Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (2 page)

Jehane is thin-shouldered, long-necked. Her hair is straight, an arras. The famous eyes ripen with emotion, and Marcus scowls, wanting to discourage her; shooting is about to begin. He has no intention of being upset because a cablegram has announced that Nanna is dead. He hears—it is imaginary—a metallic clang, a corrugated metal door sliding
shut, rollers spinning in the curved tracks (he sees them); the door bangs. What was a doorway is as solid as a wall. Fingertips creep along the bottom edge of the door, work it up an inch or two; is this memory? Nanna’s neatly waved, short gray hair, like ribs of grayish-brown sand.

“She is a rich woman,” he says, careless of his tenses. “Perhaps she’s left me her fortune.”

His senses bucket uneasily on the tide of sunlight. Marcus rides their plunging momentum, legs braced, paunch distending his belt; the figures at the table are cut about with shadows. His eyes, his nose, the features of his face are full-formed, fleshy; nothing in his face is skimped or in short supply: not flesh, not shapeliness, not intelligence. The thick quarter-moons of his eyelids blink rapidly over the strained eyes. To control the blinking he squints. He does not want his actors to be distracted or alienated. Actors are sentimental, harshly ceremonial like children, and, like children, suspicious; should they be put off, they will disbelieve his judgment, they will evade his will, commit surprises in front of the camera. “She was not very kind to me. Or to my mother,” he says sternly.

To his mother, no. Noreen was pretty, long-limbed; her hair was gold red. His mother, Noreen. A gay, laughing Irish girl—so she saw herself—bringing love and joy and religious truth into her husband’s family. Pretty Noreen said, “I’ve always admired Jews, their close family life.” She was taken by surprise. Her husband’s rich German-French Jewish family looked askance at the gift of love and joy brought by religious truth—intensities and rivalries and everything ugly breathed out through the confessional as through a whale’s spout. They practiced self-cultivation and seriousness and owned to a bewildering complexity of attitudes and rites. It seemed that they already had a religion. Noreen sat, laughed, displayed her jollity, showed off her full trousseau of beliefs on all matters, her acceptance of Jews, and her in-laws watched her politely, with good-natured patience, until they grew bored, and then they ignored her. The child Marcus looked on, and thought of a Maypole that danced and threw out streamers to dancers who would not move to pick them up. Noreen drank a good deal. “Oh, it’s four o’clock! I’m in the mood for a drinkie. Anyone else want a drinkie, too?” Marcus, catching Nanna’s eyes studying him, realized that in some lights he appeared ordinary, a doubtful quantity.

Marcus abruptly sits down at the table. The others, to soothe their uneasiness, talk of their grandmothers; Oskar mentions a
Grossmutter
killed in the bombing of Hamburg, Loesser a grandmother who played pinochle with her nurse between attacks of angina. Marcus listens. Nanna walked with her sons after dinner at Scantuate, in the garden, above the sea. The flag crackled blusteringly on the flagpole. The children in a crowd went out at dusk to lower it. Nanna was small, well formed, neat gray-brown—beside Noreen a thrush next to a flamingo. She wore dark floral-print dresses that had no particular style, and hair nets; she did not like to have her hair disarranged. Marcus sees her old-woman’s hair, grown long during illness, blowing loose, unconstrained; her uncapturable minnow eyes (he had never as a child managed to control them, hold them, as he wished, to his will: One day when he was five, he knelt by the ornamental pool in the garden. “Are you trying to catch fish, Markie?” He shook his head. “I can’t. They won’t let me catch them”) and her round cheeks, and the small almond chin that was the focus of her old-woman’s prettiness, and the thin, always somewhat awry, intelligent lips are as constrained and without vivacity as if, in a game of turnabout, they have been netted and her hair has been set free. Her face—to him a creature, like a marmoset—has been extinguished. Jehane has told a story of her grandmother bidding her obey the nuns at school or risk hellfire, and now she leans her head on Marcus’s shoulder; sweat breaks out on Marcus’s skin. He does not want to be consoled. He is concerned with facts. A fact is, he is not grief-stricken. Another fact: Nanna will not again give her letters to Nils, the chauffeur, to mail. Nor write checks.

