“I know.” After some peering and indecision he had decided to face the hotel gardens instead of the sea. “I may not stay much longer, either. I don’t know.”
Barbara, bound to her aunt’s unyielding cycle of city, sea, and mountains, marveled at his freedom. She fancied him stepping out of his hotel one morning and suddenly asking himself, “Shall I go back to Paris now, or another day?” and taking off at once for Paris, or Rome, or Lisbon, or, having decided he had had enough of this, his parents’ house.
“My father thinks I should go to Venice and Florence, now that I’m south.” He spoke with neither enthusiasm nor resentment; had his father ordered him home, he would have set off with the same equable temper.
“Then you might go to Italy soon,” Barbara said. He nodded. “I’m going home in September,” she said. “My mother’s coming for the summer, and we’re going back together. I guess I’ll go back to school. I have to do something — learn something, I mean.”
“What for?”
“Well, it’s just that I have to do something. It’s different for you,” she said, helplessly. “You have something to do. You’ve got—” She blushed, and went on, with resolution, “You’ve got this art to do.”
Startled by her reminder of his vocation, he dropped his arm. He knew he would have to decide very soon whether to go on with painting or begin something else. If someone who knows would come along and tell me what to do this minute, he thought, I would do whatever he said.
Barbara, believing him in contact with some life of the spirit from which she was excluded, looked at him with admiration; and when he did not move for a moment longer, she focused her camera and took his picture, so that her album called “Souvenirs de France” would include this image of Mike looking rapt and destined, his eyes secretively shadowed, high above the sea.
“It’s different for me,” Barbara said, forgetting once more to wind her film. “I can’t do anything. There’s nothing I’m good at. I’m really dumb in school.” She laid her camera in the shade. “Really dumb,” she repeated, shaking her head at the thought. Confronted with ruled examination paper, the electric clock purring on the wall, she was lost — sometimes she was sick and had to leave the room; sometimes she just wrote nonsense. At school, they had tested her for aptitudes and found only that she liked to cook and had played with dolls until it was a scandal; her mother had had to give the dolls away. Anybody could cook and grow up to be a parent, the brisk, sallow student psychologist from N.Y.U. who had tested her implied, and he had then written something terrible — Barbara could only imagine the summing up of her inadequacies — that had been shown to all her teachers and to her mother.
“You should worry,” Mike said. “You’ll probably get married sometime, anyway, so what does it matter what you learn?”
The effect of this was to strike her into silence.
She drew her knees up and examined her dusty sandals; she pulled at her skirt so that it covered her legs, and drew her sweater close. Does he mean to him, she wondered. It had occurred to her many times in this lonely winter that only marriage would save her from disgrace, from growing up with no skills and no profession. Her own mother did nothing all day, but she was excused by having once been married. It was the image of her aunt that Barbara found distressing — her aunt filling her day with scurrying errands, writing letters of complaint (Bus conductors were ruder than before the war. Why did young girls shrink from domestic service? The streets of Paris were increasingly dirtier) to the “Letters” column of the Continental Daily Mail. But who would marry me, Barbara had thought. From her reading she knew that she would never meet men or be of interest to them until she could, suddenly and brilliantly, perform on the violin, become a member of Macy’s Junior Executive Squad, or, at the very least, take shorthand at a hundred and twenty words a minute.
She peered up at Mike now, but he was looking only at his canvas, daubing in another patch of perfectly red geraniums. “For a while, they thought I could act,” she said, offering him this semiprecious treasure. “I had a radio audition last year, when I was still fifteen. Really,” she said quickly, as if he were about to round on her with complete disbelief. “My speech-class teacher was nice. When my mother came to school to see why I wasn’t doing so well, she met all my teachers. This teacher, Mr. Peppner, told her — something. He’s the only man teacher in the whole school.” She frowned, wondering once again what Mr. Peppner in his polished dark blue suit had found to say to Mrs. Ainslie; probably she, moist-eyed and smelling expensive, had been so warm, so interested, that Mr. Peppner had had no idea he was being treated like a meritorious cook and had said something extravagant. A few days later, Barbara’s mother had asked to dinner a bald young man in spectacles, who had stared hard at Barbara and said, gracefully, that her coloring was much too delicate for television but that he would make an appointment for her with someone else.
“It’s not that my mother wanted me to work, or anything,” Barbara explained to Mike, “but a friend of hers said it would give me poise and confidence. So I went to be tested. I had to read lines in a play. There was someone else being tested, a man, and then there was a girl, a real actress. She was only helping. My name in the play was Gillian. It was called ‘The Faltering Years.’”
Mike had never heard of it.
“Well, neither did I, but they all seemed to know it,” Barbara said. “I don’t think it was one of the great plays of our time, or anything like that. Of our time,” she repeated thoughtfully, having frequently read this phrase on the jackets of books. “Anyway, I had to be this Mayfair debutante. I was the girlfriend of this man, but I was leaving him.”
“For a rich lord?” Mike said, smiling.
“No,” she said, seriously. “He was the lord, only poor. I was leaving him for a rich industrialist. I had to say, ‘Peter, won’t you try to understand?’ Then he said something. I forget what. Then I had to say, ‘It isn’t you, Peter, and it isn’t me. It’s just.’ The line ended that way, but like a question. That was my main part, or most of it. Then I went away, but I was sorry. They skipped all that. Then the man being tested had this big scene with the actress. She was the nurse to his sick mother, who wins his heart. I forget what they said.”
“It sounds to me like she had the best part,” said Mike.
“She was around thirty,” Barbara said. “I think she was the director’s girlfriend. He took her to lunch afterwards. I saw them going out. Anyway, at the end I had to say to her, ‘You love Peter very much, don’t you?’ And she had to say, ‘Terribly.’ Just the way she said that, the director told me, showed she was an actress. I guess he meant I wasn’t. Anyway, they said I’d hear from them, but I never did.”
“It’s the craziest audition I ever heard of,” Mike said. He stopped working and turned to look at her. “You a Mayfair debutante, for God’s sake. It wasn’t a fair audition.”
She looked up at him, troubled. “But they must know what they’re doing, don’t you think?” At this reminder of knowledge and authority, Mike agreed that they probably did. “Are you hungry?” she asked. She was tired of the conversation, of exposing her failures.
The sun was nearly overhead, and they moved under a parasol pine. “There’s nothing to drink,” Barbara said apologetically, “but she put in some oranges.”
They ate their lunch in silence, like tired Alpinists resting on a ledge. Barbara screwed her eyes tight and tried to read the lettering on the monument; it was too hot to walk across the grass, out of their round island of shade. “It’s to some queen,” she said at last, and read out: “‘Elizabeth, impératrice d’Autriche et reine de la Hongrie.’ Well, I never heard of her, did you? Maybe she stayed at this hotel.” Mike seemed to be falling asleep. “About Hungary, you know,” she said, speaking rapidly. “One time, I went to a funny revue in Paris with my aunt. It was supposed to be in the war, and this lady was going to entertain the Russian ambassador. She wanted to dress up her little dog in the Russian costume, in his honor, but she had only a Hungarian one. So she called all the embassies and said, ‘Which side of the war is Hungary on?’ and nobody knew. So then she finally called the Russian ambassador and she said, ‘I want to dress my little dog in your honor but I have only a Hungarian costume. Do you know which side the Hungarians are on?’ And the ambassador said, ‘Yes, I do know, but I can’t tell you until I’ve talked to Moscow.’” Barbara looked anxiously at Mike. “Do you think that’s funny?”