Bad Characters Page 5
The maisonette seemed huge to her, and full of echoes; for the first time since she had married, she began to think about her husband and, though he was a stranger, to long for his return. Perhaps he could become the savior Fleege-Althoff had told her to seek. But she was not strong enough to wait for him. The drawing room was still in its summer shrouds; the umbrageous dining room was closed. At first, she dined in the library, and then she began to have dinner on a tray in her bedroom, sitting before the fire. Soon after this, she started keeping to her bedroom and, at last, to her bed, never rising from it except for her twice-daily ritualistic baths. Her nightdresses and bed jackets were made by the dressmaker she had always used to supplement her Paris wardrobe; she wore her jewels for the eyes of her maid and her masseuse—that is, she wore earrings and necklaces, but she never adorned her hands. And, as if she were dying in the way they thought, she wrote brave letters to her friends, and sometimes, when her loneliness became unbearable, she telephoned them and inquired in the voice of an invalid about their parties and about the theatre, though she did not want to hear, but she refused all their kind invitations to come and visit, and she rang off saying, “Do keep in touch.”
For a while, they did keep in touch, and then the flowers came less and less often and her mail dwindled away. Her panic gave way to inertia. If she had been able to rise from her bed, she would have run crying to them, saying, “I was faithful to your conception of me for all those years. Now take pity on me—reward me for my singleness of purpose.” They would have been quick to console her and to laugh away her sense of failure. (She could all but hear them saying, “But my dear, how absurd! Look at your figure! Look at your face and your hair! What on earth do you mean by killing yourself simply because of your hands?”) But she had not the strength to go to them and receive their mercy. They did not know and she could not tell them. They thought it was cancer. They would never have dreamed it was despair that she groped through sightlessly, in a vacuum everlasting and black. Their flowers and their letters and their telephone calls did not stop out of unkindness but out of forgetfulness; they were busy, they were living their lives.
Angelica began to sleep. She slept all night and all day, like a cat. Dreams became her companions and sleep became her food. She ate very little, but she did not waste away, although she was weakened—so weakened, indeed, that sometimes in her bath she had attacks of vertigo and was obliged to ring for Dora. She could not keep her mind on anything. The simplest words in the simplest book bewildered her, and she let her eyes wander drowsily from the page; before she could close the book and set it aside, she was asleep.
* * *
Just before Christmas, the drunken aunt, Angelica’s only relative, came back to town after a lengthy visit to California. She had not heard from Angelica in months, but she had not been alarmed, for neither of them was a letter writer. The first evening she was back, she dined with friends and learned from them of her niece’s illness; she was shocked into sobriety and bitterly excoriated herself for being so lazy that she had not bothered to write. She telephoned the doctor who had taken care of Angelica all her life and surprised him by repeating what she had heard—that the affliction had been diagnosed as cancer. At first, the doctor was offended that he had not been called in, and then, on second thought, he was suspicious, and he urged the aunt to go around as soon as she could and make a report to him.
The aunt did not warn Angelica that she was coming. She arrived late the next afternoon, with flowers and champagne and, by ill chance, a handsome pair of crocheted gloves she had picked up in a shop in San Francisco. She brought, as well, a bottle of Scotch, for her own amusement. The apartment was dark and silent, and in the wan light the servants looked spectral. The aunt, by nature a jovial woman—she drank for the fun of it—was oppressed by the gloom and went so quickly through the shadowy foyer and so quickly up the stairs that she was out of breath when she got to the door of Angelica’s room. Dora, who had come more and more to have the deportment of a nurse, opened the door with nurselike gentleness and, seeing that her patient was, for a change, awake, said with nurselike cheer, “You have company, Madame! Just look at what Mrs. Armstrong has brought!” She took the flowers to put in water and the champagne to put on ice, and silently left the room.
The moment Angelica saw her aunt, she burst into tears and held out her arms, like a child, to be embraced, and Mrs. Armstrong began also to cry, holding the unhappy younger woman in her arms. When the hurricane was spent and the ladies had regained their voices, the aunt said, “You must tell me the whole story, my pet, but before you do, you must give me a drink and open your present. I do pray you’re going to like them—they are so much you.”
