I'm Dying Laughing (46 page)

They went on to discuss Christy and his education. As a gentleman’s son and rich man himself he did not have to work, but they wanted him to know how to do something. Stephen’s family contained one or two aesthetes and scholars; Uncle Maurice being one, and an old lady who went out to dig in Mesopotamia in her eighties was another. Christy was the one person who had a chance to have a happy life. He was not fit for professional life, not very clever, but very kind. Now there was his adolescence. Emily and Stephen were unwilling to part with him, but they found him maddening. He had his solemn thoughts, which he produced in company, his rude manners with the servants, his new found young-mastership, his oddly placed, awkward learning. He needed the company of the right kind of girls. Never would they permit Christy to go to prostitutes or loose girls with vulgar ideas. True, in New York a poor boy, an ordinary boy, had to content himself with the coarse, flippant, cynical sex-life of the city; but here they were freed from that. He could make the grand tour, have innocent love affairs, study and dream.

Stephen said, ‘I want him to be like the English grands seigneurs, the juveniles of Voltaire’s and Charles James Fox’s time, when an Englishman was respected, though we needn’t have the expenditure and the follies. I’d like him to be a mild but not vapid milord. Americans have always had their gentlemen abroad and our son Christy shall be one.’

Emily laughed and clapped her hands,

‘Oh, how life has changed for us! We should never have been able to think of such things in New York or Hollywood or Connecticut.’

They hated to part with the boy so soon; and they couldn’t consent to his renting a small room by himself, a pied-a-terre off somewhere in a respectable but consenting quarter, where young men meet women. Stephen said,

‘He can go so far astray. I feel such a fool. The boy knows all he should know, but I can read a book about the atom bomb and not know the first thing about it: and such is sex. I suppose the best thing would be to introduce him to some nice, friendly, pretty, clever, married woman, fifteen years older than himself. That’s what they do here.’

Emily cried, ‘Oh, I’d rather see him drop dead!’

‘Well, all women start with men older than themselves!’

‘Oh, how revolting, putrid and corrupt, I’ll never let my boy so much as take a bunch of violets to an older woman; if I see him picking up her handkerchief, I’ll box his ears.’

Stephen laughed and looked at her appreciatively.

‘We’ll ask Madame Suzanne. I wish I’d had a little apartment with a side-entrance. I should have started off as a regular beast but a healthy one and been a sordid old man now making money in the nitrates business.’

‘Oh, Stephen, and not met me?’

‘H’m, well—there’s a drawback to everything; and as you know, not to have met you would have ruined my life entirely.’

This was one of their happiest nights for many years.

Next week in the mail was a letter from Stephen’s mother, Anna Howard, saying that she was coming over earlier this year; she would put up at the Ritz for a few days; and she wanted to talk to them about their plans. Her letters were never more than a few lines: this one almost filled a page.

Stephen read the letter several times. Emily said, ‘Oh, we must really welcome her. Give Anna and Maurice a party and show them our friends. I wrote to dear Anna all about our new friends, our new hopes and how you are going to give courses in American economic history and Christy is going to the Beaux-Arts.’

Stephen confessed though, that he had written several times to his mother about money. She had advanced his next quarter’s allowance; besides he had asked for a loan of $5,000. He grumbled, ‘I can’t think why not. They can take it out of my share of the estate. When Mother dies. I don’t mean I want her to die. Anyway she looks good for twenty years, to me. So it’s only reasonable. I’m not asking for it twice over. Also, I told her I thought Christy and Olivia should pay all their own expenses, housekeeping, servants, teachers, clothes. Why should we? We’re good guardians, we’re devoted parents. But our high style of living is because of them. I’m not going to be talked out of it by Mother. I’m poor, she’s rich, they’re rich, they’re all rich but me. Why should all the burden fall on the poorest member of the family? And just because we’re poor, we have to put on a bigger show than anyone else would, to show we’re not starving the kids.’

Emily did not worry about it. She felt they would make a good impression; and that Anna would be very glad to have them in Europe.

