I'm Dying Laughing (60 page)

And to this was a reply, half-written:

‘My darling Frankie,

First of all, my love, I want to tell you how sorry I am about the letter I wrote you the other day. I was in one hell of a morbid mood. All I remember about it was that I was very worried about something personal and I missed you more than I ever have; and that doesn’t mean I don’t miss you as much now, for I sure as hell do. We said that the person who left didn’t get affected as much as the other one; well, I think that I have proved to myself to my satisfaction that law to be false. I sure hope you didn’t feel as bad as I did, because if you did then all I can say is God help us, because we sure have it bad.

Father has been away for a few weeks and Mother is all right, but nothing to brag about. I am afraid I am not very interesting in the house, because I am wishing you were here, but that is just tough for them, I mean Mother, Madame Suzanne and Monsieur Jean-Claude. Giles has turned into a little monster; his voice, with trying to speak French, is changing, and what surprises me is he now sounds sometimes like a sixty-year-old man. He several times said something to me in a foreign language, he means it to be French and I haven’t even answered because I have been thinking subconsciously, ‘Who is that? I don’t know who it is.’ I hope you’re not getting confused because I am trying to get this finished—but I don’t think I’ll make it into the mail tonight. But you’ll get it in time and telephone me at Madame Suzanne’s. I’ll make her let me see you and I can arrange everything for I have a certain influence—if you know what that means? If you don’t, think it over …’

Emily put the papers back and went downstairs to think this over. Where had Christy received his letters from this girl? She questioned the servants. At last the porter said that the young man had given him money to receive letters for him. ‘I saw no harm. He is a young man of eighteen.’

When Emily went back upstairs, the dressmaker had come to make her a new dressing-gown; Emily had become so portly that she felt uncomfortable in anything but loose gowns. ‘I’m always at home; I’m a housebound wife, why should I have town suits and evening-gowns made? When I’ve finished my present book and can reduce I’ll get out and buy something, or you, Jacqueline, can make me one. I don’t know what I will weigh a month from now, so why waste money on a dress.’

Then, as she was being fitted, she told Jacqueline the story of the secret correspondence, the underhand behaviour of the lad. Jacqueline said, it’s natural, it’s a phase, Madame: don’t frighten him. Ask the girl to the house. Those aren’t real love letters. It is nothing but youthful loneliness. They are playing at love. This
dear darling
means nothing. But the boy is lonely. I strongly recommend you to have the girl at the house, even to stay.’

This idea at first did not appeal to Emily, but later she saw advantages in it. When the boy returned from the movies, she accosted him at once.

‘Christy darling, Christy my love, let’s have one of your friends here to stay. Don’t you want some girl you can go out with? You could go to the movies with a girl. Don’t you know some nice American girl who’s fun, you could go to the cafe with, smoke cigarettes with–one doesn’t hurt. I want you to be natural, be your age, Mother wants you to have fun, darling, not to live in a monstery.’

She burst out laughing, shouted laughter, lay down on the sofa panting, cried, ‘Oh, Christy, it’s such a marvellous sensation to have a good laugh. I’m tingling all over, it’s like sunbathing, listen darling, I mean it, Christy. Now who would you like?’

He said, ‘Emily, I see you read the letters in my drawer.’ She lay quiet for a while, but presently recovered and got up to say soberly, ‘Well, Christy, I did. Where’s the harm? You’re just a couple of kids. Let her come here to stay. Send her a letter. Father’s away for a couple of weeks yet; and we can all go out together, see everything. Why you poor boy, you work so hard, you haven’t even seen Paris. What will Uncle Maurice say? Yes, you and Frankie and I will tour Paris. I’ll get Madame Jacqueline to make me a suit after all.’

This was all done. Frances Wilson left her brother in the hotel in the rue Chomel and came to stay with the Howards in the rue de Varenne. Emily wanted to arrange a room for her on the same floor as Christy but Madame Suzanne strongly objected, in spite of Emily’s comical remarks and dancing eyes; and she was given a room next to Olivia. Then with Madame Suzanne, Emily organized sight-seeing tours of Paris for herself with the two youngsters, leaving Suzanne at home to attend to Olivia, Giles and the servants.

