Testimony and Demeanor (17 page)

I said, somewhat stupidly, “You mean it’s just nerves?”

He explained, obviously not for the first time, “No, not
just
nerves. No, not
just
in her mind. Her symptoms are real, whatever their origin. Anxiety is not
just
a cop-out diagnosis on my part. The only thing I’m copping out on is prognosis. My guess is she’ll feel better when she feels better. Sounds pretty dumb, huh? I gave her the name of a psychiatrist.” I must have looked alarmed. He said, “That doesn’t mean anything dramatic. It just means I’ve ruled out the possibilities that might have required the kind of treatment I’m competent at. O.K.? If I’m brusque with you, it doesn’t mean I’m brusque with the patient. And finally, I think she’s better—that is, I think her symptoms have abated. I’ve got to go now.” He got up and added, “Look.
I’m sorry. I know you’re a friend of hers. O.K.? That’s a help. O.K.?”

I was still at a loss. When I saw Elizabeth Mary again, I asked if she’d recovered her use of numbers. She said she thought she had and asked me to check the grade point averages of her graduate seminar. I did. It only took several minutes. I said she’d got all fifteen of them right.

Elizabeth Mary asked about my own state of mind. I said I thought I was O.K. I told her about my spell of agoraphobia, and said that it hadn’t recurred. I said that I’d just taken a drive through the countryside and had found it beautiful.

“Well, Oliver, that is reassuring, because you and I are birds of a feather. But I think I need an antidotal calming influence. I think I shall call Bobby and have him come visit me. Bobby is so untroubled, he is just what I need after being in hospital.”

I said that was a good idea. I also said that she looked better. In fact, she looked quite beautiful, but frail. Her pale gold skin was drawn tight across her face. There was a shadow under her eyes.

She said, “Well, I shall just give my lectures. What is the worst that can happen? A hundred people I shall never see again will hear me sounding foolish. But I wish to see a speech therapist—I’m sure there are one or two little tricks that will help.”

Bobby did fly out. I picked him up at the airport. It was wonderful to see him, and he was wonderful with Elizabeth Mary. We all drove to her lecture together. His presence made it a different occasion—he radiated cheerfulness, as though this trip was the biggest treat in the world and Elizabeth Mary’s lecture a chance to catch up on something he’d always wanted to know about. He had acquired something of the charm his father had had in his prime—a steady flow of alert but slightly inarticulate enthusiasm for other people’s events. I remember
feeling pleased by (but superior to) Mr. Morse’s pleasure at school functions, to which other fathers came looking tired and bothered, or else alertly scanned the boys, inspecting us early for traces of family faults. Mr. Morse liked the buildings, the view, the glee club, the art room, the prospect of eating a meal at the town inn, of being with us. And here it all was again—Bobby at thirty saying how healthy the students looked, how handsome the old stone capital, how much fun it was to come out to see us.

“I’ll bet Oliver knows a good place to eat lunch. What was that ad we saw—the Amana Colonies? What about that?”

I said I didn’t know; I’d heard of a German restaurant there; it was quite a drive.

Elizabeth Mary said, “Bobby wants to see the countryside. We shall all go. Do you know they have pigs here that are entirely black to their waist and then entirely white? Or is it the other way around?”

We arrived at the lecture hall. “A pig’s waist?” Bobby said. “Where on earth is a pig’s waist?”

Elizabeth Mary said, “The same place as on a fish.”

The transfusion of Bobby’s good spirits into Elizabeth Mary seemed to do the job.

She stood boldly at the podium, she apologized to the class for having missed last Thursday’s lecture, and then launched into her topic with aplomb.

Honorée came in late and sat in the aisle beside Bobby and me. I offered her my seat but she said no.

Elizabeth Mary faltered only two or three times; she got past her difficulty in each case by almost singing the word and then blending this note back into speech by half chanting the next several words.

I was sympathetically exhausted by the end of the hour, so I expected Elizabeth Mary to be near collapse, but when she joined Bobby and me she was buzzing with energy. There was
a swirl of students about her in the aisle. Bobby looked at Elizabeth Mary’s fans with interest and pleasure as he stood beside her. As the students began to leave, Honorée touched my arm. I’d lost track of her for the moment.

Elizabeth Mary said, “Bobby, I’m ravenous. Are you ready, Oliver?”

