The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (21 page)

“Ah, Madame!” he said. “You speak French.”

I gave him the visitors’ routine.

“You mock, Madame. You have the accent
absolument pur.
”

The next morning, I left the hotel early for a walk around Paris. I had not been able to understand the boy who brought me breakfast, but no doubt he was from the provinces. Hoping that I would not encounter too many people from the provinces, I set out. I tramped for miles, afloat upon the first beatific daze of tourism. One by one, to sounds as of northern lights popping and sunken cathedrals emerging, all the postcards were coming true, and it was not until I was returning on the bus from Chaillot that, blinking, I listened for the first time that day.

Two women opposite me were talking; from their glances, directed at my plastic rain boots, they were talking about me. I was piqued at their apparent assumption that I would not understand them. A moment later, listening with closed eyes, I was glad that they could not be aware of the very odd way in which I was not understanding them. For what I was hearing went something like this: “rəgard lameriken se kautƒu sekõvnabl sa nespa purlãsãbl õ pøvwarlesulje”

“a el nəsõpavremã ƒik lezameriken ƒakynrəsãblalotr”

“a wi [Pause] tykone mari la fijœl də mõ dəmi frer ãdre selwi [or sel] avek ləbuk tylarãkõtre ƒemwa alo:r lœdi swa:r el [or il] a fet yn foskuƒ”

Hours later, in my room, with the help of the dictionary and Mlle. G.’s training in
dictée,
I pieced together what they had said. It seemed to have been roughly this:
“Regarde, l’Américaine, ses caoutchoucs. C’est convenable, ça, n’est-ce-pas, pour l’ensemble. On peut voir les souliers.”

“Ah, elles ne sont pas vraiment chics, les Américaines. Chacune ressemble
à
l’autre.”

“Ah, oui.
[Pause]
Tu connais Marie, la filleule de mon demi-frère André—celui
[or
celle] avec le bouc. Tu l’as rencontré chez moi. Alors, lundi soir, elle
[or
il
]
a fait une fausse couche!”

One of them, then, had thought my boots convenient for the ensemble, since one could see the shoes; the other had commented on the lack of real chic among American women, who all resembled one another. Digressing, they had gone on to speak of Marie, the goddaughter of a stepbrother, “the one with the
bouc.
You have met him [or her, since one could not tell from the construction] at my house.” Either he or Marie had made a false couch, whatever that was.

The latter I could not find in the dictionary at all.
“Bouc”
I at first recalled as
“banc”—
either André or Marie had some kind of bench, then, or pew. I had just about decided that André had a seat in the Chamber of Deputies and had made some kind of political mistake, when it occurred to me that the word had been
“bouc”—
goatee—which almost certainly meant André. What had he done? Or Marie? What the hell did it mean “to make a false couch”?

I sat for the good part of an hour, freely associating—really, now, the goddaughter of a stepbrother! When I could bear it no longer, I rang up an American friend who had lived in Paris for some years, with whom I was to lunch the next day.

“Oh, yes, how are you?” said Ann.

“Dead tired, actually,” I said, “and I’ve had a slight shock. Listen, it seems I can’t speak French after all. Will you translate something?”

“Sure.”

“What does to
‘faire une fausse couche’
mean?”

“Honey!” said Ann.

“What?”

“Where are you, dear?” she said, in a low voice. “At a doctor’s?”

“No, for God’s sake, I’m at the hotel. What’s the matter with you? You’re as bad as the dictionary.”

“Nothing’s the matter with
me
,” said Ann. “The phrase just means ‘to have a miscarriage,’ that’s all.”

“Ohhh,” I said. “Then it was Marie after all. Poor Marie.”

“Are you all right?”

“Oh, I’m fine,” I said. “Just fine. And thanks. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I went to bed early, assuring myself that what I had was merely disembarkation jitters (what would the psychologists call it—transliteration syndrome?), which would disappear overnight. Otherwise it was going to be very troublesome having to retire from every conversation to work it out in symbols.

A month went by, and the syndrome had not disappeared. Now and then, it was true, the more familiar nouns and verbs did make their way straight to my brain, by-passing the tangled intermediaries of my ear and the International Phonetic Alphabet. Occasionally, I was able to pick up an unpoetically useful phrase: to buy a brassière you asked for “something to hold up the gorge with”; the French said “Couci-couça” (never
“Comme ci, comme ça”)
and, when they wanted to say “I don’t know,” turned up their palms and said “Schpuh.” But meanwhile, my accent, fed by the lilt of true French, altogether outsoared the shadow of my night. When I did dare the phrases prepared carefully in my room for the eventualities of the day, they fell so superbly that any French vis-à-vis immediately dropped all thought of giving me a handicap and addressed me in the native argot, at the native rate—leaving me struck dumb.

