Foreign Bodies (19 page)

“Loyalty oaths,” Harold scoffed. “What, all these pinkos don’t know how to lie? You should’ve looked under the hood, Bea, before you let it get away from you.”

“The hood?”

“The what d’you call it, the top. The lid, whatever. Of that oversized Tinkertoy you sold off. Maybe you’d find some sort of Russky spy map stashed away in there, y’never know —”

It was Harold’s version of a witticism. He started to cut himself another slice of apple cake, but Laura picked up her purse and
A Treasury of Jewish Folktales
and began their goodnights.
When Harold leaves,
Bea thought,
so will the chickens, the cow, the horse, the ox, the dog, and the sheep.

But Laura, loitering in the doorway, whispered: “That old thing did you no good, Bea. And you could give a ball in this place now —”

In the nearly denuded room the hairs of the carpet were ruthlessly indented where the grand’s brass claws had long bitten down. A brownish discoloration lay there, as flat as a shadow, in the shape of a piano.

I
T WAS IN HIS
first year at Princeton that Marvin learned what it was to find oneself the object of contempt, a knowledge he hid under a skin of confidence, not always his own. His mother especially had confidence in him — he had, after all, passed the entrance exam for Townsend Harris High, and how many boys could do that? Marvin was bright. In high school it didn’t count that he hated Latin and couldn’t see the use of it, and sang out the resentful old hand-me-down jeers (
slippo, slippere, falli, bumpus
) — he was good at math and science. Unexpectedly — because his sister was the bookish one — he could write a passable school essay when he was in the mood for it, or when he saw that he could get something useful out of it. Approbation was useful. A few of his teachers were nineteenth-century relics; he liked to parrot (but only on paper) the high-flown style he picked up from the genteel-bachelor manners of these faded frail-boned elderly aesthetes. In Marvin it was all ingratiating artifice; otherwise he talked the tough New York talk of his peers. He was his mother’s favorite — she prodded and blazed and egged him on. His father was more remote, and also more placid. He was untroubled by the worn wooden floors of the shop that had fallen to him as if through nature’s edict, while Marvin’s mother, on her knees with a bucket and a broad brush, was driven to lacquer over those scarred boards inch by inch, until every splinter was smoothed away under a honeyed gleam. Marvin was proud of her then (two years into Townsend Harris, and before modernity and his mother had risen to fluorescent lighting);
he had not yet been made to understand that a mother on her knees in an ill-lit hardware store is an embarrassment to be concealed, or at least suppressed; or that a spiritless father with a novel too often in hand is a disfigurement to be overcome.

If introspection is thought, Marvin was not introspective. He felt the contempt he lived under as raw sensation, as heat — heat in the ears, behind the eyes, in the tangled ganglia sheathed by the skull. And contempt, it seemed, was no different from fear. At Princeton he became afraid. It dawned on him that it was not enough to be bright (all Townsend Harris boys were bright): you had to be right. For the first time he was struck by the import of
birthright
— you slid out of the womb grasping it in your tiny fist, a certificate that guaranteed you would know how to speak and dress and scorn and brazenly intimidate everyone doomed to enter the world empty-handed. Not that Marvin was altogether empty-handed — he had his scholarship, and he had, most of all, the engine of his will and the grim burden of his hurt. He resisted humiliation by accepting it, sometimes almost appearing to invite it: it taught him what was suitable and what wasn’t. He never repeated a misstep — he was meticulous and watchful. This meant that he was never free, as the others were, but it gave him an advantage — the advantage of the watcher over the watched; the advantage of strenuousness over ease. When a man intends to make himself over — the scion of a hardware store, say, into a blueblood under the spell of a birthright — he will shun arrogance and move softly. Marvin’s program (he scarcely recognized it
as
a program, so organically did it evolve, an early tendril maturing out of the silent little seed of humiliation) was anything but self- refutation. He was still his mother’s conscientious son, looking to aspire and ascend. He refuted, he repudiated, nothing: it was only that he was open to everything new. It was sympathy, it was yearning. In another kind of young man — in a young man less tethered than Marvin to the datum of the Bunsen burner and the doctrine of the formula — these stirrings might have been apprehended as imagination. But Marvin’s science was earthbound, more boundary than
boundless. He was made to be a maker of useful things. What he felt was neither dream nor desire, but feral appetite. What he felt was
wanting:
he wanted to have what he saw. The modish turn of Breckinridge’s wrist when he plucked his watch from his vest pocket and dangled the loop of its slender chain. And Breckinridge’s docile sister, with her perfect eyebrows and lightly rouged lower lip (a tender mauve-skinned grape, rounder and fatter than the upper) and small pale chin. And her voice!

