Bad Characters Page 23

  A few days before Christmas there was a Day of Recollection at Stift Neuburg. At an interlude between services the ladies and several of the monks went across the road to the Wirtschaft to have tea before an open fire. Dom Paternus offered me a yellow apple, saying, “May I tempt you?” and everyone laughed but Persis, who turned blue with horror. A chair was drawn into the circle for Countess Tisza, who had just come in from the chapel, and when everyone had made a few minor adjustments and the Countess had declined tea (it was almost possible to hear her thinking, If I can’t have whiskey, I don’t want anything), the Prior, thinking that we had worn out the conversation we had been having about the spiders and reptiles of the Philippines from which Dom Bardo had recently returned, charmingly inquired of the Countess whether she had liked the new statue of St. Benedict in the entry.

  The Countess, fixing him with sincere eyes (one could not help admiring her for the way she carried it off) replied, “Father Prior, explain it to me! Will you forgive me if I say it seems to me the sculptor hasn’t captured Benedict at all?”

  Dom Bardo, a white-haired urbane old man, chuckled cosily. “Good for you! I have an ally, Dom Prior. The Countess doesn’t like it either.” The grave face of the little noblewoman did not alter as she reproached the monk. “You are unkind, Father. I have only asked for an explanation.”

  I had seen the statue; it was roughhewn of quartz, an oddity in itself distracting, and what had struck me at first was that all the saint’s appurtenances—the vase from which emerged the dragon’s head, the raven at his feet clutching the loaf of bread, the crosier and the halo—were unconnected with the figure as if they had been put there as an afterthought; it was as though St. Benedict had annexed these things but their sponsorship remained that of the sculptor. It had occurred to Dom Prior too who, smiling at Dom Bardo, said, “I find it hideous. It’s not only a travesty of Benedict, it’s bad art. Michelangelo said that a really good piece of sculpture could be rolled down hill and not be broken in any part.”

  Persis Galt flushed and swallowed angrily. “The same could be applied to a barrel, Father.” She went on to argue that the subject was so sacred that even the worst treatment of it could not be harming, that displeasing as the statue might be, they were bound in conscience to admire and revere it because it represented a saint. Poor Persis! In their own bailiwick the monks defied her and not even Dom Paternus came to her rescue, for it was she who had commissioned the statue and she who had paid its exorbitant price. But he took pity on her presently when it was time to go back to the monastery. “What are your Christmas plans? I hope you will make your duty with us.”

  She paled a little. “I am so sorry,” she cried. “I’ve contracted to go to Strasbourg.”

  The monk turned then to me. “And what will you do? Will you go to your father in Paris?”

  “I’m going to Freiburg,” I said.

  “To Freiburg?” demanded Persis. “I heard only yesterday from your father that he was expecting you in Paris.”

  “I’ve written him that I don’t want to come to Paris until spring.”

  As we were leaving, and as Mellie and I refused the offer of a lift in Persis’ car, she plucked me by the sleeve and said, “If I didn’t know you so well, I’d think you were going off to be compromised.” And she looked at me sharply, believing the opposite of what she said. “Who do you know in Freiburg?”

  I wanted to say, “The same man you think will be in Strasbourg.” For I knew that Strasbourg, just over the border from Karlsruhe, was where she and Max had often met in the past. But I said, “Friends from the boat.”

  6

  I saw him for the last time in Freiburg. It began to snow in Baden-Baden, and as the train paused there a well-tailored Englishman passing through the corridor said over his shoulder to his companion, “God, what a beastly country! Have a look-see at that muck out there!” The snow drifting through the rafters of the train shed in the wintry light looked unclean as if it would smudge whatever it fell upon, and for a moment I wished that, like the Englishmen, I were leaving Germany, were leaving all this murkiness for some brilliant southern sky. In a disabling ennui I stared at two lovers who sat opposite me in the carriage, fingering each other’s hands and exchanging bashful grins of rapture. I was displeased with the spectacle of them for I felt no rapture myself, and I closed my eyes to the dreary village and to the sweethearts and thought not of Max but of unimportant matters: the error in my week’s bath bill, a fish stew at the Haarlass that had poisoned Mellie, a blouse I had seen and liked in a shop on the Hauptstrasse. I had been awake for years and years, I thought; this morning my eyes had opened wildly long before the sun was up when the bells were ringing for prime and, confused, I had thought it was Sunday. Adjusting the eiderdown, I had closed my eyes again and had said to myself, “God does not know I am awake.”

