Burning the Days (37 page)

I saw them at Cannes a year later, together, for the last time. He
was serving as a judge at the festival. He was wearing a dinner jacket when we talked and a white, ruffled shirt. She was in a matchless gown. They were to come to the country for lunch, but never showed up.

When Sharon Tate, along with four others, was senselessly murdered in Los Angeles one night, there was, in addition to horror and disgust, the shame. America had slaughtered one of its innocents. It was incomprehensible, God would not permit it. Perhaps Polanski, who had been in Europe at the time, had overreached himself, achieved too great a happiness, and it had been taken from him. His child, unborn, had died, too—the karma his father had given him was not to be passed on. I felt the sorrow for him that one feels for kings. His powers defied simple grief.

I thought of the bedroom in Santa Monica. It was spacious, on the second floor, facing the sea. I had stood in its corner. The sun was burning the floor. The large bed in which they had slept was unmade, the sheets rumpled, the pillows tossed. In the drawers of the built-in dresser were narrow glass windows to enable one to see the color of the shirts in each. There were Matisse drawings in the beautiful bath.

Among the road maps, cards, old addresses—the lost world never put in order—there is, I know, a photograph: the brilliant, almost demonic director on a couch with the tall, graceful girl. It was taken one night when we had dinner. I envied him his wife. It is difficult now to imagine the woman she would have become. She remains as she was, as if among all the herd there had been this exceptional creature, slightly awkward perhaps, but without blemish and carrying in her person the essential traits, the true heart of the paradise he had somehow bargained for.

——

In first-class cabins, paid for with movie money—a good portion of the money, as it happened—in the warm autumn of 1967 we
sailed on the
France.
Tremendous departure, crowds on the pier, the water widening, the ship assuming life. In the blue, oceanic evening, waiters brought drinks and packs of cigarettes to the table.

We dressed for dinner. Madeleine Carroll and her daughter were aboard, and Edward Albee en route to Paris and Leningrad for the openings of his play. As they entered, the bartender called out greetings to familiar couples by name. At afternoon tea there was an orchestra, and miniskirted girls without partners sat slumped in chairs. A theater producer told stories of Ireland—men who approached him in the street crying grandly, “Sir John!” He tried to correct them but could not. “A little something for charity,” they pleaded.

“What charity?”

“Sir John!” they wailed.

The second night at three in the morning, I woke abruptly. Someone was throwing gravel against the port-holes. It was heavy rain; we had run into a storm. The ship rolled, soared ominously, slid down. The steel shivered and creaked. We had three staterooms and four children, most of whom became seasick. His twin sister, Claude, was smiling and unaffected, but in the empty dining room I could see my son’s face—he was five, Fidi was his pet name—changing color as food was brought to the slanting table.

There was bingo in the calm of the next afternoon. Amid the old couples and children sat a dark-browed Edward Albee, two cards in front of him. The handsome blond boy he was traveling with we saw little of.

We were going to France for a year, to a village in the south, not far from Grasse, where we had rented a large, sparsely furnished farmhouse—a
mas
in the regional dialect—solidly built with walls two feet thick. It had been occupied the year before by Robert Penn Warren and his wife, Eleanor Clarke. I wrote to ask if they recommended it, and a letter came from her in reply. It described
a paradise, from the windows of which the sea could be distantly seen. You will have the most wonderful year of your life, it concluded, if you don’t happen to freeze to death. The house, of course, had no heat. In the worst months of winter the sheets were so cold we could not turn over in bed—we lay like statues of saints, rigid, arms crossed.

La Moutonne,
the house was called, the female sheep. The long, descending driveway was bordered by great eucalyptus trees, whose bark hung in sinuous strips. The front of the house more or less faced empty air. There was an embankment, the roofs of a few houses below and, far off, the tinfoil sea. The most wonderful year of your life—the simplicity of that promise.

All through the summer, to prepare them for regular French school—
école communale
—our two oldest daughters had been taking French lessons. In the Manhattan apartment of a professor, several times a week they sat and talked for an hour. The amount they learned, it turned out, was limited by a large wart the professor had on the tip of his tongue, visible when he spoke and absolutely mesmerizing to two little girls.

