“Darling Walter,” said Mrs. Wiggott. “This could only happen to you.”
“If only I could explain things to Angelo in our terms,” said Walter. “How to be a good friend, a decent host, all the rest. Not to expect too much. How to make the best of life, as we do.”
“As we do,” said Mrs. Wiggott, solemn now.
“Live for the minute, I would like to tell him. Look at the things I put up with, without complaint. The summer I’ve had! Children everywhere. Eggs and bacon in the hottest weather. High tea — my brother-in-law’s influence, of course. Look at the house I live in. Ugly box, really. I never complain.”
“That is true,” said his old friend.
“No heat in winter. Not an anemone in the garden. Les Anémones, they called it, and not an anemone on the place. Nothing but a lot of irises, and I put those in myself.”
APRIL FISH
Because I was born on the first day of April, I was given April as a Christian name. Here in Switzerland they make Avril of it, which sounds more like a sort of medicine than a month of spring. “Take a good dose of Avril,” I can imagine Dr. Ehrmann saying, to each of the children. Today was the start of the fifty-first April. I woke up early and sipped my tea, careful not to disturb the dogs sleeping on the foot of the bed on their own Red Cross blanket. I still have nightmares, but the kind of terror has changed. In the hanging dream I am no longer the victim. Someone else is hanged. Last night, in one harrowing dream, one of my own adopted children drowned, there, outside the window, in the Lake of Geneva. I rushed about on the grass, among the swans. I felt dew on my bare feet; the hem of my velvet dressing gown was dark with it. I saw very plainly the children’s toys: the miniature tank Igor has always wanted, and something red — a bucket and spade, perhaps. My hair came loose and tumbled down my back. I can still feel the warmth and the comfort of it. It was auburn, leaf-colored, as it used to be. I think I saved Igor; the memory is hazy. I seemed very competent and sure of my success. As I sat in bed, summing up my progress in life as measured by dreams, trying not to be affected by the sight of the rain streaming in rivulets from the roof (I was not depressed by the rain, but by the thought that I could rely on no one, no one, to get up on the roof and clear out the weeds and grass that have taken root and are choking the gutter), the children trooped in. They are home for Easter, all three — Igor, with his small thief’s eyes, and Robert, the mulatto, who will not say “Maman” in public because it makes him shy, and Ulrich, whose father was a famous jurist and his mother a brilliant, beautiful girl but who will never be anything but dull and Swiss. There they were, at the foot of the bed, all left behind by careless parents, dropped like loose buttons and picked up by a woman they call Maman.
“Bon anniversaire,” said Igor, looking already like any postal clerk in Moscow, and the two others muttered it in a ragged way, like a response in church. They had brought me a present, an April fish, but not made of chocolate. It was the glass fish from Venice everyone buys, about twenty inches long, transparent and green — the green of geranium leaves, with chalky white stripes running from head to tail. These children have lived in my house since infancy, but their taste is part of their skin and hearts and fingernails. The nightmare I ought to be having is a projection into the future, a vision of the girls they will marry and the houses they will have — the glass coffee tables and the Venetian-glass fish on top of the television, unless that space has already been taken up with a lump of polished olive root.
Igor advanced and put the fish down very carefully on the table beside me, and, as he could think of nothing else, began again, “Bon anniversaire, Maman.” They had nothing to tell me. Their feet scuffled and scratched on the floor — the rug, soiled by the dogs, was away being cleaned.
“What are you going to do today?” I said.
“Play,” said Robert, after a silence.
A morning concert struck up on the radio next to me, and I looked for something — an appreciation, a reaction to the music — in their eyes, but they had already begun pushing each other and laughing, and I knew that the music would soon be overlaid by a second chorus, from me, “Don’t touch. Don’t tease the dogs,” all of it negative and as bad for them as for me. I turned down the music and said, “Come and see the birthday present that came in the mail this morning. It is a present from my brother, who is your uncle.” I slipped on my reading glasses and spread the precious letter on the counterpane. “It is an original letter written by Dr. Sigmund Freud. He was a famous doctor, and that is his handwriting. Now I shall teach you how to judge from the evidence of letters. The writing paper is ugly and cheap — you all see that, do you? — which means that he was a miser, or poor, or lacked aesthetic feeling, or did not lend importance to worldly matters. The long pointed loops mean a strong sense of spiritual values, and the slope of the lines means a pessimistic nature. The margin widens at the bottom of the page, like the manuscript of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale.’ You remember that I showed you a photograph of it? Who remembers? Ulrich? Good for Ulrich. It means that Dr. Freud was the same kind of person as Keats. Keats was a poet, but he died. Dr. Freud is also dead. I am sorry to say that the signature denotes conceit. But he was a great man, quite right to be sure of himself.”
“What does the letter say?” said Igor, finally.
“It is not a letter written to me. It is an old letter — see the date? It was sent about thirty years before any of you were born. It was written probably to a colleague — look, I am pointing. To another doctor. Perhaps it is an opinion about a patient.”
“Can’t you read what it says?” said Igor.
I tried to think of a constructive answer, for “I can’t read German” was too vague. “Someday you, and Robert, and even Ulrich will read German, and then you will read the letter, and we shall all know what Dr. Freud said to his colleague. I would learn German,” I went on, “if I had more time.”
As proof of how little time I have, three things took place all at once: My solicitor, who only rings up with bad news, called from Lausanne, Maria-Gabriella came in to remove the breakfast tray, and the dogs woke up and began to bark. Excessive noise seems to affect my vision: I saw the room as blurry and one-dimensional. I waved to Maria-Gabriella — discreetly, for I should never want the children to feel de trop or rejected — and she immediately understood and led them away from me. The dogs stopped barking, all but poor blind old Sarah, who went on calling dismally into a dark private room in which she hears a burglar. Meanwhile, Maître Gossart was telling me, from Lausanne, that I was not to have one of the Vietnam children. None of them could be adopted; when their burns have healed, they are all to be returned to Vietnam. That was the condition of their coming. He went on telling it in such a roundabout way that I cut him off with “Then I am not to have one of the burned children?” and as he still rambled I said, “But I want a little girl!” I said, “Look here. I want one of the Vietnam babies, and I want a girl.” The rain was coming down harder than ever. I said, “Maître, this is a filthy, rotten, bloody country, and if it weren’t for the income tax I’d pack up and leave. Because of the income tax I am not free. I am compelled to live in Switzerland.”