Tender Is the Night (27 page)

“I think
it’s ill advised,”
she
said, “I’m not sure I truly
understand your motives.”

“Don’t
let’s be unpleasant.”

“After
all I’m Nicole’s sister.”

“That
doesn’t give you the right to be unpleasant.” It irritated Dick that he knew so
much that he could not tell her. “Nicole’s rich, but that doesn’t make me an
adventurer.”

“That’s
just it,” complained Baby stubbornly. “Nicole’s rich.”

“Just
how much money has she got?” he asked.

She
started; and with a silent laugh he continued, “You see how silly this is? I’d
rather talk to some man in your family—”

“Everything’s
been left to me,” she persisted. “It isn’t we think you’re an adventurer. We
don’t know who you are.”

“I’m a
doctor of medicine,” he said. “My father is a clergyman, now retired. We lived
in
Buffalo
and
my past is open to investigation. I went to
New Haven
; afterward I was a Rhodes
scholar
. My great-grandfather was Governor of North Carolina
and I’m a direct descendant of Mad Anthony Wayne.”

“Who was
Mad Anthony Wayne?” Baby asked suspiciously.

“Mad Anthony Wayne?”

“I think
there’s enough madness in this affair.”

He shook
his head hopelessly, just as Nicole came out on the hotel terrace and looked
around for them.

“He was
too mad to leave as much money as Marshall Field,” he said.

“That’s
all very well—”

Baby was
right and she knew it. Face to face, her father would have it on almost any
clergyman. They were an American ducal family without a title—the very name
written in a hotel register, signed to an introduction, used in a difficult
situation, caused a psychological metamorphosis in people, and in return this
change had crystallized
her own
sense of position. She
knew these facts from the English, who had known them for over two hundred
years. But she did not know that twice Dick had come close to flinging the
marriage in her face. All that saved it this time was Nicole finding their
table and glowing away, white and fresh and new in the September afternoon.

How do you do, lawyer.
We’re going to
Como
tomorrow for a week and then back to
Zurich
.
That’s why I wanted you and sister to settle this, because it doesn’t matter to
us how much I’m allowed. We’re going to live very quietly in
Zurich
for two years and Dick has enough to
take care of us. No, Baby, I’m more practical than you think—
It’s
only for clothes and things I’ll need it. . . . Why, that’s more than—can the
estate really afford to give me all that? I know I’ll never manage to spend it.
Do you have that much? Why do you have more—is it because I’m supposed to be
incompetent? All right, let my share pile up then. . . . No, Dick refuses to
have anything whatever to do with it. I’ll have to feel bloated for us both. .
. . Baby, you have no more idea of what Dick is like
than
,
than—Now where do I sign? Oh, I’m sorry.

. . .
Isn’t it funny and lonely being together,
Dick.
No
place to go except close. Shall we just love and love? Ah, but I love the most,
and I can tell when you’re away from me, even a little. I think it’s wonderful
to be just like everybody else, to reach out and find you all warm beside me in
the bed.

. . .
If you will kindly call my husband at the hospital.
Yes, the
little book is selling everywhere—they want it published in six languages. I
was to do the French translation but I’m tired these days—I’m afraid of
falling, I’m so heavy and clumsy—like a broken roly-poly that can’t stand up
straight.
The cold stethoscope against my heart and my
strongest feeling “Je
m’en
fiche de tout.”
—
Oh, that poor woman in the hospital with the blue baby, much better dead. Isn’t
it fine there are three of us now?

. . .
That seems unreasonable, Dick—we have every reason for taking the bigger
apartment. Why should we penalize ourselves just because there’s more
Warren
money than Diver
money.
Oh, thank you,
cameriere
,
but we’ve changed our minds. This English clergyman tells us that your wine
here in
Orvieto
is excellent. It doesn’t travel? That
must be why we have never heard of it, because we love wine.

The
lakes are sunk in the brown clay and the slopes have all the creases of a
belly. The photographer gave us the picture of me, my hair limp over the rail
on the boat to
Capri
. “Good-by, Blue
Grotte
,” sang the boatman, “come again
soo-oon
.”
And afterward tracing down the hot sinister shin of the Italian boot with the
wind soughing around those eerie castles, the dead watching from up on those
hills.

. . .
This ship is nice, with our heels hitting the deck together. This is the blowy
corner and each time we turn it I slant forward against the wind and pull my
coat together without losing step with Dick. We are chanting nonsense:

“Oh—oh—oh—oh
Other flamingoes than me
,
Oh—oh—oh—oh
Other flamingoes than me—”

Life is
fun with Dick—the people in deck chairs look at us, and a woman is trying to
hear what we are singing. Dick is tired of singing it, so go on alone, Dick.
You will walk differently alone, dear, through a thicker atmosphere, forcing
your way through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the
funnels. You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who
look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in
order to spring from it.

Sitting
on the stanchion of this life-boat I look seaward and let my hair blow and
shine. I am motionless against the sky and the boat is made to carry my form
onward into the blue obscurity of the future, I am Pallas
Athene
carved reverently on the front of a galley. The
waters are
lapping in the public toilets and the agate green foliage of spray changes and
complains
about the stern.

. . . We
travelled a lot that year—from
Woolloomooloo
Bay
to
Biskra
. On the edge of the
Sahara
we ran into a plague of locusts and the chauffeur explained kindly that they
were bumble-bees. The sky was low at night, full of the presence of a strange
and watchful God. Oh, the poor little naked
Ouled
Naïl
; the night was noisy with drums from Senegal and
flutes and whining camels, and the natives pattering about in shoes made of old
automobile tires.