It was a long, beautiful fall. Many mornings I rose before dawn and went out on the bedroom balcony to read. Grasse rose blue in the distance. Its buildings had the luminous form and serenity of palaces. The only people we knew in the first months were Harvey Swados, the writer, and his family, half an hour away in Haut de Cagnes. It was they who had persuaded us to come to France—he was on a sabbatical.

Haut de Cagnes was on top of a hill, overlooking its then sleepy sister, Cagnes sur Mer, where Modigliani once lived and the gypsies used to come and bathe their horses in the sea. The Swadoses’ small house belonged to a sculptor or perhaps his children—he had abandoned his family, and his wife had died of drink, with empty bottles piled on the stairs. There were hundreds of books, many moldy, and often inscribed by famous figures from the
1920s, when a disheartened Scott Fitzgerald had sat in the square not far from the house and moaned, “Ernie’s done it,” of
The Sun Also Rises,
which had just come out.

The village of which
La Moutonne
was part was less distinguished, able to claim only some years when Renoir, the painter, had lived there. There was a stucco church and a restaurant or two, and beneath our olive trees with their silvery leaves a white goat danced on her hind legs, striving to strip the lowest boughs. This was Lily, sweet-smelling, graceful, and deeply unaffectionate. The children adored her, though treating her with caution. Her face offered little in the way of expression other than satisfaction at eating, and her yellow eyes, set high on her head, were as cold as those of a serpent. It was impossible to estimate what she knew, but whatever it was, we came to realize, was firmly ingrained. At night she was kept in a roomy stone shed attached to the house. During the day she would graze, often climbing onto the red-tile roof of the shed, from there stepping onto the balcony where I worked, and even, if they were open, through the french doors into the bedroom. It was only at milking time that she disappeared.

In memory my forehead is pressed against her round side and I am listening to the thin, metallic sound of milk shooting into the pail, which at a certain point, with seeming inattention, she will step in with a dirty rear hoof. I can only guess why this gave her pleasure.

She was, for a long time we hoped it—we had taken her in the car to her “wedding”—carrying a kid. Finally it was apparent. She was provided with a bed of fresh straw, to which she seemed indifferent, and one winter morning before school the children came running into the kitchen to say that there were four extra legs in the shed!

I have forgotten what we named Lily’s child, but in a matter of a day or two she was climbing the stone walls with her mother and learning the fundamentals of disdain.

I had my picture taken with Lily, holding her close while she looked the other way. One leg with its blackened, worn knee is visible and her mouth has the trace of a triumphant smile.

We were living in isolation. I had no one to talk to aside from my wife, no one whose opinion I could seek about what I had written. Late one afternoon I finished a story—it was about a man whose imaginary life slowly consumes his identity until ordinary events become fantastic—and in the panic that followed I gave it to my wife to read, desperate for a response. It was compelling, it was not. I went for a walk in the dusk. The path was desolate late in the year, but the house was lighted and alive as I returned. She was in the kitchen preparing supper. “Well, what did you think?” I asked.

“About what?”

“The story.”

“I couldn’t make head or tail of it,” she remarked.

In time we met people, among them John Collier and his wife. He was, at that time, essentially a scriptwriter. He had strong leftist convictions, though they did not affect his manner of living, which was lordly, if thinly funded. He had come through everything, marriages, leaving England, the blacklist, financial ruin, and somehow made it to shore near Grasse in a huge country house said to have once been the property of Pauline Bonaparte. He readily admitted his mistakes, they came bobbing along behind. He had been offered
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
to write when he was working in Los Angeles, but failed to see a film in it. He was luckier with
The African Queen
and had a profitable interest, even though his script was not used.

He was in his sixties, smiling, cherubic, not old, still quite green in fact, virtually a youth, he concluded. Nimble and rosy-cheeked, his thrusts were light as air. One time he came to ask if Harriet, his wife, could borrow some birth-control pills. My wife apologized, she was sorry but she didn’t have any extra. “Well,” he said unperturbedly, almost gaily, “I guess I’ll have to come over here.”

