Other Men's Daughters (10 page)

“That was something I might have thought about early. In fact, I did. Knowledge isn't always contraceptive.”

Fischer said human relationships were mostly mess, one had to make up one's mind to amputate or suffer. “I'm sorry, Robert, but I think it will get worse. At least for a while. Then the girl will find something else. And fatigue will overtake your affection. I wish I could help you.”

Merriwether fetched a drink for them. When he came back with two glasses of scotch, he told Fischer about Cynthia's using the apartment.

He was not entirely surprised that Fischer minded this. He said “fine,” but it was clearly not fine. Fischer had felt a piece of grit under his shell. For a man who lived in suitcases, he was fanatic about clean dishes, spots on rugs, rings on his coffee table. Knowing this, Merriwether had gone around after Cynthia's visits and tidied up. Well, he might as well let him have everything. “Tom, I'm not capable of carrying on an affair. I mean long distance. Sneaking off for weekends, sneaking away to telephone. That consumes, it humiliates.”

Fischer's rosy, big-nosed face took on once again the depth of a friend. He pushed off his annoyance. “Give it up, Robert. It will be painful for a bit. But you know as well as I how much easier everything else will be. There might even be another chance with Sarah.”

“Even if I could, the girl is committed. She's deeply involved. And she's not the steadiest sort of person. Just imagine what could happen.”

“Nothing will happen.”

“This girl could do herself an injury.”

“They say that. They feel that. But people can take a great deal more than they know. It will be hard for her, but then she'll feel the terrific relief of being out of something unsuitable. After all, she'll have had the experience of having known a superior person.”

“She's at least my equal, Tom. I'm going to have her come here. She's tired of her school, she's exhausted the professors there. She's extremely intelligent, her record is superb, she'd benefit here academically. She wants to take up Japanese, they have next to nothing down there. She can do serious work here. I can do my work. She can get an apartment. Not yours. I am sorry about that.”

Fischer shook his head, grimly, even angrily. “You're making a foolish mistake. For her, as well.”

“If she comes here, I think it'll burn itself out. Maybe I'll have had my fill of whatever it is I've needed.”

“Maybe.”

“And she'll be with young people, first-rate young people. She'll leave me before I get tired of her. I can take that. It'll be the proper punishment for me. It'll be misery to see her around with others, but this is a big place. I don't have to see her. She doesn't have to flaunt her conquests.”

“So you say.”

“Maybe she can leave as soon as she gets her degree.”

“Robert, I will do what I can. I wish I could dissuade you, but it's clear I can't. You want something, and your actions suit your want. Just consider this,” and Fischer waved his arms around the old room, the chairs, the books, the fire, the couches, the upstairs noise of children. The paraphernalia of comfort. But there was a force here that destabilized everything. Fischer was no guide in these questions of feeling. “If this isn't enough, well, I pity you.” Fischer had an odd smile, small teeth, small eyes. A cat's smile. He got up. “I hope you'll be in better shape when I come through again.” He went to the stairwell and called goodby to Sarah, Priscilla, Esmé and George—Albie hadn't come home for Thanksgiving.

part two

seven

From Marseilles to Menton, the Midi is on fire. The Minister of Coasts and Forests proposes massive reforestation with less inflammable vegetables, but meanwhile, the coast blazes. Driving up the hill in his rented Peugeot, Dr. Merriwether sees flames and smoke in the Var Valley. A strange excitement for him. A student of one of the four elements, perhaps he has a feeling for the others. “You're a natural firebug,” Cynthia tells him. “You'd better watch yourself. They arrested a creep yesterday up in Levens. A pharmacist from Genoa. Claimed he was satisfying
un besoin naturel
. Naturally. Everybody likes fires. So watch your step. I think Mademoiselle's got her eye on you already.”

Mademoiselle Seville is their landlady. With her dogs, Julot and Zephyre, she lives below the little villa in a wooden storage cellar. The fires terrify her. Coming back from her shopping trips to Nice, she closes her eyes when the bus rounds the turn at Boule-sur-Mer. “If there is no excitement, I open them. But every night, I dream the bus will turn, I will hear ‘
Mon dieu
.' I will open, and see my
propriété
in smoke.”

Mademoiselle is tiny, dark, always scurrying, her skin is the color of the dry ground, brown inlaid with olive and yellow. “She's like an exhausted gold mine,” says Cynthia.