Stephen, who had gone away originally for a week with Johnny Trefougar, had stayed away four weeks and hinted that he might stay longer. Trefougar had leave of absence for ill-health and was visiting doctors in Switzerland. Evidently they were travelling about a good deal, and had even returned to France to border-towns several times. Emily and the boy had had postcards and letters from Annemasse, Vallorbe, Porrentruy (near Berne) La Chaux de Fonds, and St-Louis (Haut-Rhin over the border from Basle). Emily could not understand what he was doing, was discomfited and angry with him for the news about him she had received from Americans passing through on the way home. She was more than disturbed, though she said nothing about it, by the news brought that Jay Moffat Byrd and Godfrey Bowles, who had baited them in Hollywood, had both gone to jail in the loyalty investigations, convicted under the Smith Act for refusing to give names of leftists working in the studios and among their friends, and for contempt of court.

Said Emily, writing in her
Journal of Days,
‘Who would have foreseen it, for those two heavies, Pious Jay and Noble God? But then Suzanne has taught me never to bet on loyalty. We don’t know. To think of them, that Jay and Godfrey are responsible at bottom for our being here, in the mess we are and in the unhappiness we are.’

The girl Frankie came and was installed, a lively, very short, broad-faced girl, hefty who was one of the ‘campus leaders’ in a students’ revolt and was interested in scapegoat and other unhappy, misfit children. She talked earnestly at breakfast in the latest psychological jargon and otherwise was a gay, sinless puppy, spoiled by a brilliant father and a rich mother, very serious about herself.

‘She leads Christy by the nose,’ said Emily the first morning to Suzanne. ‘We don’t know people. I never thought he was so spineless.’

Suzanne laughed, ‘You are just like all mothers and mothers-in-law.’

Emily laughed, ‘Emily Wilkes in “The Mother-in-Law”; that’s a good idea.’

She prodded the unwilling couple to fulfill her programme. Christy had had enough of the house; Frankie was going back all too soon to the campus rituals of an American college, and had better have European culture forced on her.

‘It’s the only way to do it at your age, Frankie. Ah, me! I know only too well. Get Fernande to give you your lunches and come along.’

How she heckled and high-hatted and harassed Frankie! Frankie said the Louvre was ‘not functional.’

‘What an abysmally stupid opinion, Frankie, if it is an opinion. I don’t call it an opinion. It is like a hee-haw from a hippo munching leaves, all muffled by the saliva and sap but no brain-juice in it. Don’t interrupt Christy! Frankie must learn something. Why is she here? Why don’t you like the cheese, Frankie? You surely don’t want to live all your life on grocer’s cheese? Don’t you want to learn things? Heigh-ho! Les Americains. Sit up straight Frankie, you’re getting round shoulders; you’re overweight as it is. Well, I am. But I need it, this mountain of fat is a mountain of energy. You do nothing. Don’t tell me sitting in an armchair at a desk interviewing the ragged and destitute of the mind, the poor in soul, social alley-cats, the boys kicked by their fathers and the girls half burned to death by their mothers, do you mean to say you, Frankie, who know nothing, you poor, ignorant, little sod, are going to do something for them, to heal them; when their misery and hurt comes from society and you, with your few campus slogans and your total, abysmal ignorance of Europe and of all society that went before—what can you analyse? What do you know? Don’t give me that—that, social-worker talk. What do you know? Nothing, nothing! Don’t interrupt, Christy. This ignorant girl that I would kick to the bottom of the class, she wouldn’t get ten per cent from me, she’s going into business righting the wrongs of American society with her fat-jawed, fat-eyed, fat-breasted, fat-waisted, fat-legged, fat-footed intuition and Freudian jargon. Shut up, Christy! I know America and she doesn’t. She’s an ignorant, selfish,’ vain, little maggot. Sit up, Frankie. You sit opposite me and I can see all the revolting arrogance in your fat little eyes. You’re a nobody.’

The first few mornings she had insisted upon Frankie Wilson sitting in with herself, Christy, Suzanne at the French lessons. She had soon herself been ungovernable, exhibiting Frankie, whenever she spoke; and later to Christy calling her a dull little campus sex-maniac, only going into politics to sleep with boys, so stupid, so venal, ‘Here you see it, where different values reign! What a success for a dumb little animal like that to marry an artist, you, Christy and a rich man, a very rich man. The American dream! We’ll sweep these sweepings off our doorstep, Christy! What is she but a shipboard acquaintance?’

To her astonishment, Suzanne had taken Frankie’s part. ‘She is an amiable child, quite innocent, with orthodox phrases from the schoolroom, but quite sincere, a good companion for Christy. He could do much worse. She is just a schoolgirl. You could do a lot with that girl.’

