Going Ashore (24 page)

“It’s the morphine,” said the nurse. She had a sugary voice. “You can’t focus. But you are getting smaller doses now.”

That was all. From this momentary puzzle he moved on to his new state of bliss. He knew there would be nothing but brief periods of doubt followed by intervals of blessedness. Uncaring, impartial, he remembered the name for his condition:
la belle indifférence
.

“We have used the expression too often and I for one am sick to death of it,” said the judge. Another voice remarked, “He is simulating indifference and knows very well what is in the balance.” “I used the term in an ironical sense,” said the consulting psychiatrist, rather crossly, “and did not intend the court to take it seriously.”

He saw the prisoner, the judge. The prisoner was smiling, dreamy, unaware; they could do as they liked. Had he really seen this? No, he had read about it. It was an account of a trial he had read that summer, sitting on a beach. He had the airmail edition of the
Times
. The
Times
gave a
long, thorough, and sober account of the case. He read it on the beach, with his children and wife nearby, and he wondered about
la belle indifférence
, which seemed a state of privileged happiness reserved for criminals and the totally insane. His younger son crawled away with his sunglasses, his cigarettes. It was because of his children, both babies, that his wife could not be with him now.

“When can I smoke?” he said, carefully putting the letter down.

“That is a very good sign, wanting to smoke,” said the cooing nurse. “Your wife has called twice from Paris. We told her you were very quiet, no trouble at all. When you have the telephone you can talk to her. You must practice reaching, so that you can pick up the telephone. Pretend this is a telephone.” It was his toothbrush.

In Europe, the doctors save you but the nurses kill you; before the operation someone had told him that. But he had a job in Paris and it was too expensive, out of the question, to go home. He had been told that in this place he would have care as good as any. What a mistake! The nursing was slipshod, slack. The girls were callous and unconcerned. They came and went, doing nothing really useful. They chattered together, and took little notice of him. And the doctor; what of the doctor? “Why hasn’t the doctor been to see me?” he asked in a new, querulous voice – like an ailing countertenor’s.

“Aren’t three visits a day enough for you?” said the nurse, with all the honey gone from her voice. “You will be seeing less of him now. He has cases much more serious than yours. He is a celebrated surgeon, a busy man.”

THE GODDESS WAS A PLAIN GIRL
of about twenty-three. She was rough and impatient about his bath, and when she pulled the sheet taut underneath him it was an earthquake.

“You have to do too much for patients in Switzerland,” she remarked. “I am French, and I am working here only to get an international certificate. All this washing and feeding …” She made a face and said, “In France, the patients look after themselves.”

“I know it,” he said. “That’s why I came to Lausanne. I work in France.”
He had intended to tell her all about himself that morning – all about his children and wife. Now he would tell her nothing. In any case, he hardly needed her now. He could move his head when he wanted to, and reach for the telephone or his cigarettes. With only a little help he was able to turn on his side.

“You’re getting better,” the former goddess said placidly. “Bad temper is the best sign.”

“You mean I’m a bad patient?” He resolved he would give as little trouble as possible, even if it meant hardship, hopeless neglect. Just the same, he thought, I think the doctor might come around more often than he does.

NOW HE KNEW EVERYTHING
, of course. What lingered of his amnesia was the sweetness of
la belle indifférence
. Sometimes he regretted it, and wished he had been in a state to observe it and put it away in his mind, but the return of memory, and reason, brought all the reasonable problems of the future as well – sensible problems of convalescence, work, money, home. Very soon he recalled everything he needed for everyday life, although there were crevices now and again: he forgot the names of close friends, and once the number of his own telephone. In conversation with the doctor, an amateur botanist, he forgot “trillium.” And even much later, when nearly all of the first days had gone from his consciousness, he still could not believe he had ever come to this place voluntarily but secretly was certain he had somehow been tormented and then brought against his will.

JANE AND ERNESTINE
were at breakfast in the hotel dining room when the fog finally lifted. It had clung to the windows for weeks, ever since the start of the autumn rains, reducing a promised view of mountains to a watery blur. Now, unexpectedly, the fog rose; it went up all in one piece, like a curtain, and when it had cleared away, the children saw that the mountains outside were covered with snow. Because of their father’s health, they had always, until this year, wintered in warm climates. They abandoned their slopped glasses of milk and stared at slopes that were rough with trees, black and white like the glossy postcards their mother bought to send to aunts in America. Down below, on a flat green plain, were villages no bigger than the children’s cereal plates. Some of the villages were in Germany and some were over in France – their governess, Frau Stengel, had explained about the frontier, with many a glum allusion – but from here the toy houses and steeples looked all alike; there was no hedge, no fence, no mysterious cleft in the earth to set them apart, although, staring hard, one
could
see something, a winding line, as thin as a hair. That was the Rhine.

