Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books) (16 page)

“But why?”

“Because, my dear, if you go I’m left on my own with this crazy dream business. I had to try to get whatever insight I could right away, while you’re still here to look at it with me.”

“You mean you tried to force matters,” he accused.

“Yes,” she said firmly. She felt exhilarated and wanted him to share in the triumph. He had earned it.

All morning they labored over the translation.

“What the hell kind of spelling is that?”

“Obsolete, according to this entry in the dictionary.”

“‘Callous’ is probably a closer meaning, in that sentence.”

“‘Fulling.’ That’s old fashioned dry-cleaning isn’t it?”

“Yes; they used to rub woolen clothing with a clay called ‘fuller’s earth’ to remove stains and smells without shrinkage.”

“‘Bitter as gall.’ Not exactly an original phrase-maker.”

“‘L’Ancien Régime.’
Ricky, you actually saw me write these words in this beautiful old-fashioned hand? You know what my writing looks like. How could I have produced this?”

“I watched from start to finish.”

Once Ricky went away and returned with a bowl of fruit that he set on a chair. There was no room on the bed, which was covered with sheets of paper. He did not take anything from the bowl to eat, and neither did she.

Still in her nightgown, the one with the drooping hem and the sleeve coming out at the shoulder seam, she sat back and read the translation aloud.

My dear son,

I have thought a long time about your letter. Here is my answer, but first you must understand some matters out of my own past which perhaps throw light on my position. I have not ordinarily spoken of these things, but now the time has come.

To begin with, regardless of the foolish exaggerations to which your great-aunt Marielle is given, I have survived in the world but by the standards of many I cannot be said to have risen. Your grandfather was a landowner in a small way, as well as proprietor of a prosperous fulling-works. I myself traveled far more widely as a boy than I could afford to do now. I was not sent with a lean purse to Paris to be a clerk in the law, like so many of my contemporaries, but on the contrary lived rather well. In those days Paris was smaller, and my aunt and uncle — themselves childless and thus particularly kindly disposed toward me — had a house in a suburb. They would often send me a hamper packed with excellent country food.

I was, in other words, comfortable and happy, but I was never any sort of rich man nor did I keep company with aristocrats. In fact, I was or at least became quite radical in my thinking, thanks to the company I kept in the coffee houses. I read Rousseau and Voltaire and the rest, and I believed.

Do you find this unlikely? Yet it is true. I was not a leader, you understand — it is to this above all that I owe my survival. But I was a good follower. I was solvent, too, always ready to pay the printer and the tavern-keeper and the cost of oil for the lamps by which we studied and debated how to build our dream nation of perfect law and humane justice.

I was as young as you are, as ardent as you are, as idealistic as you are, and when the Revolution came, I rejoiced, I was exalted, I felt fulfilled.

When our family’s little landholding was taken, I was glad. My parents fled to Germany where they had relatives. I was sorry about that, but I rejoiced to see the family business taken over by the local Revolutionary council. Within six months, the business was closed forever, its assets drained and dispersed. Again, I was glad, relieved of the guilt of my comfortable young life — relieved at my old parents’ expense. Yet I thought I was seeing justice done.

Until later, when even I had to admit in horror that what I saw about me was not justice but madness, bloodthirst, and greed without limit. The promised new order arrived and devoured everything in its path.

I, fortunately, was too small to be noticed, and I had the sense to leave Paris after the fall of Robespierre, for I saw that the wave of revolutionary madness had crested and that retribution, terrible retribution, must follow. So that too — the worst of the reaction — I escaped, by going quietly home to the country.

Good luck and obscurity preserved me. My once-despised provincial cousins here took me in and spoke for me. With their aid and support I was able to live out the upheavals following Robespierre’s death. I know you have never cared for Cousin Henri, and it is true that he has engaged in certain ambiguous practices in his grain business and has profited greatly while others have gone to the wall.

Yet, I owe him a great deal, for he helped me when I came wearily home, a fugitive from my own precious Revolution gone mad.

Living under Henri’s protection, making myself as useful as I could in my native province, I began to see how simple-minded we young men had been in Paris, blinded by our radical ideals. I do not mean that I ever condoned the vengeful blood-letting of the White Terror, but I did begin to understand the furious anti-Revolutionary resentment from which it sprang. A conviction possessed me that we with our youthful, foolish, longing hearts had brought our country to her knees under a horde of profiteers and madmen, and I was filled with despair and shame. In the end, I did not oppose the White Terror by word or deed. I learned to be humble and to hold my peace. It is a lesson that I hope you can learn at less cost.

Cousin Henri obtained for me a place as a schoolmaster in a nearby village. I worked. I was cold and silent, and I knew others like me, men whom I avoided and who avoided me. I ventured to write some pamphlets concerning the importance of the rule of law. Recognition came. I was cheered, though surprised, to find myself appointed a defender of the law, a member of the courts of the Emperor Napoleon’s government. I married your mother, a worthy woman, and in time came to love her, as I think even you will not deny.