N
ANNA WROTE
checks in such numbers that one could not see a checkbook without thinking of her. “Markie,” Noreen said, “Nanna’s sent you another check.” Nanna’s emanation arrived in the small apartment in New Rochelle where he lived with Noreen after her divorce from his father. They brought privileges: clothes and lessons—riding, tennis, piano—summer camp, books; a bicycle, a cashmere scarf, a globe of the world for Christmas. Nanna’s checks made him special, separated him from the other children in the block of shabby apartments. Nanna wished her grandsons and granddaughters to pursue interests, hobbies, projects; hobbies, followed seriously, became distinctions. Nanna believed a Weill was, by definition, able. To go to see Nanna was to have a darkroom in the large cellar beneath the house at Scantuate, the walls of which thrummed when the waves broke on the bluff on a stormy day.
Was to have Nanna look at him again, reconsider him. “Would you like to go away to school?” He went to Andover on Nanna’s checks like a north-woods boy on snowshoes. The doctors who tended him that spring, when the nervousness he’d suffered at school turned into pneumonia, said he must have sun, air, and untroubled rest. He spent the summer at Scantuate with Nanna. Nanna said, “I would like to buy you a present.” He said, “I am very happy you could let me come. That’s a present. I don’t want anything else.” He could not look at her directly; it seemed a hand that signed a check could circumscribe a heart. He absorbed calm from the brown, ugly house, the carpeted rooms, among the Chinese bronzes. “You should be outside—swimming.” He said, “I thought maybe you wanted company.” She said, “Later. You must have exercise, Marcus.”

“Dear Mother,” he wrote, “I am fine. I am well. I miss you.” He wanted to be polite.

He made two comic books, lithographing the pictures. One comic book was “Madame Bovary”; one was “Wuthering Heights.” He showed them to Nanna. “I like to tell stories with pictures,” he said. “Would you like a movie camera?” Carefully, Marcus said, “I would like one, but I don’t think I deserve one. I mean, it isn’t my birthday. I haven’t done anything to earn it.” The chauffeur brought a movie camera from Boston, a model recommended by Nanna’s lawyer, whom she telephoned for advice. “You must think about going to visit your mother sometime this summer. Perhaps after Labor Day,” she said. Marcus said, “But you’ll be alone then.” The next day, she said, “Since you don’t seem to want to leave me, I have written your mother and asked her to come and visit us here.” Marcus was intent on making his first movie with Nils, the chauffeur, and with one of the Irish maids. “Now, you’re a murderer. You come sn-sneaking,” Marcus stammered to Nils. He had stammered when he was younger only at moments of high excitement, but lately—for the past year—he had begun to stammer more; he stammered almost all the time now. “You c-come around the garage door with the knife.…” He set the Irish maid running along the bluff, hair and skirts awhirl. “You are in mortal t-terror of your life.” Noreen came, almost as pretty as ever. He showed her the darkroom, the comic books he’d lithographed. The comic books upset her; they were lewd. Noreen said she was seeing a man named Little, a hardware dealer. “We just may get married, Markie. You’ll have another father—won’t that be fine?” she asked hopefully.

Noreen drank quite a bit on that visit. Marcus watched—she filled herself with bubbles; the surface of her face bubbled like paint with air in it. Noreen asked, “Is it true you want to live with Nanna?” She let slide a glass tray of laughter. She said, a good sport, “After all, you have a right to all this. It’s part of your heritage.” Her gaiety was inflexible. “He can’t make a decision. Poor Markie, he won’t laugh.” She tickled him with her forefinger, saying, “Stop being a sourpuss. Come on, Markie, let’s be happy.” She said to Nanna at the dinner table, “Markie’s been disturbed; he ought to have some religious instruction. Religion is very stabilizing for a young boy.” Nanna changed the subject. In the apartment in New Rochelle, when Noreen made breakfast, she sometimes sang in a tremulous, thin, weak, charmingly lyric voice—God, what charm there was in that tremulous voice—“Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, and smile, smile, smile.…” Noreen said, “Markie, you must tell me how you feel. I’ll help you think. I have to admit Nanna can do a lot for you.” Noreen said, “What’s best is what helps you to concentrate on your studies, to work hard and do well in school, Markie. Do you want to live with Nanna?” She turned her amusement-hungry, warm, and depthless face to him. The child Marcus saw a face bubbled like paint with air in it, saw noise and a party and someone shouting, saw a hillside with shepherds and shepherdesses—and Noreen singing—and a breeze ruffling the leaves of the chairs turned into roses of Sharon. Marcus said, “I don’t know.” Nanna and Noreen were closeted in the library for several hours. Noreen came out and kissed him goodbye. She said, “You work hard and do well in school, Markie.” She went to live and drink in sunny California—Nanna’s checks helped ease the strain of emigration—and Marcus made his home with his grandmother.

