Sleepless Nights (11 page)

I wonder about this and of course I know. I know what the men are like, but I do not know what she is like, she with her washing of clothes, her baking, her dangling shutter never mended by the husband-carpenter, the broken lamp never fixed by the household electrician, the flowerless, shrubless plot of land of the town gardener. A mystery, but then one does not come home to start work again.

My mother had in many ways the nature of an exile, although her wanderings and displacements had been only in North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky. I never knew anyone so little interested in memory, in ancestors, in records, in sweetened back-glancing sceneries, little adornments of pride. Sometimes she would mention with a puzzled frown
The Annals of Tennessee
, by her grandfather with the same name, but she had never read it. Ramsey, this curious son of Tennessee, lived where she also was born in Mecklenberg County, North Carolina, the place of the “widely regarded as spurious” Mecklenberg Declaration of Independence of May 1775.

She must have had a youth and she had those brothers and sisters whose names we bear. She spoke of one brother who had been “very smart,” but that too came to a hazy end.

This brother, out of the blue, began to write letters to my mother. They arrived, unfortunately, from a mental hospital in upstate New York. They were extraordinary for their outstanding beautiful handwriting. These calligraphic marvels, with every letter perfectly formed and set in very straight, evenly spaced lines, were written with a fine black pen. The content was coherent, the spelling flawless and the subject matter a sort of oratory. He liked to write letters on our national holidays, moments which provoked an intense patriotic emotion in him.

What a beautiful letter, my mother said. I don’t see how Robbie could be crazy. He certainly wasn’t when he saw my sister about ten years ago and by that time he must have been forty-five.

We wrote the director of the hospital and after a month or so received an answer about Robert Douglas, an answer which had none of the patient’s grand flourishes. The director didn’t seem to know much about my mother’s brother, but said that he was in a “more or less calm phase.”

A few years later we received a notice of his death and a request for burial fees. So, with fifty dollars, Robert Douglas was buried someplace. Somehow we learned that his change of name was not madness but the sensible urging of practicality that followed a period of financial stress, if
stress
is the accurate word.

The house is dark. Now all the children are born and she is in one bed, he in another, according to the custom of that time and “class.” They do not know that couples who have no children, or one or two, pride themselves on remaining in one bed, the
matrimoniale
, until they are separated by some illness of old age.

My father is in the room next to the attic, reading and smoking. He may be a little drunk—it is night. She is pulling the blankets over her arms, watching the light from the moon filter through the flowered curtains. The years do not seem real: the numbers are merely words, five years, ten years, forty. They might be nouns—house, street, garage.

I do not believe they are thinking of lost youth. I do not believe they are afraid of death. I doubt whether they are wondering if they love each other or whether they are happy. It does not seem accurate to call this, whatever it is, one or the other. Nevertheless they are alive, full of opinions, of distastes,
ideas
, even. Anyway the night is good because it leads to the day, to shoes and stockings, to coffee, to drudgery and repetition, especially for her who perhaps looks forward to getting it done.

My mother was born in the 1880’s, and the girl who visited here for a few days was born in the 1950’s. Seventy years are nothing. The two women are not alike and neither represents her time or type. I would not defame the girl for her narcissism nor would I make too much of my mother’s dreadful labors, labors laid to rest long ago.

Her children loved the races. Jack, my brother, was taken sick at the Louisville track and died soon after in his room in the Brown Hotel. Tommy died in his truck on the way to the horse barns. He was rushing to see the morning workout. Horses, noble antiques, have died badly too. The great horse Hambletonian ran at Newmarket in 1799 against Diamond for a bet of three thousand guineas. Hambletonian won but never raced again. Both animals had been violently “whipped and spurred by their jockeys.”

Actually Louisa, the young girl visitor, has just gotten quite a good job. She knows a few things and a few people. She went out early, but not too early, in black pants and a black leather coat. She put on a scarf with the name of a French designer displayed with such prominence it might have been he who was the applicant.

She spoke to someone of having been to college, spoke of typing, of odd
experience
, meaning only previous work. She said untruthfully that she could certainly take dictation. They put her in a room and turned on a machine. When it went too fast for her rapid longhand, she stopped the machine and played the difficult part once more. Her typed-up dictation was well received.

She will not do too much nor too little and this is what is wanted. She will have an apartment, a lover, will take a few drugs, will listen to the phonograph, buy clothes, and something will happen. Perhaps it will be good—or at least what she likes.

T
HE TRAVELS
of youth, the cheapness of things and one’s intrepid poverty. “All ye who love the Prince of Orange take heart and follow me.”

So, it was Holland that year, 1951. Descartes, almost three hundred years before, had spoken of himself as the only foreigner in Amsterdam not on business.

An unfashionable
gracht
in the center of Amsterdam—the Nicholaas Witsenkade. A busy, bourgeois street bordering on sloppy waters and the towers of the Rijksmuseum in view toward the west. Houses with stone steps and made of yellow or red brick are lined up in a businesslike, practical, 1920’s decency and dullness. Autumnal tile decorations on the facades and here and there fans of purple and amber glass over the doorways.

Housewives of centuries have created the pleasantly stuffy little rooms with their dark paneling, have hung round lamps, with shades of old tasseled silk, over the carpeted dining tables. The house is not handsome and the landlady worries about the apartment because it has been her own and everything in it is dear to her. Anyway we said as we met her anxious glance: What a triumph every country is.

He
observed that the coziness of small countries could not always be expropriated by an invader.

