Foreign Bodies Read online

  When the police and the ambulance arrived, the bus was long gone (there were no passengers to pick up, it had never stopped), and Margaret, her sister-in-law’s letter bloodied but still legible in her pocket, was dead.

  47

  December 2

  Dear Aunt Bea,

  When your cablegram came I wrote to dad right away to tell him I’ll be coming home to be with him. You know better than anyone how bad I’ve been — this was the first he’d had a peep out of me since I got here, but he answered in an airmail and said he’s glad to hear finally where exactly I’ve been staying all this time. He didn’t even sound angry — more like all broken up, it’s so grim and horrible, and nobody seems to have figured out why it happened or where mom was going. Dad said the only way they could tell it was mom was from an envelope they found on her, with a note in it from you. I never knew you and mom were corresponding, I don’t think I ever heard her mention your name. And poor dad, he’s really all alone now, so I’ve got to leave here as soon as I can. My old return ticket’s no good anymore — I learned this just today — which means I have to wait till Phillip gets back to pay for a new one. Dad would send the money for sure, but I’d rather not let on that I’ve been depending on Phillip for everything. Actually I’m here by myself now, and I guess that’s a good thing, otherwise I might have been in Greece seeing the Parthenon or at the Uffizi in Florence, and I would’ve missed getting your cable. So it’s all worked out — well, I can’t say for the best, can I, when everything’s so awfully sad and shocking. Greece didn’t pan out anyhow, and neither did Florence, Phillip was called back to Milan practically overnight, some sort of emergency, an old client of his — he’d done some minor surgery on her a while ago (he really does do surgery!), and he asked me to hold the fort here, the way Julian used to, just in case it took him a week or so to fix up whatever the problem is. So you see we still haven’t had a chance to go on any of the trips we’ve talked about, the clinic’s been so busy here, though Phillip did promise that when it was time to move over to the Milan clinic I’d be going with him, and then we’d run down on the weekend to the Uffizi, where they’ve got a Madonna by Michelangelo and other amazing things, but when this emergency came up with this Adriana person, it’s some cranky old lady who gives him a lot of trouble, he thought it would be better for me to stay put. So here I am! I keep thinking of mom every minute, I just can’t stop crying. Julian’s always been closer to mom than I ever was — she sort of played favorites, maybe because even when we were small Julian kept waking up from scary dreams. It’s hard to know whether mom liked being married to dad as much as dad liked being married to her. It’s funny about marriage, isn’t it, and please forgive me if I’m being too personal, but you were married once, and I imagine you didn’t like it very much either, since you ended up getting divorced. I’m pretty certain I’ll never want to be married, there are parts of it I’m sure I wouldn’t like, and I might even have it in my blood not to like it, I mean I’ve heard about those three old maid aunts in dad’s family. If I can work up the nerve to say this outright, Aunt Bea, I can’t help thinking how you’ve lived most of your life on your own, and that’s exactly what I intend to do. And if there’s one thing I hope won’t ever happen to me it’s that be fruitful and multiply business, which is some sarcastic Bible quote mom used to throw at me whenever I got her really annoyed. Mostly she said it when I had to spend a lot of time in the lab, sometimes pretty late at night. I guess she decided long ago I was too much like dad, who’s always been consumed by whatever’s going on with his company, but she wouldn’t think it anymore if she knew what I’ve been up to in Paris! Only now she won’t ever know. And Julian, wherever he is, it’ll kill him when he finds out about mom. Or maybe not, that weird secret way he is with Lili and with everything else. I never told him, I never told Phillip either, but the night before Julian and Lili moved out, and I was supposed to leave too — they were asleep and all packed except for Julian’s notebook — I sneaked a look, and he’s got religion on the brain, can you believe it? I figure by now he’s over there in the desert sitting under a crazy gourd or whatever. Which is something he said he wasn’t absolutely keen on, but who can tell, when he’s so bound up with Lili?

  I’ve written again to dad to warn him that there’ll be a delay before I can get a flight home. I had to fudge it a bit, I couldn’t say my airfare has to wait for Phillip to come back — he seemed awfully concerned about this particular client — he said he wants to make it up to her for what went wrong. Well, I expect now I’ll never see the Uffizi or the Alps or the Parthenon or Lake Como or anything like that. And I’ll be giving up my own little studio place too, to stay with dad and try to make him happy. He’ll be pleased if I go back to the lab and get my degree, and I guess that’s what I’ll have to do. Maybe someday when I’m old I’ll take one of those tours, with a guidebook and a map. — Aunt Bea, would you mind if I keep on writing to you now and then when I’m back in L.A.? Not just to make amends for all those bad things from before, but to find out what it’s like to be on one’s own for the rest of one’s life. To be honest, I never realized it until only a while ago, but I think you’re terrifically brave!

