me a lot of fun and games.”

  Mellie’s grievances were manifold and justified; I liked her and I was listening to her, but at the same time I was watching Persis and Herr Rössler. At the beginning of lunch, Erika had spoken of the two marks fifty that her mistress owed the aviator and Persis said tartly, half to herself, “What an ungraceful thing to speak of. One would think he’d have some affection for the animal he gave me.” It occurred to me to ask Mellie to explain Rössler’s role in the house, but on second thought, I decided to puzzle it out myself. The man had risen but he lingered beside the tea table as if he were receiving some final instructions and then he made his way towards us. Persis Galt resumed her earlier role; she summoned the monks to return to her; her voice became a carillon: “You must teach me to love Monica’s son as
much as I love Monica!” she cried. “I’ve prayed, I’ve prayed with utmost contrition and my heart is still hard toward St. Augustine.”

  Softly Mellie said, “Listen, I can’t stand another minute of it. I’m going to tell her I’m going to Benediction. Watch out for Max Rössler—he’s her Number One spy.” She returned her glass to the tray and then she groaned, “Oh, Jesus, here come the atheists.” August Galt, so blond and broad and Aryan that he looked more German than any German in the room, and Godfrey Galt, black-haired, beak-nosed, looking clever and cantankerous, saluted Persis as if she were a chance acquaintance, and came to meet me.

  My host, casting hard looks everywhere, rubbing his hands together, made me think of a hangman. “My wife knew your father,” he said. “In Boston. She has reproduced a Boston drawing room with considerable fidelity, don’t you think?” I agreed with him and started to elaborate but he interrupted me. “I live in a hideous house. My wife cannot bear the light of day. She is fond of darkness, inconvenience, bad ventilation, gorgon-headed waste. I myself am by way of being a Bauhaus man.” He was building a modern house in the hills above Heidelberg, he told me, and his son said, “There will be nothing for Mutt to do in Vat’s house.”

  “In my house,” said the professor, “there will be nothing for a woman to do but sit and stare,” and with this he began to stare at his wife’s back. He accepted the glass of Schnaaps August poured for him, drank it like medicine and took leave of us, saying, “I’ll just say hello to the Blackfriars and Blackshirts. Grüss Gott, Heil Hitler, what’s the difference?”

  Mellie said to August, “I have been waiting for you for an hour. I am leaving now, this instant. You meet me and I mean it.”

  I had never seen so much ill-humor displayed simultaneously by so many people. August, who had not spoken to me at all, snarled like a dog and followed Mellie, who paused beside Persis and curtsied. “I’ve had a divine time,” she said in cheeky burlesque, “but I must run to Benediction. I haven’t said a rosary since morning.”

  “Aufwiedersehen, my darling,” said Persis. “In Christ!”

  “In Christ! Heil Hitler! Guten Abend! Aufwiedersehen! Danke schön!”

  I had no time to see the effect of this on Persis Galt or on the monks because Max Rössler was at my side and had taken my elbow and was guiding me to the dining room. “I’m to give you a real drink and then I’m to take you to the Haarlass,” he said. “My name is Max Rössler, I know yours. Persis apologizes but as you see she can’t leave her guests.”

  Until we had gone into the cold, quiet dining room I had not realized that I was tired to death, and tired in a way that I enjoyed; it was a merited fatigue and it claimed my bones and my blood as well as my muscles. It was a condition in which I was vulnerable to everything, to liquor, to joy, to despair, to love, to quarreling; I might cry or I might be crippled with giggles. I cared nothing at all for Mellie Anderson’s warning; I was too grateful for the delicious drink the spy had given me, too happy to be out of earshot of the Frau Professor Galt.

  This dark young man was well turned-out; his manners were a second nature and he spoke his perfectly idiomatic English without any accent at all; his laugh was easy and somewhat professional and gave me the feeling that he was peering into the darkness over footlights which at once blinded and reassured him. The smell of his tobacco was as unusual as incense and when he offered me a cigarette I found the taste of it entirely new. He smoked through an amber holder which he bit between his good white teeth. He was very handsome and he looked like the Devil. His forehead was high and his nose was sculptural and all the surfaces of his face were fine; his eyes and his mouth expressed nothing. His upper lip was long and the lower one was full but its fullness did not suggest intemperance or even pleasure; it was the mouth of a child who had been pampered in his sulks which, in adulthood, had become selfish desires, desires for power, perhaps, or for a feudal preservation of the status quo. And his eyes, polished and dark like some hard wood, copied and clinched the self-love of the mouth. His face was less a face than a representation of a kind of conduct and it had, therefore, a certain antiquity which made his American slang anachronistic. I, used to simple, noisy boys, not much younger than Max Rössler, was flurried by his sophistication, which I distrusted and admired. We covered some customary topics; we exchanged compliments on each other’s countries although I had seen nothing of his and he had never been to mine. We were sure that I would enjoy my winter here although my study of philology depressed us both. I would find the veranda cafe of the Haarlass agreeable, he told me; he often went there on sunny afternoons at this time of year, when it was especially nice to look at the autumn leaves on the Jettenbühel across the river.