The Colliers belonged to a small beach club—there were many of them—to the west of Cannes, where Picasso sometimes came; the owners possessed a napkin on which he had once sketched a fish. We swam there and farther along where there was nothing, only a lengthy strip of bare sand. The sea was our chief pleasure. Fleeing from the waves or dashing into them, lying up by the rocks, wind-sheltered, there was the sense that time and events had stopped. We drove back, wearied by the sun, at day’s end to the immemorial house where the goat waited, a sentry on the roof.

The mail, when it came, was laid by the postman on a table in the entrance hall. The telephone, with its shrill, disquieting sound, rarely rang. I sat on the balcony at a worn wooden table and wrote. Racers breaking their legs on icy runs seemed far away, but page by page I assembled lines to be typed by a woman in Grasse. I cannot recall if the Mediterranean was visible from where I sat, but from the floor above it was, in the afternoon, blinding and white.

The sea remains, the dense fragrance on the road past the perfume factories, the daily
Nice-Matin
with its glaring stories of crime and car accidents. Otéro, penniless and aged, the Venus of the century before, died in Nice that year. She is mentioned in Isak Dinesen’s
Out of Africa:
old Mr. Bulpett announces that he appears in La Belle Otéro’s memoirs, as a young man who went through a hundred thousand for her sake within six months—this was pounds, when the pound was tremendous.

“And do you consider,” he was asked, “that you did have full value?”

After a moment’s thought, he replied, “Yes. Yes, I had.”

One night in May I had a dream of intense power—my daughter had become ill. I could not believe the seriousness, it was so sudden. In the dream she died. I was numb with sorrow. I told her brother and sisters. I went into the room where she lay, her beautiful face now closed, her long hair. Suddenly I was felled by it,
brought to my knees. Tears poured down my cheeks. She was dead.

You cannot believe in dreams and yet, at some level, you must. The pharaoh dreamed. Macbeth.

The next morning there was a boil, like a stigma, in her left nostril. By nightfall she was desperately sick. The doctor pronounced it serious, an infection. The danger was that it could go to the brain. There was a vein that ran here, by the nose, he said. An infection on the face was not bad, but here … Above all, it should be energetically treated.

By the next day, pus was running. The nurse who was to give an injection didn’t come. We drove to town. My daughter was eleven, the age of perfection. By now her lip was swollen, as thick as my thumb.

In the hospital they placed a lead shield over her eyes. She lay inert on a white table, two small pillows on either side of her head. My hand was held tightly by hers, I wanted to pull her back, to this world, to my desperate embrace. A square of light from an ominous machine was being moved onto her face with a shadowed + in the center of it.

“Don’t move,” the doctor said in French. “You must remain perfectly still for two or three minutes.”

Behind the lead shield I could see her very blue, open eyes. The doctor left the room. A sound began, a low, persistent sound of voltage. She was motionless. The muzzle of the machine was only inches above her face. The square of light was the size of one’s palm. We were helpless. I was sure she was going to die.

At one time in my journals, beneath the date I had written,
Every year seems the most terrible,
but that was self-pity. Anyone might have written that. The most terrible thing is the death of a child, for whom you would do so much, for whom you can do nothing. I had heard of the death of children and seen them lying helpless, but it was an arrow that would never be aimed your way.

Nina, my daughter, lived, but twelve years afterwards her older sister, Allan, died tragically. I have never been able to write the story. I reach a certain point and cannot go on. The death of kings can be recited, but not of one’s child. It was an electrical accident. It happened in the shower. I found her lying naked on the floor, the water running. I felt for her heartbeat and hurriedly carried her, legs across one arm, limp head along the other, outside. Thinking she had drowned, I gave her artificial respiration desperately, pressing down hard on her chest and then breathing into her mouth time after time. Nothing. I kept at it. An ambulance came. Someone pronounced her dead. I could not believe it.