To See You Again (20 page)

The Estonian girl, a small round blonde, was terribly attracted to that handsome American; she couldn’t help squirming against his hands. But some still cool part of her mind was thinking that she didn’t trust him, quite. He had told her that he had no girlfriend, and that after the seminar he would come up to visit her, in the small town in Brittany where her family now lived, but somehow she didn’t believe him, and she managed to push his hand away.

It was an extremely hot night, still; an almost full pale moon, earlier a slight illumination, now had set. The lake was flat, unmoving, and no breeze stirred in the surrounding shrubbery, the concealing pines.

Tired of watching the dancers, and there was no one around he wanted to talk to—he was tired of everyone there—Howard Stein decided to go out for a breath of air. He opened the wide door to the porch, and as he passed them, he dimly recognized Stanley Morris amorously engaged with the slutty-looking Estonian girl. Howard gave a slight twitch of disgust; he felt infinitely alone.

And with the most terrible sadness, as he walked out toward the lake, he remembered another, much happier summer of his life, twenty years back, when as a young man
he had taken a hiking tour through some of the Loire Valley, the Dordogne, with Kenneth Carlisle, his great friend, now dead for several years. It was quite possible, tortured Howard had forced himself to admit, that he had been in love with Kenneth; certainly those were his strongest feelings, ever, about another human being. However, Kenneth, who later married, could never have suspected anything of the sort; they were, quite simply, perfect friends, perfectly happy together. And there had been nothing of that nature in Howard’s later life, nothing at all.

Passing the grove, with its silly statuary, where he made that awful sentimental speech, Howard realized that he was close to tears.

He would have to do something, get a grip on himself, somehow. This fall he would start a new book; maybe at last the one on Melville.

And tomorrow he would force himself to make a final visit to the Jewish DP camp just down the road from the castle. This hastily and poorly thrown together camp, housing some four hundred displaced Jews who were waiting to go to Israel, had been, for Howard, an aching problem. First, Stanley Morris, good-looking, warm and ebulliently sympathetic to those people, went over there to pay a sort of investigatory call. He returned to the castle with wrenching stories of how he had been received: with such dignity and grace, such appreciation. He was served tea; those people were overjoyed to find a cultivated American who spoke Yiddish—they were terrific people, Stanley said. Compassionate and concerned, and feeling strong kinship with those displaced Jews, Howard overcame his own shy reluctance to go anywhere; the next time Stanley visited the camp, Howard went along. (Howard did not speak Yiddish; for generations no one in his family had.) And Howard too was deeply moved by just what Stanley had described: the dignity, the courage, the
gratitude for distinguished visits. One of the men had been a classics professor in Munich; another, a Polish physicist.

However, after that Stanley announced that he had been too disturbed ever to return; it tore him apart, he said, alluding to relatives lost in the Holocaust. Believing that in all conscience he must respect Stanley’s feelings, Howard returned to the camp for several visits alone. In his academic German he had to explain Stanley’s absence: extreme busyness, he said. He felt apologetic about not knowing Yiddish; in fact, he felt himself to be a poor substitute for Stanley.

But tomorrow he would visit them once more, to say goodbye.

One reason that Diana McBride felt badly about Howard Stein’s evident distaste for her was that he was the greatest teacher in her experience. She had taken two courses from him as an undergraduate, one on Donne and the Metaphysical poets, another an American literature survey. She had not read Donne before, nor any of those poets, and she was powerfully affected both by the marvelous poetry and by Howard Stein’s concise and brilliant lectures. She would leave the lecture hall in a sort of daze, illuminated, stirred, still in her mind hearing that crisp and elegant voice, those sharp Bostonian vowels.

And his lectures at the seminar had been wonderful; he spoke on Melville, Whitman, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams.

To the Italian boy, as they slowly danced, she said, “Dr. Stein’s lectures were terrific, weren’t they?”

“I think that he is a great man,” said Vittorio Garibaldi.

