Roma whispered, “Michael thinks he has me, but wait and see. Papa said he could live with us, but I would never let anyone take Aunt Bibi’s room.”
I heard, and thought, Now I shall have Bibi for the rest of my life.
Was that such a bad prospect? While Bibi had been gaining experience and writing those despairing letters, I had fallen ill. One day Julius asked me to unpack a suitcase for him and I found myself unable to move or speak. This passed, but the attack returned each time Julius gave me an order. The neurologist he sent me to said that my paralytic seizures were caused by nothing more serious than a calcium deficiency. I was instructed to eat sixty grams of cheese four times a day. With Bibi there, I had no more calcium problems. She took over her old duties of ironing and washing the supper dishes — anything the Italian had forgotten or had left undone — and I began reading again. I read fewer books and more magazines. Possner now owned several. It was at Julius’s suggestion that a sign was put up in the editorial offices of each, saying YOUR READERS NEVER WENT TO HIGH SCHOOL.
Julius was now a colonel, and we moved here, to the newest and best of our homes. It was our house, and Julius put it in my name, as he had promised me long ago. Every windowpane belongs to me.
I knew quite a great deal about Julius; not everything. One summer evening we sat on our terrace, all five of us, with a portable television between us, and the remains of a sunset. Julius went indoors to fetch a bottle of white wine. With two wives and a daughter to serve him he need not have lifted a finger, but he was particular about wine (his cellar is shock-proof and soundproof) and he thought no one else knew how to take the cork out of a bottle. Presently I followed to see if he had everything he needed. He was in the kitchen with a glass of wine in his hand, and he stood sipping it in front of a mirror, deep in silent conversation. “What a good time you and I are having,” he might have been saying. He smiled, and his face went wry. “Oh, you know how it is sometimes,” he might have said now. He was seducing someone in the mirror — only it was himself. Julius was watching Julius seducing Julius. I remembered how confident he was when he was in love. I went back to the terrace and sat down.
I said, “Julius is a brilliant, clever man.” No one answered. That opinion was the rule of the house.
The sunset died; Michael switched on lights hidden in trees and at the bottom of the pool. Waiting for the evening news, we watched, with some disgust, a beer-drinking contest.
“Why show this to us?” said Julius. He had a bouquet of long-stemmed glasses between his fingers. He set the glasses down carefully. “No one here is Bavarian.”
“Right,” cried Michael. “We are not Bavarian! Roma is not, and her mother is from Dortmund, and Aunt Bibi is from … and … and you are from …” He should have known where Julius was born. He must surely have read the vital facts about Julius in Possner house publications often enough. “… here, in Cologne,” Michael gasped, correctly.
On the screen a slight girl downed a stein of beer in six seconds. Her throat worked in anguish and tension. She turned out to be a Berliner, not a Bavarian, either. She said she had noticed her gift of rapid drinking when still very young. It worked with milk or beer, but not so well with water.
As soon as the news came on, Julius showed signs of annoyance. The conversational aspect of world affairs has always been an irritant to him. What good is talk? In the middle of a remark about the Common Market he turned it off. He said that everyone was incompetent.
Michael the sycophant said, “Why don’t you send very efficient well-trained men from Possner into politics? You could take someone promising and give him a sound education and launch him in a good party — in fact, you could launch several in all parties. Then no matter who was elected you would be certain everything would run efficiently.…” He always let his sentences run down. Even when a sentence normally might have come to a stop, it sounded as if the end were nowhere. Sometimes my future son-in-law looked like a terrier too, peering from one large human to the other, wondering who would slip him a morsel of something good.
“Wouldn’t that strike you as immoral, Michael?” Here was Bibi sitting in the shadows — lumpy, wearing heavy stockings, saying prickly, difficult things. Bibi is raving, I thought. It seemed to me that the girl’s voice had grown rasping. A “girl,” I called her, but the person determined to spoil our enjoyment of the summer weather was nearly forty, had popping blue eyes, and had failed as an emigrant.
As if Bibi’s remark weren’t enough, now impertinent Roma spoke up: “You aren’t much of a generation to talk about morality.” This was annoying, for it meant she was mixing up the generations and making us older than we really were.
Bibi laughed and said, “Little girl, what do you know about some of us?”
“Enough of that,” said Julius, who did not need to shout to be frightening. “Enough from Bibi. Bibi, don’t you dare touch my daughter’s innocence.”
My heart was pounding. For the first time I felt that Julius and I were thinking as one. Our marriage was our house. I said to myself, Here we are together in the fortress. The bodies pile up outside. Don’t look at them. I forgave him for Bibi, the girl of the diary, the twin beds, the long-distance calls, for being a peacock who preened before mirrors. I put a hundred injuries and injustices behind me.
Bibi had pushed her chair back and risen and, after hesitating, looking over our heads and all round the garden, she walked away, down the sloping lawn. The pool, the trees, the imported white camellias in pots were beautifully lighted. We — particularly Roma — had looked charming, I thought, and now here was one person walking out of the picture. Michael suddenly said, “The neighbors!” and pressed a switch — a foolish gesture that left us sitting in semidarkness. Later he said he thought Bibi was about to drown herself in the pool and that our neighbors, excited by the sound of a quarrel (What sound? We were speaking quietly), might peer at us through field glasses.
“Turn the lights on immediately,” said Julius, without moving.
We saw Roma clinging to Bibi and we heard her sobbing, “I didn’t mean you, I meant everybody else.”
“Now they have made my daughter cry on a lovely summer evening,” said Julius, but quite casually, as if it were only one complaint on a long list of misdemeanors. But we were able to laugh, finally, because Michael, in his anxiety, had pressed all the buttons he could find, causing the gate in the driveway to slide back and forth, the garage doors to open and shut, and the pool in the garden to blink like a star. The lilies on the surface of the pool flashed negative-positive-negative. (It was thanks to an idea of Bibi’s that Julius had been able to grow the lilies; their roots feed on a chemical mixture encased in a sphere. Even with flowers the pool looks sterile. I always found the water lilies unpleasant; they attract dragonflies.) I had a vision that cramped my stomach, of Bibi facedown among the negative-positive lilies, with dragonflies darting at her wet hair.