Angelica rang for glasses and ice, for the Scotch, and then she undid the ribbon around the long box. When she saw what was inside, all the blood left her face. “Get out!” she said to her aunt, full of cold hatred. “Is that why you came—to taunt me?”
Amazed, Mrs. Armstrong turned away from a book she had been examining on a table in the window and met her niece’s angry gaze.
“I taunt you?” she cried. “Why, darling, are you out of your mind? If you don’t like the gloves, I’ll give them to someone else, but don’t—”
“Yes, do that! Give them to some young beautiful girl whose hands don’t need to be hidden.” And she flung the box and the gloves to the floor in an infantile fury. Twisting, she bent herself into her pillows and wept again, heartbrokenly.
By the end of the afternoon, Mrs. Armstrong’s heart was also broken. She managed, with taste and tact, aided by a good deal of whiskey, to ferret out the whole story, and, as she said to her dinner companion later on, it was unquestionably the saddest she had ever heard. She blamed herself for her obtuseness and she blamed Major Early for his, and, to a lesser extent, she blamed Angelica’s friends for never realizing that they, with their constant and superlative praise of her looks, had added to her burden, had forced her into so conventual a life that she had been removed from most of experience. “The child has no memories!” exclaimed Mrs. Armstrong, appalled. “She wouldn’t know danger if she met it head on, and she certainly wouldn’t know joy. We virtually said to her, ‘Don’t tire your pretty eyes with looking at anything, don’t let emotion harm a hair of your lovely head.’ We simply worshipped and said, ‘Let us look at you, but don’t you look at us, for we are toads.’ The ghastly thing is that there’s nothing to be salvaged, and even if some miracle of surgery could restore her hands to her, it would do no good, for her disillusion is complete. I think if she could love anyone, if that talent were suddenly to come to her at this point in her life, she would love her ugly man in Normandy, and would love him because he was ugly.”
When Angelica had apologized to her aunt for her tantrum over the gloves, she had then got out of bed and retrieved them and, in the course of her soliloquy, had put them on and had constantly smoothed them over each finger in turn as she talked.
She was still wearing the gloves when Dora came in to run her evening bath and found that her heart, past mending, had stopped.
A Reasonable Facsimile
Far from withering on the vine from apathy and loneliness after his retirement as chairman of the Philosophy Department at Nevilles College, Dr. Bohrmann had a second blooming, and it was observed amongst his colleagues and his idolatrous students that he would age with gusto and live to be a hundred. He looked on the end of his academic career—an impressive one that had earned him an international reputation in scholarly quarters—as simply the end of one phase of his life, and when he began the new one, he did so with fresh accoutrements, for, as he had been fond of saying to his students, “Change is the only stimulus.” He took up the study of Japanese (he said with a smile that he would write hokku as tributes to his friends on stormy days); he took up engraving and lettering (designed a new bookplate, designed a gravestone for his dead wife); he began to grow Persian melons under glass; he took up mycology, and mycophagy as well, se
nding his fidgety housekeeper off into shrill protests as he flirted with death by eating mushrooms gathered in cow pastures and on golf links. He abandoned chess for bridge, and two evenings a week played a cutthroat game with Miss Blossom Duveen, the bursar’s blond and bawdy secretary, as his partner and as his opponents Mr. Street, the logician, and Mr. Street’s hopelessly scatterbrained wife.