She insisted also on her taking the Latin lesson with Christy and herself, under the teaching of Monsieur Jean-Claude.

‘Now, Monsieur Jean-Claude, I want Frankie and then Christy to tell you what they know about Cicero before we start. Learning has to have a foundation. Frankie, please start.’

‘Well, I don’t know about Cicero.’

‘Go on, go on, you must know something. Haven’t you even heard of Cicero?’

‘Yes. He was a Roman; he wrote in Latin.’

‘And he’s in Shakespeare; but you never read Shakespeare, did you?’

‘Where is he in Shakespeare?’ enquired Jean-Claude.

‘In the play of
Julius Caesar
. Now Christy tell us what you know of Cicero. You see, Monsieur Jean-Claude, Christy’s uncle is a scholar, a Latin scholar, and it is essential, completely essential that Christy should also be a Latin scholar. Christy, now, Cicero attacked misgovernment, he was an enemy of tyranny, of dictatorship. The republicans of the French Revolution were young people who were fired by their reading of Cicero at school and from him got their passion for freedom. Like you, Christy. That is why, Monsieur Jean-Claude, it is also necessary for Christy to be soaked in Cicero. Christy’s a young communist; he must know what his spiritual ancestors said, those who attacked the enemies of freedom. Now, Frankie, what do you know about it? Nothing! But you say you led a movement for freedom on campus. But how can you, if you are just amusing yourself, looking for kudos? If you’re serious you’ll try to find out what a great liberator and lover of freedom like Cicero said. You won’t just wave a few flags, repeat a few slogans and get married and sit back fat and cosy as a hedgehog in winter, thinking you have done your bit. For that’s what you will do. I can see. You are just a talker and a poor talker at that. So I tell you to listen, Frankie and find out from Christy and Monsieur Jean-Claude and myself what a great fighter for freedom was like.’

Monsieur Jean-Claude said, ‘As a matter of record and since you are interested in scholarly views of Marcus Tullius, I should like to tell our two young friends that there is a well-known book by a scholar, Monsieur Jérome Carcopino, published in 1938, called
Secrets of Cicero’s Correspondence.
We can, if you like, go through the letters of Cicero with this commentary in mind. For instance, Monsieur Carcopino says that in these letters, “The politician is shown here so odious that his misfortunes come as the punishment of unpardonable faults into which he was plunged by the mistakes of a mind too self-centred to be farsighted and the false moves of a will too weak to overcome the crises in which his generation struggled.”

‘He bought a sumptuous private hotel on the Palatine, to be near the powerful whose cases he now wished to take. By this, he tells Atticus, he satisfied his private vanity and increased his prestige. Please take notes and we will refer to the letters. To Atticus:
ad aliquam dignitatem pervenire
… 1. 13, 5—26 Jan., 61
BC.
He borrows from women, from Julius Caesar. He was a money-lender. He lent to well-placed and famous men but he preferred loans to the reckless sons of rich men. His toughness in exacting his money back and the high percentage is excused by him, by his need for money, urgent bills and a pack of creditors always after him.

‘After his famous consulate, he jokes (so that he may not weep) about his debts: “Know that I am now so burdened with debts that I should like to enter a conspiracy if anyone would take me in.” Ad. Fam. V.6.

‘In 45
BC
he is reduced to getting money from women, and large sums were paid. He does not deny this.

‘Brother Quintus, to simplify things, had allowed Marcus Tullius to receive in Rome indemnities from the Treasury Public fixed by the senate. He received them but never transmitted them. He writes: “I see today that I am a wretch. I understand of what criminal act I have rendered myself guilty when I dissipated in mad expenditures the sums I received from the treasury in your name.” Note, Christy, “
Qua in re ipsa video miser et sentio quid sceleris ad miserium
… etc.” He wrote this from exile, brought once more face to face with his ruin. He tried to rob his close friend Atticus to whom so many of the letters are written.

‘How did he have such money troubles with his property fees and bank accounts? He could not dispense with senseless luxury. He says to Atticus, “Don’t bother about my money affairs as I don’t care about it; think only of what I desire.”’

At this Emily clapped her hands and cried, ‘Oh, how wonderful, how right he was! Why, everything was there for him to take, it was the way of the age, wasn’t it? He understood his age! He was the leading man of his age! But he was right. He was respected for that. Do you want him to live in an attic with Atticus?