Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (47 page)

And what business was she in? I asked her. Oceans, she replied. She was on her way to a conference on oceans — she was invited to conferences on oceans all over the world. Europe, Mexico, India, the Caribbean — after all, oceans are everywhere. Was she a marine biologist? An environmentalist? An expert on fishing or fish? It was with some impatience that she dismissed my crude attempts to categorize her. Her field was “everything to do with oceans,” she said.

I ordered the fish. She told the flight attendant that she was a vegetarian; she would choose the vegetables she wanted when she could
see
them, she said. This sounded so sensible; I felt like a cannibal for eating the fish — her business was probably
protecting
the oceans from the likes of me.

Since our flight had left for Paris from Toronto, she assumed I was a Canadian. No, I was an American, I confessed. She had lived in the United States, she told me; she'd not liked it. She was a professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax now; I imagined that Nova Scotia was a wise choice for someone who loved oceans — the warm current of the Gulf Stream flowing near the cold land.

I had a glass of red wine with my fish; I can't help it — I despise white wine. She continued to sip her one Scotch with her judicious selection of vegetables. As she talked, her elegance made me feel more and more oafish. I was en route to France to promote the French translation of
A Son of the Circus;
self-engendered publicity for my own novel

Struck me as exceedingly crass in comparison to her field — she promoted
oceans.
(The title in French,
Un enfant de la balle
, sounded slightly less crass, but I was unsure of how to pronounce it.)

It reluctantly emerged that I was a novelist; she hadn't heard of me, or read any of my novels. Frankly, I felt relieved. Novels can't compare to oceans — not even long novels. Furthermore, I had the feeling that, when she'd been a girl in Germany, even the bankers in her family were more cultured and better educated than what traipsed among us as literary types today — myself included.

Oh, her father had been a novelist, she said — she didn't offer his name. Meanwhile, I had swallowed some red wine the wrong way; my eyes were watering. She even
ate
exquisitely. I felt I might as well throw down my knife and fork, and dig in with both hands. Finally, she had a second Scotch; she drank so little I'd begun to feel like a drunk, too.

Suddenly there was spontaneous agreement between us: I believe the topic of conversation concerned how few good books had
not
been belittled by the movies that had been made from them… well, who
wouldn't
spontaneously agree with that? And then a coughing fit overcame her. It was too terrible a seizure to ignore, but there was nothing I could do — she coughed and coughed. It was a cough worthy of the daughter of the man who gave us Hans Castorp and
The Magic Mountain
, and all the rest; it was a cough that sounded ready for the sanatorium. But it was only after she quieted her cough, and dismissed it with an utter lack of concern — she said she'd had the flu — that I suddenly saw, in her noble profile, that haunted face of her father.

Elisabeth Mann Borgese was her name, the last surviving child of Thomas Mann. She must have made the move to Princeton and to Los Angeles — and then to Zürich, where he died. I regret that I didn't ask her. Instead, we talked about the film of
Death in Venice.
Visconti's idea to make Gustave Aschenbach a composer instead of a writer — Visconti made him Mahler — was not at all bad for a film, she declared. But the obviousness of the sexual attraction that Aschenbach feels for Tadzio, the beautiful boy, was nothing her father had intended — “purely Italian” was what I think Ms. Mann Borgese said of such obviousness. (Maybe
I
said that.)

Elisabeth Mann Borgese would go on to say that she experimented with dogs — cheerfully comparing their intelligence to that of her grandchildren. While she loved her grandchildren, and they were doubtless very smart, her dogs were far more educable, she said. One dog could play the piano, another could type — with their noses. At first I doubted this: dogs' noses seem too sensitive for piano playing and typing. If she'd said, with their
paws
… well, possibly. I felt guilty for thinking that there was some element of her father's fiction-writing capacities in her.

I felt far worse for imagining that whatever was making her cough was terminal. It was all because of the way she'd dismissed her cough by saying that she'd had the flu — implying that she was over it. I became worried about her; only later did I realize that I could not escape thinking of her as someone I had met in one of her father's novels.