“Look,” said Jane, to the back of her mother’s newspaper. She said it encouragingly, preparing Mrs. Kennedy for shock. It did not enter her head that her mother knew what snow was like. To the two little girls winter meant walks in parks where every pebble had a correct place underfoot and geraniums grew in rows, like soldiers marching. The sea was always there, but too cold to bathe in. Overhead, and outside their window at night, palms rustled bleakly, like unswept leaves.

“Look,” Jane repeated, but Mrs. Kennedy, who read the local paper every day in order to improve her German, didn’t hear. “You can see everything,” said Jane, giving her mother up. “Mountains.”

“Hitler’s mountains,” said Ernestine, repeating a phrase that Frau Stengel had used. The girls had no idea who Hitler was, but they had seen
his photograph – Frau Stengel kept it pressed between two film magazines on her bookshelf – and she frequently spoke of his death, which she appeared to have felt keenly. The children, because of this, assumed that Hitler and Frau Stengel must have been related. “Poor Hitler, Frau Stengel’s dead cousin,” Ernestine sang, inventing a tune, making whirlpools in her porridge with a spoon. Some of the people at nearby tables in the dining room turned to smile mistily at the children. What angels the Kennedy girls were, the hotel guests often remarked – so pretty and polite, and always saying the most intelligent things! “Frau Stengel says there wouldn’t have been a war that time, only all these other people were so greedy,” and “Only one little, little piece of Africa, Frau Stengel says. Frau Stengel says …” Someone had started the rumor that Jane and Ernestine were not Mrs. Kennedy’s daughters at all but had been adopted here in Germany. How else was one to account for their blond hair? Mrs. Kennedy was quite dark, and old enough to be, if not their grandmother (although some of the women in the hotel were willing to push it that far), at least a sort of elderly adoptive aunt. Mrs. Kennedy, looking up in time to catch the looks of tender good will beamed toward her daughters, would think, How fond they are of children! But then Jane and Ernestine are particularly attractive. She had no notion of the hotel gossip concerning their origins and would have been deeply offended if she had been told about it, for Jane and Ernestine were not German and not adopted. They had come along quite naturally, if disconcertingly, less than a year apart, just at a time when Mrs. Kennedy had begun to regard all children as a remote, alarming race. The second surprise had come when they had turned out to be more than commonly pretty. “Like little dolls,” Frau Stengel had said on first seeing them. “Just like dolls.”

“I have been told that they resemble little Renoirs,” Mrs. Kennedy had replied, with just a trace of correction.

Their charm, after all, was not entirely the work of nature; one’s character was just as important as one’s face, and the girls, thanks to their mother’s vigilance on their behalf, were as unblemished, as removed from the world and its coarsening effects, as their guileless faces suggested. Unlike their little compatriots, whom they sometimes met on their travels, and from whom they were quickly led away, they had never, Mrs. Kennedy
was able to assure herself, heard a thought expressed that was cheapening or less than kind. They wore, in all seasons, clothing that matched the atmosphere created for their own special world – ribboned straw hats, fluffy little sweaters, starched frocks trimmed with rows and rows of
broderie anglaise
, made to order wherever a favorable exchange prevailed – and the result was that, with their long, brushed tresses, they did indeed resemble dolls, or even, in a rosy light, little Renoirs.

What marriages they would make! Mrs. Kennedy, without complaining of her own, nevertheless hoped her girls would accomplish something with just a little more glitter – a double wedding in a cathedral, for instance. Chartres would be nice, though damp. Observing the children now, over the breakfast table, she saw the picture again – perfumed, cloudy, with a pair of faceless but utterly suitable bridegrooms hovering in the background. Mr. Kennedy, who did not believe in churches and thought they should all be turned into lending libraries, would simply have to put aside his scruples for the occasion. Mrs. Kennedy, mentally, had it out with him. “Very well,” he replied, vanquished. “I certainly owe you this much consideration after the splendid way you’ve brought them up.” He led them into the cathedral, one on each arm. After a tuneful but, to spare Mr. Kennedy, nondenominational ceremony, the two couples emerged under the crossed swords of a guard of honor. “The girls are charming, and they owe it all to their mother,” someone was heard to remark in the crowd. Returning to the breakfast table, Mrs. Kennedy heard Jane saying, “Just this one movie, and I’ll never ask again.”