But I was gone again by that time—trains and beaches they were all one.
That was why he took me travelling
but after my second child, my little girl,
Topsy
, was
born everything got dark again.

. . . If
I could get word to my husband who has seen fit to desert me here, to leave me
in the hands of incompetents. You tell me my baby is black—that’s farcical,
that’s very cheap. We went to
Africa
merely to
see
Timgad
,
since my principal interest in life is archeology. I am tired of knowing
nothing and being reminded of it all the time.

. . .
When I get well I want to be a fine person like you, Dick—I would study
medicine except
it’s
too late. We must spend my money
and have a house—I’m tired of apartments and waiting for you. You’re bored with
Zurich
and you
can’t find time for writing here and you say that it’s a confession of weakness
for a scientist not to write. And I’ll look over the whole field of knowledge
and pick out something and really know about it, so I’ll have it to hang on to
if I go to pieces again. You’ll help me, Dick, so I won’t feel so guilty. We’ll
live near a warm beach where we can be brown and young together.

. . .
This is going to be Dick’s work house. Oh, the idea came to us both at the same
moment. We had passed
Tarmes
a dozen times and we
rode up here and found the houses empty, except two stables. When we bought we
acted through a Frenchman but the navy sent spies up here in no time when they
found that Americans had bought part of a hill village. They looked for cannons
all through the building material, and finally Baby had to twitch wires for us
at the Affaires
Etrangères
in
Paris
.

No one
comes to the
Riviera
in summer, so we expect to have a few guests and to work. There are some French
people here—
Mistinguet
last week, surprised to find
the hotel open, and Picasso and the man who wrote Pas
sur
la
Bouche
.

. . .
Dick, why did you register Mr. and Mrs. Diver instead of Doctor and Mrs. Diver?
I just wondered—it just floated through my mind.—
You’ve
taught me that work is everything and I believe you. You used to say a man
knows things and when he stops knowing things he’s like anybody else, and the
thing is to get power before he stops knowing things. If you want to turn
things topsy-turvy, all right, but must your Nicole follow you walking on her
hands, darling?

. . .
Tommy says I am silent. Since I was well the first time I talked a lot to Dick
late at night, both of us sitting up in bed and lighting cigarettes, then
diving down afterward out of the blue dawn and into the pillows, to keep the
light from our eyes. Sometimes I sing, and play with the animals, and I have a
few friends too—Mary, for instance. When Mary and I talk neither of us listens
to the other. Talk is men. When I talk I say to myself that I am probably Dick.
Already I have even been my son, remembering how wise and slow he is. Sometimes
I am Doctor
Dohmler
and one time I may even be an
aspect of you, Tommy
Barban
. Tommy is in love with
me, I think, but gently, reassuringly.
Enough, though, so
that he and Dick have begun to disapprove of each other.
All in all,
everything has never gone better. I am among friends who like me. I am here on
this tranquil beach with my husband and two children. Everything is all
right—if I can finish translating this damn recipe for chicken a la
Maryland
into French. My
toes feel warm in the sand.

“Yes,
I’ll look. More new people—oh, that girl—yes. Who did you say she looked like.
. .
.
No, I haven’t, we don’t get much chance to see
the new American pictures over here. Rosemary who? Well, we’re getting very
fashionable for July—
seems
very peculiar to me. Yes,
she’s lovely, but there can be too many people.”

Doctor
Richard Diver and Mrs. Elsie Speers sat in the Café des
Alliées
in August, under cool and dusty trees. The sparkle of the mica was dulled by
the baked ground, and a few gusts of mistral from down the coast seeped through
the
Esterel
and rocked the fishing boats in the
harbor, pointing the masts here and there at a featureless sky.

“I had a
letter this morning,” said Mrs. Speers. “What a terrible time you all must have
had with those Negroes! But Rosemary said you were perfectly wonderful to her.”

“Rosemary
ought to have a service stripe. It was pretty harrowing— the only person it
didn’t disturb was Abe North—he flew off to Havre—he probably doesn’t know
about it yet.”

“I’m
sorry Mrs. Diver was upset,” she said carefully.

Rosemary
had written:

Nicole
seemed Out of her Mind. I didn’t want to come South with them because I felt
Dick had enough on his hands.

“She’s
all right now.” He spoke almost impatiently. “So you’re leaving to-morrow. When
will you sail?”

“Right away.”

“My God,
it’s awful to have you go.”

“We’re
glad we came here. We’ve had a good time, thanks to you. You’re the first man
Rosemary ever cared for.”

Another
gust of wind strained around the porphyry hills of la
Napoule
.
There was a hint in the air that the earth was hurrying on toward other
weather; the lush midsummer moment outside of time was already over.

“Rosemary’s
had crushes but sooner or later she always turned the man over to me—” Mrs.
Speers laughed, “—for dissection.”

“So I
was spared.”

“There
was nothing I could have done. She was in love with you before I ever saw you.
I told her to go ahead.”

He saw
that no provision had been made for him, or for Nicole, in Mrs. Speers’
plans—and he saw that her amorality sprang from the conditions of her own
withdrawal. It was her right, the pension on which her own emotions had
retired. Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for
survival and can scarcely be convicted of such man-made crimes as “cruelty.” So
long as the shuffle of love and pain went on within proper walls Mrs. Speers
could view it with as much detachment and humor as a eunuch. She had not even
allowed for the possibility of Rosemary’s being damaged—or was she certain that
she couldn’t be?