Madame Suzanne came as usual at ten o’clock for her lessons with the children. After one hour of French, she gave private tuition to Christy in Latin and other subjects; she lunched with the family and after lunch she taught French to the Howards for one to three hours depending on their free time. Stephen was anxious to have impressive arrangements made for Christy before his grandmother arrived, so that she would not be tempted to take him back to America. The adults were to use as a book for study
L’Enfermi
(
The Prisoner
) by Gustave Geoffroy, well-known socialist, the story of Auguste Blanqui who spent most of his life in lock-ups, gaols and fortress prisons, the world’s greatest agitator, one of the world’s greatest revolutionaries. The picture of him drawn by Madame Suzanne already had kept Emily awake tossing—the frail, small man with wretched health, living on vegetables, bread and water who accustomed himself to cold, want, misery from childhood and who, when deprived of all books, all manuscripts, all learning, was able to invent systems of thought, new worlds of imagination; the cruelly treated prisoner of Mont St-Michel and other prisons, whose struggles, work and classic failure led Lenin to formulate, with the lessons of the Commune of Paris, his own successful theories of revolution.

Emily made up her mind to study the French Revolution and the Commune too. Now that she had shaken off the curse of the narrow, prejudiced, and corrupt American radical ideas and the hate of former friends, she would start all over again. ‘I am like a pioneer and I’ve come to the young countries. The USA is getting old.’

She fell asleep in a gentle daze of white, soft light, slept with the angels all night, told Stephen on waking that for once she had had sweet dreams but could remember nothing.

‘I was happy, all day, all night, all the week, think of that! There are people in our lives who have strange meaning for us—Mernie Wauters and Suzanne and Vittorio do that for me. And perhaps for you too?’

Stephen said drily, ‘I am not so romantic. I haven’t a rich nature like yours, full of hope and finding themes everywhere. Only for God’s sake, remember we have to eat while you’re wandering in the Paradise Gardens of socialist beauties. We have to eat and there isn’t one word in all those books Vittorio and Suzanne gave you, which will be of any use in a book intended to sell in America. Wait till your book’s finished. For I know you, it will creep in, they’ll smell the fish and it won’t even sell to your favourite publisher, let alone the magazines. They can smell socialists, enemies of their dear police state miles off. Read your socialist romances later.’

But that day Suzanne brought a copy of
L’Enfermi
and they began to read it paragraph by paragraph. Stephen had written several biographies and was at first interested, though it irritated him to read a book so slowly. In a few days it was impossible to conceal from him that Emily spent almost all her time on the book. She was many pages ahead of Stephen and had already formed a plan for dramatizing the book.

She declared, ‘I’ll do a libretto for grand opera. I’m surprised it hasn’t been done.’ Hastily, she told them, in her stumbling, strange French, her plans of scenes. The boy’s naked bedroom in winter, the open window with snow drifting through, to begin with: the marriage, romantic and unhappy; the plodding son of the great revolutionist; Blanqui, little figure, standing unmoved in the fiercest battle scenes; the lonely man, denied everything, pacing the platform under the stars at Mont St-Michel and inventing for want of better things, a new theory of the universe—

In those stars must be loves like ours and their life flows along by ours, like a sister sun.

Blanqui had only a manual of algebra and from this he built up a new solar system. Dragged step by step down the stone stairs, his head bumping on the flags, tortured and tied in a low, filthy hole with rats about, in one position for days on end and coming back to life, a man so frail and living so long—for what? To go from one prison to another.

‘Look at the splendour of the prison scenes; his lifelong love for his unworthy wife, a mere bourgeoise!’

Stephen after an hour of this, unable to take part, left the room and from then on took part only erratically. He was furiously angry now. He saw that Emily had done no work for over a week. Her latest ‘obsessions, her socialist jag’ had drunk up all her energy. He went up to her room and found some books, recommended by Vittorio. He came down and heard her shouting joyfully, inexhaustibly, and declaring in English, her French having vanished, that their next book would be that wonderful, superb, gorgeous book; and she called out to Stephen to come in, while breathlessly she described a book Suzanne had brought her. It was the autobiography of Jules Valles, a small but famous three-volume story:
The Schoolboy, The Graduate. The Communard.

Bubbling over with laughter, she held Stephen by the sleeve, ‘Only listen to this! You’ll die laughing.’