Vittorio was a slender, fair-complected northern Italian from Padua. There was the faintest physical resemblance between him and Diana; both were light, slight people—a
kinship of which they themselves were unaware, being so entirely unfamiliar to each other, but which they may have sensed as a sort of affinity.

Diana was aware of feeling less shy with Vittorio than she usually was, even dancing better. She felt light on her feet as they whirled to “Tuxedo Junction,” and a little lightheaded, almost silly; possibly from the wine? But she hadn’t had that much.

The record stopped and she and Vittorio looked at each other, and for no reason at all they laughed.

“Is that young girl, young McBride’s wife, partly Italian?” an eminent historian asked an eminent economist; both were American professors.

“I haven’t a clue. I don’t know her, actually.”

“Funny, she and that Italian boy look rather alike.”

The economist peered in the direction indicated. The idea of a conversation about an instructor’s wife bored him a great deal, but then so had the one they were just having, about prices in Paris before the war. “If you ask me they both look drunk,” he decisively said.

“My country is—how do you say?—a complete mess,” Vittorio seriously told Diana, during a long pause between records. “So torn in pieces, so everywhere divided. People with not homes. And the political parties, everybody fighting. Communists fighting Socialists, fighting Christian Democrats, fighting Monarchists. So much to do. I have to find some place in all that. Some work.”

“Which is your party?” asked Diana, with timid but intense interest.

“It is called the Action Party. Mainly former partisans.
But it is so small, it will be absorbed by some larger, stronger party, either Socialists or Communists.”

His high seriousness was stirring to Diana; he seemed to take a useful life for granted; work to be done meant that he must do it. She tried to think of her own country, the States, in that way, and she then sighed with helplessness; undoubtedly there too were things to be done, but she would not know how to start, having so far never thought in those terms.

Very gently Vittorio asked her, “And you, what of your life?”

The truth was that for the moment Diana planned to follow the course currently prescribed for wives of graduate students. She would get a job and help support her husband until he got his doctorate (William McBride did not hand out a lot of money, not believing in “spoiling” his son, unaware that he already had); then, according to this pattern, the husband with the Ph.D. could get a job and the wife could start having babies.

So far, this is what Diana had vaguely imagined would happen, but suddenly, seeing it from the center of Europe, as she stood so close to Vittorio Garibaldi, she was unable to commit herself to such a plan, unable even to say it. Instead she told him what was half a lie. With a little laugh she said, “Actually, I’ve thought of going to law school.” It was true that once she had thought about law school, but that was quite a few years ago, as a freshman in college, an enthusiastic innocent, long before meeting Braxton, years before this marriage.

Naturally, Vittorio took her at her word. “That is marvelous,” he told her, with great warmth, a wide white smile. “You will be a wonderful lawyer, I know that.”

And then he said, “I have never seen brown eyes to have so much gold in them as yours do.”

Vittorio was a highly serious young man; gold-brown
eyes cannot have been all that drew him to Diana, and he was powerfully drawn. He must have sensed a potentiality in her of which no one else was then aware, not her husband, nor her former professor Howard Stein, nor, surely, Diana herself. Vittorio thought she would be a good lawyer, would even attain some greatness.

Stanley Morris, aware that he had been caught at that ignominious activity, that adolescent wrestling with a vulgar little girl from nowhere, irrationally but quite humanly directed his rage toward her.

“You stupid little tease,” he whispered into her ear, the ear that a moment ago was listening to his endearments, his amorous persuasions. “You’re nothing but a waste of my time.” He sat up and began to rearrange his disordered clothes.

The Estonian girl began to cry, as softly as a kitten.

In total disgust, for he now thought the whole summer had been a waste of time, not getting him anywhere, Stanley went back into the hall, where the dance was still going on.

If he could find Howard Stein and engage him in serious conversation, thus reassuring Howard that he, Stanley, was a worthwhile person, the evening could not be counted as a total loss. But Howard did not seem to be around.

“Honey—” That nasal sound announced the plump presence of Braxton McBride, her young husband, at Diana’s elbow. Her just-soaring spirits dropped as she turned around.