  A pall of grime hung over the bleak platform in Freiburg as it had hung over Baden-Baden, and because I moved through the station slowly I was too late to get a cab when finally I emerged through the storm doors. The Platz was deserted except for an old policeman who stood with his dog at the main entrance of the station. I advanced through the bountiful snowflakes and asked him the way to the Hotel Salmen.

  “Heil Hitler!” he saluted me. “Straight ahead.” He pointed down the wide avenue that began at the station yard and when he raised his white-gloved hand once more and we said in unison, “Heil Hitler!” he smiled at me out of some spontaneous happiness, and though I was surprised I smiled back. “The snow!” he exclaimed to me. “So beautiful!”

  The air, with this gentle, mothlike snow, was sweet after the close compartment, which had been blue with the smoke of all the cigarettes and sour with the reek of red wine that a sullen soldier had steadily drunk out of his canteen. A little canal ran at the side of the street; but for its soft sound there was an immense quiet in the avenue and nothing seemed to stir within the timbered houses through whose closed shutters came bent shafts of light.

  Max was waiting for me in the public bar, sitting at a table drinking a brandy and looking, in his civilian clothes, like all the tall lean sanitary Englishmen sitting at other tables alone or in pairs, also drinking brandy. I had not been prepared for so immediate a meeting in so great a throng and I was upset to see that there was a second glass on the table and that he meant our rendezvous to be begun in this crowded, brightly lighted place full of skiers loquaciously recounting their day’s adventures. He did not see me at first. He was fitting a cigarette into his holder and only when he snapped open his lighter did he look up. He rose then and waited for me to cross the room: I thought, he would never come to meet me. He drew out a chair for me and he could not help touching my shoulder, lightly and in a way no one could see; and leaning over the table he said, “Ah, I am so eager.” Someone was somewhere inexpertly playing Chopin on a piano with a crackly tone, but there was delicacy in the playing, and in the moment between our greeting and our conversation, I listened pleased. Our conversation, when it began at last, was as urgent and shapeless as that of any other lovers who, but for their love, would have remained strangers. There was no point in which we lost ourselves in interest of what we were saying, and the talk around us was as pertinent to us as anything we might whisper to each other.

  A very old man with a thick mustache and spectacles sat drinking Glühwein with his wife. He said in a high, peckish voice, “That young woman was unmannerly about my eggs.”

  His wife tenderly touched his hand. “All the same, Franz, the sun was lovely. You said so yourself.”

  “Yes, yes, all right,” he said irritably. “The sun was lovely. I said so then and I say so now. But I repeat, that girl was rude about my eggs.”

  “Persis knows I’m here,” I said to Max. “I told her I was coming.”

  “It’s all right,” he said. “She thinks I’m meeting her in Strasbourg tomorrow.”

  “Is there—” I decided I did not want to ask him a question about the war in Spain jus
t then.

  At the table on our left an Englishman and a Frenchman sat together. The Frenchman said, “I have been refreshing my memory of Florence,” and withdrew a map from his coat pocket. He added with humble woe, “For I shall not ever see it again.”

  “What are you talking about?” said his companion.

  Max and I waited for the Frenchman’s answer as if it had something close to do with us.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t made myself clear to you, Montgomery,” said the Frenchman. “I’m not what you think I am at all. I am no intellectual although at one time in my life it was said by a number of my teachers that I didn’t have a half bad brain. My plan to seek culture in the culture centers of Italy was just my little joke, poor as it was. The fact is that I am about to be married to a widow of great respectability who owns a pension in Passy. We met on a bus last summer to Fontainebleau. She is one okay dame.”