Bobby said to me, “Are you as good as she is? Don’t tell me I’m the only dumb one in our gang.” As he spoke he took in Honorée and smiled at her. Honorée smiled back. I introduced them.

Honorée laughed and said, “I know—you’re Oliver’s friend from school. It’s so funny to see you like this because I think of you as a schoolboy. I mean, I heard about you as Oliver’s roommate in boarding school. So I think of you as younger than me even though Oliver is older now.”

Honorée became embarrassed. Bobby laughed and fussed over her. “Oh, no, no, no. He’s probably told you all sorts of things, hasn’t he? I can’t stand it. Look—I’m not like he says. What did he say? I’ll bet it was his other roommate.” He held her wrist in a friendly way for a second, then clasped his hands together in comic pleading. Honorée squeezed her lips shut and tucked her chin in with pleasure. Bobby nodded at me and said, “Are you in this joker’s class? Herr Professor here. Is he any good?” Honorée was smiling like a very young child being entertained by a teasing uncle.

The upshot was that Bobby invited Honorée to join us for lunch.

In a way that I didn’t understand at the time, I felt diminished.

We had a huge German meal—sauerbraten and spaetzle—that made us sink into our chairs. Honorée and Bobby had chocolate cake with nuts in it. Elizabeth Mary was not, as I’d first feared, mad at Bobby for inviting Honorée. And Honorée wasn’t shy or overeager. I finally realized the difficulty was all with me.

Honorée got Elizabeth Mary to tell the outline of her life. Honorée said that this confirmed her belief that she herself should travel more, have more adventures, and be more open to change. She hoped that by doing that she might become more like Elizabeth Mary.

Elizabeth Mary smiled at this compliment. I thought that Honorée sounded like Walt Whitman, all aggressive innocence.

Honorée asked Elizabeth Mary if it would be a good idea for her to go to Sweden for a year. Honorée said she probably would learn Swedish very fast since her mother had spoken it to her when she was a baby.

I said, “Saying ‘Dere’s a yady with a yight’ when you’re two years old isn’t the same thing as speaking Swedish.”

Bobby asked Honorée what “yady with a yight” was all about. Honorée told the story. Bobby loved it. He repeated, “Dere’s
anudder
yady with a yight!” several times.

Honorée said, “If I went to Sweden and learned Swedish, then I might even try to be in a Swedish movie. Maybe not with Ingmar Bergman, but maybe with someone like him when he was just starting out.”

“Or you could go sit at a drugstore counter at Hollywood and Vine,” I said, “saying ‘Dere’s a yady with a yight,’ to distinguish you from the other ten thousand apple-cheeked farm girls wearing too much make-up. Your dreaming is taking a bad turn. At least Miss Quist only wants to be homecoming queen. You used to wish for something better than movies.”

Honorée turned to me and said seriously and much too slowly, “Why are you being so mean to me?”

I was stunned. Her saying that was out of the question; by the expression on her face she showed everyone she was wounded.

I said, “Honorée, don’t be so touchy. For heaven sakes …” I was horribly embarrassed. I also felt a poisonous rage. There was a silence.

Elizabeth Mary said, “Honorée dear, sometimes boys will be nothing but boys. He teases you because he likes you.”

Bobby said, “ ‘Boys will be nothing but boys.’ That’s really better. I like that better—‘nothing but.’ Pretty soon you’ll be nothing but adorable. I was at a party once and a tall woman came up to me, a complete stranger, and she pinched my cheek and said, ‘When God made you, sonny, he made you cute!’ I can’t tell you how charming it was. It may not sound as charming as it really was. But it was. So I drink to charm.” He raised his glass to Elizabeth Mary and then to Honorée. He said to me, “Your problem is that you’re resisting charm.” He laughed. “And my problem is that I can’t.”

I said, “You remind me of your father when I first met him.”

Bobby kept on entertaining everyone. I looked out the window. Bobby was very nice, and he was certainly my friend, but he was wrong about my resisting charm. He couldn’t tell his own charm apart from what charmed him. I didn’t resist what charmed me—I only wished to separate it from its impurities. Bobby was easily pleased and easily pleasant. He would have been corny if he hadn’t been graceful.