But the radical thing about his new life was the house he had had built for himself in the spring semester of his last year at the college. It was a house of tomorrow—cantilevered, half glass—six miles out on the prairies that confronted the mountain range in whose foothills lay Adams, the town where the college was. The house, though small and narrow, was long, and it looked like a ship, for there was a deck that went all the way around it; from certain points Dr. Bohrmann could see Pikes Peak, a hundred and fifty miles away, and from every point he could watch the multiform weather: there dark rain, here blinding sunshine, yonder a sulphurous dust storm, haze on the summit of one peak, a pillow of cloud concealing a second, hyaline light on the glacier of a third. The house amazed that nondescript, stick-in-the-mud Western town, which, from the day it was founded, had been putting up the worst eyesores it could think of. Whoever on earth would have dreamed that the professor, absentminded and old, riding a bicycle, wearing oldfangled gaiters and an Old World cape, would make such an angular nest for himself and drastically paint it bright pink? The incongruity between the man and his habitat could not possibly have been greater. He belonged in and had, in fact, spent most of his life in fusty parlors where stout, permanent furniture (bookcases with glass fronts, mahogany secretaries with big claw feet, lounges upholstered in quilted black leather, ottomans, immovable bureaus, round tables as heavy as lead) bulked larger than life in the dim-orange light of hanging lamps with fringe. You could see him cleaving through those portières people used to have that were made of long strands of brown wooden beads; you could see him hanging his hat on a much ramified hatrack. Imagine, then, this character, with his silver beard, wearing a hazel coat-sweater from J. C. Penney, and a mussed green tweed suit, those gaiters, a stiff-collared shirt, a Tyrolian hat—dressed, in general, for an altogether different mise en scène—sitting in a black sling chair on the front deck of this gleaming, youthful house, drinking ginger beer out of an earthenware mug and looking through binoculars at eagles and the weather. Or look at him pottering in his pretty Oriental garden (it had a steeply arching bridge over a lily pond and a weeping willow, and a deformed pine tree that he had brought down from up near the timber line), shading himself with the kind of giant black bumbershoot one associates with hotel doormen in a pouring rain. See him in his sleek, slender blond dining room eating a mutton chop or blood pudding with red cabbage, drinking dunkles Bier from a stein. No matter where you placed him in that house, he simply would not match. It was the joke of Adams, but a good-natured one, for Dr. Bohrmann was the pet of the town.
Dr. Bohrmann and his wife, who died two years before his retirement, had arrived in Colorado from Freiburg by way of Montreal, where, just as he was beginning to make his presence felt at the university, he was halted in his stride by a sudden, astounding hemorrhage of the lungs. When, after seventeen wan, lengthy months, he was discharged from the sanitarium, not as cured but as arrested, his careful doctors counselled him to go West, to the Rocky Mountains, under whose blue, bright skies he could, in time, rout the last bacterium. On their further recommendation, he applied for an appointment at Nevilles College, since Adams was famous for the particular salubrity of its air. And providence was pleased to accommodate him, having a few months earlier created a vacancy on the staff through the death—from tuberculosis—of a young instructor. Adams was high above sea level and its prospect of soaring palisades and pinnacles of rock was magnificent, if, at first, dismaying to European eyes that had been accustomed to grandeur on a smaller scale. Moreover, the faculty of its college was remarkable—was, in part, illustrious—because so many of its members had come here for Dr. Bohrmann’s reason; if their distemper had been of a different nature, they would have lectured in much grander but moister groves—in New Haven or Princeton, in Oxford or Bonn. For the most part, they accepted their predicament with grace—it is no myth that the tubercular is by and large a sanguine fellow—and lived urbanely in rented houses, year by year meaning it less and less when they stated their resolve that as soon as their health was completely restored they would go back to the East or to their foreign fatherlands. Although their New York Times came four days late, and although perhaps they were not in the thick of things, neither did their minds abide in Shangri-La. Visiting lecturers and vacationing friends were bound to admit that the insular community was remarkably au courant and that within it there was an exchange of ideas as brilliant and constant as the Colorado sun.
* * *
At first, when the Bohrmanns came, in 1912, they had no intention of lingering any longer than was absolutely necessary. But after little more than a year, neither of them could imagine living anywhere else; the immaculate air was deliciously inebriating and the sun, in those superlative heavens, fed them with the vibrancy of youth. They daily rejoiced in their physical existence, breathed deeply, and slept like children. They liked to walk on the mesas, gathering kinnikinnick in the winter and pasqueflowers in the spring; sometimes they rented sweet-faced burros and rode up to a waterfall of great temperament and beauty. They admired the turbulent colors of the sunsets, the profound snows of winter, the plangent thunderstorms of summer. There was, they said, some sort of spell upon the place that bound them to it; roving the tablelands, whence one could gaze for miles on miles upon the works of God, they paused in silence, their hands upon their quickened, infatuated hearts. And besides the land, they loved the people of it, both the autochthonous Town and the dislocated Gown; students thronged their house at the gemütlich coffee hour, and their coevals and their elders came at night to drink hot wine or beer and, endlessly, in witty, learned periods, to talk.