  “Is that the end of the American lesson for today?” asked the bored Englishman. “You ought to take better care of yourself.”

  “You mean I’m nuts?” The Frenchman laughed. “What a wag I am. Good lord, yes.”

  The smell of evergreens was as strong as mint in the warm room. Skiers warmed their feet at the fireplace and bragged of the jumps they had made and the climbs so steep they had had to use bearskins on their skis. A heavily pregnant cat sat on the stool beside the fire. If I had not been taught better, I would have thought that all of this belonged to the real world and that we were present in it. But I was not so fooled; what we saw and what we heard, though we received and though we acted with absorption, came adventitiously, did not last, meant nothing.

  All my selves but one spoke falsely when I said, “I have never been happier.”

  Max said, “I shall never be this happy again.”

  Everyone in the bar was enjoying himself, everyone, that is, but the cross old man, who smoothed the bristles of the goatbeard in his green hat and continued to mope over his eggs. Two pretty blond American girls sat smiling like dummies with two men who were perhaps their fathers or perhaps their sugar-daddies. The men observed mildly that the mark was up, that it was a pleasure to travel in Germany with the present rate of exchange, that there had been a scientist fellow in Cologne who had had some interesting things to say about the pressure at the bottom of the hotel swimming pool.

  “If you had come earlier,” said Max, “we could have taken the Bergbahn to the Schauinsland and had drinks there. I would have managed the Bergbahn better than I did the funicular.”

  “I wish I had. I wish everything bad could be canceled out by something good.”

  “That’s wishing for the moon.”

  He told me that he had lived three years in Freiburg when he was a child and that he had learned to ski in the mountains that surrounded the town. It was in keeping with the piecemeal nature of our relationship that I knew nothing of his background and that he knew nothing of mine; indeed, it had hardly occurred to me that he had been a child. “I was told that a sort of witch called the Budelfrau lived on the top of the Schlossberg and had marvelous eyes that could see mischief but not good. I thought she lived beside a path-marker and whenever I went up to ski, I was certain I was going to crash into it and break all my bones. I can’t imagine why. I was far too good a child for the Budelfrau to bother with.”

  “I am sure you were,” and I had never been more sure of anything. I could see him, as silent and forbearing as a saint, walking unmolested through all the terrors of childhood, never knowing the need for armor until he was eighteen and it was too late.

  We killed another half an hour with another brandy. And then lightly, as if he were offering me another piece of information as casual as that about the Budelfrau, he said, “Did I tell you I am off to Spain?”

  “To Spain?” I said, mimicking his grace and calm. “To the war?”

  “What else? Would I go to look at pictures at this time of this particular year?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I imagine you really are,” said Max. “And the pity of it is that I can know and that even so I can’t really wish I weren’t going. I don’t believe in the damned war, but I don’t care. I haven’t any politics and I haven’t any ideals.”

  I was sure he really did not mind going; in a sense, he had gone already, already he was dead and buried in an unimaginable land, and already he was no more than a memory to me; but a memory indispensable and imprisoning.

  “It’s too bad you don’t care,” I said. “I think I would.”

  “It is a waste,” he said. “It would be wonderful to be a Christian or entirely to love one’s country. Entirely loving oneself would be the best of all.”

  “Do you have to go? I don’t want you to go, Max.” In spite of my resolutions, I was dying hard.

  “I’m grateful, Fanny, I really am. But, yes, of course I have to go, and I have no intention of coming back. You understand, it is not I do not hope to come back but I don’t intend.”

  “Oh, think of me! Think for a moment of me!” I really was angry now and I cried, “You’re vain and sentimental!”

  “Certainly,” he said crisply. “I am a German.”

  “For God’s sake tell the waiter to bring us some glasses of a sensible size,” I said. “And before I forget it, who is Elizabeth?”

  He smiled, “My sister. Only my poor sister.”