Yes, a squat, round, shiny black stove that had worked for years with the solemn obedience of an old donkey tormented our days and nights with its balky resentment of a new and ignorant hand. Perplexing dying of the embers so soon after they had been coaxed to blaze. We crept into the cold sheets under the ancient thick coverlets and were held at head and foot by the heavy frame of the bed, pierced by the sharp metal of carved leaves and fruits, acute reminders of spring. Daylight came in a rush and the whole town came alive at dawn. The baker and coal-seller arrived with such swiftness they might have been dressed and waiting throughout the night. Greedy travelers, Americans, hail the dawn of a new experience!

In the winter sleet blew through the beautiful town, graying the waters of the Amstel. In the spring, in daylight and in the early evening, we used to watch, on the porch that faced us, the life of the unemployed Indonesians. Their ancestors had been exiles, once flung out from the swamps of the Zuider Zee to the humid airs of Jakarta. Now their children were returned
colons
, geographical curiosities, back once more to the sluices and polders of home, the unfamiliar homeland that received them with the chagrin proper to what they were: a delayed bill, finally arriving.

The Indonesians gathered on their porch, sitting there as a disconsolate testament to the great energy of the Dutch, to old map makers, shipbuilders, moneylenders, diamond cutters, receivers of Jews, Huguenots, Puritans. The unions we were staring at had taken place on unimaginable sugar plantations, in the deranging heat of exhausting empires. Beautiful, liquid-brown women, silky petite mother-in-law, dust-colored child, their little wrists and ankles delicate as chicken bones. And the heavy, dry, freckled, tufted Dutchmen, homely and reassuring.

The disasters of the war still lay over the country, and yet all of our Dutch friends were reading Valéry Larbaud’s
A.O. Barnabooth, His Diary
, enjoying the sly chic of the fabulously rich hero and his addiction to “boutiqueism.”

The crowds of Amsterdam and even the countryside filled with people in their houses, each one a sort of declassed nobleman sharing the space as a tree would patiently accept the nightly roosting of flocks and flocks of starlings. All the knowledge of Europe seems to be nesting there, too. And a certain sadness, a gasping for breath. No, no, the strain is nothing. Take no notice of it. I have just had a wish for the mountains.

In Amsterdam we knew many people and not a single one has slipped from memory. Just now, dreaming, I am drawn back to a woman painter named Simone and to her fervent romancer, the eternal husband, Dr. Z.

Dr. Z. had the moderate, well-nourished egotism suitable to his small, learned group of colleagues and friends and proper to the educated professional world of Amsterdam. He had his success, some of it medical as a specialist in blood diseases, and some of it amorous. Because of the time he devoted to women he might be surprised to find himself remembered as a
husband
.

In Holland the coziness of life is so complete it can not even be disturbed by the violent emotional ruptures that tear couples and friends forever apart in other places. Instead, there, first husbands and first wives are always at the same dinner parties and birthday celebrations with their second husbands and wives. Divorces and fractured loves mingled together as if the past were a sort of vinegar blending with the oil of the present. Where could one flee to? New alliances among this restless people were like the rearrangement of familiar furniture. Houses and lives are thus transformed—up to a point. My dear, look, there is a man who plays the violin in the street and there is his son with the saxophone. Coins are falling from the windows. The shadow has passed and everything is in order once more.

She moves into his place. The Herengracht, a great improvement. His wife settles someplace else, taking along her volumes of the existentialist philosophers. What a pleasure to be recombining and yet not going anyplace. The old map of the central city with its faded tintings catches the sunlight.

Dr. Z., all day in his white coat and in the evenings wearing a tie of bright red-and-blue stripes, was born in Amsterdam. Still the blood of the East runs in his veins. There is something sheikish about him and although there are more flamboyant men around, more handsome and younger, he occupies his space with a kindly, intense assurance. His personal life is rich in variety and yet thoughtful. His originality was that he did not shift so much as acquire.

Fidelity, consideration, sweet-natured uxoriousness were the marks of this faithless husband. In a way, he was like a cripple who yearly enters the hundred-yard dash. Bravo, everyone cried out when he scored. Of course his exploits were not large in number and he was a busy, serious man who was often called to the platform of universities and academies to receive honors. Still, he had his entanglements, rather plain and serious like himself, but worthy, intense, absorbing. Without ever leaving his only wife, he turned each of the women in his life into a wife. Have you paid your taxes? he would say; have you called your mother this week? Oh, dearest, I do not like the sound of that cough.

Many times he was seized by the impulse of flight and thought himself ready or forced by love to “make a new life.” But this was impossible for one who could not throw anything away. What a commitment intimacy always is, he would sigh. The sacred flow between men and women, in bed, conversing in a café, talking on the telephone, passing time. What didn’t he know about the treacherous, beautiful, golden yoke of time?

Does one still enjoy his old schoolmates, his first cousins? That is not the point. They are your schoolmates, your cousins, and there is always something there, like the enduring presence of your big toe.

Mevrouw Z.—she had been there forever. They had been separated by the war, but managed to get back together in their same old house. Mevrouw Z. liked to be called Madame Z. because she was French. Small, she must have become in her first youth one of those petite, compact persons who never change, who find a certain exterior style and accept it, as one accepts a piece of architecture for purchase. When her young black hair began to turn gray, she dyed it back to the old color and wore it in the short bob of her youth. The moment she got out of bed in the morning she recolored her eyelashes with black mascara. She wore velvet berets and held firmly to her
look
, which announced like a trumpet that she was not Dutch, she was French. Otherwise she did not conform to any of the notions of a Frenchwoman. She did not cook well, she was not interested in attracting men, she did not have a shrewd hand with household accounts. She let an old Dutchwoman from the country look after the house. Madame Z. was idle except for the enormous amount of reading she did and except for her passion for the French theater. She read about the theater in French papers every day and went to Paris often, taking in a performance every night.