Twice a day, Mademoiselle drags a hose over to the stone cistern and waters the acre she gardens. “Though what can a single woman do?” Headshake, gloom, a crooked little arm sweeping overgrown fields. “
La terre reste inculte
.”

Two weeks before, they drove up the stony path the first time. She'd stood on the terrace, grinning, holding a welcoming bowl of fresh raspberries, the seedballs glistening with sugar crystals. “What huge teeth you have,” muttered Cynthia. The dogs jumped on the little
quatre chevaux
Peugeot they'd baptized “Screed.” (After the Apostle's Creed: The first article of Screed's Credo was “I believe in regular gas.”)

“Oh God,” said Cynthia. She'd gotten out of Screed and looked around. Fruit trees, a grape arbor, the white villa gripped by red vines, roofed with blue clay tiles, and below, slope lapping green slope with shivery slices of the Mediterranean poked between. And in the air, country noises. In the school
cahier
he bought the next day in Nice, Dr. Merriwether wrote the first of his summer observations:
The air is one great motor: flies, midges, frogs, crickets, bees, humming birds. Plus scooters with musical horns (“Never on Sunday”)
.

Every morning, he sits on a beach lounger under the shredding timbers of the grape arbor, picking from a bowl of plums and writing away at sights, sounds, thoughts. He wears nothing but shorts Cynthia scissored from a pair of blue jeans.

Four days a week, he works in the laboratory of the
Faculté des Sciences
at the University of Nice; Tuesdays he takes part in the Conference on Motivation which the University and the
Fondation Rothschild
sponsor at the Rothschild villa in St. Jean. Early mornings, he writes in the notebook.
Poor Robert. Not enough flies in his joy ointment
. (The early entries were often self-indictments.)
I practice the golden mean: gold for me, meanness for others. Why do I suck the grape meat and complain about the bitterness of the skin?

Every morning their eyes open on a bough of yellow plums. Says Cynthia, “It's as if they've been eating moonbeams all night.” Cynthia lies on the other side of the great bed. Small jaw and coppery little nose peer out of the gold hair. Dr. Merriwether wakes up, puts on his blue shorts, a sport shirt, moccasins, washes up, and walks two hundred yards downhill to the
épicerie
for the morning loaf, butter, jam and cheese, then back up past church and post office (shut for July) for a pre-breakfast breakfast with his
cahier
in the grape arbor. The dogs nuzzle him; Zephyre, a police bitch shaved in ribs and belly, and Julot, a cataract-blinded terrier. Dr. Merriwether dislikes the two nuzzlers. They do everything in slow motion, even humping each other or hoisting legs to urinate on Screed's tires.

Merriwether watches a bee dive from flower to flower, nerve-rich threads sinking toward the sepal, body somersaulting in the ruby stamen. The bee scrapes, emerges, gold-dusted with pollen, dives next door, scrapes, returns to the ruby.
Only men lead double lives. The bee's decisions were made a million years ago. (Imagine a bee who didn't want to dance out the location of his honey. Impossible.) Lucky single-mindedness of animals
. The bee scrambles by a gold pistil, ascends it, then—an oddity—holds up. For rest? For goodby? Sunning itself? More likely getting a reading.
Their internal clocks synchronize with polarized light
. Dr. Merriwether dissolves in the joy of observation, speculating, remembering, lets himself become what he hears: gnats, ticks, blowflies, dragonflies, swoopsail butterflies, a trillion flying parts, marauding, raging, courting, laboring in flower mines; antenna, wings, tymbals, mandibles, whirring, crkkking, chrrrping, humming, buzzing.
Insect mind is insect action
.

A flash of yellow: Cynthia, with an armful of shirts and shorts. “Hot lavender,” she calls, hoisting a pair of his undershorts. “Mint, savory, marjoram, posies of mid-summer; that's for my sweetie.” Merriwether did the wash last time, agreeing, at times in theory, always in practice, that house chores be shared. The new age. “My shorts ‘stand in the level of your dreams.'” They have read
Winter's Tale
out loud. “It's too crazy,” says Cynthia; he found it magical. But no more servile Hermiones. No more Mademoiselles.