  We had dinner in our rooms. As the waiter arranged the table with lobster from Hamburg, figs and oranges from Italy, wine from Alsace, I intently studied a map of the mountains that lay under a glass slab on the desk, making a note of the names: Güntersthal, Schauinsland, Feldberg, as if I were getting them by heart for an examination. I would take with me nothing new except these names. If Max died in Spain, and now I felt sure he would for he had willed himself to die, I thought I would not mourn him very long. It was not at all that I did not love him (Oh, but did I? Oh, it was a dismembering confusion!), was not sunk into this love as permanently as into stone, but that in willing himself to die, he forbade me to interfere with his plans. Turning as the waiter closed the door and Max opened a bottle of champagne, I went to take my glass and across the room, as if from across a field of flowers, I called, “I love you,” as if they were the last words I was ever to utter in my life.

  It was a long night and this was the only one, for orders had come for the bootleg troops; they were to be sent out on the day after Christmas and all leaves had been curtailed. When it was daylight we went to the windows and looked out at the stiff vineyards on their zigzagged arbors. The bells began to ring for Lord Jesus, their tones commingled and cadenced against one another like a madrigal. I had put on the quilted jacket he had brought for my Christmas present: its design was of blue hunters on red horses with yellow dogs running at their feet. And I had taken the sea shell from Naples out of my coin purse and put it into one of the pockets. We stood listening to the bells and to the wind’s wings beating the branches of the cedar trees against the windowpanes.

  “Will Persis go mad at losing you?” I asked.

  “She’ll find another paschal youth,” he said. “But I doubt if she’ll find another Jew. There aren’t many of us left.”

  “Max! Oh, Max! Oh, my God!”

  “Hush, Fanny. Listen, my sister is taking my rooms for a few weeks until she can get to England, but she won’t be there for a day or so. Here is the key. If you want anything, take it.” Dressed in his slate blue uniform, his cape loose at his shoulders, he was at the door.

  “Persis knows? Is that her blackmail?”

  “Hush, Fanny.” He opened the door.

  “Aufwiedersehen, Max,” I said.

  “Lebewohl.”

  7

  Elizabeth Rössler never came to Heidelberg and I never could bring myself to go to his rooms. I had a letter from her, though, sent from Berlin. It said, coldly and dutifully in perfect English, that Max had been killed “on maneuvers near Karlsruhe” and that he had directed in his last letter that I
be notified if anything happened to him. The day I got it I bicycled to Heilbronn with Mellie and two rowdy American boys. We played poker all night long and got drunk on atrocious champagne; I had a wonderful time.

  There was a day when Persis Galt came to my room at the Haarlass to say that a friend of Godfrey’s had seen Max and me in Freiburg. I was too woebegone to fear her; she was too afraid of me to scold me. She had come, craven, to drive a bargain with me: we would keep each other’s secrets. I agreed although I did not give a damn. She was in her masquerade of tweeds and I pitied her immensely.

  My father died that May in Paris and I came back to Boston and my aunts.

  * * *

  Soon the scene from my window will begin gradually to change; I find myself reluctant to think that the leaves will presently be coming out. Similarly, I remember, Heidelberg was intolerable to me when the wild plum began to bloom. I hardly dared go into the hills for fear of meeting pairs of sweethearts; I scarcely dared look out the windows of the veranda for fear they would be rowing on the river to Neckar-Gemünd. There had always been the danger that I would mourn Max, that I would miss him, would become inward about him. It had been necessary to get back to America to return to the exterior. And so, until I was summoned to Paris to Daddy dying of a thrombosis, I hid in my Gothic grammar, in the confessional boxes and in my room, half hallucinated by the Haarlass homemade red wine. I never thought of the future and I never thought of the immediate past. I lived in a heavy stupefaction.

  It is warm today and the window is open. At half past five I throw the sea shell out and see it caught in the tall privet before my house. I am exalted; I believe that I am altogether purged. I look at the clock that still reads twelve and I say, “Goodbye, then, lebewohl.”

  When did that clock stop? Midnight or noon? Someone has come into my room and I wheel to face my husband. He sees the decanter beside the long chair and he sees the glass in my hand and he sounds like Daddy when he says, “Fanny, I don’t like this at all.”