A
FLY
struts jerkily in the sunlight. Marcus says, “We were talking about the movie. Where was I?” “Self-pity,” says Loesser. “Yes,” says Marcus. Noreen still held legal custody. “A formality,” Nanna said. Nanna said she was going to Florida for the winter; Marcus was to have Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter with his father and his father’s second wife and the four children he had by that second wife. “You must get to know them better,” Nanna said. Nanna said she had brought Marcus back to the family. “You are a Weill,” Marcus’s father said. “I want you to feel free to come to my house at any time.” “Thank you,”
Marcus said. He was thirteen. Marcus says, “Yes. Well. These people have no self-pity. They go
at
things.” He makes a gesture of someone grabbing. It crosses his mind to say that they are as bold as doctors, that what they want—their habit—is to fall in love. But instead he falls silent. His father said, “Marcus, I want to say I’m glad you’re—Well, let me say a father and his son are not happily parted.” “Thank you,” Marcus said. His father said, “You never asked me about the divorce. You must have a good many questions.” “No, sir. I mean, no, thank y-you, sir.” His father said, “Marcus, I’m not doing this for
my
sake.” He paused, he said, “Don’t you want to talk anything over with me?” Marcus said, “It’s up to y-you, sir. If you w-want to talk, s-sir.” Marcus says, “You have any questions about the camera angles? Oskar? Jehane?” His father said, “Never mind. We’ll try again later.” Marcus was ashamed of his father. What did talk mean? Talk didn’t mean anything. Jehane cries,
“Marc, c’est impossible!”
The day is
triste,
the city, Rome, is
triste,
unendurable on the occasion of a death. “How can we work?” she demands. She is insistent, bitter, contemptuous. “How can we be expected to work as if nothing has happened? A woman is dead. It is a terrible thing. A terrible omen. My God.”

Nanna said, “Your allowance will be fifty dollars a month. I expect you to keep a record of your expenditures. Someday you will have money of your own, and you must start now to learn how to take care of it.”

Oskar, eyeing Jehane curiously, strokes his long, muscular throat. Jehane is always unsettled before starting a movie; the geometry of old age and death appalls her. Marcus says, “Our work makes us monsters.” Jehane says sadly,
“C’est vrai; tu as raison.
” She lifts a sugar-encrusted roll to her mouth. Marcus thinks, That will stop the rathole … nothing can slither for a moment.

The maid announces the car is at the door.
“Bon!”
cries Marcus.
“Allons,
everyone.” He chivies them along. The immense and dusty rooms swing up, float, descend behind him.

Two boats rode at mooring in front of Nanna’s beach, which gardeners raked free of shells on Mondays and Thursdays. It was forbidden to swim or take out the boats on Sunday morning. Almost everyone in Scantuate went to church. “It is not polite to desecrate the Sabbath of others.” To be late or unwashed at mealtimes meant eating in the kitchen. One wore a jacket to dinner during the week, and a jacket and tie on weekends. The only permissible way to dress was in the casual,
local, escape-from-the-city style. A daughter-in-law foolish enough to attempt chic would be greeted with “I love red silk at the seashore. So suitable.” Nanna’s sarcasm, politely uttered, continued until the offender was submissive. Anger or sulkiness or a son’s trying to persuade her—“Be more reasonable, Nanna”—would lead her to say, “It would seem I am not free to enjoy my own house.” Her son then admitted he was wrong or gathered his wife and children and left—so the family joke went—on still another of the flights of the Jews. As her children grew older and more prosperous, they came to visit Nanna for shorter periods of time and more formally. The worst thing Nanna could say was, “This is boring. This is so boring.”

Alliat, the cameraman, talking of emulsions, lenses, says, “In
Rashomon
…” Nanna’s voice mocks: “Panchromatic! Emulsion! Egg tempera sounds so much nicer.” “Not really, Nanna. Listen—
egg tempera
…” Nanna rarely went to movies. Oskar, Jehane, Loesser, and Alliat climb into the black Lancia; the sunlight beats down on the white stones of the driveway, the nearby bushes; the atmosphere, Marcus thinks, is exactly that of a funeral—the tension, the unease, the constraint. It is always the same before a movie begins.

Marcus has said in interviews and to disciples that a movie is a face. “People go to movies to spy on a face. If a movie gallops, only children are amused. A true film advances from gossip to weeping. In
Camille
you see Garbo first as a demimondaine, a very simple, very glamorous piece of gossip, but scene by scene the gossip becomes more complex, more details are added—she practices falsity, is ashamed of her body and herself, has a neurotic longing for honesty. Suddenly you get this breath, this sensation, My God, she really is a whore; she really does love that young man; he mustn’t marry a whore; oh, my God, how awful. And then you cry.”