New Year’s Eve was my last night in Paris. I had planned to fly to London to start the new year with telephones, parties, the wireless, conversation, in a wild blaze of unrestricted communication. But the airport had informed me that no planes were flying the Channel, or perhaps anywhere, for the next twenty-four hours, New Year’s Eve being the one night on which the pilots were traditionally “allowed” to get drunk. At least, it
seemed
to me that I had been so informed, but perhaps I libel, for by now my passion for accurately understanding what was said to me was dead. All my pockets and purses were full of paper scraps of decoding, set down in vowel-hallucinated corners while my lips moved grotesquely, and it seemed to me that, if left alone here any longer, I would end by having composed at random a phonetic variorum for France.

In a small, family-run café around the corner from my hotel, where I had often eaten alone, I ordered dinner, successive
cafés filtres,
and repeated doses of marc. Tonight, at the elegiac opening of the new year, it was “allowed”—for pilots and the warped failures of educational snobbism—to get drunk. Outside, it was raining, or weeping; in my heart, it was doing both.

Presently, I was the only customer at any of the zinc tables. Opposite, in a corner, the
grand-pére
of the family of owners lit a Gauloise and regarded me with the privileged stare of the elderly. He was the only one there who seemed aware that I existed; for the others I had the invisibility of the foreigner who cannot “speak”—next door to that of a child, I mused, except for the adult password of money in the pocket. The old man’s daughter, or daughter-in-law, a dark woman with a gall-bladder complexion and temperament, had served me obliquely and retired to the kitchen, from which she emerged now and then to speak sourly to her husband, a capped man, better-looking than she, who ignored her, lounging at the bar like a customer. I should have liked to know whether her sourness was in her words as well as her manner, and whether his lordliness was something personal between them or only the authority of the French male, but their harsh gutturals, so far from the sugarplum sounds I had been trained to that they did not even dissolve into phonetics, went by me like the crude blue smoke of the Gauloise. A girl of about fourteen—their daughter, I thought—was tending bar and deflecting the remarks of the customers with a petted, precocious insouciance. Now and then, her parents addressed remarks, either to her or to the men at the bar, that seemed to have the sharpness of reprimand, but I could not be sure; to my eye the gaiety of the men toward the young girl had a certain avuncular decorum that made the scene pleasant and tender to watch. In my own country, I loved to listen at bars, where the human scene was often arrested as it is in those genre paintings whose deceptively simple contours must be approached with all one’s knowledge of the period, and it saddened me not to be able to savor those nuances here.

I lit a Gauloise, too, with a flourish that the old man, who nodded stiffly, must have taken for a salute. And why not? Pantomime was all that was left to me. Or money. To hell with my perfectionist urge to understand; I must resign myself to being no different from those summer thousands who jammed the ocean every June, to whom Europe was merely a montage of their own sensations, a glamorous old phoenix that rose seasonally, just for them. On impulse, I mimed an invitation to the old man to join me in a marc. On second thought, I signaled for marc for everybody in the house.

“To the new year!” I said, in French, waving my glass at the old man. Inside my brain, my monitor tapped his worried finger—did
“nouvelle”
come before or after
“année”
in such cases, and wasn’t the accent a little “ice cream”? I drowned him, in another marc.

Across the room from me, the old man’s smile faded in and out like the Cheshire cat’s; I was not at all surprised when it spoke, in words I seemed to understand, inquiring politely as to my purpose in Paris. I was here on a scholarship, I replied. I was a writer.
(“Ecrivain? Romancier?”
asked my monitor faintly.)

“Ah,” said the old man. “I am familiar with one of your writers. Père Le Buc.”

“Père Le Buc?” I shook my head sadly. “I regret, but it is not known to me, the work of the Father Le Buc.”

“Pas un homme!”
he said.
“Une femme! Une femme qui s’appelle Père Le Buc!”

My monitor raised his head for one last time. “Perləbyk!” he chirped desperately. “Perləbyk!”

I listened. “Oh, my God,” I said then. “Of course. That is how it would be. Pearl Buck!”

“Mais oui,”
said the old man, beaming and raising his glass. “Perləbyk!”

At the bar, the loungers, thinking we were exchanging some toast, raised their own glasses in courteous imitation. “Perləbyk!” they said, politely. “Perləbyk!”