There is that air of dismissal about the first sentence of
The Magic Mountain,
, too. It is one of my favorite beginnings. “An unassuming young man was traveling, in midsummer, from his native city of

Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Canton of the Grisons, on a three weeks' visit.” Poor Hans Castorp! From the first sentence, we know it's no “three weeks' visit” that this “unassuming young man” is taking — it is a trip to the end of his life.

Is it any wonder that I have the hardest time trying to separate Elisabeth Mann Borgese from her cough? Even looking at a biography of Thomas Mann, and at a picture of Elisabeth — she was a pretty little girl — I feel afraid for her, as I have so often felt afraid for the people in a Thomas Mann story. There's no logic to this. It would be impertinent of me to write to Ms. Mann Borgese and ask her if she is truly over the flu; yet I liked her so much — and I
loved
the story about her dogs. (I have since revised my first impression and convinced myself that one of them
does
type, and another plays the piano — with their noses.)

Of course, I
could
write to her, and politely inquire as to her health. She gave me her address, because I foolishly promised to send her one of my books — “foolishly,” because who would dare send a novel to Thomas Mann's daughter? And which one of mine should I send? There's nothing about oceans in any of them, and only one of them has “water” in the title; I somehow think that
The Water-Method Man
would be the
worst
of my novels to send her — what fool would send a story about a man who delays having urinary-tract surgery to Thomas Mann's daughter? It's becoming a dilemma.

If this were fiction, only a story, I would call it “Elisabeth's Cough.” Like Hans Castorp, Elisabeth would be depicted as having already entered that final sanatorium, which she would never leave. By the way that she ate, and sipped her Scotch, and by the way that she spoke about her dogs, and absolutely because of her cough, she has already become (in my mind) one of her father's exquisitely doomed characters.

But Elisabeth Mann Borgese is real. In reality, she probably
did
have the flu — and now she's long over it. That she physically resembles her father is only natural; and that her father's imagination has captured even my memory of my brief meeting with his daughter is not surprising — her father's imagination was vast.

It was 6:40
A.M.
when our Air France flight arrived in Paris. Janet and I were a little slow leaving the cabin, what with having to wake up Everett and gather together his books and toys; I saw that the regal Ms. Mann Borgese had remained in her seat while the other passengers left the plane. It was only when I took Everett's hand and we left the cabin that I saw the attendant who was waiting for her, with the wheelchair. Fittingly, a Thomas Mann detail.

“Which book of mine would
you
send to Elisabeth Mann?” I asked my friend Harvey Loomis.

He said, “A short one.” (This was deliberately unfair; Harvey knows that all my novels are long.)

I am considering
A Son of the Circus
, not only because it's the most recent of my novels but because Ms. Mann Borgese told me that she'd been to ocean conferences in India. Then again, India isn't for everyone — and
A Son of the Circus
is the longest of my books.

I am considering
The Cider House Rules
because isn't Maine a little like Nova Scotia? Also, it's a historical novel — and sort of scientific. Then again, obstetrics and gynecological surgery aren't for everyone either.

I am considering
A Prayer for Owen Meany
because the narrator ends up living in Canada because he hates the United States — and didn't Elisabeth say to me that she didn't like living in the U.S.? Then again, it's a religious novel — religion isn't for everyone either.

And I am considering
The World According to Garp
because of how much I've read about it — namely, that it is the
only
one of my novels that anyone actually
likes
(I see this in print all the time). Then again, I may be the only person who remembers that, at the time
Garp
was published, the reviews were very mixed; the reviews of
A Son of the Circus, The Cider House Rules
, and
A Prayer for Owen Meany
were better than the reviews of
Garp.
(Look who's talking about reviews!)

The matter is unresolved. The point is: I think that Günter Grass will like my story about meeting Thomas Mann's daughter on an airplane. And maybe Günter will have his own ideas about which of my books I should send to Elisabeth. Maybe this one.