  “Is there a bar there?” I asked him.

  “A bar? You mean do they sell drinks? My God, of course! You are in Europe, Fräulein.”

  “Then I would rather drink there than here,” I said. “I want to go there now.”

  “At your service,” he said and bowed and gave me an ambiguous smile, half seducing and half warning; I felt mocked and as green as grass and needlessly I added, “I don’t mean you have to stay. I halfway promised to meet Mellie Anderson.”

  “Well, they don’t have a bar at Stift Neuburg where presumably Mellie is telling her beads like a good girl.” He smiled warmly, really amused and surely on our side, and he took my hand; the touch of his warm fingers on my cold ones was exciting; he bent toward me as if I were much shorter than I was, as if I were some small woman whom he loved. “We won’t go to the Haarlass yet,” he said. “We’ll go to the Cafe Sö. There won’t be anyone there.”

  4

  Persis Galt, a Blackwood specialist, played bridge ferociously on Tuesdays. The salon at the Europaischer Hof which she dominated was a sumptuous room, brightly lighted, thickly carpeted, and full of artificial roses and counterfeit Louis Quatorze. Technically this room could be used by any guest of the hotel or even by a nonresident pleasure seeker who was willing to buy enough drinks at the bar to make his visit worth-while. But Persis had some power over the lackeys so that, at a word from her, anyone could be denied admission. If her bridge nucleus, which numbered twelve with an occasional peripatetic thirteenth, was annoyed by outsiders, they were treated with such snubs and outright discourtesies by the waiters and the bartender that they departed in humiliated silence.

  It was my misfortune almost always to draw as partner a Hungarian dipsomaniac called Countess Tisza who for many years had been working on a life of Walther von der Vogelweide. Her bridge, as she steadily drank (her capacity had been likened to that of the Great Tun in the castle which held forty-seven thousand gallons) became so disengaged from any kind of method that I often thought it would be possible to bring legal action against her. The Countess was sometimes in and sometimes out of favor with Persis, but in or out, she was always at the Europaischer Hof on Tuesday evening and each time without fail she asked Max Rössler and she asked me why we were not interested in each other. The question embarrassed me and Rössler seemed not to hear it. It was sometimes for this reason that the Countess fell from our leader’s favor, but more often she was sent to Coventry for making a scene with the bartender, whom she suspected of watering her Scotch, or for accusing someone of being homosexual. Whenever she took a false step Persis Galt and her cohorts not only commented devastatingly on her drinking but, as well, attacked her friend von Ribbentrop, who they said was a man no one would want to know, a sycophant and, worse, a bore; although at other times it was because of this friendship that the Countess was looked on respectfully as someone who got about in the most amusing and important places. When she was “in” her boozing was called an eccentricity.

  The other players, for the most part, were residents of this hotel; if they had had the money they would have lived at the Ritz in Paris or in London or in New York or Boston. They were chic, uneducated, indolent and discontented; they lived in Heidelberg because this was a good hotel and it was cheap in Germany and the
y were not far from the casino at Baden-Baden. They were so entirely cosmopolitan that there was no way of telling their nationality save by their surnames.

  As I looked back, I realized that I had imagined a much more pastoral way of life in Germany; I had thought of waltzing, wine festivals and pleasure steamers on the Rhine. I had thought of seidels of dark beer and evenings of fraternal song, of Mosel in stemmed glasses for quiet trysts. At the Europaischer Hof the drinks were expensive (we paid for our own), the conversation was tedious, the anecdotes were provincial and obscure, and the evenings ended invariably in a squabble over the score. Frau Galt, an adroit Yankee, generally managed to extort an undue sum from me which I paid without protest when she casually remarked, “I must remember to write to your dear father tomorrow.”

  Sometimes Persis and Max Rössler played against the Countess and me. The combination of the Countess’s irresponsibility and my preoccupation with Rössler’s hands and with his gentle leaning toward that hypothetical petite caused me to play so badly that the Frau Professor caustically observed, “I am sadly enlightened. I thought in America these days one took in bridge with one’s mother’s milk.”