Extreme Magic (3 page)

Now, on her doorstep, he deplored, for Mr. Pines’s sake, the enthusiasm of her offer to house him, but the childless Mabies had two spare bedrooms, and there were not many such in Pittston.

Mrs. Mabie opened the door, chin forward, hair brimming over. “Oh Hans, did you try to ring me? I was out getting in some coal.”

“Coal?” He knew the Mabies heated with oil.

“Yes, you know how
they
like a morning fire. And Pattini wouldn’t deliver less than half a ton, so I brought some home in the car. Come on in.”

“No, no,” he said. “I came only to say I cannot go with you to meet him tomorrow; I must go earlier for the language convention in Chicago. So I have here a little note—” He heard his own words, the German juxtaposition, with outrage. He almost never did that any more; the woman acted on him like a solvent, fuddling all his backgrounds together.

She made him come in, and, although he kept out of her sooty clutch the coat his wife, Hertha, had just cleaned for him, he had to follow her up the stairs to see the bedroom.

“Hope he’ll like his digs.” She flung the door back smartly. “Just finished distempering the walls.”

Looking, Weil hoped that Mr. Pines would see nothing more unusual than kindness in the hot-water bottle prominently posed on the turned-down bed, near the radiator, or in the huge, brass scuttle of coal in a steam-heated American room. “Distemper?” he said. He sniffed an odor. “Oh, yes, rubber paint.”

“Worst thing about American progress,” she said. “Always sure to bring something bloody nasty along with it.”

He bent to examine the coal scuttle, thinking that he was not quite enough of an American, although naturalized, to be able to agree with her in comfort. “Didn’t know you used this fireplace. Don’t you burn wood in the one downstairs?”

Ignoring him, she fingered the hot-water bottle. “Such a naked red, these things look; that’s because we only use them for illness. But of course there wouldn’t be a cover for it in all of Michigan. I tried the tea cozy on it, but it was no go.”

Weil straightened, and took out the note to the expected guest, placing it on the night table, where, next to the neat pile of towels and soap, he saw a worn packet of Players. “Portia-Lou. They are crazy for our cigarettes, you know. And after all, isn’t he here to see us as we are?”

She flung out a hand in an impatience that included Pittston, Michigan, the hemisphere. “Don’t worry. He will. He will.”

“Well—” he said. “
’Wiedersehen,”
and ground his teeth. He no longer said that, except to Hertha.

On his way downstairs, she called after him. “You and Hertha wouldn’t have brought over one of those big sponge-things, would you? Isn’t that what they use?”

He turned his head. “You mean possibly a loofah?”

“Oh, is
that
what they call them?”

“I wouldn’t know. I never saw one in London. But if my reading is correct he would carry his own with him. In something called a sponge-bag.” He clapped his beret firmly on his head. “’Bye now.”

“Cheerio,” said Mrs. Mabie.

Later that night, at about one-thirty, when Weil could not stay asleep, as often happened, he got up noiselessly and went downstairs to forage in the bookshelves and the icebox until Hertha should miss him and come after him. This, the constant nervous rounding-up of what family was left to her—by telephone, by visit, from room to room—was almost all that remained, after all these years, of the effects of the concentration camp. It was why, as long as her sister Elsa and Sigmund had the store in Lansing, as long as she could talk with Elsa every morning, drive over for the biweekly
Kaffeeklatsch,
and exchange Sunday dinners, he would never take up the offers from Princeton or Yale. It was no use telling himself that they might none of them be here now had he not gone ahead to England; he could not forget where she had been while he had been safe from all but the bombs in London, nor would he forget her eyes, so blue under the grizzled hair, when she had said to him, on the morning the letter came from Pittston, “Only that we should be together, Hans! Only that we should all of us be together.”

He was reading when she came to the top of the stairs in her nightgown. “Hans! You will catch cold.
Soll ich
cocoa
machen?”

“Nein, nein. Ich hab’ ein bischen Wein. Und Schmier-käse. Wilst du?”

She wrinkled her nose, but came and sat at the table, looking over his shoulder. “You are working?”