“Honey, I think I’m getting a sort of a headache. I’d better go on to bed. No, you stay, I’ll be all right.”

According to the previous rules of their relationship,
Diana was then supposed to express strong sympathy and concern: Braxton had frequent terrible headaches. And of course she should accompany him to bed. But tonight she did not do this. She said, “Well, okay. Sleep is probably the best thing. I’ll be along later.”

Braxton was surprised, but there was not much he could say. With a martyred look he kissed her left cheek. He said good night and left.

The party seemed to be winding down. The wine was not strong enough for any long-range effect, and by now they had run out of it. And the good fellowship engendered by general awareness that this was the last night was running out too.

A conversation between the organizing, success-oriented dean and a visiting anthropologist came apart when the anthropologist described the seminar as “a bizarre but predictable group situation.”

The dean scowled as the anthropologist tried to explain. “I mean, all the groups acted within their assigned national characters. The Danes were noble, high-minded, the Austrians untrustworthy, the Spaniards dark and mysterious. The Italians were sexually active, the Americans foolishly ignorant and the Germans pigs.”

This did not work. The dean was thinking: Christ, these generalizing, bigoted remarks from an anthropologist? And that sentence could be read on his face.

“Of course I am generalizing,” said the anthropologist.

They parted in mutual distrust, dislike.

Various people went off to their beds.

No one was any longer playing records, the old man having gone to his bed in a narrow room just off the kitchen.

And, strangely, the still night was hotter than ever.

  •  •  •

One of the “mysterious” dark Spaniards, an intelligent and kindly fellow, walked out onto the porch for a taste of air, and there he came upon the Estonian girl, still crying. For several weeks he had been looking at her with a sort of lustful affection, and so he sat down beside her and did the obvious thing, which was to take her in his arms and stroke her hair.

She soon calmed down, and in a gentle way they talked, in French—whispering, because it was so late and dark. It turned out that by the most wonderful coincidence, the two of them would be attending the Sorbonne that fall. They would see each other again very soon—in Paris!

Quite suddenly visited by despair—it was over, their evening—Diana said, very soft-voiced, to Vittorio, “I guess I ought to go now. To bed.”

“No, you must not.”

Taking her hand, he led her strongly out through the door, across the porch and into the hot black still night, past the clearing where, among the ghostly statuary, Howard Stein had made his hopeful commencing speech.

After the clearing there was a small forest of pines that ran along the lake, and within that forest there was a ring of small thick trees, forming a cave. Into the cave Vittorio led Diana. Where, kissing, embracing each other, they slowly removed their clothes.

At a certain point he said to her, sighingly, “Ah, you are so
thin
.”

And suddenly, for Diana, who had always felt scrawny, inadequate, “thin” was the most beautiful word in the world.
Thin
.

Years later she would sometimes hear that word said in a certain way, and she would be pierced through with remembering
Vittorio, his voice and those dark hours that ended sometime close to dawn.

Since all those events took place so long ago, more than thirty years, it is possible now to know how things turned out, what happened to everyone.

To begin with the worst: Howard Stein committed suicide, an overdose of pills, in the early Fifties. In various intellectual communities, from his own Midwestern university to Harvard and Yale, there were frequent and overheated arguments as to why he did this. Political despair at the emerging climate of the Fifties was one of the most popular theories, repressed homosexuality the other. A few quieter voices (wives) mentioned loneliness, isolation, the sheer fatigue of living.

The dean who had organized the seminar, and who so believed in its success, suddenly left the academic world altogether and went into real estate, where he made a fortune in the late Fifties and early Sixties.

The eminent professors, on the whole, went on to further eminence, except for one, the historian, who, as an enthusiastic adviser to President Johnson on the Vietnam War, an eager hawk, was generally (academically) considered to have disgraced himself.

The unreconstructed Austrian boy married the Fascist Italian girl, amid great pomp, in Venice.

Another marriage: the dark Spanish boy and the pretty blond Estonian girl were married, at her parents’ home in Brittany.