III
When the old man had finished his long thoughts, everyone except Gérard and Father Zinkin had disappeared. The small children were made to kiss him — moist reluctant mouths on his cheek— “before Granpa takes his nap.” Léopold, who never touched anyone, looked at him briefly through his new camera and said softly to him, and only to him, “Il n’y a pas assez de lumière.” Their dark identical eyes reflected each other. Then everyone vanished, the women to rattle plates in the kitchen, Léopold to his room, the five fathers to play some game with the children at the back of the house. He sat in his leather armchair, sometimes he slept, and he heard Gérard protesting, “I know the difference between seeing and dreaming.”
“Well, it was a waking dream,” said the priest. “There is no snow on the streets, but you say there had been a storm.”
The old man looked. The white light in the room surely was the reflection of a snowy day? The room seemed filled with white furniture, white flowers. The priest, because he was dressed like Gérard, tried to sound like a young man and an old friend. Only when the priest turned his head, seeking an ashtray, did the old man see what Father Zinkin knew. His interest in Gérard was intellectual. His mind was occupied with its own power. The old man imagined him, narrow, suspicious, in a small parish, lording it over a flock of old maids. They were thin, their eyebrows met over their noses.
Gérard said, “All right, what if I was analyzed? What difference would it make?”
“You would be yourself. You would be yourself without eVort.”
The old man had been waiting for him to say, “it would break the mirror;” for what is the good of being yourself, if you are Gérard?
“What I mean is, you can’t understand about this girl. So there’s no use talking about her.”
“I know about girls,” said the other. “I went out. I even danced.”
It struck the old man how often he had been told by priests they knew about life because they had, once, danced with girls. He was willing to let them keep that as a memory of life, but what about Gérard, as entangled with a woman as a man of thirty? But then Gérard lost interest and said, “I’d want to be analyzed in French,” so it didn’t matter.
“It wouldn’t work. Your French isn’t spontaneous enough. Now, begin again. You were on the street, it was daylight, then you were in the kitchen in the dark.”
How the old man despised this self-indulgence! He felt it was not his business to put a stop to it. His wife stopped it simply by coming in and beginning to talk about herself. When she talked about her children she seemed to be talking about herself, and when the priest said, to console some complaint she was making, “The little one will be brilliant,” meaning Léopold he seemed to be prophesying a future in which she would shine. Outside, the others were breaking up into groups, carrying cots, ushering children into cars. It would take a good ten minutes, and so she sat perched on the arm of a sofa with her hat on her head and her coat on her arm, and said, “Léopold will be brilliant, but I never wanted him. I’d had six children, five close together. French Canadians of our background, for I daren’t say class, it sounds so … Well, we, people like ourselves, do not usually have these monstrous families, regardless of what you may have been told, Father. My mother had no one but me, and when she tried having a second child, it killed her. When I knew I was having Léopold I took ergot. I lay here, on this very sofa, in the middle of the afternoon. Nothing happened, and nothing showed. He was born without even a strawberry mark to condemn me.”
She likes to shock, the old man remembered. How much you can take is measure of your intelligence. So she thinks. Oddly enough, she can be shocked.
She stopped speaking and sighed and smoothed the collar of her coat. When she thought, “My son Gérard is sleeping with a common girl,” it shocked her. She thought, now, seeing him slouch past the doorway, scarcely able to wait for the house to empty so that he could go off and find that girl and spend a disgusting Saturday night with her, “Gérard knows. He looks at his father, and me, and now he knows. Before, he only thought he knew. He knows now why the old man follows me up the stairs.”
She said very lightly, “My son has sex on the brain. It’s all he thinks about now. I suppose all boys are the same. You must have been that way once, Father.” Really, that was farther than she had ever gone. The priest looked like a statue resembling the person he had been a moment before.
Once she had departed the house seemed to relax, like an animal that feels safe and can sleep. The old man was to walk the dog and do something about his children. Those had been his instructions for the day. Oh, yes, and he was to stop thinking about himself. He put on his hat and coat and walked down the street with Don Carlos. Don Carlos dug the wet spring lawns with tortoiseshell nails. Let off the leash, he at once rolled in something horrible. The old man wanted to scold, but the wind made all conversation between himself and the dog impossible. The wind suddenly dropped; it was to the old man like a sudden absence of fear. He could dream as well as Gérard. He invented: he and Don Carlos went through the gap of a fence and were in a large sloping pasture. He trod on wild-flowers. From the spongy spring soil grew crab apple trees and choke cherries, and a hedge of something he no longer remembered, that was sweet and white. Presently they — he and the dog — looked down on a village and the two silvery spires of a church. He saw the date over the door: 1885. The hills on the other side of the water were green and black with shadows. He had never seen such a blue and green day. But he was still here, on the street, and had not forgotten it for a second. Imagination was as good as sleepwalking any day.
Léopold stood on the porch, watching him through his camera. He seemed to be walking straight into Léopold’s camera, magically reduced in size.
“Why, Léo,” he said. “You’re not supposed to be here,” not caring to show how happy it made him that Léopold was here. They were bound so soon to lose each other — why start?
“Wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t what?”
“Wouldn’t go to Pauline’s. She’s coming back to get us for supper.”
“I don’t want anything more to eat today.”
“Neither do I. And I’m not going.”
Who would dare argue with Léopold? He put his camera down. One day he would have the assurance of a real street, a real father, a real afternoon.
“Well, well,” his father said. “So they’re all gone.” He felt shy. He would never have enough of Léo — he would never know what became of him. He edged past and held the door open for the dog.
“All gone. Il n’y a que moi.” Léopold who never touched anyone, pressed his lips to his father’s hand.
1968
The Latehomecomer
WHEN I came back to Berlin out of captivity in the spring of 1950, I discovered I had a stepfather. My mother had never mentioned him. I had been writing from Brittany to “Grete Bestermann,” but the “Toeppler” engraved on a brass plate next to the bellpull at her new address turned out to be her name, too. As she slipped the key in the lock, she said quietly, “Listen, Thomas. I’m Frau Toeppler now. I married a kind man with a pension. This is his key, his name, and his apartment. He wants to make you welcome.” From the moment she met me at the railway station that day, she must have been wondering how to break it.