“No, I just wanted to look something up, and I found it.” He chuckled, thinking that he might tell her of his encounter with Mrs. Mabie, but she had little ear or eye for the nuances of their life here, content to display her cuisine at intervals to these supermarket savages, to wonder whether she could get the fruiterer to stock fennel, and to lament with Elsa that there was no little
Conditorei
in East Lansing.

“Here. Let me read you something.” He got up and put an afghan around her shoulders. “What they call a stole,
ja? Sehr schön,
matches the eyes.”

“Schmeichelkatz’.
You just want me to let you stay up.” But she liked him to read to her.

“Listen.” He read out bits of the passage he had hunted up, smiling to himself, in Max Müller. “‘We do not want to know languages; we want to know what language is, how it can form a vehicle or an organ of thought…The classical scholar uses Greek or Latin, the Oriental scholar Hebrew or Sanskrit, to trace the social, moral progress of the human race.’”

He looked up. “You follow? Now listen.” He took a sip of wine. “‘In
comparative philology
the case is totally different. The jargons of savage tribes, the clicks of the Hottentots, and the vocal modulations of the Indo-Chinese, are as important, nay, for the solutions of some of our problems, more important than the poetry of Homer, or the prose of Cicero.’”

He slapped his thigh, and took another sip of wine.

“‘The clicks of the Hottentots.’ What you think of that for a title for my little Chicago piece on the Middle West ‘r’? Good, hah? In fact,
bloody
good!”

“Säufer,”
she said. “How much wine did you have? Come to bed.”

He was still laughing when she got him to go to bed, and the next morning, looking for something to read on the train, he took Max Müller with him.

Meanwhile, on a Greyhound bus approaching Detroit, Alastair Pines, slumped next to the window he had opened at once on entering, was sleeping off both a night out in New York (paid for with the difference between the cashed-in train ticket sent from Pittston and the bus fare) and the eyestrain of hours of digestive gazing at the country that, unknown to it, he meant to call his own.

The wind, ruffling a blond lock that flopped engagingly over his forehead even when he was awake, passed without a ripple over his well-rigged old Aquascutum, over his skis and duffelbag on the rack above. Travel fitted him like a skin; he voyaged with all the aplomb of his nation, of school holidays spent in Paris, of walking tours on the cheap in Yugoslavia. He was that unobtrusive man to be met everywhere in or out of the sterling area—leaning over the rails of the small steamers that plied the lesser isles of Greece, knees pressed together in the third-class carriage going over Domodossola or through Torremolinos—the Englishman of between twenty and forty, whose berth in life and appearance is also somewhere adequately middle, who, to Americans, travels disarmingly light in baggage and heavy in experience. To his compatriots, he was recognizable in more detail, as that projectile still spinning with leftover impetus down the targetless postwar years, that “type” known to them as “R.A.F.”

When he awoke, the bus was nearing downtown Detroit, and he was surprised to see that there were skyscrapers here too, not on a stunning pedestal of bridge and harbor, as in New York, but forming upward like some harder fusion of the smoky, after-barrage air. He leaned forward eagerly, though not romantically; the point about new places, and the duty, was to grip the
fact
of them. New York’s air, mica-shot, had the fluid chic of big business; this place had the heavy thunder-shade of industry.

He took out one of their sweets and ate it thoughtfully. With the two strings that he had to his bow, there was no reason why, during the year at Pittston, or after, he should not find some post here that would suit him. He had had three terms reading history at a provincial university, before the war saved him from the likelihood that he would be sent down. After the war, the government had been well pleased to send him to an engineering college, where he had since taught for several years. Browsing over a list of posts abroad, he had come upon the exchange offer from Pitt; trying for it on the hunch that they couldn’t have the pick of his betters, he had found his divided talents suited them to a T. He would be a Fellow in English, but would also teach a course in mechanics on the side—what luck to find that his education, on the spotty side for home, had shifted about in a way they seemed to admire here. And after his year here, he ought to feel cheeky enough to jump ship, into the wider seas of industry.