Every day they get more of her melancholy history, along with
petits cadeaux:
baskets of
tilleul
leaves for infusions, lavender stalks heavy with sachet, bowls of blue plums, raspberries, medlars. Tiny, toothy, lordotic, she peers into the kitchen through the plastic strips. “Tomatoes?” Hour after hour, comma turned caret, she picks the golden bloodballs hung from the propped plants.

“She looks like a mourner in an Indian village,” says Merriwether. The plants are propped like wigwams.

“Like hell. That back comes from bending over Julot.”

Cynthia and Merriwether have waked up to moaning. “Love calls.” “
Elle fait le soixante-neuf avec le chien
. How do they say ‘make the beast with two backs?'”

“You mean the table with five legs.” Cynthia sketches that in his
cahier
. “I was going to leave my papers to Widener.”

“This'll show you have heart.”

For the most part, Merriwether is content. Now and then Cynthia suffered one of the depressions he'd first encountered in the spring after her move to Cambridge. He'd found what he thought was a safe apartment for her in the Commonwealth Apartments on Mellen Street, an apartment-hotel for old ladies run by old ladies. “Why didn't you stick me in a nursing home? Or a cemetery?”

It was his idea to get her out of the Harvard mainstream, though not too far from her classes. The place was clean, safe, hermetically proper. There was a maid to clean up and change sheets daily. “Are the old ladies so dirty?” It was—in its way—furnished: huge lamps squatted on flimsy end-tables by a coarse-grained, cigar-colored sofa and cigar-colored chairs. Part of a cigar-colored family whose cousins were in the lobby. Dr. Merriwether bought a used television set from the offerings on the Holyoke Bulletin Board, Cynthia put up her pictures, her jewelry tree, her books, laid shawls and Indian rugs over the chairs, stuck her bottles and statuettes on the tables. In a day she made it her own. But the circle of old ladies who sat day-in-and-out in the lobby rotted her patience. She passed under their eyes with trepidation and then hatred. “I thought suttee only came after death. Or is this some Merriwether rite of living burial we simple folk don't know about?” Dr. Merriwether had thought she'd feel more secure here. “You could have put me in your deposit vault,” she said. “That's probably the heart of the matter.” She sank from anger to silent misery.

In St. Vetry, it went better. Merriwether did not feel like Judas, nor Cynthia a pariah. They became easier and easier with each other. Her intelligence and wit delighted him. So many years he had been uncomfortable, sometimes miserable at Sarah's incomprehension. Partly, it was that Sarah played the fool. “You wanted it that way,” she told him later. He hadn't. Yet he preferred the Old to the New Sarah who corrected everybody. The Universal Expert. “I have a right to an opinion.”

“It's not a question of opinion.”

“That's your opinion.”

“You know the function of the liver or you don't.”

“Everybody has common medical knowledge.”

“But the liver does not filter waste products. Maybe you were thinking of the kidney.”

“I said the kidney.”

“Ah. I thought you'd said the liver. That's what I was talking about with Esmé.”

“If you'd listen to me once in a while, you'd know I said the kidney.”

“Mommy,” said Esmé, “I think you said the liver.”

“I meant the kidney. It's not worth this barrage. There is no point in acting smug about what one's been trained for.” Exit in fury. His corrective calm infuriated her.

Cynthia too resented his calm in the face of her anger. “You're so cold.” But somehow they were equals. They argued as equals. And they could argue about anything. Driving up from Nice, they debated Hilbert's postulates. “Connection, congruence, continuity and,” she came up with “parallelism,” he, “symmetry.”

“Stoopid. You're sooo stoopid.”

Nuggets of shore light below them in the mild air; at Boule-sur-Mer, perfume from a wall of jasmine.

“I may be stoopid, but you're wrong.”

“You're stoopid and wrong. In you, they're congruent, connected, continuous and parallel.”

“They can't be parallel
and
connected. But,” as if remembering, “as a matter of fact, I am wrong.”

“All right,” she said. “You're just stoopid. Sometimes you remember a fact or two. I mean if you've just read it in the noospaper or something. Not something you read too long ago, of course. Twenty-four hours is a long time for my sweetie.”

She was so tan now, any twist of her face made flash points in her teeth and eyeballs. Within the bleaching hair, the small, flashing face was exceptionally lovely. Lots of ruffled feeling could be smoothed by that.