Postscript: I decided that I couldn't make Elisabeth wait for this collection; it wouldn't be published for 10 months after my meeting her on the Air France flight to Paris. Having promised to send Ms. Mann Borgese a book in April ‘95, it would have been entirely too cavalier of me to deliver the goods in February ‘96; nor could I have permitted myself the informality of beginning an accompanying letter to Elisabeth with “Hi! Remember me?” (Or words to that effect.)

No; it simply wouldn't have been proper to make her wait — not that I presumed she was “waiting.” By June, in fact, I feared that she had probably forgotten that she'd ever met me — or else she remembered me as the liar she'd met on the airplane, the shabbily dressed man who drank red wine with fish and who claimed to be a novelist (a likely story). Nor could I bear to wait until September, until I would be with Günter Grass, to tell him the story, which (more than a month after the Air France flight) I still thought of as a story called “Elisabeth's Cough.” Instead, I wrote to Günter in May: I told him the details of my encounter with Elisabeth Mann Borgese; he replied immediately, demanding to know which book I had sent her. It further shamed me that Grass presumed I had been enough of a gentleman to have
already
sent Elisabeth a book.

And so I sent her
The Cider House Rules;
it was as spontaneous a decision as any decision that takes two months — I sent the novel off to Halifax in June, addressed to Professor Elisabeth Mann Borgese at the International Ocean Institute of Dalhousie University. I happened to have a handsome leather-bound edition of
The Cider House Rules
on hand; this lent to the novel a certain elegance that it might otherwise have lacked. Also — and this was truly spontaneous — I thought that the atmosphere of the orphanage hospital in St. Cloud's, Maine, owed its inspiration (in part) to the atmosphere of no escape that I remembered so powerfully from the sanatorium in
The Magic Mountain.
At least my accompanying letter to Elisabeth said that this was the case; I may have added that I thought
The Cider House Rules
was among the more “atmospheric” of my novels — if one doesn't come away from Thomas Mann with
atmosphere
, what does one come away with? (Or words to that effect.)

Elisabeth graciously responded, at once. She thanked me for my book and expressed her regret that she had no book of her own to send me. (‘The oceans do not leave me any time, and when they release me, I'll be too old to write anything.”) Instead of a book, Elisabeth sent me a tape recording. On the audio cassette, there was her photograph: she was at the piano with four or five dogs — all English setters. I must confess that the one nosing the keyboard looked remarkably self-possessed. The pianist's name was Claudio; Elisabeth explained in her letter that what I would hear on the tape was her fingers playing the left hand and Claudio's nose playing the right.

Indeed, that is what I heard; I have heard it many times since that first time, when I played the tape in my car. I have played it for countless appreciative houseguests, and at almost every dinner party where the conversation (predictably) flags. Only my most musically inclined friends are quick to recognize the three pieces that Elisabeth and Claudio play: a minuet by Mozart, a Schumann (one of the pieces for children), and a Bartók (also for children). And none of my friends has been able to identify Claudio as an English setter; they generally offer the guess that Claudio is a somewhat gifted child.

It was Claudio's great-great-grandfather, Arlecchino, who was the typist. Elisabeth included some samples of the typist's masterful nosework — Arlecchino was called Arli, for short. And so it happened that Arli's great-great-grandson Claudio would learn to play the right-hand part of a minuet by Mozart, and pieces for children by Schumann and Bartók — with his nose — and that Claudio's piano teacher would be an oceanographer, who herself is a great novelist's daughter.

It is exactly as Günter Grass has written: “People want to hear the truth. But when the truth is told, they say, ‘Anyway, it's all made up.' Or, with a laugh, ‘What that man won't think up next!'“

As for the story that I used to call “Elisabeth's Cough,” I would now suggest a different title. Besides, Elisabeth assured me in her letter that she was completely recovered from the cough that conjured up the sanatorium in my mind. “Many years ago,” she wrote, “a lot of young people thought they had TB, after reading
The Magic Mountain
, but don't worry about me: I don't have it. That cough was passing and harmless.”