To Alastair, third son of a colonial servant who had died in the service before rising in it—but not too soon to see his children reared as they should be, on the strong asses’ milk of the imperial habit—it was normal beyond notice to have a brother in Malaya, another in Johannesburg, a married sister in Cyprus and an uncle in Accra. Hitherto, Alastair had been the one who had worried
them,
but now he rather pitied them, dogging along as they did, bewailing the loss of India, toward a half-pay retirement in Kensington—and all for a groundling lack-of-vision that had kept them from seeing the modern world as he had once been used to seeing it from his plane. At twenty thousand feet up, the technical lines of empire erased themselves; one saw that one might descend on the States as in other days one might have sailed to Kenya, but carrying a passport now, instead of a gun. And colonial sacrifices were still to be made; although in the modern way one might have to give up one’s citizenship instead of one’s health. Had to be done, unless one wanted to fizzle out in some corner, still denying that sahibs were passé. For, entering a country already in a high state of cultivation, and one in a certain sense already appropriated, the trick was to play it in reverse, to go native as quickly as possible. Which he was fully resigned to do.

When he was met by his hosts at the end of his journey, they all took to each other at once. Dr. Mabie, stammering a pace behind his wife, expanded on being deferred to as “sir.” Mrs. Mabie crimsoned with understanding when Mr. Pines referred to the bus as a charabanc. As for their guest, taking note of the man’s jellyfish way with his wife, and the woman—hair right out of the flicks, and such an oddly nasal way of talking—he thought them as American as anything he’d seen yet.

It was close to two weeks before the professor, delaying happily in conferences and libraries, returned to Pittston alone, having left Hertha for a visit in Lansing. He spent Saturday night alone by choice, in one of those reflective lulls of the closely married, and, noting a card in the collected mail, went on Sunday afternoon to the McFarlands’ opening tea of the academic season.

It was a lovely day, both crisp and smoky with autumn expectancy, and Weil, refreshed in perspective, leaned against Mrs. McFarland’s wall with an enjoyment not yet dampened by the grapejuice-tea punch, watching the
Les Sylphides
advances between teacher and student, savoring a familiar, faculty-wife hat heightened inexplicably by a new feather. Then Mrs. McFarland bore down on him with a group, muttering names all round in her furry Scots. “Yeer to stay on, Mr. Pines,” she said, tapping one young man on the shoulder, and passing by Weil, of whose worldliness she disapproved.

So this was young Pines. Listening with a pang of remembrance, Weil docketed the accent: not quite Oxford or B.B.C., but within the gates—of Knightsbridge say, Kensington, or St. John’s Wood. And could it be, yes, relaxing already into a certain Americanism? Looking, he saw what he used to think of as one of their
blended
faces, too browned and water-slapped for a man of intellect, too veiled for a man of sport.

He approached him, and they exchanged amenities on the wind and the weather, and on how Pines was settling in; it didn’t occur to Weil that Pines might not have caught his name. Those around them, all students, melted back in deference to this faculty meeting. From a group across the room, Portia-Lou waved to Weil and called out an inquiry about Hertha. The young man included himself in her wave, and signaled back. “Hi!” he said.

To Weil’s surprise, Mrs. Mabie’s nod seemed sullen. “You are quite comfortable at the Mabies’?” he asked.

“Oh yes, rather. She’s been incredibly, well—very kind really. Yes!”

“She seems a little—quiet,” said the professor.

“Rather hard to take someone in, don’t you know. Privacy, and so on,” said Pines. “By the way, you pronounce it pri-vacy here, with the long ‘i’?”

Weil nodded. “The great vowel change. Among others.”

“Rather think I may have got her back up a bit, though. You see, I asked her to coach me in American. It was before I knew that she, er well, that she—”

“That she was so very British?” said Weil.

Mr. Pines began to laugh, then thought better of it. “You see—I hadn’t the faintest. You see—I offered to
exchange.”

Weil grinned. “Poor Portia-Lou. When I was in London, I always felt one had to be
très bien élevé
to be able to say ‘bloody.’”

Mr. Pines smiled, eyes hooded. “There during the war?”

“Yes.”

There was a pause, during which Mr. Pines took a frail sip of punch, then set his cup decisively down.

“You drink wine?” asked Weil.

“When I can get it. But I was given to understand that one doesn’t do, here.”

“They
don’t,” said Weil. “But I do.” He smiled. “And if you play it right—I should think you could.” He saw a clear path to the door. Clapping on his beret, he shook hands in adieu. “We must have a bottle, some night. See you in the department.”