But the main circumstance for me then was that Honorée had hurt my feelings worse than I’d hurt hers. I couldn’t tell when. Perhaps it was her talk of wanting to change, to have adventures. All this talk of change and adventure made me wish for stillness, made me wish that accidents would vanish, that what was beautiful would be itself and nothing else.

And, as in a fairy tale, I got my wish. We all got our wishes. That is to say, we got to go on wishing. My wish became my seal.

Honorée ate the last crumbs of her cake there, finished the school year, and arranged to go to Sweden for the summer to
stay with her mother’s relatives. She sent me a letter and a picture of herself carrying a knapsack. She wrote that in the picture she was crossing the Arctic Circle and that it was the middle of the night and still light.

Elizabeth Mary finished the school year and went back to New York with Bobby.

Honorée didn’t come back to school. In the late fall she sent me a letter and a picture of herself in cross-country ski clothes after the first snowfall.

I spent the summer in New York. Bobby, Elizabeth Mary, Antoinette, and I were a perfect circle of friends.

In the fall, when I was back in Iowa, Elizabeth Mary wrote me that she had a job offer for the following year, and that she and Bobby were thinking of getting married. Elizabeth Mary also discovered a job for me at a fairly good Catholic women’s college near New York. We could all be together again.

That Christmas when I went back to New York I only saw Antoinette, Elizabeth Mary, and Bobby. Except of course for meeting the chairwoman who offered me the job on Elizabeth Mary’s recommendation. Everything was getting simpler.

My remaining half year at Iowa was completely calm. My prospects kept me from being lonely. The only curious event was that Miss Quist called me in February. Her sorority had, in fact, sponsored her and she had been nominated for homecoming queen and had been voted runner-up, first princess in the queen’s court. That had been in November. When she called me in February her voice sounded oddly different, much less pointed. She asked if she could come out to my house to talk about a problem. I said I was going to my office. She said she couldn’t go there—would I stop by her room at her boardinghouse? I hesitated and she said, “Please. I really need help.”

When I got to the boardinghouse, she was waiting just inside the front door. I almost didn’t recognize her. Her face was fat and puffy. She took my arm and gestured for me to come
upstairs. Her landlady popped out of a door on the first floor and said, “Just one minute there, young lady.” Miss Quist looked terrified. The landlady said, “This is approved housing and you’re just not going to get away with this sneaking anymore of these men in your room.” The landlady was spattering venom. I couldn’t tell if I was an exhibit for the prosecution, the judge hearing her case, or the victim of Miss Quist’s crime. The landlady went on, “I’d be within my rights to see your dean. You can’t sneak away—there’s those bad checks—”

“Just one,” Miss Quist said.

“Oh ho! Well now, there’s the one to me and then there’s the drugstore—they called up here, you know. That’s two, if you could ever bring yourself to tell the truth for once.”

Miss Quist was beaten. The landlady saw it in her numb face. The landlady said, “What do you have to say to that? It’s time you learned that most people pay for things. You came in here this fall all neat and pretty. Well, now look at you.”

I finally said, “There’s no need to be abusive.” I loaned Miss Quist the money for her rent. We went out to the car and drove to the drugstore. I paid her debt while she waited in the car with her overcoat lapels pulled in front of her face. She wouldn’t go anywhere where she might be seen. I took her back to my house for coffee. She kept her overcoat on. She was miserable, but her troubles with the world weren’t as bad as she thought. Aside from the two checks, her first worry was that she’d gained twenty pounds. She’d been told by a psychologist at student health that the reason she’d done this was to make herself unattractive to men. I asked why the psychologist thought she wanted to do that. Miss Quist said that she’d stolen a dress from a store: she’d tried it on, gone back to the dressing room and simply put her own dress and coat on over it. Some days later a man who worked in the store stopped her in the street and accused her of stealing the dress. He said he might not have to tell anyone—he understood why a good-looker
like her wanted a nice dress—but they’d have to talk it over since he might have to be responsible for the missing dress.

It struck me as an almost archaic mode. I pointed out that the clerk would be in an awkward position to press charges, now that he’d compromised himself.

Miss Quist said, “Oh, I know that. I even found out later he’s married.” She added grimly, “So he can’t do a thing.”

I asked what she thought this had to do with her gaining weight. She said, “I’m punishing myself and then I’m punishing men.”

That sounded archaic too. I asked if she had any more problems.