She and her stepmother stopped speaking to each other altogether; they communicated, if need be, by signs: Louise, for instance, pointing dramatically at the ruthless clock and Bel tapping in the negative on the crystal of her loyal little wristwatch. She lost all affection for me, twisting away gently when I attempted a perfunctory caress. She adopted again the wan absent expression that had dimmed her features at her arrival from Rosedale. Camus replaced Keats. Her marks deteriorated. She no longer wrote poetry. One day as Louise and I were packing for our next trip to Europe (London, Paris, Pisa, Stresa, and—in small print—Larive) I started removing some old maps, Colorado, Oregon, from the silk «cheek» inside a valise, and the moment my secret prompter uttered that «shcheka» I came across a poem of hers written long before Louise’s intrusion into her trustful young life. I thought it might do Louise good to read it and handed her the exercise-book page (all ragged along its torn root but still mine) on which the following lines were penciled:
At sixty, if I’ll look back, jungles and hills will hide the notch, the source, the sand and a bird’s footprints across it. I’ll see nothing at all with my old eyes, yet I’ll know it was there, the source.
How come, then, that when I look back at twelve—one fifth of the stretch!—with visibility presumably better and no junk in between, I can’t even imagine that patch of wet sand and the walking bird and the gleam of my source?
«Almost Poundian in purity,» remarked Louise—which annoyed me, because I thought Pound a fake.
7
Chбteau Vignedor, Bel’s charming boarding school in Switzerland, on a charming hill three hundred meters above charming Larive on the Rhтne, had been recommended to Louise in the autumn of 1957 by a Swiss lady in Quirn’s French Department. There were two other «finishing» schools of the same general type that might have done just as well, but Louise set her sights on Vignedor because of a chance remark made not even by her Swiss friend but by a chance girl in a chance travel agency who summed up the qualities of the school in one phrase: «Many Tunisian princesses.»
It offered five main subjects (French, Psychology, Savoir-vivre, Couture, Cuisine), various sports (under the direction of Christine Dupraz, the once famous skier), and a dozen additional classes on request (which would keep the plainest girl there till she married), including Ballet and Bridge. Another supplиment—especially suitable for orphans or unneeded children—was a summer trimester, filling up the year’s last remaining segment with excursions and nature studies, to be spent by a few lucky girls at the home of the headmistress, Madame de Turm, an Alpine chalet some twelve hundred meters higher: «Its solitary light, twinkling in a black fold of the mountains, can be seen,» said the prospectus in four languages, «from the Chбteau on clear nights.» There was also some kind of camp for differently handicapped local children in different years conducted by our medically inclined sports directress.
1957, 1958, 1959. Sometimes, seldom, hiding from Louise, who objected to Bel’s twenty well-spaced monosyllables’ costing us fifty dollars, I would call her from Quirn, but after a few such calls I received a curt note from Mme. de Turm, asking me not to upset my daughter by telephoning, and so retreated into my dark shell.
Dark shell, dark years of my heart! They coincided oddly with the composition of my most vigorous, most festive, and commercially most successful novel, A Kingdom by the Sea. Its demands, the fun and the fancy of it, its intricate imagery, made up in a way for the absence of my beloved Bel. It was also bound to reduce, though I was hardly conscious of that, my correspondence with her (well-meant, chatty, dreadfully artificial letters which she seldom troubled to answer). Even more startling, of course, more incomprehensible to me, in groaning retrospect, is the effect my self-entertainment had on the number and length of our visits between 1957 and 1960 (when she eloped with a progressive blond-bearded young American). You were appalled to learn the other day, when we discussed the present notes, that I had seen «beloved Bel» only four times in three summers and that only two of our visits lasted as long as a couple of weeks. I must add, however, that she resolutely declined to spend her vacations at home. I ought never, of course, have dumped her in Europe. I should have elected to sweat it out in my hellish household, between a childish woman and a somber child.
The work on my novel also impinged on my marital mores, making of me a less passionate and more indulgent husband: I let Louise go on suspiciously frequent trips to out-of-town unlisted eye specialists and neglected her in the meantime for Rose Brown, our cute housemaid who took three soapshowers daily and thought frilly black panties «did something to guys.»
But the greatest havoc wrought by my work was its effect on my lectures. To it I sacrificed, like Gain, the flowers of my summers, and, like Abel, the sheep of the campus. Because of it, the process of my academic discarnation reached its ultimate stage. The last vestiges of human interconnection were severed, for I not only vanished physically from the lecture hall but had my entire course taped so as to be funneled through the College Closed Circuit into the rooms of headphoned students. Rumor had it that I was ready to quit; in fact, an anonymous punster wrote in the Quirn Quarterly, Spring, 1959: «His Temerity is said to have asked for a raise before emeriting.»
In the summer of that year my third wife and I saw Bel for the last time. Allan Garden (after whom the genus of the Cape Jasmin should have been named, so great and triumphant was the flower in his buttonhole) had just been united in wedlock to his youthful Virginia, after several years of cloudless concubinage. They were to live to the combined age of 170 in absolute bliss, yet one grim fateful chapter remained to be constructed. I foiled over its first pages at the wrong desk, in the wrong hotel, above the wrong lake, with a view of the wrong isoletta at my left elbow. The only right thing was a pregnant-shaped bottle of Gattinara before me. In the middle of a mangled sentence Louise came to join me from Pisa, where I gathered—with amused indifference—that she had recoupled with a former lover. Playing on the strings of her meek uneasiness I took her to Switzerland, which she detested. An early dinner with Bel was scheduled at the Larive Grand Hotel. She arrived with that Christ-haired youth, both purple trousered. The maнtre d’hтtel murmured something over the menu to my wife, and she rode up and brought down my oldest necktie for the young lout to put around his Adam’s apple and scrawny neck.
His grandmother had been related by marriage, so it turned out, to a third cousin of Louise’s grandfather, the not quite untarnished Boston banker. This took care of the main course. We had coffee and kirsch in the lounge, and Charlie Everett showed us pictures of the summer Camp for Blind Children (who were spared the sight of its drab locust trees and rings of ashed refuse amidst the riverside burdocks) which he and Bella (Bella!) were supervising. He was twenty-five years old. He had spent five years studying Russian, and spoke it as fluently, he said, as a trained seal. A sample justified the comparison. He was a dedicated «revolutionary,» and a hopeless nincompoop, knowing nothing, crazy about jazz, existentialism, Leninism, pacifism, and African Art. He thought snappy pamphlets and catalogues so much more «meaningful» than fat old books. A sweet, stale, and unhealthy smell emanated from the poor fellow. Throughout the dinner and coffee-drinking ordeal I never once—never once, reader!—looked up at my Bel, but as we were about to part (forever) I did look at her, and she had new twin lines from nostrils to wicks, and she wore granny glasses, and a middle part, and had lost all her pubescent prettiness, remnants of which I had still glimpsed during a visit to Larive a spring and winter ago. They had to be back at half-past-twenty, alas—not really «alas.»
«Come and see us at Quirn soon, soon, Dolly,» I said, as we all stood on the sidewalk with mountains outlined in solid black against an aquamarine sky, and choughs jacking harshly, flying in flocks to roost, away, away.
I cannot explain the slip, but it angered Bel more than anything had ever angered her at any time.
«What is he saying?» she cried, looking in turn at Louise, at her beau, and
