It looked as though the mother had decided to behave well. She was going to be big about it and beat Lily at this game. Perhaps it was natural. Anyway, she was highly ladylike to me, but there came a moment when she couldn’t check herself, and she said, “I have met your son.”
“Oh yes, a slender fellow? Edward? He drives a red MG. You see him around Danbury sometimes.”
Presently I left, saying to Lily, “You’re a fine-looking big girl, but you oughtn’t to have done that to your mother.”
The stout old lady was sitting there on the sofa with her hands clasped and her eyes making a continuous line under her brows from tears or vexation.
“Good-by, Eugene,” said Lily.
“So long, Miss Simmons,” I said.
We didn’t part friends exactly.
Nevertheless we soon met again, but in New York City, for Lily had separated from her mother, quitted Danbury, and had a cold-water flat on Hudson Street where the drunks hid from the weather on the staircase. I came, a great weight, a huge shadow on those stairs, with my face full of country color and booze, and yellow pigskin gloves on my hands, and a ceaseless voice in my heart that said, I want, I want, I want, oh, I want-yes, go on, I said to myself, Strike, strike, strike! And I kept going on the staircase in my thick padded coat, in pigskin gloves and pigskin shoes, a pigskin wallet in my pocket, seething with lust and seething with trouble, and realizing how my gaze glittered up to the top banister where Lily had opened the door and was waiting. Her face was round, white, and full, her eyes clear and narrowed.
“Hell! How can you live In this stinking joint? It stinks here,” I said. The building had hall toilets; the chain pulls had turned green and there were panes of plum-colored glass in the doors.
She was a friend of the slum people, the old and the mothers in particular. She said she understood why they had television sets though on relief, and she let them keep their milk and butter in her refrigerator and filled out their social-security forms for them. I think she felt she did them good and showed these immigrants and Italians how nice an American could be. However, she genuinely tried to help them and ran around with her impulsive looks and said a lot of disconnected things.
The odors of this building clutched at your face, and I was coming up the stairs and said, “Whew, I am out of condition!”
We went into her apartment on the top floor. It was dirty, too, but there was light in it at least. We sat down to talk and Lily said to me, “Are you going to waste the rest of your life?”
With Frances the case was hopeless. Only once after I came back from the Army did anything of a personal nature take place between us, and after that it was no soap, so I let her be, more or less. Except that one morning in the kitchen we had a conversation that set us apart for good and all. Just a few words. They went like this:
“And what would you like to do now?”
(I was then losing interest in the farm.)
“I wonder,” I said, “if it’s too late for me to become a doctor-if I could enter medical school.”
Frances opened her mouth, usually so sober, not to say dismal and straight, and laughed at me; and as she laughed I saw nothing but her dark open mouth, and not even teeth, which is certainly strange, for she has teeth, white ones. What had happened to them?
“Okay, okay, okay,” I said.
Thus I realized that Lily was perfectly right about Frances. Nevertheless the rest did not follow.
“I need to have a child. I can’t wait much longer,” said Lily. “In a few years I’ll be thirty.”
“Am I responsible?” I said. “What’s the matter with you?”
“You and I have got to be together,” she said.
“Who says so?”
“We’ll die if we’re not,” she said.
A year or so went by, and she failed to convince me. I didn’t believe the thing could be so simple. So she suddenly married a man from New Jersey, a fellow named Hazard, a broker. Come to think of it she had spoken of him a few times, but I thought it was only more of her blackmail. Because she was a blackmailer. Anyway, she married him. This was her second marriage. Then I took Frances and the two girls and went to Europe, to France, for a year.
Several years of my boyhood were spent in the south of the country, near the town of Albi, where my old man was busy with his research. Fifty years ago I used to taunt a kid across the way, “François, oh François, ta soeur est constipée.” My father was a big man, solid and clean. His long underwear was made of Irish linen and his hatboxes were lined with red velvet and he ordered his shoes from England and his gloves from Vitale Milano, Rome. He played pretty well on the violin. My mother used to write poems in the brick cathedral of Albi. She had a favorite story about a lady from Paris who was very affected. They met in a narrow doorway of the church and the lady said, “Voulez-vous que je passasse?” So my mother said, “Passassassez, Madame.” She told everyone this joke and for many years would sometimes laugh and say in a whisper, “Passassassez.” Gone, those times. Closed, sealed, and gone.
But Frances and I didn’t go to Albi with the children. She was attending the Collège de France, where all the philosophers were. Apartments were hard to get but I rented a good one from a Russian prince. De Vogüé mentions his grandfather, who was minister under Nicolas I. He was a tall, gentle creature; his wife was Spanish and his Spanish mother-in-law, Señora Guirlandes, rode him continually. The guy was suffering from her. His wife and kids lived with the old woman while he moved into the maid’s room in the attic. About three million bucks, I have. I suppose I might have done something to help him. But at this time my heart was consumed with the demand I have mentioned-I want, I want! Poor prince, upstairs! His children were sick, and he said to me that if his condition didn’t improve he would throw himself out of the window.
I said, “Don’t be nuts, Prince.”
Guiltily, I lived in his apartment, slept in his bed, and bathed in his bath twice a day. Instead of helping, those two hot baths only aggravated my melancholy. After Frances laughed at my dream of a medical career I never discussed another thing with her. Around and around the city of Paris I walked every day; all the way to the Gobelin factories and the Père Lachaise Cemetery and St. Cloud I went on foot. The only person who considered what my life was like was Lily, now Lily Hazard. At the American Express I received a note from her written on one of the wedding announcements long after the date of the marriage. I was bursting with trouble, and as there are a lot of whores who cruise that neighborhood near the Madeleine, I looked some of them over, but this terrible repetition within-I want, I want! — was not stopped by any face I saw. I saw quite some faces.
“Lily may arrive,” I thought. And she did. She cruised the city in a taxi looking for me and caught up with me near the Metro Vavin. Big and shining, she cried out to me from the cab. She opened the antique door and tried to stand on the runningboard. Yes, she was beautiful-a good face, a clear, pure face, hot and white. Her neck as she stretched forward from the door of the cab was big and shapely. Her upper lip was trembling with joy. But, stirred as she was, she remembered those front teeth and kept them covered. What did I care then about new porcelain teeth! Blessed be God for the mercies He continually sends me!