  Iris

  48

  IN AMERICA on Thanksgiving Day it is always easy to travel, especially on trains and planes. Everyone heading home for a family reunion or to a festive gathering of far-off friends has already arrived, and will hardly be ready to depart until two or three days after the holiday. This in-between time found Marvin the sole passenger in the curtained first-class forward section of his Pan Am flight to Los Angeles, anticipating an enforced two-hour wait in Dallas. The blasting roar of the four propellers brought on a muted but constant shrieking in his ears, the familiar sensation of internal sirens that he knew was bound to outlast the trip, hanging on long afterward like the whistlings of angry spirits. He had picked up a news magazine in the terminal at LaGuardia and thumbed through it desultorily: in Korea this battle and that, Eisenhower defeats Taft for the GOP nomination, cave paintings of Irish elk discovered in the south of France, Mau Mau depredations in Kenya, Soviet Jewish poets doomed . . . He waved the stewardess and her tray of drinks away, though he had ordered his usual pair of gin and tonics not three minutes before. He had slept badly in the doughy softness of his hotel bed. Between yawns, and between the two rivalrous coasts of the continent, it felt as if he had not slept at all. And still he was aware of a habitual swell of potency, an expenditure of elation, as after a hard-driven round of negotiations leading to triumph over a competitor, or the not infrequent pleasure he took in outthinking his teams of chemists and engineers. His brain was good in a crisis: he could resolve the intractable. As always, there was a lesson in it for the vanquished. Marvin’s science — that meager aspect of it nearest to the psychological — was rooted (so he might have put it himself) in Mendelian genetics. He was the son of a strong mother, which clearly accounted for his own energies — but he was also the offspring of a weak father, the shopkeeping son of a shopkeeper, an unaspiring pushover given to reclining during business hours on an antiquated settee wearing his eyes out in heaps of unrealistic bookish claptrap; and this unforgiving heritable wastefulness had unhappily shown up in Julian. Surely there was a lesson in it — not for his boy, the luckless carrier of a predetermined deficiency, but for his daughter. What precisely was the lesson for his daughter, he could not be certain — it hung before him, but dimly, behind a veil. She had sought out her brother; she had, in inscrutable fact, decamped to live with him and the woman, and what did it mean, what could it portend? A better head on her shoulders than her brother, thanks to Mendel and his sweet peas, and thanks also to that ancestral tea kettle; Margaret too had a part in it. Iris had grown into a sound young woman. Tender pragmatist that she was, her motive in bolting after Julian may well have been to denounce without renouncing, as if old intimacy could keep its influence. A job markedly different from Marvin’s rush to New York: the quick clean cut. A
lesson not for the boy, no! (the boy was ruined beyond repair), but for this industrious bright girl, a steadfast mind like his own. Iris would see the justice of what he had done — the calculated businesslike balance of it — repudiation without abandonment. There was a lesson in it, a lesson for his daughter, but it was slipping away, he nearly caught hold of it and then again it eluded him . . .

  He rang for the stewardess.

  “Where’s my gin and tonic?”

  “I brought it, you said you didn’t want it —”

  “Well I want it now. And bring me some eyeshades, will you?”

  He drank, and the thickness of his neck became overwarmed, the fatty nape and the fat all around his Adam’s apple, and the sirens in his ears diminished (but only a little, ghostlike); he could not sleep. What was the lesson, and if he could retrieve it — it drifted almost, almost at the penumbra of his thought — would the girl recognize it, would she embrace it, would she live up to it? What were his children’s grievances, how had he offended them? His son and his son’s wife were the offense! While Iris, a steadfast mind like his own if a trifle more yielding . . . he had lost one, had he lost the other?

  Many hours later, as Marvin labored up the path to his house in the depleted fatigue of sleeplessness, he was surprised to see the heavy door with its stained-glass fanlight wide open, and the whitehaired housekeeper standing there in her street clothes gripping her washing bag — she had long ago acquiesced to Margaret’s insistence on a maid’s uniform, and commonly carried it away for a twiceweekly laundering. A much younger man — a motorist asking directions? — was displaying what appeared to be a dirty scrap of paper. The housekeeper cried out and tapped the man on the elbow to get him to turn to her approaching employer.

  “I was just this minute leaving for the day,” she called, “and God help us it’s from the police.”

  Afterward Marvin recollected, however pointlessly, that the offi-cer too was in street clothes.

  49

  MARVIN ON THE PHONE the morning after Thanksgiving, hoarse, haranguing, accusing, what on earth was he telling her? A confusion of elements, impossible to sort out. A lawsuit, he said, he’d sue them out of their imbecile brains, out of their last cent, a dereliction of duty if he ever saw one, he’d found out anyhow this wasn’t the idiot’s first time falling down on the job, she’d been warned before, supposed to monitor people’s comings and goings, sign in visitors, et cetera, they’d fired the woman on the spot what good was that now? And no shoes, her feet were bleeding, it was ghastly, the goddamn driver, sue the bus company won’t let them get away with it, murder pure and simple, and that letter they took out of her pocket, soaked in blood, out of your mind to send a sick woman a letter like that, rile her up and barefoot, my God, barefoot in the middle of the freeway, murder pure and simple!