And yes, it is true, I continued to accept such advances as came to me, for I saw that they gave pleasure to my wife, and then I trust for a time at least to my sole surviving child, yourself. And I have remained here, in the quiet of my native province, working and writing and never more pleased than when no notice is taken of me, and in this, believe me, I am far from unique.

There are no old revolutionaries, unless you count LaFayette, who is, I think, a little mad. In making our Revolution in l789 we unmade ourselves, and we have become something else: chastened failures who cannot be profitably judged by the standards of idealistic, romantic youth.

As for my dead friends, I honor and mourn them. They were hotter souls than I, truer to their visions, consumed while still steadfast. I no longer think of myself as one of the heroes who will set all right; and so, my dear son, I will not aid you in attempting to bring about a new revolt, a new “new order,” a return to the Revolution. Indeed, I must set my face against you in this, for I have passed once through such an upheaval, and I tremble to contemplate the approach of yet another.

I realize that now, in your youth, you look back on my times with romantic longing. You see these new agitations for reform and revolution throughout Europe as a revival of the glorious aspirations of those days. My son, I do not begrudge you the wish to take hold of such vital currents yourself. It is only that you are wrong. Not wrong in your objections — I agree that the gains of the Republic are being destroyed by the return of the restored King and the aristocrats. But do not ask me to write articles saying so for your outlawed newspapers, do not ask me to intervene on behalf of your radical friends when they are arrested, do not ask me to join you in a hopeless battle.

These days like Candide I cultivate my garden, a lesson I might have taken from Voltaire at the outset had I been wiser and less idealistic. And I uphold the law — imperfect as it is — rather than invite the return of bloody chaos.

As for your friend Moran the publisher, I have nothing to say, other than that it was foolish of you to send him to me. Whoever pried into my past and revealed to you the radical nature of my early career did not look deep enough, for that is all over. I have made my peace with the present. Therefore, I have turned Moran over to the local authorities to be returned to Paris for trial. If he — or you — persist in printing rabble-rousing attacks on the present government, he — or you — must be prepared to take the consequences. And I do not intend to play a part in assuring that those consequences should be a new destruction of the public order. Quite the opposite. My past to the contrary, or rather directly on account of the lessons of my past, I stand for stability, for humble devotion to my own work and affairs, and for peace even at the price of some injustice, for fear of the alternative that I have seen made real: injustice beyond imagining and constant warfare.

So send me, I beg you, no more fugitives and no more inflammatory letters or articles. Come instead yourself. Leave the hotbed of reformism that Paris has always been and return to the true France, a land of pious and tradition-minded countrymen and townsmen who go about their business without any passion for change.

I am completing my book on the law as I have known it, my own modest contribution to the world, I believe. I wish you would read it. Since you are to judge me, as all children judge their parents, I would have you judge not by my past nor by some imaginary reformist career that you wish on me now, but by the work that I have lately chosen to occupy my time and engage my declining energies.

Your mother joins me in the earnest hope that you will come soon to see us and share a meal and perhaps some quiet talk in what is now and forever your home.

In love and farewell, your father.

Dorothea ceased reading, her lips trembling, her throat hoarse. Ricky said nothing. She looked up and saw his bony profile, his sunken eyes fixed on the hills beyond the patio wall.

“You saw me write all this?” she whispered. She watched the slow focusing of his mind and eyes upon her.

“Ricky, you’re crying,” she said stupidly.

“Weeping,” he croaked, blotting at his eyes with his cuff. “Crying is noisy, it involves the voice. Why can’t you Americans ever learn these distinctions?”

Near tears herself, she cried, “Oh, for God’s sake —!” She got up and hugged her robe around herself. She was cold. In shock, she thought numbly. I believe I’m in shock. “I’m going back to bed,” she said.

He blinked at her, eyes still red-rimmed, as she went shivering past him.

He came and stood by her bed a moment, and then got in with her and drew her against him, closing his hands over her icy ones. For a long time they lay like that. She had almost dozed off when she felt him shift suddenly and realized that it was his erection that had been prodding her thigh, and that he was embarrassed and was trying to conceal it.

But why, when her own body was suddenly flush with appetite, ravenous and clamoring? “Ricky,” she whispered, “would you like to make love?”

“God, yes,” he groaned, his whole body contracting possessively about her.

“Then let’s get up and brush our teeth first so we can do it properly,” she said.

They did. They made long, slow, careful love, burning away for a while the chilly voice of that other life and time in the intensity of their absorption with each other. At the end she lay on her side with Ricky behind her, for he had no strength to hold himself above her. With her feet braced between his long, sharp shins, her body arched up and out, her arms stretched down her sides to clasp the backs of his hands where he held and steadied her hips, like a ship’s figurehead she rode his thrusts.