‘Jules Valles had shut the mayor in the closet and even the guard pleaded for him, saying there would be a lot of trouble in the closet if he was not allowed to go to the—shh!—so Jules Valles let him out and told him, run along.’

Emily shouted, ‘A big mistake! A big mistake. And typical of the gentle revolutionaries they were. They didn’t take over the Banque de France, a primordial error. They wanted to prove revolutionists didn’t grab. Prove to whom, pray? And no one ever thanked them for it. And it ended up at the Mur des Fédérés. Oh, what a story! Stephen I am going for once in my life to become a specialist on something—on the Commune! Lenin learned about revolution from it.’

She waved her arms, got up, walked about the room, excitably called for coffee, glasses of water, and for over an hour she described her future studies.

‘I am going to study all the children study and more. More, because I should know more. They’ll absorb it naturally, just by living here. Am I going to sit round with my mouth open, yessing and noing? Dumb Madame Howard, a typical American; knows nothing! Eh? No!’

She hit the table. ‘Stephen, it’s all very well for you. You’re learned. You went to Princeton. But I came from Arkansas. They don’t ever teach anything in America, Madame Suzanne. They’re afraid you might question the eternal values, like ice-cream soda. They’re tripping over themselves racing farther and farther backwards into the Ostrogoth age, determined that whatever happens to the world, the Chinese people, the Kashmiri, the Kirghiz shall all know more than the average American.’

She raved on like this for some time to Stephen’s annoyance. He was proud of his country, regarded himself as a representative American, a sample American abroad: he would analyse the country but never deride and belittle.

After chocolate and bread with the children, Madame Suzanne went on to Christy’s Latin lesson. Emily sat in on this. She had worked over the lessons in order to keep up with Christy. Stephen had forgotten his Latin. He growled, ‘Go ahead. I’ll be the dumb American cluck reading the comic strips while you three talk monkey-Latin to each other.’

‘You don’t study and you’re not learning French, Stephen. Madame Suzanne says I am improving.
Allez-vous coucher, Monsieur. Je vous park comme á un chien,
because, that is
parce que,
you are a
chien.
That is,
vous etes un chien.’

‘Nice,’ said Stephen.

‘That’s what I heard in the street today. And listen, that old iron man says
O! Du lapin-mo-ort
;
du lapin—qu’il est mort!’
Mad with hilarity, she took Olivia in her arms, kissed her soft, warm hair and sang:

‘Fais dodo, ma poulette, dors ma mignonette! Quand tu auras vingt ans passés, tu vas te marier, Avec un homme sage, qui fera ton ménage, Avec un homme de Paris, qui fera ton petit lit.’

‘That’s frank isn’t it? Marie-Jo sings that and with such hysterical fury. It’s dreadful to have people in the house who aren’t married, who haven’t children, who can’t share our joys and have to take out their miseries in stealing sugar and having murderous friends around and talking about whether God thinks they’re dutiful if they wash the stone floor of the basement on Sundays. Ai-ai-ai. Why must our happiness, joy, wonderful fulfilment be built on the sorrows of others? What are we to do? Oh, life is cruel, cruel.’

In the evening Madame Suzanne was still with them. After a few such evenings, and with ‘Madame Suzanne always underfoot and exercise books even in the toilet’ Stephen declared he was fed up. He was going to invite some lousy reactionaries to get a breath of stale air. He couldn’t stand the new hope and light blazing all round the joint. ‘It’s too sweet and good here, pure thought and love of humanity. I’ll scream if I hear one more story of the Resistance and if Christy begins one more time on the tragedy of man under capitalism. Let man die under capitalism or any other way. I want to meet some funny people, some witty, lousy people who backbite and whom I can sneer at and hate.’

Emily called out, ‘Oh, good, a real party. The Wauters couple are depressing, I agree. Who’ll we ask? Not that boat crowd! Let’s ask Suzanne.’

Stephen said, ‘Oh, God, never!’ but in the end they did and Madame Suzanne coolly agreed to introduce them to other friends; ‘neither teachers, benefactors, child-study psychologists, nor librarians’ Stephen specified, smiling engagingly to Suzanne.

Emily enquired, ‘Well heavens, we have enough introductions around the American and British Embassies, not to say half literary Paris, and even people at the Louvre—won’t they do?’