“One
what!”

“This movie,” said Jane. “The one I was just telling about,
Das Herz Einer Mutti
. Frau Stengel could take us this afternoon, she says. She already went twice. She cried like anything.”

“Frau Stengel should know better than to suggest such a thing,” said Mrs. Kennedy, looking crossly at her brides. “There’s milk all over your mouth, and Ernestine’s hands are filthy. Do you want to make my life a trial?”

“No,” said Jane. She opened a picture book she had brought to the table and began to read aloud in German, in a high, stumbling recitative. One silky tress of hair lay on the buttered side of a piece of bread. She wiped her mouth on the fluffy sleeve of her pale blue sweater.

“Well, really, sometimes I just –” Mrs. Kennedy began, but Jane was reading, and Ernestine singing, and she said, annoyed, “What is that book, if you please?”

“Nothing,” said Jane. It was a book Frau Stengel had given them, the comic adventures of Hansi, a baboon. Hansi was always in mischief, bursting in where grown-up people were taking baths, and that kind of thing, but the most enchanting thing about him, from the children’s point of view, was his heart-shaped scarlet behind, on which the artist had dwelt with loving exactitude.

Mrs. Kennedy drew the book toward her. She glanced quickly through the pages, then put it down by her coffee cup. She said nothing.

“Is it cruel?” said Jane nervously. She tried again: “Is it too cruel, or something?”

“It is worse than cruel,” said Mrs. Kennedy, when at last she could speak. “It is vulgar. I forbid you to read it.”

“We already have.”

“Then don’t read it again. If Frau Stengel gave it to you, give it back this morning.”

“It has our names written in it,” said Jane.

Momentarily halted, Mrs. Kennedy looked out at the view. Absorbed with her own problem – the children, the book, whether or not she had handled it well – she failed to notice that the fog had lifted, and felt just as hemmed in and baffled as usual. If only one could consult one’s husband, she thought. But Mr. Kennedy, who lay at this very moment in a nursing home half a mile distant, waiting for his wife to come and read to him, could not be counted on for advice. He cherished an obscure stomach complaint and a touchy liver that had withstood, triumphantly, the best attention of twenty doctors. It was because of Mr. Kennedy’s stomach that the family moved about so much, guided by a new treatment in London, an excellent liver man on the Riviera, or the bracing climate of the Italian lakes. A weaker man, Mrs. Kennedy sometimes thought, might have given up and pretended he was better, but her husband, besides having an uncommon lot of patience, had been ailing just long enough to be faddish; this year it was a nursing home on the rim of the Black Forest that had taken his fancy, and here they all were, shivering in the
unaccustomed damp, dosed with a bracing vitamin tonic sent over from America and guaranteed to replace the southern sun.

Mr. Kennedy seldom saw his daughters. The rules of the private clinics he frequented were all in his favor. In any case, he seldom asked to see the girls, for he felt that they were not at an interesting age. Wistfully, his wife sometimes wondered when their interesting age would begin – when they were old enough to be sent away to school, perhaps, or, better still, safely disposed of in the handsome marriages that gave her so much concern.

Reminded now of Mr. Kennedy and the day ahead, she looked around the dining room, wondering if anyone would like to come along to the nursing home for a little visit. She stared coldly past the young American couple who sat before the next window; they were the only other foreigners in the hotel, and Mrs. Kennedy had swept them off to the hospital one morning before they knew what was happening. The visit had not been a success. Cheered by a new audience, Mr. Kennedy had talked about his views – views so bold that they still left his wife quite breathless after fourteen years of marriage. Were people fit to govern themselves, for instance? Mr. Kennedy could not be sure. Look at France. And what of the ants? Was not their civilization, with its emphasis on industry and thrift, superior to ours? Mr. Kennedy thought that it was. And then there was God – or was there? Mr. Kennedy had talked about God at some length that morning, and the young couple had listened, looking puzzled, until, at last, the young woman said, “Yes, well, I see. Agnostic. How sweet.”