She had driven down from Mount Holyoke on her way to New York to look at paintings, and stopped on impulse to visit her brother. She was studying art history, there was an exhibit of the Hudson River School at the Met this month . . . but where on earth was Peter?

“He’s got a slew of classes this morning,” Marvin told her.

“I never did let him know I was planning on coming down. Should I wait? What time do you think he’ll be getting back?”

Each half-whispered syllable was tentative. Her tone was all hesitation. And yet she was a girl with a car of her own!

“He’s off to football practice afterward.” Marvin could account for Breckinridge’s every move: an attentive valet.

“Then I’ll miss him, won’t I? Will you tell him —”

She left it unfinished; it was a trick of her voice, to let it hover, so that her meaning wafted vaguely, looking for direction.

“I’ll tell him you came,” he said. “Are the two of you twins?”

“Oh no, Peter’s three years older. But only one inch taller — is it that I look like him? No one’s ever said that before. Besides, we couldn’t be identical even if we were twins, could we? Do I look mannish to you? I’d hate that —”

“You have the same mouth.” That bottom lip — a predatory protrusion in the male, a pretty knoll in the female.

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

He could not decide whether this was flirtation or taunt, so he said, “Depends what comes out of it.”

“Well, I try —”

And again the rest of it hung unresolved. Tentative, hesitant —
docile. He was as much afraid of this docility as he was of Breckinridge’s sallies. He was unfamiliar with docility in a woman: his mother wasn’t docile, the aunts weren’t docile, and Bea could unleash rip tides of obstinacy — her infatuation, for instance, with that oboe boy.

But he was practiced at manipulating the little nub of his fear. “I don’t suppose,” he said, “you’d want some lunch before you go.”

“Don’t you have classes too?”

“Sometimes I take a day off to catch up.”

“Peter mentions you once in a while. He says you’re awfully diligent.”

He knew what this meant: at times they called him Dilijew. Not Breckinridge’s invention, but also not foreign to his tongue.

“Walking distance,” he said, when she pointed out her green coupe. He scouted a free table in a busy local coffee shop. She declined everything but water.

“They’ll throw us out,” he protested, “if you don’t order at least a sandwich.”

“You order. I’ll watch you eat.”

“Like the monkey in the zoo —”

“More like the lion in the jungle.”

He understood then that there was no rift between what was flirtation and what might be ridicule. Had she really intended to find her brother, or was it curiosity about the rumored beast in her brother’s house?

He said, “Then why did you come out with me?”

“For the company. I’m supposed to say that, aren’t I? But if you absolutely must know —”

She paused to sip her water, and he saw how the rim of the glass slipped into the gap between her lips. He had never observed this action with so much suspense; it was punishing in its slow-motion efficiency.

“It’s to annoy Peter,” she said, “that’s why.”

“In that case,” he said quickly, “I won’t tell him you’ve been here.”

“You promised you would. And I
want
him to be annoyed.” She leaned toward him. A droplet glittered at the corner of her mouth. “Mostly I like what other people don’t.”

He did not question this. He hardly noticed the insult, and was it an insult at all? It was natural, it was the condition of his present life. He was passive before it, biding his time. And in Breckinridge’s sister he sensed opportunity. She was pulling off her gloves — white gloves flecked with tiny stitched petals.

He dropped his hand over hers. She let him keep it there. “I think,” he said (a new awareness, unlike the bruise of fear), “that when people say they want lunch they ought to
have
lunch.”

“All right,” she said. “Bacon and tomato. And you?”

He felt her small hard knuckles under his palm. A row of stones; but submissive, yielding. A mystery in that acquiescent lowering of her head. He could not read her look (in the absence of introspection, impossible to intuit another’s thought), but her tall forehead, bowing, somehow spoke to him: that clear white wall, still uninscribed by anything more intricate than liking and disliking.

“The same,” he said. To woo and to undo was his heart’s program, formulated on the instant, and in the lightning glare of her white forehead. She was to be his America, his newfound land, the sloughing off of a skin too tight to breathe in.