Sometimes Dr. Bohrmann and Hedda spoke of summering in Europe—in spite of their contentment, they were often grievously homesick for Freiburg—and occasionally they went so far as to book passage, but something always prevented them from going. One year, Wolfgang was engaged in writing a monograph on Maimonides for the Hibbert Journal, another year Hedda was bedridden for a long while after a miscarriage that doomed them, to their everlasting sorrow, to childlessness. After the Second World War, they no longer even spoke of going back, for the thought of how Freiburg now must look sickened them.
All in all, they had an uncommonly happy life and they so much enjoyed each other that when Hedda died, with no warning at all, of heart disease, Wolfgang’s friends were afraid that he, too, might die, of grief. And, indeed, he asked for a semester’s leave and spent the whole of it indoors, seldom answering his doorbell and never answering his telephone. But, at the end of that time, he emerged as companionable and as exuberant as ever, as much at home with life.
It was then, upon his return to the mild and miniature hurly-burly of the campus, that he began to lay in his supplies against the lean times when his rank would be emeritus. He started Japanese with Professor Symington, the historian, who, until he had got tuberculosis, had been an Orientalist resident in Kyoto; he read Goren and Culbertson on bridge; he studied every magazine on architecture that was published, and throughout that winter he worked on designs for his new house. In the beginning, when he went to the builders, they dismissed his plans as the work of a visionary—all that expanse of window, they said, was impractical in a cold climate; they said he would rue the day he put a flat roof over his head. If it had been anyone but Dr. Bohrmann, they probably never would have come round, but Dr. Bohrmann had a way about him that could persuade a river to stand still or a builder to build a pavilion at the North Pole. So, in the end, they took on the job, and they admitted, grudgingly but still with fondness, that he had not faltered in his specifications by so much as a fraction of an inch. While t
he house was going up, he rode out on his bicycle each afternoon at tremendous speed, his romantic mantle billowing, the brim of his hat standing straight up in the wind, to watch the installation of his windows and the progress of his grass; he was like a mother watching, in pride and fascination, the extraordinary daily changes in her first-born.
In June, after his last Commencement, he moved out of the house in which he and Hedda had lived all those years, and he transferred to the new house his vast polylingual library, his busts of Plato and Lucretius and Aesculapius and Kant, his collection of maps and of antique firearms, and Hedda’s pure-linen sheets. He sold or gave away the durable, lubberly furniture he and Hedda had accumulated and all those souvenirs of another time—antimacassars, needlepoint cushions, afghans, porcelain umbrella stands, Lalique bud vases. He transplanted his tuberous begonias to the terrace on the west side of the new house and, at the back, he put in mountain-ash trees, a row of eight Lombardy poplars, and an ambitious kitchen garden, bordered with herbs, pinks, primroses, and bachelor’s-buttons.
On the morning he moved, after the vans had gone, Dr. Bohrmann got on his bicycle, with his fiddle strapped in its case behind him and his ginger cat in a basket in front of him, and he pedalled out to the plains, singing “Gaudeamus Igitur” in a rich, if untrue, baritone. Street, the logician, saw him wheeling past his house and later said on the telephone to Symington, the historian, “You should have seen mein Herr Doktor Professor this morning, with his cat and his fiddle, singing hi-diddle-diddle, ready to hop right over the moon.” Symington, with a laugh, rejoined, “When we’re pushing up daisies, he’ll be learning jujitsu.” Blossom Duveen saw him, too; she drove past him in her brash crimson convertible on her way to Denver and a flicker of interest started a flame in her heart; he was really a dear, she thought, and by no means all that old. She wouldn’t mind in the least little bit going to live in that snappy, streamlined house.