  Marvin, suffering. The scraped voice, the headlong anguished fury. “You’ll have to tell my kids, you’re the one to do it, I can’t do it myself, I can’t, I’m not up to it, even if I knew how to reach them, not a line from Iris all this time, and my son — well, it’s all over with Julian. But he has to be told, Margaret would want it —”

  And Margaret: sick or sane? A little of each. Sanity it surely was to resist Marvin, to see into him, even to deny him; and to see into him was inevitably to deny him. But what did it matter now if Margaret had seen, resisted, denied? A broken body on a California road.

  “And how is it your business to be sending my wife that inane little note, Julian’s got himself married, he’s on his way home, exactly the things it so happens she’s been babbling about in these lunatic delusions she’s been having, you never knew Margaret anyhow, you’ve never had a thing in common with her, how would you, you’ve lived practically your whole life like a goddamn nun, and if you ask me it’s you and your goddamn little note that’s killed her —”

  Bea said feebly, contritely, “I thought it would make her happy.”

  “Happy! Bea, she’s dead, my wife is dead.”

  And then the electric silence of the miles between them.

  But again he had left her with one of his inescapable imperatives: it fell to her — again! — to be emissary to Marvin’s children. Inescapable? She was already a master of betrayal — what Marvin didn’t know, what she’d concealed from him! He didn’t know she’d been to see Margaret, he didn’t know she’d spied on that girl in the cape, he didn’t know she’d burned up his check. He didn’t know his daughter was in thrall to a crook! Bea counted it up, she turned it over, she weighed the consequences of confession — suppose she were to confess these things to Marvin — in the end it would all amount to the same. Margaret was dead. Dead, whether exonerated of delusion or not. Marvin a likely adulterer. Julian exiled by his father; there would be no reprieve. And Iris . . . In all this Bea saw herself as blameless: she had come to side with the party of the far horizon. As for the ashes in the sink, she had thwarted Marvin’s unreason with sanity: sanity it was to thwart Marvin! Money frees, yes — she might have freed Julian altogether, she might have given the son his inheritance without revealing the father’s stipulation. But money is also bondage — if Julian were tempted to take it, or could be persuaded to take it (by whom? by Lili?), the money would always and forever burn with his father’s imperium, his father’s contempt. In the logic of her betrayal, she had released Julian from the vise of Marvin’s spite. Freedom! In order to liberate, expunge! No last vestige of attachment, no last link . . .

  The exorcism of Leo Coopersmith. The exorcism of the ashes in the sink. Merged in a single night.

  On the other hand — oh, the torment of that eternal other hand — hadn’t she expunged Julian’s chance to choose, to take the money if he dared? To take it even if he were made to understand the condition of his taking it? In the absence of choice, where is liberty? And Marvin’s horrendous indictment — was it true? Was there the faintest breath of truth in it? It couldn’t be true! Grief is nightmare, grief is gargoyle: the shock of fresh bereavement must be stirring up such grotesqueries of criminality. Out of a highway accident! Or, God forbid, a suicide. In that sumptuous vacuous mausoleum for the living, how harshly she’d spoken to Margaret — yet how was it possible for a little bit of paper, sent in recompense and remorse, to kill?

  50

  BECAUSE THE BARON had jabbed the foot of his stick against his breastbone — that patch of outraged manhood where his most unspoken intuitions were stored — Kleinman knew he must go to Lili tonight. The fault (the sin!) was the Baron’s; he felt defiled by that humiliating poke. But Kleinman too was culpable; he had been servile, a bystander to Lili’s maltreatment. He had allowed the Baron to harangue him, to jab him with his stick, to mock him, and through it all he stood servile and afraid. Afraid to call Lili back — he had let her go, he hadn’t so much as called her back, even for the half week’s wages that were rightfully hers. And Lili was ill, it was plain she was ill. Ill and driven out, like Hagar, into some uncharted trouble of her own — but Hagar had the consolation of Ishmael her son, and poor Lili was childless. Or perhaps . . . Kleinman had once seen her with a boy who seemed to have come expressly to meet her, a tall plump boy in American-looking sandals, unlike anyone in the queues. Kleinman didn’t pry into the hurtful lives of his staff. Their stories were bound to be melancholy.

  In his record book — he kept it admirably, the figures scrupulously ordered (the Baron would not have been able to dispute a line of it) — he discovered where Lili lived. The neighborhood was unfamiliar, and took him by surprise. His people, Lipkinoff, for instance, and Kleinman himself, took rooms in one or another of the overcrowded crannies of the Marais. But this — the stone façade of a fortress, these tall windows with rounded tops, the heavy doors and their carvings — this was an edifice! He had brought with him a thin packet: the handful of francs owed to Lili, and a rush of sentences he had hastily set down, remorse and regret, shame and apology (he was complicit, he had let her go with no more than the feeblest cowardly protest), he m
eant her to know how his inmost faith, his faithfulness, was with her, he had not ever intended to shunt her off like some discarded Hagar, the sin was the Baron’s, not his! He had no power to console, he was childless himself, and wifeless besides, but if ever she was in need . . .