November 16

Dear Aunt Bea,

I know you’ll be surprised to be hearing from me after the way Julian and I carried on. I was a lot worse, I was the one who was really bad! The two of us, we’ve behaved so badly! You shouldn’t blame Julian too much, though, his life is so jumbled, and who knows where he’s at. I’ve been to see him twice, and the first time they were both there, but the second time they were gone. The hideous way we treated you! But we were afraid. I was afraid more than Julian — somehow Julian’s let everything go, and it’s only Lili he cares about, and the things he scribbles and keeps to himself. When you were here — it all went so speedily, four days, five, and we tried to hide it about Lili and Julian, but then Lili told anyhow, so you already knew on that last night when you had us all to dinner, and I suppose by now you’ve told dad everything, about Julian and Lili, and where we’ve been living, Phillip’s place, I mean. I’m still here with Phillip, helping in the clinic, so I would know if dad had written, but what’s so peculiar is that he hasn’t. At first I worried about it, if he’d exploded in some horrible way — don’t some men dad’s age come down with a stroke when they’ve had a bad shock? That’s what I was afraid of all along — that Julian with a wife would just about kill him, as if things with Julian before hadn’t upset him enough.

But if you’ve got the idea that I’m writing now to ask how dad’s been taking it — no, I’m not! There are three reasons why.

1. I’m no longer afraid.

2. What dad thinks doesn’t matter.

3. I’ve stopped caring.

These may sound like all the same reason, but they’re all a bit different. I guess if I had to face him I’d still be afraid, but he’s in L.A. and I’m in Paris! And I’m
staying
, as long as I please. Not always in Paris exactly, or rather in Paris just for now, but there’ll be other places too, and there’s not a thing dad can do about it. In six weeks or so I’ll be looking at an Alp! It’s because I saw — really
saw
— or Julian made me see — how easy it is to slip out of a harness. You just slip out of it, that’s all. And now that I’m out of it, I can think back to how scared I was in those few winks of time when you were here and Julian and I thought you were snooping around to please dad — well, you
were
, weren’t you? Remember how Alice in Wonderland nibbles at the mushroom and then shrinks so quickly that her chin hits her shoe? That’s how fast you were — in and out, you came and went, and didn’t even stop to inhale the Paris air! Our fault, I admit, the way we rushed you out of sight — but at the last minute, when I was feeling a little tipsy, it seemed it was
you
who wanted to be rid of
us
. When we were children dad hated seeing me with Alice and make-believe books like that, or Julian either. Julian used to be stuck on The Yellow Fairy Book especially, I never understood why, but dad would take it away from him and give him something like How Electricity Works, and make some joke about how only cowards love yellow, and then Julian cried, and dad would say, See? I told you so. That’s dad’s mean streak, and I’ve got one of my own, or I wouldn’t have been so rotten, even behind your back. I’ve been rotten all around, maybe to Lili
too. I could never warm to her or get close, not that I didn’t mostly try — she’s like nobody we’ve ever known. It’s just so weird about Julian, he fusses over her, he watches out for her. And she watches out for him, they’re like a secret society together, not that it does either of them any good! When I went over there — the rooming house they moved into when Phillip got back — it was around 6 PM or so and Lili was bunched up on the bed — the place had only the one bed and a chest of drawers and a wardrobe with its doors hanging loose off their hinges, and nothing more — and you could almost smell the gloom. I’d expected Julian to be pretty much flummoxed that I hadn’t left Paris after all, but he was so wrapped up in Lili that he shooed me out, even when I told him I was staying on with Phillip. I couldn’t tell from the way he explained it whether Lili had quit her job or for some reason they’d let her go. She was lying there not saying a word, with her face all brownish and scrunched up and old-looking, so I just turned around and walked out — what else could I do? — and Julian never tried to stop me. Afterward some funny little man showed up at the clinic asking for her, he might have been one of Lili’s people from that place, but I never did find out what the trouble was. I went right back the next day — Phillip came with me — and they were gone. The landlady began screeching that if she’d known they were going to be a pair of irresponsible truants (Phillip’s French is first-rate, so he got it all) she would’ve rented to someone more reliable. Phillip asked if she knew where they were headed, and she said the devil take them wherever they are, but then he asked again and she said she hoped they went where swindlers like that belong,
le pays des Juifs
. So we couldn’t figure out from that if it was a curse or what, if it meant they were really intending to go to Lili’s uncle — he’s supposed to be living somewhere or other, I don’t know, not far from Tel Aviv. Of course they hadn’t damaged
that woman at all, it’s just that she has to wait for another tenant to come along.