I raised mine.
“Il pleure,”
I began,
“il pleure dans mon coeur comme il pleut …”

Before the evening was over, I had given them quite a selection: from Verlaine, from Heredia’s “Les Trophées,” from Baudelaire’s poem on a painting by Delacroix, from de Musset’s “R-r-ra-ppelle-toi!” As a final tribute, I gave them certain stanzas from Hugo’s “L’Expiation”—the ones that begin
“Waterloo! Waterloo! Waterloo! Morne plaine!”
And in between, raised or lowered by a new faith that was not all brandy, into an air freed of cuneiform at last—I spoke French.

Making my way home afterward, along the dark stretches of the Rue du Bac, I reflected that to learn a language outside its native habitat you must really believe that the other country exists—in its humdrum, its winter self. Could I remember to stay there now—down in that lower-case world in which stairs creaked, cops yelled, in which women bought brassières and sometimes made the false couch?

The door of my hotel was locked. I rang, and M. Lampacher admitted me. He snapped on the stair light, economically timed to go out again in a matter of seconds, and watched me as I mounted the stairs with the aid of the banister.

“Off bright and early, hmm?” he said sleepily, in French. “Well, good night, Madame. Hope you had a good time here.”

I turned, wanting to answer him properly, to answer them all. At that moment, the light went off, perhaps to reinforce forever my faith in the mundanity of France.

“Ah, ça va, ça va!”
I said strongly, into the dark. “Couci-couça. Schpuh.”

M
ARY PONTHUS STEPPED OUTSIDE
, into the straw-colored June morning, from the Fifth Avenue entrance of the bank to which, as administratrix of her nephew’s trust fund, she had just paid her usual call when in New York. In her size forty-two Liberty lawn and wide ballibuntl hat set firmly on unshorn white hair, she might have just stepped off a veranda in Tuxedo or Newport, from one of those corners where the dowagers affixed themselves. It would be a corner, perhaps, smelling pleasantly of Morny bath soap and littered with playing cards, over which the pairs of blue-veined hands with the buffed, pale nails would pass expertly, pausing to dip now and then into the large Beauvais handbags—hallmarks of Parisian honeymoons of forty years ago—that had outlasted the husbands and were likely to outlast the owners as well.

In fact, Mrs. Ponthus had not been on such a veranda since a morning thirty years ago, when news had been brought to her there of the drowning of her husband and son, while out sailing, in a sudden squall. Her summers, ever since, had been spent in a house on the grounds of the New England college from which she had been married and to which, desperate for occupation, she had returned to teach within a year after the news. Occasionally the summers had varied, with trips abroad to university friends made through correspondence over the slowly published critiques which had earned her a more than scholarly repute during those years when, while teaching, she herself had learned—and had finally brought her the honorary doctorate of letters that she was to be awarded here later in the day.

She walked south on the Avenue, reluctant to complete her errand, to keep her appointment with her nephew and her old acquaintance, the doctor who had once more been summoned to treat him. If she thought, momentarily, of her husband now, it was not of the tall young man standing in the boat in that aura of lost grace and virility with which the youthfully dead surrounded themselves. His influence had survived in other ways—in the money he had left her, which had not only exempted her from that professorial scratching for preferment out of which so many theses were born, but had allowed also her dearest extravagance, the subsidizing, now and then, of some young person of promise. It had survived too in the income siphoned through her to the son of his dead brother—the nephew Paul she was on her way to see. And for him, Paul, it had been, blameless in itself, perhaps the touch of ruin.

She turned down Lexington Avenue toward the old brownstone where Paul and Helen, or rather just Paul now, had the second floor front. Here the street had a nineteenth-century breadth which only pointed up the dullness of the façades on each side, houses without resurrectible charm, that still had escaped the ash-can vibrancy of a slum. Really, Paul had a homing instinct for the vitiated, the in-between. In a city where almost no place was any longer this way depersonalized, he had managed to find a street still as inconclusive as himself, this byway that neither stank nor sparkled but merely had a look of having been turned, like the collar on an old shirt. Here and there the lights of some marginal enterprise glistened indeterminately on a parlor or a basement floor, but in general, if the street had any character at all, it was that of the “small private income.” Opposite Paul’s corner there was a vestigial hotel with an open-cage, curlicued elevator, potted plants at a few of its bays and a permanent roster of vintage guests. On her last visit she and Paul had breakfasted in its coffee shop in the company of two of these—an elderly theatrical relic in wing collar and Homburg, and a hennaed old woman, fussily ringed and dressed as if for some long-superannuated soirée, leading a dachshund that had settled down to sleep at once in an accustomed spot. The talkative waitress had fed scraps to the dog, provided saccharin for the old man and inquired about Paul’s last X rays, performing a function that, in a brisker neighborhood, might have been that of the neighborhood bartender.